#true love waits (to rob you blind) chapter 12 spoilers if u haven't read that far and like. care

[altfire-archive]

how i write tun-tei's skyrim journal

i've written hundreds of thousands of words of these stupid garbage journals so i thought i'd run through the process i'm using for my current (and favorite) one: tun-tei's. i do it a lot differently than i did thadan's or any of the others i've started and abandoned, and i think i've really gotten it down to a science at this point.

for reference, i use the take notes! journal of the dragonborn mod and only play oldrim bc special edition lags on my pc

step one: play the game. i make a journal entry for every in-game day detailing what i did and what my thoughts are and occasionally what i plan on doing next (especially when i'm hopping off for the night bc i have a tendency to forget). sometimes i throw in scenes and dialogue i want to include. here's an example from chapter 12 that i'll use for the rest of this post:

at the end of the session i export my journal and copy-paste the new entries into a document, and from there i re-read what i've written and pull out the scenes i know i want to flesh out. here there's two clear scenes i'll need: talking to ulfric at the palace of kings and then the battle of whiterun itself.

starting with the first scene, i know i'm gonna want to use the in-game dialogue (as i've done in previous scenes such as the peace talks) so i go to ulfric's page on the wiki and find the exchange. i copy-paste it into my doc and add my dialogue tags and prose so it goes from this:

to this:

not the full scene but u get the idea. so after that i decide to skip ahead to the battle of whiterun, which i started in-media-res. since i was already doing a tun POV for that scene, it continued into the next one.

i also had my internal sense of the character plot here - tun and marc's relationship. i don't have any in-game dialogue or scenes to draw from so i was kind of flying blind, but i had two ideas: i wanted hadvar to flirt with tun and make marc act even more like a bitch than usual as he struggles to accept his feelings for tun. the other idea was that i wanted a repeat performance of the riften docks scene from chapter 4, which was a sort of hatefuck-to-make-marc-shut-up scene. and i wanted tun to realize that was a stupid idea and be fucked up emotionally afterward.

with all that in mind i was able to write the scene, communicating my own opinions of the fucking battle

claustrophobic and pissed marc wasn't there. i'd even recruited lydia to help but she also stayed inside the walls. i was so mad kjshdgkj

i used this uh mishap (bug?) to have tun be even more on edge, which marc exacerbated by being a bitch when they finally reunited - while hadvar flirts with tun.

from there i had hadvar leave and marc just make a total ass of himself til tun dragged him around the outside walls and... well.

and then i finished the scene on a sort of cliffhanger, marc sent back to breezehome with his tail between his legs, satisfied but confused, and hadvar comforting a heartbroken tun-tei under the stars.

i do this for all the entries i've written and then take the huge blocks of new prose (usually a week-ish worth of entries, though some are more or less depending on how many important scenes there are) and put them into a new document which i then cut into chapters as well as i can, aiming for 2.5-5k words each. the prose doc that includes chapter 12 had two weeks of entries and ended up only being about 8k words of prose, chapters 12 and 13. the next chunk was also two weeks of entries but ended up being 12k and three chapters. chapters 12 and 13 are a LOT of travelling between forts and stuff so a lot of dead air.

but yeah idk why i wrote all this :) no one's gonna read it i just like to share stuff. anyway read true love waits (to rob you blind) and have a good night

#tuntei #idk if anyone cares but here u go #:) #watch your feet #true love waits (to rob you blind) chapter 12 spoilers if u haven't read that far and like. care