FF8: Future Bound

[Bob]

*claps*

Yeah, I plan to get caught up after I'm done writing AFFR. Hoping that'll happen soon enough. I only have three episodes left. I can do that...right? So yeah, hoping after that to get caught up. Might also start earlier than that, depending on how school and future baby treats me.

[countlieberkuhn]

Congrats on the good reviews on fanfiction.net! Although I'm a bit behind still, what I've read so far as been well-written and really engaging. Were it in a physical book format I'd have read it all by now, but for some reason when things are in digital format, I have to read whole chapters at a time, or not at all. Maybe it's the lack of tangible bookmarks. Anyway, keep up the good work!

[Fleck]

Thank you one, thank you all. I don't expect this hiatus to be too terribly long. I wouldn't be surprised if I was back at it before the year is over (or maybe even before November is over, but let's not get ahead of ourselves). I just needed some time away, and the mid-book break was my best opportunity to do so.

If anyone does have anything to say that's a spoiler, remember to put it in the other FB thread instead of this one. And thanks, you guys!

[Fleck]

So I'm terrible at taking a hiatus. Or, at least, I'm terrible at taking a hiatus that lasts longer than 2 weeks. Because as of today, I am officially back in Future Bound writing mode. I just couldn't stay away. It seemed the harder I tried to not think about FB, the more frequently I was pummeled with good ideas. It was like my brain was actively fighting me.

Anyway, it's still going to be a while before any new chapters are released, since I burned through my writing buffer. I'm thinking maybe December-ish before anything is posted.

Just figured I'd let y'all know.

[Bob]

That MIGHT give me time to catch up!

[Fleck]

Go, Bob! Go!

[Bob]

I FINALLY FINISHED DISC 1! I'm...pretty lame, but hey, it's progress! I had a week off (Spring Break, woo! *flashes boobs*), so got the last couple chapters of the first part finished. Gonna TRY to read more occasionally, but I'm guessing my next big burst of reading will happen at the beginning of summer vacation (June). With any luck, I'll catch up to the posted chapters before it all ends!

...I suck at reading. And to be fair, I kind of blame my optometrist for some of my slowness. I've been using a new contacts prescription for a few months and it just wasn't right. I switched back to my old one recently and can actually read a friggin computer again.

Anywho, TMI and stuff, so now the mostly-spoiler-free comments for Disc 1!

In my opinion, it had a good start, a less-good early middle, and then it picked up as awesome. The Seifer chapters kinda bored me (they feel like necessary evils to me, in that you need to put them in to build to something), plus I'm not a big fan of the Irvine and Selphie chapters. Well, until Chapter 16 at least--that one was pretty cool. But the other characters' chapters were all awesome. And my absolute favorite, at least thus far, is Quistis. I think you captured her personality well, plus she has a great position in the story--basically the most direct plot line so far since most others are building to larger concepts and she's just in the middle of a war, plain and simple.

So yeah, I'm eager to read more and I'll try to get a few more under my belt this weekend before school resumes on Monday (End of Spring Break...boo! *covers up boobs*). Not sure if you wanted any feedback and opinion, but...there it is. I could get into more details on AIM or PM or something, so if you wanted to know my opinions on anything more specific, then lemme know, but I'm guessing you'd care more if I were on say, chapter 47, not 17.

[Fleck]

Future Bound News:

On this day, almost a full 2 years after I started writing FB (this thread began July 16th, 2012), I have written the words "The End" at the bottom of the last chapter. Granted, there's still a hell of a lot of editing left to do, and three of the remaining six chapters need some serious work before they're ready to be seen by the public, but if I fell over dead right now, you guys could theoretically hack my laptop and see how the story ends.

Thanks for all your support, guys. I know most of you probably haven't finished the first half of it yet, but you guys got me going long enough to keep the momentum going on my own, so thanks. I hope you guys can find the time to finish the story this summer and let me know what you think. I'll have more to say when the story is officially done and uploaded, but right now I'm just glad to have completed a major milestone in the series.

FLECK OUT!

[wyvernxk7]

*Insert long and unsettling passage full of creepy metaphors that stand in for my admiration of you.*

[Fleck]

I'm sure that admiration will dwindle as you work your way through FB. It's hardly a perfect story. But thanks! Sorry if I'm unable to accept a compliment without an equivalent self-deprecating comment. Tell me how far you are/when you finish.

[Fleck]

So it's done. Insert montage of famous movie scenes where people say "it's done" or "it's over." I feel like a part of my life has ended, but in a good way. Like quitting a job or moving to a new house. Things have changed, but not necessarily for the worse. All of Future Bound is online for you guys to read, including the Epilogue which was not included on Fanfiction.net. If you guys get around to reading it, let me know. According to fanfiction.net, the final word tally is 626,709. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, what's wrong with me? I must have a problem.

Count asked to be informed about what my next projects are, so here we go.

Project 1: A horror/humor novel entitled "Shut In" about a girl who stays in her apartment all the time and also has a Lovecraftian monstrosity living in her closet as a pet. I still have a lot of details to work out before I can begin writing it, so you might not hear anything else about this one for a while. I don't even rightly know if it will be "horror/humor" yet. I may end up dropping one of those genres, depending how the story develops.

Project 2: A fantasy encyclopedia entitled "Legendarium." Pretty much every fantasy world gets compared to Tolkien's Middle Earth, so I might as well call my story after a word he helped popularize. And yes, it's a fantasy encyclopedia, like Tolkien's Silmarillion... in a way.

See, the thing about fantasy worlds is that they generally exist to support one story. Hogwarts was created to tell the story of Harry Potter. Middle Earth is for Lord of the Rings. The Seven Kingdoms are for A Song of Ice and Fire. The unnamed galaxy far, far away is for Star Wars. And so on.

But I want to create a fantasy world that can encase a theoretical infinite number of stories. One large enough and complex enough to where one person or one group or one story simply cannot cover all of it, or even a majority of it. So, with that in mind, I'm creating a fantasy encyclopedia which I will fill in with short stories, novellas, serials, and perhaps full novels, all set in this one world. None of these stories will be the "one" story of that world and none will be the most important. Instead, they'll all be pieces of the whole, working together to flesh out and develop the world.

Obviously, this is an enormous undertaking. I don't intend to ever finish. It's something that I think I'll be working on off and on for the foreseeable future, always in the background of other projects.

Since the phrase, "fantasy encyclopedia" is probably the most boring pair of words in the English language, I'll try to build a little bit of hype by showing you a really rough world map that I've created.

www.darksarcasm.goatpen.org/images/Simple%20worldmap.jpg

Obviously, I'm going to add details like cities, rivers, mountains, etc. but this should give you a rough idea of what I'm going towards. The shaded places around each continent are shallows, and one of the features of my world is the fact that the tides vary wildly. During low tide, those shallow areas become exposed, forming navigable land bridges, which is why it's worth pointing them out on a map.

Anyway, I'll have more news later on.

[Bob]

Well, you've gotta have connected shallows for the Tiny Bronco! Like, duh!

Congrats on finishing Future Bound! It certainly is a massive undertaking! It is always an interesting feeling to finish a big project (although I've never had a project quite that big, but maybe all my stuff combined is similar...). I'll definitely update you when I'm finished. I'll probably mention something whenever I finish a disc.

Projects sound interesting. I'll be interested to see what direction the closet monster pet goes. A lot of my story ideas are like that, too, where I have a vision in my head, but have a gut feeling that it'll drastically change in style as I start actually writing it.

The large world is a neat idea, too. It's hard playing something like a Final Fantasy that takes up the entire world in a single shot, so it's nice to have stories that theoretically stay based around a certain place, but still have similar themes going on. Not to say that at least one of your stories won't involve massive world travel, but either way, I like depth, so being able to focus on different things in multiple stories is cool.

By the way, how'd you make the map? It looks really good. I'm kinda guessing just Photoshop, but I've always struggled with making decent quality maps with it.

[Fleck]

Aug 16, 2014 7:43:22 GMT -8 Bob said:

Well, you've gotta have connected shallows for the Tiny Bronco! Like, duh!

Of course! And I guess it goes without saying that I'll obviously be influenced by Final Fantasy, which is something most fantasy writers can't claim. Hopefully it will give my world a more unique style.

Aug 16, 2014 7:43:22 GMT -8 Bob said:

By the way, how'd you make the map? It looks really good. I'm kinda guessing just Photoshop, but I've always struggled with making decent quality maps with it.

Yup, photoshop. I found a couple of mapmaking tutorials and, combined with a little screwing around of my own, made that map. I plan to make a much more elaborate and a lot cooler map later on, so we'll see how that goes.

Anyway, to make a map like that is pretty easy, so long as you're content with a little randomness in the design. Use the cloud filter on a blank document. Use it a couple of times to make the randomness less random. If you just use it once, you'll end up with a lot of little islands instead of continents. Then when you're content, use the fill tool to turn sections white (or black, or whatever). You'll get continent-shaped designs where you click. If they aren't big enough, use the cloud filter a couple more times.

From there, color in the seas and the continents. You'll probably end up with a lot of black outlines around the continents; instead of erasing that, I turned it into the shallow areas on my map. If you only used white and black when filling colors, it's pretty easy to use tools like Replace Color to make everything even. The fewer colors you have on the screen, the easier it is to work with.

It'll still look pretty jagged and ugly at this point. I screwed around a lot at this point, so I don't remember the exact steps I took. But I know I used Filter>Stylize>Diffuse to blur out all the jagged-ness and I think I used something to make the green outlines, but I don't remember what.

Basically I used the cloud filter and then dicked around for an hour or so until it started to look good.

[Bob]

I might have to try that at some point. Things like maps help me write stories, so a few of my more Final Fantasy-based stories (like yours where some form of world travel and otherwise world politics might be important) need a good map for me to get started...which is part of why some of them haven't started yet. But yeah, I'll have to try out that method with the clouds and such. It sounds neat. Even if things are kinda jagged, I'm a fan of the "nature ain't perfect" angle (although you have to wonder sometimes if those formations would occur naturally or not).

Keep us posted with the map as it gains more detail and such. And also any tutorials you might have found or invented to do so.