Migration to Wordpress

 I am suspending posting to this blog, having created a personal WordPress-based site at davidalexlamb.com. I copied over all my old posts, and will slowly be adding categorization that I rarely did here.  If you were subscribing to this blog using an RSS aggregator like Feedly, you should update it to point to the new site instead, since I don’t expect to post here again.

Unifying Three Story Structures

 I’ve been reading about writing for years, and am often puzzled by the differences in what different people tell you are essential, approaches to various aspects of writing. I am usually skeptical of “essentiallism” and “only one way” approaches; one of my teachers, Mary Robinette Kowal, once said in one of her Patreon classes that “all writing advice, even mine, is what worked for that writer.” So I focus on what seems useful to me in my current state as an aspiring writer.

At the moment, what I’m working on is character development for my protagonist and secondary characters. I’ve been mostly plot-driven in the past, and my characters have to a large extent been “cardboard” plot tokens. So I’ve been studying sources on creating character arcs; this is a summary of what I’ve learned.

Settlers 6 Custom Scenarios, Part 1

 I’ve said before that city-builders are one of my two favourite forms of video game. Unfortunately, sometimes they have “gotchas” that make you start over from the beginning (or from a many-turns-ago save file) that lead me to wish for walkthroughs that don’t give away too much but at least give me a chance to prepare for whatever the problem might be. Lately I’ve been playing The Settlers®: Rise of an Empire – Gold Edition (released April 18, 2008 by Blue Byte Studio / Ubisoft). There is a nice walkthrough for the campaign scenarios, but I haven’t found one for the custom ones. If anybody out there is still playing this almost-13-year-old game, here are a few warnings. If you want to try to reduce exposure to spoilers, just read the list immediately after the break gives the key idea of the gotcha.

Reflections on January 6, 2021

 As part of learning how to write, I have been reading Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller, her reflections on 27 years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshops. One section talks about how she works “from images, to scenes, to incidents, then situations and finally plot” in contrast with either pantsing or the usual kind of plotting. The images often arose from her subconscious, her “Silent Partner;” plotting is essentially knitting together the scenes and incidents into a coherent order, adding new material to connect the old. Diana Gabaldon describes a somewhat similar process, and in a brief conversation with Nalo Hopkinson on the 2015 Writing Excuses Retreat cruise she told me she writes this way, too.

All of my NaNoWriMo novels started with images or very brief scenes. So after the riots on January 6, my reactions crystalized around a small number of images.