Character-Driven

This is going to cover a slew of things, because I felt really well yesterday up until about mid-afternoon when the fever returned and I was just useless the rest of the day. So I'm going to rush through this entire mess.

As you know, I was just lousy with the flu last week and am still recuperating. I have had good and bad days since Friday; I usually start off feeling fairly well, then the fever hits about 2-3:00pm and I just have to lie around and moan again. So things are still dicey at this point.

I wanted to discuss what I stated over at The OddBlog the other day:

Weird Ink, while a blog in and of its own right, is actually part of The Weirding. The design structure makes it the writing department of The Weirding, as a whole. So, if you came here through some bloggery way - looking specifically for a blog on writing and the like, then welcome! - you need look no further; everything you want is right here and you can find it by clicking on any of the tags you see there to your right to find out more.

If, on the other hand, you found this by surfing across the site - either from the homepage or because something else you were reading linked to an article here - then you may have been thrown for a loop. Rest assured, you are still on The Weirding and can get through it just like you do any other page (more or less), it just has a slightly different aesthetic from the rest of the site. Since the majority of what we do is text-based, it is easier to present and manage this way; instead of an individual page for every subject or topic (which then requires additional pages to index them), many articles can be better written and managed within the shell of a blog software package, such as this one. That's why we did it this way.

And I bring this to your attention because you might not realize just how closely all of the information is related and how much more you get out of it by just following the links in the text - even if it seems like you wouldn't be interested in it or it doesn't directly matter. If the link leads to something else on the site, you can always find your way right back to where you were; if it leads outside the site, it generally opens in a new window (unless it's an ad, and even most of those open in new windows).

In the immediate future, we are going to be focusing largely on characterization, which is directly-applicable to both writers and role-players. And while writers' and role-players' work and interests only rarely openly overlap, both might be surprised to discover just how closely-related the subjects with which they regularly deal are, as well as how many of them are the same. Research is another topic that is directly-applicable to both pursuits and will often result in crossover posts - as are setting, (fictionalized) history, story development, pacing... the list goes on.

I wanted to mention this because, like I said over to The OddBlog, when I look at visitors data, there are very clear lines betwixt the departments: comics and entertainment fans go to The Rundown and only sometimes check out the site, proper; gamers hit The Weirding and rarely anywhere else; writers come here; and... shit, almost no one checks out The OddBlog. And you are all really missing-out, because I try to provide the most in-depth coverage I can, regardless of whichever "niche" whatever it is I'm discussing fits into. I just wanted to make you aware of just how replete the entire site is, regardless of the fact that everything is a total mess right this minute and many subjects are specific to one topic or another.

A great example is The Jersey Devil: an unexplained phenomenon which happened only once in recorded history in the early 20^th-Century, it has become an indelible part of regional American History, as well as the annals of The Unexplained, and was covered on The OddBlog many moons ago. Any writer working on a horror project anywhere near the region or dealing with the paranormal in general would find knowledge of this event useful, even if only as colorful back history for one's self while working. Comics fans might have seen a rendition of the beast in the new Perhapanauts Annual, which I reviewed on The Rundown, and role-players might find it a great nemesis for PCs in any number of games.

The Jersey Devil was a real event and the details were faithfully recorded. So fantastic and inexplicable was this occurrence that it made its way into history books, folklore and legend, and has since appeared numerous times in pop-culture. Any character who has any knowledge of such general topics (the paranormal, Supernatural, American Folklore, etc.) would be at least tangentially aware of the story, and such characters often appear in pop-fiction and tabletop role-playing games.

But, unless you are working on some project specifically about the Jersey Devil, you just want a good overview of the entire subject - the facts, the fallout, the hype, the concepts - and every, last bit of it can be found at The Weirding.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008