The Shadowrun Situation

Critias · Post by **Critias** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:20 am

*sigh* Okay, man. Whatever you say.

Critias · Post by **Critias** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:27 am

Otakusensei wrote:
Fuchs wrote:You're working for the company, you're a company man. If the company is bad, that makes you a bad guy company man.

And CGL is bad.
Right here, dude.

You're never going to get a neutral review here, and you know it. You're going to get heat for working for a corrupt company like CGL, and you know it. You came here and called Frank Trollman out. And you got exactly what you were looking for.

You don't get to bitch and take the high ground on shit that you brought on yourself.

Yes, I called Frank out. Because he was talking shit about me, and he can't even keep his insults straight today. In one post I'm not counted as a current Shadowrun writer at all, in the next all of Attitude and even War! are entirely my fault, and I'm one of CGL's worst writers; an opinion that changed over the course of an afternoon's discussion (what an amazing coincidence, the more you dare to disagree with Frank, the worse a writer you become!).

I'll take criticism, and I'll take feedback. I told people that when War! his shelves, during all the firestorm that surrounded it, with me involved in discussions about it (without having worked on it), I told people I'd speak up and point out my work when it hit shelves. I'm not scared of people telling me what they think of my work, and my self esteem doesn't rest on their answer. I'm fine with people knowing what I wrote, and telling me what they think about it. I'm not fine with Frank running his mouth about my writing without even knowing what I've written.

And CGL hasn't done any dirty business in the time I've been around them. Yes, I know what happened in recent years, and I think it's a fucking shame. I am a freelancer, you think I don't care about how freelancers have been treated? But so far all my dealings with them have been on the up and up, with contracts sent out in a timely manner, t's crossed and i's dotted, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt until I feel they don't deserve it any more. It gives me something to write when grad school gives me some free time, I get a little spending money, and everyone wins. I wasn't around when the shit hit the fan, and I've never claimed to have all the information about it -- in the meantime, I'm giving them a shot and working off the assumption they've learned their lesson.

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:43 am

Critias wrote:
Otakusensei wrote:
Fuchs wrote:You're working for the company, you're a company man. If the company is bad, that makes you a bad guy company man.

And CGL is bad.
Right here, dude.

You're never going to get a neutral review here, and you know it. You're going to get heat for working for a corrupt company like CGL, and you know it. You came here and called Frank Trollman out. And you got exactly what you were looking for.

You don't get to bitch and take the high ground on shit that you brought on yourself.
Yes, I called Frank out. Because he was talking shit about me, and he can't even keep his insults straight today. In one post I'm not counted as a current Shadowrun writer at all, in the next all of Attitude and even War! are entirely my fault, and I'm one of CGL's worst writers; an opinion that changed over the course of an afternoon's discussion (what an amazing coincidence, the more you dare to disagree with Frank, the worse a writer you become!).

I'll take criticism, and I'll take feedback. I told people that when War! his shelves, during all the firestorm that surrounded it, with me involved in discussions about it (without having worked on it), I told people I'd speak up and point out my work when it hit shelves. I'm not scared of people telling me what they think of my work, and my self esteem doesn't rest on their answer. I'm fine with people knowing what I wrote, and telling me what they think about it. I'm not fine with Frank running his mouth about my writing without even knowing what I've written.

And CGL hasn't done any dirty business in the time I've been around them. Yes, I know what happened in recent years, and I think it's a fucking shame. I am a freelancer, you think I don't care about how freelancers have been treated? But so far all my dealings with them have been on the up and up, with contracts sent out in a timely manner, t's crossed and i's dotted, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt until I feel they don't deserve it any more. It gives me something to write when grad school gives me some free time, I get a little spending money, and everyone wins. I wasn't around when the shit hit the fan, and I've never claimed to have all the information about it -- in the meantime, I'm giving them a shot and working off the assumption they've learned their lesson.

Bitch more.

You know exactly who Frank Trollman is. Quit fucking trying to hold back the ocean. You aren't fighting the good fight, you're making an ass of yourself. If Frank is as bad as you say you don't need to defend your honor.

I can't speak on your writing because you started after CGL fucked up itself and the game. CGL never made good on that so it doesn't matter if they haven't fucked anyone over lately. You freelance for them, so you're a fucker by association. Could be worse; you're lumped in with Hardy and not Loren Coleman.

Critias · Post by **Critias** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:49 am

Who's fighting the good fight? I'm killing time 'cause my mid-terms are over and I just turned in one of the big freelance projects I was working on. If butting heads with Frank Trollman on a few forums is the worst thing that happens to me all day, big fucking deal. It's just the internet. Nothing TGD says is going to get me to kill myself or stop writing, but there are people here whose opinions I value, and this is as good a place as any to clear the air about what I wrote (and what I didn't) to see what people think.

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:54 am

Critias wrote:Who's fighting the good fight? I'm killing time 'cause my mid-terms are over and I just turned in one of the big freelance projects I was working on. If butting heads with Frank Trollman on a few forums is the worst thing that happens to me all day, big fucking deal. It's just the internet. Nothing TGD says is going to get me to kill myself or stop writing, but there are people here whose opinions I value, and this is as good a place as any to clear the air about what I wrote (and what I didn't) to see what people think.

Cool. At least you know you're trolling. Good to have that out in the open.

For a second there I was worried you were trying to say something.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 2:50 am

So anyone that works with CGL for Shadowrun now is an awful person? Is that the general rule?

I am sort of anxiously awaiting Frank to go off on whatever writing Critias actually did. That's usually good entertainment.

Fucks · Post by **Fucks** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 3:48 am

mean_liar wrote:So anyone that works with CGL for Shadowrun now is an awful person? Is that the general rule?

Yep. Co-mingling of money, toting the party line, sacrificing children. That kind of shit can only be done my evil villains and their evil assistants.

Fucks · Post by **Fucks** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 3:50 am

Kaelik wrote:
Critias wrote:More than anything else, on multiple forums, I've been encouraging people to go read Attitude, or the free preview, for themselves and make up their own mind. HOLY SHIT what a vocal defense of mine, with that zany "I dunno, I like it, but you should go check it out for it yourself" vocal defense of mine.
Well, when checking it out for themselves involves paying money for Catalyst Product, it's pretty much a defense of attitude to claim that everyone should buy the damn thing before they can decide it's not worth buying.

Yeah. You are a 12 year old who've never heard of any other way to get hold of a new PDF. Right.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 4:35 am

Is attitude really 30 bucks for a 200 page softcover? Holy shit. I mean, I expect to get raped financially when I buy something like Dark Heresy, which has to pay Games Workshop, the dark licensing gods, but at least there, when I buy a splat book for 30 bucks, I get a quality hardbound book. And even then I'm *extremely* hesitant to buy splat books.

Sad to day, if CGL things they can get 30 bucks out of me for a softcover that really introduces nothing new to the system, they're dreaming.

Oh, the word "Attitude" on the cover made me start singing "teenage mutant ninja turtles" without even realizing it. Way to say "we aren't taking this seriously, neither should you!"

But I'm giving the sample PDF an honest-to-god reading right now. Let's see what it reads like (especially The Untethered Life).

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 5:17 am

And I'm done. I couldn't get through the intro fiction for The Untethered Life.

The beginning reads like a Junior High essay, and I say that without hyperbole. So let's dive in with some honest critique shall we?

Throwing the narrator's full name out in the first narrative sentence of the piece is jarring and sets the tone for the rest of the introduction. It's also a problem because this piece, in retrospect, is third person omniscient with a focus on the subject's thought process. I don't know about you, but I don't refer to myself by my full name in my own head. Another major problem is that the entire paragraph reads like a list. There is no flow of ideas, and the sentences are short and choppy.

The second paragraph opens up with a klunky contraction. If "they'd" occurs to readers first as "they would", then the whole sentence starts by tripping the reader. This is why, in a narrative voice, it is preferable to avoid contractions. When speaking "in character", such things tend to be acceptable. But for a third person omniscient narrator, when in doubt, avoid contractions.

As far as general grammar in the second paragraph, the topic of the paragraph seems to be shutting off the radio, and then segues into being pissed that the subject can't wipe steam away from the mirror. It's a disjointed paragraph, with the first half probably belonging to the first paragraph, and the second half desperation requiring some kind of action. Shaving springs to mind instantly.

The next paragraph starts with an incredible example of a run-on sentence, combining window defoggers, an evaluation, and a brief history lesson. It's a mess. Further more, this obsession with full names feels odd and disjointed, especially since we're kind of monitoring the subject's thoughts in this piece. When I think of my friend, I do not think of my friend John Smith, I think of John, Johnny, or Smitty, or Dipshit, or whatever. I know there's someone named Aman Khayyam, but at this point, the name is dropped like a bombshell in the narrative. The reader's mind immediately goes "who? Did I miss someone?" and at that point, your entire narrative is broken and I'm merely reading something instead of experiencing a moment in this dude's life.

The paragraph ends by going back into a history lesson with Lone Star. So we've gone from a mirror defogging, to a pseudo-description of the subject's body, to a history lesson, to name dropping with no clue who the name is, and back to a history lesson. Plus, you've managed to break the narrative up already. Quite a dense paragraph.

Next paragraph. You activate the eye-overlays. It's finished. Then you talk about it being part of his uniform. Then the eye overlays activate again and the subject gets dressed. It feels messy and needs reworking. Actions that only happen once in the narrative should only occur once in the flow of the writing.

Next up, you actually manage to fit the subject's full name into a proper place. I'm okay as a reader with the full name here. But then, I start to think about the piece as a whole, and this might be the real crux of my issues with the writing. You say here that Reid is gone. No more. History. Killed off when Lone Star abandoned him. That's fine, except... Reid just woke up 20 minutes ago. Unless it's your intent to have Reid "transform" every morning from Reid, ex-Lone Star cop, to Saber the Shadowrunner, waking up as Reid and then saying Reid is gone is an incredibly poor piece of writing.

To sum up, Reid Sabelhaus can't wake up in your first real sentence of the piece, and then say Reid Sabelhaus is gone. If he's always been gone, then the beginning blows and is contrary to the rest of the piece. If the citizen is "put away", there's no transition by the subject. There's literally no difference between Reid that we see waking up and Saber that walks out the door. He doesn't even think to himself "Time to put the old me away" and brace himself for the day to come. The simple fact that there is room for error or confusion is a sign that the writing is sloppy.

So after that blunder, we get a long point/counterpoint comparison of The Cop vs The Shadowrunner. But the transformation has already been made, and the reader doesn't care at this point about the differences, because we're now on the wavelength with Saber, and Saber doesn't give a shit about his old life, because as you say, he's all attitude. It needed to come before the transformation, and ideally needed to be the road we took in the narrative to get us from The Cop and lead us to The Shadowrunner.

The final paragraph ties the Jekyll/Hyde thing together quickly. But even there it's a missed opportunity. Just surviving isn't enough for a professional. Doing the job *right* is the most important part of being a professional. So I'm left with feeling that neither The Cop nor The Runner is particularly professional... Which leads me to my overall gripe with the piece.

This reads like a day in the life of a 30 year old emo crybaby. You've established, as fact, a man that was a cop, is now a paid murderer/criminal, and is concerned with the image he projects. Yet he's really this sad, crumbling, emotionally bankrupt individual. He's boring. He's unsympathetic. He seems more like he's 16 and morose over losing his girlfriend.

From your remark about midterms, I'm going to guess you're in college. Which means you don't have a fucking clue what it's like to be A. An adult, and B. A professional. The subject doesn't seem real, because he's a pussy, and I don't naturally imagine pussies in roles of responsibility and danger like being a cop who gets his arms ripped off in the line of duty, or a serial professional criminal. Maybe he has issues in the dark hours of the night with everything you wrote about, but when you're getting ready to go to work, you don't give yourself a psychological beating, you psych yourself up, pull yourself together, and walk out the door like you're the goddamn master of the universe, because someone is going to rely on you getting shit done.

For a man who has lost the very essence of his purpose and somehow found a way to keep going, and to even excel, he seems... maybe not weak, but young and inexperienced. Which I can only suspect is the author behind the work. Seriously, go watch the Firefly pilot, especially with the commentary on, and then watch Serenity with the commentary on, and listen to Joss Whedon talk about the idea of a man who's lost everything and yet finds a way to keep going. Then compare Mal Reynolds to Reid/Saber. There's a mighty big difference in "attitude" there.

But yes. You told me to read the preview, and I've given an honest-to-god critique of your writing. I've been published enough times that I like to think I have a small idea of what works and what doesn't, but if that introduction is as good as it gets from you, Shadowrun is fucked. But after reading that intro I'm so unenthusiastic that I'm going to have to force myself to keep reading, because Attitude is a book that is above all full of fluff and fiction, and not rules crunch.

PS: I I don't imagine that you wrote the Fastjack intro, but please go tell whoever did that Fastjack isn't a 20-year old, he's pretty aged if memory serves.

Critias · Post by **Critias** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:47 am

I appreciate the feedback, occasional personal attack (by way of observation or assumption) notwithstanding.

It never occurred to me that a contraction used that way (for instance) would cause such an issue, and I can appreciate your suggestions about when/where his full name was used. I started the piece with his full name to show, very obviously, that the piece began with one person and ended with the other. The change from cop to street samurai, everyday name to street name. I thought opening with his name would hit that home, but I can certainly understand your perspective on the matter and agree that it could have been stronger that way.

The entire point of the piece is that the character of Saber is young and inexperienced -- Lone Star "lost" Seattle is March of 2072, not all that long ago in-game. Reid Sabelhaus, not so much, but Saber, very much so. A year, year and a half, isn't a lot of time to adjust to your life turning a 180 on you.

In part the piece was inspired by a non-gamer friend of mine who has some issues reminding himself basically the opposite of Saber's issue (that he's not a rank and uniform any more, and is a husband and father again), and how he'd mentioned that it was a daily challenge, a daily ritual, to give himself a morning mirror staredown. There's the possibility he was exaggerating or is a unique case, but the idea of that (a need for a daily transition from one persona to another, as part of the morning routine) was what gave me the idea for the piece.

I'm sorry you didn't like it, but your feedback isn't the only opinion I've gotten on it, and the response has been fairly positive. Given what I tried to fit into a word count that's not much over half the word count of your critique, I'm still pretty happy with the end result. I appreciate the feedback, though, and will keep some of it (the contraction issue, in particular) in mind in future writings.

And, just for the record, I'm plenty old enough to know what it's like to be an adult and a professional. I went back to school several years ago after ten years in a corporate environment, and I'm currently a grad student and GA (which is why so much of my schedule is dependent on the flow of the semester). Thanks for the guess and the comment -- just to remind me what forum I'm on -- though.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 9:37 am

The Flatline gives a very accurate depiction of the intro fiction to the Untethered Life. It's bad. Really bad.

I've mentioned The Untethered Life before in my chapter by chapter review. It's horrendously shallow. And that's not super excusable because it wastes a lot of space. I'm not talking about the actual white space, although it does have that, I'm talking about the paragraph after paragraph spent fapping to Intern's publication history and academic credentials. I know you're personally in academia right now but seriously: no one cares.

If you had all that word count to waste on completely unfunny snipe fests about whether a one-off fictional character cared too much about his CV as a community college professor, you should have had enough word count to treat the issue the chapter is nominally about: who shadowruns and why they do it, with more depth. You only get around to mentioning 3 categories: professionals laid low, street punks raised up, and other. Your "other" category is bigger than the other two combined, which means your systemization is a failure. The second part is even less informative: the entire bit could be summated in a single sentence about freedom coming at a price but still being freedom. Or even part of a sentence, like I just did.

So the pacing is really bad. Very little actual information is imparted and a lot of space is outright wasted. The POV character is self indulgent and annoying. For fuck's sake, you gave your self-insertion Sue the magical power that everyone likes him! That's pathetic. But how bad is that self indulgence? Pretty bad. You have 14 and half paragraphs on the first page of the section. Of those, ten of them are spent ranting about the POV character. What the fuck is this shit? Remember: this is all written by a single author, and the reader knows this. So when you write in a paragraph of a shadowtalker bitching about the POV character being self indulgent and writing about himself instead of getting to the fucking point, that is in reality you being self indulgent and writing about the POV character instead of getting to the fucking point.

Yes, the mechanics aren't good. You need to indent your paragraphs consistently. Your lists need to be formated consistently too. Crap like this:

Critias wrote:I’ve broached the subject with people I’ve worked with everywhere from Seattle to New York, Los Angeles to Portland, two teams in Hong Kong, a set of guides in Australia, bounty hunters in Quebec, a dozen smugglers out of Denver, and Lakota Mafia hitmen on the Great Plains.

...is not acceptable. The subject of the list is people "everywhere", which means that list elements like "New York" or "Portland" are fine, but list elements like "bounty hunters" or "Lakota Mafia" are not. Because the first list elements are place, and the second list elements are people. So they don't go into the same list without a completely different construction that you didn't use.

And keep in mind: this is one page of you fucking up. The whole thing is six pages. It's painful to read, and you really only fit 4 on-topic paragraphs on the whole page. I'm just not drunk enough to go through th whole thing.

-Username17

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 12:45 pm

Fucks wrote:
mean_liar wrote:So anyone that works with CGL for Shadowrun now is an awful person? Is that the general rule?
Yep. Co-mingling of money, toting the party line, sacrificing children. That kind of shit can only be done my evil villains and their evil assistants.

Interesting. I personally don't have a problem with anyone that thinks the owner/management teams are shit - there's ample evidence for that - but shitting on independent freelancers coming after the shitstorm to work in the vacuum created by the previous talent disappearing I can't get on board with.

A lot of people want to write for RPGs and it sounds like a good opportunity with a relatively desperate owner.

The alternative is expecting a total freelancer's boycott of SR and waiting for the line to die, hopefully to be picked up by someone else, a series of events with a timeline of maybe three years. To me that doesn't sound good for the game.

EDIT - Not that poor writing and mechanics is doing any good for the game either.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 12:48 pm

If freelancers decide to work for the very people who drove away the talent, and therefore created the vacuum, then yes, I'll consider them bad people. They're enabling such behaviour by supporting assholes.

And having idiots and incompetents ruin the line is even worse for the game.

Rasumichin · Post by **Rasumichin** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:22 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:You only get around to mentioning 3 categories: professionals laid low, street punks raised up, and other. Your "other" category is bigger than the other two combined [...].

Is that something that's stated in Attitude?
Because most of the backgrounds i've seen both in official products and among player characters fall into the "professsional fallen from grace" or "gutterscum having worked their way up the food chain" category.

There's a host of other groups, obviously. Part-time runners who normally do other stuff, 2nd or 3rd generation runners, people only associating with runners for the duration of the campaign because they share a common interest, critters who end up in the runner community because they are illegals with superpowers by default etc, but all of these are exceptions rather than the rule.
They definitely haven't constituted a group "larger than the other two combined" in any previous SR product, so i'm wondering where your impression comes from.

It would certainly be in order to devote more space to the kinds of runners that people aren't already familiar with from reading the core book, particularly when you want to have any actual informational value in a chapter like this, but i never had the impression that "others" make up the biggest part of the shadowrunning scene.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:34 pm

i guess that's frank complaint essentially.
he says it's too much space wasted on something that does not have as much of a face in the SR world as the other parts . .

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 2:21 pm

Fucks wrote:Yeah. You are a 12 year old who've never heard of any other way to get hold of a new PDF. Right.

Thank you for a random meaningless insult about my age, that frankly, makes no goddam sense, since I have been posting on this forum for 4 years, but I'm pretty sure that the guy who wrote part of the book, and works for the company that is putting it out isn't jumping from forum to forum advocating piracy of their official product.

Seeing as, he would get fired for that.

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 2:24 pm

If CGL was a professional operation with competent leadership that took charge in the wake of a tragic situation that shattered the company, I would be cheering on anyone who stepped up to write for them.

But we have the same fuckers who put the company in the situation it was then running the company now. If they have gotten their act together they have only done so because they got caught, and only then because exploitation become unsustainable. They have very little regard for the quality of the line and make only the barest effort to maintain some level of continuity with past products. People coming to write for them now can expect to do more with less, to be forced to write to a vision of Shadowrun that is not clearly defined or understood by the people who are charged to define and understand the game. To top it off they are only now seeing any attempt by the development team to edit their work.

I've worked for some pretty shitty bosses. I've watched some bad shit go down and kept my mouth shut to keep my job. But the second a past boss started putting out product he knew was shit, and told me to tell anyone who called that they had done something to break it, I was done.

You can hope for a professional work environment, but sometimes you don't have one. However, if that keeps you from doing your job in an honest and professional manner, get the fuck out. If that puts you in a situation where the work you do appears to be of a lesser quality, like if your work gets published, then get out. To stay in that situation is to devalue your own work and abilities. I don't care if you love what you do, or the product you work on; if the final result is shit with your name on it then what you loved is shit, and now it has your name on it.

Someone who seeks out work in that type of environment despite being fully aware of the situation gets exactly what you'd expect.

And I don't want to hurt anyone's self esteem or anything, but negative criticism like the stuff posted above has a lot more weight than "I liked it". Unless you're concerned with being "good enough", which seems to be the MO over at CGL right now. That and really cranking the enthusiasm up to 11 every time a product somehow reaches sale.

Fucks · Post by **Fucks** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 2:29 pm

Kaelik wrote:
Fucks wrote:Yeah. You are a 12 year old who've never heard of any other way to get hold of a new PDF. Right.
Thank you for a random meaningless insult about my age, that frankly, makes no goddam sense, since I have been posting on this forum for 4 years, but I'm pretty sure that the guy who wrote part of the book, and works for the company that is putting it out isn't jumping from forum to forum advocating piracy of their official product.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 2:48 pm

I like shadowrun, and while I hope someone other than CGL gets the line, I absolutely don't want the line to get killed.

Calling the freelancers working for CGL evil by association is pretty immature

but then again, this IS TGD.. immature is to be expected. And calling FrankTrollman out for being mean to you seems pointless. Frank is mean to everyone who doesn't agree with him. That's like complaining that you put your hand in a fire and it got burned.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 3:28 pm

CGL's current writers are scabs. Full stop.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 3:40 pm

I tried reading the preview and I agree that it is absolutely terrible.

The introduction gives me no reason to care about the contents of the book. The first few paragraphs are all about how the next generation of runners will care about attitude, but not how it matters right now.

Heres some advice. If you had written stuff like:

Nowadays what gets you your next run may be your looks, your clothing, or even the confidence shown by your strut as you walk in the door.

or

'But I'm a guy' I hear you say. 'Fashion doesn't affect me.' Bullshit. If you want to sneak into a party during the only time the security is relaxed enough to hack into the server, then you need to know how to fit in. Or even better how to stand out, so that the attention is on you and not your group's hacker.

or

Attitude may not be for you. You may like the shadows. You may like sitting back at home in your dressing gown hacking from afar. But if you want to go in all guns blazin', or sneak up on a guard and frighten the shit out of them, or make sure noone ever calls your bluff, then you need attitude.

After all, a boob job won't help you hack a drone. It won't help you drive a car, and it'll get in the way when you're trying to shoot. But when you have your Little Black Dress on, or a low cut bulletproof vest with a few strips of caution tape then breast implants are a weapon themselves. They'll make people look twice, distract them or just make you feel good. And for some of us, isn't that why we run? The rush of adrenaline when the alarms go off, that winning feeling when you pull off a scam, or the knowledge you're the toughest one in the room that makes us feel on top of the world?

I know that's why I do it.

then you'd have directly linked attitude to running and made the whole book seem relevant. But you didn't, and the introduction doesn't make me care.

Again, "The Untethered Life" is absolutely dire. The biggest thing is that it has nothing to do with the Attitude book. It could be in any Shadowrun supplement. It could even be in Cyberpunk 2020, or any near future scifi setting. It has a one word throwaway mention of attitude.

I'd have suggested that if it had spent the latter third with him pumping himself up mentally and either faking an attitude or getting into the right frame of mind then it could be fitting and interesting. Showing how at first he had to fake Saber's attitude, then as time went by it becomes part of him until he doesn't know how to act without it and even if he was able to live a normal life he could no longer mentally adjust to other people.

The "Where we come from" is also bullshit. The Intern guy is publicly telling everyone that he hates being called Intern and that he is planning on telling his next group that he is called Professor. But, for years he is known by hundreds of runners as Intern and is signing this section as Intern?

And I know that the whole book is all about attitude, but over half of what he talks about is himself? Is the rest of Intern's group aware that he wants them to die in a fire? Why is he telling everyone that? Why is it so bullshit?

I'd redo the whole section there. It adds nothing.

Critias · Post by **Critias** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 5:41 pm

Intern's supposed to be annoying and self-centered, and his whole college theme is meant to serve, in its own way, as a reminder of the point of the whole first chapter; that folks can dive into the shadows, but can't necessarily get away from who they were. Or, rather, that they can only get away from their old self if they genuinely try to. I'm not sure if I didn't make that clear enough about him, or made it so clear you guys are overlooking it for being too obvious. I went with academia because it made a certain amount of sense given the subject matter, and because (like Rasumichin) I've always had the impression that the first two of my categories were always, overwhelmingly, the two largest, so Intern would be a change of pace. You seem to feel (and pretty strongly, since you've mentioned it multiple times now) otherwise, but I can't help but be curious what gives you that impression.

But honestly, Frank, any further issues you've got, feel free to PM them to me if you want (since there are five pages to go), or post again tomorrow, or whatever. Once again, I wasn't aware that a conversational character conversationally mixing a where/who list would be such a huge deal, but it's on my radar now and I'll keep an ear out for future criticism along those lines. I'm not going to take anything anyone (especially here) says as gospel, but I am going to listen and take mental notes about things, no matter who brings them to my attention. If you've got more to share -- more that can, through a little work, be halfway constructive instead of just more insults, I mean -- like I said, please feel free to share it.

If I didn't give a damn what anyone thought, I wouldn't be telling people what I wrote and I wouldn't be reading reviews (here and elsewhere) to try and get feedback. I'm not scared of criticism, or shying away from advice. I don't even get my feathers ruffled when someone's just plain mean spirited -- what bothers me is outright lies, or putting words in my mouth. If things continue in the vein of these last couple posts, I'm perfectly content to hear more.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 5:44 pm

Quick note: I wasn't insulting the author personally. I stated what was stated to me when I first started to get published. I (the author) was coming through in my writing. I received an extremely similar talk about my own point of view being pushed onto my characters, and thus alienating them from people who *have* gone through what I'm writing about, instead of my own conjecture.

And I got that from my *grandfather* at the time of all people (who was generally a wonderful guy, and a successful screenplay writer, but the first time he said "You have no fucking clue what you're writing about and it's insulting to me because I *went* through that", it was a real wakeup call).

The problem with intro text and short stories in general is that you only have a handful of words to do what a novella or full blown story takes it's time to do. Short story writing is a completely different beast than novel writing, or even non-fiction writing. You have to be aggressive and merciless with your narrative. Every syllable has to be there because it means something, pushes the story, and knits in with the rest of the surrounding writing. It almost feels like you're writing a haiku sometimes. At any rate, *really* short fiction has more in common with poetry than with most other kinds of writing.

In a longer story (say even a 20 page short story), the intro text I reviewed wouldn't leave nearly as much of a "meh" impression. The reader would move on, and assuming the story as a whole is interesting, you'd accept it. But there isn't anything else surrounding it, which means that every flaw is really bright and glaring, perhaps even moreso than it deserves to be.

RiotGearEpsilon · Post by **RiotGearEpsilon** » Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:45 pm

Is this preview available for free anywhere? I'm not sure what we're talking about.