Hey guys - not sure if you've heard, but Corvus Belli has asked War Garage to include english submissions and they have agreed! You can read the details here. www.facebook.com/wargarage/posts/1180498068769836 It's a great opportunity. I hope you guys check it out!
Is anyone writing for this? I think it's cool. I want to write but I'm not sure if I can line up that many words coherently.
Yes, I'm interested. And I've already written a couple of things. Problem is they're complete bollocks, so I'm not sure where to go from here! Then again of course, if @DaRedOne submits a piece then, talented and experienced Infinity writer that he is, the rest of us are all competing for second place anyway. Maybe we can bribe him to stay out?
Dude, don't toot my horn like that. Now if I lose I'll be embarassed as all fuck :D In all seriousness, though, I've had 4 people throw that link at me by now. I'm definetely writing something for it, but it's not gonna be about Morats. However, I do have some cool stuff for this, I hopé I'll be able to show some peeks by January. Btw, @Wolf I added a couple more MAF stories, not sure if you've checked those at the thread. Thanks for the love, mate.
Hrm... Some early story about Eddie, when he was an undercover, might be fun. Maybe that fight with an Antipode I've mentioned in passing. 3500-5000 words is probably right at my upper limit for decent scene-setting. But to be honest I'm not that interested in the prizes.
As anyone who labours through my posts here will instantly agree, an editor is exactly what I need. 50/50 split of the rich prizes when we win; dinner and drinks at my expense - Interplanetario Summer 2019?
My thoughts exactly. Reading this almost makes me want to start up a share thread here for us more amateur writers out there doing it purely for fun.
Yes, people currently publish in the Fan Fiction sub-forum and at various web sites of their own. I presume the forum is what Corvus Belli has officially provided for us to share our writing, which is fine, but it's not an ideal place to read fiction for pleasure. The forum at large is also so far from being a supportive environment that we lost @Magonus. He was probably the single best writer in the community, and his Lonely Artichoke site was the definitive resource for Tohaa. He quit explicitly because the forum can be such toxic, shit-posting free-for-all, and I've no intention of posting my half-finished stuff out here for the trolls to trample over! Are there purpose-built sites for writing, or commonly-used web applications for sharing and feedback?
Dude, cool your horses. I strongly disagree that the forum is a toxic environment. Some parts of it can be, but overall my experience has been mostly positive. Magonus quit because he was fed up with Tohaa getting the shaft from CB development, it had little to do with the toxicity or not of the forums. If we feel there's a need to improve, it's better we be the change we want to see. If you don't think you are finding support as a writer, then you can either create a thread for that, or reach out for someone you believe can do a better job than you can. Be positive and people will react positively to you.
Mate, I’m always a fan; appreciate the sentiment; and would certainly accept your admonishment in any other situation - consider my horses duly cooled But there's no question that Dawson (@Magonus) quit because of toxicity in the forum and the real world because that's exactly what he himself has said. He said so directly to many of us behind the scenes, and you might remember the thread which some of us remarked on his outstanding community contribution and in reply, others expressed their delight that he was quitting in an unironic display of exactly what had defeated him! As far as this thread is concerned, fair enough; I accept that I've probably expressed myself badly (again). What I was trying to say that given how harsh the forum can be to even excellent writers, it's not a place where I (a far less accomplished writer), would wish to put my drafts on public display.
Again, I think we need to start fostering the good feelings. Most of the stories and drafts I've seen posted on the forum were barely even commented on. I've never seen a bad comment at all
I don't know how to comment on people's writing here; I just upvote if they're particularly good, but upvoting is a very coarse tool.
Painting is relatively easy to comment on. Even if you can't paint to that level, you can still say that something isn't working right. I forget whose PanO rems I made that comment about, that the OSL just didn't look right. Had no clue how to fix it, said so, and said I felt bad for commenting without having a clue how to fix the problem. Writing is a lot harder. I used to write for the navy. You can tell, I get painfully technical sometimes. I also get brutally sarcastic. We had a rule in the office: You NEVER, EVER proofread your own work. My Chief (an E7, man had nearly 20 years in service when I didn't have 5 years yet!) regularly handed me stuff to proofread (that's kinda the opposite of the usual workflow, usually low man writes and boss proofreads!). I can usually do decent work, but I still always give anything important (resume, job application essays or cover letters, that kind of thing) to someone else to look at.
'Too technical'; you? Next you’ll be saying that my writing is too long-winded! Yes, you usually do. Your Scenery Formula for Infinity Tables stands as one of the best forum posts of the year, so 'too technical' definitely has it's place... whereas 'too long' probably doesn't.
Long is fine, I'd be more concerned about disqualification: spelling errors, grammar and others. This means basically, no - slang; or you have to cite every incorrect grammatical choice or word that isn't in the base language dictionary, plus there's alway the difference between English and American. Sounds like they want a technical paper, and they are apparently going to have a editor to sort through the entires but not fix any of them.
Not to forget that spoken and written grammar are different. I write closer to how I speak on the forum, deliberately (chats and IMs tend to be my spoken voice, not written). If you wander over to the Sunz Never Set play-by-post RP, Eddie speaks differently than I write. So this is actually sounding like the kind of person who would take away points for grammar or spelling in a book report on Mark Twain, when those specific grammar or spelling errors were in the quotes from the book.
As I've progressed my drafts, I keep running into the issue of wanting to refer to events in the existing canon* but found I had no ready reference for the history of events in the Human Sphere. I don't know if such a project exists anywhere, but a 'History of the Human Sphere' site would be a great help with our stories; does anyone know of any such?
* I think it's probably a good idea for us to distinguish what we might mean by the 'Infinity canon' if we ever use the word, because the way it's used by fans is quite different to the way it's used in academia (forum sig. checks out ). The FanSphere tends to use it to mean "everything that's written by an official source" whereas academia uses it to mean "those writings that are accepted as part of the field, by people involved in that field". I've seen this different use cause no little heartache in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and think we should conscientiously save ourselves from that crap as early as possible. The way canon is understood in academia can be explored by examining the similarity between the third Star Wars film in the Star Wars canon, and the Revelation of St John in the Christian Biblical canon. (No really, bear with me; this is important, dammit!) As anyone who's ever read it in full can tell you, St John's Revelation is a deeply whacky book, probably as much inspired by John's profound faith as by the probably-plentiful psilocybin mushrooms on the island of Patmos, where he's believed to have written it. Whereas the Gospel of St Thomas isn't at all whacky by Christian standards, and was very widely read at the time but was not canonised. Not to mention the Gospel of Judas which isn't mystical at all, but was only discovered and translated by National Geographic very recently and therefore missed the cut-off date for inclusion by about 1700 years. The reason John's Revelation is in the Bible is generally understood to be his focus on eternal judgement and one of the very few scriptural mentions of an afterlife. These were both such important ideas to 3rd Century Rome-based Christianity that it got canonised Similarly, George Lucas is the acknowledged author of 6 Star Wars films, but his genius in the first two films is widely agreed by many fans to have pretty much entirely deserted him when it came to the next four. He would not say that of course; but I bloody would! So whilst the third film includes dancing teddy bears whose ludicrous use of stone-aged weapons help destroy the Empire's greatest weapon, it also includes the redemption of Darth Vader - an important idea if you think Star Wars should follow epic themes. So the third film IS canon (according to the New Zealand Church of Jedi), because the ideas it contains are important to our faith. Whereas it's totally obvious that Gungans generally, Jar-Jar Binks specifically, the idea that anyone could start their Jedi training too late, and Midi-fucking-chlorians are all totally heretical ideas, and we should properly regard the second three films as apocryphal.
