Current and future writing projects

[End Master]

As usual post ‘em if you got ‘em

Here a sample of what I want to eventually get around to working on next.

Primal

The large island of Tokari is home to many creatures and plants both harmless and dangerous. It consists mainly of jungle. A few swamps, even a mountain which rumbles every now and then. It is said a great fire god lives there.

Sandy beaches and rocky reefs are found mostly near the endless water. Some wonder if anything exists past the endless water, but such wondering is quickly dismissed. Why would anything exist past a place that already provides everything?

Your people call themselves the Zoltec, Your people make their home just within the jungle outskirts. A beach is not far away where the endless water meets it. Spears, and bows and knives are the mainstay of protection and hunting. Though blowguns, slings, clubs and darts are certainly used as well.

Hunting and gathering is the primary source of food. Despite the belief of nothing exists past the endless water, there have been a few small boats made for fishing purposes. Your people also build and live in huts.

The Zoltec practice minor body piercing and tattooings, but not to a great extent. Your beliefs are simple in that you believe in nature spirits, but due to your proximity to the endless water, there is a strong belief of a water god that looks after your people.

You have a few elders in your village that attempt to determine the will of the gods and spirits.

There are two other tribes that live on Tokari as well. These are the Umlabo and the Salkun. Both live much further inland. The Umlabo live deep in the heart of the jungle. The Salkun live near the mountain.

Since these two tribes live far from your own, not much contact is made with them. What little contact has been made has been somewhat strained.

The Umlabo are closer, but are isolationistic and have made it quite clear about trespassing on what they consider to be their territory. They do not build huts and live in the trees themselves. They heavily tattoo and pierce their bodies and worship the jungle spirits. They have shamans that engage in crazed trances and stranger magic.

They engage in the activity of head shrinking and head hunting. One can always tell they are in Umlabo territory by the shrunken head dangling from the trees.

The Salkun fortunately live on the far side of the island near the mountain of the fire god, which it is thought that they worship. They are very aggressive and most encounters with them result in violence.

They adorn themselves with the bones of their enemies or even their own people. Cannibalism is practiced by them. Human sacrifice is also practiced presumably to appease the fire god. It must work, as they carry weapons and tools that are much stronger. It is thought that they are made from the fire itself.

The Salkun mostly come in conflict with the Umlabo who are closer. In fact the two tribes are in a perpetual war with one another. Your people just try to stay out of it and defend yourselves whenever possible.

Life on Tokari, may be plentiful, but it isn’t necessarily long.

[Usoki]

Rentyre II

Just like the first piece, Rentyre II isn't really about anything- it's just the protagonist interacting within the setting of the story. Shortly after his first day, the main character will either hang out with people of his own kind, or pretend to fit in with the popular crowd. I have a few scenes visualized (like the kegger), but as far as actual connections, I'm still working on it.

"Oh, right, enrollment!" you say. "That's today, isn't it?"

Your mother just glares back at you. "Finally joining us in the world of the living? Honestly, you used to be such a morning person, I don't understand! Now finish up and let's go- registering your body as public domain takes a while."

"Why do I have to do that again?" you ask, shoving the bowl of bland cereal away.

Your mother sighs again. "I suppose you weren't listening at all?"...

..."Honestly, Maxwell, haven't you been paying attention to anything I've said this summer? Well, I'm not repeating myself. Read one of the school's pamplets on the way there, if you're so clueless. Now come on, or we'll be late!"...

Newkirk High School

Here at the NHS magnet school for boys, we pride ourselves in providing a safe learning environment for our students. With our creative usage of the Rentyre technology, students will learn to respect the differences between their fellow classmates that make us all unique.

Please note that your child may not always come home in his natural body. Extended Rentyre periods frequently used as teaching aids. Additionally, insensitive or hurtful remarks may result in your child Rentyring into the body in question to experience how it feels when somebody else makes fun of him. Your child will be given his original body for all holidays, as well as by request should an important family event occur.

To further reassure you the parent of the safety of our school, we offer the following advice:

You stop reading there- it's just a list of clichéd do's and don'ts every potential Rentyrer has to hear. "Mom, why are you making me attend here? Isn't it a bit...excessive?"

"You think so?" she askes, genuinely surprised. "We thought you'd like it, considering how interested you've always been in Rentyring."

"Well, yeah," you say, angrily, "but for fun! Not for some stupid morality crusade! This has got to be the cheesiest thing I've ever heard of!"

"Cheesy or not, you will be attending this school," your mother says matter-of-factly. "Your father and I think it will break you out of your shell."

You roll your eyes at this- your parents confused your utter refusal to talk with stupid people (i.e., most of your year) with shyness.

"You'll thank us for this later," she says. The idiotic but common parental phrase means the conversation is closed, so you content yourself with staring angrily out the window until you arrive at the parking lot.

[Locke]

Omni is planned out as a rather large story with broad scope, though certainly smaller than HOID, and more focused as it is driven mostly around a central plot.

In the beginning, the universe was formless. There was matter, or there wasn't. All things existed in a vast, cold and timeless void - if even void could be said to exist, for there was nothing to compare it to; nothing to define it against. Time could not be said to pass in this place, though by modern perspective, if one were to try to make sense of the inconceivable within the laughable limitations of our mortal minds, a great deal of it indeed went by. All existence since the Event is as nothing compared to that monothlithic eternity.

But something changed in the relatively not-so-distant past. A singularity, a great Catalyst was born into this universe from somewhere without. It began as a single point of super-dense matter, a packet so small as to be undetectable except by association with the behavior of larger objects around it. The Catalyst, whatever it was and wherever it came from, could not maintain its form in our exceptionally vacant universe. In a great expansion men would know as the Big Bang, the Catalyst erupted outward.

Travelling faster than the speed of light, transcending the limitations of modern physics, it formed an infinite wave front that expanded - is expanding - will always expand outward in all directions, and inward into itself, with greater force than any mortal mind could ever comprehend. The universe became warmer. Energy cascaded through the vacuum with wild abandon, eventually coalescing in formations of matter that bore a passing resemblance to those mortal minds in these later ages have described.

Another incident sometimes known as the Big Rip or Translocation Project which occurred or did not occur billions of years earlier or later had some bearing on this process. It was a paradox or cataclysm unimaginable by our mortal minds, but created by those simple minds nonetheless. The stars, the galaxies and time itself shattered into an infinite number of pieces - spinning, broken and dying in a vast abyss. If the universe could feel pain, the tortured song of its riven soul would break our fragile bodies, and the worlds they cling to. If there is a God, He weeps endlessly over the severed flower of His creation.

But as callous as it may seem to turn our heads, to avert our eyes from the horror of it all, the agony of gods and stars does not, for the moment, concern us. We do know for certain, in any event, that the coming of the Catalyst changed everything. The equation of the universe, which had for ages unfathomable stood comfortably near absolute zero, became unbalanced. The mechanics of the universe responded in an attempt to compensate, rendering from the chaos galaxies, solar systems, planets - and life. In this particular instance, that life was intelligent; self-aware. So it was that the vast joy and the despair, the song and discord, the creation, harmony, destruction and disruption of the spheres was played out in the realm of the mundane as well as that of the cosmic - among human beings, in the minute and intricate workings of inner space: the human mind.

[Vesnic]

My dearest Locke,

The epistemological quandaries in the first paragraph alone are enough to make my head explode! Locke, perhaps you haven't noticed, but around here we're all kind of THTOOPUD. That's right. Stupid. With a lisp and an unexplained vowel malformation. Because these things make one sound less intelligent. (Note to all: if you talk with a lisp, I'm really sorry that you are so amusing to your friends. The most brilliant fellow I ever knew had a remarkable stutter, yet people just snickered whenever he talked. Tragic, really.) I'm not saying we're not waiting with anticipation and existential angst for the arrival of your story. I'm just requesting that you not expect us to COMPREHEND anything.

Thtoopudly yours,

Ves

[Usoki]

Speak for yourself- Omni looks like a hardcore piece of Sci-Fi technobabble, and I for one am excited for it. I'm not entirely sure what the plot would be, but it definitely sounds interesting.

I'm kinda interested as to the plotline of Primal, as well. I mean, it's EndMaster writing it, so whatever happens, there will be all sorts of shit goin' down. The question is- will the main character gradually become a warlord and kill the other two tribes? Or do the other two tribes randomly start a full-island war, and you try and be the last alive? Maybe civilized people come, and you pick a tribe to help you wipe them out?

I'm going for the middle one, since the first one is Necromancer's plot, and I doubt he'd want to write the exact same thing again so soon.

[End Master]

All of them, variations of them and probably different scenarios than that. There will definitely be tribal warfare, but the protagonist is starting out at a really young age (Like 10) so it's possible that the island is going to change quite a bit over the years assuming you survive.

For example you could very well rise to become the warchief and crush the other two tribes, only to get wiped out years later by those civilized people you were talking about.

Other things like diseases, weather, possible supernatural occurences, and just the local fauna and flora could all potentially get you. Tribal people tend to have to stick together to survive, attempting to go it alone can be pretty hard in a dangerous environment.

So no "Godmoding" this time around.

[donteatpoop]

Finished one complete path of Brothers (Paul). There were a few ways to die, and one Epilogue ending. There will be another epilogue ending for Paul as well based off of the final choice that I'll probably have finished tonight.

Let me know what you think (if you are into that sort of thing).

[End Master]

Grrr! A lot of the paths that I was trying to choose for Paul were still unfinished! I must’ve ended up picking every path you hadn’t worked on yet.

Anyway, I still liked new rooms I read. Nice wrap up of your past actions for the current epilogue you have up. Your wife was right though when she said no matter what you do, their lives just get worse.

I hope when you’re finally done with Paul, Mikey is the next one you work on; I was enjoying that path the first time I was reading through it.

[donteatpoop]

Grrr! A lot of the paths that I was trying to choose for Paul were still unfinished! I must’ve ended up picking every path you hadn’t worked on yet.

Anyway, I still liked new rooms I read. Nice wrap up of your past actions for the current epilogue you have up. Your wife was right though when she said no matter what you do, their lives just get worse.

I hope when you’re finally done with Paul, Mikey is the next one you work on; I was enjoying that path the first time I was reading through it.

Yeah, Mikey is next in line. He's at least got a humorous side in addition to be horribly fucked up. I'm saving Kenny for last, because he is going to depress the shit out of me. Paul was painful enough to write, actually.

[End Master]

That was the thing with Paul though, it seems like he has a path that potentially avoids some of the bad stuff though.

The first time I was going through Paul’s path I was choosing just about all the choices that involved me distancing myself from the family (and the highschool girlfriend) as much as possible. So he was basically just looking out for himself and things were going relatively okay but the story ended when the professor started hitting on him.

[donteatpoop]

That was the thing with Paul though, it seems like he has a path that potentially avoids some of the bad stuff though.

The first time I was going through Paul’s path I was choosing just about all the choices that involved me distancing myself from the family (and the highschool girlfriend) as much as possible. So he was basically just looking out for himself and things were going relatively okay but the story ended when the professor started hitting on him.

Oh yeah, the "am I gay" path. I don't know. I was going to delete that one. Sometimes I shouldnt' drink as much as I do when I'm writing.

[End Master]

Heh, actually though a “sexual confusion” path would probably work better for Kenny, given what happened. It would be pretty likely as well.

[End Master]

I’m getting into writing Primal, but after getting further into it, I decided that I really need to flesh out the island a little more and the tribes in particular because it’s getting a little more complex. It’s always hard to just “spring info” on people in CYOAs since you’ll usually have to explain the same thing in several paths. And that’s just redundantly annoying for me, so I think it’ll be necessary to do a whole “room” for each of the main tribes as well as the island itself in the beginning, rather than just the brief bit I wrote.

Some changes for example:

I decided that the Zolopotec (New name for the Volcano/fire god worshipping tribe) shouldn’t really have metal weapons (at least not yet), but they’ll definitely have obsidian arrowheads and similar sturdy weapons. Still some cannibalism and human sacrifice, though maybe it’ll take the form of throwing someone in the volcano, rather than the traditional heart cutting business. (Though I guess they might do both)

The Umlabo are still wild tree dwellers living in the swampy area of the island. Still shrink the heads of their enemies too. I’m thinking they might have more “magic” about them since I’m thinking the swamp area contains a lot of different kinds of plants for them to mix up. Hallucinogenic mushrooms will definitely be on the list.

Changed your tribe name to the Kaimori. More affinity to the water (having actually built small rafts and canoes) and most of the tribe is made up of fishermen, but there are land hunters as well, which also act as the protectors of the tribe. There’s a reverence of a Water Goddess, but it’s not reaching a semi-fanaticism like the Zolos have for their fire god. Your tribe is probably the least violent.

Need to explain some of the ecology of the island and life in general on Tokari, just so I don’t get bogged down with explaining certain details within the actual story. Like some of the particularly vicious lizard creatures called Rograks (Bigger and meaner versions of a real life Komodo Dragons) rodent creatures called Qweepas, certain other creatures, fruits, plants, fresh water sources, the “Endless Water” etc.

Also I was pondering over whether to give people proper names or give them names like “Strong Sun” or “Broken Shells” due to the primitive culture type status, but I mostly discarded that idea and everyone’s getting proper names.


Anyway I have to start over a bit, but I still got lots of ideas for this one though. Just need to get all the background “fluff” out of the way first. Though I have to remember not to go overboard, I’m not shooting for complete “island life” accuracy; it’s still a fantasy story after all, not set on historical Earth.

I think I will be trying to shoot for the Ground Zero route though in terms of long paths and tons of choices. Hopefully anyway.

[donteatpoop]

Sounds really good, End. I can't wait to read it.

[End Master]

Currently working on Legend again.

Was almost tempted to cheap out with the Priest paths due to laziness and boredom of writing those...but I'm not going to do that now and there will at least be somewhat of a lengthly path though probably still shorter than the others

Demon possessed path is going to be worked on afterwards. The goal is to get all these finished before the end of the year.