The silence is deafening

Jon Katz posted a blog about a lack of discussion, and he's right that we're all lazy, but what I wanted to talk about is a lack of feedback.

Crash 50, and the three legs of the EPW/NE joint show Aggression 50, Destrucity II, and Sin City Showdown got posted, Crash 50 was a production that was 6 months in the arrival, yet when I check the feedback thread, the only detailed feedback I've seen for it was from Billy (fanatical NFW'er) and Katz himself, the fed head. Aggression 50 got detailed feedback from me, Seth, Fuse, Destrucity II got an airball, and Sin City Showdown got detailed feedback from only me and Karl Brown.

Does nobody really care about this stuff? I mean I know we all like to say we're very busy and have so much going on in our very busy lives that it's hard to meet the grueling demands to do 2-3 Rp's every month or so, (Slave driving fed-heads!) but I'd expect people to read over the cards and have a general idea of what happened, and to give their point of view on what happened, it's kind of hard for me to know if what I've written has connected with the audience if the audience never responds, and I'm sure the other card writers would feel the same way.

And the other problem with feedback is that generally the people that do give feedback are in the league, and seek to get pushed/remain in the good graces of the fed-heads, so feedback is almost always positive and anything negative is mentioned in passing. The most honest feedback would be feedback from people outside the fed who don't have a dog in the race and don't care who's feelings they hurt.

So give feedback, be honest, get something going, let's talk about this hobby we're all addicts to.

Writing matches sucks

Writing matches is truly the crummiest part of this hobby, Rp's are fun because you are either telling a story with your character or you're smacktalking people and putting them in their place. Angles are fun because you're interacting with other people to tell a story and hopefully set things up for a pay off down the road. Writing matches, it's just drudgery, plain and simple, oh I do some things to try to make it entertaining to myself, like giving characters spots or finishers they didn't have before (and only if I think they are in line with the ideal of the character.) but on the whole it's tough work, and I find my style of match writing is kind of repetitive, if you did a shot for every time someone was picked up or 'hooked'...Well you would be dead of alcohol poisoning even if it was a 4 page quickie.

But the two biggest things I'd want people to know about match writing is attention to detail and to not be a slave to page count. On Crash 50, Felicia Hart was repeatedly called "Jessica" and even spoke and was labeled as such. Jessica is Shawn Hart's middle name...So that's an error. When Bloodhunt was leaving the ring, he was led away by "Miss America" a stage name that had been dropped forever ago and she was know as Emily for the tail end of Bloodhunt's NFW run and his pop ups whenever after that...So that irked me...

Page count doesn't really matter a whole hell of a lot, if you can tell a story in 20 pages for a main event that's fine, you don't need to go beyond that, hell if you think you can tell the story in 15 pages, do that. Don't think that you NEED to add more to the situation than is required. Putting to many pages on a match can make it intimidating to read, look you know the lazy scum who read cards are gonna scroll to the bottom to see who won or lost 90% of the time, then if they feel like it they'll go back and read the whole thing to find out how things got to where they were at the end. If you have a giant wall of text waiting for them, they might not be so eager to take the journey.

If a match has a finish that's not in doubt you really have no need to break your back on it. Whoever wrote the Roberts/First Cyber Title match in A1E is a sicko, 10 pages of a really solid match, that's a lot of effort for a match where one party no Rp'ed and the other party, being a total prick, stacked the guy twice...(Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with some people? Get a life.) and the biggest thing for me in the match was that Muse didn't accompany First to the ring. So I was like "No Muse?! Bah!" and then got a long, long match, and won it, but I mean, I knew I was going to win, Brunk knew he was going to lose, there was no drama, if someone felt the need to protect Roberts with a long match, then protect him with a flash pin or something, I'm not proud, I don't need to win a title via devastating clean win, I'll take it any way I can.

In closing on the whole Roberts/First thing, a 4-5 page match with Muse in First's corner would have made me way happier than a ten page Museless match.

The reverse of all this I felt with the P6B itself, I thought it was paced perfectly, written out well with all the proper details and what have you, it was very tight, in that it didn't drag, the action flowed very well, that was a excellent read of a match.

All of that being said, maybe I should have posted this blog after the voting deadline in A1E, sorry Cross and Mr. Entertainment.

I thought I wrote a good War Games match in EPW, and of course, I missed a detail somebody wanted written into the match, and well it sucks that the match let them down because that didn't happen, it's these kind of things that bug me as a writer, so I'll try to do better with that down the line, since I know how details being missed in my matches annoys me.

Just try to get a feel for the characters you're writing, read the bios and know what's up, and tell the story you feel needs to be told in that match, but don't force it, don't try to make it longer than it has to be because you feel like it won't be epic enough, there is a reason Strawsma is Strawsma and well, don't try what he does at home. Map your match out, guess about how many pages you want to make it, figure out your finish, and work towards it, as you do, fill in the details and the story of the match, get to the payoff organically, not with endless near falls and build up for the sake of build up.

Pillar to Post Episode 2

With Bloody New Year, Crash 50, Aggression 50 all posted, and Sin City Showdown likely to be posted shortly. I'll be getting my 10 questions ready for episode 2 of Pillar to Post, the Around The Horn style talk show hosted by Green Machine.

So if you want on the panel, read up on those 4 shows and be ready for the questions that shall be forthcoming.

Deadlines

I was talking to a friend who doesn't involve himself in E-Fedding. I was telling him about the general slow nature of the leagues on FWC, late cards due to people not getting matches written on time, etc, etc. And he said to me "Do these cards have deadlines?"

And that was really a sort of illuminating moment. That we don't put deadlines on card production. We have deadlines for Rp, but at some point, it become acceptable for the sake of finishing the card, to wait till every match was handed in. Short-forming is a 'necessary evil' that we never deem necessary.

Cards always have to be big, and if not big, than at the very least they have to be good. NFW was a bit late as we all know with Crash 50...I'm hopeful that Sin City Showdown gets posted this week so New Era can get off and running and EPW can get back to what's been a good turn-around on it's cards. NLW has hit a bump in the road because Billy's become active in training for an MMA match and school (as if such things could ever be more important than E-Fedding. I mean I'd only ever not bother writing matches if I was doing something important, like high end raiding in WoW.)

I posted an alternate reality fed in the blog, now for another one. Deadline Wrestling Fed. It posts that a card will be up at a certain time and it shows up at that time, even if it's just 'guy X beat guy Y at 14:21 with a power bomb'...Just gets results posted when they say they will, even if the matches aren't written out. This would give all the card writers a sense of urgency to get stuff done, because you know the fed head is dead serious that he's posting whatever he's got come deadline.

Would deadlines help? What is your acceptable level of waiting for a late card? When would you want stuff shortformed?

We're really just writers

This is a writing hobby, and in the end, we're just writers, we have a story we're trying to tell and we interact with each other as we try to tell it. What E-Fedding really is in the end, is a collaborative writing effort. Feuds are just two characters being played off each other, the storyline is the actions that happen as the matches unfold before us.

I say all of this because I recently stumbled across the GTT7 forums. Now let me say that clearly the PTC folks take GTT very seriously, and well, I'd never last 5 minutes there. They want me to source song lyrics I quote? Doc Silver's DQ'ed after my first promo, because honestly, I didn't think I was trying to sneak "Only Happy When It Rains" past anyone as being an original Mike Stanton thought. To be totally honest to me it's not E-Fedding, it's writing a series of short stories, the wrestling content varies from 'trivial' to 'non existent' in the promos, the mythos of some of the characters would make the writers of "Lost" recoil in horror. This is some pretty dense stuff.

E-Fedding to me is two guys talking smack. That's about it, you might build the characters in skits and segments, but in the end, it's about the battle between two sides, you build them up, you fight. Someone wins, someone loses, and their story arc is defined through their careers, what happens in the ring effects them outside it, and so on and so forth. These GTT promos are self contained worlds, the opponent doesn't exist, the wrestling is at absolute best, an afterthought.

Now just cause I don't care for this stuff in respect to E-Fedding, I did like the stories, I liked the writing and respect the people that would take that much time to craft those stories and those ideas. I thought everything I read was well written and for the genres that they were going for, I thought they did a good job.

The guy who writes "Violence Jack" posted a note about how he felt that his third place finish proved to him that he wasn't ready to be published, and take a shot at making a career out of being a creative writer. To which I have to say to him, seriously dude, do you think Stephenie Meyer or Dan Brown could win GTT? Are you kidding me? Hacks far less talented than the people who busted their asses to make that finals have had major, major success as authors, I mean honestly, you're basing your writing skills on a Varga judged contest?! The day I let the mind that belched forth Biff Busey and his Saved By The Bell minions upon NFW have any power over me is the day I quit breathing.

My dream in life would be to get all the GTT people to join some forum I started up that had some random, 20,000 word long 'terms of agreement' that everyone just skims through and clicks 'accept' on, so that in doing so, all the stuff they wrote was legally mine, so I could publish 5 or 6 books and be hailed as a author with 'boundless imagination for new stories' who 'speaks with many different voices in each of his works' because seriously, ya'll are talented, and you need to do something with that talent, something more then slaving away hoping against hope you end up with a higher score than the other maniac who's just as devoted to his story as you are to yours.

Seriously, try to get this stuff published, try to get your names out there, do not spend however many countless hours it was you spent writing these things only to at the end have 4 guys judge you wanting or worthy.