Another Short Tale

There once was a woman, an agent of her government, who was asked by the people to protect them from the coming invaders. The people wanted her to take on the powers of the devils to help them, but she did not wish to. What they did not know, however, was that she already had the blood of devils in her, from ancestors that had loved and born children of devils. She spent all her life hiding her heritage, and found it horrible now that the people wanted her to use it.

As time went on, however, the invaders grew in number, and the situation of the people grew more dire. She could hide it no longer, her country was in peril, and so she chose to finally accept her devil blood. She used its power to overwhelm the invaders, and they were driven away. The woman was a celebrated hero among her people, but things did not stay that way for long. Since she had released her devil blood, she could not  suppress it any longer, and she soon found herself avoided by others, and then driven out by the people in anger and fear. She retreated into exile, bitter and angry at the people who had begged her to be what they hated her for.

A Short Tale

There was once a man, a soldier, who wished to lead his country to victory in the face of invaders. The enemy was stronger, faster, and so the man went to make a deal with a devil. The devil told him, "wear this helmet, and I will grant you my power." The man put on the helmet, and his body was transformed, twisting and enlarging him so his form was somewhat demonic itself. He removed the helmet, and he returned back to his normal form. Elated, he accepted the devil's deal, and took the helmet to go into battle.

As a demon commander, he and his fellows made quick work of the enemy, until they finally retreated to leave the land in peace. No longer needing the demon form, he removed the helmet, only to find that he did not return to his normal body. When he went to confront the devil, he simply laughed. "You were foolish to trust that I would just let you have my power for free. Now your body is mine." The devil vanished, leaving the demonic commander stuck in his form. The people soon came to fear and avoid him. He could not live among the country he fought so hard to save, and was driven into exile.

Text Adventure Inferrment

So I figured out how to turn the build number into a date in Silverlight, so the next time I update the Text Adventure Experiment it will indicate when it was built by date. I am not going to do it yet, because that would be the only change in this build.

So far, I have no idea what I want to do as far as a story for the text adventure. I don't even know what genre I want to fit it in, to be honest with you. I just had the urge to put together something, starting with a framework, but of course without knowing what it will be telling it can't move very far. I've been spending most of my development time lately working on the roguelike I'm making, but after thats done I can't honestly say I will have any more idea of what I want to do once I have more time to work on the text adventure.

There's not really anything on my scratchpad of ideas in my wiki that would fit well as such, either. I could possibly do something related to the storyline of The Pocketwatch, but at this point it doesn't sound like that good of an idea (although I thought of adding multiple stories into this app as time goes on, so maybe one later on). I guess I'll just have to wait until I have some interesting dream that would be a good fit to adapt to a story such as this.

Half-Paragraphs?

To continue on along the same line of the last entry, the second problem pointed out to me has been paragraph length. And that's the one that's confounded me the most, actually, because, as I think about it, I don't ever recall anything about paragraph length being covered in any of my English classes. 

This particular individual that hassled me had two things to complain about primarily: my sentence length being too short, which I went over last time, and my paragraph length being roughly half of the "normal".  She states the average should be 6 sentences per paragraph, and my overall average for the active projects (excluding Skewed, because again how dialogue-heavy it is) is 3.5 sentences per paragraph. The longest out of these is the "celebration" document, the story The Green House.

Now obviously, these rules about writing aren't meant to be strict, they are guidelines. And as such, things are going to be different from thing to thing. I've read some people's instructions to stay around that length, and I've read some people's instructions to write short paragraphs, depending on the particular style of writing. But, as I've read through these writing style guides and looked back over my work, I've come to notice that you almost could combine every two paragraphs into one.

The paragraphs are meant to be one set of ideas, one structure to hold everything together talking about a point before moving on to another one. Somehow, though, my style seems to split that, into half-paragraphs. I write a 3 sentence paragraph on some point, then the next paragraph I write a 3 sentence paragraph still on that same point, but looking at it in another way or something. Essentially, I am finding my writing is in a sort of "point/counterpoint" format. The two 3-sentence paragraphs are on the same particular topic, but because one is sort of a counterpoint, it looks better to me visually to separate it into a second paragraph. Essentially making the paragraphs into "half-paragraphs". 

Obviously not all of it is going to look like that, and dialogue breaks things up quite a bit as well. But as I review all my work over the years, that seems to be overall the way I have written for a very long time. I don't know when it started, because I don't have any of the stuff I wrote in Jr. High or Elementary School anymore, and I don't know why it started, but thats the way I write. Should I change it? Maybe. Maybe not. That's hard to say, really. Yes, I am going to have some criticisms about it from time to time, but aside from now I have never once had anyone particularly comment on that. But it is something that makes my writing mine, my own style of writing that makes it distinct from others. If, say, a publisher were to say I should adjust it for a work to be published, then I would in that case, but since people aren't complaining about it in general I don't see a reason to. After all, its the content that matters, not the structure, isn't it?

By some strange irony, the second highest document is the storyline for a roguelike I'm working on right now, which I was trying to deliberately write short to make the story segments simple to read. After all, you don't play a roguelike for the gripping storyline, you play it for the randomness. And this blog is written with an altogether different style, the style of online news, which treats paragraphs rather differently, so not going to do any sort of counts for this blog overall. And because, as evidenced last time with the post's word count, I totally can't show my point using my explanation as a demonstration, as this blog post's average to the end of this line is 5.0.

Too Short

Entry Number Eleven. Well, technically number 9 because of the two default articles a Pivot installation starts with, but thats how far back I talked about this before. Right at the very beginning of the blog. And now, reading back there, I had noticed the deterioration back then, but didn't really pay attention to it.

The biggest problem is short sentences. Short sentences and short paragraphs, but sentences is what we'll worry about for now. The normal average for English writing is 15 words per sentence. That of course is the very short ones together with the long ones, so it balances some things out, but one of the main focuses of my English class with Mr. Thompson was long sentences. We had writing exercises daily for practicing, requiring, at the beginning, writing a sentence with at minimum 20 words, and then moving up from there. Somewhere in my box of old school papers I should have the sentence that was the class high score, one of my own sentences that if I recall correctly was somewhere in upwards of 50+ words.

The exercises were all about trying to overcome a stigma about writing, which had grown from this average. The perception becomes that sentences longer than that are simply run-on sentences, but when done correctly with proper writing styles, they are far from run-on and are in fact properly structured English sentences. The class itself was I believe a college writing course, although I had him for two different classes so I don't remember which was which. My brother is going to school there now, and I know he is still teaching there, so I am hoping my brother has him as a teacher at some point here in the next couple years so I can find out if he is still teaching that class in that fashion.

After the discussion, I began analyzing some of my documents. And, while it led me to finding a strange inconsistency between Word 2007's "Word Count" and "Readability Statistics" information, the overall consensus among all my writing projects was that my word count was way lower than I should want it to be, given my training.  Adding the reported numbers from all my active writing projects together, I am sitting at a grand average of 14 words per sentence. From those numbers, the most complex is The Pocketwatch at 17.9, the actual document in question that sparked this all is at 13.1, and my grand project, Skewed, which is now at over a quarter of a million words, sits at a palsy 12.5. Skewed I'll write off because it is incredibly dialogue-based, and that hits hard for sentence average, but altogether they are very bad results. 

 For a matter of comparison, everything above this line sits at a high average of 23.8 words per sentence. I should do an overall blog word count some time to see what that gives me, but it sounds rather time consuming so I will do that sometime in the future.