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  The short version is that because my research before I wrote the initial draft (in 2014) was using such outdated texts, almost everything I had "learned" in that research was wrong.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.

IWSG: What's in an ending?

 

    Since I've had this post sitting around 3/4 finished since like the 10th of April, and since it's about writing, I figure I may as well use it for this month's ISWG post.

    Instead of talking about the month's suggested question (the answer to that being mostly that I'm afraid of people actually reading anything I wrote, but simultaneously kind of afraid of them not reading it, too), I'm going to talk about endings.

    Or, more accurately, what is it that I look for in an ending?

    I ask because, well...where to start?

    Okay, so in my previous post I mentioned a fantasy novel I had bought on a whim earlier, a book I had decided would be up next from my "to read" pile.

    That book was fantasy in the sense of "historical setting but folklore is real."  So nothing strictly speaking invented for the novel, that kind of thing.

    When I finished reading it, I found the ending had left a bad taste in my mouth (in my mind?) but I'm not even sure why.

    It wasn't a bad ending by any conventional definition:  the heroes were triumphant, they didn't die, and their loved ones didn't die.  So, it should have been satisfying, yes?

    And yet, for some reason, it wasn't.  Not for me.  And I don't know why.

    I can identify a few things that may have been factors:

1. There is a sword in the novel.  It comes up early on and is brought up periodically throughout to ensure the reader hasn't forgotten its existence, then in the final climactic confrontation it's revealed to be the legendary sword itself!  Problem:  because this novel was based in real world folklore, said legendary sword is a very famous one from actual folklore and so I clocked it literally as soon as it was first mentioned.  Where it had been found signaled it as absolutely that sword and no other.  So what was probably(?) intended to be at least a little surprising was instead a "ho hum" moment because it was so incredibly obvious.
2. There's a fake-out moment (more than just a moment, really; it's maybe a chapter and a half long) before the final climax where our first-person narrator makes it sound like she's killed one of her companions.  That leaves a nasty feeling behind even when you're relatively sure she's lying.  I don't like that nasty feeling, and it definitely soured me on the entire thing, despite that it did turn out that she had not killed her friend.
3. The ending is very "restoration of the status quo" despite that the status quo in question was definitely not nice.  Obviously, as it was a historical setting (+folklore being real) the author was not free to change up the status quo beyond maybe changing things in that one village, which was made clear not to be the case.  But it just...it definitely left me feeling like "why didn't they accomplish more?"  Even if there really wasn't much more they could have accomplished.

    Following soon on the heels of that, I finished playing the Dragon Quest III remake...and was left feeling very underwhelmed by the ending.  Admittedly, Dragon Quest as a whole is not as story-intensive as some other JRPG series are (though the stories did become richer and more central to the experience as the series went on) and the endings are often pretty lackluster, but something about that particular ending left me particularly not satisfied.  Again, I can't even put my finger on what about it I was unsatisfied with.  Though the player character's lack of a homecoming didn't help...and the post-credits scene lost any punch it was supposed to have because although I was positive I had heard the name mentioned at the very end before, I have no idea quite where or who he was.  (Logically, you would expect them to be setting up that he's the big bad of IV, only I'm pretty dang sure that was not the name of the guy who was manipulating Psarro, so...also, after the scene it went "To be continued in" the HD remake of the first two games, so...are they saying that III somehow took place before I and II?  I am confused by that logic...but I just checked on the Dragon Quest wiki, and yes, that's what they're saying, which is very strange to me, but the end of Dragon Quest VI also seemed to be claiming that it was before IV and V, so...that's weird, but...)

    Anyway, so double whammy of "endings that left me unsatisfied without actually being bad" in short order.  (I was similarly dissatisfied with the ending of Zenshu, but in that case I know exactly why.  Though it still wasn't a bad ending, per se.  But that was a week or so earlier anyway.)

    Net result, it has me wondering if I am applying a double standard.  Am I being harder on the endings of works written by others than I am on my own endings?

    Thinking about it logically...I should analyze my own endings and see how they fit the criteria I feel like I gathered in looking at why that novel and Dragon Quest III left me feeling less than pleased.

    Setting aside fanfic for the moment, since there are always aspects there that are trying to tie together canon material with material of my own invention and thus making endings trickier to arrange, I'm going to look at series of books I'm 3/7 of the way through rewriting.  But since this is now an IWSG post and a few people will actually read it, I'll be more vague than I was originally going to be.

1. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is not (though as of the ending it's not clear how much of a shake-up it will be, and it's later books that illuminate that)
2. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is improved
3. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is partially upheld and partially improved
4. From here on, I haven't done the rewrites (I'm working on the final research for book 4 now, in fact), so the endings aren't set yet.  Heroes triumph, divine status quo upheld.  The mortal status quo feels like it wasn't particularly even involved in this book.  In large part because my ancient Greek heroes were visiting Babylon, and I didn't have enough information about Late Bronze Age Babylon and its culture (plus I hadn't readjusted the chronology, so I thought they would be visiting in a period when Babylon was under Assyrian control, which was going to get heckin' awkward to write about without way more information than I had available to me).  Even with the new research I've done, I feel like I won't be able to connect events much to what's going on among the actual human beings because the current version is so disconnected that even in the new version the rest of humanity won't too be much impacted by the heroes winning the day.  (Aside from, you know, not getting exterminated by the machinations of the villains.)
5. There's a lot about the ending of this one that I don't even remember.  (I wrote the originals in 2014...and last reread the old drafts in 2020...)  I know the heroes triumph and that the divine status quo is mostly upheld (the villains of the series are trying to off the Olympian gods, ya see, so that comes up a lot), but I can't recall if there's any impact on the status quo of the mortal world at all.  I feel like this one, too, is a bit divorced from human society, though not as much so as the previous book.  They travel a lot in this one, too, but the travel isn't as responsible as in book 4, since their travel is mostly to Egypt and Crete, and I was able to research Egypt a lot more easily at the time, and I'm following the myths to treat Crete at this period as being basically the same as mainland Greece (which is probably not actually the slightest bit archaeologically accurate for this period, but I figured the myths needed to outweigh reality for a myth-based setting).
6. Heroes triumph but at a cost, divine status quo sort of maintained and sort of shaken up, mortal status quo not enormously altered but at least slightly improved.  Sort of.  (I mean, an inheritance issue that could have led to warfare and/or fratricide/sororicide is settled peacefully.  That's something, right?)
7. Heroes ultimately (if only barely) triumph, and the divine status quo is as protected as it can get when you realize that the gods are powered/created by human belief and the Late Bronze Age has about a generation left before its impending collapse.  (And yes, that's actually a minor plot point in the novels.  Or maybe more of a talking point a few times.  It comes up, anyway.)  Again, this one as I recall it is not enormously connected to the actions of other people, in part because they're really going all over the place in this one; they hit a large number of places, including stuff much further north where I had pretty much zero clue what the culture in the region would be at that time.  (I still don't fully know, even though I've done a little more research since then.)  There is at least a little improvement of the mortal status quo--if only for a small slice of it--though, so that's something?

    Looking at all of those, I feel like only the first three would meet my current standards.  Though of course books 4-7 are kind of more "part of a series" than the first three are.  Or rather...how do I explain?  Book 3's ending is where the heroes learn that they have a powerful enemy who's been involved with everything that they've had to deal with up until now.  Book 4 starts out with them actively trying to learn more about this enemy, and that continues right up until they finally deal with said enemy in the climax of book 7.  Because of all that, it's kind of like...the endings don't fully matter as much until reaching the ending of book 7?  Which doesn't seem right, but that's definitely how my brain perceives it no matter what.  (Maybe it's the side-effect of growing up watching the Star Wars movies constantly, and The Empire Strikes Back is the only one with an unsatisfying ending...)

    Obviously, since I haven't yet started the rewriting process for books 4-7, I can do what little is available to me to fix the parts of the endings that aren't up to my current standings for an ending, but...for some of them that might require more restructuring than I really want to put into the process.  Less like a new draft and more like a fully new novel, you know?  I'd like to get the rest of the series finished and released (in what minimal sense the first three count as released, anyway) sooner rather than later, and having to do that much reworking would definitely delay me a lot.

    I guess what most gets to me about this is that I'm not actually sure how much it matters.  Or rather, I don't actually know what other people look for in an ending.  Would most people be annoyed by getting through a novel and finding that the heroes' victory didn't do anything to change the status quo of the world around them?  (Since this is the Late Bronze Age, said status quo is definitely not pleasant, but there's not much I can do about that, y'know?  I'm not as confined by historical reality as the novel that set me onto thinking about all this, but I'm still bound to the larger aspects.)

    Even more importantly, are readers going to get frustrated that the endings become less satisfying after the heroes become aware of the larger flow of events and the actions of the mysterious villain behind it all?  I mean, to be clear, this is not an "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" situation with the same enemy just running off at the end of the book to come back working some new evil in the next novel.  There are smaller villains they defeat each time (though I think in the current draft both 5 and 6 have the same sub-villain, who had left a lesser (but also physically much larger) sub-villain to be the final boss of book 5) so it's at least got that much satisfaction, but...gnh.

    I'm not sure there is any real answer to this.

    I'm also not sure how many people have actually read any of the first three, or how many people are going to read the remaining four whenever they're made available.  And I guess it shouldn't even matter, since I'm making the books available for free on itch.io and AO3, so it's not like I'm trying to sell copies or anything.  I guess I just don't want to disappoint anyone who might read them, you know?

    I know one thing that probably turns people off who do encounter the books is the fact that the heroes are striving to protect the Olympian gods when a lot of modern works tend to want to get rid of them  or at least change them since they were not, in fact, very nice, and did a lot of genuinely horrible things.  But that's a very modern perspective on the Olympian gods.  The people of ancient Greece did not think of them that way.  Of course, we don't fully know how they did think of them, since they didn't write down their cultic practices, and thus the versions of the gods reflected in the myths are not actually the same versions that they actively worshiped.  (This is especially the case for Hera.)  Of course, in the end, I'm not trying to write about the actual religion versions of the Greek gods, but the mythological version, but that still comes down to the same thing, doesn't it?  If I want to use the Heroic Age setting and not completely betray the epic poetry that this is supposed to be building off of (though my writing is nowhere near good enough to be mentioned in the same conversation as masterworks that have survived more than two thousand years!), then the heroes have to believe in and want to win the support of the gods, and if they ever disrespect the gods, they have to suffer because of it.  Because that's what happens in the myths:  you tick off a god, you suffer and probably die.  (Unless you're Agamemnon, then when you tick off a god, you get hundreds or thousands of your own men killed (and/or your daughter) and you just sit there and survive it like a monster.)

    So that's something I could in theory change that might make my works more palatable to more people, but I don't want to do that, because that's not what I'm going for.

    I should probably write something else where I'm free to have characters tell the gods "get lost!" when they do the awful stuff they're known for.  (I should write a visual novel where Zeus finally gets his for all his skirt-chasing.  That would be epic.)

    ...I feel like I have wandered way off my original topic of "endings."

    Given that I am very bad at them, somehow that seems appropriate.

IWSG: April 2025

 

    Since I don't have much to say about my writing at the moment aside from an extension of the general "I can't seem to get anything done and my methods are feeling like they're interfering with my progress" that I was saying last month, I guess I'll do the suggested discussion question instead.

April 2 question - What fantasy character would you like to fight, go on a quest with, or have a beer/glass of wine with?

    Well.

    Given my current obsession, I feel like the obvious answer is "Wei Wuxian."  But that's kinda cheating?  Because technically who I would want there would be both Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji so I could watch them being all sweetly romantic with each other.  (Though if they look like the actors from The Untamed then I would probably be satisfied with just Wei Wuxian because damn is he pretty!  I mean, both of them are, but I could definitely stare at Xiao Zhan in Wei Wuxian mode all day and then some.)

    As I try to think of others I might want to meet--well, I guess to answer the question properly it would have to be "go on a quest with" 'cause no hecking way am I fighting anyone, and I don't like alcohol in any form, so beer and wine are vomitously out--I am struck by how little of my recent fantasy reading/watching has actually been Western in origin.  'Cause my first thought after Wei Wuxian is Lina Inverse (a thought quickly rejected, ofc, because being around Lina Inverse can be pretty hazardous to one's health, particularly if it's the anime version of Lina rather than the light novel version, as she casts 'Dragon Slave' a lot more often in the anime than in the novels), and my next thought after that was Maomao but actually she doesn't count because The Apothecary Diaries is not a fantasy.  (I'm not quite sure what it does count as, though.  It's hard to call it 'historical fiction' since it's in a made-up setting that merely resembles Imperial China in virtually every respect, and it's not exactly a 'palace novel,' either, so...but either way there's no magic or monsters, so definitely not a fantasy.)  Holo might also be fun to meet, especially if there was some reason for her to revert to her giant wolf form.

    After that, my mind flits about to various video game characters, again mostly Japanese in origin.

    Hmm.

    Maybe the thing to take away from this is that I need to read more fantasy works that didn't originate in Japan or China.  (Lately most of them have been Chinese, but I do have a big stack of the Slayers light novels waiting for me, though I wanted to wait until all of them are out physically so I can read the entire series in one giant binge.)  Or at least that I should try to read some that are less "pop culture" and more "culture" if that distinction makes sense; light novels and web novels are kinda...I mean, they're less the sort of thing that my parents would look down on than manga and graphic novels, but they're still...they feel somehow less "legit"...but maybe that's just a generational issue and younger people don't feel like they're failing as readers to have shelves and shelves full of light novels...?

    Though I did actually buy an English-language fantasy novel on a whim while I was picking up the first volume of Legend of Exorcism, now that I think about it.  I should read that next.  (Though the chances of any of its characters fitting the bill for this question are pretty slim...)  Uh, when I say "English-language fantasy novel" I mean "fantasy novel that was always in English rather than one that's been translated into English" since I am absolutely rubbish at learning languages.  (Also doesn't help that two of the three foreign languages I spent any serious amount of time learning were dead languages.  Limited number of things to read in those.)

    I mean, not to say that I haven't read a fair chunk of English-language fantasy in my time, but most of it has not really stuck with me aside from The Last Unicorn and the works of Tolkien, and to some extent the Prydain Chronicles.  Oh, and several of the Discworld novels, but my brain tends to classify those more as comedy than fantasy, even though they are most certainly fantasy.  (Wait, does Alice in Wonderland count as fantasy?  I remember that and Through the Looking Glass quite well, too...)  As to non-English-language (originally) but still Western works of fantasy...all that leaps to mind is that I've read The Neverending Story a couple of times (and even bought an untranslated copy back when I thought I was going to finally actually learn German during my studies for my Master's Degree) but mostly the details that stick with me are only the ones most closely connected to what's in the movie.  (A shameful truth, but I've only read the novel a few times, whereas I've seen the movie countless times.)

    ...anyway...I guess...getting back to the original question...

    I suppose the answer really is 'Wei Wuxian' at the moment.  Either in the pre-fall of Lotus Pier teenage version or in the post-canon version, but definitely not any of the versions in between, as I'd want to feel sure that I would survive the 'quest' and also that I wouldn't have to witness the horrors of war or him acting all...well, I wouldn't want to see him at his lowest psychological point, because he got pretty grim and unlike his usual cheerful self in there for a while, and that would be very upsetting to witness.  (One of many changes for the live-action drama was to tone that personality shift down to make for a more pleasant viewing experience...)  The teenage version might be better for me, personally, since even post-canon there would likely still be a lot of fierce corpses involved in any 'quest' Wei Wuxian might go on, and I'm pretty squeamish, so I don't know if I could handle being around any fierce corpses (other than Wen Ning).

    Getting to experience the world he lives in would really help me trying to capture very different worlds from my own in my writing, as would studying his behavior in person, as his cheerful, indefatigable, extroverted, extremely confident personality is pretty much the opposite of mine in most respects.  (And yes, of course I would also want to watch him and Lan Wangji making eyes at each other, because who wouldn't want to watch that?  Though if it was the teenage version of Wei Wuxian, then Lan Wangji wouldn't be there, but Jiang Cheng probably would be, and I do love the brotherly relationship between Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, so that would be fun to witness, too.)

    Wait, y'know who else might be fun to go on a quest with? The Luggage from Discworld.  It can carry basically anything you might need with you, and you could probably ride it if the need arose.  😅

IWSG: um...March

    As usual, I am having trouble writing.  Also having trouble with everything else, but that's an entirely different issue.

    One thing that's particularly frustrating me is that I've spent so long being a pantser that I kinda don't know how to write any other way any more, and I had a project I wanted to do that really needs to be planned out pretty carefully before I can start writing it.

    So I got to a certain point in the planning process and just...stopped.

    Not because I didn't want to do the project anymore, but because I just couldn't go any further.

    I needed to fully define the supporting characters and plan out their side stories, and....I just couldn't.  When I tried, I'd just sit there, staring at my planning document for a while, then give up and do something else.

    This happened over and over again until I eventually stopped even opening the file.

    I don't know how to rewire my writing brain.  I've been writing the same basic way since the 1990s.  Admittedly, things have changed a little, in that now I write my ideas down rather than trusting that I'll remember them, but they're still pretty nebulous, especially as they progress; I might have a pretty strong outline for the opening, and a relatively well-defined idea of the early middle, but the "outlines" always eventually devolve into "not sure where it goes from there, but the good guys win in the end" territory.  And sure, eventually I get near the vague parts and find myself writing a new partial outline, which then takes me through another section of the story, but it's still more pantsing than plotting, you know?

    Which is fine if it's just silly fan fiction or a novel I don't ever intend to show to others.

    It's a different issue entirely when it's the idea for a visual novel that would require me to hire artists and such in order for the final project to be completed.  I can't waste my money and/or their time working on a project that can never go anywhere because I can't visualize the details of the story until I've worked on part of the story.

    Admittedly, I wouldn't want to hire artists until I'd written a full draft of the script anyway, but if I can't ever start writing it, then it's still wrecked up.  And because it's something more complicated than I usually attempt--even though each story is planned to be linear, with only flavor text different based on player choice, the idea is still to have each major NPC have their own line of (mostly optional) sidequests to give them each their own story--I can't just say "well, heck with it, I'll just start writing and hope for the best!" because the best is not what would happen if I do.  It would just be my usual muddled mess.

    It's very frustrating and I have no idea what I can possibly do about it.

Finally remembered the last thing!

     After I failed to remember my last MDZS thing to add it to the previous "oh I forgot some stuff" post, I finally remembered it.

    It's that I was stunned to see that Crunchyroll has added the animated version of MDZS to streaming.  They didn't exactly put any effort into its presentation on the page for the series, though:  there's literally no description of the story (I can only think of one other show I've ever clicked on that left that space entirely blank, and that was something that was simulcasting so I had assumed they had no idea how to describe its story) and for the first two seasons the episodes have thumbnails and titles but no episode summaries.  Then for the final season and the quasi-fourth season (made up of mini episodes of things that happened during the earlier seasons that apparently they just left out) they have episode summaries but no thumbnails.  Everything about the show's page on Crunchyroll is just sort of "wtf." 😰  (Okay, actually, it seems like episode summaries are only available on the console version of Crunchyroll, as I just went to the version on my computer to double-check something and found no access to episode summaries at all.  Which is particularly weird all around, but maybe I'm just failing to navigate the PC version correctly.)

    The second time I clicked on it to have a look at the wtf-ness of it all (several days later than the initial time), I noticed something appalling in the descriptions of the episodes in that final season: