Ask Us Anything!

[alt_moderator]

The cast thread is filling up rapidly, and while we don't have to fuss about comment collapse, it is getting difficult to navigate...

So here's a new post, where we're asking YOU to ask US: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?

Comments

[synecdochic]

I feel like I had a lot of missed opportunities with my characters because I wasn't available at a particular time or because I didn't have the physical or mental capacity to deal at a particular moment, but really, that's inherent to the format. I think a lot of us had times when we wished we'd been there for something and weren't, but the strict 1:1 ratio between game time and realtime opened up as many opportunities as it closed off, really. The constraints really forced us to get creative -- sometimes a particular character was involved in a situation because that character's player was one of the only people around who could help move the plot!

(For instance, the battle at Fradswell was done at a time that very few of us could be there, due to Life. Some of the stuff was pre-written and posted when it needed to be, and some of it was "welp. we only have like four people here, how can we make this work?" Charlie being at Fradswell was because we had very few Order players available! And it opened up the chance for me to do one of the things I wanted to do with him, namely, make his worst fear come true -- I didn't think I'd get the chance to do it.)

[stormyhearted]

I don't really expect anyone to be able to answer this, but it makes me wonder what Alternity would have looked like if it was a collaborative novel series, more in the style of the original books. I think it would be very difficult to pull off well, with so many points of view!

[synecdochic]

I honestly don't think Alternity could have happened in any format other than the one it did, really! There are some long-running, broad-lensed fantasy epics out there, but the journal/RP format gave us just so much room to roll around in, and it let us fully explore things that would have been excised from a novel because they were too much of a digression. (There was a lot of stuff that looked like a digression at the time and then was revisited later!)

[naomikritzer]

This is really true.

A story told for seven years in real time is going to be filled with tiny random incidents that you would never, ever put into a book, like Sally-Anne getting her first period in Myrtle's loo and having to appeal for help and getting a sanitary pad delivered by -- of all people -- Padma. That was hilarious and random and never had any larger significance, other than showing that even Padma would show at least that much feminine solidarity.

But there were other random little incidents that we revisited later and decided did have larger significance. Ron Weasley got cast as Mad Moody's Mad Cat in the school play, refused to die when he was supposed to, which Arista Selwyn thought was hysterically funny. We built on that during the QWC bombing, where Ron encounters Arista while she's missing and keeps her calm and safe until she can be reclaimed by her parents. We built on that further by saying that after that, her parents got her a tracking bracelet; she also gave Ron her stuffed toy cat to comfort him after Arthur's death, and the cat and the bracelet came into play when our characters needed to find Arista in the Department of Mysteries...

You could pick a single person and tell their story in a series of books, but the sweep of all of it, there's no way.

[synecdochic]

RON AND ARISTA.

I think I remember at the time that there was a thread here in alt_fen with people going "holy shit! They've been planning this all along!" and we were all looking at it and cracking up like, no, we just took a LOT of random details and stitched them together. Heh.

[naomikritzer]

I think the lo-jack bracelet was a deliberate squid on the mantle. The gifting of the stuffed cat was just a piece that fell into place, I think, but I can't remember. (There was a bunch with that plot that we planned way in advance: the Machine of Doom, because we put in a bunch of hints that something was happening to muggleborns, for instance. And I think we started with, "we need to go to the Department of Mysteries, but anything as disastrous as the canon trip will wind up killing all our characters. What can we do instead?" A bunch of other pieces just fell beautifully into place as we built up to it.)

[synecdochic]

Which actually reiterates another piece of what I loved about writing Alternity, which I think a few other people have already called out: the combination of long-term pre-planning and "HEY I HAVE AN IDEA" five minutes before we kicked off the thing we'd been planning for made for some really great juxtapositions.