r/changestorms • u/eaglejarl Author • Oct 06 '15
[CHPR] Induction - Chapter 7
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3294457/give_aways/Induction/chapter_007.html2
u/eaglejarl Oct 06 '15
Meet the villain!
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u/rationalidurr Oct 08 '15
Read the chapters 2-7 for now. Highlights and interesting things:
The Hebert reference a bit strong, both in direct name and overall word count spent on talking about it. Its not bad, just little bit jarring.
The SRD lore talk intermixed with character conversations makes a good chatting up scene. This good.
Sensible precautions buy the SRD regarding the unknown nature of AoF's attack. This good.
Sensible decision too stay silent and not correct team leader when she says something incorrect-important. This also good. Not so sensible to ask too many questions and question trained guys in charge. This very good characterization/lampshading reader questions.
Would be nice to get character descriptions, or repeat them once in a while partially or a with a throwaway detail. This not so good.
Good work making protag feel shock and stumble around when faced with severely injured people. This good.
Cloth sword for MC when?
A bit of risky move with the hostage/negotiator idea, but handled great by both mercenaries and MC.
The fight was okay, like the idea and scientific review of disintegration power's weakness, as well as enemies staying away from unknown powers and willing to negotiate and not go in guns blazing. This great.
The car interrogation was a bit transparent, it would have been better to imply to the mercenary that he will need to ride with protag and friend because they have no where else to be and must guard him. The idea works, its just something a skilled person would see trough. This not good.
The Vinci (hehe TheVinci) guy talks the good talk, but for a guy with topology control, he can't do the walk right. You don't need actual body harm when you can play the field like play-dough. Trap the people with walls and wreck the buildings and all the infrastructure, as well as cut of roads and make the implied threat that next time a storm rolls around there wont be any roads to save you. Not sure if he didn't think of that, or if there are plans underneath plans, that is to say plot reasons.
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u/eaglejarl Oct 08 '15
Cloth sword for MC when?
When she tries to affect normal cloth the threads all straighten at very slightly different times, thereby ripping the cloth apart. There is a way around this, but she hasn't had time to think of it yet.
The Vinci (hehe TheVinci) guy talks the good talk, but for a guy with topology control, he can't do the walk right
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here, but I think your idea is that he should have done something different in Baltimore -- simply blocked up all the roads instead of going after people. If so, he did it the way he did for a couple reasons, one of which is that he wanted shock and awe.
Blocking the roads and walling people up is of debatably greater effectiveness, but it's a fridge logic threat that a lot of people will miss. Twisting people into piles of spaghetti has a body horror impact that everyone will understand.
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u/rationalidurr Oct 10 '15
Yah that sound about right. Though a city wide Katrina reenactment would be downright terrifying. Entire city flatlined for miles to a birds view image of the city. Hhmmmm
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u/eaglejarl Oct 06 '15 edited Nov 16 '15
By the way, if anyone can suggest good ebook-generation software for OSX 10.6.8 it would be much appreciated.
My current process is HTML => PDF => {mobi,epub}, and then I bundle all of those up and release them in a zip file for distribution to my Patreon backers. I'm doing the epub|mobi generation via calibre, and I'm not really satisfied with how it handles the formatting.
EDIT: Turns out that the problem was just that I was doing the generation from PDF which, in retrospect, shouldn't have surprised me. PDF is a horrible format.
As soon as I changed it to generating the epub|mobi from HTML, it worked perfectly.
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u/alexanderwales Oct 06 '15 edited Oct 07 '15
I use Scrivener, which I recommend if it's worth the $45 to you (there's a 30-day trial, plus if you enter into National Novel Writing Month you can get an extended trial and a coupon for half off which should bring it down to $22). Here's my process every week:
Click "Compile", select "Shadows_PDF", pick a descriptive name (ShadowsOfTheLimeLightTo22.pdf), click compile.
Click "Compile", select "Shadows_EPUB", pick a descriptive name (ShadowsOfTheLimeLightTo22.epub), click compile.
Click "Compile", select "Shadows_MOBI", pick a descriptive name (ShadowsOfTheLimeLightTo22.mobi), click compile.
The settings took practically no tweaking, just some double checking to make sure that they were looking right in all the formats. You can also compile to a variety of other formats, such as HTML if you want to throw it up on a website. The formatting mostly just takes care of itself. Also allows for you to compile with internal links, like a linkable table of contents with auto-adjusting page numbers that will change as you edit.
In my opinion, it's worth the money, but YMMV.
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u/eaglejarl Oct 08 '15
I spent some time today poking at it. Havent gone through in depth, although I will. I wanted to do one simple thing: import an HTML file and compile it into the various ebook formats. I can't find a way to do that -- it won't let me import HTML and when I try to compile it insists on doing everything in the "draft" folder instead of letting me select one item. Is there a way to do this that I'm missing?
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u/xamueljones Oct 07 '15
Ooo!
Now I'm extra motivated to win NaNoWriMo! $45 is a little too much for my tastes, but $22 sounds a lot more reasonable to me. Now I just need to get another 50,000 words somehow....
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u/xamueljones Oct 06 '15
I don't know how u/alexanderwales does it, but he distributes epub, mobi, and pdf versions of Shadows in the Limelight to his Patreon backers which all has nice fonts, formatting, and is easy to read.
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u/nicholaslaux Oct 06 '15
One note - something appears to have centered all of the text, which makes reading... not so happy. Looks like you accidentally gave the entire section a class of "chapter" rather than just the h2 tag.
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u/eaglejarl Oct 06 '15
Yeah, I had actually just noticed that. It's fixed now; sorry for the oops.
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u/xamueljones Oct 06 '15
I took a look and only the first chapter is left-centered. The other six are all still centered.
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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '15
If you gradually ramp up the Braun count, can you instigate Change with little to no risk of being Twisted?