Recently, I've followed one unrelated case of a badly-run-away fan fiction, and it has made me think of the fan fiction as an overarching genre in general.

It's probably way too early to think of what I think of fan fiction of Avarthrel, because a) there's no fan fiction that I know of and b) there's also no super-enthusiastic fans of my writings that I know of to write the said fan fiction in first place. And yet...

I've always intended Avarthrel to be an open world. I'm not sure it's ready for "release" yet (whatever it may mean in the context of writing stories - I'm just a tinkering programmer), and I'm awful at creating anything release-quality... but it never hurts to be prepared.

Just a random quick note: Apparently, in a fit of random weirdness, I managed to publish Conman's Dictionary source code on github. This is the dictionary application that I've used when developing the Avarthrelian brand of elvish language. I'm not sure how cool it will be, but I hope it will be useful!

Happy new year and all that.

Regrettably, my brain seems a little bit cramped these days so I'm not writing much. But I have one story under development, and it seems to work pretty well so far. I'm also pursuing yet another interactive fiction project - and it seems to be working pretty nicely too.

Anyway, to the real topic...

StorYBook seems like a rather nice piece of software. I'll just say it has one pretty damn obvious flaw: while I first used it in the holidays, the most recent version was 2.1.9, and when I got back home, it seems a new version, 2.1.10, came out - a version that incidentally forgot about all of my side characters and seems to have completely messed up the chronological view. I'm sure that's just a temporary bit of confusion and I'll eventually figure out what went wrong.

But otherwise, it seems like a really interesting approach in coming up with characters, locations, and various plot strands, both chronologically and sequentially. It seems to have little quirks still, but it will undoubtedly rule one day. I'm sure this will eventually be of great help when I finally pause and make sense of the horrible mess of notes and prose that begs to be rewritten.