[CONTEST OVER] JNC Original Light Novel Contest
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@jazzyjeoff good luck!
I don't think I have enough time to finish my story by the deadline this time. Hopefully I'll have it finished by the next time they do the contest 😉
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Aaah! Wow, I just discovered this forum! I was searching around on the web for any news other than the official site on this contest but couldn't find any except for Justus R Stone's vid. I'm at about 91k words but have had my story done for over a year. The announcement for this contest literally came out the day before my birthday as I was wondering what to do with this story. I have been editing and rewriting endlessly for the last 6 months and i'm almost done. I think I have found all of the plot holes but I'm running out of time for grammar and revision! I'm giving it all that I've got now that exams are over but I don't think I'm going to have enough time for someone else to read through it. However I think that I do have a good text to speech app! Wishing everyone good luck as I pull multiple all nighters to try and get everything wrapped up! The title of my work is called Soul Shifters I'd like to think of it as a YA fantasy/ shonen but with a poc female protag.
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Non-serious question: Can our stories be disqualified for being to sad? I'm struggling to edit through the tears.
I wanted to write a comedy... Why did it end up like this... 😭
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@Parity comedy & tragedy are two sides of the same coin
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With the holiday, I finished
murderingediting out like half the characters. There are now officially, no more bad guys. And the ending is that much sadder for it.I discarded over 20k words, and wrote an extra 5-10k to round things out. This is my first longer story, but I think the ruthless editing really helped. I'm happy where the story is now. Well- I'm as happy as I can be when I'm tearing up at the ending. If half my own attachment to the characters is communicated, this should be a half-decent story.
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Doing some of my own writing made me realize why there are so many isekai stories that only barely make use of the protagonist's otherworldly origins. Even if it's not necessary to the plot, it makes it a lot easier to justify explaining how the new world differs from our own. Like, if everyone rapidly regenerates from injury using an unconscious form of magic like hitpoints from an RPG, an isekai character could point that out to the reader easily as they explore the magic system themselves. A native from the world is less likely to comment on it since it's just a natural part of life for them.
So be it. That world wasn't an isekai 25 years ago, and I'm not going to make it one now.
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@LeavesCat There's always the "token disabled background character used only as an excuse for exposition" gambit.
I waved to Jerry. As always, he was dressed like he was still at work. He worked in construction, despite his disability, and not only wore a hard hat even while not working, but these hand-crafted boots with toes reinforced with metal. Unlike normal people like me, poor Jerry was born unable to regenerate. People like him could heal from little cuts and bruises, but it took forever, and they couldn't even grow back something as trivial as a finger or toe. We all tried to be considerate of him, but it seemed like every week we had a new story to tell of how someone nearly maimed him.
My talking sword has a point. And is also right.
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@Gamen I figure I can work most of it into fights as long as I keep my own rules consistent. The bigger problem is explaining the fact that the planet has a radius of galactic scale. Effects of this include:
- The sun is a magical phenomenon that circles the country, rather than orbiting the planet. It brightens and dims to create day/night, and seasons are based on how physically far away the sun is (their version of the seasonless equator is the center of the sun's orbit). To an isekai person this would be super weird, but to them it's just the sun.
- The horizon at eye level is over 10 million miles away. Effectively, the only limits on the distance of your vision are physical obstructions (trees, hills), and how good your eyes are. The planet is not flat, but functionally it may as well be.
- The very fact that the planet is not an enormous black hole implies some magical fuckery. Since their own planet laughs in the face of the laws of physics, local understanding of gravity is heavily colored by magic.
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@LeavesCat said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
The horizon at eye level is over 10 million miles away
Dear lord... What in gods name... That's over a hundred times the size of Jupiter... Over ten times the size of our sun... And that's just the horizon..? My brain hurts just thinking about this... Next you'll say it's actually a Matrioshka World, and that would be the real mind breaker cherry to top it off.
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@Parity said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
Next you'll say it's actually a Matrioshka World
That is actually one of the potential explanations behind the gravity situation that I considered. If the surface is a (relatively) thin shell while the interior is hollow, surface gravity could be reasonably normal. That's not the route I'm planning to go, but still. There could easily be caves the size of planets.
Effectively this is a consequence of kid me thinking "wouldn't it be cool if the planet is cosmically gigantic? You'd need FTL spaceships to cross the ocean! After all, with a normal planet, high-level RPG protagonists should be able to move at such high speeds that a normal planet would run out of space real quick (see Goku, who I didn't know about at the time)." Originally I intended to have multiple suns orbiting the planet (which is technically still true, but they're far enough away to appear as stars), but I realized that there was no way to get a consistent day/night cycle that way. Instead, various regions will have their own style of light source... or be permanently dark. Not that any story arc I have planned will travel too far away from the sun's influence.
Anyway, the thoughts from back then collided with "why are unwanted harems so goddamn popular? I'm a much bigger fan of the power couple trope. Fuck it, I'll do it myself!"
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FINALLY I have the ball rolling again, and that's even after my PC kept having to have Windows reinstalled so I got a new one in the end. I eventually figured out how to get through the parts of the story I was stuck at and this anime season doesn't seem to have much I'm interested in so that will help too.
I'm averaging around 750 words a day now so I should be able to hit 70,000 or so by the final submission date. Will that be enough to finish off the story properly? I hope so!
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@LeavesCat
Well, people will talk endlessly about anything when they are complaining:"Oh, move to the Sunlit Kingdom!" they said. "It is warm and bright all the time, unlike life here on Dark Island!" they said. "You will never have to spend a single coin on firewood!" Now I have no firewood, the weather is cold because of some nonsense called "winter" and the stupid sun only shines for half of the time! I've been f*&%#g scammed!
"Some stupid merchant built a six-story shop a million miles west from here and now I can't see the beach on my telescope!"
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@LeavesCat Geez, that's reminding me of the Little Garden in Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai kara Kurusou Desu yo. However even it is only the size of a star.
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@kingpendragon Well, due to actual plot-related reasons, there's only the one country (that anyone knows about. The planet is inconceivably massive, so there's other countries, they're just a few hundred lightyears away). The plot would be contained within a ~10,000 mile wide area. The main effects the planetary scale has on the story is line of sight (get on a big mountain and you can see the whole country with enough magic), as well as providing limitless wilderness for anyone that might have reason to hide. If you're strong enough to survive, that is.
But, far enough into the future, those statements could very well happen.
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I’ve tried doing abnormal astronomy a few times, but I’ve never had much success. The big one is that if you have the length of a year being different from an Earth year, many readers will forget or outright ignore it, however often you remind them. I had one world with longer years, and the number of complaints it generated about people acting too mature/having inappropriate relationships/etc was silly. I’ve sworn never to do that again.
In another story, I tried to sidestep that problem by doing away with years entirely, but that just resulted in me forgetting instead. >.> The number of times I caught myself writing dialogue for in-world characters that mentioned years was silly.
A galactic sized planet has the advantage that it’s so alien that you kinda have to remember it, because the effects pervade everything. That’s exactly what I’d recommend; if you’re going to modify astronomy, don’t just make small tweaks. Do something ridiculous. Or just have a better memory for your own world building than I do. That would work too. :)
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@cathfach Units are a thing I've thought about. In the end, I decided to just use Earth units for things so that I don't have to be concerned about people (including me) forgetting what time of day 5 PM is. The sun's weird enough as it is since I can't say it's rising or setting. And if a guy runs through a 100 mile forest in 3 hours, I want the reader to know he's going at a superhuman speed. With absolutely no common frame of reference between our worlds (another thing branding as an isekai can do), fantasy units would be impossible to parse.
I figure it's easiest to change nothing and say the story was localized for our convenience.
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@Parity I am sort of in the same boat. I adore “Tearmoon Empire” because it manages to portray tragic events convincingly, while still being a comedic and uplifting story—and I think I’ve been able to somewhat successfully emulate that in my “Tearmoon” fanfics—but the tone of my current story is much darker and I am afraid that I might lose my audience before I get to the warmer parts (and while there is some humor in the story, it is scarce, and often dark)
On the plus side, I think I should have something to submit—even if it is at a very svelte 40K words (almost). It doesn’t help that my supposed proofreader flaked out on me, so I hope that what I submit is readable.
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Finally found someone to proofread my story—they’ve already started!
I am way more excited than I should be. I don’t even think I will ask what they think of the story—I am afraid of the answer. But it just makes me so happy that I get some sort of a response from someone that has actually read what I wrote—even if that response is just a grammar corrections.
It is so pathetic, I know—but a happy sort of pathetic!edit: just noticed I had at least one grammar error in my sentence about grammar corrections—I think I will let that one stay.
So, she found a ton of errors—no surprise—but she said that she liked the story—maybe she was just being nice —but I’ll take it! -
I've written 6,000 words in the past 7 days so I'm pretty pleased with that, but it's not taken me that much closer to completion. Because I write from the outside in, and then I opened up a sort of "second front" by writing another unconnected section when I was trying to get unstuck a while back, I now have two gaps to fill. One of them will be fine, but the other one is kind of the crux of the whole thing and I can't see it being anything other than really boring because it's about a guy trying to work stuff out from books. Anyway, having got this far I shall soldier on.
@jazzyjeoff I have 2 people reading drafts of my story, but all they ever say is that they like it. I know it can't really be that good so I need them to tell me what's wrong with it in time for me to fix it!
After reading something captivating, book lovers simply need to talk about it with someone.
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@Angelus said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
the other one is kind of the crux of the whole thing and I can't see it being anything other than really boring because it's about a guy trying to work stuff out from books.
Oh I love those kind of stories. Regis pulling the correct answer from books and while Mia pulls well, a (wrong) answer from the book, are fascinating to read.
It's even weirder when the book itself is wrong, but it all works out anyways.
