So Much Stuff...

It's Too Much! I Think I'm Going to Have an Asplosion!

Seriously, look at how much stuff is going on here. We have Gladiator Fights. The chosen is coming back. There is... SPOILER ALERT... another writing contest just around the corner. All of this, in addition to the multitudes of daily occurrences happening around Valucre. With so much stuff to do, who needs a life outside the internets, right? 

Well, don't take that as an endorsement to become an internet addict- there really is a little more to life than hanging out on Valucre, but it certainly isn't the worst way to spend your time (I'd like to think I could put it up near the top of any list ;) ), but you do have to balance out your lifestyle diet! Certain foods are good for you, but if the only thing you eat is fruit... well, look at what happened to Ashton Kutcher. 

Anyway, enough about celebrities trying to cause their pancreas to have an asplosion. Let's get down to our usual business, and see what's up on Valucre. 

(And because I keep saying Asplosions, and Traxien Cion thinks everything needs more explosions, I now present to you a 100% increase in explosions inside the blog: Aslposions!)

What's Happening Valucre?

Chosen Tournament is BACK- What is the Chosen you ask? Only the biggest tournament in all of Valucre. Do you wish to earn great prestige? Do you wish to have your chance to face the best fighters Valucre has to offer? Are you after your own sub-board (inside Terrenus), where you can do as you will for the duration of a year? Well now, I think you can see where this is headed. Join the Chosen tournament, because you never know if you might be the next chosen. Do you think you have what it takes to beat the former champion? We shall see. Come here to Register, and come here to hang out in the lounge.

Where Men Win Glory (Betting)- Well, if you like to gamble, or are interested in testing your ability to predict fights, the Gladiator betting pools are getting ready to open. So step up and take your chance to earn some VB. Can you bet who shall be the victors, and who shall go home with nothing? Go for bust!

Soldiers' Arrival- It seems that Valucre will soon have visitors from afar, and who can say with certainty what their intent shall be? A queen arrives with 48 soldiers, she in pursuit of an estranged husband- one who likely isn't aware that he's now married to a queen. This will be starting out in Morgana, Orisia, and likely will involve some extensive traveling. If you'd like to RP with a foreign group of folks who have some interesting, and certainly different, customs and cultural ideals, then you might have just found your next thread to start posting in.


North Sea for Pirates- Hey, did you notice the recent changes to the Genesaris layout? Did you notice that you now have a new sub-board for the North Sea? That's right folks, you now have the first official sub-board dedicated to pirate activity. If you are a sucker for pirates and pirate based role-plays, you now have a wide open playground, fresh and ready to accept role-play. Plunder and pillage this way, lads and lassies.

Free Legion is Recruiting- A knightly order seeks men of all stations and backgrounds to join, to pursue honor and glory, fighting for the needs of others. In the Free Legion, all men are free and equal, each having given up their pasts, including estates, titles, and riches. The Free Legion is for those looking for a fresh start, and never will they ask questions. Gain your freedom, and join today.

Untitled Fantasy RP- I think it's sort of funny that this has no title- not because of the lack of title, but because I am calling it untitled fantasy rp... okay, I have a weird sense of humor. Anyway, this fantasy rp has a wide variety of roles available for filling, looking for a colorful cast of characters to give this story some flavor. The tale involves a wrongfully accused woman who is whisked away and imprisoned on her wedding day, taken so she can be coerced into going willingly with a villainous figure intent upon using her for dark magic. Her husband to be must get her back, and recruits the help of a harlot and a something called a Shadow Savior. The story has a basic plot laid out, but many details are left open, so other players have a chance to give some input on story direction. Check it out over here.


Escape from Antigone- No one escapes from Antigone Isles, or so it is said. A dystopia disguised as a utopia, magic users are the slaves of the rich and powerful, exploited for their talents and treated as nothing better than potentially dangerous cattle. Their treatment is poor, and their outlook grim. Trouble makers disappear, rumored to be taken to a tower where dark experiments take place. Naturally, magic users trapped in this place are eager to find a way to get free. Will you be the first to escape Antigone?

Question of the Week!!!

Two weeks to receive answers, and all I got was three answers. Three! I'm not sure how to motivate more of you folks into giving me answers to fill this section, but I will have to think about it. Maybe if we added more explosions...

If you could have a day (all to yourself) with the writer of your choice (Alive or Dead), who would it be, and why?

Response One: Sir Terry Pratchett.

I have no idea what we'd talk about after I said "Thank you so much for giving fantasy fans Discworld," but there's no other writer I'd be more honored to meet and spend time with. I like comedy. I like wittiness. I like puns and wordplay. I like comedy wrapped around serious things, and serious things accentuated by comedy. I've never seen that done better than I have in the Discworld novels. I also like having a lot of canon to read, a huge world to immerse myself in. Forty-ish novels gives me that.

Response Two: Gail Carson Levine. 

I'm big on young adult fiction, and Ella Enchanted is one of my all-time favorite books. Levine mixes action and adventure with tenderness and (believable) romance, and she packages it in a lighthearted story that's easy to read with vivid scenes that have stayed with me since I was eight years old. I envy her sense of character and setting. I would love to meet her, and while I'd like to say I would pick her brain for writing and publishing tips, in all likelihood, I would probably just spend the day gushing about Ella and feminism. But I'd like to meet her, all the same.

Response Three: Piers Anthony

To spend a day with a writer of my choice is would be a great day indeed. To chose only one....now that's a hard decision. Who can really know what writer would be a good time spent for not every writer is the same as their attitudes in the books. And thinking longer on it makes more come to mind! It would also come down to the reason of spending the day with them. So coming up with the solution of spending the day with the writer to improve my own writing, I would chose the professional writer of Piers Anthony (Xanth rocks!). Out of those that I've seen here within Valucre....Boiling it down to writers I've spent enough time reading to get an idea of the direction of their work. Irene or Hummingbird. No particular order.

There you have it, the people a few of our members would like to hang out from the writing world. With all that said, we have to move on to picking out the winner of the month. That's right- first blog of the week, new winner in the drawing!

The winner is.... (man, we could really use an actual drumroll about now)... Praetorian!

Congrats Praetorian! You get your choice of a $5 E-card to anywhere, or 500vb. :)

Alright Valucre, here's your question of the week: What is the most unusual character you ever role-played?

Let's see what fun answers come up. 

New Members and Returns!

Welcome, TheBeautifulSin 

Welcome, Polar

Welcome, Foxrally

Welcome, Ella Bailey

Welcome, FactoryKat

Welcome, Senna

Welcome, Mugen

Welcome, Black Rock Shooter

Welcome, ChiNekoGami

Welcome, Kuukakulily

Welcome, Jericho Nash

Welcome, OatmealCreamCookie

Welcome, Celtic Deamon

Welcome, Bartholomew Butcheroo

Welcome, Pulse

Welcome, Varmac

Welcome, Ruzo

Welcome, Eango

Welcome, GBE

Welcome, DarrenHodge

Welcome, FightForWhatIsRight

Welcome, Mindi Ikkoku

Returns:

Welcome, Tiem

Whoo, that was 22 brand new members and one new return- a lot of work getting all of those up there! Well, I think 22 is a great number for two weeks, and I am happy to greet all these new members. 

Other Highlights?

Groan! Never a rest from these damn highlights. Not only have I given you a ton of content, I even gave you explosions, and still you want more. Entitled bastards. >_>

Ignore Feature- I've covered it before, but now we got some new news regarding it- Ignore has received an upgrade! If you put someone on ignore, not only do you not see their posts, you do not see that they even made a post! That's right, you no longer even have to see that temptation to go look at their comments. Just ignore them all together. 

Did You Know- Did you know that if you are new to the site, you can take a couple quizzes to prove your knowledge of the site. If you get all the questions right, you get 50vb per test! It's a great way to get your self started on VB collections. Check out the other did you knows over here.

Closing Thoughts?

This subject has come up quite a bit lately, so I thought it would be a good time to touch upon it, for all of you aspiring writers among my readership. I’ve suffered this pitfall many a time myself, and I’ve heard many others describe great trials with this… urge as well. What am I talking about? That dirty, dirty, dirty little habit of trying to edit your work before you have even finished writing it.

Admit it; you’ve probably done it a time or two. Hell, if you are like me, you’re a chronic editoholic, constantly looking over your prose and with a twitching eye and shaking hand, working on an excuse to go back through those lines and improve upon them. I suffered from this for a very long time, when doing personal projects, and I only truly escaped this tendency for the first time while doing NaNoWriMo. During that one month period, I convinced my inner editor to put down his red pen and sit this one out, letting me write uninhibited for 30 days, pouring words onto paper no matter how bad I thought they were.

Why not, right? Ernest Hemmingway himself said, ‘The first draft of anything is shit’. Now, if you don’t know who Ernest Hemmingway is, I’m going to assume that you either live under a rock, or you liked picking fights with cows as a young child, antagonizing them by pulling on their tails- don’t muck around with cows. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2sB5ZJsV3A Like him or not, we can all agree that Ernest Hemmingway is among the biggest names in writing, and if he himself is considering the first thing he rights to be about as charming and attractive as that road apple you saw the other day, I think it’s safe to assume that our manure isn’t really any worse off either.

When I quelled that inner editor, telling him that he will someday have his turn, just not yet, I found it was much easier to let the words just flow. I wrote without worrying about the quality of what I was writing, just allowing the ideas to spill from my mind to the paper. There were times I could just write and write, and other times that I knew what I was doing, but had to make a push for it. I completed NaNoWriMo in 28 days, and wrote over 50 thousand words- more than any other writing project I ever wrote. Had I let my inner editor take over, I probably would not have passed the first 10 thousand words.

It’s been said many times, and so I will repeat it all for you again- write during the writing stages, edit during the editing stages. The most important thing you can do for your story is to get it out! Look, it might be a hideous baby, but even the ugly duckling managed to become a swan in the end. Let the story come as it will, and when the story is finally arrived, you can then go about reworking the wording, finding better ways to handle a scene, tying up the plotholes, adding in other elements you think are needed, etcetera. This is also the time you can reach out for help from others, and get their feedback.

Do NOT do this before you have finished the work.

Take it from me, the guy who spent a great deal of his time trying to rewrite passages he was unhappy with, when I had not even finished the chapter, let alone the story itself. I have become hung up on parts so much, that eventually I lose interest, get discouraged, and abandon the project. Now, I have other issues I’m working on (I am such a basket case when it comes to follow through on personal stories :P ), but that one I have managed to put down. The inner editor has been slipped some tranquilizers, and is put to bed. He isn’t waking up until I go dump a bucket of ice water on him. >_>

With that said, that’s about all I got for this week. Sorry if it is a bit brief, but there is only so much I can say on this, and I have other stuff I need attend to- always more work to be done.

I’ll see you next week folks! Until then, take care, and keep writing. ;)

- Acies

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

~ Larry McMurtry

ONE FINAL EXPLOSION!!! -> Boom goes the Blog