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Avram Grumer has been so kind as to write a web-based PHP randomizer for the Evil Overlord Plot Generator.
Yay rah Avram! And thank you. Now everyone go read Pigs and Fishes.
Nicely Done. This is what makes the Internet great.
We all go forward together. I know of two other R&D Overlord Randomizer projects. I'll post updates.
Thank you, Avram; thank you, innumerable Evil Overlord and Murphy's Laws of Combat contributors; thank you Debra Doyle, for suggesting that Murphy's Laws of Combat make great plot twists.
I wish I'd thought to ask Avram to put in a line that says it's a randomizer for the Evil Overlord Plot Generator, with link. When we tried to add that text to the line about reloading the page to get a new set, the whole thing stopped working, and we didn't have time this morning to stop and figure out why.
Never mind that for now. I like it just fine.
It's interesting where you find story-making material. Years ago, a friend of mine had a ten-volume set of Napoleon Hill's _The Laws of Success_, and one chapter said something like, "If you would know a man, observe him when he's having success, when he's having failure, and when he thinks he's alone." There was more. It seemed like a great way of showing who a character was in fiction, and I realized I was seeing writers do that already. I should look and see if that passage made its way into the paperback version of _Think and Grow Rich_ that I have.
Basic stuff, I know. I tell ya, this was years ago!
Sure. Look at Rudy Giuliani. Who'd have guessed he'd be absolutely stellar in the midst of disaster? Too bad he reverted the minute the crisis was over.
Ulysses S. Grant's an even better example. You'd have to see him in war and in peace, with and without his family, and in situations that did and didn't involve money, in order to understand him.
This is why I'm uneasy about the idea one hears sometimes about all fiction being character-driven. Granted, you can't do without characters; but their context matters. If it weren't the Nineteenth Century and there wasn't a war on, Scarlett O'Hara would simply be irritating.
Who says she isn't? (Scarlett irritating, I mean.)
Always wearing flats when an escape seems imminent,
Shal