Moid said something in one of his recent videos about how he had to learn to be a you tuber by gaining understanding as he went along. It reminded me much of a journey I have been through, in a manner of speaking. So settle back in your easy chairs and prepare for a short story.
It started with a character I ran, one of several in a certain place called Second Life. In this place, they had a Vampire the Masquerade game going on, and I joined not really knowing what I was doing. The people there were all quite patient with newbies and made me feel welcome.
There was one particular character who had an interesting story. Her name was Patricia Ann Heron. She wound up getting much too involved in a certain storyline, uncovering mysteries that were never meant to be exposed, much less poked or prodded at. As a result, she was made a Kindred, or vampire, against her will.
At first, Patty enjoyed her new vampiric powers, but she soon realized that this was a one-way trip, and that she was cursed, inhuman, cold, dead and damned. She wanted to find a way to reverse the curse- to become human again. But no matter how much I pleaded with the Storytellers (the AD&D equivalent of a Dungeon Master) they would not run a Golconda arc for her. (Golconda being the little-known mystical path that a vampire might become human again.) Then the VtM site on Second Life closed down. What was I to do? I had a character with no end, no resolution, no determination as to her outcome. It ate at me. A lot. Like an itch I could not scratch.
Finally, I determined that if an outcome were to happen, I would have to write it. I sat down in earnest and banged out a short story in two weeks, spending hours after work each day. The end result was absolutely horrid. It was an extremely bad example of written fiction, and would give (the book that shall not be named, RP1) competition.
Thus began for me a 7 year odyssey. I had to learn the craft of writing fiction and start over again. So I began to collect a small library of books on the subject. I learned about the Hero’s Epic Journey and the D.A.D. method, for description, action and dialog. I went through these books, highlighting, underlining and writing in the margins. (See the picture below.) For those interested in writing your own fiction, I have some recommendations. Some titles were not very useful, Writing Fiction for Dummies and Wired for Story come to mind. Anything by James Scott Bell was pure gold. Two books on writing stood out as being most used. The first was called The Emotion Thesaurus, and was extremely helpful in translating emotion into action. The very best book in the collection that ignited the fire to inspire me through to the end is not pictured. I used it so much that by the time I was finished writing my initial manuscript, pages were literally coming out of the binding and I had to throw it away. That book was Make a Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld. I would recommend Make a Scene strongly for anyone desiring to learn the craft of writing fiction. Jordan noticed I had mentioned her by name in a blog entry and sent me a short note. That started a correspondence and I was very lucky to hire her later as my first editor.
It is extremely rare for fan fiction to be published, but I lucked out again with a program put out by White Wolf (the copyright owners of the setting) called the Storyteller’s Vault. Thus, my goal was complete. I had written a three act, 142k word 500 page novel and actually had it published. I was able to hire the guru of all things VtM, Matthew Dawkins, to be my setting editor and had story analyst Merphy Napier read through it about a year ago, providing assessment to polish the polish. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of hiring one or more good editors and putting down the money to provide professional feedback.
Just like Moid has become a semi-professional you tuber, you also can do great things! It takes baby steps. Then, once you are on top of the mountain, you can look down on the hapless masses below, and lob the Media Death Cult bomb at them, chuckling in their despair.
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