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Mate, pay attention to what that guy just said. You can't start with a theme and work up, if the gameplay mechanics are crap, the game will bomb horribly.

Post extracts here, nobody serious is going to private message you.

If you're not a completely competent programmer, then just program something and let a story evolve out of an enjoyable gameplay mechanism. Working the other way around wont work well.

Its nothing great. If it was part of your sketch packet it wouldn't get you hired for television.

That's not to say of course that it can't be done extremely well (Great Expectations, Time Traveller's Wife) but you need to approach it from an understanding of the third-person in order to know it's exact advantages and disadvantages. As an early author you're going to want to experiment as much as possible, its good preparation for any creative writing classes you'll take which, like all arts degrees, begin with you doing as much experimentation as humanly possible.

God I need to buy a typewriter. When I get my own place that's objective numero uno.

The content is fine, good even, but given the age of the character it does read quite like an english assignment. The first-person narrative is great for many reasons, but when it comes to things like this I see it as more of a crutch. As you evolve as a writer, try to embrace the third person. Trust me, you'll appreciate the freedom it gives you.

Also, try not to pre-phrase extracts with things like "This is the start of a book". Is it really the start of a book? Are you really going to write 200-300 pages of this, chapters and arc already mapped out? Even so, writing a whole book in first person is... limiting.

Keep it up buddy!

I'm sorry, I'm honestly not trying to be too harsh here but...

THAT'S NOT HOW YOU WRITE DIALOGUE AREHGRJHGKLHWEBANALK'BNK!!!

It reads like a screenplay, and not in a good way. There's no description, you can't influence speech without phrasing it correctly! Please, please, please learn how to write in the third person correctly, if only for the sanity of your english lit teacher.

Its not great. Read up on story structure, but like the above poster said, its difficult to constructively criticise such a small extract of work.

You play a woman at a bar, she's enjoying herself, you control her interactions with her friends. This guy comes up to you and starts flirting, you have to play a little conversation minigame to interact with him without being seen by your friends as either a "prude" or a "slut". After that, you go to the bathroom, where you don't feel so good. You stumble out of the bar without your friends and everything goes blurry. Suddenly, there's a hand on your characters back, helping her up: It's the guy from earlier, and he's leading your blurry, disorientated mind down an alley. Suddenly, it clicks: He spiked your drink. You kick him and try to escape, running, but all physical exertion is difficult and your character is hard to control. If you manage to control her drunken and drugged running well enough, she makes it back to the bar where her friends are waiting worries. They call the police, use CCTV footage, and eventually catch the guy that drugged you. He gets imprisoned for attempted rape etc.

However, if you don't run fast enough and trip or fall over, the man catched up to you. He wrestles you to the ground, putting his hand over his mouth. You smash the keyboard to make your character struggle, press the button to scream but no sounds make it out. He tears off your clothes, as the player still struggles to escape, pushes you against the bins and violates you violently. Eventually the player, like the character, realises there's nothing they can do and is forced to just sit there and watch his/her character get raped in a dark alley, as the camera zooms out slowly. The camera is very far away when the guy finally finishes and leaves your character stripped and crying on the ground.

EPILOGUE: For bonus points, you can crawl back to the bar.

I haven't given you a setting so it can be whatever time period you want, but the important thing is to remember that the drugged character controls like QWOP. The character could also be male if you want, but I feel the message hits harder if you're forced to control a typical teenage girl out on the town.

Or even better, the man they arrested was actually the Pathologist/Real Nazi's ultimate project; Corrupting and brainwashing a Jewish man to such an extent that he would hate and thus kill Jewish children.

Yeah, it was the combination of being under the influence and having just finished The Invisible Man (H.G Wells). I was like "Woah, why don't more characters with superhuman powers end up raping people?" It just sort of snowballed from there.

Thanks for your input though, yeah, the use of an anti-hero narrator always confers some sense that aspects could be false, or dream-like as you put it. That's a really nice sentiment.

I just thought, I'm never going to do anything with this, no-one's ever going to fund a film about time-rape, I'll just edit it down and throw it up here.

At 5/27/11 04:47 PM, Hexler4 wrote: Hmm, great idea :D I started to write a basic on paper script for the story, and got an new idea. Story will start when he is caught. A detective and an psihologist will ask questions about his murdurers and his past, but at the smae time hi will try to mentaly break detective.

You need to really be able to acutely switch the action back and forth between the two or three main characters without it feeling forced, that's the problem with having both protaganistic and antagonistic main characters.

What I would do, personally, is use the pathologist and detective arrest as a framing story. If it's a comic book, split it into 2-3 "issues". First, you need an origin for the nazi character. So, with the framing device of the detective and pathologist in place [DETECTIVE visits the pathologist, another jew death. This time they have a suspect. Detective goes to interview the nazi, they have substancial evidence, he confesses everything]. ACT (ISSUE) 1 would deal with the origin, i.e. the nazi pre-war and up until the end of the war. ACT 2 would once again start with the detective and pathologist investigation, but cover the years after the war finished until the recent murders. Introduce a love interest here, and as a parallel cover the detective's early police years [i.e. Nazi: "I've told you about my origins, Detective, if you want any more out of me you'll have to tell me yours."], this takes it up to the detective taking on the jew serial killer case. ACT 3 consists of the events leading up the arrest, and then the trial. The man is convicted, and everyone seems pleased, but something feels wrong. The Detective's years of finely tuned instinct are telling him that he's missed something: Why would a serial killer who's been at large for over fifteen years suddenly leave incriminating evidence at the crime scene? Then, suddenly, it all comes together. TWIST! The pathologist is the real Nazi officer, using his skills of manipulation to steer the case in the direction of a scapegoat junkie he brainwashed to take the hit. Nazi Pathologist either gets away, or if you like action cliches have a little showdown.

I'd also give the Detective a wife or girlfriend for the Pathologist to go after, preferably Jewish. Ooh!

You can have all that free of charge mate.

The next years of reality consisted of around 15 years of my life lived through moments. I was on a bender as they say, an unstoppable rampage with no barriers of methods of prevention other than the broken remnants of my own moral compass. I remember every scared expression. I have recorded in my brain every frightened gasp, every hopeless plea uttered through shrill cries of pain. The daughter begging for help from her family, as I pinned her under my weight to the dining room table, her ever-stoic family in fact so very far away. Perhaps it was the irremovable image of her father's glazed over expression that caused her to later commit suicide. Amelia was her name, an upper class sort of girl from north of the river. Very well-mannered-and-spoken. These types of pre-women were my fodder, and I snapped them underfoot like mere twigs. That particular girl was caught in an autumn moment during an evening meal, with the whole family present when I made my move. First I entered the moment, then I tied the ropes around her ankles and hands so tightly; the efforts of applied practice. I would then extend the 'field', and bring the subject into my little theatre. I took her then and there, on the dining room table. I tried not to look at them back them, the squirming motions and movements and sounds, the textures of sweat and blood still bothering me to some extent. No longer. She must have been a smart girl, because it only took her a few minutes to realise her family were nought but frozen statuettes and not a real participating audience in this twisted circus I was leading steadily onward. From her father's perspective, it was just another ordinary meal, when in the blink of an eye his daughter, his innocent young thing vanished and suddenly reappeared, spread-eagle on the table amidst the food and cutlery dashed around the room from. I can still hear it now, like grinding on the chalkboard of my almost non-existant soul.

She was only one of many. I have so many contorted faces carved into my very being, into my marrow. Many of them killed themselves, but several of them lived full and happy lives. But the past and the future just sort of fade away, when you live within the moment. Why should any of those other pointless issues even distract you for a second? I lived fifteen years of my life as a stalker, as a monster. And it took me ten more years to develop the capacity to feel any regret for my actions.

I sometimes find myself wondering what would have become of the world if a better man than myself had received this theological talent, this ability to mould the world and all that inhabit it. Would we live in a utopia? I was certainly by no means the worst choice. I didn't strive to become a dictator, I worked strictly on a person-to-person basis with no real discretion for my victims. I had, of course, my focus; a particular fetish for those late-teenage females, but near the end of that fifteen year stint I found that my element of discrimination waned and my ability to pick and choose faded alongside it. I could have been a thousand leagues worse; I could have froze the world and then after killed myself. I still think about it some days, that perhaps life for all universal living organisms would be better off if I extended the field, and then just left it there and died peacefully in my final moment. But there's no real chance of that now. That ship has long sailed. Because of one intrepid young reporter, and her quest to find this single illusive man.

________________________________________
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That's all I wrote and I probably wont write anymore. From what I remember of the synopsis, basically, the guy by chance meets a girl like him. They fall in love and f- up. He realises the sheer capability for destruction that they both have, kills her with difficulty, then becomes a recluse and lives forty years in the real world. A young reporter comes to visit him, having heard that he might have some sort of lead on a series of mysterious deaths that happened many years ago. He renders her unconscious, and the story then switches from a first person monologue as we reveal that the male character is telling all of this to the young reporter he's probably going to rape/murder. He lets her speak, the first victim he allows to describe her feelings, and she stabs him in the eye with a pen, and then stabs him with his own hunting knife. The injury plays havoc with his ability to control time, and he runs away with the reporter giving chase, both switching between real and paused time. There's a car chase into the city, where he uses his ability to unpause cars, shoot people in paused time them unpause, plough into people etc basically causing as much destruction as possible. Actually, it's more like the reporter is chasing this man who is drifting in and out of realtime, vanishing and reappearing constantly. There's a final showdown at the town bridge where Erica died, where he does a little speech about how she's making a huge mistake, extends the Field around the entire planet in an attempt to somehow destroy the world, when the other time-control woman from earlier appears to him as he's about to try and kill the world. She explains to him that he doesn't control time, that time in fact has her own way of evening out the random problems that crop up in life, then pushes him off the bridge. As he falls, he admired the rigid structure of water particles at almost-absolute zero, then smashes into them gorily, karmic death and all that. the reporter almost gets hit by a truck, suddenly teleports to her office at the local newspaper whatever, with a case file full of victim names and photos, and a location map of all the dens. le finale.

trophy girl.

A pleated summer dress in seashell green was her choice of gown for the evening, but in that slowed down light it seemed much darker. We all became darker. She looked up at the sky, and experienced the latent trail that special type of light leaves behind for the first time, and I could see her pupils adjust and her body react. Unscheduled goosebumps, for the both of us it seemed. Her head dropped and her gaze drifted slowly toward me, almost as if she knew. All those countless moments where I touched her, where I explored my own repressed sexuality by exploring her pert and unattainable physique, came flooding back to me and I held firm against the buckling of my legs by my heart.
"Jonathan?" She called, quietly at first. At least a month of must have passed since we last spoke, during that initial passage of rejection.
"Erica." I replied simply, silently fortifying myself for the journey ahead.
"What are you doing here?" She asked, confused but not horrified, and I fell silent.
How should a person correctly reply to that question? What was I doing there?
I explained to her the nature of the situation, and to my surprise there was little of the discomfort or the disbelief I had predicted. It was more an element of understanding that shone from her, as her undeniably pretty face creased itself into a smile.
"So you can... Pause time?"
That was the first time I had heard it phrased like that, my gift. She was in fact the one who in fact coined most of the phrases I have used here in this lab report (of sorts). Whereas I saw the coldness of those frozen figurines and viewed the world of the moment like the dusty and desolate model house sitting unused in a basement garage, she viewed it as more of an upbeat experience; a place of wonder and majesty, a holiday from reality, a living dream in which to explore. And although exploration was in fact her primary objective, I convinced her to follow me back to that fabled Den, constructed on the highest bridge in the city, overlooking the beautiful gorge with it's ebbs and flows and it's ancient rock. Whilst she percieved beauty in the unblinking eyes of the statues that inhabit the moments, I saw equal brilliance in the formatted and frozen waves of the river far below. It was like gazing at a glacier, a far-expanding natural prism of light and energy and atomage; the very molecules themselves bound to a single spot, made unable to move or falter. It was perfect. She was perfect. As we sat there on a bed in a room on a bridge, surrounded by faux-parked vehicles, she guided my hand to hers, and then a modest amount further. I stumbled so pathetically, back then in the beginning, master of time but an amateur at love. I look back at that virgin boy and shudder sometimes; what would he think of me, this future-Him? This haggard and aged vessel, still technically young? What would he perceive of me? Would he be capable of forgiveness? Would I need his forgiveness? But all my anxious questions melt away when I remember that first time on the bridge, that explosive shattering of taboos and the entrance of myself from childhood into something altogether more adult. The thundering climax hit the both of us like a truck. Exactly like a truck in fact, as my body spasmed and my efforts to control the Field momentarily collapsed. A transit vehicle ploughed through the plasterboard walls I had flimsily constructed on that heavy duty bridge, and dashed us both far and wide. I remember a visceral sensation of falling, a painless plummet, then the stark warmth of water. Several minutes scrambling had me landing on muddy riverbank. We had fell a good hundred metres, a dastardly plunge into the waters below. Erica's body was found washed-up the following few weeks, right alongside my heart and soul.

I crawled to my own rescue in what is a rather boring tale of hospital beds and unappetising matrons. That stark period of my life, forcibly lived in real-time had nonetheless honed my instinctive planning skills. A plot was forming ahead of me, a storyline unfolding piece by broken piece. I find it quite amusing how the man for whom time has no real power over, still fears death in its various forms to such a great extent. You would have though I would have come to terms with my own mortality, but with every corpse I dumped or buried or burned I only felt increasingly stronger. With every innocent woman I took advantage of, I only felt increasingly isolated from that withering side effect of the passage of time.

In the beginning, I worried a lot about cosmic interferences with nature. "What if the field doesn't extend as far as I believe it to?" I asked in the puzzled voice of a child learning about the grandest extinction events. "What if the world stops spinning but the other heavenly bodies continue onward in their orbits?" I had many dreams of the moon crunching down, thrusting wave upon wave onto land until everything sunk into murky depths, but I digress. Those were the silly thoughts of a silly boy, whose silliness knew no bounds. In the worst case scenario, I hypothesized, I would merely pause any impending disasters and live out my final days in that moment, be it what it is. It wouldn't be the worst method of expiration, or so I believed. As far as I can tell the field extends beyond the known universe; every particle stops simultaneously when I command them to, and being again when permitted. In a way, I am the very centre of the universe with all objects orbiting my gravity. Yet despite my natural pull, they always try to run away at first. Without fail, that became my game, my hunt, my happy trial with my meaty prize. They would run and I would chase; if they managed escape I would merely retract the field and all would be well once more. It was undeniably fun, at first. It become part of the process, an integral step in the machine that I had created to satisfy that urge, that salaciously unfulfillable hole that itched so incessantly. I scratched until I drew blood, and then scratched further.

Erica was my first. I was close friends with her in real-time, a confidant in all matters but those of sexuality. I pressed her for more but she denied me access, repeating to me instead those glorious cliches that I imagine have plagued soft, whirring teens in the midst of courtship throughout every great civilizations. So I found myself gifted a permanent seat in the zone of friendship. I followed her for a short while, in real-time at first. I watched through windows from hide-aways and photographed intimate portraits which I filed away in one of the many 'dens', the temporal homes I had created across the city for myself to inhabit during my brief stints in reality. It wasn't long before my very being craved more; the itch grew stronger. It pulsated through me and satisfying it from a distance no longer presented itself as a viable course of action. I couldn't satiate this persistent thirst with humble masturbation over blurry imagery any more, and so I timidly began to plot and plan and re-examine. Oh, it was all hypothetical at first; just numbers and math and notation pertaining to nothing grounded in reality. That's the problem with living in the moment, you see. You no longer inhabit a realm of impossibilities; everything becomes achievable, no matter how "morally debatable" it might in fact be considered by the average layman.

I spent twelve days and thirteen nights constructing Den 114. It was built under a bridge for a moment of summertime, late morning. The heat in those late summer days was beautiful when felt through the shimmering mask of the moment, it warmed you like a dim fireplace crackling happily away. It was a different kind of heat, and by the eighth day I found myself working in nought but my tailored birthday suit to finalise the details of my construction. It was a beautiful room with a view, centred on the city's largest bridge. A pristine king-size bed with expensive stolen linen was placed with care on a cream carpet adorned with candles and petals and other romantic little accessories. Looking back it seems like a waste of time, but in the moment it's placement seemed to me like that of a high-flying hollywood movie set, this drywall room erected upon a bridge overlooking the most beautiful valley in southern England. To Erica it must have felt like a dungeon, a single point of surrealism within the infinite prison our moment embodied for her. I had made sure to pause Erica in a suitable position; she had just taken a bath, and was drying her soaking skin with sunset light through her three-pain bedroom bay window. I had touched that skin before so many times, carefully caressing her frozen form with absolutely no reaction. From my naive perspective, I was simply removing the shackles that had stopped us from truly being together. I can only guess at what it must have felt like from her perspective, I never any of them a real chance to describe it. They tend to waste their last moments begging, or sometimes praying. Ironic, considering how much I myself have in common with most recorded deities. I like to believe I expressed a gentleman's decorum back then, a quality installed unto me from a harsh step-fatherly upbringing, so I had up until that point had exactly no sexual encounters, in the moment or otherwise. I had merely observed, being the curious young lad I was. I was a viewer, or a light toucher. "Never hurt, never harm" was the general code of conduct back in the beginning, when I still followed meaningless self-installed rules and regulations like a damn peasant. It was a great moral dilemma, bringing another human being into the moments I had only very recently myself tamed, but I felt she was ready to be my second in that sense and then hopefully later my 'first'.

I stood outside her house in the finest outfit in a finely tailored suit I had taken from one of the city's many department stores. One might wonder why an individual such as myself would have the need for wardrobes and other evidence of the docile and the domestic, but it helps anchor you in all that free-floating madness. That's why I first constructed the dens; Its beneficial for the soul to have places of intrinsic normality amid the desolate wasteland outside. I used to read a lot, before the itch began. Endless tomes still adorn the many shelves of the many dens hidden around the city. Occasionally an exploring child or rampant teenage couple will stumble upon those old archaic designs, usually the quick-fits that I didn't invest the time to hide. Its like losing a part of myself, when I enter one of those sacred little places to find it full of pestilence and drugs and attitude and graffiti. Its both disappointing and elating; the latter because it affords me once again the opportunity to hunt a deserving prey. That was my primary method of selecting subjects for the process; people who had wronged me in some way. Perhaps that's an insightful comment on the nature of humanity, that a man frozen in time can still accumulate enemies. Or perhaps it's more a statement of my own mental position and placement in the world of the living. Or perhaps not. Regardless, I extended the Field and swallowed Erica's father's house into that moment of warm, late summer. I waited for several hours before she finally opened that front door, perfectly dressed even without the intention to impress. She was like a great art, a collectible I simply had to own. My first

This is an unfinished story I wrote after I had the initial idea whilst heavily stoned. I just rediscovered it, and did a quick edit/proofread/spell-check. S'alright.

JUST A MOMENT by JL "TACTFUL", unfinished.

For most in the world tonight is the night before Christmas, but for me it may as well be any other day. When you live life the way I do, chunk by perpetual chunk, the calendar days and brief holidays cease to hold any real meaning. The world becomes sections of stillness and suburbia glued haphazardly to the substandard and primordial fabric of continuity. I do not experience the world in a continuous nature; my experience is one of rather modest linear portions separated not by the ongoing passage of time but rather the effortless bidding of my bright young body and mind. This world in fact becomes a mere toy; a train-set frozen in my grandfather's attic, a snapshot scene in which I move freely among the still and restful figurines and their lives which they themselves become tangled up in so very easily. You could say I float like a phantom, or some other winged monster; I've heard it all before: The curses, the endless screams and chants and statements of epic disbelief thrown by these porcelain human beings, mere children's puppets in comparison to I. I am undeniably a god; a thespian being of power, an animus of unrepentant self-satisfaction and endless desire placed merely on this glasshouse planet to fool with its people like a court jester, like a limitless warlock from one of those twisted fables. And like those eerie villains of old I too sit here, alone, in my tower. Surrounded by the Field I find myself lost in the intangible mist, the domain projected outwards and controlled by myself at will. Or perhaps the Field is more like fat and I a clot, a mutant product of chance and the vital tools of evolution, a tumorous bezoar of toxins and moral incredulity. When you live like myself, in the moment, you become accustomed to the absence of morality; this freedom is a dream and like a lucid dream-walker my actions have no equal and/or opposite reaction. In this photograph of the present that I inhabit I am but a joint wanderer-and-observer, a collector of fine things and an explorer infinite magnitude. There are no butterflies to crush, no child dictators to joyfully kill. I am a seeing eye with no real influence, and nothing I do is of any real or immediate consequence to myself, not with the lingering knowledge that a simple wishful thought could correct this mess, return this milk so spilt to it's previously sealed container. Mistakes can be eradicated, or removed via deep-water cleanse or high octane incineration with little fuss or bother. In light of even the darkest actions I do nought but continue on my merry way, skipping tidily from beat to beat, from moment to moment, washed of the troubles of my past by my own sheer ableness; my own innate ability to pause to consider and thus act.

Yet I find myself in constant want. Like an opiate itch, this desire acts as a looming presence guiding me through my day-to-day interactions. I can barely exist in the free world for more than a month before it begins again, the compulsion to abuse this tempestuous power gifted to me. Sometimes I even start to consider if this ability, this power to casually obstruct the natural flow of time, is more of a curse than a beneficial trait. Perhaps it is more a mutant delusion of genetic fallacy than the absolute product of natural selection. Keep in mind though that I usually fall off the wagon long before I reach this latent stage of philosophical introspection and once again I find myself trapped, in the moment. Outside the snowglobe, looking in. I am a "peeping tom", a voyeur staring fervently through the cracks in the closet at the taboo undressing of society. She called it stalking, but it is nothing of the sort. It is mere scientific interest in social interaction, an empirical endeavour I pursue for the betterment of not only myself but our world and collective consciousness as a whole. I am not a monster; I am a man of both faith and science, a single person that has, by chance, earned the genetic right to take huge leaps hidden within the slight movement of every tiny step. Or at least that's what I told myself, for the longest time.

"Time". I miss her. We once shared a love so divine that it hurts me to think of it, but I learnt long ago to spend my waking moments focused on the present and the next. If the past is an illusion, then so is time and it's influence. How could I still put up with her many issues and imperfections, when I know in my heart I hold the key to the progression of the earth on a potentially universal scale? A mere biopsy of my brain matter, the tiniest flicker of neurons beneath my greying hair can incept entire new worlds. I can build empires in-between breaths and total galaxies during a single heartbeat. I can forge beauty and madness, and solve crime and art and illness and all the other problems that time in her cruelly ironic nature simply allows to continue. I could exist not at the bequest of, but alongside this callous force who so easily ignores the weathering of the biological achievement that is the human race. So I set out to battle her, and battle we did. It was a ruthless war, a year-long struggle duelled in-and-out of seconds. Eventually I bested her; I conquered time, who merely exists now as my pet mistress, collared and neutered, jumping through flaming hoops like a gypsy child, enslaved by the stronger concept. She seems so tragic now, whenever I let her out to play. Like all those years of captivity broke her, whittling down her resolve like dead bark to the decomposers. Whenever I free her momentarily from her pause'd constraints she cries out to me for mercy, helpless beyond helping. And so I allow for a mere cut of her Time's breast our love to regrow and blossom once more. Still, never for longer than a month. Twenty-eight days is the longest I can tolerate the itching, the ever-growing itching. I feel that pounding through arteries, that knifing pain boiling through veins. I feel that cold, stricken breath catch in my alveoli. It is then that I can resist the inevitable no longer. Everything stops.

The silence is what hits you at first, like a museum or a library or my step-father's old study. I feel like I should be looking through a picture frame or an old-weathered spyglass at a world that has suddenly found itself frozen in time and space It is in this period of fragile adjustment that I get myself reacquainted with the methods of this induced madness. In the moments, light acts quite differently. It's somewhat slower, and pours like fine olive oil through the gaps and cracks in this country's unceasing cloud cover. Another aspect to consider is the effect of the Field, which I have deduced to be the acting factor in sustaining our matrix of solitude. It may be my imagination, but sometimes I believe I can feel it, if only for a moment. This coldness, an aura emanating from myself, effortlessly causing everything to become slow. A transcendental calmness exudes from every pore of my skin, bringing life to what naturally should be just another lifeless freeze-frame image. The Field continues to project in sleep and other unconscious or comatose states, as I have discovered much to my own extended misery. At my current level of experience, it is with ease that I can bring another object in, be it organic or coldly inanimate. Back at the start it took what I assume were hours of struggle just to get the hands of my own timepiece to turn by themselves, which to this day is the only method of tracking time available in a solar system with no interplanetary cycle. In these present days I find it almost too easy to flick a wrist and achieve desire. Sometimes I think there should be some sort of spell or incantation associated with this dark magick, some password or industrial device which makes things start and stop and go and pause unexpectedly. Alas, there is just I, and whatever I choose to bring with me.