You write an apocalypse scene and:
- The intrepid heroes try to call their friends and can’t get through
- They send texts
- They go to the car to see what’s on the radio
If you don’t see what’s missing from that list, you’re old.
I don’t know if the phone/Intertube connections will be working or not. I’m pretty sure that texts can drop back to old-school format and get through under most conditions. I’m not sure how things like X and Instagram react to overload conditions. I need to find out. Not the details, because it doesn’t matter and I don’t c are, but the effects.
My intrepid werewolves are 27 and 25. They would at least try. “Check the radio” <snort> maybe right before resorting to smoke signals.
On the bright side, I noticed this myself.
Chapter 25 is done aside from a few “I don’t feel like writing that now” holes. Nothing as hideous as the chapter 18/19 firepit. It’s just turning ‘then they all went their separate ways’ into anything not that.
Chapter 26 is moving along. It’s the ‘dungeon vs heroes’ chapter, in which they earn Marcy’s scholarship. Not bad, so far. The first ‘floor’ is a wave floor, so I’m having depth-of-field issues. Our intrepid heroes are fighting 100s targs – not all at once: in waves.
Blow-by-blow fights are obviously out. Even if a video popped out of the aether with the footage of that, I wouldn’t watch the whole thing, let alone transcribe it. (I would most definitely watch a good deal it. What would you do if a 40GB file of werewolves fighting targs showed up on your computer?)
On the other paw, “They fought lots of targs. It was hard. They leveled up.” is just wee bit too far in the other direction. Maybe if I add “The week after that had actually gone incredibly well.” That’s a nice chapter. Four sentences. Pages are for amatures.
I’m trying to vary from “the horn scraped the hair from his thigh, but he had moved just enough” to “They tackled the next pack of targs with more confidence. It was warranted.” The trick is to maintain some sort of ‘flow’ through it all so it’s not one of those vertiginous zoom-in/zoom-out/repeat things. Meh. We’ll see.
Speaking of targs, they’ve created a dilemma.
For those of you (I’m not delusionally thinking that I have readers; it’s just grammar) who have not been following the Bob arc: Bob’s the dungeon. Our intrepid heroes laughed at its tropey goblins. For stuff, they gave Bob lots and lots of SciFi DVDs to create better dungeons. This is the first one and Bob custom-designed it for our heroes.
I have publicly mocked gratuitous aesthetic fluff. I have already fallen short of my lofty initial standard. I’ve even agonized over where the line between functional, aesthetic, and gratuitous may lie.
But how can you not want to use a Klingon font for the title of the chapter containing the multiverse’s first Klingon-themed dungeon?
Oh what a brave new world to have such dilemmas in it!
