General Stuff, + Sol Mosier on Patriotism

 So, the last time I posted anything, for my monthly IWSG post, I said this:

Yup, I haven't posted anything this year, so of course I had to start with a "thank god it's over" about 2020.  (Though my hopes are not high for 2021 being all that great, either.  Maybe it will be, but as long as it's better than 2020, I'll take it.)

    Hours later, white supremacists were invading the US Capitol building in an armed insurrection.

    I spent the following weeks alternating between tensely holding my breath in terror of further violence closer to home (the advantage of being in the Midwest is that it's far from anything bad happening on the coasts, but the enormous disadvantage is that there are a lot of white supremacists, gun nuts, and other right-wing extremists) and actively trying to think about absolutely anything else, meaning that I really threw myself into finishing that proofreading job, working on the rewrite of my novel, reading, and playing video games.

    I'm glad to say that last night around 11:00 I finally finished the new draft of the novel, which is now nearly twice the size of the old draft:  the original (well, the most recent version of it, which had had minor edits done from the true original draft) was 134 word processor pages and 79,980 words long (with each chapter having a title), and the new draft is 241 word processor pages long, and 144,730 words long (with chapters not having titles).  Of course, since I'm adapting it not into a new novel version but into a text-based game, there is some extra text involved in the terms of choices to be made by the player, alternate versions of combat scenes dependent on those choices, and of course game over scenarios, but I doubt those added much more than five thousand words, maybe ten thousand at the outside, but there aren't really enough of them to make it likely there's anywhere near that many words involved.  It's not ready for entering into the game engine yet (especially because I realized very late in the draft that my brain kept sabotaging me and defaulting to types of armor that were impossible to make in the Bronze Age, so I have to go back and fix a lot of that text) and I'll need to write up many more glossary entries, plus some post-game information about the real versions of myths I was drawing from (in part because one of the characters most people will assume I made up is actually a very minor mythological figure, though one who met a very different fate), but the hardest part, the redraft itself, is over, so that's great.

    But that's not actually what I wanted to post about.  The main thing I wanted to post was a quote from one of the books I read in the last three weeks.  It's called The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig, and it's one of the many book projects I've backed on Kickstarter.  In this case, it's one of the ones from Tough Poets Press, which finds long out-of-print novels (and plays and collections of poetry) and gets the rights to bring them back into print.  I've backed a fair number of their projects, though most of them are still buried in various places in my constantly growing to-read pile.  Anyway, the main reason I backed this one, I think, was actually because of the description of one of the author's "second novel, Singermann, a semi-autobiographical novel of a Jewish immigrant peddler's family in the early 1900's American frontier.  The novel is notable in that it is one of the earliest instances in American literature of a gay protagonist whose character is portrayed in a compassionate, non-stigmatizing manner."  (Quote from the "About the Author" page in the back of the book, which I believe is exactly the same text from the Kickstarter page, only I'm too lazy to go check.)

    The Flutter of an Eyelid was written in 1933, and it bears the hallmarks of its age in terms of racism and misogyny (though not as badly as many other products of the age do), and frankly some of it feels anti-Semitic to the modern reader, but it sounds like the author was Jewish himself, so it probably wasn't actually anti-Semitism, or if it was, it was merely echoing the attitudes of the era in the increasingly unreliable narrator.  (Or something.)  Anyway, it's a very unusual book, and I don't even know if I want to recommend it, though I did overall enjoy it:  it started out feeling like it might be a less normal, more extreme novel in the vein of Day of the Locust, but it went off those rails pretty quickly and ended up in all sorts of very meta places.

    Anyway, fairly late in the book (pages 244-5 of 298), there's an extended speech (or internal monologue?) from a character named Sol Mosier on the subject of patriotism that felt very appropriate right now, so I wanted to share it:

"If, in school, we had been taught that life is an endless chain of pleasant and grievous futilities, how much happier our adult years would be!  Instead of which, we were taught the beauty of a blind patriotism, the goodness of chastity, the decency of hard work and the importance of conformity.  It is not until we grow up that we learn how patriotism is an emotion that has little or nothing to do with shooting and military drill.  It is only when we are grown that we know how patriotism has everything to do with the picture of a certain street in a small country town, red brick houses surrounded by tall trees and pale green grass in the dawn.  Patriotism has much to do with Fifth Avenue and Michigan Boulevard at two 'clock of a rainy morning; but the saying, 'My Country, right or wrong!' is not patriotism.  When I was a child, the teacher used to make the entire class rise every morning and salute the flag.  I remember it went something like this:  'I salute my flag and the Republic for which it stands.  One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.'  After several years, I began to speak these words as a parrot would speak them, finding no thought, beauty or affection in them.  How much more beautiful patriotism could have been made for me had the teacher spoken of the iridescent plumes of geysers in Yellowstone Park, the varied scenes of hill and plain in Montana, the golden wheat fields of North Dakota, and the Mississippi River as it drifts, with a slow, turgid charm, past small hamlets in Missouri and Louisiana.  But I had to learn all this for myself many years later.  How much better I would have understood patriotism, if the teacher had told me about the radiance in the faces of immigrants when they first catch sight of the Statue of Liberty!  For it is obvious that the most patriotic American is the one who has just arrived, and does not, as yet, know of America's heartaches and disappointments."

     And, with that thought, I'll close out this post in the hopes that January 6th was actually 2020's last horrifying gasp, and that 2021 proper has now started (though certain Senators seem determined to prevent that), and in the hopes that in the coming days, months and years we'll see more of the kind of patriotism Sol is endorsing at the end of the speech, and a distinct lack of the type he rejects in the middle.

IWSG: Good riddance, 2020!

     Yup, I haven't posted anything this year, so of course I had to start with a "thank god it's over" about 2020.  (Though my hopes are not high for 2021 being all that great, either.  Maybe it will be, but as long as it's better than 2020, I'll take it.)

    Since it's the first IWSG post of the year, this seems like a good time to reflect on what the past year was like for me as a writer, and what my writing-specific hopes for the coming year are.

    There were actually a lot of good things that happened for me as a writer in the second half of 2020.  No, more like the final third, maybe just the final quarter.  Well, whichever.  I not only started into a really serious and heavy re-write of a series of novels I wrote in 2014, but I also started writing video games.  Well, text games.  In fact, technically, the re-write is turning the novels into lightly interactive fiction (mostly you just read them like an ordinary novel, but periodically the two heroines go in separate directions, and you choose whether to find out what happened to one of them or the other (there's an undo command, of course, if you want to see both), and in a few key moments there's much more interaction (when they escape the slavery they were born into, and the novel's three big fight scenes) which can actually lead to losing the game if you screw up.  Although I plan on posting the final game version on itch.io for free, there is at least the possibility of someone donating money to me when they play it in their browser or download it for later.  (Such donations don't happen often, but evidently some people have in fact received money for free-or-donate titles.)  So, technically, I might, in theory, eventually see a tiny bit of money from that.  But more importantly, it's something that I'm working to improve (and improving a lot over its original incarnation!) and then putting it out there where people can actually read it.  And maybe some of them actually will.  I put up the escape sequence as a demo of sorts, and had some people start following my account shortly thereafter, so I think they at least are wanting to read the rest of the story.  Which is pretty exciting, I have to say!  It's also a good impetus to keep me working and get the finished product out there as soon as I can without sacrificing quality.

    And I have all the time in the world to write, since I lost my job to COVID, and as a former museum registrar/curator, I'm not going to be able to find a new one until museums start reopening and getting enough visitors to be able to hire more staff.  (Thus, probably not until 2022...)

    Which brings me around to the writing problems and drawbacks from 2020.  I spent a lot of the year in a writing funk because I was bogged down in one project after another that were just slow, hard going, and which I do want to eventually finish up, meaning more bogging down is in my future somewhere.  (Though thankfully not until after I finish these rewrites-into-games!  And since it's a seven novel series, that's a hefty chunk of time accounted for.)  My mental state has been one of shifting malaise ever since losing my job (and to a certain extent even before that), though the reception to the "demo" has helped to revitalize it a bit.  (Not as much as I'd like, but...)

    Unfortunately, my health has really deteriorated over the past year.  Last year's very first IWSG post complained about having just sprained my ankle, assuming it was going to go away in time like a normal sprain, even though I knew from the feel of it that it was anything but normal.  What happened was that a chip of bone broke off in the fall (not sure how exactly, I guess it's the part some ligament attached to or something?), and when the urgent care center saw that on the x-ray, they told me I should see a specialist.  Well, that specialist said "oh, that's totally normal in a sprain; that's why I tell people never to go to urgent care centers, because they just panic over nothing."  I am convinced that he didn't even look at the x-rays I brought from the urgent care center, because this is not normal.  And yes, present tense:  the bone chip is still slipping around inside my ankle, and frequently decides it wants to move in between proper bones and otherwise muck up the functioning of my ankle, which can make climbing stairs, walking and sometimes just standing an agony.  I have a feeling the only way it's actually going to get better is if I have surgery to remove the chip, but there's no way I'm having something like that happen while COVID is still a thing!  In addition to my obesity and generally iffy health, I also have asthma, so if I get COVID, it's likely to kill me, therefore I'm going to be very careful until the threat is over.  (Unfortunately, I'm likely to be very late to get the vaccine, because I'm not elderly, I don't have an important job (or any job at all), and I don't even have a personal physician at the moment, so I have no idea how I'd even get the shot at all.)  And the state of my ankle is very crucial to my writing because my various other conditions have become exacerbated to the point that on some days, the only way I can be comfortable is to stand up, because my legs have started to react to anything underneath them like it's super-heated sandpaper, and my upper thighs sometimes freak out at any touch of my stomach against them, which makes sitting a very difficult thing.  But I also get back pains from standing too long, and...well, it's very, very bad, and some days it stops me from getting anything done at all.  I'm still trying to develop working strategies to get around these issues, as well as trying to figure out the best way to safely and (hopefully) permanently lose weight.  Some days it doesn't interfere much with my writing, and other days it keeps me from accomplishing anything at all.  (For example, I am now writing this standing up, because I couldn't take sitting any longer.  But I don't know how long I can stand before my back screams me to death.)\

    Whew.  Okay, so...yeah.  2020 was not great for me, even as a writer, despite some promising stuff in the final months.

    But what about 2021?  Well, obviously, I can't know in advance how it's going to turn out.  (Rereading last year's IWSG posts on the old blog really drove the truth of that home!)  I'm hoping to finish with the rewrite of the novel I'm working on right now in time to post the game version sometime this spring, but I haven't made any commitments to or beyond that.

    After I finish that rewrite, I'll probably either dive right into book 2's rewrite, try to finish up some unfinished fanfiction, or...I dunno.  I'm always coming up with interesting new ideas, but most of them never get past the "something I'm idly tossing around in the back of my mind" stage.  It'll of course depend on, among other things, what the world looks like when I get there, and what my particular section of the world is like.

    I'm glad to say that my biggest worry on the rewrite right now (other than being able to find a position in which I can actually write it) is what to title the novel/game/thing.  The old title was The Vessel of Athene, which makes no sense until you get really late in the book and suddenly realize it's a massive spoiler.  Then I was going to call it The Walls of Troy, which is pretty much meaningless as a title, since although most of the book takes place in the partially rebuilt Troy, there's no much time spent talking about the walls of the city, and no time at all spent on them.  My current plan is to title it either Ties of Blood and Water or Bonds of Blood and Water, since there are a lot of kinship themes in the novel (the trio of heroes are cousins, or rather both of the other two are cousins of the main heroine, though only very distantly related to each other by their small inheritance of divine blood), and also a lot of talk about people descended from watery divinities, since our heroine is the granddaughter of the Nereid Thetis, and the new king of Troy is the grandson of a river god on his mother's side, and distantly descended from another river god on his father's side.  It also rather ties into the finale, too, which is good.  But it's kind of a weird title and doesn't signify "Greek mythology-derived", so...still not 100% on board with it.

    I also need to figure out a series title, so that the thumbnail summary for the game on itch.io will both indicate right away that it's the opening of a series (Book One of the *cough* series) and also give a hint as to what the main themes of the series are.  Which is where it gets really complicated.  Because I want the series title to indicate Greek mythology, first and foremost, and preferably something that suggests immediately post-Trojan War.  (My initial thought for the series title was "Scions of Troy" but that implies the children of the Trojans, not the children of the Greeks who were fighting against Troy.)  But two of the novels are spent primarily outside the traditional Greek myth region (they go to Babylon in one, and in the last one to a mountain range that's not really specified where it is, but my plan was for it to be the Alps, possibly the Swiss Alps, even), and one of the biggest themes throughout the series is the fate of gods whose worship has fallen by the wayside as its people moved on or died out.  There's also a subtheme of how the more gender-equal ways of the Bronze Age were being abandoned by the misogynistic patriarchy of the culture we know from the historical period of ancient Greece, but that's not really something I want to have imparted in the title of the series!  But how does one imply "dealing with fallen gods" in a series title without giving that away?  Because that...the villain's plan in the first book is basically to take down the Olympian gods, because he feels they've overstayed their welcome, and so he's trying to reduce them to the fallen gods that they ought to be by now in his estimation.  It's not until book two that we start meeting the actual "already fallen religions" theme, so I don't want it to be too obvious in the series title.

    The original plan when I wrote these novels back in 2014 was for them to be a Young Adult series, but one in which the teenage leads do not pair up by the end of the series, having somehow met their soul mates before turning twenty.  (Surprisingly, it wasn't until a year later that I realized that I was aromantic and asexual.)  I'm not sure if the end result is going to be at all YA in tone or more adult than that.  (Though the one heroine being asexual, the other heroine being unwilling/unable to accept or admit that she's in love with the first heroine, and the male lead having a girlfriend who is rarely present and who he would literally be killed for sleeping with (she's an Egyptian princess) does help to at least prevent there being any chance of sex to worry about!  (Except in the prologues taking place during the war. *cough*))  Anyway, I'd kind of like the title for the series to be one that could fit the kind of YA books that I read growing up, like the Prydain Chronicles, or...um...okay, actually that's the only YA series I read as a kid, now that I think about it.  Some individual ones, but mostly I kind of jumped right to regular fantasy early on.

    It's a very complicated situation, and titles are something I really, really, really suck at.

    Still, overall, I'm hesitantly optimistic about how 2021 will go for me as a writer.  And I'm hoping it'll be good for me in all other ways, but...not daring to be optimistic yet.  Hopefully by next month's IWSG post, I'll be optimistic again.  (Hopefully there will also be posts in between this one and that one, but the way I've been going, who knows?)