>>2594
I didn't dream up the part where the Kadabra was levitating and doing such other psychic shenanigans to the Houndoom, did I?

>>2595

Oh, right. I thought you pulled that line verbatim from the chapter. Yes, given enough power any move and/or Pokemon can be made to ignore type immunities.

Oh yes, here's the new map.

>>2598
>looks at map
>remembers this
Granted, this image of the planet is from the Anime, but it's quite similar. Just thought I'd share.

I've seen that map before, although I had intended to place the new Sedera a few hundred miles on the other side of Unova. This works better. So sayeth I: Sedera lies three hundred miles east of Unova!

Now then, obviously the biggest change is attaching Sedera to the Unovan continent. The border is that fine red line about an eighth of a mile north of the Iceclave shrine. Also, Forlone Jungle has subsumed the Geshrude Forest, effectively cutting off the Sederan League HQ (now the headquarters of the federal government) and Victory Road from the rest of the country.

Skorta Holdings, and by extension Scion, is now based out of the secure facility in the northwest corner of the country. A new route runs east out of Geshrude City, allowing for another point of entry besides Mortridge City. There's also the matter of the new Champion Islands west of Sederan League HQ; they're more or less Sedera's post-League challenge, analogous to the Cerulean Dungeon or Mt. Silver. The current League Champion has exclusive use of a mansion on one of the inner islands.

Obviously I haven't represented everything in the country here (I have excluded everything in this by-no-means-exhaustive list: rivers, lakes, waterfalls, secondary footpaths, vehicle-purposed roads, Trainer outposts, minor settlements, caves, private airstrips like the one at the Skorta facility, public airports, military bases, prisons, space centers, thief covens, Regi dens, canyons, valleys, bridges, minor outlying islands, plot-irrelevant ruins, grottoes, traveling salesman routes, real world - Lacuna portal locations, secret training locations, icebergs, common smuggling paths, etc.), but I've made an effort to include everything relevant to the main plot.

That being said, if a setting's exact location isn't made clear, it's open to interpretation. For instance, Dragon's Egg Army Base, which is featured in Chapter 7, never has its location explicitly stated, beyond the fact that one can drive there. I consider it to be just north of Shortide City, but it has no set location.

No, no hiatus. Been working like an entry-level employee all summer. Now that things are winding down, I've been devoting more time to Chapter 7 and fleshing out the revised story. Whereas the first time around people generally practiced what they preached, now what characters say and what they do have a little more disparity.

I want to say Ch. 7 will be out this month, but I'm not going to make a promise I can't keep for sure.

For those of you who don't know, I live in eastern Long Island, and no matter which way Irene veers I'm going to be hit. Hard. My house is pretty sturdy (it was one of the town's few surviving structures after the New England Hurricane in 1938 passed), but we're anticipating significant structural damage and power outages lasting at least 3 days. My laptop battery will hold out about 4 hours, so I can't see much writing getting done before the end of the month, let alone uploading (I guarantee my craptastic ISP will go down at the first drop of rain).

Incidentally, I work in the Dune Road area of Westhampton Beach, which was completely destroyed in the '38 hurricane. Good thing the 31st is my last day anyway; the hotel may very well be partially submerged after the storm passes.

Hurricanes make for terrible writing conditions anyway. Too hard to concentrate.

Seriously though, I hope you make it through without much damage from the storm.

>>2619

Yeah, I'll probably just leave my electronics off and unplugged and try to read for the whole time.

This does give me an interesting idea for Equilibrium, though. After returning from Hoenn, Jason and Storm have to go to Mortridge City for a few chapters and someone has to die before they get to the last Relic. A hurricane is the perfect way to stick them there for a while. And since by that point in the story both the Air and Water Gems have been disturbed, it fits in so nicely with the way everything is falling apart at that point. Hooray!

>>2620
and then they fucked.

>>2621

wut

I still have power, for now. And I got another idea.

<< That is not what Arceus really looks like in Equilibrium. That is a form that human minds can tolerate.

>>2623
So, is that gold ring around that form still a thing? The Cryst, right?

Also, can Arceus change his/her/it's form at will? Or do you mean that form is what humans CAN see, but not ALL to be seen?

>>2624

The Cryst is still real (It'll be explained better in Book IX), but the gold ring as we see it only exists on the qilin-avatar (the form we see). What actually constitutes the bonds holding Arceus is complicated; a blend of metaphysical and topological concepts that I haven't fully fleshed out.

What Arceus actaually looks like would break the mind of any human; that's why our brains (and the brains of regular Pokemon) envision Arceus as a majestic qilin. They can't handle the true form (think Giygas or something Lovecraftian if that helps you).

We'll get a text description from Giratina later in the story. I wrote it earlier, and it makes the listener, a human, physically sick. I didn't even feel too good thinking about it or writing it.

>>2625
>think something Lovecraftian
Tren Krom it is!

When you say humans and 'regular' pokemon see the white quadrupedal form, I take it you mean that Legendary Pokemon can see (or only see?) his true form? I'd understand if it's only ones of Giratina's caliber though.

>>2626

Yes, only the Higher Lords (Giratina, Dialga, Palkia, Cresselia, Darkrai, Reshiram, Zekrom & Kyurem) are able to see Arceus' true form. This is because each of the Higher Lords is the embodiment of a concept, rather than a force in and of themselves (Antimatter, time, space, life, death, yin/fire, yang/thunder and wuji, respectively). Physical beings, like the High Lords, regular Lords and regular Pokemon, cannot gaze upon Arceus without their mind simply breaking.

The Higher Lords, are at least the Pokemon as we know them, are the protrusions of their respective concepts into the physical world. They exist, certainly, but they are not bound to physicality like the other Pokemon and humans. They straddle the border between god and mortal, and they're pretty far on the god side. What prevents them from attaining godhood, though, is the fact that they are constrained to whatever concept they embody; i.e, Reshiram cannot control thunder and Zekrom can't control fire. Arceus is (or was, when He wasn't sealed) not limited in this regard and thus remains the unchallenged Highest Lord.

*peers into thread*

Hello? Hello? Anyone alive in here? Skyler, you... what's that smell? Oh god! The flies! The maggots! The sound of broken dreams and lost ambitions!

...any progress?

I'm not dead, I've been working. Also reddit.

There hasn't been as much progress as I'd like, but I'll have Chapter 7 out before 11/11/11.

Don't expect much for a while after that date.

Let it not be said that I spent the whole of November in anticipation of Skyrim. I'm currently working on Chapter 7's final draft and I have a good part of Chapter 8 down in my math notebook.

I present a question to my fellow writers of /canalave/: How do you go about planning chapters/arcs/entire stories? I'm curious about your processes.

And I just so happen to be done with the final draft. It'll get a thorough check and then it's off to beta, if anyone's interested in doing so.

>>2651
If there's anything I really need to do, is to actually write down most of my long-term plans for my stories. As for what I've got down, I do everything from bullet points in regards to locations and what happens there, to just random ideas that may or may not be included. A way for me to get a good scope on things is to jot down everything I've got, and mark it by a calendar date, then project when my future plot points will occur, and pin tentative dates on those.

Chapter wise, I used to just write down a summary paragraph with how the chapter is going, in order. Recently however, I've taken to just bullet point creating scenes, plotting pretty much every action of the scene very basically, then writing them from that. I'll include sample dialog bits or specifics in there as well, if they deserve to be elaborated on. Once a scene is 'done', I determine the order that they occur in the chapter. I find it constantly funny that, in my current TDT chapter, the first scene I've outlined and started to write is expanding well enough to be its own chapter. But that's irrelevant because since I've started Mass Effect, time to write has being drastically and surprisingly cut short.

And if you want, I'll gladly help out with a beta read. Haven't done one of those in a while.

I'd like to do something similar, rather than just winging everything. To that end I bought Scrivener (a formerly Mac-exclusive program) for writing and I'm already really liking it.

Well, I have a game dropping at midnight and I probably won't move from in front of my TV until I finish MW3's campaign. Yes, I play it for the single-player. I like story.

>>2655
Scrivener, huh? I may have to take a peek at that myself. How much did that run you?

On a related subject, I'd be willing to beta the next chapter too if you still have slots open.

>>2655
Exactly how does this program help? What does it do? I'm intrigued.

Also, just got done with my run-through(s), time didn't allow me to finish as fast as I'd like though.

Scrivener set me back $31.50, but that's because I preordered the educational license. The regular edition is now $40 and the educational license (same thing, meant for students and teachers) is $35. Website's here: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/index.php . You can try it for 30 days to get the feel of it.

What it allows me to do is look at Equilibrium as a whole and as separate chapters at once. I can organize outlines, snippets (the little epigrams I put at the top of each chapter), pieces of technical information from Bulbapedia. I can annotate chapters (or smaller sections if I choose to break them up, I can make subfolders for individual chapters) in such a way that I don't have to delete the annotations before releasing a chapter. Being able to switch back and forth between chapters in a single window on the fly will hopefully make rooting out continuity hiccups much easier.

It was originally Mac-exclusive and it shows in the design. Don't get me wrong, the porting job was seamless; the interface is very clean and most features are out in the open, as opposed to flipping through multiple tabs like Word 2007. But you're not writing any macros or doing academic reports in this. It's a creative writing tool, where Word has more business applications.

tl;dr: A somewhat cheap alternative to MS Word that just became Windows-friendly and provides ease of access to all parts of a story at once.

Attached: A screenshot of my snippets page, mostly about how powerful Skorta is compared to the Sederan government. No real spoilers, just the name of a wholly owned Skorta subsidiary, Blackwing Security.

Definitely looking into that. I always seem to need to access upwards to 5 separate documents when I'm writing, and having to shift between that many windows can be annoying.

http://anime.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=600051250&chapter=7

Here you are. Now if you'll excuse me, I have dragons to slay.

WHAT YEAR IS IT

I have done very little in the past few days than sit on my couch and play Skyrim. But I finally tore myself away long enough to actually plan out all of Equilibrium! The whole thing! Not just a section in advance like last time. And now that I know what I actually want to do it should go much smoother.

Catastrophic hard drive failure here. With any luck, I'll be able to recover something...but more likely it'll need to be completely replaced. In the meantime I'm on my old laptop, but writing is out of the question right now.

I seem to recall this happening before. And again before that. Bad luck?

Hard drives and I don't seem to mesh well. Hopefully I'll have it fixed in a week's time.

I'm back on my usual computer...without any programs. Or music. Documents. Pictures. Anything.

>feelsbadman.jpg

No! I found a backup I made and forgot about! And I got my music from my iPod!

>feelsgoodman.jpg

I don't know if I need your permission or not, but can I take your story and turn it into a PDF. That was it's easier to read ON MY BRAND NEW KINDLE FIRE?

>>2685

Go for it.

How goes it, comrade?

>>2697

It's cold, man. No one here has ever heard of insulation.

Oh, you mean the story. It's going. I have the structure planned out for the rest of the section.

Cold eh? It was 60 degrees today. January is weird.

How difficult was it for you to plan out your entire story, anyway? I've never had more than half a chapter's worth of outline ahead of where I am.

>>2699

Granted, today was unusually warm. I'm getting nights in the 20s here, though. The space heater next to my bed is utterly ineffective.

I have the whole story planned out. I don't have a blow-by-blow of every scene of every chapter (some scenes near the end I do), but I have notes on every chapter. Place, featured characters, year (which becomes important in Book 9). I also did a "where are they now" in class today, with a list of things that happen after the story ends that wraps up the secondary plots. Also since some of the chapters overlap a little time-wise (as Chapters 8 and 9 will do), I have to keep track of that to keep everything congruous.

I'd be happy to shed light on anything else you or anyone else is curious about.

>>2700
I might've asked this before, but is Giratina still the narrator, or is there any named narrator this time?

>>2701
Yes, Giratina is still the narrator. Like before he stays out of the action until Book 5.

Chapter 8's done. Would anyone like to give it a beta read before it goes up? I really just want to delay putting it up as long as possible so AFF can get all the kinks worked out of their new system. Personally I thought the old system was just fine.

Depending on how today goes, you might get a 'same day' turn around from me, so I'll help.

Also, go Giants.

http://anime.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=600051250&chapter=8

Much thanks to Iruni for his prompt beta services.

Yes, Chapter 8 is up! And before you ask, "shiver" is the collective noun for a group of sharks, or Sharpedo in this case. Really! Go look it up.

Chapter 9's going up soon. That is all.

http://anime.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=600051250&chapter=9

Dialogue, dialogue everywhere!

Also, what happened to AFF? Why did they replace the straightforward interface with this...this...labyrinthine monstrosity? 9_9

Picture tangentially related.

>title
Well, that's one more word I can't not associate with Mass Effect. I have a problem.

But more on topic, good chapter, once again. I see you found yet another way to mess around with Jason's Ralt's evo, interesting. Is it a permanent ability, or would he lose it if he stayed in one form for long enough?

One day, perhaps, AFF will be a respectable site, if only in coding. One day.

>>2734

There's a Tyranitar later on named Sovereign, too...

Gallade/Gardevoir won't ever lose that ability, but he obviously has a preference, though it's at odds with what Jason would like.

Glorious. Simply glorious.

>>2738

Thank you!