[sachmo]

Originally posted by WhiteHojo:
again, excellent story... You should get paid by the company for this - seems I'm not the only one who's forked out $45 plus S&H based on this story... and I already HAVE the old SE4 (just not Gold)...

Now, how the heck do you go about writing these things? that is, how do you keep all the information & personalities straight while playing the game?

What works for me is playing a turn, and seeing if anything interesting happens. If it does, I'll ALT+TAB over to a Word document and write a paragraph or two about what is happening. At the end of said document, I have a list of personalities I've used in the story...some may or may not ever make another appearance, but I never know for sure so I jot them down. I also keep track of ship losses, milestones, rank structure, or anything else I need handy. It really saves me time when I'm writing to be able to quickly reference who is doing what at a certain time.

If you read the whole story from start to finish, you can see how it evolved from sort of a turn by turn account of the game into a continuing story. That just happened naturally...I don't really know why, but it did. I'm at a point now where I can fill in a chapter or two without playing the game (which has been the case with a couple of recent chapters), but it's not necessary to write this way.

There have been...errr...large gaps of time where I haven't played or written anything, and so I have to go back sometimes and reread the story and find out where I am.

Even with all of this, there are inevitably holes in the story. Thankfully, I'm just writing for fun, so it's not a big deal.

As far as motivation, it is twofold.

1. Pratice my writing skills - sure I'd like to write something for publishing one day, but to get there, I need a lot more pratice. This is a great way, and I get to entertain at the same time.

2. Entertain friends - most people who bother to come and post on this board have at least one interest in common with me: a love of science fiction! If my friends read and enjoy the story, then that makes me feel good when they stop and say something, which in turn makes me want to write more, which entertains more...you see were this is going!

That's about it. The key to the whole damn thing is to have fun.