IWSG - Floundering About

 First IWSG post at the new blog!  Wow.  (My old one was at this URL.  And unfortunately I didn't see a way to remove the old one from the linky list...*cough*)  And no, I'm not really in love with this new layout.  It's a work in progress.  Hopefully it'll be less, you know, awful by next month.

(since I'm not sure if I'll be able to do a sidebar display like I used to, here's this)

Right, so, I feel like I have a lot of writing stuff to talk about.  It's sort of weird how it happened (in fact, I couldn't trace it out if I wanted to, even though it's happened in less than a month), but I ended up getting into writing text games.  I'm currently working on two for game jams at itch.io.  One of them is a sort of odd Trojan War game, and the other is adapting the first chapter of one of my novels into a nearly 20,000 word mini-adventure.  (I also did a sort of dark humor self-parody game for a previous game jam, if anyone's interested in checking it out.)

The adaptation game is a work in progress, but I've actually already posted the super-rough draft, and would really like some feedback if anyone was willing to wade through nearly 20k of text, most of which has only gotten one low-level editing pass.  (You can find the posted draft here.)  So, short version about the original novel it's adapting:  it's the first in a series of seven, which I intended to  be approximately Young Adult level, though I'm not sure if they actually are, featuring the illegitimate offspring of three of the greatest Achaian figures from the Trojan War.  Two are teenage girls original to the novel (though named after genuine mythological figures) and are the daughters of Achilles and Odysseus, fathered on a pair of Greek sisters enslaved in the town of Methymna on Lesbos when the two men went there overnight just weeks before Achilles' death.  (The reasons they were there are a genuine part of the Trojan War myth (or at least were by the time of the late texts that actually survive) but would take too long to go into here.)  The third is Eurysakes, the son of Aias of Salamis by his concubine Tekmessa; Eurysakes is a genuine mythological figure (Sophocles even wrote a play about him, though the play is lost) about whom we don't actually know that much, though I suspect most of what I have done with him is dead wrong.  (It was partially inspired by misreading, or rather misinterpreting, the one sentence summary of what the Sophocles play is believed to have been about.  And while I know my version is almost certainly wrong, I prefer it to the real one, and feel justified using it since a) there's no surviving text to prove that I am in fact wrong and b) mine is not outside the realm of possibility, given the types of things that happen in Greek myths.)

Anyway, I wrote all seven of the novels in a burst of "inspiration" back in 2014, and after setting them aside awhile, just kind of left them aside, for reasons I don't entirely remember.  (I am, btw, eventually going to meander my way to a proper insecurity.  There's just a lot of background building up to it first.)  As I mentioned a couple of times on the old blog, earlier this year, I ended up looking back at these novels and realized that they were actually a lot better than I remembered.  They needed even more work than I had remembered, but there was a lot there that was worth salvaging.  And despite all the work they needed, it still seemed less difficult to salvage them than to go back to world-building for my low-fantasy-with-hints-of-steampunk first-in-a-series novel that needs its world completed before its next rewrite, so I turned my attention back to this quasi-YA Greek myth series instead.  (The series needs a name, btw, if anyone's good at coming up with series names.  I suck at titles of all sorts, so I'm stymied as to naming the series.  Heck, a lot of the novels are probably going to need new names.  I've already retitled the first one, but I'm not sure the new title is much better than the old one.)

A few things particularly stood out as needing fixing in the novels as they stand.  Well, actually, a lot of things did, but most of them were the easier "fix them as I go" type things, specific only to their circumstances.  However, one thing that needed crucial repair and standardization was the intellect of the daughter of Achilles, Atalanta; sometimes she was just a little bit dim and other times she was impossibly moronic.  Another thing that needed standardization was the relationship between her and her cousin Ariadne; I had at some point (around 2015,  think) tried to write an eighth book, in which Eurysakes witnessed Ariadne trying to 'protect' Atalanta from a potential suitor (who Atalanta could have broken in half like a twig), and after talking to her about it for a few minutes, he suddenly says "I see" and immediately begins trying to explain to Ariadne why she can never act on her romantic desires for Atalanta, since they're almost more sisters than cousins, etc.  Ariadne, of course, denied it, but for me it was very much a lightbulb moment, because yes, Ariadne was absolutely in love with Atalanta, and somehow I had never picked up on it until one that moment.  (How I could write a situation without understanding it is another question entirely, of course...)  So I wanted to go back and put that into the rewrites, so that it would hopefully come across in the new version that Atalanta was asexual and Ariadne was a lesbian in the modern figurative sense (as well as being a Lesbian in the literal sense of having been born and raised on Lebsos) but didn't want to admit or understand that about herself.

So, I tried to add that into the rewritten first chapter, which covers the girls' escape from the state of slavery into which they had been born.  In the original draft, it was pretty hastily done, because I wanted to get to the good stuff after they joined up with Eurysakes and made their way to the partially rebuilt Troy.  In the old version, they had run away because of a potentially groundless rumor that they were both  being sold to a cult in Thrace that might or might not want to sacrifice them to barbarian gods.  In the new version, they decide to escape because it is very definite that they are going to be separated, one being sent to Thessaly and the other to Thrace.  We get to see their lives in Methymna for a few days instead of one evening, and to meet some of the other slaves and servants, and so forth.  And pretty much everyone other than Atalanta and Ariadne themselves is entirely aware of the romantic nature of Ariadne's affections for Atalanta, which Ariadne consistently denies to herself whenever she hears anyone mention it.

It's...I feel like I may have gone too far.  I mean, I was going for "the lady doth protest too much" but I'm not sure it's evident that it's denial-because-it's-true rather than denial-because-it's-false.  (Though the part where Atalanta is shy about changing her clothes in front of her cousin because she doesn't like the way she stares at her breasts might make it more obvious that it's true.  Though it's probably anachronistic.  (It would definitely be anachronistic if they lived in Greece rather than in Hittite territory, since as far as we can tell, it was absolutely normal for Mycenaean women to walk around with their breasts hanging out of their dresses.) But even though that makes Ariadne's affections more obvious, I'm not sure if it comes off feeling weird or otherwise awful in context.)  Basically, I'm worried that my attempts to add in what was supposed to be subtle positive LGBTQ+ content may have ended up looking almost homophobic.

While this is a problem all around, it would especially be a problem if I were to release the game version of the escape.  (I haven't decided yet if I want to game-ify the whole novel or not.  It's kind of fun, actually, writing all the awful things that can happen if they do the wrong thing in a given situation, and helps to gloss over my basic problem of my heroes being too good at avoiding the worst conflicts.)  Naturally, in the whole novel, there's more time to normalize both halves of the situation, to show that Atalanta is just as uncomfortable when she realizes men are staring at her desirously, and to show Ariadne flirting with other girls (there's actually a place in the original draft where the girls are disguised as young men and a local girl is flirting with Ariadne, so it'll actually work better if I just turn that around and it's Ariadne who's doing the flirting), but I'm worried about how it's going to look if I release this one section by itself as was my original plan.

I'm new to the whole "interactive fiction" thing, so I don't know how people react to it yet.  I'm well accustomed to regular fiction and how people react.  (Though I suspect in my case the primary way will be the same:  to ignore it completely because I suck as a writer.)

So, that's my current insecurity.  (That and that I'm spend a crazy amount of time working on this Trojan War game, even after I figured out ways that I'm doing a lot of stuff wrong, but I figured it probably made more sense to get to the end of the game in the ridiculously pedestrian way I've been going, and then go back and fix it up to the more elegant behind-the-screen solutions and adding in things like actually keeping track of supplies and troops and things instead of just making everything sort of random.  But it feels like I'm doing things backwards...though I guess that's just what happens if you try something this ambitious while you're still in the process of teaching yourself the programming language you're using.)