@alexchenco I liked it too. It's just a beginning with no end. It was something I wrote for one of the timed exercises, but I haven't gotten back to it yet. Someday soon, I hope.

None of the unanswered questions are about story-writing

I found a couple that I could possibly answer by title, but then they turn out to have a dozen answers

@GraceNote do you have any writing anywhere that we can read?

Or half. Or approaching half

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Published? No.

what about "posted"

Those are synonymous to me in this instance, as I mean "published" in the sense of "publicly available" not "earning me cash-monies"

I see.

The majority of my writing falls in four categories

From the writers chat I gathered that you've done a lot of writing, which I guess is in an unfinished state.

(1) A series of short stories I wrote following the adventures of a cobra and his best friend, a butterfly who he originally thought was just a "fuzzy snake"

Those are complete but I don't even know where they are anymore, unfortunately. I wrote those many years ago, but I always loved it.

(2) I wrote a fanfiction that has gone through three drafts. The first two were publicly available but then the site went down under, the third draft is currently on my harddrive and only through two chapters.

I rewrote it twice because of terrible narrative structure that I implemented the first time around.

(3) A new story I wrote based on a little forum RPG. This is on a yellow notepad that is right next to me, actually.

(4) Countless design documents for game storyboarding. While these are the things I am actually most proud of, they're also the things I am least conducive to sharing the text for obvious reasons.

I wrote the third one in pencil because it's essentially a design diary of an inventor documenting her latest project, intersparsing narrative event sequences with her actual writing. I chose to write it that way just to get in character, really.

huh. That's a lot of writing.

Despite coming from a technical background and a predisposition to maths and sciences, I have always loved writing and all of my academic writing courses I have scored better than my academic math/science courses. I really do like to write.

Yeah, same for me. Except I never took any writing courses because I was too busy taking technical courses.

Heh. One of my degrees is semi-humanities, so I opted to take a few extra writing courses in college.

Which is the opposite of most everyone else in my other degree, who otherwise wanted to avoid taking any writing courses at all.

I actually had two really, really good writing professors, too. I miss them.

I took a writing course, I guess, in first year Computer Engineering. But I dont' count that because it was technical writing and it was mandatory.

I took Science Writing as one of my extra writing courses. The first writing I took was also an introductory writing course, but the name is misleading. It was the kind of course that even an experienced writer would've enjoyed, both to refresh skills and just to refine.

The other stuff I took was mostly supplementary stuff. Designing Interactive Characters for Computer Games being a notable one, but there was also the course I took for my thesis that I already forgot the name of. Oh, wait, it was Interactive Narratives, that was it.

At University of Toronto, the Engineering program has a pre-set courseload and there is essentially no room for electives. Back then, I was an arrogant engineering student, so I didn't care. Now, I wish there had been more time for different courses. I would have like to have studied some extra languages or some linguistics. Or something creative.

Ooh, I have a funny story about "no room for electives". I'll share it in a few minutes, summat to handle right now

Okay, back.

So, when I first went to college, my plan was to do a dual major - two majors on one paper. Computer Science and Electronic Media, Arts, and Communications.

However, the course load for this demands that I not only have no free-electives, but also that I have to spend at least two semesters at 20 credits (normal is 16 credits every semester).

so you picked something less demanding?

Which was fine, I was okay with this. Now, all students of Science have a H&SS requirement of taking some amount of Humanities courses and some amount of Social Studies courses. In my second semester, I took Japanese as a Humanities course, because hey, I already knew a good portion of it, might as well hone it.

But I hadn't taken into account that as a dual major component, Electronic Media, Arts, and Communications is chock full of arts courses that automatically fulfill the Humanities requirement. In other words, I only actually had a social studies requirement and I had just taken a free elective.

So, I ended up panicking about not being able to finish in four years because I just burned credits on a course I didn't have room for. This led me to cram 20 credits for the next four semesters, making my sophomore and junior years to be exceedingly painful (aside from creative schedule mongering for 2 weekdays off a week on the 5th and 6th semesters)

Then my academic advisor for Electronic Media, Arts, and Communications brought me over for my senior year and we started to plot out what I'd need for my senior year, and she politely informed me that "Because of your cramming, you don't have enough required course credits to stay a full time student."

!!

I had completely forgotten about several transfer college credits and AP course values that I had accumulated from night classes and summer courses while I was in high school. Add those in with what I had, and not only was I no longer needing to cram, but indeed, I only had 24 credits left to complete my dual major, and I would need to take 16 credits in the first semester.

The requirement of a full time student is 12 credits, so I had a required free elective in my last semester. Which, in combined with the actual credit load (since not all of my transfer credits were major-related), this actually pushed me to enough credits to get a double degree - two papers.

So, as a result of all this, my initial panic that first year may have been pointless for graduating according to my original plan, but the end result is that now I have 2 full college degrees from only 4 years. Woo~

wow! that sounds intense

holy smokes

@GraceNote You wimp out, that's all. We have over 1,300 questions. There must be one you can add your wisdom (and gain a Necromancer badge).

@LadybugKiller There probably is one buried, yes

Dig it up!

Damn, someone who finishes two degrees in four years is certainly able to answer our questions. How can you accomplish that and staying timid?

@LadybugKiller I'll work on something like this.

:)

This is a funny one to me since one of the first short stories I wrote (actually about the cobra I mentioned earlier), I had a flashback that took up maybe half the story. Later on I'd split those into two separate short stories altogether.

Flashbacks are always funny ;)

And they are troublesome. So I new answer shedding some light there would be helpful.

It looks like, that especially beginning writers love flashbacks.

It's easy to get distracted. You think of this cool thing that happened in the past, and you want to share it. Hey, I can just flashback in the middle, so I just dump it there.

I think there was a giant red circle on my paper for that.

Yeah, you think it is important, but maybe it is just irrelevant at the moment for the reader and you are interrupting the tension of the main plot with something totally uninteresting.

Or you jump back and for so often, that the reader is lost in time.