Dev Blog | Elyssia says hello!

BlackLotusDragon

Our first introduction to new Lore writer, Elyssia!

Hello everyone! I'm excited to get to share with you a little bit about what it is that I am doing to help bring life to TerVarus and Trials of Ascension. As most of you know, I was brought onto the team mid-October as a Lore Writer. But I'm willing to bet that some of you are curious as to what that involves and maybe would also like to know a little about my background.

Ondria, Varl, and I work closely together, sometimes collaboratively and other times just editing/proofreading one another's work. We meet once a week as a sub-team to share ideas and report in our progress. As the newest person on the team I feel this pressure to do as much as I can to help, especially when I get to see first hand how hard everyone works! While most of my contributions to the team are limited to writing about the information already available on the website, I do get to suggest ideas for lore and the world to the team. It's really exciting to share an idea and hear "Yeah that's a good one, go write about it and we'll review it."

Creative writing was always my favorite part of the English classes I took in high school and college, and for me it naturally went hand-in-hand with the obscene amount of reading I enjoy. I was even published twice; first in 1997 for a school publication and in 1999 through a national student publication. I remember an instance once in my early teens where I finished a book and hated the ending so much that I wrote my own version to it. Then in high school I fell in with the table-top gaming crowd, joined a club, and discovered that "RPG" meant so much more than Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire. Finally online gaming created the perfect storm for me and I dove head first into fan-fiction for my favorites.

My insurance against writer's block is to create a summary outline before I begin a story. In this way I always know what's going to happen next so I don't get hung up. I can always go back and add more detail to a weak scene, or remove it all together, after the story is told. I do find that I sometimes have trouble finishing a story. I get so into the characters that I want to keep following their adventure. But a line has to be drawn, and we can always go back to the character and pick the story back up later.

My greatest challenge has been keeping what I learn about design and development to myself. The community here is so fantastic and I got to know most of you as fellow fans, so I naturally want to share everything with you! But team FC trusts me to keep my yap shut and I must honor that trust. Besides, I couldn't steal the fun of sharing from Brax! That's the only fun he gets.