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Trope Me Definitely

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So, uh, despite what I said the other day, I went ahead and set a TV Tropes page up for the Eldraeverse.

Y’see, what I figure is that the hardest part in creating such a thing is actually creating the page. That’s a fair bit of work, so it has a high bar to getting started. Actually putting tropes on it once it exists, now that’s much easier. So by doing the initial setup and giving it a decent set of starting tropes, I can catalyze things.

I still don’t intend to trope everything myself, though, or even anything close to it. That way lies madness and site abuse.

But if it’s made it easier for y’all in the fan community to collect these things, jolly good.

Trope Me Maybe?

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A commenter over on Google+ suggests that the issues mentioned in my last post could also be satisfied by an Eldraeverse TV Tropes page.

And, well, I certainly can’t argue against that. But while technically creators are allowed to trope their own works, I’m not terribly comfortable with doing that, myself. I am, after all, a great sea of pro-me bias… and also, in all probability, unduly influenced by my trope-a-day series, which while it uses TV Tropes as a worldbuilding tool, does not on the whole do so in TV Tropes compatible format.

Or, to put it another way, I can’t help but think such a page should be for the tropes y’all find in my works, not for the tropes I try to design in.

But, hey, consider this an open invitation for any tropers among my readers to set to and create such a thing! I have faith that such an effort would be appreciated greatly by both me and the general community.

Future Directions

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I recently received an e-mail from a reader making the very good point that this ‘verse is getting somewhat impenetrable for the newcomer – at least, without going on an absolutely huge archive binge. (And, let’s face it, so long as I’m primarily sticking here to the nanofic format, it’s not really all that compatible with filling in all the useful background that one might want to have for each piece in, well, a fairly small piece.)

A suggestion for dealing with that was an “Eldraewiki”, as it were, with the background information that readers may need.

Now, I’m not opposed to such a thing in principle, but, well, background-information-wise, I have something like a 10,000 page internal reference wiki here, but it’s not what you might call suitable for publication, being absolutely chock-full of spoilers, things that would be spoilers if I knew what I was going to do with them in the future yet, semi-canonical information, etc., etc., and other things that would be, well, problematic. And, frankly, while it might be possible to sort through it to devise an appropriate subset to release, it’s a huge enough job that I wouldn’t have any writing time for the foreseeable future.

And the fiction has to come first, and all that.

But enough of what I can’t do. Let’s talk about what I can do.

First, I can create a Wikia wiki for the Eldraeverse, sure enough, but while I’ll certainly post stuff there from time to time, if I do set one up, most of the actual work of filling it out is going to be left up to you, the readers, much like the Wikias for pretty much every other book/series/game/movie out there. A fan wikia, if you will.

Second, I have no objection to answering questions on background – the only problem, of course, being that I can’t answer an unlimited number of questions on background. What I’m thinking of here is essentially adding to the other things my Patreon subscribers (a writer having to eat, after all) get the right and privilege of asking those questions, say one per $ per month, whose answers are posted monthly and collected on a FAQ page on this blog. (So even if you can’t patronize me, you still get to read the answers; you just don’t get to steer the questioning. 🙂 )

At the moment, of course, this is all speculative, but I thought I’d throw these notions out there to try and gauge interest and see if there are any other ideas out there that I should maybe be considering. If you have any, or would be interested in either of the above, please leave me a comment or fill in my contact form, and let me know.