Not-NaNo Final Day!

 Uh...well...yup.

It's the last day of November.

Not sure what else I can say.

I did at least get a little writing done today.  Some of it was actually pretty good, in fact.  The cousins have arrived at the port in Troy now (one major flaw here is that I have zero idea what kind of port and/or docks various cities had in the Late Bronze Age, and I've just kind of flubbed around on the assumption that there was something kinda/sorta like what was present in the historic era in Greece, which may well be completely wrong), and I had some fun with the port official who greeted them and tried to intimidate them with his officialness...until Eurysakes (who is this enormous guy in full armor and carrying a shield as big as he is) let him know that he was the son of the #2 Greek champion from the war.  Then the official got kind of pale and frightened and yet was still trying to yap intimidatingly.

Then after he went away, the captain of the boat (who had fought in the war, as I feel like maybe I mentioned at some point before?) helped identify some of the foreign visitors they were seeing on the shore, and when he spotted some Ethiopians he changed the subject to tell them about the former king of Ethiopia, Memnon, who was the most beautiful man who fought in the Trojan War, and how there were whispers (when no one important could hear them) that Achilles had actually killed him out of jealousy because he'd never met a man better-looking than himself before.  I was also able to mention what most accounts don't, that Memnon had a brother, who was now ruling Ethiopia in his place.

So that was kind of fun.

I probably would have gotten a lot more done, but then I heard someone messing around on my porch, and it was someone from the water company, I saw as they drove off again, and I was suddenly afraid that I was behind on my payments and they were going to shut off my water (even though I had paid my previous bill on time), so I had to turn off my good laptop and turn on my internet laptop to check and see that no, I was had no payments due at this time, so whatever the heck that guy was doing, it wasn't about that.  (I still kind of want to know what it was, but...I have no idea who the heck I could ask!)  In any case, then I started looking at Cyber Monday sales, and there went most of my day.  (*sigh*)

I was going to turn in the first ten pages of my proofreading work, only when I went back to have a look at them to make sure there weren't any errors in my own text, I noticed some spots where I missed the original author using the wrong tense, so I have to go back and fix that before I can turn in the work.  (And I can't do that on this computer, because it would put the wrong name on the comments, as I am doing my proofing work under my pen name not my real name, and I can't find a way to make the modern Word change what name it uses on the comments.  Which sounds like a dumb reason, but...)

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Anyway, my total time in November spent working on my various writing projects turned out to be 45:18:10.98.  Which is not the least bit cool, but...hey, at least now I can close the timer app on my phone without worrying it'll erase my hour count! ;)

I wanted to calculate my rough number of words (though they can't be totally accurate since there was a lot of coding and stuff), but due to the panic over the guy from the water company, that didn't happen.  I'll calculate that by IWSG on Wednesday. ;)  (I'm pretty sure The Walls of Troy got up to about 23k, and then the glossary for Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? was over 17k, pre-coding, so that's like 40k, so I actually got pretty close to hitting the official NaNo mark even though I was going for time rather than words.  That's something, right?)

Not-NaNo Day 29: Oh boy...

 *cough*

Wow.  I skipped from day 25 to day 29.

Admittedly, due to the holiday, I ended up not writing at all on the 26th, and I'm not so sure I wrote on the 27th, either.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I didn't?  No, wait, I must have?

Ugh.  Something's just gone wrong with me on this.

(Although, let's be honest, I miss the nice keep-track-of-it-for-you angle of the official NaNo site.  Y'know, before they butchered it.)

I just haven't been able to do much the last few days.

Part of it was the holiday, part of it was panic over my basement door (the new guy who came to look at it promised to send an estimate on Tuesday...you know, after four nights of below freezing temperatures), and part of it was general problems that are plaguing me in everything (mostly to do with my weight issues, ultimately), and part of it was distraction by having gotten addicted to a particularly time-sucking video game, but there's definitely something else going wrong, too.

I think maybe part of it is because this rewrite puts me in a weird place, and not because I'm trying to change a novel into interactive fiction.  The problem is that some scenes I am keeping all but unchanged, other scenes I'm keeping with modifications, and other scenes are being entirely discarded for new ones.  Just when I'll get into the groove of writing something new, I end up having to change to merely modify a different scene, or copy another whole-cloth.  It's very disruptive to my rhythm.

But I think it's also because I'm starting to really need to work again.

And I don't mean "work on my novel" work.  I mean, I need a job again.

Which is a problem, considering that my old job (which it was implied I might be allowed to resume when the museum's finances allow them to start hiring people again) will at this rate not be available again until sometime late in 2022...maybe.

And with my minimal employment history, I'm not really qualified for...well, for anything really, but particularly not for anything unrelated to my previous career.  Because yeah, my MA is not in historic preservation or anything closely related to it, but I do have the experience of five years employment in a position that eventually grew the title curator/registrar (without its functions significantly changing, meaning I was doing that job all along, just without the name), plus five further years before that as a volunteer doing basically the same thing.  That experience might be enough to get another museum to hire me (if they don't mind my broken social skills), but with the pandemic, no museums are open, and therefore cannot possibly be hiring right now.  So getting a job outside the house is currently off the table.

And yet a job outside the house is, I think, exactly what I need right now.  In general, and in order to help me focus on my writing.

It's a problem, one without any solution I can see.  (Without any solution that does not involve magic and/or time travel, anyway.  Or benevolent aliens.  Or rifts to other dimensions.  Basically, anything sci-fi or fantasy.)

Ack.  This went sideways into crazytown.

Sorry.

Anyway, on Friday I did manage to get about two hours writing done.  And then yesterday I managed about five minutes. :(  I mean, I did spend longer than than that reading over what I'd done to remind myself of where I was and what was going on, etc, but I'm not counting that time.

Thankfully, I had long since decided (though I'm not sure I ever officially said so on the blog) to reduce my hour count goal from 60 to 45, so I'm still good as long as I can manage to get some writing done today or tomorrow.

Which will probably be tomorrow, because I've set today aside to check my email, which can take all day if it's been too long since I last checked it (I think it's only been about a week this time, so hopefully it won't be too bad, esp. since the election is over...though I do keep getting email about sending financial support to the two Senate run-off elections in Georgia...), plus I am determined to actually get some proofreading done today, because the last three days I've opened the file, looked at the next paragraph and just kind of noped out of there for the day.  Which is not cool.  Not cool and not professional.  (And it's not like the paragraph was any worse than some of the ones I'd already done.  In fact, it wasn't as bad.  I've just been incredibly tired lately, and that makes me unwilling to face challenges like working or cleaning my house.  (Oh god, does my house need cleaning!  I need a magic wand and/or a robotic maid...)

Not-NaNo Day 25: Behind in my posts

 I'm behind in my posts about my Not-NaNo, but not in my actual writing.  I just haven't been posting because...honestly, because I didn't feel like booting up this computer just to write a blog post.  (That was at least one advantage to staying with Wordpress, in that it had an app and I could just write the post on my phone, but there doesn't seem to be an official app for Blogger.)

Anyway, I've been continuing to work on the rewrite of The Walls of Troy, though I have only found one very minor place to add any interactivity to it.  (Then again, the interactivity in The Cousins was also very minor, so maybe that's all right.)

I'm posting first thing in the morning not because I've already done today's writing (lol, haven't even thought about it yet) but because I had to boot up this computer in order to look up a phone number for someone who would actually fix my basement door before all my pipes freeze, unlike the handyman who's been promising to fix it for two months now, and responded to my text yesterday with a rather dismissive promise to do something that wouldn't even remotely solve the problem, because evidently he'd forgotten what the problem actually was.  Ugh.  So now I'm waiting for an actual company to call me back about fixing it, and hopefully I won't have to turn off my water on Friday before the temperature can drop below freezing.  (Hopefully.)

I'm trying to think if I had anything to say about the way the rewrite is progressing, but I think I said most of it last time, really.  Because although I had gotten to Eurysakes' first appearance, I still had to write their entire first conversation with him, plus several conversations (practically a negotiation, really) with the captain of his ship, an older man who had fought with their fathers in the Trojan War, and followed Teukros into exile after the war ended.

Ooh, that brings up an interesting point, though.  See, I'm writing this novel from a perspective of intimate familiarity with the myth and its various tangential myths, but most people who will  be reading the novel/game are coming from a point lacking in that familiarity.  So, when I mention Teukros going into exile after the war, I know the whole story behind that, but most other people do not, and it's really hard to know when to insert the explanation into the novel.  Some of what needs to be explained (not just about Teukros, but about various portions of the larger Trojan War myth) can be explained in the work, because the girls wouldn't know the deep dark secrets of various royal families, but other things are going to be common knowledge.

Take Teukros, for example.  At the time when this novel is taking place, he is the founder and king of the city of Salamis on the island of Cyprus, and he's the half-brother of Aias of Salamis.  That much is common knowledge in-universe, and the girls cannot possibly feign ignorance of it.  Given his name, they must at least suspect that his mother was Trojan (Teukros was the name of one of the three legendary figures at the origin of the city, the others being Tros and Ilos), but they probably don't realize that his mother was Hesione, one of King Priam's sisters.  Which is important because that means the current king of Troy, the son of Alexander, is actually a cousin of Teukros, which makes it rather awful that he's been refusing to have any official dealings with him, I only just now realized.  (Thankfully, that wouldn't be something that any of Teukros' people would bring up, but the king will sure as heck bring it up, which he had not done in the original version!)  I can't have the girls feign ignorance about who Teukros is or the fact that he's the ruler of Cyprian Salamis, because you know that there would be chatter about him in a royal palace on Lesbos, so they would have heard all about him.  Or at least, that much about him.  (Realistically, at least one of them should probably have heard the rumor that his mother was a sister of King Priam's.  Ariadne, after all, had been singing to entertain at royal feasts for several years, and that's the sort of thing that might come up around the royal dinner table.)

But there's the matter of his exile.  That they don't know about, because it pertains to the death of his brother, which I've already established they don't know about.  What happened, for those who might happen to read this who don't know the Trojan War very well, is that Aias and Odysseus both claimed the armor of Achilles after Achilles finally died.  After much debate and argument on the subject, the armor was awarded to Odysseus, despite that he wasn't as good a warrior and despite that in most post-Homeric versions, Aias and Achilles were first cousins.  This situation was intolerable to Aias, and he kind of snapped, and decided he was going to go kill Odysseus, take the armor, kill Agamemnon and a few others who also made the decision, and then go home.  Athene didn't want anything happening to her boy, so she cast a veil of madness over Aias, and he slaughtered the herds instead of his comrades.  About dawn, her veil was lifted and he saw what he had done, and was horrified by his own actions, throwing himself on his sword as the only way to preserve what little honor he had left.  Sophocles' play on the subject is really brilliant, and I absolutely recommend it.  (Especially since it's a rare example of a version of Odysseus on the Athenian stage who is not the epitome of evil.  He actually shows remorse for having unintentionally caused Aias to do this, and he convinces Agamemnon to allow Aias to be buried.)  As this was all quite scandalous and distressing, the assumption in my take on the immediately post-Trojan War Greek world is that most of Aias' fellow princes did not want to spread the tale, and thus it is still relatively unknown, so the girls know he died about the same time as Achilles, but they don't know how.  (The problem with that is that it's actually important to the plot of the second novel, so I can't put it in the actual text, but I'm not sure if it's important for the readers not to know, so I'm not sure if I should put it in the glossary or not.  Not like my not putting it in the glossary will do jack-all, considering things like Wikipedia and Google exist.)

Anyway, when Teukros returned to Salamis at the end of the war with his brother's concubine and the son that concubine had borne him, and with the tale of his brother's ignominious end, his father Telamon was outraged at Teukros' failure to prevent the tragedy, and banished him.  (Here's where my version diverges from the real myth:  I misunderstood the single sentence that was the entire summary of a lost tragedy (I think also by Sophocles) about Teukros and his nephew following the death of Telamon, and for some reason thought it meant that Telamon had rejected his grandson as well as his son.  So in my version, Telamon wouldn't allow the concubine and her son into Salamis, either, though in the real myth he did.  (Though Plutarch also mentions another son of Aias, without saying where he came from, so I make it that Aias had a pregnant wife when he left for the war, so Eurysakes has an older brother, and that's why Telamon felt he didn't need his legitimate son's illegitimate son.))  In his banishment, Teukros ends up in Cyprus, where he marries the daughter of a local king, and sets up his own kingdom, which he names after his erstwhile homeland, Salamis.  The fact that he named his new home after his old one the girls know, but why he did so instead of just going home, they don't.  And I can't count on my readers knowing that, either.  Admittedly, that's one of the reasons I was liking the idea of going with this as a text-based game (or rather, a lightly interactive piece of fiction), because then I get to have a glossary to explain all this stuff, but...the question is always how much to try to put into the main text (since one cannot count on people looking for this stuff in the glossary) and how much not to bother with.

Though my more immediate concern is how much I want to try to salvage of the original version, and how much I want to just write from scratch.  My first task today (now that I have an appointment with someone to look at the door) is to go over the first version of the novel and see what needs to be kept, what I would like to keep, and what needs to be just tossed right out, and then make up a bit of a plan for the order of events.  I mean, I know I need, for example, the fight against the brigands which in the original version was how they first gained access to the palace, because they were being rewarded for having done so, but I need to keep it because it gave them their first chance to have a major fight scene together as a trio (actually, it's their first major fight scene at all period), and because it let them meet several people who had key knowledge that was going to be important to them later.  But now I need a reason for them to go out and hunt down these bandits, and I can't just have the king ask them to do so, because that's really rude behavior for a host.  And I know I need the scenes in the various temples within Troy itself, but do I also need the scenes in Thymbria, where they meet Chryseis, her husband and her daughter?  I feel like the only major callback to that entire sequence later on is the fact that when they stay the night there, Atalanta has a dream in which Apollo comes to speak to her (and no, she's not just dreaming that Apollo is speaking to her; he actually has entered her dream to speak to her) and that gets referenced a lot in the later books, but Chryseis and her family not so much.  (Obviously, I can remove or rewrite any later references when I get to those books, but I want to see if there's any important character development potential there, that kind of thing.)

I think I just had an idea of how to get them out there to deal with the bandits, but I'm not sure how well it will work out.  I don't know how any of this is going to work.  I have to walk a very dangerous line dealing with Korythos, since he has some secrets which are probably going to be pretty freakin' obvious to the reader no matter how I handle them (one of them being blatant,  because no matter how much I only speak of the instigator of the war as Prince Alexander, everyone already knows him by the name Paris, but I can't reverse those, since Alexander is the name that is historically one that was part of the Trojan royal family), and I feel like if I try too hard to obscure some of those secrets, I'll just be insulting the reader's intelligence.

That's a worry for later, though.  Right now I want to jot down my ideas before I forget them.

Laters! :p

Not-NaNo Day 22: The More Things Change...

 So, I got in a good amount of writing today on The Walls of Troy.  All the way up to the appearance of the third member of the core cast, in fact.  But it's funny how changes have a way of snowballing.

When I changed the very brief pre-escape and escape sequence from the original draft of the novel into a 22,000 word text game, I changed a lot about the nature of how they got aboard a ship off of Lesbos.  Combining that with a better understanding of the geography and sailing times and suddenly I had the girls deposited in a half-rebuilt city that had been burned down during the war (by one of their fathers!) on the same day they had left the island, as opposed to dumped randomly on the Trojan shore several days later.

Add to that a better grip on just how guest-friendship and pre-monetary trade and travel worked, and a new wrinkle to the history of Troy following the war, and suddenly instead of meeting Eurysakes, son of Aias of Salamis, all alone at the grave of Achilles, where he had been deposited by his own ship, they meet the crew of his ship first, because his excuse to come to Troy at all was as an official visit on behalf of his uncle, founder and king of Cyprian Salamis.  So now instead of them walking to Troy from the site of the Greek camp, they're going to be sailing there in a Cypriote ship.  And instead of only meeting the new king after stopping some marauding bandits, they're going to be at a formal feast before setting out to fight the bandits.

There are going to be so many changed dynamics to this that it's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around it!  But the new version is going to be vastly improved over the old one, and that's what's important. :)

Unfortunately, I only got about an hour and a half written, because I exacerbated this injury I've been putting up with all freaking year. :(  Last year on New Year's Eve, I twisted my ankle really badly.  This is nothing new for me; I've had weak ankles for years.  This time was worse than usual, though, and I ended up on the floor in a lot of pain, much worse than usual.  I probably griped about it on my old blog a lot, but the short version is that when it wasn't even a little better after several days, I went to the urgent care center, they x-rayed it and did the usual sprained ankle stuff, only then they also said that I should see a specialist, because a chip had come off the bone.  That explained a lot to me, because I knew it had felt different at the time and ever since.  So I duly went to see a specialist, who laughed off the whole thing as "that's why I tell people not to go to urgent care centers, because they get all worked up over nothing."  It was totally routine and normal, he claimed, before giving me a sheet full of the usual exercises to do to strengthen the muscles.

Most of which I couldn't do because they hurt too much.

And here I am, close to a year later, and that oh-so-normal bone chip hasn't gone anywhere.

 Well, no, that's not technically true.  It's moved around inside my ankle.  It's done that a lot.  But it hasn't disintegrated and it hasn't reattached to the rest of the bone. And if this was normal and routine, one of those things would have happened.

Uh, yeah, so, anyway, point is, sometimes I do something a tiny bit wrong and the chip slips further than usual and it hurts like crazy.  And today when that happened, I had to stop writing because that would have made it worse.  :(  So, that sucked.  But there's not much I can do about it now.  It's pretty clear that bone chip is never going to go away on its own; the only thing I can hope for is to have it removed surgically, and I am not having any medical procedures done that aren't strictly necessary, not in the middle of a pandemic.  That's a really good way to risk getting contaminated.  So I'm just going to have to live with a lot of pain for another year or so.  Which sucks, but what else can I do?

But at least I have my writing to sustain me!  (Also my video games.  But that doesn't sound as good.)

Not-NaNo Day 21: Slight Progress

 So, the good news is that I finished the first section of that game I'm proofreading, and can send it back to the person whose game it is.  And I got about an hour of work done on The Walls of Troy.  (Though so far I haven't found any more places to put in any interactivity, which may become a slight problem.  Well, okay, no, technically I don't have to add in any interactivity:  it can just remain a book.  But I feel like the people who started following me on itch.io after The Cousins went up probably want to see the rest as a game, not a novel... (I am, btw, totally squeeing inside that people actually want to read the rest of the story!))

Anyway, the bad(?) news is that I got like zero hours of sleep last night.

About, I dunno, eleven o'clock last night, when I should have been winding down and getting my brain ready to shut off for the day, I heard this noise from outside.  It was like the noise when a bird decides to perch on the screen of my new window (seriously, they do that), only much, much, much more so.  Also longer and moving.

Best I can figure, there was something trying to jump from the tree to my roof (probably a raccoon, but we also have opossums in this area) and didn't quite make the jump, and ended up trying to grab hold of the screen to keep from completely falling straight down to the ground.  (I meant to go outside and check for damage to the screen today, but...well, it was cold and raining all day and I really didn't feel like getting out of my pajamas.  Because I am the queen of lazy slobs.)

Of course, when I heard that noise, I ran over and turned on the light just inside that window, to scare whatever it was away, without even pausing my game.  (Yes, yes, I was playing video games at eleven o'clock at night.  As I said, queen of lazy slobs.)

And then I left the light on.

All night.

I don't sleep very well with the lights on.  (I should probably get a sleep mask, but I don't think I'd sleep very well with one of those on my face, either.)

So while I did drift in and out of sleep (I know because in order to keep myself from thinking stuff that will keep me awake, I have to have some show I know really well streaming all night long, so any time I'm awake I can just focus on it until my brain gives up and lets me sleep), I didn't get more than maybe two hours at a time, and probably not even that much.

Which is why I actually thought I wasn't going to get anything accomplished today at all.  In fact, as soon as I got up and turned the light off this morning, I kind of contemplated trying to go right back to sleep.  If I hadn't had that proofreading job hanging over my head, I probably would have gone straight back to bed, in fact.

And when I finished with Animal Crossing and proofreading, it was almost lunch time, and my initial attempt to work on either The Walls of Troy or Love Allergy proved entirely fruitless, so I was completely ready to write the day off as one in which I got no work done on my own projects.

Then I decided to take a bath mid-afternoon (because by that time I was awake enough that I was pretty sure I wouldn't fall asleep in the tub) and while I was in the tub, I found myself thinking about how to handle the next stage of the story in The Walls of Troy, since the way they took ship from Methymna in the original book and the way they do in the new game version are completely incompatible with each other.  I not only came up with a pretty good way of handling it, I came up with new fake names for them to travel under while they're claiming to be boys.  (Though their pretense at being boys is complicated by the fact that they basically have to claim to be eunuchs, because boys whose voices haven't broken yet wouldn't be allowed out by themselves.  At least, not if Mycenaeans had the same policies in that regards as the Greeks of the historic period.)

So, end result, I actually got some pretty good stuff written today--well, okay, maybe "pretty good" is an exaggeration, but it's at least decent, and way better than the original version was--and made sufficient progress on the proofreading, despite no sleep.  I'm pretty chuffed about the end results, but I'm not going to be avoiding sleep in the future on the assumption that it improves my work results! :P

Not-NaNo Day 20: I'm not sure if it's "Already Day 20?!" or "Only Day 20?!"

 To quote myself, yesterday:

Still, I'm hoping to get through about ten pages today, which I can then send back to them tomorrow.  This may be highly naïve of me. 

O.M.G.

That was so far beyond naïve.  Like, words cannot describe how far beyond. 

Last night, in an hour and a half, I got through two pages.

This morning, in two hours, I hit my stride a bit better (or perhaps was just more prepared going in) and I got through three pages.  Which doesn't sound like much of an improvement, but it was at least some improvement.

I mean, I knew going in that the text was written in English by someone whose native language was not English.  And I've played badly translated visual novels before.  So I knew the kinds of things I was going to be seeing.

But I hadn't realized just how long it takes to leave correcting notes on every single one of those problems!  Especially the ones where it's not completely clear what word they actually wanted to use.  Those are real time drains.

Still, it's good experience, and I'm getting to really improve the final product of this person's game, so that's a great thing.

It is, however, going to have a serious impact on my own writing projects.  It's hard to get really into my own writing after going through that.

I did get about an hour done today, though.  Most of it, surprisingly, on the opening of Love Allergy after all.  Because guess what?  It turns out that my roughly fifteen-year-old, internet-free, writing-only laptop is so old that it can't play my TWINE game. :P  (Which I thought surely it would be able to, since it's an .html thing.)  Anyway, because of that, I had to set it aside until I could boot up this laptop and copy-paste the text into a new Word document to transfer over to the other computer.  And so I ended up working on Love Allergy after all.

I'm not at all sure if I'm taking it in the right direction.  I feel like I may have made the heroine a bit too much like myself.  And a twenty-year-old college junior should not be as jaded and cynical as a forty-five-year-old misanthrope like myself, whose misanthropy has only been heightened by seeing just how vile some people are behaving in the midst of a freaking global pandemic.  (Which isn't to say that there haven't been a lot of examples of people pulling together to help each other.  There have been a lot of those, but most of them were at the start of the pandemic, and now it seems like there are more and more anti-mask idiots out there who insist that it's all some kind of sick conspiracy, despite how many hundreds of thousands have died.  Seriously, what has to be wrong with a person that they could believe anyone would lie about something like that?)

Anyway, tomorrow I'll be able to get back to work on The Walls of Troy, so Love Allergy will probably be set aside.  (Probably.  At this point, I know better than to make any firm statements about anything.)

Not-NaNo Day19: Oops

 Soooo, yeah, it's not that I forgot to post my time yesterday.

It's that I didn't actually spend any time working on any of my writing projects yesterday.

I did try to!  I booted up the computer, looked over my notes on the cast and plot of Love Allergy...and completely felt nothing.  No impetus to write.  No sense of who the characters were or what I wanted from telling the story.  Not even a good idea for precisely how to begin the text, even though I know the situation and participants of the first scene.

Basically, I'm suddenly questioning whether I'll really write it.  I had envisioned it as a big "screw you" to the asexual-denying otome game I saw on the Switch store, but...that's kind of...petty.  Which isn't to say I haven't written things for petty reasons before, but generally there I had a sense of who I was writing about, etc.  So maybe it's still gonna happen, but maybe it's not.

Instead, I just took yesterday off.

This morning, I did spend some time working on the full rewrite/game-adaptation of the novel that I'm tentatively retitling The Walls of Troy.  Got through the prologue, but then I had to stop because the final version of the next part wasn't on my good (which is to say roughly fifteen-year-old) laptop, and my battery was dying anyway.

So, I've copied the final version off this computer onto a flashdrive, and will get back to work on that soon, but...I probably need to start out doing actual work first.

Y'see, I've finally gotten a proofreading job!  Yay!

Unfortunately, it's an unpaid proofreading job, but I look at as "something I can put on my CV to prove that a) I'm not just lazing around my house playing video games and b) actual professional experience as a proofreader, which puts me one step closer to getting paid proofreading gigs."

So, before I get back to my writing (not-NaNo notwithstanding) I need to put in some hours working on the actual work I've promised to someone else.  (Fortunately, they don't need it until December, and there's only about 80 pages, so I have time.  Still, I'm hoping to get through about ten pages today, which I can then send back to them tomorrow.  This may be highly naïve of me.  We'll just have to see how things progress.

Anyway, speaking of not-NaNo, I only got in about an hour and a half today, and I was about half an hour ahead the day before, so I'm basically caught up to where I should have been yesterday.  (Unless I decide to cut my desired hour count from 60 to 45 or 30.  In which case I'd be fine and dandy for reaching 45, and already past it for 30.)  I should be able to catch up, as long as the proofreading doesn't take too long, and/or I don't spend too much time playing video games.  *cough*

Not-NaNo Day 17: One More Project Done!

 Well, I say "done," but I doubt it's genuinely done.  I've uploaded version 1.1 of Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, but it's probably still got lots of errors.  (I mean, I was checking that the graphics worked today and I already spotted the enormous-yet-not-worthy-of-an-update problem that I forgot to re-italicize The Iliad and Troilus and Cressida in Patroclos' Glossary entry.)  Still, I'm hoping it's not got any more howling errors, and can stay at version 1.1 at least long enough for me not to have to mess with again until at least next year. :P

And I did start work on Love Allergy, the parody of a dating sim game, where the point is to avoid getting a boyfriend.

Though I actually decided to make one of the...what should I even call them?  They're not love interests, since the point is to keep them away, but calling them antagonists doesn't feel even the tiniest bit right.

Well, whatever they are, I decided to make one of them less clear cut.  Instead of the household butler, the character is the live-in...uh...I'm not sure what term to use for it, to be honest.  "Live-in help" sounds horribly dismissive.  (If anyone knows a non-gendered equivalent of butler, please let me know!)  Anyway, the heroine (who is also the narrator) can't figure out if they're male or female, and doesn't want to pry, so she just uses they/them pronouns for the character.  Which is less cool than the character being specifically agender or nonbinary or whatever, rather than being mysteriously androgynous, but...given what I'm parodying, even this is almost revolutionary.

I didn't actually start writing the game, though.  I just planned out the bare bones of the scenario (beyond the even more bare bones stuff I'd already decided on) and figured out the characters' names, and a little bit of their character and history.  And by the time I had done that, I didn't feel like doing the actual writing.  (Dunno why.)

So, I'll start the actual writing tomorrow.

Anyway, I only got in about an hour and a half today, but I was ahead yesterday, so I'm still on track for 60 hours in November.

Oh, before I forget, here's my self-reward I mentioned yesterday:

Of course, in that form, it's not too clear what it is!  I couldn't actually assemble it, because it didn't have assembly slots/holes/etc, and needed to be simply glued together, but this photo might make it a little more clear:

It's a Chibi Trojan Horse model. :P  I saw that and just couldn't resist it! :D  I need to go to the site where I bought it and see if they recommend a particular type of glue to assemble it.  (And then once it's glued, I should probably paint it, since they used gray plastic...)

Not-NaNo Day 16: Closer, but...

 So, I lost a lot of time today.  My area is going back into a partial lockdown tomorrow (dining areas of restaurants closed again, all stores limited to 25% capacity, etc.), and so my parents wanted all four of us to get in one more nice lunch out, and my brother wanted to go out to dinner, too, so I lost a huge chunk of time to those outings.  (On the other hand, hey, free food.)

Still, I did make a good deal of progress!  I fixed a whole lot of errors in the code on the two passages that displayed the post-war fates of the various characters.  (The down side of that is that I'm utterly humiliated that it went out in that condition!)  In fact, I was hoping that I was more or less done...but then I found out that I made a mistake in the passages where you're deciding what to do with the captured Trojan royal family, and somehow Helenos was getting auto-assigned to the player character. :(  That shouldn't have been happening, and I mean, looking at the code I can't even figure out how it was happening!

So that's my tomorrow, figuring that out.  (I may have to scrap most of the coding for that passage and just start over if I can't figure out where the error is.)

I got in almost two and a half hours, though.  That's cool. :)

And I believe the package that arrived today is my self-reward for finishing the game.  I'll post a picture of it once I've uploaded the patched version of the game. ;)

Not-NaNo Day 15: Ughhh

 This is not a good day.

My back is killing me, and I'm suddenly deeply ticked off because of something that's actually quite inconsequential.

So nothing even attempting to be a real post, just an hour count.

Total in November to date:  30:36:38.65

Not-NaNo Day 14: The slog is real

 I didn't even spend that long working today, but it felt so amazingly tedious that I couldn't take more than about an hour and a half.  But on the plus side, the Glossary is inserted into Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? and it actually works!  (And yes, part of the tedium was having to click on every single entry to make sure they work.  There are 233 of them, so that actually took quite some time!)

I started work on trying to simplify how the two screens that share the fates of all the people involved on both sides of the war work, to make sure that they display correctly (apparently, some of the epilogue passages didn't show on the original build), but it's a very complex process, and I didn't get very far it in before I was feeling entirely wiped out and felt the deep-seated need to stop for the day.

Tomorrow, I hope to get it finished and the new build uploaded, but I have a feeling that's just not going to be in the cards...

Not-NaNo Day 13: Coding is time-consuming!

 Not that what I did today was just coding, of course.  I also gave one last round of edits to the glossary entries.  And had to re-order them because I decided to handle the list of them on the page about the same way I did for The Cousins.

As you can (maybe) see in this screen capture from the glossary for The Cousins, I have the entries in three columns, listed alphabetically across the screen, rather than going alphabetically down one column, then down the next, then down the next.  The latter method would have been easy to do, but I feel like it wouldn't have looked as good, and it definitely wouldn't have been as easy to use.  (Or maybe it would?  I dunno.)

But doing it this way required me to go through and change the order of the entries, listing all the ones for the first column, then the ones for the second column, etc.  And that takes a while, especially when you're also coding them as you go!  (Also, I accidentally skipped over one.  But thankfully it was one that I doubt anyone was going to click on anyway, because Attica is not really an obscure concept.  And anyone who really needs to know what it is can always Google it or go to Wikipedia or whatever.)

The way the glossary for Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? is going to work is that when you click on the name of the entry, a text box will pop up giving you the actual entry.  It's not the most efficient way to do it, probably, and may well throw players for a bit of a loop, but I did not want to have to make new passages for all those entries!  The downside of the pop-ups, of course, is that the pop-ups don't have scroll bars, so I had to cut some of the entries down.  (Fortunately, there was only one that looked to be losing important information, and I was able to just split that into two separate entries.)

But I got them all organized and coded and ready for insertion into the game!  Yay!

And it only took me three and a half hours!

(OMG, what am I doing with my life?)

Tomorrow, I'll have to actually insert it into the game, and then actually, you know, add a way to access the Glossary (details, details...), and then test the game about a zillion times to see if I can fix the countless errors with the Nostoi section.

Actually, I may add a few variables to the game so I can remove some of the places where the Nostoi has to check the history array to see if something happened.  That way I can check the endings more easily with my test page.  Yeah, I think I'll do that first so I don't have to play all the way through over and over again.

Not-NaNo Day 12: Some real progress, sort of

 So, I've finished the glossary for Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?.  At least, I've sort of finished it.  I've written the basic text of it, though I may have left some names and terms out.  (But as it's already almost 17k words long, I really don't want to have to add any more entries!)

What I still have to do is to code it and insert it into the game.  The insertion won't be too hard, but the coding will likely be a nightmare.  I still haven't looked up just what kind of code I need.

Still, it's promising to have gotten this far so early in the month.  I should have a good amount of time to either start work on the romance-avoidance sim or to realize that there's no way I can do a decent job at it and give up in order to start work on updating the rest of the novel that The Cousins came from. :P

Anyway, I somehow managed to get in about two hours today, despite losing half the day to my parents wanting to take me and my brother out to lunch and then somehow managing to forget (again) that I hate that one restaurant because its menu is 90% fish and 5% hamburgers, and I don't like either of those things.  (Okay, technically, I kinda like beer-battered fish, but that's not what they serve.  They serve fish that actually looks like it came from a fish.  Also their menu has the words "Frog's Legs" on it, which frankly is enough to make me nauseous all by itself.  As if the décor in that place and its general fishy stink wasn't already enough to churn my stomach.)  And I can no longer order two of the three things on their menu that I don't hate because their toasted ravioli is nasty and their grilled chicken sandwich once gave me such horrible food poisoning that I will never, ever order it there again, period, end of subject.  But somehow I was the one being unreasonable when I decided to eat after getting home instead of asking my father to pay $13 for chicken fingers.  Um, yeah.  That's unreasonable of me.  Sure it is.

Ugh.

I get ticked off just thinking about it.

(Not to mention that I slept so late this morning that I hadn't had breakfast, so I ended up going without breakfast and having to make do with a couple of granola bars for lunch!  Which, ironically, will probably just make me gain weight even faster, because now my body probably thinks there's a famine going on and that it needs to stockpile fat.  Because my body is evil and it hates me.)

Not-NaNo Day 11: One project finished!

 I didn't contribute a lot to my hour count today (though I probably lost about twenty minutes or so due to not starting and stopping the timer every time I made a tiny little edit as I was playing through the game), but I uploaded the adaptation of the first chapter of that old novel from 2014! :D  It's called "The Cousins"  (or "The Kinswomen" in Ancient Greek, because apparently only men got to be cousins), and you can find it on itch.io here, if you're curious about how it turned out.

Ultimately, I think I probably will adapt the whole novel into a game; there's just something sort of satisfying about the experience.  Plus I think people are more forgiving about problems with interactive fiction than regular fiction.  (Also, as response to Are You A Better General Than Agamamnon? taught me, most people don't know even half as much about Greek mythology as I do, and they would quickly be stymied by all the unfamiliar names and give up.  By making it a game, I can have a glossary merely one click away.  Which would not necessarily stop people from walking away, but might at least keep one or two reading.)

Not-NaNo Day 10: Hmm...

 Something has been nagging at me all day that there's some significance to the tenth of November, but I can't remember what in the world it is.  (It could be as minor as maybe I have a bill that came due today and I forgot about it...)  That's frustrating.

Anyway, that aside, I was able to catch up today, did about three hours.  Still just working on that glossary, of course, but I'm in the "T"s now, so I'll soon be ready to code it and upload the updated version, and then (once I've fixed some small errors in the escape game and uploaded that) I'll finally be able to move on to writing something real and new!

Yay!

Not-NaNo Day 9: Um...?

 Again, not much to say about today.  Honestly, a large chunk of it was spent on my e-mail.  (I hadn't checked it since last Thursday...though at least there were only ~200 new emails instead of ~800, since the election is over and I'm no longer being bombarded with countless "donate money" emails from a zillion campaigns.)

Still, I did manage to get in two hours, so that's something.  I'm still behind, of course, but it's something.

Oh, and the rankings came in on the previous game jam, and I got 3rd place in Writing...sort of.  My "Score*" came in 3rd, but my "Raw Score" came in 1st.  I have no idea how they calculate the Score*, other than reducing the score of everyone who didn't get the median number of rankings.  (Seriously, my Raw Score for Writing was 4.429, but because I didn't get a whole 10 rankings my Score* was bumped down to 3.801.  My score for Interpretation of the Theme suffered even worse:  it went from 4.714 down to 4.047.  Wait, actually, that's the same amount, it just looks worse somehow.)

Anyway, regardless of the bitterness of having my score reduced just because fewer people gave it ratings...actually, no, I'm not done with that yet.  In some of the game jams on itch.io, I can understand that there are wide disparities in the number of ratings games receive.  I mean, I just went to the "Top Past Jams" page and the first one on the list had 5,377 entries and 143,000 ratings, and yet the average number of ratings per game was 26.6 with the median number being 18...yet some games received over 250 ratings.  (Ouch.  I went to the last page of the ratings, and there was a game that received only one rating, with a straight 4.000 from whoever rated it...which was shoved down to a 0.943 because it was the only rating.)  So, yeah, in a jam of that size, I can get...well, no, actually, I can't really wrap my head around any of the thought processes involved in a jam of that size.  But the thing is, the jam I was in?  It had a total of 20 entries.  There was no excuse for anyone not to rate all of them, and yet the median number of ratings was 10, with an average of 9.2 ratings per game.  In other words, not everyone who submitted a game bothered to rate them.  I rated every single game in the jam (other than my own, of course), but evidently a lot of the others didn't bother, or they only bothered to rate the short games (though even the most rated game only got 12 ratings).  Mine, of course, at about 230k words, was anything but short.  Seeing as we have no control over whether or not others rate our games (and in one the size of that 5k monster of a jam, no control over whether anyone can even find the game!), it does seem rather shockingly unfair that we're penalized for the failures of others.

In the long run, it's not like it matters; there's no prize for "winning" this particular jam or anything.  It just kind of rankles me that I'm eternally on this posted ratings board several numbers down from where I would be if the ratings hadn't been skewed like that.  (Two #3s that would have been #1, a #8 that would have been...did I figure that one as #4 or #5?  It was complicated by one of the ones above me also having been shoved down by fewer than the median number of ratings.  I didn't calculate the others, but the point remains.)

*sigh*

I guess deep down somewhere I do actually have a competitive side.  Probably why I generally avoid anything that remotely resembles competition; I secretly don't like losing. :(

Ugh, now I'm in a weird, sour headspace.

Whatever I was going to say, I've forgotten it.

Hopefully I'll remember it tomorrow.

Not-NaNo Day 8 - Not A Big Day

 I just had all kinds of other stuff going on today.  Didn't have much time to work on my projects.

And I'm frustrated how little of my work time is actually being spent on the writing aspect.  Well, one way or another, that'll get fixed once I finish with the glossary.  (Thank goodness!)

Anyway, only got in about an hour today, so I'll have to play catch-up later if I want my total for the month to be sixty hours.

Not-NaNo Day 7 (Insert Clever Title Here)

 Yup, it's only the seventh of November.

And it was almost eighty degrees here today.  That's summer weather.  In November.

Ugh.

On the plus side, I was somehow able to get in about two hours of work in between getting my car, going out to a celebratory lunch with my family now that the election results are finally official, and going to the mall to return some jeans that didn't work out and buy some stuff at Lush and also waste a lot of time and money in the new anime-and-other-fun-stuff store that just opened up next to Lush.

I say "about" two hours because I really goofed up on the timer a lot today.  There were times I forgot to turn it on and times I forgot to turn it off.  But I think they more or less evened out.  (On the whole I'm more likely to forget to turn it on than to turn it off.)

It was mostly more fiddly work with getting the glossary into the TWINE setup than any actual writing, though.

On the plus side, the escape game is now more or less finished.  I want to spend a long time with it tomorrow or the next day  or the next day just playing it over and over to look for any mistakes in coding or wording or anything else, but it's more or less done.  Enough that I can start focusing on the glossary for the other game instead. ;)  (Thankfully, the game jam's due date is the end of the month, so I have tons of time to play through the game and make sure it's all okay.)

Not-NaNo Day 6: Well...this has been a day...

 Ugh, and what a day it's been!

It started last night, actually.  My brother invited me to come over to his place to watch some stuff and have dinner.  Totally normal.

Only then my car didn't start.

So this morning I had to call AAA, have them come take a look at it, and nope, they couldn't fix it.  They could get it going, but they couldn't just replace the dead battery.  I had to take it to the dealership.

So I leave the car at the dealership, and my brother and I go out to get some lunch and run some errands while it's with the dealership.  And I get the call that it's ready to go while we're out...

...but before we're done with our errands, I am hit by...I don't know quite what to call it.  I suppose it was just an extreme reaction to eating greasier food than my stomach is used to, but it was so severe I was afraid it might be food poisoning.

Consequently, I was left so incapacitated that I was unable to go pick up  my car.

I was even feeling so out of it that I didn't think I'd be up to any kind of further work on my project, and ended up turning on Disney+ to watch a movie with the four slices of toast that made up my dinner.  Thankfully, the toast seemed to help a lot, so I was able to get back to work after the movie was over (and after I finished looking up some of the voices on imdb, lol), and I managed to get some more work done on the escape game, even if it was mostly boring grind work.

Before having to deal with the car, of course, I had done the graphical work I'd needed to do yesterday, and also written up one small part of the glossary for the previous game.  (Okay, technically what I did was copy-paste the glossary from the escape game, deleting, shortening and extending various entries as needed.)  So at least I did  a little writing as well as coding.  And being sick to my stomach. :(

But now I'm in this annoying situation where I still have to go get my car tomorrow.  (This is especially annoying because I had double-checked with the person I checked the car in with that I would be called when it was ready, because I hadn't been last time, meaning I hadn't been able to pick it up until the next day...and so what happened this time?  I still ended up not picking it up until the next day...)

Anyway, at least I did manage to get in two hours of work today, so that's something. :)

Not-Nano Day 5: Steadily Climbing...

Actually, I didn't do much writing today.  I spent my roughly 2 and a quarter hours working on coding, mostly.  Largely in bashing my head against the brick wall that was me trying to figure out how in the blue blazes to force TWINE to let me get rid of my pretty text box for one passage so I could have a full-screen title splash.  (It would help if I had any understanding of CSS rather than merely adapting a template a helpful individual posted on itch.io, of course...)

But the good news is that I did eventually figure out how to do it.  (It helped when I finally noticed that "~=" is CSS for "=" not for "does not equal".  That sped things up enormously.)

I also remembered to go back into my glossary and add in an explanation of why I describe Achilles as having red hair, which is rather unexpected since a) he's described as a blond in the Iliad, and b) most ethnically Greek people tend to have dark hair.  (Of course, with his descent from an ocean goddess and his linguistically non-Greek name, there's not really too much reason to think he's ethnically Greek...)

Oh, and thanks to a suggestion from someone on itch.io, the escape game now has a name!  Yay! :D  I even found a way to express the name in Ancient Greek for the title screen. :)

I also prepared all but one of the images I'm going to use, thanks to my old computer still having an ancient copy of Photoshop on it.  (The new graphics programs have been made impossible to use, having way too many buttons and way too little text to tell you what the *#@&$*T%& the buttons do.  When I got this new computer up and running, I downloaded the latest version of GIMP, but I can't use it for much more than changing image sizes, because they've made its functions too obscure.)  I needed one more change of time image, though, and I've downloaded the base image for that, so I'll be able to get that done tomorrow.

I'm going two routes for the images.  One route is genuine ancient art (well, some of the Mycenaean frescoes are very heavily reconstructed, but...they're as close as we can get to genuine at present) and the other is graphically manipulated photographs of locations on Lesbos (where the game takes place) to make them kinda-sorta look a little bit like frescoes, maybe.  (All the images are from Wikimedia Commons, of course, and I'm going to have a credits page in the game crediting the people who took the photos and there will be links to the download pages, too.)  The "Photoshopped photograph" is not the most professional of looks for game graphics, needless to say, but as this is a free game I'm uploading for a game jam, I'm hoping people will forgive that. ;)  The hardest part was that one of the photos I wanted to use had a modern road smack dab in the middle of the picture.  Fortunately, it also had a tall tree in the foreground...so now it has two tall trees in the foreground. :P

Tomorrow I'll finish up that last image, and then I'll probably do a little work on the glossary for the earlier game before I switch back to this computer and keep coding.  (It may sound absurd to have two working computers, but the thing is that my "good" laptop, the one I use for writing, is at this point so old that I'm not sure when I got it.  (I know for sure I already had it in 2008, but I don't remember for how long.)  It's lasted so long because it never, ever touches the Internet, and I'm going to keep it that way.  So while I probably paid more for this new computer I'm writing on now, it's still not my "good" computer.  Heck, this one still has all the paint on its keys!  And they're not all shiny from having been pressed a zillion times, either.  What kind of proper computer keyboard still has all the letters visible, and the keys aren't smooth and sweet to touch?  No kind at all!)

IWSG - Not sure what to say

 

I'm going to get this posted before I go check the election results (if there even are any results yet), so I'm a little too on edge to have much to say about my current writing projects, so instead I guess I'll answer the optional question for this month, which is:

November 4 question - Albert Camus once said, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Flannery O’Conner said, “I write to discover what I know.” Authors across time and distance have had many reasons to write. Why do you write what you write?

In some ways, I'm not even sure what the answer is.  I mean, I know I write because I have stories inside me that want to get out, but as I typically don't share the stories with people (except when they're fan fiction, which I do post online), it's not like I can claim any great purpose behind them.  (I like that Camus quote, though.  That's great.)  Sometimes I do vent my fears, frustrations and (social) desires into fiction, but...more often than not it's mere empty escapism.

What I do know is that if I don't write--even if I'm writing in a non-traditional way, like my past things written in screenplay form, or my current dabbling in interactive fiction--it's mostly something to keep me sane.  I feel like if I don't write, I'll lose whatever small semblance of sanity I have.  (Possibly due to the excess of stories banging around inside my head.)

Hmmm.

Feels like I should have a longer, deeper answer than that, but I can't really think of one.  (It's hard to think at all right now.) 

I guess, in closing, I want to apologize to anyone who sees this and left a comment on last month's post, because I was so completely overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to put in on my game jam project that I ended up not checking for comments until after the jam ended (on the 25th!) at which point answering comments felt sort of, uh, weird, to say the least.

Not-NaNo Day 3 - Well...

 So, to start with, I totally goofed in yesterday's post.  I didn't "almost do two hours" yesterday.  I almost did three hours yesterday, so yesterday I was actually ten minutes short of being caught up to doing two hours a day.  How I missed that, I do not know.

Anyway, I did about two and a half hours today, and finished up the glossary for the escape game.  I still need to rework the one scene I got feedback on, and then replace Thessaly/Thessalian with Aiolia/Aiolian, and run the spellcheck on the glossary, but mostly the writing is done for that one and I can move on to getting it coded and getting it ready graphically.

The glossary, btw, clocks in at 7,101 words, so if I was counting words, I'd be in good shape for 50K!  That says, to me, that my choice of two hours a day seems like a good one; if I stick to that, I should be at the equivalent of my usual 90-200k words for November.  (Okay, I only broke 200k once, and it was for a trilogy of novellas, but still, it did happen!)

I'm actually surprised that I managed to get in two and a half hours, considering I lost an hour to going to vote, and then another three or so to having lunch with my brother, watching the first episode of season two of The Mandalorian (promising start to the season, btw), and then watching some random Rifftrax stuff.  We had planned on watching something with Sean Connery in it as a tribute, but then stuff happened and we decided to put that off for another day and watch short things instead so I could be home in time to eat my own food instead of his (and/or instead of eating out for two meals in a row).

.

..

...

....

Needless to say, I'm antsy about how the election is going to turn out.  I did what I could by voting and by giving some money to the candidates I support, but I couldn't give much money because I'm out of a job, and I'm too socially phobic to do any volunteer work, so...I mean...ugh, it's just all so...I don't even know what words to use to describe it all.  Other than, you know, a bad dream.  (I was seriously afraid to go to the polling place because I was worried there would be gangs of men with massive guns trying to intimidate people out of voting.  I should have known not to worry about that, of course, because I live in a middle class neighborhood that's mostly white people; the gangs of armed white supremacists will have been out menacing low income people of color, not middle-class white people.  And I hate that we live in a world where people can do that--a world where they actually do that.)

I'm probably going to stay up late and do my IWSG post shortly after midnight, so that I don't have to try and be coherent tomorrow morning when preliminary results may begin showing up.  (Though realistically, we can't know the actual results for days, if not weeks, given all the mail-in ballots.)

Not-NaNo Day Two: Nothing to Report

 Of course, the thing about having to post daily to update my status on the Not-NaNo progress is that there isn't actually usually anything for me to post about.

I almost did the full two hours today that I was thinking I probably want to do, which still puts me an hour behind.  (I likely would have done more if I hadn't had to do things like stop for lunch.  Also to log onto the computer to make sure that my payment went through to the sewer district, 'cause they called me to say "oh, you're still late on your payment!" even though I knew I had already paid it (and according to my bank's site, the payment went through today) and other tedious things like that.)

I will probably either end up making up the difference and then some tomorrow or fall further behind.  Depends what happens when I get back from the polls.  (I know, I should have already voted, but the creep in charge of my state's election board sent out this smarmy notice about all the ways you can vote with this big, bolded statement of "Make sure your vote counts!" beside Nov. 3 at the polls, with the not-so-subtle implication that he's going to do everything in his power to throw out every single vote cast in every other way.  And this election is too important for my vote to get pitched out by a corrupt creep.  So I have to risk my life going to the polls tomorrow.  (And no, that's not an exaggeration.  I have asthma and am in generally not great health, plus being obese, so if I get it, it's over.))  I may want to immerse myself in writing fiction as escapism, or I may huddle on my brother's couch to escape into watching something as escapism, or...who knows.  I'm trying not to think about it right now because there's not really anything I can do at this point.

Anyway, I guess I never did talk about the other game I'd like to make someday.  It wouldn't be very writing heavy, though, so I'd have to be working with at least one other person and probably at least two, and I'd write the text and then they'd do the art and actual game design.  Because the other game would be a Metroidvania with quasi-rogue-lite elements.  (And if you don't understand those words, probably best to just skip the rest of this post.  I'm about to go all weird and gamery.)

See, I was messing around with the Randomizer Mode in Bloodstained, rather than play something new, because it was less likely to grab me and tear me away from my writing.  And when I took Miriam in to get a haircut, I noticed the short twintails hairstyle, and without even thinking about it, I was suddenly making the main hair color a very pale blonde, and the tips blue, then heightening the red and black in her costume, making her almost-but-not-quite Harley Quinn....and then it hit me that it would be so freaking cool to have a co-op Metroidvania with Harley and Poison Ivy as the main characters.

Now, obviously, that would never happen for real.  But an indie game with a hyperactive female clown and a plant-controlling lady who are in no way or shape possibly even slightly connected to said copyrighted characters...*cough*cough*...no problem there, right? ;P

So, yeah, that's the Metroidvania I want to write.  Specifically, the not-actually-Harley character and the not-actually-Ivy character are lovers, and you start out in control of one, trying to rescue the other from...uh...whoever the bad guy is (haven't got that far in my very idle conjectures yet) and whenever you lose all your health, then she gets captured, but guess what?  Her girlfriend had managed to escape, and so she has to go right back in to try and rescue the one who was trying to rescue her in the first place!  And so on, so that every time you want to swap characters, you have to get KO'd first.  (Obviously, that would mean that you wouldn't want any completely game-breaking differences between them.  Maybe one is a little faster and the other a little tougher or something, but both would have to have equivalent abilities in terms of movements, attacks, etc.  So while the not-actually-Ivy would be able to use a thorn whip to swing on posts or pull herself up to higher levels or whatever, the not-actually-Harley would have, I dunno, like springs in her boots or something, something to achieve the same results but in a different way.)

Not-NaNo Day One: Enter the Double-Rebel

 So, it's the first of November.  And as people around the world are hunkering down to work on brand new novels, I am hunkering down to...write whatever the heck I feel like.

Last year, in my one-woman boycott of the official NaNoWriMo (due to the horrible new site), I still counted words and worked on traditional fiction.

This year, in my continued one-woman boycott, I am changing to measuring time and working on games.  Because that's what I happen to be into working on right now.  (They're text-heavy games, though.  An interactive reworking of one of my old novels, and possibly a visual novel after that.)

So...that's where I am right now.

I only put in one hour and six minutes today, which is probably less than I really want to do in a single day.  (Haven't made up my mind what my goal is yet.  I think at my rate of writing, I probably need to do about two hours a day, minimum, to do approximately the same amount of work as it takes me to get to 50K on a novel.  So my goal may be 60 hours.  But I'm not sure yet.)

Biggest hurdle in the near future is deciding what in the world to title the game.  It's the first chapter of the old novel, in which the two teenage heroine on the island of Lesbos in the terminal Late Bronze Age escape from the slavery they were born into, and board a Phoenician boat on its way (though they don't know this when they board) towards the partially rebuilt Troy.  (And their fathers were two of the most important heroes among the Greek army that destroyed the city, so that's a big deal!  Not that they ever met their fathers, having been fathered on slave girls during the one night their fathers were staying in that city on Lesbos, but...the one who's Achilles' daughter is very fond of telling all and sundry who her father was.)  I think I'm currently planning on calling the whole novel (and/or the game version of it) The Walls of Troy (which is not a particularly good name for it, but better than its original title, since the original title was incomprehensible until you find out what's going on, and then it becomes a spoiler), but what to call the game version of just this one chapter about them escaping slavery...no clue.

Another hurdle is that I'll have to decide if I want to count working on the graphics towards my hour count or not. :P