I spent most of yesterday plotting out the next twenty chapters of Weaver. Half of those twenty are already written and just need to be adjusted accordingly. We’ve entered the middle third of the book that was already written before I went back to fix the first third. I’m feeling good about the middle third. I dropped enough foreshadowing in the first third to cover the middle. The final third is a little squishy and needs the most help. That brings the Where Weavers Daire K BAR count to: My deadline is July 4th. Camp NaNoWrimo begins in July. My hope is to get Weaver done and work on the spin-off that the writing group liked. It would appear neither myself or Bennett North got into the Amtrak’s Residency. Glad to see I’m good company. Association of Rhode Island Authors is having a Meet and Greet at Warwick Public Library on August 9th.
So as the E3 continues to roll on, the Ubisoft fallout over no playable women characters continues on blogs from Bennett North‘s to Chuck Wendig. I hope James Therien isn’t the biggest whiner in the world because his sound bytes sure sound like he’s biggest whiner, ever. Did some fact checking via the web*: Aveline de Grandpré from Assassins Creed III and Black Flag was a playable character. So that means, all the code these whiners are complaining about is already in the computer. And sure, it may take a while to “update” aka spend time but it’s already been done. If the code for a playable female character is already in the computer why are we even having this conversation? Instead of continuing with the playable female character that had been a plus for Ubisoft like it was for BioWare when female Shepard popularity shot through the roof, instead, we get a speed bump and negative traction on social media. MMORPGs have been doing player customization for years while console games have struggled to catch up to make sure their On-Line version can be played out of the box. Patches come later. Personally, I enjoy customizing characters. I’d rather get shot by someone different then just a different tinted Master Chief. Why isn’t Cortana a playable character? It’d be fun to get killed by a giant blue naked A.I.. She’s a reverse Dr. Manhattan. Hell, even EVE On-line got into it. Downloadable Content (DLC), Season Passes and pre-order to play XYZ character is unfortunately the next big thing. I say unfortunately for several reasons: 1. I want to customize and choose playable characters (like Harley Quinn) out of the box. 2. Oh, right, is this extra feature going to work next year when the iteration of the game drops? Question 3. See question 2. Question 2 is big problem if like me you play Call of Duty Games. Call of Duty has become a annual national holiday in upon itself. And none of the DLC’s or levels are portable. Player customization for sandbox games like GTA, Saint’s Row, Watchdogs and Dead Rising is half the fun of these games. It should be half the fun of any game. Code and time be damned. Tiger Woods’s golf games have character creation trees that put WOW to shame. ** Ubisoft should be able fix this problem by the time the next game launches. Ask for forgiveness and pledge that playable female characters will be on their to-do list going forward. Hey, if Microsoft can dump the Kinect out of Xbox One then Ubisoft can do this. If they can’t and if their upcoming game The Division has no playable female characters then it’s more than time to start a letter writing campaign. Maybe get Aiysha Tyler to knock some sense into them… * If I got my facts wrong, I blame the web. Move along. ** Yes, I’m repeating myself with that Tiger Woods line.
Chapter 17. I haven’t said that in a while. Last week was good to me. First, I figured out how to fix Chapter 5. Chapter 5 was supposed to be revealed throughout the book but I figured out how to use it as a chapter instead. It introduced Melinda’s supporting cast better than what I had done in Chapter 6. So all the chapters got bumped up one then I hit the call to action for Melinda and then hit the old section of chapters I had written previously. So all in all a good week. That brings the Where Weavers Daire K BAR count to: Now begins the task of writing the next chapter to bring all the characters together for the introduction of the big bad. Once that chapter is done it’s back to the already written chapters. In non-novel news: Myself and Bennett North went to the book launch party for Rhode Island local author Heather Rigney for her book: Waking the Merrow. I had met her at The Elephant Room a few months back when I was slogging through the re-writes of Weaver. The place was packed. For a self published book, Heather did everything right. The cover looks good, edited and the price for the dead tree version is a perfect price and not bloated like some other soft cover books I’ve seen. I highly recommend it. And go see Edge of Tomorrow. It’s a fun movie and not just a excuse to go and enjoy the air conditioned theater like The Lone Ranger was last year.
Live. Die. Repeat. Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s book with the title All You Need Is Kill, Edge of Tomorrow is directed by Doug Liman and stars Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt and a cast of rememberable grunts fighting off hordes of alien spaghetti monsters called Mimics.
