trying out a floornight audiobook

I should be working today, but my mind isn’t quite in the zone yet and I decided to try something fun/creative instead.  So I recorded myself reading the first two chapters of Floornight.  You can listen to them here.

I’d love to do the whole thing as an audiobook, and TNC too (although TNC will present some format translation issues, obviously).  Before I actually go any further, I’d like to see what people think of these test chapters.

• Does my voice work?  Given both the inherent qualities of my voice and the style in which I chose to read, are these chapters pleasant to listen to?  Would you feel natural listening to them in whatever way you usually listen to audiobooks (possibly while going to sleep, or driving, etc.)?  Are there vocal choices (speed, enunciation, etc.) I should be making differently?
  
• Is the recording quality good enough?  I’m just using my laptop microphone.
• In sum, would you be interested in listening to more of this?  (Either if you’ve read Floornight before, or if you haven’t.  In the latter case, note that the story gets more interesting in the next few chapters.)

How would you pronounce “[,,,,]”?

Ideally, I’d add some synthesized noise to each of the bracketed words, and [,,,,] would just be a distinctive burst of that noise without me speaking alongside it.

Other stuff I should do at some point:

Make an actual functioning ebook of The Northern Caves.  This will take nontrivial work, since I want to preserve as much of the textual content of the forum sections as possible, but I think it’s something that needs to be done.  (I myself have such a hard time reading fiction in a web browser that if I hadn’t written TNC, I probably wouldn’t be able to read it.)

Record audiobook versions of Floornight or TNC?  Some people have expressed interest in these, and I would have fun reading them.  I only have a laptop microphone, though, and don’t want to spend money on a microphone, so this may or may not be feasible.

okay let’s see what –

wait

enhance

Satisfying endings, esp. in serialized fiction

jonomancer:

This is in response to http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/143321851339/lovestwell-nostalgebraist-the-most-common

@nostalgebraist

Hi. I’ve been thinking about the question of what makes a satisfying ending, because I’m also trying to learn how to tell a good story. So this is party a response to your thread and partly me trying to work this out for myself. The post turned out really long because I don’t have time to make it shorter.

My theory, short version: The ending has to be an answer to the question that the rest of the story was posing.

When an ending is unsatisfying to me there’s usually a sense that the question the author thought needed answering was different from the question I thought needed answering.

Mild spoilers for Homestuck and for Floornight below the cut.
If you haven’t read Floornight I recommend reading it! Despite my criticisms it’s a very original and fascinatingly weird science fiction story.

Keep reading

This is really interesting – for one thing, it makes me aware of some specific ways I could have done the Floornight ending better.

This suggests it’s a good framework to keep in mind generally.  The way these kinds of discussions usually go is that a bunch of people don’t like an ending because it didn’t wrap up some thing or things they specifically cared about.  But on the other hand, “tidy little bow” endings that methodically wrap up every loose end can feel artificial, and get criticized for that reason.  So from the author’s perspective, it feels like: “I’m not supposed to wrap up everything, and anything I don’t wrap up will dissatisfy someone, so there’s no ‘right answer’ and I’ll just strive for ‘not ideal but not terrible.’”

But as you say, rather than throwing up one’s hands like this, it may be better for a serial writer to at least think “what it is that my readers are currently reading to find out?”  (Often, I think, the problem is that the ending was planned from the beginning, but the events right before the ending weren’t; the ending makes sense as the culmination of the entire story, but doesn’t seem to flow from the recent events that ought to have been setting it up.)

floornight

fvanillic-aldehyde:

nostalgebraist:

memeteendotcom:

I just read Floornight by nostalgebraist. It’s basically a remake of NGE, with a strong Fine Structure flavor, but with more gay relationships. If that sounds like something you’d want to read, then do it right now, because I’m about to spoil the ending.

Keep reading

(Spoilers)

Keep reading

I think it’s clear enough while reading the story that you can use this One Weird Trick involving pneumatech that allows people to decompress in a couple hours instead of many days.

No, wait, on second thought, maybe pneumatech allows them to exist at the bottom of the ocean without pressurization at all. I don’t remember there being any references to people, for example, having restricted cooking methods due to the pressurization, like Crichton mentions in Sphere. Pneuma energy magically sustains the walls of the Sphere and the submarines, so the insides can exist at surface pressure.

Keep reading

(via finestoftheflavors)

lovestwell:

nostalgebraist:

The most common complaint about my stories is that I promise too much and don’t deliver.  Some of this is just poor planning that I can get better at.

But I worry that the majority of it is inescapable, because it’s hard for me to write without adopting a bias toward “saying yes to new shit” – being willing to put in anything that seems fun to me, and hoping it’ll fall into place in the bigger picture eventually.

It would be one thing if I could just stop doing this and retain a core of essential material without extraneous loose ends.  But without the devil-may-care attitude that produces the loose ends, I can’t even produce the essential material.

Presumably (a lot of) Real Authors deal with this by revising and reworking over a long period of time, but that feels very weird to me.  I like writing serial fiction because it’s almost like roleplaying as the characters.  Being able to “undo” some character’s action in order to improve the plot still feels wrong.

I’m beginning to think that many readers (including myself) implicitly grade authors on how well they perform under the constraints that they, or they story’s logic, or the story’s world, impose. What I’m trying to say is that maybe instead of looking at it in terms of “promise and not deliver”, look at it in terms of “set up a tightrope walk, CHEATED while tightrope walking”. The “cheated” thing is an instinctive reaction to the feeling that the author is exercising too much freedom in throwing shit around. We don’t like it, because… I’m not sure? Maybe because we feel that universe and our lives are relatively tightly constrained, and so our stories should be too? Not as tight as to forbid all magic, SF, miracles, whatever (although now that I think about it, maybe some people who don’t like SF/fantasy don’t like it because of that). But we feel the magic aspects should be world-building, not author’s-ass-saving. 

In HPMOR, some people were turned off by how Harry was not being emotionally his age at all, it worked well with the plot but was not believable in terms of character. And then later EY said “of course but this is how I planned it all along, because Harry is a shard of Voldemort and his extreme emotional coldness is yada yada yada”. And that didn’t satisfy ANYONE (I’m exaggerating) because that feeling of “this is under-constrained. EY is puppeteering Harry in ways that are too easy for him. Real-life Harry would not be so convenient to EY’s plotting” is local, it’s generated while reading the text, and is not placated by a later global retrofit, even if for the author it was not a retrofit.

A while ago I wrote why I liked FN less than TNC and I think I wrote smth like FN feeling much less “tight”, and I’m thinking now this may be more usefully expanded into thinking in terms of constraints. FN felt like something that didn’t respect enough its own/its author’s previously imposed constraints, and that was a turn-off. I’ve just read the earlier exchange with a critic of FN you just posted, and I’m inclined to interpret their criticism in the same vein. LUDWIG feels like a huge cheaty character because once the reader realizes that this mind-out-of-thin-air controls the entire sphere it feels like the author is WAY under-constrained, and is just throwing stuff around w/o trying to internally motivate it. And just as with EY, it doesn’t help to say “but this is globally explained by Martin etc.” It doesn’t help with the local feeling of – uhm-this-is-falling-apart–

So yeah, I don’t know how to square that with “saying yes to new shit“, but certainly part of the answer might be careful editing later. I think lots of writers put in substantial work while editing to bury their leads, to reshape the flow of information, and precisely to manage the readers’ feelings of constraint-strength. “I know this tightrope is legit, but this colorful vest that I’m wearing - the audience are definitely going to think it’s a safety harness. I need to come up with more decisive ways to let them know IN ADVANCE it’s not. Taking it off and letting them see it up close when the walk is over? - not good enough”.

(I don’t know if that makes much sense, and I’ve no time to write this shorter and more thought-out, sorry)

Hmmm.  Part of what going on here is that (IMO) there are certain kinds of stories that are inherently hard to make tightly constrained, particularly those where “the (partial) incomprehensibility of the rules” is a core, non-removable feature.  This includes stories where the incomprehensibility has aesthetic appeal – say in many stories that get categorized as surrealist fiction, weird fiction, magical realism, slipstream, etc. – as well as stories about encounters with entities far more powerful and/or intelligent than human beings.

If you’re writing this kind of story, you can either completely eschew “making sense,” or you can strive for making a kind of partial sense, with the knowledge that this will have to be fundamentally unsatisfactory in a certain way – there is usually going to be a big hole somewhere that could potentially explain or do anything, like the way a single logical contradiction in a system makes every statement true.

I’ve just made the latter category sound bad, but I actually really like it and I’m always happy when I see another instance of it.  I can easily get frustrated with surrealist, magical realist, etc. fiction because the fantasy elements feel weightless and artificial because they seem to have no rules, not even alien ones.  (I feel this way about Haruki Murakami, for instance.)  “Being extremely and continually weird while still using cause-and-effect explanations and partially defined rules” is a sweet spot for me, since it’s how I intuitively feel these kinds of stories would play out if they were “really happening” – there’d at least be patches of explicability here and there, because we’d build little local models in our heads that would at least sometimes capture the local characteristics of the alien-rules.

But like I said in that other post, for me this is the best of both worlds, but I can easily see how someone would experience it as the worst of both worlds – inviting all the head-scratching of a real rule-bound story without rewarding it.  I think this difference says a lot about the very divergent reactions to Floornight.

In particular, people who liked the story tended to see it as “climbing up from surrealism” (which is how I saw it) rather than “climbing down from hard SF.”  All the science-y terms made the story look like an attempt at rule-bound SF to many people, which then led to disappointment when their efforts at figuring it out were wasted.  For me, and some other readers, the mere appearance of some rule-boundedness was a “bonus” layered onto a story whose main appeal was surreal weirdness.

From the “climbing up from surrealism” viewpoint, it’s simply in the nature of the genre to introduce bizarre unmotivated elements like LUDWIG, and the fun (for author and, hopefully, reader) is to see how much this chaos can be made to seem orderly.  It won’t be as orderly as something intended to be orderly in the first place, but that’s not the game we’re playing.  (Incidentally, I felt much more satisfied with my plotting in Floornight than in TNC precisely because with the former the task was so much closer to being impossible; with Floornight I thought “if this makes any sense, I’m a genius” and with TNC I thought “if this isn’t airtight, I’m shameful.”)

(via lovestwell)

floornight

memeteendotcom:

I just read Floornight by nostalgebraist. It’s basically a remake of NGE, with a strong Fine Structure flavor, but with more gay relationships. If that sounds like something you’d want to read, then do it right now, because I’m about to spoil the ending.

Keep reading

(Spoilers)

Keep reading

transgenderer:

The Northern Caves and Floornight (which you should all read theyre free online and INCREDIBLY WELL WRITTEN) are like….if homestuck was good

Since I actually really love Homestuck, this feels like way higher praise than I think you meant it as, but anyway, thank you!