Oolite Bulletins

It's worth sticking with, certainly. One thing I'd suggest is that you should be careful with the point of view: particularly with multiple characters and narrative threads, I think it would be best to have one POV per thread. An example would be in Part 2, the section Aerater planetary surface, Tarina village, Citadel outskirts: Three weeks later. The POV starts by following Brewer and his thugs, who are then confronted by an anonymous vigilante. Then the vigilante is revealed to be Jacob (does Brewer know who he is?) as soon as the helmet comes off, and the narrative POV then switches to follow Jacob and give the reader access to his internal state. It would be better if the scene was (like Jacob's first scene) all told from his POV: give a quick rundown of how he's survived the three weeks, what he's witnessed, and have him try to stop it (maybe he's hiding out in one of the huts, when the thugs come through the town?). If you give each narrative thread its own POV, and stick to it, it makes it easier for the reader to follow the action.

The best piece of writing advice I've ever been given was to cut out my adjectives and adverbs. For example, drop words like "timidly" and "gruffly", and show the fear or the aggression in what is being said, and how: have the timid speaker whimper and stammer and fail to form proper sentences, and have the gruff speaker shout and bang his fist (or the butt of his gun) on the wall. And a verb like "strides" doesn't need "purposefully" added to it: it's a purposeful word to begin with.

Disembodied wrote:

The best piece of writing advice I've ever been given was to cut out my adjectives and adverbs.

<nods> Good advice, is that... I've been guilty of using too many of them.

Part 4's posted.

Good writing advice there, thanks. I'll do my best to cut down on unnecessary words, though I doubt I can catch them all. As for the jumpy narration, that's a bit harder to pin down. Not something that can be easily fixed with a spellchecker . Still, I'll try to keep a tighter reign on it.

Cody wrote:

Thing is, the forum generally is in the doldrums, and interest in Oolite fiction is almost non-existent.

Yeah, this part of the forum doesn't really attract that much attention, and I guess I just kind of forgot that it's quiet by nature.

Anyway, thanks for the replies. That's all the encouragement I needed!

Updated part 5.

Part 6

...and we're back.

Apologies for the sudden and long absence, plenty of real life to keep me busy.

part 7

Trying to stick to weekly updates this time.

Part 10

I'm starting to get busy again so I'm going to have to dial back updates to once every two weeks. To whoever's still following this, I hope it doesn't bother you too much.

Hi Myammocrate, there's at least one member who likes what you're doing. Just takes a while for me to get there. It fairly hums along, but certainly would like to find out how it turns out.

Don't know if it's my pad, but can't seem to access pt11&12