Oolite Bulletins

From memory I think I spend a lot of time describing things "inside" the cockpit - panic, sirens, noise etc - the fact that this is caused by a fight going on "outside" is almost irrelevant! (I'd hope)

DaddyHoggy wrote:

It's tempting to write a ship to ship combat thus:
"The two ships approached other under full power, each desperately trying to draw a vector that would give it the first, potentially killer blow [insert imagination here - the good guy wins]..."

Heh - that's damn near perfect. I recently got seduced by a small fleet/capital ship engagement - luckily, I came to my senses, and changed it somewhat!

He he... I found the fight scenes one of the hardest parts to write actually. The trick, or atleast *a* trick that worked for me, is to concentrate on all the jockeying for position prior to the fight - builds the tension. If you read the fight scene in Status Quo where Rebecca's families' Boa is destroyed, the interest stuff is happening before they get attacked...

In the fights themselves I found it better to focus on what happens to the ships, rather than what the ships actually do, thus:

"The Python jolted as laser fire splashed across the forward shields, a sickening lurch foreshadowing a drastic loss of engine power..." is far more interesting than "The python took a hit and pulled up forty five degrees, engines damaged."

Failing that, concentrate on what the pilots are experiencing: Fear, anger, frustration, revenge etc... makes it more compelling.

£0.02

Cheers,

Drew.

Took me a few years, but I finally started reading these. First one down, soon starting the second one.

Posted my review to Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/460787394), but overall I must say that I'm impressed with this. It avoids the pitfalls of most fanfic with its strong characters and plot (both pitfalls that I personally stumbled into all those years ago when I tried writing Elite fanfic).

Started reading Mutabilis and I must say that after the relatively slow start, it is growing on me. The introduction of Captain Hesperus and his crew had me laughing out loud and that is a rare occurrence for me.

Where did you download from Wolfwood? I thought we'd nailed most of the typos by now... <puzzled>

We definitely nailed the hanger/hangar one. Disembodied had to fall on his sword and everything.

Cheers,

Drew.

Downloaded from the site you linked to in Kickstarter, I think. After I had finished, I regretted not having marked the typos down so that I could have reported them. There were quite a few of them.

Reading Mutabilis now and I've only bumped into a couple of typos thus far (adjectives instead of adverbs and one extra word somewhere). Marked them down so I can report them when I've finished the book.

Mind you, I edit people's reviews for publication as my "hobby", so these things tend to stand out for me.

Oh, and it seems that I started Mutabilis expecting it to be similar to Status Quo. Thus far, however, it's been a bit more serious (or slightly sterner stuff, if you will) and once I got over my per-expectations I've enjoyed it quite a lot.

Status Quo was definitely a story that happened to exist to join a lot of in-gags together - and it is to Drew's created that it will worked very well. They get steadily more serious as they go - although Drew has a knack of writing situations that make you laugh, not because of a joke but because they're genuinely funny.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

...it is to Drew's created that it will worked very well.

+++ ERROR +++ ERROR +++ REBOOT UNIVERSE +++



I had to read that four times until the full impact of that sentence could take root. Then I went cross-eyed...

Having myself some problems to understand, I though that was some sort of local dialect

Apparently you were having a DaddyHoggy moment...
Joking

It's the Oogle translate function - it doesn't always handle the corvine language perfectly!

Oh Lord, that sentence is so mangled even I can't remember what it was actually supposed to say.

Even if I do remember I shall repost rather than edit - that idiot sentence should stand as testimony to a failure of brain-finger interface...

'Daddyhoggy moments' are small fissures in the space-time continuum where genius has the opportunity to spontaneously create from the nothingness...

Cheers,

Drew.

I finally got around to reading Incursio and Finis..

Am now seriously tempted to declare war on GalCop.