On ‎6‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 3:09 AM, Shiba Gunichi said:

I also like that the backmatter mentions shamanism rather than blood sorcery as the traditions the Isawa recognized when discussing the Kaito becoming their own thing. Yobanjin shamanism is cool. Blood sorcery is something I can get quite tiresome about (no, not "tired of," "tiresome about.").

Tsukune having a Toshigoku eye is the kind of cool thematic scarring with potential dire consequences I enjoy in my L5R stories.

I am most seriously pleased, both with how the supernatural elements were treated, with how the Phoenix were portrayed, and with how the Isawa didn't run away with the narrative focus as they so often did in the AEG days.

(no, not "tired of," "tiresome about.") Yeah, but you ended a sentence with a preposition and that's something I will not put up with.

I love the eye scarring - although there is no such thing as a "sickly purple" color, as purple is the one true perfect color. I would love if she gets some form of alternate vision from that.

On ‎6‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 4:33 AM, Kaito Kikaze said:

Have you MET the Isawa? I'd be more surprised if there was anyone they DIDN'T have a feud with.

Yeah, how's that impending feud with the Shiba gonna shake out?

Also, AAAAAAAAAAGH! How did I finish it so quickly!? So good! I am a Dragon, but Tsukune is my favorite champion. No! Will we need wait at least 6 more novellas before again receiving a feature-length adventure with her?!

I can imagine purple being a sickly colour for an eye, especially if it includes the sclera.

@Spooky Electric So I was reading through the material of the back of the book again and noticed while there's a general description for the Kaito family mon, I couldn't seem to find an actual depiction of it anywhere. Did you have any sort of concept art for the mon by any chance, or additional details you could share about how it should look? I think it'd be really cool if some sort of semi-official or unofficial mon could be designed.

I like how it explores the idea the introduced in the RPG beta that non-shugenja can earn the favor of the kami.

Really liking the tonal shift of Ofushikai and how it selects the champion. My only nitpick was early in the book there was a lot of overuse of "almost/nearly/slightly glowing" but once things picked up the repetition dropped. The loss of the former champion's spirit to Toshigoku was a powerful scene, and the others saying For Now makes me look forward to him returning.

I didn't notice the repetition in this book, but I've certainly seen that often with other fantasy writers. Once you notice that sort of repetition it get's really distracting. I remember reading another high profile fantasy series and everyone in the story was pursing their lips constantly. If it was a characteristic of one character it would be fine, but the author had everyone doing it for a large percentage of the book. How often do you really see someone purse their lips?

2 hours ago, phillos said:

I didn't notice the repetition in this book, but I've certainly seen that often with other fantasy writers. Once you notice that sort of repetition it get's really distracting. I remember reading another high profile fantasy series and everyone in the story was pursing their lips constantly. If it was a characteristic of one character it would be fine, but the author had everyone doing it for a large percentage of the book. How often do you really see someone purse their lips?

Well, pondering your words made me purse mine.

I agree with the inability to unsee repeated phrasing, though. My lone complaint in The Deep Gate (the 5th Arkham Horror novella) was a repeated character tic.

It has been explained to me, that the Twilight author needed a thesaurus. Special emphasis on the adjective 'smoldering.'

One of the greatest takeaways I remember from a Young Writers' Workshop was a forced effort not to use the same word more than three times in a paragraph. I took it further, attempting not to use the same adage, adjective, or analogy in the same paragraph, then page, then chapter if I could reasonably help it. I then reasoned (I was eleven or so) that if I shouldn't do it in the written word, I shouldn't do it in the spoken either. It went a long way to making a lot of adults think I was smart. Not sure what it my peers thought. I try to adhere to that maxim in my posts, too. Unless I am making a point using rhythm.

4 hours ago, phillos said:

I didn't notice the repetition in this book, but I've certainly seen that often with other fantasy writers. Once you notice that sort of repetition it get's really distracting.

You think it's bad as a reader, try dealing with it as a writer. >_<

Not all professional writers are equally alert to this kind of thing, obviously, but once you start paying attention to it, your own prose can easily drive you mad. Not just noticing where you overuse words or descriptive tics, but "oh my god how many times have I started a sentence with a prepositional phrase/modified a noun with a present participle/my last four paragraphs begin with 'The.'" Problem is, there really are only so many ways to construct a grammatically correct sentence in English, so across the millions of words of your career it's inevitable that you're going to repeat yourself. I have to remind myself that my readers are for the most part not as sensitive to things like the repetition of "X, but Y" as I am, so as long as I don't beat them over the head with it, it won't annoy them the way it annoys me.

And yet, things still slip through the cracks, even when we try to scrub them out.

I'm the king of overused ellipses...

1 hour ago, Shiba Gunichi said:

I'm the king of overused ellipses...

Ellipses, em-dashes, semicolons, colons, I demand the freedom to use THE ENTIRE PUNCTUATION SET!

(I blame five novels in a row of writing in the voice of a Victorian lady.)

1 hour ago, Kinzen said:

Ellipses, em-dashes, semicolons, colons, I demand the freedom to use THE ENTIRE PUNCTUATION SET!

(I blame five novels in a row of writing in the voice of a Victorian lady.)

Just so; in that, there is a high likelihood (or so I should believe to be so) that the sentences also bear a strong tendency to...ramble on, as one might do, when writing down the multitudinous thoughts which one has cross their mind and they wish not to lose those thoughts in the moment?

I use way too many ellipses as well. I also overuse the phrases "In any event" and "That said". I see myself doing it constantly and sometimes within the same paragraph, which is ridiculous.

I've never attempted to write something more than 5000 words long. I can certainly see how it starts to get really hard to avoid these sorts of things once you move into more long form storytelling.

I primarily only use ellipses in the quoting of things, without need to use the how quote, or by ending a paragraph with a thought I wish the reader to give a moment's pause to consider - usually while making a point...

(But the parentheses mid thought (or mid parenthetical thought), oh man - there's no stopping me!)

Don't get me started on parentheticals. I'm genuinely surprised I've only made two parenthetical statements in this thread so far.

My characters frown a lot. I now go through all my work before submitting it and doing a global search for "frown" (a few other things, too, but mostly "frown".) A lot of frowns get smoothed away in revisions.

Part of the problem is that contemporary fiction puts an emphasis on "showing, not telling". That's fine, and it's a good practice in general; it's more engaging to say, "He slammed the door" than, "He was really angry". But, if you have characters that aren't given to a lot of dramatic gestures--and that definitely includes our typically very restrained Rokugani samurai, at least when they're in social settings and not, say, trying to hack each other to bits--then you're left trying to show emotion mainly through things like posture and facial expressions. Trouble is, there are only so many of those that communicate, say, anger. Your character can frown, or scowl, or glare...and this is where you start to run out of things to use to communicate that restrained anger. Sure, you can go to the thesaurus and look for alternatives. But here's what thesaurus.com offers as synonyms for "frown":

glare
glower
grimace
pout
gloom
lower
sulk
cloud up
do a slow burn
give a dirty look
give the evil eye
knit brows
look black
look daggers
look stern

And that's it. A bunch of those are non-starters (imagine if one of us wrote, "Bayushi Shoju wheeled on his insubordinate vassal and pouted") so there really AREN'T too many alternatives. In the end, what we can do, I guess, is be aware of the words we overuse, and then just mix things up as much as we can...at least without having our samurai "pouting", "sulking" or "clouding up".

4 minutes ago, DGLaderoute said:

My characters frown a lot. I now go through all my work before submitting it and doing a global search for "frown" (a few other things, too, but mostly "frown".) A lot of frowns get smoothed away in revisions.

Part of the problem is that contemporary fiction puts an emphasis on "showing, not telling". That's fine, and it's a good practice in general; it's more engaging to say, "He slammed the door" than, "He was really angry". But, if you have characters that aren't given to a lot of dramatic gestures--and that definitely includes our typically very restrained Rokugani samurai, at least when they're in social settings and not, say, trying to hack each other to bits--then you're left trying to show emotion mainly through things like posture and facial expressions. Trouble is, there are only so many of those that communicate, say, anger. Your character can frown, or scowl, or glare...and this is where you start to run out of things to use to communicate that restrained anger. Sure, you can go to the thesaurus and look for alternatives. But here's what thesaurus.com offers as synonyms for "frown":

glare
glower
grimace
pout
gloom
lower
sulk
cloud up
do a slow burn
give a dirty look
give the evil eye
knit brows
look black
look daggers
look stern

And that's it. A bunch of those are non-starters (imagine if one of us wrote, "Bayushi Shoju wheeled on his insubordinate vassal and pouted") so there really AREN'T too many alternatives. In the end, what we can do, I guess, is be aware of the words we overuse, and then just mix things up as much as we can...at least without having our samurai "pouting", "sulking" or "clouding up".

Yes! Those! I resent every samurai who doesn't "pout", "sulk", "could up", or "gloom".

Hida Kisada sulked. Akodo Toturi clouded up. Tsukune pouted. Uh oh. Now I'm thinking about Tsukune pouting. I may need to change to a different website for a time.

That's an interesting hindrance when writing L5R fiction that I hadn't considered. One even more complicated when one of your factions not only restrain their emotions as expected in the setting but also deliberately hide their faces with masks and veils.

Shoju isn't gonna emote with his face, and he's really not likely to emote with his body as well.

Just now, phillos said:

That's an interesting hindrance when writing L5R fiction that I hadn't considered. One even more complicated when one of your factions not only restrain their emotions as expected in the setting but also deliberately hide their faces with masks and veils.

Indeed. It's hard to write Shoju as being...well, pretty much anything, since all you can see is his eyes. On top of that, he's THE master of portraying himself essentially however he wishes, so he's even less likely to "frown" or "glare" (or "pout") than most other samurai. You have to portray Bayushi Shoju's character almost entirely through what he says, with a little bit of support from whatever expression you can convey through his eyes and posture.

At least Kachiko leaves more of herself...revealed.

11 minutes ago, DGLaderoute said:

Indeed. It's hard to write Shoju as being...well, pretty much anything, since all you can see is his eyes. On top of that, he's THE master of portraying himself essentially however he wishes, so he's even less likely to "frown" or "glare" (or "pout") than most other samurai. You have to portray Bayushi Shoju's character almost entirely through what he says, with a little bit of support from whatever expression you can convey through his eyes and posture.

At least Kachiko leaves more of herself...revealed.

That is the challenge with many proper Samurai characters, in many cases what is not said speaks louder than what they are actually saying and doing.

My immediate assumption as a reader would be if a Scorpion character is presenting me with obvious body language in the story then they are likely doing it on purpose to be misleading or manipulative.

I agree looking for what isn't being said in a conversation is a really interesting aspect of reading L5R stories and samurai fiction in general. This is an remarkable obstacle for both the writer and the reader though. The reader would have to be perceptive enough to pick up the subtly and the writer would need to draw enough attention to it without "telling and not showing" as DGLaderoute points out.

1 hour ago, phillos said:

Shoju isn't gonna emote with his face, and he's really not likely to emote with his body as well.

See, I take something like that as an opportunity. ? If he's the pov character, you can show the disconnect between what he feels and what he displays. And if he isn't the pov character, then it all becomes a mind game as the person whose viewpoint you're in tries to scrape microscopic clues or guess at his mood based on reasoning or go mad because they can't read him at all . . .

When I wrote from Shoju's POV in "The World, A Stage", it was challenging--I wanted to convey ambiguity in what he was saying (in this case, to Kachiko), but had to remain mindful of the fact that we were "inside his head". I finally settled on giving less direct insight into what Shoju was thinking, even though he WAS the POV character, reasoning that even inside his head there are layers, and we only got to see through a very few of them. I'm not sure if we'll EVER come to understand the complex depths of the man that is Bayushi Shoju; more to point, I don't think we ever should, because he's more interesting as something of an enigma. Contrast that with Hotaru, who is still a skilled politician, but younger and more likely to wear her heart on her sleeve, as it were. Were we to meet her later in her career as Crane Champion, she might be more like Shoju, with those hidden layers, but we've got to know her at the outset of her career as Champion, so she's a little more transparent (at least to the reader, when it's her POV.) This immediately set her and Shoju apart as distinct characters, which is a good thing.

I guess this is a way of saying that, even among the relatively reserved and restrained Rokugani samurai, each is still an individual character, and needs to be treated as such.

10 hours ago, DGLaderoute said:

When I wrote from Shoju's POV in "The World, A Stage", it was challenging--I wanted to convey ambiguity in what he was saying (in this case, to Kachiko), but had to remain mindful of the fact that we were "inside his head". I finally settled on giving less direct insight into what Shoju was thinking, even though he WAS the POV character, reasoning that even inside his head there are layers, and we only got to see through a very few of them. I'm not sure if we'll EVER come to understand the complex depths of the man that is Bayushi Shoju; more to point, I don't think we ever should, because he's more interesting as something of an enigma.

Absolutely. There are degrees of closeness in pov, and furthermore, not all viewpoints are reliable. For the campaign I ran I came up with a framework for how the Shosuro Actor technique worked that involved them almost mystically shifting their thoughts into and out of a persona; I could have written a scene from the perspective of "Seikiro" and not felt I was cheating at all by not revealing that he was actually Shosuro Arikoto. In one of the novels I'm working on right now it isn't quite that severe, but the con artist main character mostly thinks like the woman she's pretending to be, except when something jars her out of that. I can absolutely see Shoju as the kind of man who's wearing so many masks that even he doesn't look very often at what's under them.

Add in the fact that many scorpion choose a mask to portray a certain emotion, whether it be how they feel or not. It may have been in the Scorpion Clan Wars novel but didn't Shoju have a mask that he could just flip upside-down and it went from a frowning demon to a smiling one? I'm sure many of their masks would make use of a black mesh material to hide their eyes as well.

Edit: Found the novel on Drivethru Fiction

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