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This style of game has been imitated so many times, by so many game developers. It's essentially a dungeon crawl. You make a character, you explore dungeons, you kill things and gather loot and level up. Games like Dungeon Siege and Torchlight are Diablo clones. They're the same kind of game. And yet they're not the same at all.
The problem with the Diablo clones, all of them, is that they are boring. Dungeon crawling is fun for a little while, and then it very quickly gets old. Kill stuff, get better loot, level up. It's just the same thing over and over again. Right?
Not in Diablo. Diablo is the only game that makes dungeon crawling truly fun, and it's hard to explain what's fundamentally different about Diablo vs. all its imitators, because it's no single thing. It's the details and polish.
It's the fact that every level, you get one or two or three new abilities to try out that make your character play a bit differently. Some may be variations on existing abilities, while others are completely new.
It's the fact that the game is always a little bit scary. You may come across a big skull in the middle of a barren desert and wonder what it's doing there, and while you're staring at it, a giant horde of creatures streams out the skull's mouth to attack you. You may be in a dungeon and see a flash of light nearby and know that something bad is happening--it's always something bad--but you don't know what it is or what to do about it. You may be running along a passageway, and the floor crumbles away just alongside you. A group of huge birds may start swarming above you, and you can't target them, and they just follow you around, which is super creepy, and then when you're under attack and struggling, they finally swoop in for the kill.
Diablo 3 is never just a kill stuff, grab loot kind of game. There is always a surprise lurking around the next corner. Expect to laugh, smile, to be awed, and above all, to feel your heart race.
I love this game. If you're not playing it, you're missing out on RPG gaming at its finest.
So I’m up to my eyeballs in revisions. I’ve put in my “think time” and I’m writing actual words at this point. I’m just past the halfway point of the novel, with three major scene rewrites still ahead of me and a number of small revisions left to make. I’ve informed the editor of my progress and scheduled a tentative delivery date of this first round of revisions. (We may go through several rounds.)
But guess what! The manuscript is not the only thing I have to deliver!
I also have to come up with a title, a series title, and cover ideas.
Fortunately, the editor likes the current title of the novel, Assassin’s Gambit, so it stays. Cross that one off the list!
Series title? I have no idea! I have to come up with one! It’s due by the end of next week.
As for cover, this is not entirely my job, but one of the things I love about working with NAL is that they work closely with their authors on cover design. This is a way better situation than some publishers who just slap a cover on the novel and if the author doesn’t like it, too bad. So they want input from me, and that means I need to do a lot of thinking about what I want the cover to look like.
I know lots of writers have envisioned the covers of their novels from the very beginning, but I am not one of those writers. I am not a visual writer at all. I am an auditory writer, the kind who cares a great deal about things like the rhythm of the dialogue and the mouth feel of names and titles. If you look up photos of celebrities to serve as models for your characters, you are a visual writer. If you rehearse your characters’ dialogue endlessly as you are walking about the house, you are an auditory writer. And if you are an auditory writer, you have probably not thought a whole lot about your novel’s cover art.
So I’m thinking about it now, because cover art is important. Good covers sell books, and this is something that deserves a great deal of thought. Even though I have 185 pages of revisions still to go…
So I took it again, read for comprehension, scored exactly the same as far as speed, and was able to answer the questions correctly.
Source: Staples eReader Department
The truth is that when I read, I do a lot of skimming. Here are the sorts of things I routinely skim:
* In romance novels, most sex scenes, especially if the plot comes to a screeching halt so the hero and heroine can have sex and then resumes after the sex is over
* Many action scenes, especially if they contain no dialogue and nothing matters except who wins. I am more interested in the outcome than the details of each sword swing.
* Long blocks of description, especially if the writing is lackluster.
* Character navelgazing, if it is repetitive. If the character internals are different every time, I will read them, but if the heroine thinks about the same things over and over again, I'll start skimming her thoughts when she's repeating herself.
Here are the parts of novels I never skim:
* Beautiful writing. If the author is an exceptionally skilled writer, I will read every word and skim nothing.
* Dialogue. I never skim this.
* Sex or action scenes that carry plot, include dialogue, and are emotionally intense.
* Anything fresh and new and exciting.
And, gacked from Dr. Grumpy, this is a pretty funny video if, like me, you think homeopathic medicine is a total scam:
I actually cleaned one up and ate it. It tasted like a carrot, except a little tough and leathery. I guess that's what happens when you let carrots sit in the ground for over six months.
After I cleared the bed, I planted green beans and pumpkins which, knowing me, I will neglect just as badly.
What I remember is this. In my previous novel, Soldier, Sage, and Vagabond, I had a minor character named Lucien. He was a whip-smart, chess-playing, young disabled war veteran who had ended the novel by ascending the imperial Kjallan throne, and he stole every scene he was in. I knew I had to write a novel featuring him as a romantic hero, but I also knew I needed a spectacular heroine to match him, because otherwise he would overshadow her.
So I came up with the idea of her being an assassin sent to kill him. And then, in keeping with this being a romance, I decided she would be an assassin who killed via seduction because that gave her a reason to want to get close to him romantically but there was an obvious tension there. And then I built a whole political structure around all this so that it made sense--her country was occupying hers, she needed him dead in order to liberate her country, she was part of an organization of freedom fighters, etc.
And then we come to the chess. In the book the game is actually called Caturanga, and it's a fantasy-world chess-like game, but for purposes of discussion we'll pretend it's chess. I knew I wanted my assassin heroine--Vitala--to be a chess player too, because that's how she gets close to Lucien, and I wanted the chess playing to be a recurring metaphor for the political and battlefield strategizing that went on throughout the second two-thirds of the book. In this LJ entry from December 2009, I outlined my intentions with the chess and military/political strategy.
When the editor from NAL called me to discuss the book, this was one of the things she mentioned that sold her on it.
There was also a scene she particularly liked, and that scene was a favorite of many of my critique partners too. It's the scene where Vitala and Lucien first meet and play Caturanga (chess) together.
That scene came directly from a personal experience I had, and that personal experience was being at one of my kids' chess tournaments. My boys used to play tournament chess, and in the chess world there's all this crazy jargon that only chess players know. So my boys would come out of the tournament room after a match and enthusiastically explain how their game went, using this crazy jargon. All the other chess players understood it. I don't play chess, so I didn't understand a word, but I could pick up the emotional undertones. I could tell that this was good, and that was bad, and if so-and-so used this kind of opening, it meant he was a bold player, and if so-and-so used that kind of opening, he was overly cautious. And so-and-so always used the same opening, so he was predictable, and so-and-so changed it up every time, so he was terrifying. It was fascinating to listen to a conversation that I could understand emotionally but not intellectually.
I realized I could replicate that experience in my novel, so I did. I invented a Caturanga jargon and had Vitala use it in her close third-person internals, so the reader has no idea what's really happening on the game board, but they understand exactly how Vitala feels about it and what it means to her. That scene has been a favorite among readers ever since, and the editor called it out specifically.
I'm thrilled to announce that it just sold in a 3-book deal to NAL/Penguin! This deal also includes Soldier, Sage, and Vagabond, for those of you familiar with that book.
A big thank you to my agent, the incomparable Alexandra Machinist of Janklow & Nesbit, and to the many critique partners who helped me whip this novel into shape. I plan to include you all in the acknowledgements.
More information later, but for now I'm just getting the word out!
Then we went on a nature walk through the camp, much of which appeared to be old growth forest (although I don't know how old it actually is). The camp was run by older boy scouts, which is always fun for the kids. They love being around older boys. The boys identified plants and trees for us and told us which ones were edible and which were poisonous.
They pointed out a flower called trillium. It's an endangered flower, nearing extinction, and the Boy Scouts are trying to preserve it. There are several specimens on the campgrounds, carefully looked after. I didn't get a picture of the trillium--everyone was crowding around that one little flower--but here's a picture of the forest we were in.
Lunch was fun because the boy scouts serenaded us with a series of cute songs. After that, Ethan got to shoot a BB gun at the shooting range:
And then learn some archery:
And then build a planter. Ethan loves to build things, so this project was right up his alley, and the difficulty level was about right. I helped him just a little, holding some of the pieces steady while he hammered in the nails, and occasionally pulling out a bent nail for him. Other than that, he did it all by himself.
Then we had the closing campfire with skits and songs and vespers, and we headed home to collapse. Long day.
He remains a remarkably good-natured boy. We had one bit of ugliness Tuesday night. Tuesdays are difficult for me. Tuesdays are packed with kid activities, and all the activities are Ethan's. I go from a long day of homeschooling to Ethan's piano lesson to Ethan's soccer practice to dinner and bedtime. No writing time, no time to rest or play games, and also no time for Sean.
This particular Tuesday, after spending the whole day taking care of Ethan, I succumbed to the temptation to write a long blog post, and then went upstairs after 10pm to find Sean face down in bed asleep, fully clothed and obviously without having brushed his teeth or anything.
He's in braces now and really can't skip brushing his teeth, so I woke him up and told him he had to go brush. He wasn't fully conscious, so he went into the bathroom, got a drink of water, and came back out. I told him he hadn't brushed his teeth yet. He got angry and told me he had. Even though it was obvious he hadn't, I felt his toothbrush to make sure. Bone dry. So I made him go back. He kept arguing and protesting, and in the end I had to put toothpaste on the brush myself and practically stick it in his mouth.
I finally got him properly put in bed, and in the morning he was still grumpy about the indignity of it all.
But that afternoon, after school, I told him the whole story. He thought the part about how I told him to brush his teeth and he just went in the bathroom and got a drink of water was really funny. So he played a series of pranks on me all evening. Every time I told him to do something, he did something completely random and then laughingly told me he'd done the other thing. Like I'd tell him to take a bath, and he'd very obviously go and drink a glass of milk, then tell me he'd taken a bath. Or he'd take the jug of milk and put it in the cabinet with the glasses.
I love that he had a sense of humor about it, that he took our moment of mild conflict and turned it into a running joke. He is that kind of kid.
And I'm trying to make sure I still spend plenty of time with him. It's harder now that he's a teenager and does not demand my attention as much, and Ethan is a bottomless pit who will soak up every ounce of my attention if I allow him to. So I look for opportunities to do things Sean will enjoy.
Last night, for example, Rick Riordan was in town for a reading, and Sean is a huge Rick Riordan fan. So I took Sean and Ethan and two of my friends' kids across town to buy signed books and hear Rick Riordan speak. Traffic was a bear--we were in the car over an hour to get there--but it was worth our while. The kids enjoyed the talk by Rick Riordan, and we got dinner at the food court afterward, which was fun too.
And Diablo III is coming out soon. I hope to spend some time playing that with him too.
