General Writer's Block thread

I have now used Lorem Ipsum as romantic dialogue. Not as a placeholder, but as the actual dialogue. (It's to indicate that the characters in question are both the sort of people who would memorize Lorem Ipsum.)

Alright, I'll keep that in mind.

Anyone think that there would be merit in creating a thread for advice on how to Gender Flip well-known historical or legendary/mythological figures while maintaining their history/legends still recording them as male (a la Fate/stay night and Fate Apocrypha regarding King Arthur and Jack The Ripper, respectively)?

So, they say a useful way to organize huge casts is to group them. Leo belongs to the villain group, and I've come up with two very nice Five-Man Band's for the rest, but Virgo doesn't fit in with either dynamic, and she doesn't fit the Sixth Ranger archetype. Virgo is sort of the maid/manager of the zodiac, cleaning up after everyone and generally keeping things under control from the sidelines.

edited 14th Apr '13 5:34:59 PM by Haldo

Sixth Ranger is not an archetype. It's plot-related. /end mini-rant

Well, the description didn't make that very clear. But what I meant was, she's not the morally ambiguous one-man-army type that the trope describes.

That's not what the trope is about, at all. A Sixth Ranger is a "new character that joins an established ensemble and knocks it out of one of the traditional categories (and possibly into another)." They can have any sort of personality and fill any role in the new team. It's not about their personality; it's about plot occurrences changing team dynamics.

And sorry if it seems like I'm harping, but I've been heavily involved in the Five-Man Band cleanup, and this misperception contributes to a lot of misuse, so it's a bit of a pet peeve for me.

edited 15th Apr '13 10:03:26 AM by Nocturna

—scribbles note on sixth ranger—

Then the trope shouldn't describe it that way.

Clashing FTL Drives

I'm just thinking up a sci fi story and was wondering if anyone could solve a problem I had. My Sci Fi universe has 2 different types of FTL drive, a Warp Drive and a Wormhole Drive. The longer the wormhole drive is active the longer your jumps. It creates a tunnel that gets longer and longer and the universe of the story is represented as kind of "spherical bubble" so you can imagine the tube being able to reach further and further. The Wormhole generator is carried within the starship and generates a spherical bubble that grows to encompass the spaceship. The warp drive immediately starts moving you in a given direction by distorting space.

I was wondering how you could make it so that you couldn't just leave your wormhole drive on whilst travelling with the warp drive. This has caused a problem because now the heroes should be able to instantaneously wormhole out of a fight as soon as they meet trouble after "saving" up their wormhole drive. I try to give explanations that kind of make intuitive sense in a very general way eg. The warp jammer machine in the story unevenly induces distortion in the space around the enemy ship to prevent them getting the shape of space needed to warp. Hyperspace and subspace as places with different laws of physics do not exist in this story. You can travel deeper and more shallow to the bubble but the laws of physics are consistent everywhere. Psychic powers do not exist. Communication is by quantum entanglement.

The power limitation explanation doesn't work as the story covers many generations of a exponentially growing civ and they go from having 1/100 of the galaxy to 3 galaxy clusters under their control and millions of dyson swarms per galaxy. This is a pretty hard problem and I was wondering if anyone could figure out the solution.

Replied in the other thread.

Suppose that a Second Chinese Civil War ends with the modern People's Republic of China breaking into numerous splinter states, including the original PRC government as a Vestigial Empire. What possible splinter states could form, and where in China would their capitals most likely be? Is a revived Imperial monarchy in some portion of the original PRC viable, for example?

Please note that you are not limited to revivals of historical Chinese states.

Hong Kong breaks off to form a city-state, probably. Maybe Shanghai as well.

Hainan may or may not join up with Shanghai or Taiwan, the former of which would likely dominate the southeast. Hong Kong and Macao would almost certainly be free cities. Tibet and Xinjiang would be de facto independent countries by default due to the lack of military force and ethnic allegiances; the same might be said for some small regions in the south dominated by the Yi, Naxhi and others and parts of former Manchuria in the north. Outer Mongolia would just join Mongolia. A good chunk of the east would probably just call itself China, though, PRC or not.

At least, that's my most adventurous answer...

OK, so we have some of the ethnic/nation-based secessions nailed down. What about political secessions?

The Yi and Naxi/Nakhi peoples form too small proportions of their home provinces to make any secession feasible without external intervention, IMO. And I think you mean Inner Mongolia.

edited 11th May '13 11:44:01 AM by MarqFJA

I am struggling with a Hetalia Fan Fic of mine. I keep wanting to change the beginning, and I'm really finding it hard to end the first chapter now that I decided to end it by starting Kiku Honda/Japan's flight to West Germany. I feel like I am just hammering out words at this point, and I'm putting too much description into what gear he wears/what rations he prepares for his trip across two oceans (the Atlantic and Pacific), not to mention North America and a part of Europe.

Should I just skip writing those details? Or would the readers say "hey, where did he pack stuff?"

edited 11th May '13 4:44:24 PM by Misuki

So what's the difference between this thread and Writer's Block?

In theory, this thread is for long, drawn-out, often meandering discussions, and Writer's Block Daily is just a place to post random thoughts you want to get off your chest. As you can see, this dichotomy did not endure long.

Oh okay, so I have been posting in the right thread then.

That reminds me... What's the difference between this thread and Random Questions? Because it seems to me the only practical distinction is that this thread tends to be a lot slower in responses, and doesn't get as much "traffic" in the first place.

edited 14th May '13 1:24:42 PM by MarqFJA

I think some of the threads could usefully be consolidated...

People don't ask questions here, a lot of the time.

I have an urban fantasy story where the setting is largely like Harry Potter (there's a masquerade of people who can naturally do magic), except the main character dropped out of the educational program. I understand that my internal conflict is mostly the character's desire to be a part of the magical world despite his failings, but I cannot come up with a substantial outward conflict. From what I've read, this is the opposite of a problem a lot of people have where they have a plot, but little going on internally.

Any ideas on how I can generate ideas/a plot? I'm trying to discovery write, but I just end up following the character around his life as mundane events happen.

(If anyone's interested, here is the first chapter).

Apologies if this is in the wrong thread.

So he summoned it himself, and doesn't remember it? You successfully force me to speculate on what happened. Was it attacking him or trying to act friendly? Cool.

Consider the idea that you don't really need an outward conflict. Solving the mystery of what is happening to him should provide enough dramatic tension by itself to engage the readers. You could write "The Wizard of Earthsea" except in an urban setting. Just a thought.

Well, I'm glad I was able to provoke some thought. It's pretty much what you see on the surface, though—the way I have it written now, the imp attacked him because it was drawn to magic, but he doesn't know enough to have any defenses up against such "pests." However, he thinks someone intentionally set it on him, and wants to find out who could have a grudge against him. The closest thing to a climax I have is the idea that someone finds out about his lack of security and breaks in. Unfortunately, that's all the plot I've got.

I'm guessing Earthsea doesn't have much external conflict, based on your comment?