Admin Thread for WWXLV: The Fellowship of Saruman

[Nogrod]

Just a question of how to go with the things one writes. This is Gwath's latest post in the game-thread:

Halbarad didn't like orcs, for obvious reasons, but was beginning to agree with Ugluk about Bombadil's singing. What does it mean? he wondered. He seems so jolly on the outside, but I wish he'd speak plain and to the point, like an honest man and a soldier.

He chose not to say anything, as Halbarad was no complainer, but all the same he could not help but wonder if that whimsical exterior was simply an effective cover for something darker.......the apparently nonsensical rhymes and airs began to take on an eerie, dream-like, almost sinister quality in Halbarad's mind. He shook off the feeling.

Steady on, he thought. Steady on.

He called back to Elladan and Elrohir, whom he knew from previous journeys. "If you don't hurry, Bombadil's going to beat you two over the mountain!"

The first paragraph looks good indeed but then the rest looks a little confused.

If it's a question of someone's inner thoughts (or a song which is separated from the other text by empty lines and quotation marks) one should use the italics. In other cases, like what someone says openly the quotation marks should be enough to differentiate between the speech of someone's character and the overall depiction? A new line would be well though if the speech is a long one. And the overall description of someone's moods should be in plain text as well unless it's an inner monologue?

So how about this version of Gwath's latest?

Halbarad didn't like orcs, for obvious reasons, but was beginning to agree with Ugluk about Bombadil's singing. What does it mean? he wondered. He seems so jolly on the outside, but I wish he'd speak plain and to the point, like an honest man and a soldier.

He chose not to say anything, as Halbarad was no complainer, but all the same he could not help but wonder if that whimsical exterior was simply an effective cover for something darker.......the apparently nonsensical rhymes and airs began to take on an eerie, dream-like, almost sinister quality in Halbarad's mind. He shook off the feeling.

Steady on, he thought. Steady on.

He called back to Elladan and Elrohir, whom he knew from previous journeys. "If you don't hurry, Bombadil's going to beat you two over the mountain!"

Sure in the last-minute frenzy one should be forgiven not to formulate things correctly but we should have a basic and shared understanding how to point out to different things (Like inner thoughts, open speech, story-telling). Otherwise it will be very hard to follow the game if we have different practises with these.

Also if we like to hang on with calling each other with our in-game names we should probably also mark crosspostings with "X'd with Tom" and not "X'd with Nogrod"?

And even if I haven't quite followed this advice myself this far I'd suggest we keep up with the good practise of bolding the names of the people we talk about in our posts as they're so much easier to find that way later - just using the story-names and not the player's id's here in the 'Downs...

Just suggestions, but to be considered.

PS. Look at Groin's last post (#14) to see what I mean with the bolding-stuff & open speech / general depiction of a character's mood!