I've had a weird half-week or so. The major street that my street is off of has been undergoing road construction for about two years now, and they've been working on the section directly by my street for what feels like forever, but I suppose it's just been three or four months. Every so often they end up doing work at night as well as during the day, and my house sadly is not noise proof. (Or rather, it's great at keeping my noise in, and rubbish at keeping everyone else's noise out.) And four days in a row I was losing sleep as they were doing super-noisy work from about 8:30 at night to about 3:30 in the morning. I have noise-cancelling headphones, but they don't work perfectly, and I have trouble sleeping in them. (I should get Bluetooth ones so I wouldn't have to worry about the cord, but those things are really expensive, and I don't need the headphones that often. Although they would presumably allow me to use them for things that don't have a headphone jack, like my TV...)
Anyway, because of that, until I had a good night's sleep last night, I was sorta the walking dead and unable to get much accomplished. (Well, technically I got a lot accomplished yesterday in the video game I'm playing, but...that's sorta different...) But this morning I was well rested and decided to sit down and write to try and, you know, accomplish something.
At one point, I glanced down at my word count and found myself taking a screen shot to capture the moment:
Terrifying thing is, there's still so much more to go! (And by a half hour after that screenshot was taken, the number had already gone up to 174,367, placing no dent in the remaining story whatsoever.) What I'm working on is an MDZS AU fanfic, based on The Untamed (CQL) instead of the novel (for reasons), in which I'm having to cover the whole Sunshot Campaign...and also trying to make it a little more like what little we got of the war in the novel, rather than what was in the show, a four month long conflict that Wei Wuxian took almost no part in. He's not even the lead of this fanfic (for reasons), but I still let him do more in the Sunshot Campaign than CQL did. (Not as much as in the novel, because part of the AU in this is that he never develops his demonic cultivation techniques, but he's still vital to the war effort, instead of just contributing on two occasions.) Anyway, I'm still not done with the Sunshot Campaign at this point, though they've passed through a point of no return moment (not that they recognize it as such) so the war should only be about a month longer, but...yeah, writing that month is not going to be any faster than any of the rest of it.
And then once the Sunshot Campaign is over, then we get to the political drama as Jin Guangshan tries to take over the cultivation world by attempting to discredit and turn the other clans against the Jiang Clan. (Among other tactics.) This thing is going to be truly monstrous by the time it's done. 😅
But that's part of why I wanted to have maps so people can see where everything is and what the current situation is in the war. Every so often, I refine the map a bit further, adding things here or there, and since the last time I posted about it, I added a filter to try and do something about how blank the edges of the screen seem.
Overall, I think it's a great improvement, visually. (Helps that I added more filters than just the vignette effect on the edges.) With the slight problem that the filter also impacts the label in the corner. 😰 I can change that in GIMP after the fact, but eventually I may join the map-making site's Discord to ask if there's a way to keep that filter from impacting the label. I did a mock-up of what it would look like unaffected by it:
I think it's a definite improvement. 😄 The other alternative would be to move the label to the center of the bottom of the map, where the vignette filter would have minimal impact on it, but I feel like that would look pretty weird. (Though I can definitely think of historic maps that have their legend/title in the center, so maybe?)
In other writing news, I got to have a fun moment of a character exposing his own sheltered, misguided world view today. For reasons, Jiang Yanli ended up meeting a bunch of homeless children, who she has decided are going to be taken back to Lotus Pier and raised up as Jiang Cheng's disciples, no matter what he has to say in the matter. He, of course, does not want homeless orphans for disciples, but due to his sister complex he has trouble arguing with her directly. Eventually, he tries to convince the children that they wouldn't like joining the Jiang Clan, and would surely much prefer that his sister find local families to adopt them. After he's given them a description of the rigors of cultivation training, he's stunned when not one of them prefers to stay where they are and be adopted by a farmer/shopkeeper/what-have-you. In reflecting on it in horror, the narration says this:
Jiang Cheng was at a loss for words. Had he really miscalculated so badly? How could that be? How could jiejie have been right that these boys would honestly prefer the hard life of studying cultivation over a simple farm life?
He totally exposes what a sheltered, privileged young master he's been his whole life, and totally doesn't even get that that's what he is. (I don't even want to know what he thinks is involved in growing food if he thinks it's an easier life. Probably thinks you just plant the seeds and forget about them until it's time to harvest them...)
Jiang Cheng is such a fun character to work with, though. He's so broken but thinks he's totally normal, and he's so co-dependent on his loved ones (which is, of course, why he's so awful in the novel's present, when he's lost all his loved ones) without even realizing it. I don't think my fic is so far managing to capture just how broken he really is (his temper is certainly not as bad as it ought to be), but I always enjoy it whenever I manage to get close to doing justice to his many, many issues.
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