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mastin2 -> RE: Darkness Reign (1/25/2011 15:18:55)
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And now, Part One is out. Notes about this chapter:
Lots of info-dumping. Many of the times, both of them know everything Darvic is saying; he's saying it for the audience's convenience. I might need to better justify it, but that's for a later day. Something like that she knows the basics, but doesn't know the more advanced level, which Darvic--having been the one who made the choice--obviously does.
~-You'll note I'm pretty repetitive with the way I transition to the images being displayed, instead of his narrative. It was originally accidental, but I'm thinking of making it intentional. I'm actually thinking of including a lot more italics--not describing scenes in the flashback, but rather, Darvic's face as he tells the story. This also would allow me to alter some of the italics to contain less information about the scene and let Darvic handle that. For example:
"An image comes up of the World Map. On it, Helios is shown, but it is not a huge star. Instead, it is the tiniest dot on the map. When zooming in, the small village is revealed as the poor town it really was. An image of Darvic is shown as a boy."
I'm thinking that'd become something like "An image comes up of the World Map. Darvic smiles, sensing the curiosity about there being no visible representation of Helios. Looking for a huge star? You won't find it. It's on there, but it's the tiniest dot there. The image zooms in on the location of Helios, and it eventually becomes visible, as a small village. That, right there, is what Helios was: the poor town it used to be, which nobody knows about. The image continues to zoom in, to just outside the central hut. A young boy is sleeping against the wooden abode, shivering in the cold. Recognize him? He's Darvic as a boy--me, outside the village elder's dwelling, seeping off of what little heat escapes from the fireplace in there."
You can see the difference between the two, but eh, I'll fix it later. The goal of this project wasn't to bring this up to the maximum level of my ability, but rather, to bring it up to my normal level of ability (that's what I mean by "okay, not quite, but eh, close enough!"), my casual writing. What's there is what I'd write naturally. (And did!) The above is probably an example of my best. (Your Mileage May Vary, of course, but *I* think it's better than what's actually there.) Alright, not my best-best (that generally requires more than just the improvisation I did above :P), but pretty darn good, compared to what's there, but what you see in the story was--again--just my average writing. I didn't go above and beyond to make it as powerful as I could have. I let it be a little info-dumpish, telling instead of showing. (When you're pretty much advised to do "show, don't tell" universally, nowadays.) Trust me; it was worse before, so this IS better than it was.
You might've noticed the small font when the Pyromancer is speaking. That's Sylfaen, which looks pretty similar to TNR in Word. (I wanted to differentiate between speech in the recording [which is normal italics] and HER speech, so I got a font for it which was similar enough to not be a problem.) It seems a bit small (ironic; it's a little larger in Word), so I might want to increase its size.
PLOT:
His rise to power. I'm a bit sketchy on the details, but his trial introduced him to the political world, and he was soon able to manipulate it to his advantage. Once he got started, he continued to grow his village, into a town, then a city. To gain further political power and make the transition from a city into a nation, he chose a Great Nation to worship. His particular choice encouraged population growth, making his nation boom into an empire. He gained a few enemies, of course, but most people respected him enough to be allies.
The injury. I'm not sure when it happens, exactly, but it happens, nonetheless. This was the result of two different versions of the story. In one, he just retired because he was getting tired of being the King. In the other, the arrow forced his retirement; what kind of leader of a nation has only one eye? That'd be a serious impediment to his job! I liked both versions, so I decided that he was getting tired of the job, and the arrow injury was the perfect excuse he needed to retire.
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