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Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

It's funny how misleading blurbs and forewords can be. I picked up The Living Mountain recently, a forgotten classic of nature writing by a Scotswoman, Nan Shephard, who spent decades wandering over the Cairngorm mountains. The foreword's by Robert MacFarlane, who I do like, but he has a nasty habit of meandering purple prose speckled with observations that look suspiciously like ice-cream koans.

You'd think, based on this foreword essay, that The Living Mountain would be a bit dippy, with some Scots flower-power crowding out the nature. Shephard could hardly be more different to MacFarlane - her writing is lucid, pin-sharp, patient and logical in the metaphors, with the naturalist's eye for detail
 
for a second i thought you said seth macfarlane and was beyond disorientated
 
I wonder if they misspelled it that way initially, or just hammered the replace button in their spellcheck without even looking at what was wrong.
 
lovecraft has started to fight back from beyond the grave, he's sick of me drawing sexy squid men and me calling him a racist frogf*cker and he keeps sending cthulhu into my dreams to star as bullshit impossible-to-beat video game bosses

but he's a fool if he thinks this'll stop me
 
I just started wondering if there are any bad game translations into Japanese. I'm also mildly interested in learning about genuinely bad non-English translations in general; Spanish Final Fantasy VII and German Digimon World are the only ones that come to mind.
 
canisaries said:
lovecraft has started to fight back from beyond the grave, he's sick of me drawing sexy squid men and me calling him a racist frogf*cker and he keeps sending cthulhu into my dreams to star as bullshit impossible-to-beat video game bosses

but he's a fool if he thinks this'll stop me
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Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! Tekeli- oh, wait, wrong story
 
you want to know what's hard? writing a sex scene.
you know what's harder? writing a sex scene involving a handcuffed cat woman and an anthropomorphic snake with two wieners.

i started off doing this as a joke, but alas, my crippling perfectionism doesn't allow me to just throw words together and call it a story, even when the subject matter is as ridiculous as this.

luckily, i'm about to finish the first draft of an actual short story. even if it still feels like it's miles away from being actually complete. hopefully, a couple of my friends will agree to go over it and tell me why it seems so freakin' disconnected.
 
And you know what is hardest? It is to visualize that sex scene and put it in graphics.

Imagination is the source of creation. Whatever ridiculous thing it may seems like, imagining the "possibility" of such things happening is where one can start to become creative.
 
actually i feel like i could draw a sex scene just fine, because you only have to worry about one sense there, in literature there's five to describe
 
The tips and advice articles around tend to be pretty rubbish as well. The worst type are those that seem to insist on the narrative doing anything other than actually describing sex, with the overall impression of the author dealing with the subject as if it were a dead rat, to be delicately disposed of as quickly and secretly as possible
 
>mfw i can come up with extremely detailed and descriptive violence but something even horny 13 year olds can write is completely beyond me and awkward to think about

i'd take the dead rat any day
 
I'll always take the television approach: two characters go behind closed doors -> time lapse forward a bit -> conversation/next morning. I don't quite feel the need to go into lurid detail and it really brings me out of a story if it happens in the work isn't built around it.

Also, I forgot just how much work goes into putting together a worldbuilding atlas. I've been wanting to do it for awhile and now that I've started, I know why I kept putting it off.
 
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On a more... SFW note, here's another thrilling installment of Indigo Gets Confused About Kingdom Hearts Things on TV Tropes.
Video Games / Chuck Cunningham Syndrome said:
In the Kingdom Hearts series, we've got a whole world that is permanently retconned out of series: Deep Jungle. This is justified, as Disney could no longer secure the rights to the franchise. In the dreams at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts II, when Jafar mentions that Sora's found a Keyhole, the following scene is Sora sealing the one for Agrabah (after Jafar's defeat), when he actually said it after the one for Deep Jungle was sealed.
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How did Disney lose the rights to Tarzan?
 
From my understanding, a lot of Disney's largest franchises are borrowed from old stories and fairytales that have entered the public domain because their copyrights expired, and I assume Tarzan is no different. However, the original author (Edgar Rice Burroughs) trademarked the name, and the trademark is still in effect. Mr. Burroughs company probably negotiated with Disney for the movies, but didn't sign off on anything else I imagine.
 
Y'know, in recent months I've come to realise that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games aren't very well-written. Sure, they deal with dark themes, but at the end of the day, the power of friendship solves everything. The protagonist being an avatar of the player really limits what can be done with the story. I get the impression that Chunsoft have to follow strict rules enforced by the Pokémon company, but with Sun and Moon being overtly darker than other main games (eg: being allowed to say "die"), I hope Mystery Dungeon follows suit.

Am I making any sense here?
 
Nitro Indigo said:
Y'know, in recent months I've come to realise that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games aren't very well-written. Sure, they deal with dark themes, but at the end of the day, the power of friendship solves everything. The protagonist being an avatar of the player really limits what can be done with the story. I get the impression that Chunsoft have to follow strict rules enforced by the Pokémon company, but with Sun and Moon being overtly darker than other main games (eg: being allowed to say "die"), I hope Mystery Dungeon follows suit.

Am I making any sense here?
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I enjoy the PMD games for the stories more than anything, myself - I hate the mechanics and exploring dungeons just isn't my thing - but the story isn't that great or in-depth, either, I agree. They seem to be written with a younger audience in mind, like most games. Sun/Moon is "darker," or deals with more realistic/mature themes, but they didn't delve into them nearly as much as they could have because then the game wouldn't be able to reach their main audience.
 
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