IWSG: Trying to unwind myself from all the stress

 

    So, my game is finally finished and submitted, thank goodness.  (I ended up having to learn Ren'py and finish programming it myself.  Which was kind of a nightmare, since Ren'py's documentation pretty much goes "okay, here's how you do the basic stuff" and then goes "here's a list of all the other commands you can use" but without providing any syntax for those other commands, which is....mind-boggling to me.)  It's not great, but it's finished for the moment.  (I want to redo it and get a lot of stuff right that ended up being sort of half-assed the first time around...and I'm mostly talking about the writing here...)

    I'll be spending October mostly trying to calm my frazzled brain, but I also want to prepare for November.  Not that I'll be taking part in NaNoWriMo--even in the unlikely event that they've restored their website to the pleasant and functional one they had before they trashed it and replaced it with an ugly, broken mess--but I still want to focus on writing a novel during November, as this will make the tenth year (counting the years I've just posted daily to my blog to replace posting word count to the NaNo site).

    My plan is to work on the next draft of The Golden God of Aiolia, the second book about the illegitimate daughters of Achilles and Odysseus as they travel around the Mediterranean area (starting about 17 years after the Trojan War) and have adventures.  I tried making the first one into interactive fiction, which didn't work very well, and also posted the text of the novel to my AO3 account, so between the two sites I may have as many as four or five readers waiting for the next book.  But the previous draft was severely lacking.  Book two was always the shortest of the series (I wrote all seven novels back in 2014), and while book one wasn't terribly long originally, I had nearly doubled its length in its re-write.  This one only gained about 5-10k words in its rewrite. 😓 So....yeah, it's just much too short.  Also, in the current (possibly final?) version of the first book, I had really worked on making the girls' relationship to each other apparent--one of them is not ready to understand or admit it, but she's in love with the other, while the other is actually asexual and aromantic, not that either of those concepts existed as such at the time, and both of them are quite codependent on each other--whereas in the first re-draft of this one, I didn't manage to put much in about their relationship.  I think it was harder for me to bring it to the fore in this one because it wasn't so much under threat:  the first novel starts with their master planning to separate them, and then once they escape to the mainland, they're soon traveling with someone else as well, so the one who's in love is very antagonistic to him, not wanting anyone to come between the two of them, but by this point they're all used to each other, and so she's no longer antagonistic to him, and...it has problems, is the short version.

    Therefore, my hope for November is to get through the next draft--or at least make significant headway into it--and add enough additional text to make it feel as fleshed-out and alive as the previous volume did (if it did), without adding enough to just bog it down.

    If I find I can't really get moving on that, I may try to work on one of a couple of unfinished old projects.  Both are series where I wrote the first novel in the series, but wasn't able to move past that.  (I'm such a pantser that I pretty much need to write the whole series so that I can go back and fix the earlier books to match up to changes to the universe made in the later ones.)  In one case, it was because I never could quite figure out who the bad guys were or what they were up to (I know, I know, that's so basic!), and in the other I feel like maybe I need to tear out half the world-building and start over with something less blatantly based on real cultures at various times in history. 

    However, those are big headache projects, and obviously no one is waiting on the results since I've never released anything of them, which is why I want to do the other instead.

    But first I have to let my head clear from the chaos of the game jam...