IWSG: favorites

    So, this month's question is

October 1 question - What is the most favorite thing you have written, published or not? And why?

    Hmm.  Can't say I like the phrasing "the most favorite" somehow, but that's just me.  Anyway, it's actually kind of hard to answer.  Not in a "they're all my babies--I can't choose between them!" kind of way, but just because I've never really thought about it before.  Also I write in a lot of different categories that don't really smoothly compare to each other.

    In the "things I've written that I wouldn't be ashamed to show to my parents" category, the sixth book of the Atalanta and Ariadne series is the only one that comes to mind.  I did a lot of things in that one that I'm really proud of to this day (wrote the first draft in 2014), and I'm looking forward to someday fixing it up so I can release it.  Assuming I can ever manage to finish rewriting book four.  😰  Anyway, book six's setting is mostly in Sparta, trying to deal with a potential succession crisis, as Menelaos wants his son by his Trojan concubine to inherit, but his daughter by Helen (who is married to Agamemnon's son, Orestes, as that's what happened in the myths 🤢) feels that she's the only proper heir.  Menelaos calls on his old friend Odysseus to argue his case, and Orestes calls on Eurysakes (one of my three protagonists) to argue his case.  What we see of the official debates (if you can call them that) is a fun exercise in trying to expose multiple people plotting various things, and considering one of those people is the master schemer Odysseus, I think I did a surprisingly decent job of it!  Of course, a bigger part of the story is slowly exposing my novel's version of just why Helen went to Troy in the first place, which I flatter myself to think has a few elements to it that haven't been done before.  (At least, not in conjunction with all the other elements I'm using, anyway.  Can't really vouch for any of them being 100% new by themselves.)  Atalanta and Ariadne also end up visiting Hades to see if he will allow them to talk to the shade of Bellerophon, since they need the winged horse Pegasos for reasons. 😅  I got to do a lot of fun stuff in book 6!  (I know it seems especially self-indulgent and cliche to have them obtain the services of Pegasos--and it is!--but at least I foreshadowed it a bit all through the series, as Atalanta talks about the idea of getting to ride him on numerous occasions.)

    But would I truly say that's my all-time favorite?  No, not really.  (Especially since it still needs at least one hefty rewrite.)

    Moving into fan fiction, I have a few strong favorite contenders among my Velvet Goldmine fics.

    There's "Celebrity," in which Arthur Stuart has a secret second life as a gay romance novelist, and one of his novels was actually a thinly veiled retelling of the Brian Slade/Curt Wild romance, only with a different ending where they stay together.  The novel was both his long-term passion project and also a way to exorcise the ghosts of his glam past.  But now his editor is once again pressuring him to write a sequel to it, however since he now knows what Brian's done in the intervening years, it's not that simple for him.  Running into Curt again encourages him to write it after all, but that leads to further complications.  It's pretty different from most of my other Velvet Goldmine fics, but I just really liked how it turned out.  Unfortunately, I decided to experiment with posting the whole thing to AO3 at once (despite that it's eighteen chapters long) and that ended up giving it a pretty low view count somehow.

    There are also the fusion fics:  in response to a prompt to fuse Velvet Goldmine with one of the myriad other films by the prolific actors who played Curt and Arthur, instead of going for the obvious Star Wars and Batman angles, I went Jane Austen and Shakespeare instead.  Didn't do justice to either of those authors, but I did produce a couple pieces I was pretty proud of, regardless.  And there's the one where Curt becomes an actor, but...

    Anyway.  In terms of Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic, wow.  I'm honestly pretty proud of a lot of it, but some of that may be because I'm still in the "madly in love with this novel" phase of my fannishness. 😅  How I feel about them whenever I cease obsessing about MDZS will be the real question.  But who knows how long that will take?

    Probably my favorite is "To Walk This Earth With You Again," in which Wei Wuxian was not revived, and didn't reincarnate until modern day.  (To explain:  Mo Dao Zu Shi begins with the death of Wei Wuxian, the novel's hero...and then goes immediately to him being revived (sort of) thirteen years later.)  He has most of his memories from his previous life, and goes to an online support group for other people with past life memories (allowing me to finally complete something with a particular pair of reincarnations of Achilles and Patroclos that I used in about half a dozen incomplete works because I loved them too much to let them be dead backstory characters in a sci-fi "Trojan War repeating itself in space" thing) and it just really resonated with me somehow.  I even went back and added two more chapters to it later, one in which Wei Wuxian's almost-but-not-quite-adopted-brother reincarnates with all his memories and they get a chance to work out the feud between them, and then another one detailing just why Wei Wuxian wasn't revived in this alternate universe, which features the villain's slow descent into madness.  Honestly, that slow descent into madness for a villain who is the "always outwitting his enemies fifteen steps ahead of them" type was particularly satisfying!  Though I also liked the online chat sections, too.  (I even looked up someone's formatting code to make it look like Discord, so it looks really great on screen, too.)

    Honorary mention has to go to "The Spark That Ignites the Embers," which is using the version of MDZS canon from its live-action adaptation, The Untamed, and centers on that not-quite-brother I was just talking about (in part in apology to him, because he died a rather humiliating death in "To Walk," though the final bonus chapter at least changed it into being murdered by the villain, which is probably slightly less humiliating?), and somehow ended up being 500k words long, far and away the longest thing I've ever written...and hopefully it will stay that way, 'cause man is that a crazy lot of words!  It took me eleven months to write the first draft, and editing it was a nightmare, because it was really hard to remember some of the pickiest details of what happened earlier on.  (Not to mention that Word takes quite a while to open a file that big!)

    My last category that can't really be compared to anything else is that of the games I've written.  It's not a super-large category (especially if you discount the lightly interactive version of the Atalanta and Ariadne books), but I'm still pretty proud of some of it.  Though the one I'm most proud of is probably less for the writing than for the "everything else" about it.  My most recent release, Orchid Duet, (which is actually also a MDZS fan game 😅) spent a long time waiting for the artist to finish up their work, and while I was waiting, I kept iterating through the game and adding more and more visual effects and little bits of polish, so I'm actually quite proud of it.  (I've also played it through at least three dozen times in the last two months, so I'm likely not to touch it again for some time to come...😰)

    Ironically, the one I'm next most proud of is actually called The Worst Visual Novel Ever, and was for a game jam specifically to create bad games.  But somehow I ended up putting in a lot of silly, quasi-clever stuff in the writing, and I kind of love it despite how insane it is.  Especially because of some of the really meta stuff, like the narrator becoming more and more unhinged the longer I spend writing the game, which only is obvious if you're looking at the script instead of the game, because the player might get the narrator breaking down on their first playthrough, instead of closer to the end of the script.  The narrator actually even gets replaced a few times because its breakdown is that intense.

    Hmm.

    I feel like I went on too long and didn't really say much and...

    ...sorry.  I think I'm a little nuts right now because I'm getting my butt kicked by the mold count in the air.

IWSG: no title has been prepared

    So.

    I, uh, haven't been doing a lot of writing lately.

    I'm not 100% sure why.  Or rather I'm not sure which factor is the primary one.

    Part of it is because I'm still working on a game jam entry.  (The jam normally would have ended on the 1st, but it was extended for reasons that it's probably better not to go into.)  Technically, the game ought to already be up, since I considered it to be all but "finished" like two weeks ago, but the artist who agreed to create a unique background and some other art for me has had a lot on their plate and still has only gotten roughs done.  So I keep going in and fiddling with what I've got. 😅 In some ways it's a waste of time to keep iterating on it like that, but on the other hand it means I'm really pulling out all the stops I can in regards to little visual effects and stuff.

    But I haven't been doing much with the writing, since I've considered the script more or less finished for quite a while now.  I had to do some edits thanks to one of my two sensitivity readers getting back to me and recommending some improvements, but that's been quite a while now.

    I think the most writing I've done all month was probably when someone on a writing discord server posted a link to this blog post with the most ultimate "character questionnaire" pretty much ever.  I was actually going to fill it out on a blog post for one of the characters I've been writing about, but thought the better of it when I reached his answer to "What's the most evil thing you've ever done?" because I do not want someone seeing his answer to that question out of context and thinking I had done that!  Because, yeah, that was a very evil thing he had done.  (Even though he's usually a very good person.  It's just that he went a wee bit over the edge after suffering a particularly brutal tragedy...)

    That's sort of off topic, though.

    The main thing I wanted to talk about, in terms of my "not getting much writing done lately" issue is the rewrite I have been bogged down in for what feels roughly like forever.  The draft I'm trying to revise is really, really awful.  And a lot of the problems are structurally baked in, so rewriting is a little like banging my head against a brick wall.  Thus I have been doing almost everything else I can think of except working on that rewrite.

    I know at this point a lot of people would probably advise me to just not bother; drop the project.  But it's book four out of seven (and yes, I've written first drafts for the whole series), and I've already released books one through three on AO3 and itch.io, so it would feel a bit like breaking a promise if I just stopped.  Besides, I'm eager to get to the later books, especially book six, which is when they go to Sparta and meet Helen (and I feel like I did some moderately unique things with her!), plus they also go into the underworld and meet Hades, albeit briefly, and it's so important to get more versions of Hades in the public sphere that aren't mutilating him into a "villain."  (There is very little that ticks me off harder about modern mangling of Greek mythology than people who stupidly conflate Hades with the devil.)

    So.  Yeah.

    Anyone else struggling to get through a hard rewrite?  How do you handle it?

IWSG: A Different Question

 

    So, I don't have a lot to say about my writing as I've been distracted this month by health issues and the real world trying to force itself into my forcibly-sheltered life, but I can't talk about the latter because a) it would be bad for my heart and b) it might verge on the political.  However, something someone said in replying to me in Discord has put a question in my head, one that others in the IWSG community might have reactions to.  (I can't even try to address this month's suggested discussion question because I'm a purely hobbyist writer and thus don't follow the ins and outs of the publishing industry.  Except a few minor things I notice as a consumer, but that's sort of a different issue.)

    The question is this:

How do you feel about the idea of derivative works featuring your characters?  More specifically, how would you feel about the idea of people selling fan art of your characters?

    It came up because there was discussion of the sales of fan works of a particular novel being forbidden to be sold.  The fan works themselves weren't being suppressed, just them being traded for money, and someone said that was the author's own will.  This led to a discussion in which two of our more prolific members--it was a visual novel dev community--discussing their own feelings on the subject.  One said that they were conflicted, because they don't want anyone else selling their characters but on the other hand they also don't want to quash the indie artist community.  Another said that they would be thrilled if people were selling fan art of their favorites among their characters...and would in fact buy copies of said fan art.

    Personally, I don't have all that many of my original characters that are super-important to me, in part because a lot of my original fiction over the last 10-15 years has been based in and around Greek mythology, so many of the characters aren't mine...which doesn't stop me having a lot of feelings about how other people use them, naturally enough!  (Hence why I was very nervous about trying the game Hades, which thankfully turned out to hit all my sweet spots, so I absolutely love it.)  Of the ones who are original and mean a lot to me, mostly Atalanta and Ariadne (and my version of Eurysakes may as well be an OC, given how little connection there is between him and the original version in the few myths that mention him)...I'm not sure how I would feel about derivative works.  On the one hand, I would definitely be flattered if someone cared enough to want to draw them, but how would I feel if they drew them in some grotesquely wrong fashion or doing something horrifically out of character for them?  I mean, no, I don't even have to ask that last question:  if someone drew them doing something that is antithetical to their character, I would hate it.  On the other hand, just drawing them, or drawing them doing something from one of the books, I would probably love that?  Or maybe not.  I don't know.  One of the advantages of releasing only through itch.io and AO3 is that no one pays the least bit of attention to what I've written; it's comfortingly safe knowing that no one is looking.  But if someone drew my characters, that would mean that someone was looking, and that might weird me out.

    So, there's my answer to my own question:  I don't even know.  But I'm curious how other people feel on the subject!

IWSG: post title needed

 

    So.  The last month has been pretty meh for me as a writer.  I started out bouncing between two projects, then came up with a third (which is a VN for a game jam, so it has a time limit) and now I'm bouncing between three projects.  And the first two aren't even proceeding all that well.  (The one that ought to be the priority, the rewrite of book four of my series from 2014, has been moving the slowest; I'm barely into the first chapter!)  There hasn't been any particular obstacle to my writing--aside from summer heat, which is always an obstacle to everything, as I am not good at dealing with heat--it's just not been flowing very quickly by my standards.

    Anyway, point is, I don't have a lot to say, so I guess I'll look into the monthly discussion question.

July 2 question - Is there a genre you haven't tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?

    Hmm.

    Well...not really?

    Or rather, there are genres I've never successfully written a complete work in that I might like to someday?  I've never written anything to completion that was sci-fi (aside from some Star Wars fanfic back in college, before I even knew the term "fan fiction"), and I would kind of like to someday, but I would need the right story idea before I even tried it.  I can't really say that I "plan" on writing sci-fi someday, because I can never predict what kind of ideas I'll come up with before I come up with them.  Although there was the "Trojan War in space" novel I tried to write, which I would like to get back to and rework and complete someday.  That wouldn't end up as a novel, though; it needs to be something more along the lines of a hybrid strategy RPG and visual novel.  Which in itself causes all sorts of problems since in addition to needing to be able to actually write the dang thing, I'd also need to find a programmer and one or more artists, but I don't work well with other people.  (Which means it will probably never happen, even if I do manage to get the script written.)

    Similarly, in the past I started an isekai VN script and a reverse-isekai fanfic, but didn't manage to finish either.  I'm not entirely sure I actually want to work in either of those genres, though they do offer a lot of interesting possibilities, to be sure.  Oh, actually, I started a different isekai work once, too, but didn't get very far into it because one of the only ideas I had for it was "isekai protagonist who is not the special and in fact has zero useful abilities and is just running an average store in town while someone else who merely passed through once or twice is actually the hero out saving the world" but that was going to be very boring.  I'm not even sure if it was going to be an original work of fiction or if I was planning to make it a VN.  I think the former, though.

    I suppose if there's a genre that I've never touched at all that I might like to, it would be more along the lines of the "palace intrigue" novel.  But it's unlikely that I'd attempt a genre like that.  I don't even have much experience reading that genre.  (The Apothecary Diaries could plausibly be called "palace intrigue," but that's pretty much the only one I've read, really?  (And I've currently only read the first two out of I don't know how many volumes of it.)  The novel that the hero of The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish transmigrated into was a palace intrigue novel, but I don't think that counts, since the novel I read was a transmigration danmei, so it would fall into the "isekai" genre (if it's not too deeply wrong to apply a Japanese word to define the genre of a Chinese novel) rather than palace intrigue.)  I doubt I'd ever actually try my hand at the genre because my understanding of people is not actually what it would need to be to successfully write that genre.  (Admittedly, that hamstrings my writing in all genres, but the less need there is for deep psychological understanding of highly complex characters the more chance that I can at least write something halfway decent.)

    Hmm.

    Another chaotic and pointless post from me.

    I feel like I need to apologize to the internet as a whole for my own existence.

    😭

IWSG: Still Floundering

 

    So...

    I am still having...issues...with my current rewriting project.

    The project is to rewrite book four of my quasi-YA, Greek-myth-based fantasy novels about a young trio of adventurers living not quite twenty years after the Trojan War.  I have made quite a few posts about these novels over the last year or so (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).  I am up to book four...which is supremely problematic in all sorts of ways.

    I went into a lot of it in the previous post (the last one on that massive list), so I'll skip a lot of the preliminaries.  The short version is that because my research before I wrote the initial draft (in 2014) was using such outdated texts, almost everything I had "learned" in that research was wrong.  My understanding of the setting is now improved, though still lacking the larger cultural picture I have for the Greek Heroic Age, because the surviving corpus of myths is so much smaller for Mesopotamia.

    Of course, how I had coped with my lack of knowledge in the original draft was to write a book in which the trio of young heroes barely interacted with the locals at all.  Can't get wrong what you don't write at all, was my thinking.  Which I suppose isn't technically incorrect?  (And yet I still managed to get a truly spectacular amount of things wrong!)

    In the end, I ended up with a text in which the story is so centered around not interacting with the locals that I'm having trouble finding a way to restructure it in order to have them interact with the locals beyond their translator.  (Who I had to jump through some pretty crazy hoops to keep from getting killed by the villain, even.)

    That's not necessarily unworkable, of course.  Maybe I won't even want to change it.  But most of the next draft is going to have to be entirely new, and I'm kind of struggling to figure out how to make things work.

    The original draft has the three heroes get individual divine visitations (in their dreams) from three of the Babylonian gods, and then all three of them met with Ishtar in person (though the situation was bizarre and illogical at best) and she gave them gifts to help them through the battle to come.  Of course, none of those gifts belonged to Ishtar, and most of them were for Ariadne, but...

    So I came up with the idea of coming up with a series of trials they go through to win the support of the Babylonian gods, but the trials are also contests, and after each contest, the one of the trio who "won" will get to speak to the god behind the trial and receive an object from them to help with the battle ahead.  This would allow me to preserve some of the earlier dialog between the trio and the various Babylonian gods, by having the winner of each trial be the one who spoke to that god in the visitations in the original version of the text.  A bit formulaic, but serviceable, and in dealing with such an ancient culture surely an older formula like that is actually kind of appropriate.

    Problem, of course, is that for the most part the one who would receive the gift is not the one who would use it:  

1. The bow and arrows could come from Ninurta (they were Marduk's in the first draft, but Ninurta is better known for the use of bow and arrow), but they would be awarded to Eurysakes even though Ariadne would be the one using them.
2. The net is the one Marduk used to contain Tiamat, so obviously Marduk would be the one who handed it over to the heroes, but Atalanta is the one who spoke to Marduk, yet it's Eurysakes who used the net.

    Okay, technically that's only half of them, not "most" of them, but it's still a problem!

    Isn't it?

    I don't know, maybe it's not a problem?  I can't think of anything with this kind of formula off the top of my head to recall if the gifts were ever given to someone other than the one who would use them.  (Closest I can think of is the gifts Galadriel gave to the Fellowship when they were leaving Lothlorien, but those were used by the people she gave them to.  With the addition that Sam also used the vial of starlight she gave Frodo.  But that's entirely different.)  I feel like the basic formula of "do a favor for a magical entity and get a magical item as a reward" is usually one person meeting magical beings (or the same one in different disguises) as they travel, not multiple people in a party going to one deity after another in the same basic location.  Which I'm not sure if it's better or worse that I'd be changing up the formula that way...

    It just feels really off to have them given to the wrong person.  But they're divine gifts, so they should be given by the god they belonged to, surely!

    There's also the fact that Ariadne gets the largest number of gifts--bow, arrows and a vial of poison for the arrows--and Atalanta originally got no gifts whatsoever.  I've figured out something Ishtar can give Atalanta that actually belonged to her (well, it's not so much something that belongs to Ishtar as the transformed body of one of Ishtar's enemies, but it's the only magic item I can figure out to add to the final confrontation that would be useful for Atalanta in any way, shape or form) but it's still pretty lopsided, and doesn't sound the least bit impressive:  "Here, Ariadne, have the bow and arrows Ninurta used to defeat Anzu, and this vial of poison from Ea to make the arrows more deadly.  Here, Eurysakes, have the net that Marduk used to ensare Tiamat.  Here, Atalanta, uh...you can have this enchanted waterskin that used to be the woman who murdered Dumuzi."

    It just doesn't...feel fair.

    Admittedly, this book starts Atalanta's negative character growth arc, as all hints of her father's arrogance are pounded out of her and she becomes so depressed and convinced of her own worthlessness that by the end of book seven she kind of wants to die in battle to rid the world of herself.  (Her father's spirit shows up to help her in the final confrontation of that book, which helps to restore her self-confidence, though, so it's not a total downer.  (Her father being Achilles, btw.))  Still, having the Babylonian gods spurn her by giving her useless gifts is a bit too much, isn't it?  It's not like they're spurning her for being female, after all:  Ariadne is also female, and she gets the best gifts, plus she's the one who learns how to read and write cuneiform, which is the key to winning the final battle of the book.

    Ugh.

    It's like...like...like I need to write an entirely different book from the ground up and only keep the final battle, as that actually worked pretty well.  But I have zero ideas what else to write that would build up to that final battle.  Especially because I don't feel like I have all that good a grip on Late Bronze Age Babylon, not well enough to conjure up an entire tale set there. (Well, there's actually the opening couple of chapters that are back in Troy, then they have to pass through Tarsus and take a caravan from there to Babylon, but it's still the bulk of the book...)

    It's honestly quite overwhelming, and I feel so daunted by the prospect that I don't even know where to start.  And yet I know that if I don't start relatively soon, I'll forget everything I learned in my new research and I'll have to redo the research first.

    (I would be ashamed of myself for being on about working on a non-Pride-related novel in June, but Atalanta is aromantic and asexual (not that those concepts were understood in her day!) and Ariadne is lesbian in the woman-loving-woman sense (as well as being Lesbian in the sense of "having been born on the island of Lesbos") so I figure this is at least somewhat Pride-related.)

Stymied

     So.

    I am:

• Overwhelmed.
• Lost.
• Confused.
• Frustrated.
• All of the above.

    You see, I'm trying to get to work on the rewrite of book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books.

    Precis version:  I wrote the original drafts (for all seven books!) of these quasi-YA Greek-myth-based fantasy novels back in 2014.  During 2020's COVID lockdown, I re-visted them and decided they were worth salvaging, unlike most of what I was writing back then.

    Since 2021, I've managed to get the first three polished up and released, both on AO3 as plain text and on itch.io in a slightly interactive form.  (Though having just re-read the AO3 versions, all three still need a lot of work.  😭)  Anyway, having gotten book three out of the metaphorical door, it is now book four's turn.

    And.  Um.

    See, in book one, my heroic trio are mostly just in the region of Troy.  In book two, they return to their roots and go to mainland Greece.  In book three, they visit Athens, Aiaia (home of Kirke (aka Circe)), and then spend most of the novel in Thrace, which I had to give a fairly Greek-adjacent cultural setting, because it had to fit the myths of Heracles' visit to deal with the man-eating mares of Diomedes of the Bistones.

    Book four, however, is when they start doing a little globe-trotting.  (Or the closest you can get to same in a Bronze Age setting, anyhow.)  After visiting a trading town, they head to Babylon, looking for information on the big bad of the series.

    So.  Um...

    Mesopotamia is not my region of expertise.  (Technically, I have no region of expertise, being at best an amateur and at worst an unqualified hack.)  I needed to research it before I could write the first draft.  And I did research it.  Not as much as I needed to, but I did do research.  I read the Enuma Elish (not realizing that it probably wasn't written until several generations after my novel takes place 😰) and I looked at quite a few books in the library of the university where I had just started working on my MA in History.

    I was aware, of course, that the books were not the most recent, as the university hadn't been keeping all that up to date on history and archaeology in general, and particularly not Mesopotamian history and archaeology.

    If I was also aware of how much of a problem that actually was, I had forgotten in the intervening decade.

    I, um, I'm aware of it now.

    Having read both a general survey of Mesopotamian history and a specialized history of Babylonia itself, I dived into rereading the latest draft of book four so I could make notes on what needed to change for the next draft.

    Basically...everything.

    Apparently most of those books I used back in 2014 were approximately as old as I am, maybe older.

    Virtually everything that can be wrong is wrong.

    Whole sequences are centered around traditions that either I made up out of whole cloth or that someone else made up out of whole cloth.  Wherever they came from, what they are is completely incompatible with what is actually known of Bronze Age Babylon's culture.

    If it was just little things, I wouldn't have too much of a problem.

    But like...there's so much that's so weird that I have no idea what to use to replace it.  For example...

    For some reason, I had decided that it was "typical" for supplicants to sleep in the temples to request divine visions in their dreams.  This cannot be much more wrong:  temples in Mesopotamia were such sacred spaces that no one except priests and the most upper of upper echelons of society were allowed inside.  Random people--particularly foreigners!--absolutely would not have been allowed even to set foot in one, let alone sleep in one.  But I have to do something, because the trio had not so much visions as actual divine visitations, and these were vital to communicating the plot to them.

    Which, really, maybe is super-weak and I should do something else.  But what?  That's the problem, you know?  I have to put something in there to let the trio learn what they need to learn.

    And honestly I don't want to let go of some of it.  I love the visuals of Ariadne's visions, in which she's confronted with a giant blank expanse of clay and words and shapes appear before her to show her what the god in question wants to communicate to her.  (Which requires him to divinely teach her cuneiform so she can understand him!  And that's vital to what follows...)  And in Atalanta's dream, which starts out as a nightmare, she has a vision of an enormous ziggurat filled with praying statuettes (which I thought were still a thing in their day, despite that they were long outdated by then) which come to life and surround her and grow and chase her, and it's actually a pretty effective nightmare sequence, one which I have some interesting ideas about how to give the sequence a bit of a visual punch in the Ren'py version.  Eurysakes, as I recall, just has a conversation with the god he talks to.  That one's not particularly interesting, tbh, and could easily be disposed of.

    Another sequence that is both vital and kind of weirdly pointless is one in which they encounter a procession taking the statue of Ishtar to a temple to the underworld gods, at which time the goddess literally enters the underworld (again)...for apparently no reason whatsoever?  On top of me misunderstanding just why Ishtar went into the underworld in the first place (suggesting that the book I read that talked about her descent into the underworld was especially ancient, considering the full text that explained it was discovered in like the early 1950s), did I think she did it repeatedly, or that it was that important a part of her cultic presence?  Because...no.  None of that.  Additionally, the statues of the gods were essentially their physical forms to the ancient Mesopotamians, and while there were a few rituals that involved moving them around, they wouldn't have been wandering the countryside in the care of merely a few...a few...I don't even know who those people were accompanying the statue, because my original draft didn't make it clear, but they certainly seemed to be absolutely nobody!

    As a sequence, it's not necessary, but it accomplishes some important things, especially in that it's the final part of the Babylonian gods giving the trio gifts to ensure that they can triumph over their enemies--the enemies, in this case, more of the Babylonian gods than the trio--and is directly addressing Ishtar as the Lady of Battles, a function her Hellenic counterpart doesn't have.  Honestly, I need to address Ishtar's unique qualities more, since she has both masculine and feminine qualities, and in that respect she is actually kinda similar to Atalanta and Ariadne.

    Realistically, if they're going to get gifts from the Babylonian gods who want them to defeat the threat that looms over Babylonia, then they should have to do tasks to earn them.  (Admittedly, they did at least fight off enemies who were attacking that procession carrying the statue of Ishtar, but it was never explained why those enemies were attacking it, nor why Ishtar had on hand Marduk's bow and quiver to give them.)  They should have to seek out sites in the wilds where those items have been carefully hidden away, but...I don't know of any appropriate sites for that.  What they're being given are weapons the gods themselves used to fight their own foes, so it's not like they're things that mortals would normally have in their possession.

    Hmm.

    It would be a massive amount of new text, but it's gonna need that regardless, so maybe I do just need to invent challenges for the Babylonian gods to set before them, and for each challenge they pass, they get one of the weapons they need to defeat the villain-du-jour, plus a fraction of the information they need.

    It's a bit formulaic--especially compared to the earlier books--but it's a tried and true formula that's literally been around since ancient times.

    In the current draft, Atalanta--and only Atalanta--is taught "Babylonian" by Marduk so that they can communicate without him having to lower himself to use her language.  (I'm not sure if I didn't know at the time that the language was called Akkadian or if I figured she wouldn't know and it therefore didn't matter.)  I'm not sure how plausible it is for only her to learn it in the new set-up I just described, and yet I feel like certain points aren't going to work very well if they all know it.  (Not sure why Ninurta didn't have to teach it to Eurysakes when they spoke.  It doesn't seem even slightly probable that Ninurta would know Mycenaean Greek...)

    <sigh>

    I feel like this one draft is going to be the hardest part of adapting, rewriting and releasing the entire seven book series.  (They do visit Egypt in book five, but that's just a brief stop-over, more akin to visiting Aiaia in book three, rather than being the major portion of the novel.  Plus Egypt was better understood culturally at the time the books I was consulting were written.)

    Anyway.

    Final, bizarre parting note.

    In 2021, I had taken the most recent drafts of the novels (they had mostly just received minor rephrasings and such since their completion) and left annotations on them in the form of comments in Word.  For rereading book four, I opened up that annotated version in Google Docs so I could read it on my phone and leave myself further notes.

    For some reason Google Docs decided that all those comments I left on the document were made on December 31st, 1969.

    Which is:

• Before there were home PCs
• Before Microsoft Word existed
• Before Microsoft existed (as far as I know)
• Before the novels were ever written
• Before I was born
• Insanity
• All of the above

    Yeah.  Just wanted to share that.  (It's definitely not an error on the file or a dating error on the computer I was using when I left those notes, because when I open the same file in Word on this computer, each comment has the correct date from 2021.)

A thought about the juniors in Yi City

 Okay, so this post is going to contain a lot of spoilers for Mo Dao Zu Shi (aka The Untamed), so please don't read further if you haven't finished reading/watching it.  (I mean, I'm assuming no one would even want to read further if they're not the least bit interested in MDZS...)  This is relating to a background element of the Yi City arc, in the context of the revelations made at the end of the novel.