Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Remuthra]

I hear you. I just have school recovering from a long snow break .

[WillowLuman]

I love projects like these.

[Lord Shonus]

No problem. Just wanted to make sure you didn't think that I only posted half my chapter or something.


In any case, what do you think of discussing the currently extant chapter while waiting for the next to be posted? Personally, a big part of why I wanted to do this was to sharpen up my writing skills (you may have noticed that I'm bad at dialogue, for example, and I have a really hard time focusing on one part of a thing at a time, I always want to jump to a more interesting part), and feedback would be nice.

[Remuthra]

Personally, I find it sometimes useful to just narrate dialogue. If they don't really need to see exactly what's happening for dramatic purposes, sometimes it's better to just sum things up.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Depends on exactly what, I suppose.

And it might not hurt to read Shonus's bit at some point.

[Nirur Torir]

Post-WW2, I would expect a decent number of people should be able to reverse-engineer a breech-loaded just from knowing about them, given a few years. That the local area has reverted to muzzle-loaded guns strains my SOD.

I'm guessing the apocalypse happened not long after WWII (within two decades?), if there weren't enough nukes for complete annihilation. (Anyone know how many nukes it takes to get to the center of Mount Rushmore?)

What happened to the wealth of automatic weapons left after the Battle of Keystone? I think there should be at least a line mentioning it.

Or carried by bandits, who seemed to have an unlimited supply. Although a rare problem, these raiders were becoming increasingly dangerous.

A) Please do not start paragraphs with 'or.'
B) Your tense is off. If the raiders have not been seen since the Battle of Keystone, they had been becoming increasingly dangerous.

along with her mother's and her own shorter gun. They were already loaded, as was the brace of pistols that they retrieved from a kitchen drawer. Both had always hated those two guns.

It took me two re-reads of this paragraph before I realized that they hated the brace of pistols, not their own guns.

Is the protagonist of our Bay12-dark post-apocalyptic interdimensional action/adventure a twelve-year-old girl? This should be interesting.

[Fniff]

(Anyone know how many nukes it takes to get to the center of Mount Rushmore?)

The same amount as the amount of licks you need to get to the center of a tootsie pop.

I think the bandits took the guns left after the battle of keystone, which implies they're the deserters/remnants of one of the armies who fought there. As for why there isn't any proper breech guns, perhaps due to the nature of the apocalypse some minor time screwy stuff is going on? This is meant to be dimensional, after all. Could be that memories before the apocalypse and the exact nature of the world before it gets more and more distorted every day. Now that could be interesting...

[Lord Shonus]

Post-WW2, I would expect a decent number of people should be able to reverse-engineer a breech-loaded just from knowing about them, given a few years. That the local area has reverted to muzzle-loaded guns strains my SOD.

I'm guessing the apocalypse happened not long after WWII (within two decades?), if there weren't enough nukes for complete annihilation. (Anyone know how many nukes it takes to get to the center of Mount Rushmore?)

I was going for more of "a couple of centuries" after the apocolypse, not just a few generations. Notice that a character doesn't believe in France, which suggests a lot more than simply not knowing how to make a decent gun. Also, breechloaders are in production, they're just very expensive because of the high level of workmanship required. They use muzzleloaders a lot because it is extremely easy to turn those out with very little in the way of tools. What is extremely rare is repeating guns such as William's fancy revolver and rifle. (Didn't include that primarily in an effort to avoid my tendency to infodump.)

What happened to the wealth of automatic weapons left after the Battle of Keystone? I think there should be at least a line mentioning it.

The implication that I was trying to get across was that the ammunition was even rarer than the guns (the local tinkers, at least, are just barely able to replicate 1880's pistol cartridges.)

Or carried by bandits, who seemed to have an unlimited supply. Although a rare problem, these raiders were becoming increasingly dangerous.

A) Please do not start paragraphs with 'or.'
B) Your tense is off. If the raiders have not been seen since the Battle of Keystone, they had been becoming increasingly dangerous.

A:) This is a matter of style. I'll begin a sentence with "or" whenever I want to.

B:) I thought it was clear enough that William doesn't believe the Battle of Keystone to have destroyed the raiders, or done much more than set them back a bit. To the average fringer, they "had been" a threat. To William, they "are" a threat.

along with her mother's and her own shorter gun. They were already loaded, as was the brace of pistols that they retrieved from a kitchen drawer. Both had always hated those two guns.

It took me two re-reads of this paragraph before I realized that they hated the brace of pistols, not their own guns.

I see your point, but how would you have worded it? I can't see an alternative that isn't really, really clunky.

Is the protagonist of our Bay12-dark post-apocalyptic interdimensional action/adventure a twelve-year-old girl? This should be interesting.

Assuming that Remurtha doesn't pull a timeskip, or switch focus to another character, or something of that sort.

[Remuthra]

Actually. my current intention is to destroy as many things as possible. Protagonist needs to get with the revenge plot already, lest this become one of those historical fiction books where the main conflict is a family being pressured to sell their farm.

[Fniff]

I think doing something with the bandits would be good, especially with Lord Shonus' point about how the majority of the villagers don't believe they're much of a threat.

[Remuthra]

I'm rather inclined to give them some sort of space-gun, too.

[Lord Shonus]

Just remember that there's a lot of chapters after you, and this will fall apart if you tear things up too much.

[Remuthra]

Serves them right for sticking around in the same place.

[Nirur Torir]

What is extremely rare is repeating guns such as William's fancy revolver and rifle. (Didn't include that primarily in an effort to avoid my tendency to infodump.)

I think you should have infodumped here, as the chapter gave me the impression that semi-automatics weren't all that rare, and that the bandits were using automatics (likely only using burst fire as desperation attacks).

The implication that I was trying to get across was that the ammunition was even rarer than the guns (the local tinkers, at least, are just barely able to replicate 1880's pistol cartridges.)

I think you should have included a spoiler at the end specifying that. If I was writing chapter 2, I wouldn't have known just which ammo they were barely able to make, which could easily spiral into everyone trampling over each others' plot-threads.

I see your point, but how would you have worded it? I can't see an alternative that isn't really, really clunky.

Spoiler: I'd probably write it more like this. (click to show/hide)

[....] Maria had retrived from the living room her father's old muzzle-loader, along with her mother's and her own shorter gun. They were already loaded, as was the brace of pistols that they retrieved from a kitchen drawer. Both had always hated those two guns. Unlike the rifles, the pistols were not for an attacker. Horrible things tended to happen to women and girls that were taken alive.

Maria had retrieved her father's old muzzle-loader, along with their own, from the living room. They, along with the pair of pistols she then took from the kitchen drawer, were kept loaded. The pistols were a hated necessity - For women and girls, being taken alive led to a fate worse than death.

[Lord Shonus]

What is extremely rare is repeating guns such as William's fancy revolver and rifle. (Didn't include that primarily in an effort to avoid my tendency to infodump.)

I think you should have infodumped here, as the chapter gave me the impression that semi-automatics weren't all that rare, and that the bandits were using automatics (likely only using burst fire as desperation attacks).

The implication that I was trying to get across was that the ammunition was even rarer than the guns (the local tinkers, at least, are just barely able to replicate 1880's pistol cartridges.)

I think you should have included a spoiler at the end specifying that. If I was writing chapter 2, I wouldn't have known just which ammo they were barely able to make, which could easily spiral into everyone trampling over each others' plot-threads.

I see. I was simply using the term "repeater" to mean "firing more than one shot before reloading", and the image I had for William's pistol and rifle were a revolver pistol and either a Winchester-type lever-action or a revolving rifle. In other words, relatively simple but oddly ideal-for-the-frontier weapons. If you took "repeater" to mean "semi-automatic", then it's understandable that you wouldn't get what I was getting at.

Spoiler: I'd probably write it more like this. (click to show/hide)

[....] Maria had retrived from the living room her father's old muzzle-loader, along with her mother's and her own shorter gun. They were already loaded, as was the brace of pistols that they retrieved from a kitchen drawer. Both had always hated those two guns. Unlike the rifles, the pistols were not for an attacker. Horrible things tended to happen to women and girls that were taken alive.

Maria had retrieved her father's old muzzle-loader, along with their own, from the living room. They, along with the pair of pistols she then took from the kitchen drawer, were kept loaded. The pistols were a hated necessity - For women and girls, being taken alive led to a fate worse than death.

The only quibble I have with that wording is that it removes the implication that Maria had a rifle specifically made for her, which was intended to convey that she was taught to -and was expected to be able to- defend herself rather than it being merely a situation that they appeared to be forced into.