• AAR of the Year 2015 Interview: Caillagh, A Long Way from Home




    AAR of the Year 2015 Interview:
    Shankbot de Bodemloze and Alwyn ask Caillagh about A Long Way From Home



    You mentioned this was your first interview on TWC, Caillagh, so you will have to forgive me for asking one of the most predictable opening questions, but could you tell us a bit about your TWC-self? How did you find the site and what made you sign up?

    Actually, I think it's my first interview anywhere. So I'm probably going to get the etiquette completely wrong, drop virtual biscuit crumbs all over the virtual carpet, that sort of thing. Apologies in advance.

    But on to your questions...

    How did I find the site? Well, I have several TW-playing friends, and one of them recommended it to me as a good place for information. Good mods, hints on useful tactics, all that sort of thing. (I'm a rubbish TW player. I enjoy playing, but I'm pretty hopeless. So I need all the help I can get.) And as if all that wasn’t enough, my friend recommended the Writers' Study as a place with some good reading-matter in it.

    When I eventually found the Writers' Study, I discovered my friend had been right. And when you find a good ongoing AAR or creative writing piece (and I did), you want to know what will happen next, so then I had to keep coming back to TWC to read the updates.

    Posting on TWC took me quite a long time, but in the end, the desire to tell people I liked their stories defeated my fear of embarrassing myself in public, and then I was gradually but inevitably sucked in to the way of life that is not just TWC, but the TWC Writers' Study…

    Well I'm honoured to be the first person to interview you, and I'm sure signing up to post in AARs and the Study in particular is similar to many people who come to the Study. Looking back now, to your pre-registered self, what would you say to encourage him, and other anonymous readers that I'm sure make up the bulk of a writer's audience, to take that step to creating an account?

    That's tricky, because I think different people are bound to be looking for different things from TWC (and even from the Study). I think, also, that for a lot of people (me, for instance), there's quite a big gap between registering and actually posting anything. Registering is quick, easy, and free. It allows you to download mods, and means you can see all the pictures people post – even the ones hidden behind teeny tiny thumbnails.

    So as far as registering goes, I'd say “Go for it! What are you waiting for? You have absolutely nothing to lose, and there's lots of good stuff here!”

    Encouraging people to post, though, is a bit different. There are far too many interesting and useful TWC forums for me to talk about all of them, so I'm going to stick to talking about my experience of the Writers' Study. The other forums of TWC are all worth posting on, too, but the Study is the place I know best.

    I would absolutely, whole-heartedly recommend posting in the Study. What I get from actually posting – rather than just reading – comes in two categories, really.

    First, there are benefits from posting as a reader of other people's work. When I first posted, as I said, it was because I wanted to tell people I liked their writing. I expected I'd just post something like “I like this!” in a few places and nothing else would happen. To my surprise, a lot of authors responded – and they were all pleased I'd posted. It turned out to be a virtuous circle kind of thing. My posts helped encourage them to carry on posting what they'd written; their posts helped encourage me to carry on posting, and gave me more to read.

    Secondly, there are benefits from posting as an author (or prospective author). When I began to think about writing an AAR of my own, I didn't really know what I was doing (I’m not sure I do now!), so I started a thread in the Writers' Lounge asking for advice – and got lots and lots of helpful suggestions and encouragement. That helped a lot with actually beginning my AAR – knowing that there are people who are happy to provide constructive advice and encouragement was great. And, of course, posting what you've written is a good way to try things out. If your first story, or your first AAR, doesn't work out the way you wanted, you can just stop writing it – and start a new one.

    Now that I am writing an AAR, I can also say that I'm one of those authors who really values other people's comments. I don't write my AAR just to get comments – an AAR is quite a time-consuming thing to do, and I wouldn't do it if I wasn't having fun writing – but knowing somebody liked a bit of your writing is fantastic. Everybody likes being appreciated, right? And even knowing somebody wasn't so keen on something you wrote is interesting and useful. (And yes, occasionally, people's comments give me ideas for future bits of plot.)

    So maybe I'd say: if you're a reader, please post! It's hard to keep going as a writer if you think nobody's even bothering to read the things you post. We writers benefit enormously from readers' posts – you are very valuable people. If you're a writer, also please post! I can always use new things to read. And go and post on other people's work, too. It encourages them to keep writing, which is great for everybody. (It might also encourage them to post on your own work, which is great for you, too!)

    Thank you for your advice, I hope people take it on board and get signing up. You mentioned above that, amongst other things, reading a selection of AARs and Creative Writing pieces kept drawing you back to TWC before you had registered. Do you remember any AARs or Creative Writing pieces in particular from that time? Then, moving back into the present, what does your current reading list on TWC look like? Also, have you found what you enjoy reading has changed at all since when you registered?

    Older stuff first, then. I'm sure we don't have space to mention all of the things I enjoyed reading (or even all the ones I’ve found and can link to). So this is just a few of the things I remember reading, either before I'd registered, or after I'd registered but before I'd posted much. I've pruned the list ferociously, so if your favourites (or things you’ve written) are missing, it’s probably not because I didn’t like them…

    The Attila AARs sub-forum was yet to be born when I found TWC, so let's start with:

    Rome II AARs:
    Reunification: A Marcomanni AAR by hooahguy14
    This is a good story, with nice humorous touches and some wonderful pictures.

    Empire AARs:
    The White Horse by Scottish King
    This is a story where you can really see war having an effect on the main characters, which I think is brilliant.

    Medieval II AARs:
    Reichsadler: A Holy Roman Empire AAR by Massive_attack
    Great characters, good dialogue, and lots of excitement.

    Eras AARs:
    Haradrim FATW ---The Black Serpent--- by Solid Snake
    Epic high fantasy in AAR form.

    Creative Writing:
    From Brighter Skies to Darker Depths by Tamiara
    An intriguing setting and plot – it was one of those stories where I really wanted to know what would happen next.
    The Road to God is Paved with Sins by McScottish
    Great characterisation and plenty of drama.

    My more recent reading list has expanded hugely, because since I became a staff member, I feel I should try to read as much as I can of the writing that people post in the Writers' Study. I don't manage to read everything, of course. But I try to look at least once at most things.

    I don’t think my preferences have changed very much since I first registered. The things I find I enjoy most are generally things where I feel the characters are convincing. There are exceptions to this – some of the best AARs are almost entirely about the broader sweep of history and deal very little with individual characters – but on the whole I find it easier to engage with a story if I can see how it is affecting the people in the world it's about. In Creative Writing, an interesting world for things to happen in is also a bonus. That could be the real world, or a completely imagined world in a whole new universe, or anywhere in between, but learning about the world and how it works is often fun. That might be less necessary in an AAR, depending on what kind of AAR you're writing, but having background added to the story of an AAR is another thing I enjoy.

    Something I notice authors occasionally worry about is whether or not they've managed to squeeze a battle (or at least something they think is dramatic and exciting) into every chapter. Personally, I think it makes for a much better story if there are chapters where nothing 'exciting' happens at all. It gives the writer time to develop characters and the world, and to explain what's going on and why. In fact, I think changes of pace and tone add to the story in themselves – if the drama is relentless, it soon becomes just ordinary and loses its effectiveness. So I like stories where there are changes of pace, and where (at least some of the time) I know enough about what's going on to know why I should care about it.

    Finally, I think if the writer's having fun, that usually shows – and it adds enormously to any piece of writing.

    That answer brings us nicely on to our next topic, your own award-winning AAR. We'll take a look at it in more detail soon, but could you give us a general overview of the story for those people who might not be following it?

    At the risk of sounding a bit self-satisfied, I'm going to start my answer by quoting part of the OP of A Long Way From Home:
    This is a Skyrim AAR that doesn't start in Skyrim. This is a Skyrim AAR that doesn't even start in the same world as Skyrim. This is the story of a man who doesn't know where he is, doesn't know why he's there, and hasn't the first idea what to do about it. And then the dragons arrive...
    That's the short version. The longer version (which will contain some spoilers, so if you want to read ALWFH for yourself and discover this as you go along, LOOK AWAY NOW…) is:

    Yannick Morgan is from our world, the real world. One ordinary day, he walks into the university library – and the next thing he remembers is waking up on a hillside with a lion asking him how he is. He still has no idea how he got there, he has (irregular but recurring) blackouts, his mobile phone has no signal, and there are bandits, wolves, soldiers, lizard-people, lion-people, elves and orcs all over the place. And somehow he can use a sword. Which is bizarre, to say the least. Unsurprisingly, he isn't sure whether he's really seeing all this stuff, or whether he's hallucinating.

    Then he falls off a cliff and gets arrested. He doesn't know what he's supposed to have done (he was in the middle of a blackout when he was arrested), and because of the blackouts, even if he knew, he couldn't be sure whether or not he did it. Things are looking bad. Particularly when it turns out the soldiers who arrested him are planning to behead him – until a dragon turns up at the last minute and attacks everyone, giving Yannick the chance to escape. So now he's essentially on the run. Fortunately, in Skyrim, photography hasn't been invented yet, so there's a good chance the people he meets won't be able to identify him as “that chap who escaped being beheaded when the dragon attacked”. Also, Skyrim's in the middle of a civil war, so the two sides have other things occupying them, and those things are frequently more urgent than catching one escaped (possible) criminal.

    On the more positive side, the lion-person (or 'Khajiit') who met Yannick befriended him. When Yannick told the lion-person (whose name is Ma'Jhan) the truth about his arrival on the hillside, Ma'Jhan gave him some good advice. He suggested finding some wizards, because wizards would probably know how to get Yannick back home. That’s still Yannick’s plan, but now he’s in a different province – Skyrim – and the nearest wizards are in the College of magic way up in the inhospitable north-east of Skyrim, in Winterhold. And, of course, the world is full of lizard-people, lion-people, elves and orcs (weird for Yannick, but pretty cool, on the whole).

    On the third side of this strange triangular scale I'm just inventing, things are more mixed: people seem to think Yannick is what's known as 'Dragonborn'. This gives him the gift of the Voice, which means he can speak the language of the dragons without needing to learn how to do that (although he needs to learn each word before he can speak it). The act of speaking a word in draconic causes something to happen, if you can use the Voice. If, for instance, you say the word 'Yol' (which means 'fire'), gouts of flame will spew from your mouth and fry whoever you're talking to, just like a dragon's breath. Naturally, when other people find out about that, they're going to have their own plans for Yannick – and those plans probably don't involve Yannick getting home any time soon.

    For those who you who want to read this awesome story please follow this link and get out the popcorn. You said the writer having fun adds enormously to a story, so I guess I have to ask, do you have fun writing your AAR? Does it ever become a chore or something you put off?

    Yes, and yes.

    That's not much of an answer, though, so let me see if I can expand that a bit…

    I have a huge amount of fun writing about Yannick and his bizarre adventures. This is the hard part of the question for me to answer, because that's just how it is – I enjoy writing, and I'm having fun (so far) with this story.

    On the other hand, it does take a lot of work. I generally end up replaying sections of the game at least two or three times to try and get usable screenshots of the things I think I'd like pictures of. And then I end up with lots and lots of screenshots, most of which I don't use at all. Then there's the writing. And the re-writing. And the checking of spelling, and grammar, and punctuation. (And after all that, I still make mistakes…)

    Since I'm both phenomenally lazy and very easily distracted (and also, to be fair, there are other things in life I have to do that take up chunks of my time), yes, sometimes I can't be bothered with all the work of writing Yannick. But (so far) I've always come back to it and carried on, because overall, the fun outweighs the difficulty and annoyance.

    Well, and because I made a decision that I would always be several chapters ahead of what's posted. So I have a rule that I'm not allowed to post a chapter until I've written a new one. Seeing the chapters I've already written languishing on my hard drive, with nobody to read them, seems to work as a spur to make me try to write the next chapter. And once I've got started on a chapter, it's much easier to keep going. Getting round to writing is no fun, but writing (once I'm actually writing) is great!

    I think it is safe to say the work has paid off, your AAR has been a huge success. Most recently you won the Writers' Study AAR of the Year award for 2015, how do you feel about that?

    Gobsmacked.

    To go back in time a bit, for me the whole thing happened in two stages. The first was when I discovered A Long Way From Home had been nominated for AAR of the Year. That was a shock. I mean, I'm a relatively new member of the TWC community, and ALWFH is my first AAR. I thought some kind-hearted soul might nominate me for Best Newcomer, if I was lucky. But there are so many other great AARs currently running on TWC. So when I was nominated, I was pleased, very, very flattered, and most of all, you could have knocked me down with a feather.

    Then there was the result. I'm really not sure there are words big enough, or complicated enough to describe how that felt. The other nominees in the category were all, every single one of them, brilliant pieces of writing. If ALWFH had won, then none of those other AARs had won. And that felt profoundly wrong. How could it be possible that none of those fantastic AARs had won? But... ALWFH winning couldn't help but feel good. So I was hit from one side by excitement, and bludgeoned from the other by bewilderment. At that point, not only could you have knocked me down with a feather, I felt as if I already had been knocked down – by a wrecking ball.

    I've now had a bit longer to get used to the idea, and that brings us back to where we started. I'm absolutely thrilled to have won, and I'm still totally gobsmacked. It's a great honour just to have been nominated; winning is something I could never have imagined.

    I'm starting to sound like an over-emotional Oscar-winner, so I should definitely stop there. I would very strongly encourage anyone who hasn't read the other entries to go and do that, though – they're well worth the effort. And I'm still surprised they didn't win!

    As you say at the start, the story does not begin in Skyrim. You could have started your AAR in Helgen or after Helgen, but instead you chose to start the story before that. I enjoyed the section where Yannick is in and around Bruma. What attracted you to include the Bruma section in your story?

    Erm… I like Bruma?

    OK, that happens to be true, but there was more to it than that. I like the mystery of the beginning of Skyrim, where your character is arrested but not told much about why. In the game, of course, that’s to allow you to invent your own reason for your arrest so that it fits with the character you want to play. But I thought it would be interesting – and, I hope, entertaining – to have a character who really doesn’t have a clue why he was arrested.

    I also wanted a character who was from our world, not the world of the game, though. He was already going to be bewildered by the world itself. And if Yannick popped into Skyrim right in the middle of the execution of (as the Empire sees it) a rebel leader, and instantly had to cope with dragons on top of that, I thought it would probably be too much for him to cope with – and, not entirely coincidentally, too much for me to explain all at once. I couldn’t see a way of avoiding some kind of large ‘infodump’ when Yannick got to Riverwood, and I wanted to write a more interesting story than that.

    So if I was going to have a bewildered main character from our world, and subject him to an arrest that would add to his bewilderment, he had to materialise in or near Skyrim at some point before that arrest, so that he could learn a bit about the world he was in before he was arrested.

    Your readers seem to like Ma'Jhan. I agree that he is a very likeable character, what makes him so popular with your readers?

    Well, you’d have to ask them that!

    I can tell you why I like him, though. I like Ma’Jhan because, when someone magically appears in front of him and falls over, he doesn’t scream and run away (which I’d probably do), he doesn’t assume he’s being attacked and pull out a weapon, he doesn’t take advantage of the person’s unconsciousness to steal all their belongings. No, Ma’Jhan’s first instinct is to check if the stranger is all right.

    Ma’Jhan is cool-headed, fairly sensible (for the world he lives in), extremely modest, and, above all, very much a team player. His natural approach to the world is to think about other people ahead of himself.

    I like the way that Yannick has a long-term goal (getting home) and short-term goals (such as fetching something for Farengar, or learning magic so that he can enter the College at Winterhold). This reminds me of TV series which have a long-term story arc as well as an individual story in each episode. Obviously, the game is based around a character who is fighting dragons and saving Skyrim - while Yannick simply wants to get home. Is there tension between the implicit goals of the game and Yannick's aims - does that make the story easier or harder to tell?

    Skyrim’s a pretty open world, so it’s relatively easy to ignore all the major quest-lines of the game if you want to. I’ve chosen not to ignore all of them, because I think the tension between Yannick’s desire to get home and other people’s plans for Yannick (Balgruuf’s obvious hope that Yannick will be part of Whiterun’s defences, for instance) improves the story. If Yannick never had to choose between his plans and other people’s, and was never delayed or diverted by having to do things for people before they’ll do things for him, I suspect the readers of ALWFH would be very bored. I know I would!

    It might be worth saying that so far, Yannick hasn’t realised the world he's arrived in might be doomed unless he helps defeat the dragons. When he does realise that, he’ll have a real dilemma to deal with.

    Your story uses a first-person perspective, the AAR is Yannick's journal. Of course, that means that we see Skyrim only through Yannick's eyes and ears. You use him as an 'unreliable narrator' at times, for example when he writes that he thinks that the area south of Skyrim is called 'Cyril'! How do you feel about telling the story using this perspective? There are some things which it prevents you from doing - the reader's view cannot suddenly switch to another location, where (for example) a group of bandits might be planning to ambush Yannick - maybe the first-person perspective constrains your writing in some ways, while creating interesting possibilities?

    Oh, Yannick’s highly unreliable. He’s not even sure the world he’s in is real. But anyone writing a journal leaves things out, and tells you just their own view of the world, so you can’t really avoid that unreliability if you use a journal format.

    You’re absolutely right, of course, to say that the first-person perspective imposes some pretty strict limitations. I can’t tell you anything Yannick doesn’t know. That does sometimes make it difficult to generate tension – as you say, I can’t build up that tension by showing Yannick blithely strolling along, humming his favourite tune, and then cutting to the bandits, hiding behind some rocks and sniggering about the easy money they’re about to make from robbing the singing idiot. I can’t tell you what Ma’Jhan, or Ralof, or Balgruuf, or Lydia, really thinks of Yannick. I can’t tell you whether Yannick is hallucinating at any given moment – or how much of what he’s seeing (if any) is a hallucination.

    And all of that, as far as I’m concerned, is wonderful.

    Admittedly, sometimes it’s a pain in the neck, when I’d like to be able to tell the story of something Yannick hasn’t witnessed or heard about. But mostly it pushes me to find creative ways of doing things. If I can’t build tension by showing you the bandits, I can show you Yannick’s shock and terror as the bandits jump out at him. If I can’t tell you what Lydia thinks of Yannick, I can try to show you by describing her words and behaviour carefully. If I can’t explain whether Yannick is hallucinating or not… well, that particular bit of uncertainty is exactly the way I want things.

    I like the way that Yannick makes sense of the world he has arrived in using his knowledge of our world. For example, in Bruma he considers telling a guard about his situation but considers how this would sound if someone approached a police officer in an unfamiliar city on Earth, saying that they didn't know where they were or how they had got there. When arriving at Whiterun, he sees what he thinks is Skyrim's equivalent of a bus service. In some ways, Yannick reminds me of the character of Marty McFly, travelling back in time to the 1950s in the first Back to the Future movie. At times, that can be a disadvantage, when Marty says something which doesn't make sense to people in the 1950s - at other times, Marty can use his knowledge to his advantage, such as making an improvised skateboard (before they had been invented). Would you recommend to other writers the idea of using a main character who is an outsider, like Yannick?

    Isn't that how we all make sense of the world? Using our previous experiences, and maybe things we've read about or heard about? I hope so - I just made Yannick do that because it seemed like what I'd do! (Although I think Yannick's coping far better than I would in his situation.)

    I think having an outsider as a main character (or sidekick) can be a useful excuse for explaining the world to your readers. If the outsider doesn’t understand something, they’ll have to ask, or they’ll do something wrong and be corrected, and that tells the reader things about the world (and also about your character). It can make the world seem strange, and perhaps somewhat hostile.

    Having said that, I think there’s also a lot to be said for using main characters who are part of the world they live in, and just assuming the reader will keep up. (Obviously, you have to be careful not to go so far that you baffle the reader!) That, I think, can lead to a greater sense of familiarity with, and immersion in, the world of the story. So what kind of main character you choose will depend a lot on what kind of story you want to write, and how you want the world to feel.

    I agree with Roman Heritage that your screenshots are outstanding. You have already mentioned playing through a section again, to get the best screenshots. What else have you learned about getting great screenshots? Do you edit the pictures? Are there particular mods which you recommend? Do you mod the game yourself - for example I noticed that Yannick learns magic from Farengar, perhaps you modded the game to create that scene?

    Thank you!

    Let’s go through those questions in the order you asked them…

    I think my best advice for screenshots would be:

    1. Take lots of screenshots – more than you think you need. Then take more than that. Then scrap most of them.
    2. Take screenshots you think look good – it’s always nice to have some of those – but also take screenshots that look boring but provide information about the story, and don’t be afraid to use those when they suit the chapter better than the pretty ones.
    3. Only use screenshots that tell people something about the story. You don’t have to find a picture that moves the plot along all by itself, obviously, but if it doesn’t illustrate something about the chapter you’re putting it in, why is it there? The AAR is formed from a combination of your words and your pictures, so they have to work together.

    (If anyone wants advice specific to Skyrim, please feel free to say so, either in the comments here, or on the ALWFH thread. I’m guessing – since this is a Total War site – that most people aren’t interested in that.)

    I do (sometimes) edit the pictures. A lot of them are cropped. Some of them are edited more heavily than that. I try to edit as little as possible, because that seems to me to fit with the “ordinary person writes journal about Skyrim” feel of the AAR. Sometimes, though, the lighting in Skyrim lets me down, and the main subject of the picture just doesn’t stand out enough to be noticeable. Then I do a bit of tweaking.

    I’ve tried to list all the mods I use for ALWFH in the first post. (I think, actually, there are a couple of others that I use but that haven’t been seen in screenshots. If they’re ever visible, they’ll obviously be listed.)

    The two I would instantly recommend for everybody are SKSE and SkyUI. Both are required for a large number of other mods. And probably A Quality World Map with Roads, for anyone who’d like a bit of an improvement to the world map (or anyone who gets lost in Skyrim a lot, as I do). I also like Timing is Everything. It allows you to decide how early in the game various quests should start, and alter the frequency of some things. It’s handy in general, and very useful if you’re trying to write an AAR and don’t want things to happen till the plot will benefit from them!

    Around this point in lists, the Unofficial Patches usually get mentioned (USKP and its siblings, and the more recent USLEEP), but I can’t recommend them because I don’t use them – they make a load of helpful adjustments to Skyrim, but they also make a few alterations I, personally, don’t want. A lot of people consider it madness to play Skyrim without them, though, so it’s all a question of individual preferences. As, really, is everything else I might mention. There are loads of mods to choose from, though, so if you fancy modding your game, why not? (Especially if you use a mod organiser like, for instance, Mod Organizer, which allows you to set up several different profiles, each using different mods, so you don’t have to install and uninstall all your mods every time you feel like a slightly different style of game.)

    About my own modding, let me just say I’m really pleased you noticed Farengar!

    Or at least Farengar’s rarely-seen stunt double, since it is well known that Farengar never ventures outside Dragonsreach. (He’s far too busy with his research.) Yes, I modded that bit. I’ve modded one or two other bits as well – I created Shulgak and gave her a hut (thanks to Markus Liberty’s brilliant Orc hut model), and there’s some more of my modding you haven’t seen yet. None of it’s very advanced stuff, and I’m not very good, but I really enjoy doing the modding.

    Your AAR has attracted positive comments from readers. Have readers' comments given you ideas or influenced the direction of your story?

    Yes.

    Oh, you want details?

    Well, let’s see. Merchant of Venice pushed me to think about how I was dealing with Yannick’s arrest and the fact that Yannick didn’t know what was going on. As I’ve said above, that was deliberate. However, what I haven’t already said is that I’ve always known why Yannick was arrested. I wanted Yannick not to know, but I needed to know. There are – obviously – people in Skyrim who do know why Yannick was arrested, and the reason for his arrest will affect how they behave. You don’t expect the police to treat the hunt for a serial killer exactly the same way as the hunt for a petty thief, after all. But Merchant of Venice convinced me that I should make sure the whole of the story of Yannick’s arrest ended up in the AAR, instead of just little pieces if he overhears Imperial soldiers talking about it. It isn’t in the AAR yet – Yannick’s going to need some help tracking down what he was doing during that blackout, and he hasn’t yet met anyone in Skyrim who can give him that help. But he will.

    Merchant of Venice and luck_ponte have both also suggested Skyrim mods. I’m trying both out, and it looks pretty likely I’ll end up using both in the AAR campaign, so they’re likely to appear in future.

    And then there are much more subtle things. I think it’s true to say that every comment anyone has made has influenced the course of the AAR, even if only by encouraging me to carry on writing it. So maybe this is a good place to thank everybody who has commented. If you’ve commented, you’re part of the reason the AAR is still being written; thank you.

    Can you give us any hints about Yannick's future? I am wondering whether he will meet Ma'Jhan and Shulgak again.

    Having peered into my crystal ball, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance Yannick will meet Shulgak again. There aren’t all that many routes to Winterhold, and that’s still where he’s trying to get to, so it’s reasonably likely he’ll find himself not too far from Shulgak’s hut at some point. Ma’Jhan… Hmm. The crystal ball remains oddly cloudy when I peer in his direction. It would be nice to see him again, though, so I hope we meet him again.

    I think I can safely predict that at some point, Yannick will have trouble with either dragons or Thalmor (most likely both – although quite possibly not both at the same time), and that Yannick is going to need some very warm clothes in the not too distant future.

    Earth-shaking revelations there, I know. I’m reluctant to say too much, because I might change my mind about all of it before it ends up on TWC!


    So, we reach the end of our interview. Thank you to Shankbot de Bodemloze and Alwyn for providing such excellent and thought-provoking questions. If you would like to make any comments, or if I have made no sense at all and you want to ask me about something, please do post here or in the ALWFH thread, or PM me. And please do rep Shankbot and Alwyn for all their hard work coming up with questions and trying to get me to stick to the point!

    [Note: as you might guess from the paragraph above, Caillagh was responsible for editing this interview.]

    Comments 1 Comment
    1. Flinn's Avatar
      Flinn -
      annnddd I finally found time to read this one too

      a great interview, with an amazing writer; very well done to all of you gents.

      ps. I like Bruma too! My first character with Oblivion was a Nord from Bruma, I almost jumped off of the chair when they announced Skyrim some years ago