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I'll drink to that Boss. It's hard to get detail into an action scene and keep it fast. But you ain't seen nothing 'til you see a magic floating rock start talking smack to a Loli god.

I swear, color your hair blond and you'd be able to pull off one heck of a "Mr. Incredible" cosplay. Looking damn good, congrats on completing that goal as well

 liquidjoshi wrote:
I'll drink to that Boss. It's hard to get detail into an action scene and keep it fast. But you ain't seen nothing 'til you see a magic floating rock start talking smack to a Loli god.

See, that sounds like an anime. When you write for an anime, manga, or other visual media, the hard work is done for you. You've already got the image right there so you don't need to do much to set the scene. When writing fiction without any pictures to go with it, you have to create pictures in people's minds with just your words, so finding the right ones to get the job done can be exhausting.


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Excerpt from Chapter 15: Garters and Salvation:

Madame Bovina’s Discount Bordello was the type of place where they’d never heard ‘less is more.’ The exterior of the building sported baroque decor and all manner of tasteless gilded statuary that had, on more than one occasion, been cited by the city zoning commission as an eyesore operating outside of a designated eyesore zone. The zoning issues were hardly the management’s fault. The place had been an old plantation house in the countryside by the mines from which the city of Mirth originally sprouted, until the urban sprawl caught up and swallowed it. Now the quaint old house was crowded on all sides by ugly tenements and, like the middle child seeking its parents’ attention, had to act out in outlandish ways to retain its identity. No surface could be wasted on such banal pursuits as good taste, and so even the glass doors featured mage-scribed engravings depicting all manner of unmentionable activities involving mayonnaise and a rake. Once inside through the double glass doors with their etched lechery, the perfumed air assaulted the senses with its unique mix of fine spices, essential oils, mildew from the leaky roof, and exotic body odor from a dozen different races of clients and professionals. The carpets may have been luxurious once upon a time, though now like the furniture and the staff they were well traveled and world-weary. A grand staircase, where a couple of ladies practiced a provocative form of lounging, led to the upper floors where the professionals plied their trade in rather depressing private rooms. On the bright side, the place never closed and they had a fabulous student discount program.

I'm liking this more and more haha

You should come up with a preorder function

 IHateNids wrote:
I'm liking this more and more haha

You should come up with a preorder function

I wish. I could do some kind of GoFundMe thing or something like that. But if I accept any kind of money ahead of time that might constitute sales, legally speaking, and I have no idea how that would affect my ability to publish through a traditional publishing house. I'm determined to get published the old-fashioned way. A lot of people self-publish nowadays with mixed results, but I've seen a lot of members of my family go that route in order to put out truly god-awful piles of crap that didn't deserve to be published at all. When this is finished, it will be a labor of love that I will send out to be brutally hacked apart by merciless predators, and hopefully through all that it will get a respectable name behind it and nice cover art and everything.

ferarless....i did enjoy your excerpt of your story it was quite amusing...jeez dude do you even lift bro good on ya for keeping your time busy well if you feel the need to give any more snippets of your story do post them. i do enjoy your writings immensely

Built the chest piece of Wing Zero. That little thing is about 20 parts and took me about an hour. Of course, a large part of that was spent finding out that the instructions and sprues were labeled differently.

Also wrote another chapter involving chefromancy and the forbidden truths whispered by Merrick's lasagna.

Yeah, I'm sat here thinking about my sci-fi setting and then you're there with chefromancy. I'm just like "Damn son." That's awesome. I mean, I'll give you real comments when I'm not buried in essays, but what I've read so far from what you've put up has been great. Easily better than some of the stuff I've had to read for uni

Liquidjoshi, if you're having trouble with your setting shoot me a PM. I tend to be pretty good with world building and character creation. Finding something for those characters to run around doing, though, that's my downfall. Oh, and major spoiler alert (if this ends up getting turned into a series and gets that far), this is really just science fiction masquerading as fantasy.

Oh I'm all good for that, don't get me wrong, but damn dude. Your stuff is on a whole other level.

That's the best kind of Fantasy, though!

Beware (or embrace, your choice) the Dragonriders Syndrome, where your Fantasy story is slowly encroached upon by Science Fiction.

My series (fingers crossed) focuses on two main principles:

Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic--Arthur C Clarke

Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science--Agatha Heterodyne

Magic is a subject pursued by scientific minds, an evolving field of study that continually advances with each generation to better serve the needs of the various races of the world. Except trolls. feth those guys.


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Oh, and just think! If one day my writing career blows up, people will sometimes whisper of a depraved warhammer 40k fanfic I wrote in obscurity, and GW will be forced to make it canon to satisfy my slavering fan base.


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Actually, and it's times like these that I love the automatically appended sequential posts since I never have to click the edit button, if I blow up real good then I swear by the seventeen screaming hells that I will write at least one good book for Black Library.


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feth you I'm a manatee. Okay maybe I'm not a manatee. I'm just really fething high from working out way too much and I wanted to post something somewhere because I'm hyper and I feel like it. My latest chapter involves compulsive masturbation and vampire piss. These are actual things I write about. If you need me I'll just be cackling like an idiot in my corner over here.

C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!


Are you like Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger? Is pumping iron better than sex for you?

Anvildude wrote:
C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!


Are you like Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger? Is pumping iron better than sex for you?

You know, I'd let you know if I could just find some sex to have out here. No women, yo! So I just pump constantly and wait for those glorious vacations to Thailand or Bahrain where girls literally throw themselves at you from all sides. I actually thought I had gotten a really great girlfriend in this country last month, met her online and we started getting really involved. But just before I could finally get a day off to go up to Dahran and see her for the weekend, she flips out and dumps me. The hits just keep on coming lately. So that's another reason I'm working out so much lately, a good way to channel unmitigated hatred for the entire female gender until I cool off and start thinking rationally again.

Geez, she preemptively dumped you? Without, like, actually meeting you? You really are rolling a lot of 1s lately, doesn't matter how good you are with luck like that.... You have my sympathy, we've all had runs like that.

Yeah, pretty much exactly how it went down. It made no sense then, and it made no sense now. The only question is whether to post all those nudes she sent me online with her contact info attached. There's nothing quite like revenge porn.


Tonight's writings began a chapter dealing with teddy bears, zappy things and science, glorious science.

She dumped you when things were getting serious and you were about to come up and see her in person after (only? Mostly?) interacting online? Sounds like an "oh gak this is getting too real too fast" moment. I.e. cold feet. Frustrating as feth -- I can tell you about this girl I knew before I met my wife who emailed me "yeah I'm still coming to stay with you for a week but I kinda have a boyfriend now, sorry" -- but an understandable reason to freak out.

Use in your art, man! Channel all that frustration and pent-up sexual energy into your characters, it's a proven recipe.

Finished up that last chapter with a Rocky-esque montage of experimental potions and self-digesting mice. Yeah science, bitches!

Moving on to an arms race with an enforcer who uses flow charts, and false senses of security.


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Hey, I need help coming up with a pen name for the fantasy/adventure genre. Throw some ideas at me!

*Insert Lord of the Rings, Narnia and DnD innuendos here*.

"Everything I make is gold!"

I'm honestly drawing a blank past that though :/

I know, right? It's hard to come up with a good pen name for yourself because it has to sort of fit the genre, and for me that would mean something like "Jake Action" with a middle name consisting entirely of exclamation points.

Go with Boss Fearless. It's catchy, interesting, and clearly a fake name.

Well a pen name is supposed to sound plausible. A good example is Jim Butcher, who is made of awesome and with whom I would totally just hang out all day being awesome and talking about wizards.

[Insert first name] Boss? Or Fearless?

I know some people just make an anagram of their name and run with that.

Hugo Boss? Wait, I think that's already taken...

Well damn, that would have been perfect if it wasn't for that one, tiny issue of previous usage....

How about something like Jake Fearless, that should scan well on the cover.

Self-digesting mice and enforcement flow-charts? You're talking my kind of language right there

I'm... Not entirely sure that "Jim Butcher" isn't his birth name. Butcher is actually a family name, you know, and James isn't that uncommon a first name.

For example, I had a friend in high school named Alex Savage.

For funding stuff you could take a look at Patreon. It's not reeeealy crowd funding, but like. Open source patronage for stuff people like and want to support.

I may turn to Patreon or something of the like after I'm published. Kind of like "Hey, here's proof I actually produce work, so you don't feel sketch about helping me make more."



[MOD EDIT - Maybe you'd be better off with a Personal Blog for some of this? - Alpharius]

If you really wanted to some how incorporate Boss or Fearless into the name, you could translate one of those into another language for a last name.

A few example from Google Translate:
-Courageux (French)
-Orädd (Swedish)
-Intrepidus (Latin)

Okay, so I pushed the envelope a tad too far in the last post, not so bad in my own opinion but the site rules are what count. So, yeah, I'll throttle that particular bit back a bit.


Tonight I mostly focused on writing a solid synopsis for the novel to be submitted along with initial chapters to agents. Way harder than I thought it would be, trying to condense 300 pages into 1 and have it still be a meaningful description.

After that was at a good place (read: terrible but complete) I put about 1000 words into a chapter involving the dangers of static discharge, really hungry vermin, and the horror of Fat Suzy.