It's coming! Prepare for the Awesome Adventure

The excitement is building on the Bananafish Discord server. We're set to launch the Quest in the Realms on Monday and it's hard to wait!

I wanted to share some reflections about writing and editing with this group of amazing people.

We have a great vocabulary

I like to think my vocabulary is quite good. But after editing the episodes, I had to re-think my assessment.

Collectively though, the writers of these episodes wrote some vocabulary-expanding stories. This is especially true if you aren't well-versed in anatomical or polite descriptions of sexual acts. [I warned in my last post this is an adult adventure!]

I'm curious to see if others agree, or if it turns out I need to start reading a dictionary because I'm the only one who didn't know the words!

It's stylish and atmospheric

I searched to see if there were any other crowdsourced choose your own adventures. I couldn't find any. There are video games based on the concept, but I couldn't find a story like the Quest in the Realms.

The reason I was looking was to get some ideas on how to edit it. Obviously when you get eleven different writers together, you're going to encounter a lot of issues - from an editorial point of view.

There are different styles for one. Even when the story lines up perfectly, each writer goes about telling it a different way. Some are interactive and dialog focused. Others are more narrative.

My copywriter and editorial instincts kicked in, and I started off quite harsh. I chopped like a psychotic ax-wielding monster to make everything simple, clean, and under the word count required.

But it hurt me to do it. I felt like I was cutting out everything that gave the episodes personality, but still, I stuck to it because I thought I had to.

Then, @tristancarax got online as I was editing his episodes and straightened me out. He showed me I HAD cut out all the personality that made the episodes fun to read.

To be fair to myself, I was following directions to keep them short and just moving the story along. But that wasn't any fun.

So, from then on I corrected grammar and made the episodes consistent as they flowed from one to another. And for the ones that were way too long, I did cut out things that didn't help the story, even if they were "good". But I was more conscious of keeping the heart and soul intact.

The result I think, is a story told in various styles. Normally I would say that isn't good in a work of fiction. But here, it works. Each author brings something special to their episodes and we get glimpses of the characters and settings from different points of view.

I can't wait

Having been through the entire story and all the options multiple times, I have to say I'm super excited to share this project with all of you.

I hope you all enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed working on it with the @bananafish Knights.

Oh, yeah, and you can win 30 Steem and some of the 30 SBI shares up for grabs too.

Read more about it here, and drop your name if you want to be notified when it goes live:

https://steemit.com/contest/@bananafish/quest-in-the-realms-a-treasure-hunt-for-bold-adventurers



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