Explaining Jim T ?
- Thread starter Narmlet
- Start date
Yeah, he left to pursue non-smut work. People really love his stuff usually, which is why it sucks that expansions on his stuff tend to fail miserably.
Well I guess that explains it then. Though I genuinely thought that its because of Bess/Ben coding.
Eh, its more that yes, people love JimT's work, but he also had a reputation for creating somewhat...complicated characters, such as BessN and Embry. Which is partly what has lead to the idea of the JimT curse, because people have tried adding to characters that were already something of a Gordian Knot.
The JimT phenomenon; a lot of his writing is present on the early worlds because that's when he was around, early in development.
New writer encounters the writing -> goes hey, these characters are cool. It'd be great if they were expanded upon.
New writer finds out JimT is gone and not coming back -> I'll just do it myself!
New writer finds out the hard way that writing is really hard, writing for someone else's characters and trying to live up to the crowd's expectations is even harder, and burns out and fades away.
Old writers go around moaning about how they wish people would stop trying to write JimT's stuff because it just kills potential authors before they even have a chance to grow thanks to the peanut gallery slathering expectations on every prospective author who takes a stab at it
Just write your own stuff goddamnit, Embry's cute but not worth dying for
New writer encounters the writing -> goes hey, these characters are cool. It'd be great if they were expanded upon.
New writer finds out JimT is gone and not coming back -> I'll just do it myself!
New writer finds out the hard way that writing is really hard, writing for someone else's characters and trying to live up to the crowd's expectations is even harder, and burns out and fades away.
Old writers go around moaning about how they wish people would stop trying to write JimT's stuff because it just kills potential authors before they even have a chance to grow thanks to the peanut gallery slathering expectations on every prospective author who takes a stab at it
Just write your own stuff goddamnit, Embry's cute but not worth dying for
It's mostly been answered but essentially people have a lot of trouble mimicking his particular voice when attempting to expand on his content and get burned out in general, leading to them leaving the community if it gets bad enough. It's not his fault.
That being said, a LOT of writers that do want to and attempt to write expacs for Jim's characters tend to want to write expacs that are even more ambitious than the original works of his, which usually leads to said burnouts. I like to think that this could be avoided by not strictly following what JimT did himself, but go off of the base idea and make a small little extension out of it.
For example, an idea I had floating around in my head (and that I've been throwing out for a while now) was for Embry, I'd like to make an expac with her that explores her amateur novel writing hobby. Steele could temporarily have her be a crew member to take her on mini-dates based on the planet they're on (Cept Zheng-Shi... she's too innocent for that!) and get some ideas for her novel through those. By the end of things, you can get a new story added to your codex written by her. Of course, some additional sex scenes could be added along the way of this as well!
I would still like to attempt this sometime if I could get my butt in gear to start writing! >.< (Heck, I'd even do this as a commission if someone really wanted to motivate me after I finish up the last of the Kiona stuff.)