EVE?

hey, I'm a pod pilot too, somehow i have a feeling there won't be many of us here. Hope I'm wrong though.

Tanchacor
Director of Twilight Military Industrial Complex

I played Eve for about six months. I really like the game a lot in many ways, but I ended up finding it dull after that length of time. They need more variation for players I think.

How long ago PlanNine? My problem is there are too MANY possible paths to take them all. Of course, a lot depends on who you hook up with as corp mates and how well you get along together. I've been playing over 3 years now and have a lot of friends floating around in different places. But during November, you will find me here... well... pounding keys anyway.

Excellent Tanchacor!
I was casting around for plots and it occurred to me that almost any of my old "war stories" might make a good basis for a Novel. Have to change the names of course, and that would be a shame, but still...

Might be fun.

Subakai

Hey Turotulco....been about 2 1/2 years since I played I think. Quite a while in any event. I also felt so far behind so many of the other players that I'd never really catch up. I don't know if that was just me, though, and not due to some inherent aspect of the game. Like I said, I think the game is cool.

I've been playing a couple years, i mostly stay in high security space so i don't have very many war stories but the ones i do are tend to be hilarious because of how much somebody (usually me) failed in the situation presented before them.

The one of PlanNine's concerns I can address pretty well is the feeling that everybody else is too far ahead. there are characters up to four years older than mine if i remember correctly, but since I did a fairly good job managing my training I now have perfect skills in a few small areas. I can't do as many things as well as the older players, but i can rival them where i choose.

Other thing you should know, is that the game has changed a lot in the past 2 1/2 years, we now have a few modular ships (you not only fit modules onto them, but you also choose the bits that go right on the hull) and some other cool stuff, the modular ships are the highlight of recent changes for me.

I agree Grey Matter. I've seen blundering youngsters take down experienced battle veterans. I've even lost a Covetor once to an inexperienced gate camp simply by setting my autopilot and not bothering to check the system security status on my route. I was 4 jumps into low sec when I returned from the galley with a fresh cold beer only to sit down and witness my complete and helpless destruction by a couple of 3 month olds.
I also keep regenerating a couple of alts just to try out the new tutorials every few patches, so quite often I am playing with a fresh character myself. It's still fun. I usually make up some story about how they are lost relatives of my main and just play around a bit.
Any road, I'll keep an eye for you online, I work mainly out of Eram. I see you are Matari also. Fly safe!

Hi all,

I'm just freshly back from the Eve Fanfest and have both Eve and gearing up for this year's Nanowrimo on the brain. While at Fanfest I sat in on a fiction writing round table discussion led by CCP Abraxas who writes almost all of the new Eve Chronicles. The round table was not meant to be Eve specific, but of course that's what we all came back to over and over given the venue. I also sat in on a number of sessions on backstory and content creation. Great stuff.

An interesting constellation of points were brought up about writing style and the cultural characteristics of the in game races. I'm wondering if you can help me test a theory by answering a couple questions: 1) do you tend to outline what you're writing very thoroughly and work off of that as you go or do you start with an idea and some characters and let what you're writing emerge as you go -- ie. plot driven vs. character driven; and 2) what race is your main?

I see a couple of you are Minmatar. I'm already not sure how that fits into the theory I was formulating, but I'm throwing my question out there anyhow.

I found Nanowrimo through Chris Baty's No Plot, No Problem, so I'm pretty squarely in the put-some-characters-in-a-sandbox-and-see-what-they-do camp. My main is Gallente.

I'll let you know what my theory is if I get enough data points to see a real trend --

Maj Hakuri

Lo Maj,

To answer your question's first,

1) I start by doing a loose outline, about to the Chapter level. Any story needs a strong reason for existence in order to be a good story. I usually know who my protag is and who the Antag is and a couple of supporting characters. I usually know if the Protag is going to get what he\she wants in the end, and I usually know what the end is. Other than that, I have no idea how things get from point A to point B. When I start writing I put someone in a scene, a situation, that startles them, and then let them figure out how to get out of it. I tend to write from the standpoint of the main spending a lot of time in the "Now what the hell?" state. If things get too slow, I throw in a terrorist bomb or headhunters, or a crazed cheerleader running amuck in a bulldozer to get things stirred up again. I usually figure out WHY those things occurred a little later on. Sometimes, this method completely derails my plot and I have to completely redraw the outline. But it's a lot easier to adapt a 25 point outline than it is to hold an unruly cast of misfits to a plan when they suddenly decide to go somewhere else en-mass.

2) Matari, specifically Vheriokor Shaman.

I'm pretty certain I'll be doing this years Nano in the form of some of my old alts. War stories as it were. I'm thinking I will hew as closely as I can to the current EVE universe. I've decided to use the current place names and I do hope CCP will not have a problem with that, copyright issues and all. So this year will be a little unique for me in that i will be writing about things that have already happened, though hopefully not in a "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" style. My Epic EVE adventures will become sub-plots to a main storyline that I am currently chipping away at.

Sorry for the long reply, just getting warmed up.

Subakai

I shouldn't think that they'd have a problem with using NPCs, place names, etc. There were a lot of questions in the fiction round table about whether the developers were going to make a canonical version of the Eve backstory available and it sounds like eventually there will be more in the Evelopedia to make it easier to correlate people, events, and dates. They're going through a big internal push towards consistency within the backstory, even going back and editing portions of the Chronicles to eliminate confusion and inconsistency. They really seem to welcome players' creative efforts and encourage them.

If you want to go on to publish something after November though, I think you'd have to do it in conjunction with CCP or White Wolf, but then again White Wolf is accepting submissions for fiction based on any of their game worlds, including Eve/New Eden, see: http://www.white-wolf.com/MoreInfo/Submissions/FictionGuidelines.php

Thanks for the insight into your writing process -- hope there'll be more Eve players dropping into this forum to say hi and more responses as we get closer to November.

Maj Hakuri

Hurray, i love having questions to answer

1) I really do no outlining or planning of any sort. I start out by describing a place, with no real intention of making it an important or significant place in the book, just somewhere to start. Once I feel like its been fleshed out a bit, I'll make a character or two in the scene, not describing them too much so I can get a feel for who I want them to be later on. There really isn't a plan or starting idea though, I just let them go and at about the 10k word mark the plot and the characters conspire against me and wrest control of the story from me. It's after that point that I am writing my good stuff, and I only really learn where the story is going as I'm typing it out.

2) My main is a Sebiestor Minmatar,

As of the present I haven't done any EVE-based novels or short stories, guess I just haven't gotten around to it yet, but who knows? Maybe I'll change it up this year.

Thanks for the questions Maj

-Tanchacor

Thanks Maj,

You've answered a few burning questions and the links are interesting. Not sure I'd pursue that route, after all, once written, place names and the like can be changed so easily. I guess I won't really know until after Nov 30, eh?

I was playing around with this a little last night, hauling out some old alts and dusting them off. Sort of seeing how they all might react together. A story concept has presented itself in enough detail I think I'll go ahead and work out the kinks to see if I can kick some life into it. Hey, if I can't walkabout in station yet I can at least writeabout in station, right?

Thanks again for the pertinent CCP info.

Subakai

I noticed that one of the Fanfest lectures I went to, "Words, Words, Words", has been uploaded to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ccpgames#p/c/E7A45268BF4505BC/10/o2PQqdniqfQ

In this video CCP Abraxas gives a reading of one of the chapters of the new EVE novel he wrote, The Burning Life, due out early next year. This is not a sequel to Tony Gonzales' EVE: The Empyrean Age.

About 14 minutes in he begins a lecture on fiction writing in general based on what he's learned along the way. It's not about EVE fiction or the canon specifically, but about the writer's lifestyle, attitude, and job.

On lifestyle -- read a lot across wide-ranging genres and pay attention to all kinds of media

On attitude --
Be kind -- Try to understand and see your characters from the inside -- regardless of your agreement or lack thereof with the characters' ideas, motives, goals, etc.
Have fun -- Don't take yourself too seriously. Write out of joy, not out of hate because it will take you further through the times when writing feels like a real slog.
Keep writing -- Set public goals (like what we do every November by declaring we're going to do Nanowrimo). Find the right setting. Use the time you have. Read something that inspires you or makes you want to do better.

On the writer's job -- Rewrite to make your work as good as you can, but then move on. You get better by writing a lot and learning from it not by only ever writing one thing and trying to polish that one thing to perfection. When writing is your job, you need to be able to recreate your success over and over under the pressure of deadlines.

If you haven't been to www.youtube.com/ccpgames in a while, have a look. They've begun uploading a lot of the videos from Fanfest 2009, including one on the upcoming expansion, Dominion, and one on the new console FPS they're working on, Dust 514 (see "CCP Presents!").

Enjoy!

Maj Hakuri

Aye, I be a pilot of the pod.

Chainer Cygnus, CSO of Back Alley Trading Company [BKAT]

My CEO is on here somewhere too. And there are posts on blogs trying to get more of the EVE Blogging Community involved.

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If I wanted cute and cuddly I would call Cthulu over.

Excellent. EVE is such a rich universe, and full of all sorts of interesting characters. It's a natural source for material. I'm looking forward to November.

Yarrr! I be a space piwate!

Steph Wing, Reaper Industries.

Another pod pilot over here. My main is Rusalka Renoir - Gallente. I seriously considered doing an EVE fanfic novel piece this year. But then I had another story start screaming in my head, so I think I'll save the EVE idea for next year maybe. Nice to see so many EVE folks over here!

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Wow. I was shocked to see that EvE had its own forum here (and I see that ChainerCygnus found it).

HI, EVERYBODY!

I'm on a twelve-step program for EvE, but I keep tripping and falling down the damn staircase. I do write fiction in that universe. I can even type that with a straight face, and should be able to as long as the characters in that fiction remain fictional. If they ever manage to get out of it, I'll be too busy running for my life to be sitting here typing anything.

Some of it can be found on two blogs: http://vievetisserand.blogspot.com (inconsistent, wildly varies between first and third person and involves a lot of iterative navel gazing loops. do not read while trying to operate heavy machinery.) and http://sabiaubery.blogspot.com (collaborative third-person tale that sometimes approaches a coherent state. sometimes).

Fortunately for everyone involved, I'm not doing EvE fiction for Nano.

So, It looks like I may be the only EVE storyline? Still, it is nice to see a small crowd representing life between the gatecamps. Maybe Dec 1 we might all get together and go blow something up?

That could be fun!

Now that would be a fun party!

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Holy crap! Of all the places to find you! At least I think it's you. Didn't you race with the Eve-Uni team in Eve a very long time ago, and then came back with a BRUCE team which kinda fizzled? And if it's you, it's even more of a coincidence since that's exactly what I'm writing about this month :o Well... not -that- particular season, but a later one.

Anyway *ahem* Hi! I too am an Eve player, sporadic blogger, and occasional role-player. I'm writing about some adventures I've had in the world of Eve though I haven't bothered changing any of the names. It would feel weird to. It's not like I'm ever going to get this published, anyway, since the entire world and setting is copyright of CCP :P

Queluxa
(aka Kayleigh Jamieson, Gallente, racer ;) )

Heh, I should have known there would be a couple other pod pilots lurking around. I almost wrote a story based in EVE for Nano, but it lost out to one of my other ideas. That and I just didn't feel I had a coherent enough idea for 50,000 words. Maybe next year.

Grigori Black
EVE University
Minmatar, Sebiestor, Tinker, Explorer

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Hey Maj Hakuri I have some answers here

1)
I dont really plan ahead, I start off with a basic idea of where I want things to go. ANd when I start typing, I do not stop to think about what I am doing, resulting in some unusual strange but generally pretty cool stuff.

This year right before I typed my first word, the only thing I knew what that it had to include zombies and vampires and I had no idea of how I wanted it to end. Now 25k words later, it is turning into an interesting story. There is a small problem though, I have to think a lot about what I am doing, so it wont conflict with what I have already written, or make things impossibly complicated for my self later on.

2)
Minmatar FTW.

--
Khuri - Minmatar Female Sebiestor.

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Characters killed: around 10
Main characters killed: 0
Explosions: 2
Romances: 0
Sanity left: 80%
--
07: All about me! - FAIL
08: Steel of Pandora - WIN
09: HARD - Pending