The BSN writers club

Thanks for posting this I was actually a bit curious to read it after, what I assume was, a snippet read back in the Star Wars thread proper.  Not sure when/ if I will get to it but you did pique my curiosity. 

So lets see here.

I recently finished ASOIF books by GRR Martin. Other than a more in depth thoughts about it, which I wanna post somewhere else,the most interesting lesson for us writers is how he handles plot. As people probably know, or have some familarity with, Martin's plot is quite...complicated. But, what I like about it and what I find somewhat unique about his work (so much so I am considering it the best lesson I have learned from the work) is his ability to sort of make jigsaw puzzle pieces out of his plot. Or, slowly filling in pieces by getting bits and pieces here and there across his POV shots. For insstance you get a city under siege who recently has signed a tentative peace with their besiegers, but then a character comes along and says you they are about to break the peace, but you do not know if you should trust the character until you see another POV shot which shows another city girding for war. I am probably oversimplyfying it and notdoing it justice (don' wanna spoil it here) but the priniple lesson is you do not have to have one character have access to all knowledge in a particular work.

Over in the Character book I am reading it was quite interesting. I am working on her chapters on 'The Normal world'and the 'Characteristic moment'. The latter I found the most...interesting. The idea behind it is in the moment your character is introduced you want to introduce as much information and make it distinctive. I think she is mostly applying things to the protagonist but it fits for other characters in any given work. You are supposed to introduce their lie, their ghost, some of their characteristics good and bad and...well it will make a lot more sense if yo read it. For now (since I am running out of time on my break) I would recommend Dragon Age Inquistion for how the game introduces each character.

On my own personal writing front up to Chapter 25 in the Reluctant Rebel of Man. Trying to apply the lessons I learned from the previous book more, like setting up the characters better and having more time with said characters to set up and better execute their arcs. Though hopefully I will be updating my outline this weekend, speaking of which because I think I finally have the respective character arcs for my 2 protagonists in book 2.

Greetings to you my fellow writers!

Shameless self-promotion time :

Just started a fic about a quarian in MEA, if anyone's interested! I intend to fill the void of no quarians anywhere in Heleus, starting from the very beginning of the Andromeda saga. Unusual character, love writing it. Angst and spice planned for later chapters, for the moment I'm still deciding where I want the story to go.

Chapter 1 of The Quarian Initiative on Tumblr, AO3 and Fanfiction.net!

We need more quarians! More is always better!

Well if your mind races with ideas you’ve got to spin them out fast, hahaha. Depending on how much work I have I churn out quite a bit, too, though I’m not at top performance now as I was with my first MEA fic, I was publishing every day then for the majority of the story (I basically wrote a full length novel in around a month’s time - that’s how inspired I was, hahaha, best writing experience ever), 3-5k each (they got longer towards the middle and end), but that was a special time... since then I’ve started up several others though and I’m updating them, too, so my chapter progression here might be relatively slow compared to that, but I’m having so much fun writing it that I might be able to pull off more frequent posts. I write pretty niche though, more so now than that first fic, so it requires more thought and editing, since I don’t have a lot of base material to go on there. I guess the same is true of the quarian, but I can’t contradict canon or be off character since it’s an OC, so there’s that! Definite advantage in speed there. The only remaining question for me is: are there enough readers out there? I noticed some drastic drops in numbers when I came back to this... I mean, I’m finishing my open stories regardless, but I miss those times when there was still hope for MEA’s future. Anyway, QUARIANS - if BioWare won’t provide, I make it myself, hahaha!

Hmm... should I make Lyanna monstrous or not? I need a villain to my story... hmm... And I haven't got anyone else to meet my requirement so.. sorry Lyanna fans, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to keep a story interesting.

Well to be fair though, Lyanna was very selfish for running away with Rhaegar... so I decided... well why not make her evil (a lot of things go wrong to make it happen, like the fact Rhaegar being the absentee father figure and husband, and the court hates her cause of her mistakes in the past, and Rhaegar invited his mistress over... and they have a bastard, which makes Lyanna go literally insane with how angry she is at Rhaegar, and than he had the audacity to legitimise his bastard upon birth as well as give him the Targaryen name and invite him to live in King's Landing against her wishes, so she gets so angry, she takes it out on other people even though she's regent and in doing so, she cut Aegon's childhood in half making him very mature considering his age and makes Cersei's life harder...)

I like it's setting and time zone. And it's rather easy to write if you've written DA fanfic as they're in similar settings.

I was finally able to read it my friend, sorry for the delay but I'm not surprised that yet again another one of your fics proves to be very captivating. I said it once and I'll say it again, it would be in Bioware's best interests to hire you on as a writer. Like you said, the Mass Effect universe always needs more Quarians as you can never have too many.

You wouldn't have to stretch too hard to make Lyanna monstrous, as I already think she is one. How in the world that fuck up or dickwad Rhaegar has fans is beyond me.. Although I'm very bitter over what happened to Elia Martell.

True and that makes sense, as you have to walk a fine line for writing believable characters because you don't want to take people out of the story. I do feel any character has the potential to break and become someone truly vicious if given the right circumstances and written right. Although I'm just a reader and not a writer, so much of what I say is probably worthless.

I don't know the intricacies of your fic as I haven't read it but it sounds interesting, so when I get the time I'll check it out.

I'm feeling the writing itch again but have perpetual writer's block. Can anyone provide any DA or ME prompts? My forte is humor. Followed by smut but I'm not really into writing that, it's more of a ... natural gift.

We're masochists and also enjoy watching people die in horrible ways. On my part I got into GoT because I was starved for a good fantasy series that was better than the Twilight-type nonsense floating around everywhere (I could rant about that all day).

Ahhhh! Interesting. That pretty much changes the whole map of the original GoT story - is Jon/Baelon aware of who he is in your fic?

Awwwww. Well I would totally work there if someone offered, hahahaha.

I have to hear more about this now! I mean I've only read the books partway but I've watched everything, Lyanna and Rhaegar didn't strike me as that terrible - am I missing something? I mean, it was Tywin who ordered the Mountain to kill Elia and her children, I hate those two plenty for that and the other things they did (GODDAMMIT OBERYN WHYYY) but I got the impression that Rhaegar and Lyanna were more like star-crossed lovers in an inconvenient political situation (like most people in GoT find themselves in). I know Rhaegar divorced Elia, but I'm probably forgetting half the details of that. Subplots in GoT are a little hard to follow sometimes, it's a bit sprawling.

A mysterious cave-dwelling creature is discovered on Elaaden and New Tuchankan krogans immediately fry them up and proclaim the dish as the new local "delicacy" - better than Varren steaks! - but it happens to have hallucinogenic properties with a very delayed onset. Now New Tuchanka is in chaos because almost all the krogans are dancing around singing soft tunes since days (the effects don't wear off apparently, because of some weird mutation that makes it ironically incredibly difficult for krogans to metabolize it) while whispering to each other because everything is "too loud" - Pathfinder Ryder is called in to investigate and find out if the krogans can be sobered up, but upon arriving finds herself contending with a horde of amorous krogans because they think she is the embodiment of the planet's "patron goddess". (I had too much coffee, OK? )

Figured that, him being king would only make sense if the story was laid out similarly to the original plot; besides, there would be plenty other power players still alive in this version contending for the throne, right? Are you following a similar story focus (warring factions laying claim to the Iron Throne, political intrigue, backstabbery and the great, terrible mystery of the Wall/white walkers/etc.)?