feedback on story so far and writing setup

[Icey]

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KiobMbaXMZGfhmykUQnVZSRiZHfR465nsi2EqPLqIGw/edit?usp=docslist_api

Hello friends, recently been working on 1 out of 3 books that tell the tale of the story prior to my Pub Master Quest games. To be honest I haven't wrote books since middle school and even then my I never felt I could present a story in text form at the same degree of which it played out in my mind...

Point is I stopped but I want to give it another try for future fans to come to be able to understand what they're getting involved with.

I'm really interested in hearing what you guys think. I do have a friend who's going to go through the things and edit things and what not so we can release the book along side our PMQ portable Knight (AGS version) cause I know there are typos and stuff.

[Retro Wolf]

Point is I stopped but I want to give it another shit for future fans to come to be able to understand what they're getting involved with.

I'm sorry but that just made my day!

[Icey]

Damn it this is why I hate talking to people while I type from my phone.

[Ghost]

Evil spellcheck is evil. Happens to the best of us

[Retro Wolf]

I'm finding it hard to put into words what I thought about your story, I've retyped this a bunch of times.
There were parts when I thought the character dialogue was pretty good, the situation fairly well described. Then I'd find parts that seemed clumsily put together. You're right to get someone to edit, but they have a lot of work to do.

I mean there's a few sparks of potential in there:
"He was an alcoholic but it made his memories of his past life and Ellen's mother's death easy to bare."
Stuff like that makes you think, it adds depth to the character; gives an impression of what Ellen's life was like growing up.

But I'm not sure if book writing is the way forward for you, if you're charging money for the book you really do have to have your shit set right.
I get that you would want to create your own universe with a meaty history, I've fantasized about making a world as rich as Lord of the Rings or Star Wars myself.

Have you ever considered taking a course in creative writing? Retaking an English class? There's no shame in this, as I myself retook English after I'd left school.

I did have an idea for you while I was at work today: Rather than write a book, make a comic.
It would be good practice for your art skills, plus there's a lot less writing involved.
You could make it a webcomic that serves as a promotional teaser to your game.
Each instalment could be set from the point of view of different characters (good and bad guys), or important events in your world's history (epic battles!).
This would give your fans a good idea of each character's motivations.

[Icey]

@Ghost: Noted 

@Retro Wold: to be honest,  book writing is just not for me as I prefer to make comics. A few months ago I decided to do a comic in place of these books but that was just going to take too much of my time and I needed to conserve drawing energy for working on our games. So I decided to just give the book ago. I kinda want to just finished these stories and then let him edit them. But I alost wanted to see what other people (not to public) thought so I can see what's the best way of going about editing things myself so I won't have to annoy others.

[Ghost]

I got to second much of what Retro already said. You clearly have an idea in your head and it wants out, but a book may not be the best medium. At times I had a hard time figuring out what was going on, and that is a bad sign. I get the feeling that you have not only an idea of a background lore, but also wish to present characters. Many of those, and a history, and that means you have no clear focus- everything is fighting for attention.

Once again my tip would be to "start small". Don't write a book, write short stories. Give yourself a limit of words/pages. Make up one simple situation and explore it. Short stories are hard to do right because they impose a lot of limits, but it's also easier to edit a few pages of text instead of one large epic story. And you can be highly creative without overstaying your welcome: Points of view, settings, tone, you get to try it all out. Heck, you could even collect a bunch of those stories, or invite some friends to "borrow your setting" and write their own, and collect them in one neat volume under a certain "theme". (I wrote a pack of cigarettes once- 19 stories all starting with the current main character lighting up a cigarette, and each story lasting as long as that one cigarette. Why 19 stories? Because that's how many cigarettes you get in a pack. It even had a Kafka parody that was two sentences long.)

__
edit:

That sounds a lot like "make short games before you start on a huge one" but just for the sake of example, compare "The Stand" with "Skeleton Crew" (both by Stephen King)- the first is a huge, sometimes unwieldy doorstopper of a book that takes effort to get invested into, and requires some time to finish. The second gives you a couple of stories that show variety, creativity, and you can just pick one and read it in one go in the evening and come back with the feeling you just read a neat story.

[Icey]

It does sound like what I was told before with starting small then working your way up. I guess I'm just stuck in a point where I gotta keep pushing stuff forward in a big way and just learning as I go along. But I still think the bigger reason why I suck at writing books is due to my lack of reading books through the years. Unless it was school related I just don't like books but I'll read comics/mangas and well interesting articles but I just struggle to enjoy reading books.

I really wanted to do a light novel for these 3 books but maybe (I can't start over now) when I do other stories which I do have another 1 on the side to do then I think I'll just break the whole thing down into short stories and just post them up for download.

Also I was gonna drop these in here earlier but I didn't have the pics on my phone.
This is what this book was supposed to be as a comic.

[Retro Wolf]

This is where you get me jealous Icey, because I can't draw like that.
This comic grabs my attention a lot more than your book. There may be a few panels that I wondered how you could possibly squeeze a speech bubble in there, but then again I don't know what you want to put in there.

I say go with the webcomic idea, scale back your stories. Webcomics are supposed to be short; you don't necessarily have to colour it in either.

[Icey]

but I do sadly still need the practice and I need to find a way that to not lose momentum with making these things. Maybe I'll try to get webcomic out once a month. Depends which is shorter and easier.

[Ghost]

This comic grabs my attention a lot more than your book.

Aye. Forget what I said about the short stories. Draw that stuff. That's your thing there alright

[Icey]

@Ghost: hahah maybe if I can find the PSD file I'll try to finish up this comic and release it next to this god forsaken book XD

[Andail]

Those comics aren't bad at all. Sure, there's a bunch of improvements I can think of from the top of my head (like, add variation to the panel layout, or at least don't make them almost aligned).
But you definitely have a good sense of story telling through pictures.

However, I refuse to read more than just a sentence or two out of your "book", and that's because I don't think it's worth my time. Why? Because you clearly aren't ready for it. When you say that you don't even read books yourself, or that you still write here on your phone, again, so that words get messed up, that's when you tell us that this is a pretty half-assed attempt.

Ask anyone anywhere, and they'll tell you to start out small, but you've never listened to such advice before. I mean, you have 30 pages and expect people to read that, when your very first paragraph goes like this:

Years before I was born not everything wasn't so great between the Vikings and Lokirians. There was a war between the two, and though not huge there was word that second one was could follow." Said Thorgest.

You have a double negation in the first sentence, there should be a 'the' before Lokirians, an 'a' before 'second', you have written "was could follow" which I think you can see for yourself doesn't make sense, and finally a dialogue line typically ends with comma, and 'said' with lower case s.

If you had submitted a page of prose to the critics lounge, let's say a short story, we could have helped you revise at and taught you some basic writing rules. But I'm not sure that's what you're after.

So - start over, start small, and be prepared to revise your text a lot!

[Icey]

I totally see where you're coming from Andail, but it's not something new that I'm always working on more than one thing at once. And what I mean buy that is that these books where supposed to help bring people into world of my games so starting small is too time consuming unless I make finish the comic. They may be hard to read now (however others have read it and said it was good but was clear enough like you guys what needed to be fixed) but once my friend fixes things up it will be way better. It's almost like he's going to rewrite everything. These books are not long, really only like 8 chapters.
I post from my phone because it's another platform that I can use to communicate on the go. Lol I mean think about, shit isn't a spelling error or an auto correct error. I was just talking to someone while posting XD.

On the bright side atleast now I know where I stand as a writer  , but once I finish the stories and they get fixed up I'm surr it'll all make sense.

[Cassiebsg]

I think you should take into consideration who you're writing these books for.

You want your players to have this background into the universe and such, but are your players (heavy) book readers? Casual book readers, or like you, only read what that they "must"? Like you, I'm the later, so I avoid reading unless I need to or the topic of the book if extremely interesting.
How many of your players will say "Hey! I just got this great game, but first I'll go sit over there and read this '200' page book!" Most people won't even bother reading a manual, and will only consult it if they stumble into difficulties (and some will just ask someone else to solve the problem, even if the solution IS in the manual!). I think that most of your players will read/devour a comic, even if it's B/W (most Manga is B/W and it doesn't get read less because of it!). I know I would read those comics! Short stories? Probably! At least one if it really was short, and then take it from there.
If you really don't want to lose what you already have, then I would try and fit the story telling into short stories,, that you then can compile into one big book.

But my vote goes to the comic! Do the comic!

[Icey]

Good point, I was thinking about that hard at the start. I was thinking maybe it would bring over some people who do like to read but the amount it would bring over to not so known game is quite small. I mean I love Halo but I can't say I've read a single one of their books even though they've been right in front of me from time to time.

It's a lot to think about and I think the book would be nice to released but it doesn't quite capture the same feeling that my mind is trying to convey, however the comic does a better job at this easily.