So... I decided to play Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

Being stuck at home because of the coronavirus means that I have more free time than what I know what to do with. So... I ended up looking at some old games that I wanted to play when I was a kid but never had the chance to.

One of those games is Final Fantasy Mystic Quest; the game has a poor reputation in the RPG circles, but now that I've been playing it I really don't know why. Sure, the game is rather easy and from what I can tell I'm already on the final dungeon after about a weekend of playing, but this game is fun, the music is great, the graphics are colorful and bright and the story, while simple, is interesting with likeable characters.

It's really a very nice little game, I don't regret playing it at all and I honestly can't understand its bad reputation.

If you're curious about it, here's the soundtrack:

My writing process, part 4

Now that we have talked about the previous step, it is time to talk about the last one: the Final Review.

This step is both very simple and very tricky, as it consist on letting the chapter or the full story sit for a couple of days before reading it again to look for typos, grammar mistakes, plot holes and other details that were overlooked in previous steps.

Something to note here is that if the story does not feel right or it has too many mistakes or issues with how it reads, then it may be necessary to drop some of it, most of it, or all of it and start it all over again.

To illustrate this point, I'll share my experience with the story Preludes to tragedy: Cheetara which is a side story/prequel to Embracing Dark Desires. The point of this prequel was to show important information that would help develop some elements from the main story, but at the same time it had to be a completely optional read. When I was doing the Final Review, before sending it to my beta reader, I decided the story was both too long and that it didn't work the way I wanted it to; because of this, I was forced to cut several scenes to make it shorter, and to alter the rest so that it would fit with the main story the way it was intended to.

But once the corrections were made, the story was streamlined and made shorter, during the second Final Review, I was satisfied with it and decided it was adequately doing what I needed. Only then I sent it to my beta reader and when I got it back I was able to publish it.

So there you have it, that's the way I usually write my stories, I hope this helped you out at least a little.

My writing process 3

Last time we talked about the plot drafting.

In this entry I will talk about the third step of my writing process, which is the Story Draft, and this is the step where the heavy writing and production really starts. It may sound difficult or taxing, but it's actually the simplest one, however it is also the one that takes the most effort to complete.

The main difference between the plot draft and the story draft is that the former is just a series of ideas and events that make the base for the story you want to write; the latter is the actual draft for the story, and it includes scenes and dialogue.

To explain this point, I'll talk a little about the creation process of the story draft for my Castlevania fanfic Story of two souls. The idea for this one came after I played Dawn of Sorrows and it was basically a slice of life type of story between the monsters living in the castle.

After I did the plot draft and was satisfied with it, I began the process of drafting the actual story. First, I decided on the scenes and their definitive locations; this was easy because I only had to limit the location based on where the monsters from the game could be found. After that I started working on the dialogues; since the story is dialogue heavy, this took a while, as I had to write down who said what and with what emotion.

Once that was done, I had a very streamlined three scene (or three acts) story that used dialogues adequately for my purposes. After that, the next part of this step could start, and that is the actual writing before the final review. With this I mean that after deciding on the scenes and dialogues based on the plot draft, I could start writing the story itself, detailing the scenes and the lines of dialogues between the characters as I had planned beforehand.

When that was completed, the story was ready for the last step of this process: The final review.

Music and writing 2

A couple of weeks ago a friend invited me to watch as he and his friends played Dungeons & Dragons, hoping that I would decide to join. I am not really that big of a fan of RPGs, but the experience was interesting, I was impressed by how creative the session was.

One thing that helped improve the mood and the experience was that they had a soundtrack ready for their game. I was curious about it because it was unexpected and in the end I enjoyed the musc they had selected even more than the game.

I was told the music they used was Dungeon Synth, and that it was not that strange for people to use music of that genre during D&D sessions.

I thought the music would be good to listening to while I wrote, and I found it worked quite well to help set the mood. I've been listening to a few Dungeon Synth albums recently, and it's been a nice surprise so far.

My favorite out of the albums I've found until now is this one, by Midnight Syndicate:

 Give it a try, you may enjoy this as much as I did.

My writing process, part 2.

In the previous post I explained how I do canon research before I start writing a story; so now it's time to talk about the second step, which is drafting the plot of the story.

As I said, it all starts with an idea, but in order to write the idea well, it is important to have a plot ready. The plot is the skeleton that supports the actual story, and it is here where you can go crazy and include all the options that you could think of. It's the thinking heavy part of the process, I believe.

The first thing I do when I'm preparing a draft is to determine the goal and write it down as short as possible, three lines maximum. This helps me keep the central idea front and center. I'll use my Ranma 1/2 story A Nabiki mystery to illustrate this point.

When I first came up with the idea, the goal was clear and easy to summarize, if I remember correctly it was something like this:

"Nabiki solves a mystery that begins in the Kuno mansion, Kasumi helps her a little."

It's very simple and it can be expanded (or not) as needed, it also determines quite well what the story is going to be about and it gives the frame to work in properly.

Once I had the goal set, I did the first draft, which focused on the mystery itself and how the results affected the characters. This ended up being too long and tedious, and I thought it would not fit the tone of the series well, so I rewrote the draft again and it took a more silly approach to the central conflict. I remember that was better, but it would have been too description heavy and perhaps not funny enough. So I reworked it a third time, in that one the central conflict changed and ended up being worse than the previous one, so I went back to the second and worked on the problem I had with it, which was it relied heavily on description; a few tweaks later, I was able to shift the narrative so that it would be dialogue based, something I thought then would help keep the funny and light-hearted aspect of the story I wanted to convey.

Alright, to make this short, this is what I do when drafting a plot:

1. Identify the goal and write it clearly in no more than three sentences.
2. Write the events in the draft, don't fear moving them around.
3. If the draft strays from the original goal, revise and determine if it's worth it or not.
4. If the draft sticks to the goal, but it ends up being something difficult to narrate, revise.
5. Revise, revise, revise until you think the draft is good enough to work with.

As you can see, the most important aspect here is to lose your fear of revising a draft. It took me a while to lose this fear, but I eventually learned that this is what the draft is for, it's the place to throw and move ideas around, and where you can go wild with them; it is here where I can prepare the contents and the foundation and the advantage is that I don't have to worry about it being terrible, because I am the only one who will ever see this very early rough outline.

Next time we'll talk about the third step: The story draft.