Well, I'm trying to write in an SR sort of setting and I hope it goes according to plan. Let me know how you feel about it.

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

Well, I’m not so great at writing journal entries so let me begin with this disclaimer. Second of all, my name is Carrie Daniels, and third of all I live in the Seattle Metroplex. Congratulations, you now know enough to stalk me.

As with every tale the beginning is the most difficult, so I’ll skip straight to the point. I used to work at a software company called CrystalDon, where I endured my boss Donald’s sexual advances without reprieve. He stepped over a boundary, and in the end I decided he needed a nose job by hand. Moving on, I knew he would tell his big brother and the owner of the company, so I took all the data my CMT Avatar could hold and sold it to a rival company.

I set up my own office, selling a lot of software from my new friends and even managing to break about even, but I couldn’t afford my nice house Auburn, no way. I was drinking away at the local bar when I let slip that I was Awakened. What’s that mean? Duh, it means I can cast spells. The boss of the place quickly told me about the advantages of one of 2060 Seattle’s best jobs, and I was soon dumping my remaining funds into Shadowrunning.

Pete (I’m not gonna tell you his whole name, though I bet it isn’t even his real one) is one nice guy, considering all the limitations I brought to the table. I’m a “groggy,” meaning I don’t have a tenth of a chance of conjuring a spirit. Oh, I astrally project and I can throw spells just fine, but I’m no summoner of big flame things (or small tree spirits, either.)

My other big limitation is that I’m both a computer specialist and a Mage. Nonsensical? Oh yes - I use a necklace with very fine ingredients in order to cast my spells. The silver star with a gem at each point is hellishly expensive to replace, not to mention that I need to spend an hour meditating with it to attune my spirit to it.

So that’s my nature - I’m no gunslinger, I’m a mana-bolter. Regardless, I threw Nuyen into medical kits, a few cheap motorcycles to store in a small shack in the Redmond Barrens (under very, very heavy lock and key I might add) and three, count ‘em three sub-machine guns. I even have two cars now - My usual one for work and cheap Americar that I keep around to do runs with. Go figure, it’s worked thusfar.

I felt like a nice, tough Shadowrunner. I felt like I could go break into any ‘ol corporate system and take the paydata, that I could run into a building and get out without a scratch all while wearing tight leather. I was dead wrong.


-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

That would be great as an intro to a character. But it doesn't really tell a story. If it is the first part of short story then terrific, but I would like to see the rest.

Remember, stories have a begining, middle and end. And each should be obvious and flow from one to the other. Nice style though, overall pretty good writing.

Heh it definitely is the beginning. There's more, but I want to know if I'm on the right path. Otherwise there's nada. Nada importante, anyhow. So if people want more, I got more. Not much more yet, but a little...At least not for this plot.

Then again I have like 4 short stories and 3 chapters and the like...*shrug*

Here's a little more of the story. Yeah, the first bit was wayyy too short.

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-
Pete called me up and asked me if I were interested in finally taking my first job. My bank account was starting to look very, very much like that of Australia, so I decided to take the offer up. I was asked to meet in a small bar and did so, finding myself met by two young men who seemed rather talented or, at least, used to their jobs. Two Adepts seemed like a good squad when paired with a mage.

How wrong was I?

The first one was named Stew. He’s one of those anti-social types who truly fit the word. I don’t mean “not much of a fan of socialization,” I mean “psychotic.” He’s a stealthy type who uses no weapons better than his hands or, in the event its necessary, a sniper rifle. He seemed to have some type of history with the cops, but who knows? Well, even if I did I wouldn’t tell ya, chummer!

The second called himself Bob. He’s a quiet guy, fairly nice and fairly inept when it comes to stealthy endeavors as you’ll soon find out. He is, however, an expert with a monofilament whip and is a damn good killer.

We met in the back room of this large bar, a scene I’m sure most of you are familiar with, and we were given the business proposition.

“We need this power plant taken down.” Simple enough, it sounded. Hearing it was a Shiawese plants, I first feared it was an atomic facility but we were assured it was conventional. The pay was to be twenty thousand for each of us and we were given a floor plan. It sounded great to me, hell I was all ready to go! All ways of turning it off were applicable, including a simple jaunt through the Matrix and a quick system crashing.

Then I found out that, apparently, twenty thousand isn’t much at all. Stew and Bob both walked right out and, though I couldn’t convince them, I submitted that I would handle the job myself. Our prospective hirer refused, saying it was all of us or none, and I was about done with that when he begged the three of us back in.

“Fine, I’ve got another job for you. I don’t have the details, my co-worker does, but he’ll contact you within a week if he likes your style.”

So for a week I was forced to sweat the heat bill out. Then the call came and things started to get good.

I'd originally intended to suggest that if you're looking at making it into a journal, why not open up an IC blog? While I'd still suggest that for many, just as a sheerly fun exercise, after your second post the style no longer suits: you've now turned the growing story into a narrative, a person recounting a specific event (as distinct from the writer telling it directly: both methods have their advantages and disadvantages).

The real trick, when you're filtring the story that tightly through a character's pov, is that you have to immediately get the readers, not necessarily to like the character, but to care enough about their pov to "follow" them through their story. In general, this means you either tell a bit more about the character who's telling the story right from the beginning, or you tell almost nothing about that character and try to hook the readers into becoming interested and even curious about that character. In order to get the readers hooked this way, ask yourself how the story would be different if you were writing it without it being filtred through that one character? There is potential here ... but as you're writing it now, the story is so heavily "this happened" and "that happened" that I'm not getting any real sense of character reality beyond the one-line description; and really, that sounds like something you'd write in answer to one of the Twenty Questions. This distinction is one of the key elements separating an intriguing story from cliché.

Btw -- it's okay for a narrating character like this to be completely wrong in the way s/he understands events around them, as long as the audience has learned enough about them to be able to second-guess what they're being told. (Thus a project such as the one you've undertaken also makes excellent practice for running NPCs )

Thanks Yeah, until the majority of my schoolwork this semester (Which has decided to all be due in the same two days) is out of my way, I can't really revise this. Its also something of a side project to my main one (see my deviantart in my signature) so really it is an experiment in a style.

But yeah, I could throw more description in when it comes to some places, but for the most part I follow that tradition set forth by the Oddessy (if I can spell it) and Beowulf - To let the reader imagine more than you tell, so that if you want to imagine a character looking one way you can.

Not to mention that telling someone what their teammate looks like might cause trouble in the streets