IWSG - postless post

 

    Not sure what to write here today.  I'm not really feeling the monthly suggested question, either.

    I'm having trouble writing lately.  Not writer's block, per se, just...I don't know.  Lack of motivation, inability to concentrate, inability to pick a new project, lack of inspiration...I don't know what it is.

    I do have a new project that I'm planning--the script for a game, rather than standard fiction--but I'm still just muddling along in the planning stages, not finished defining who the characters are or even exactly what the place is where it's set.

    Today it's also not helping that it sorta feels like time was shut off a few days ago:  it started snowing late Saturday night and finished in the wee hours of Monday morning.  Who knows when I'll next leave my house.  😰  (Thankfully, I do have plenty of food.  And if I run out, it's not that far to the grocery store, like half a mile at most.  I could walk it if I wasn't so badly out of shape.)  As of right now (early Tuesday), the street still isn't properly cleared, and my driveway is not likely to show itself for a very long time.  I have heard very few cars leaving the other houses in the subdivision, and no mail was delivered yesterday; it really feels like time has simply stopped because of the storm.  That makes it even harder to focus on writing.

    But the lack of a project grabbing me and saying "write me!" is the biggest problem.

    And that's a hard one to conquer.

So, I've started a new project

     It's a visual novel.  Or possibly a VN/cozy-farming-sim hybrid.  Not sure yet.  I mean, the story is what it would be in a hybrid, but I might use RPGMaker and just fake the farming sim aspect with cutscenes showing the player character going about farm tasks in between the VN scenes.  (Which would have the bonus of allowing me to easily add some turn-based combat periodically.)  Whether or not I do that will largely depend on how well the script turns out; if it seems really good, then I might actually go to the expense of hiring a programmer to make a farming sim to integrate it with.  (Presumably this would also mean using some engine other than Ren'py.  Like Unity or something.)

    All that is for later, though.  I'm still just working on the script.

    No, not even the script yet.  I'm still in the planning phase, actually.

    I've gotten to the point where I'm deciding on the other people in the village, who they are and what they do.  (Fortunately, unlike normal cozy farming sims, there's only one love interest, and the MC will fall for her regardless of the player's wishes.)

    Anyway, since the story and two leads are inspired by danmei, I'm basing the setting on ancient China, though it's a fictional world.  (Like with Avatar:  The Last Airbender, you know?)

    I like what I wrote today about one of the NPCs for the town where the heroine settles down:

Village Head – a dotty grandpa type.  Seems senile because he is.  But very friendly and warm, loved by all.  Just don’t expect an intelligent answer to your question.  The type to misquote philosophy rather than tell you what you want to know.  (Ack, I’m going to have to invent a Confucius-analog and write countless aphorisms of his!)

    I'm not looking forward to the whole "inventing a Confucius-analog" part, but I still love that character description.  🤣

A Random (Fandom) Thought

     Okay, so back in April, I mentioned the fact that it had long been my assumption about/reaction to Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen that they were supposed to be a reflection of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, or more specifically that they actually are what most everyone else in the story sees when they look at Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji together:  an evil demonic cultivator harassing a pure and proper cultivator.  And that meanwhile Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen are also a reflection of the true relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, only one where the tragic ending remains in place, with no revival stepping in to reunite them.  (Okay, actually, looking at that post again, I didn't so much mention that as tangentially imply it.  But that was what I thought on reaching the later portions of the Yueyang sequence in The Untamed when I first watched it, that the three of them provided a double mirror of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji.  Um, except at that time I didn't know that Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen's story would end in tragedy. 😭)

    And I still do think that's the case, no question.  Those parallels are absolutely there.

    But in thinking about the chapter of my fanfic that went up yesterday, I realized that Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan serve as mirrors to another situation within the main plot of MDZS:  that of Wei Wuxian with Jiang Cheng.  (I mean, the clue's right there in their names, even!  Jiang Cheng and Song Lan are the only adult characters in the novel (as far as I can recall, anyway) who are consistently referred to by their birth names by the narrator.  Oh, uh, no, duh, there's also Wen Ning.  Okay, so that breaks the birth name part of the comparison a bit.  (And then there's Wen Xu and Wen Chao, whose only known names sure sound like birth names, but that makes zero sense all around unless the Wen Clan uses courtesy names differently from the other clans.))

    Let me sum up my thinking on this thusly.  Um, after a "read more" tag just in case somehow someone stumbles on this post who hasn't read (or watched) the whole story.  (Unlikely, I know, but...)

IWSG: last IWSG of the year

 

    There's a creative title for ya.  😰

    Uh.  Anyway.  This month's discussion question is

December 4 question - Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

    And my answer is "No, I do not."  (To the first question.)

    I'm not a fan of cliffhangers in general; I like to wrap up the major story threads or it doesn't feel like it's actually finished.  Even in my series of seven novels (of which only three have been polished up for any kind of release, despite that I wrote the first drafts ten years ago 😭), I never had cliffhangers.  There were times after the leads had started learning about the overarching plot of the series that story threads from the larger plot were necessarily left unresolved, but the story of the individual novel was still neatly concluded.

    As a reader, I've mostly been fortunate enough not to run into them.  (Cannot say the same thing about as a watcher, but that's another question entirely.)  I think a particular novel I read last year that I really didn't like had something of a cliffhanger ending, but I disliked the whole work so much that I couldn't care in the slightest about the cliffhanger in that context.

    The closest I can think of to encountering a considerable number of cliffhangers as a reader is that I've been reading a lot of danmei novels (Chinese web novels featuring romances between men) in translation, and most of the chapters tend to end on cliffhangers, meaning that typically each volume of the novel ends on a cliffhanger, and that can be insanely frustrating.  Mitigated by the fact that there are mere months between volumes (since the novels are not licensed for translated publication until after they are complete) instead of the potential years there would be if one was waiting for a full novel to be written from scratch.  (Also if one is confident one will like the novel, one can buy all the volumes and not read it until it's complete.  At this point, I have decided not to do that unless I'm already familiar with the author's work.)

    I think if I did come across a writer who consistently preferred to end their works with cliffhangers, I would probably avoid their work, because yes, that would definitely be a turn-off to me as a reader.  Doing so once in a while because the larger plot of the series required it, that much I could live with, but doing it every time...I'd nope outta there.

    Changing the subject radically and probably pointlessly, there was a long discussion in a discord channel that got deleted the other day because it was instigated by someone being a bad actor.  Which is a pity, because the conversation started out with some really useful comments and suggestions by regular users of the channel.  I bring it up because one thing that someone said was so brilliant that it must be recorded somewhere for posterity, and this isn't the greatest of places, but...it's what I've got.

    They suggested that someone could write a character who knits socks with designs inspired by their favorite heavy metal bands.

    That would be epic.  Someone needs to write a character like that.

    (Unfortunately, I typically do not write in a modern setting these days, so it's unlikely to be me.)

NotNaNo '24, final day

     Well.

    I've decided to stop writing for the day because I can't really come up with what to have the characters say next.

    This fic is so far so much talking that even by my standards it's mind-numbing to have them talk so much.  If I ever finish it, massive sections of it will have to be torn out and replaced with something that is less...well....boring.  The amount of infodumping is especially awful, but because I'm working with alternate history and alternate versions of the work it's a fanfic of, it's going to be very tricky to find a way to get that information out there without it just being an infodump.  But I guess I can worry about that if and when I finish the first draft.

    Anyway.  I wrote 2116 words today, all on that one fic, which is now up to 16,033 words.

    My total for the month is 57,696 words, which may be the smallest number I have ever written during November since I started doing NaNo in 2011.

    The final chart for my progress is:

    And the day by day chart is:

    ...which is just really alarming to look at.  At least, that's how it seems to me, anyway.

    Although maybe it's not too much worse than last year's:

    ....nope.  Nope.  This year's is much worse, no matter how you look at it.

    I don't know how much of it is due to the horror of real life events, and how much is because I didn't have a strong project to work on.  (A small amount of it is due to not-necessarily-horrible real life events intervening, but there's really only a few days like that.)

NotNaNo '24, day 23 - breaking silence

     I haven't wanted to face the permanence of a blog post for quite a while.  Still don't, really, but...

    Anyway, I have still been writing every day, though there were a few days that I didn't even reach 500 words.  One day I didn't even reach 100.

    I've accomplished little things, though?

    I started the month trying to be hopeful and upbeat, so I was working on a happy fic, an AU for MDZS in which Wei Wuxian was raised at Cloud Recesses and so got to spend most of his life with Lan Wangji, and it was a No War AU, so everything was happy and hopeful all the way through.  (Which actually made it sort of boring after a while because that removed the entire plot of the novel and most of the conflict, but...)  I finished it a while back, and it rounded out at 19,513 words.

    I was also working on a pre-existing My Time at Sandrock fic, but that's been sort of...meh.  I don't know if I'll ever finish it, because it's turning out a little too much like "here's the plot of the game" and not sufficiently "here's my own story about the game's characters and world."

    After finishing the WWX-raised-in-Gusu fic, I decided to do a canon compliant AU based on The Untamed's version of MDZS, one in which Wen Qing survived, having been held as a prisoner by the Jin Clan for the last sixteen years.  (And which also ends with Wei Wuxian confessing his love to Lan Wangji, who of course has loved him from the day they met, so happy romantic ending there.)  That one I finished a few days ago, and it came to 11,177 words total.

    So, after puttering around pointlessly on the Sandrock fic for a while, yesterday's words were actually all just brainstorming words for the new fic I started today, which took some working out, because it's a massive and complicated idea.  (No idea how long it will end up being, but the idea is still massive and complicated.)

    It's a crossover between a modern AU of MDZS and Velvet Goldmine, inspired by the anime Ya Boy Kongming, in which a dying Zhuge Liang is transported to modern-day Tokyo (and youthified in the process, thankfully) where he helps a young singer with her career.  As I was watching that show, I had wanted to find a way to do that with MDZS, making Lan Wangji the one to be transported to the modern world.

    I figured out a way, and it's a multi-fandom crossover event, in that there will be a lot of other bands who are cameos from other fandoms, but the Velvet Goldmine connection is major, because Wei Wuxian's band is trying to enter a contest that will net them a contract from the record label owned by the now-septuagenarian Curt Wild.  And Wei Wuxian lives in the Chinatown of a fictional city that is actually the setting of my first visual novel, A Song of Warriors...just because.  (That visual novel was itself heavily inspired by Velvet Goldmine, which is kinda meta in and of itself, but...)

    I bring this up because it's particularly mind-boggling in connection with what happened today.

    There's a tradition in my family of family visits on the weekends.  Used to be on Sundays only, but it gets moved around a lot these days, and so today my brother and I went to visit my parents even though it's Saturday.  We made the rash decision to eat out for lunch instead of getting take-out somewhere, and that was crazy because there were mobs of people everywhere.

    After we ate, we went back to my parents' house to watch some TV together, because for some reason that's what we do.  And what we watched was the first episode of the Hulu show Interior Chinatown.  Which is set in the Chinatown of a fictional city.

    After that, my brother wanted to watch the 1980s-styled opening credits for the Obi-wan Kenobi mini-series that someone had put on Youtube a while back.  And that starred Ewan McGregor.  Who played Curt Wild.  (And the present-day sequences of Velvet Goldmine took place in the 1980s.  As did my visual novel, in fact.)

    This level of coincidence is just too weird, you know?

    Kinda freaks me out.

    It's like proof that we don't live in the real world, we live in a Matrix-like fake world.  One that I suspect has a very nasty virus.

    Uh.

    Yeah.

    Anyway.

    Here's my current NotNaNo graphs.

Current total is 44,048 words.  The by-the-day chart, though...

    It just shouldn't look like that.

    At all.

IWSG I don't think I can today

 

    I don't...

    I'm just really scared right now.

    How am I supposed to write in a world like this?

    I can't even think right now.  I just want to curl up in a corner and cry.

    I'm going to try to write, but who knows if it will work.