IWSG: (clever title goes here)

 

EDIT: evidently if you put < > brackets around part of your post title it just gets ignored by the system. 😓  I've replaced the < and > with ( and ) so hopefully now the whole post title will show...

    As my health problems are starting to stabilize (or at least I've realized that they're coming every two weeks, which suggests that maybe my high school friend was right when she suggested it might be connected to menopause), I'm going to try answering the monthly question for a change.

June 7 question - If you ever did stop writing, what would you replace it with?

    I've spent so much of my life writing, it's hard to imagine what I'd do if I stopped!  (Other than totally lose my mind.)  I suppose I'd have to depend on one of the other creative endeavors that I have occasionally flirted with:  maybe making things with resin, maybe working more on making box rooms (though I'd need a bigger house first if I wanted to have a place to store/display them!), or just devote myself to game dev.  (Though game dev is also writing for me, since I'm a writer and you have to write the game before you can make it, but...)  I could maybe actually dive into one of the two Humble Bundles I've bought with content to teach a person how to use Blender (one a set of video courses and the other a set of books) and maybe finally learn how to do 3D art and hope that I'd be less garbage at it than 2D art.  Maybe I could keep mucking around in that mapmaking program until I got to be slightly less awful at it.

    I suppose I could also just lose myself in my non-creative hobbies, but I feel like that would get old pretty quick.  These days, I can't even make it all the way through a turn-based JRPG without finding myself wanting to do something else while the battle animations play.  (And until my heart issues are resolved, I don't know if I can play anything that isn't turn-based.  Though hopefully I could at least handle the low-level action combat in, say, Stardew Valley, or its myriad imitators.  Hopefully.  (I'm in trouble if I can't, 'cause I've backed a lot of them on Kickstarter and some of them may actually release this year (if I'm lucky)!)  But maybe I'd finally get back to trying to learn another language (probably German, 'cause it's easiest, plus many years ago I bought an untranslated copy of The Neverending Story and I am determined to someday actually read it!) and actually follow through for once.

    But yeah...mostly I think I would go insane if I stopped writing.  Unlike a lot of other writers, I don't have any intention of trying to publish my work, aside from releasing a few things free on itch.io or AO3, so I sort of approach it differently than many others.  I write because I have stories jostling around in my head and wanting to get out; I write to get them out of my head so maybe it'll be less cluttered in there.  (Of course by the time I finish writing one story, five or six more have taken its place, so it's a never-ending struggle...)

More Fanfic Stuff (MDZS/The Untamed)

     So, my heart is still giving me trouble, and I don't really dare go back to writing anything but light fanfic.  (Well, not all that light, given that I'm now trying to write about a war that no version of canon ever actually gave a detailed account of.  And I suck at the whole "war" thing...)

    In keeping with this being Pride Month, I kind of wonder how "right" it is for me to be writing stuff like this, and even if maybe there's something a little...how should I put it?  Mo Dao Zu Shi is danmei, which was largely inspired by the Japanese genre of BL/yaoi, and thus is largely (but not entirely) written by women for women, despite being about romances between men.  It feels like maybe that's actually sort of...wrong?  Like the sexuality equivalent of cultural appropriation?  (For that matter is it cultural appropriation for me to write fanfic set in ancient China when I'm of European descent?  The original work was written by a Chinese person, so...I have no idea if that makes it okay.  I mean, I'm kinda obsessed right now so I'm going to keep writing it anyway; I'm just wondering how guilty I ought to feel about it.  I am, at least, trying to depict the culture as accurately as I'm able (and I have done some research), which hopefully counts for something.)

    In my own defense, I'm trying for the most part to represent the romance between the two leads as realistically to an actual gay relationship as I can, but as I'm female, aromantic, asexual and not really very well versed in humanity (as I tend to hide in my house whenever possible because people are mean, scary creatures I would prefer to avoid at all costs), that's not really all that realistic, I fear.

    Ironically, the live-action adaptation, The Untamed, in some ways portrays the romance more realistically despite that it's been all but removed.  In the novel, we get a thoroughly narrated picture of how the hero is feeling towards his love interest at all times, and thus we see the rather hasty change from "he's practically my enemy" to "he's my friend" to "wait, was I teasing him all the time because I secretly liked him" to "I'm gonna marry him," with that last step taking about twenty-four hours.  (Maybe forty-eight, but definitely not more than that.)  In the drama, however, all we get to indicate their feelings for each other is a lot of longing glances, the occasional action to risk their lives for each other, the near-constant (in the second half) actions of the love interest to step in between the hero and anything that might threaten him, and a few moments that are decidedly suggestive of romantic affection (like when the love interest gets drunk and steals a couple of roosters to give to the hero as a gift 🤣).  By making it entirely subtext, it actually feels more natural, because we, the audience, can assign it the progression that seems most plausible to us, instead of being told a specific romantic chronology that might ring a bit more falsely to our individual perceptions.  (Which is why this current fic I'm working on is probably going to be the one with the most realistic romance of all the fics I'll end up writing for this fandom, because in this one the novel's lead is not the fic's lead, so his romance is in the background and we just catch glimpses of it at different stages, without seeing the progression of it at all.  (In fact it moves from "just friends" to "kissing but calling it energy transfer because we're not ready to admit how we feel yet" during a three month gap in which they're off traveling alone together.)  Not that I'm advocating for relegating romances to the subtext (unless they're straight romances), just saying that it's sort of ironic that the attempt to delete the romance actually made it in some ways better.

    In other random ramblings because I'm sort of blocked as to what the next scene should be and whose POV it should be in, last time I talked about this I showed the map I was working on so I'd have an idea of where various places were in relation to each other.  This was that map:

    Well, I've kept working on it periodically since then.  This is the current iteration:

    The biggest change is that I've fixed up the waterways.  I found a way to superimpose the river-specific maps from Wikipedia's articles on the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, so I was able to add a lot more and more accurate rivers and lakes.  And I think it makes it look like I actually got the cities in the right place, since all of them are either on or near water.  (Of course, it's also got rivers coming out of a freaking volcano, but...at least I established in the text that the volcano is actually a magical illusion created by the bad guys so they'll seem scarier.🤣)  Admittedly, I kind of wonder if maybe I went a little overboard on the rivers, but...if they're real, they're real, right?  Besides, I think it helps to give a sense of just how big an area this is covering.  (For reference, the real places of Qishan and Gusu are over 700 miles away from each other!)

    The next biggest change is probably adding the ominous effect around the mountain beside Yiling.  That's there to represent the Burial Mounds, a super-haunted mountain that plays a huge role in the hero's story.  Smaller role in this AU fic, but...🤷  I do hope to reuse the basic map for later fics...albeit with the volcano removed. 🤣

    I guess I didn't really have anything more to say than that.  I was just sort of hoping that if I wrote for a while I'd come up with a plan for the next scene, but I didn't. 😭  Hopefully I'll think of something by tomorrow.