The problem with being a Plantser

 It's like at this point this thing I'm writing is actively trying to sabotage me.

As it's long (245k and counting) and convoluted, I've had to make mini-outlines drawing the broad strokes story and then others detailing the immediate bits to come.

Where I am now in the story, a war and its immediate aftermath have just ended, and now our heroes have some down time before the work's ultimate foe shows his true colors by trying to...uh, actually I'm still fuzzy on what, exactly, he's going to try to do in the later parts of the story.  He wants to become the next xiandu--translated by Seven Seas Danmei sometimes as "Cultivation Chief" and sometimes "Chief Cultivator" neither of which I'm particularly keen on as terms, hence why I chose to just use "xiandu"--at any cost, but what his methods will be past the current outline phase, I'm not sure.  (But this outline phase will likely last me until December, so... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Future me can worry about it.)  In the current phase, the villain's plans are mostly political in nature.  (Hopefully, they'll remain largely politcal even after, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Anyway, until the villain makes his first move, the work's lead is unaware that anyone is plotting in the shadows...and since fighting to stop someone from seizing power is often a reactive process, particularly in the early stages, that leaves me with holes in the current activities of the work's lead.

The problem is compounded by the fact that this is a work of fan fiction, and the one who's the lead in what I'm writing is not the lead of the original work.  So I have this alarming tendency to gravitate towards the original lead, especially in the outlining process...and especially especially at this particular part in the story, because the original lead is about to set off on a very important sidequest (in RPG terms) that only he can do, while his adoptive brother (the lead of the fanfic) has to stay behind and run the clan.  Having them switch places or having them both go are not possible, but that also means that for a while the original lead has much more to do, plotwise, and that's no good!

I need to figure out what the lead's actual goals are both at this point in the story and overall, only the problem is that I feel like he genuinely hasn't got any goals more complex than the ones I had him outline to a potential new recruit early on in the war:

            “So the question is, what are your goals here, Jiang-zongzhu?”

            “My goals?  I want to avenge my parents and everyone else from my clan—I want to avenge everyone who was killed at Lotus Pier.”

            “And how will you know when you’ve avenged them?”

            “When the Wen Clan is destroyed and Wen Ruohan’s ashes are scattered to the winds, then I’ll know I’ve avenged them,” Jiang Cheng answered firmly.  If it wasn’t for Wen Qing standing right beside him, he would have said considerably more than that, but…

            “A bit much,” the youngest commented.

            “You’d feel the same if our parents had been murdered like that,” the middle one said.  They were brothers, then?

            “What do you plan to do after that?” the eldest asked.

            “After that…?”  The question took Jiang Cheng by surprise.  “Restore Lotus Pier, restore the Jiang Clan, make sure my sister finds a husband who treats her the way she deserves to be treated…”  He shook his head.  “I don’t quite understand why you’re asking.”

            “A man’s goals tell you a lot about the man’s character,” the eldest rogue cultivator said.  “Your goals tell me you’re not the type to plan very far ahead.”

            Jiang Cheng felt his face grow hot as the other two rogue cultivators laughed.

            “But there’s nothing wrong with that!” the eldest added, laughing himself.  “I was no different when I was your age.  And maybe there’s not much point in having far-reaching plans when you’re about to enter into a war.  What good is it having dreams if you end up dying before having a chance to act on them?”

So, yeah.  I mean, that pretty much summed up his goals at the time, and with the war over (and Wen Ruohan suitably killed) those parts of his goals are now achieved.  The only additional goal he's gained has been to see if he can get Wen Qing to marry him (which technically was already his goal then, too, only he couldn't say so with her standing right there (not that he'd have said it even if she wasn't, as he's very reluctant to ever admit what his feelings are (and sometimes that he even has them))) but that's got a long, slow ways to go before there's any action on it.  😅  (I kinda get the feeling from what little I've encountered of the original genre that any romance that gets to the "signed, sealed, delivered" stage before the final confrontation is one that's doomed to a horrible death.  (Though I plan to flout that very thoroughly in this fic with the background relationships...))

Anyway, so the major problem is that where the lead is right now in his own personal story, he's in a stagnant position where the ideal is to reestablish the status quo that his father had lived by (or at least to establish his own status quo in its place) and then work to preserve it.  Which is inherently dull. 😰  So it's like on the current outline, most of what I have for him to do is largely very dull, and/or just reacting to what others are doing.  And that seems like a no-no, especially since during the war he was leading his troops into battle all the time, making this an even more jarring shift.  I mean, I guess I could try to write him having some kind of psychological break because he'd gotten so used to fighting in the war and now that's been taken away from him, but the thing is that he didn't have any problem with it in the original work, in which the war was about twice as long, and even more horrible, and he was just as much in the thick of it, if not even more so.  So it feels out of character to have him be particularly heavily impacted in my thing.

Gnnnnh.

This is very frustrating.

I mean, it's obviously my own fault for a) not realizing just how massive this would end up being and rethinking the whole idea, and b) not planning ahead more carefully regarding the motivations of the lead and especially the antagonist, but...I've been working on it since spring and it's closing in on 250,000 words long, so I feel like I have to see it through or it'll be a total waste of all that time.  More than that, I just plain want to finish it.  I'm just at a little bit of a loss as to how to go about it.

Well, no, that's not strictly true, either.  I could just follow the current outline, virtually ignoring the supposed lead of the fic for most of the next 25k words, but that would produce an end result even more sloppy and disjointed than my usual writing.  And my stuff is bad enough already; I don't want to go out of my way to make it worse!

Honestly, with NaNo coming up (though I'll be doing my usual rebel thing and not actually entering the official NaNoWriMo process), I may mostly take a break from writing between now and November 1st.  Just sit down to work out what the heck I'm gonna do about the whole plot and motivation debacle, then rest my writing brain for a few days.

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So, everything above the line, I wrote last night, but couldn't post because getting the long-form quote to work on my phone just wasn't.  Therefore, I put off finishing the post until today, and in my morning bath I came up with a good next scene, which not only addressed the lead's lack of known goals (thus putting him to thinking about them as he moves forward) but also referred back to the scene I was quoting above.  Still doesn't fully answer what his goals are between now and when the antagonist starts making his moves (giving the lead someone to be working against), but at least if he's actively trying to figure out his own goals, that's something for him to do.

Naturally, this is all somewhat hampered by the fact that his goals in the original work at this point in the story pretty much were just "run the clan, restore its reputation, etc."  He's a very dutiful guy, all told, which unfortunately caused a lot of friction between him and the original work's lead, just at the time when he needed support the most. 😭  But that's why this fanfic is changing the course of events, so that I--like the mentally-immature individual that I am--can have a version of events where the characters I like don't die, suffer horrible loss (well, beyond the loss of their parents and so on) and suffer needlessly just because...well, if I try to go into that, it'll take all day.

Anyway, I feel like I've yammered on until I've lost the thread of what I was trying to say (if there ever was such a thread), so I suppose I should stop here...

Aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!!!!!

 My new writing routine has been to put the tail end of whatever I've written for the day into my "Continuing Current Work" file on Google Docs, so if I want to keep going on my phone later, after the computer is off, I can.  This is usually prefaced with [where i am] and sometimes followed up with a bracket containing my immediate plans for the scene.

Allow me to share what I put in that Google doc early this afternoon when I stopped work and turned off the computer:

[where i am:

            His first official banquet as zongzhu.

            The war was over, the Wen Clan had been decimated, Wen Ruohan’s ashes had been spread to the wind, and the few remaining people important to him were still alive and well and by his side.

            Jiang Cheng was deeply aware that he ought to be happier than he was.

            Instead, he felt rather like he stood on the edge of a precipice.  No, in the middle of an elevated platform that dangled by unsafe ropes.

 

            [when I started that paragraph, I knew where I was going with it.  I don’t anymore, and that was like a minute ago. D:  hopefully I’ll remember it later?]

😭

I still don't remember where I was going with that.

Something about his worries of finding a husband for his sister, maybe, or...something? 😭😭😵‍💫😭😫

See, this is why it's taking me forever to finish this dang thing.  I keep getting hung up on some little point or other, and stall myself for hours or even days.  😣

(Also not helping is that I wrote like five long, twisted paragraphs of Lan Xichen reflecting on how he didn't understand what this whole 'love' thing was really about and how disgusting sex was, and not only is it convoluted and confusing, I'm quite sure it's entirely out of character. 😰  I may be able to keep a little of it, since I do see him as being pretty ace, but...most of it will have to go in the next draft, meaning it was entirely a waste of time writing it in the first place. 😭)

I don't have any point in saying any of this, of course.  I just felt like whining into the void about it.

Comic Adaptation and Other MDZS Stuff

     So, in an earlier post, I briefly mentioned the importance of connecting tissue.  I think that's something that's really striking me in the comic adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi.  The chapters tend to feel disjointed from each other, often skipping the connecting tissue of how they get from place to place, and even important things that happen en route.

    For example:  when they head from Qinghe to the "Man-Eating Ridge," we just see them in town in one chapter, ready to pursue the rumor, and then we're with them in the woods as Wei Wuxian panics over hearing Fairy barking.  (Erm...wait, there may have been a page or so in the forest before Fairy showed up.)  We don't see anything they had to go through in getting that far, so later on when they talk about how the truth of the saber tombs explains the walking corpses and maze array, it's coming out of nowhere, because the adaptation skipped over the walking corpses and maze array, without so much as mentioning them in passing.

    Equally jarring are incidents where the visuals and the words don't match up.  The waiter in Yueyang, for example.  The dialog with him is about the same as in the novel (didn't go in to actually compare, mind you, but the main points are all covered, at least), but it's like the visuals were drawn without proper reference to the text they would accompany.  At the end of the conversation, in the novel, the waiter puts his arm around Wei Wuxian in a friendly way as they're talking, in a kind of "let's keep this between ourselves" manner as he's spreading gossip.  This leads Lan Wangji to glare jealousy at the waiter, because duh, he had the gall to touch his Wei Ying!  The perplexed waiter asks Wei Wuxian what's eating his friend, and comments that he's glaring as though the waiter had just put his arm around his wife.  (And yet Wei Wuxian does not figure out why that is... 😅)  In the adaptation, it's Wei Wuxian who puts his arm around the waiter, at the beginning of the conversation, and in the panel where the waiter asks what his friend is so mad about, Lan Wangji is already walking away, so not only not currently glaring at him (and the dialog does describe it in the present tense) but also never having been shown glaring at him at any prior point in the conversation.

    It very much feels like they just had highlights they knew they needed to hit and weren't too worried about whether or not the connecting tissue was present enough for it to make sense.  Which is fine for me, since I know the story so well, but I do wonder how much sense it will make for anyone who decided to skip the novel and read the graphic novel adaptation instead.  (Especially given how hard it is to tell the Lan juniors apart in the adaptation!)  The final page teasing the next volume struck me as pretty funny, though, asking all these "what will happen when" kinds of questions, and I'm just looking at it and wondering if anyone is reading those questions who doesn't already know the answers.

    Don't get me wrong, though.  I'm not saying it's bad as an adaptation, just that it could stand to be a bit more thorough with the material.  And the faces need to be more distinct from each other.  (Though they do seem more distinct than the ones I've seen in the promo art for the animated version, at least.)

    Also, I have to say that this image is one of the all-time cutest:

    (It's not something actually happening, btw:  it's Wei Wuxian's imagination.  But it is super-adorable.  Though I was a little weirded out in the flashback part to him bringing in the first two rabbits, and one of them is the black one with the white forehead.  It's like, that's your animal-self, so why are you suggesting eating it?  (Auto-cannibalism?))

----------------------------------------------------

    In other news, in the fanfic I'm working on, since it's an AU from CQL canon, I followed CQL's lead and had various events take place in Nightless City following the end of the Sunshot Campaign, right?  These events actually got stretched much further in my fic because the political jockeying for power has already started, and so there was all this stuff going on about the Wen Clan prisoners.  (I mean, there was in CQL, too, but that was more one-sided stuff of WWX and LWJ witnessing and barely managing to intervene at all as the Jin Clan just wholesale slaughtered them.  Mine is not quite so bald-faced in its "the Jin Clan is evil!" and also the leads manage to accomplish more.)  Anyway, I lost a whole day of writing because upon finishing up with that Nightless City sequence, I realized I didn't have a full idea of exactly what was going to happen next, other than JGS trying to stir up the whole cultivation world against the Jiang Clan, and therefore I had to stop and brainstorm and write up a new partial outline.  (Like any outline of mine, it starts to get weak towards the end, but...)

    So, before I started working on writing the stuff from that new outline bit, I went and checked how long the Nightless City sequence was, from the scene immediately after WRH's death to the scene where they leave again at the end of the sequence.  It was just over 42k words long.  I really have no idea what happened.  This story is so freaking bloated. 😰  And yet I don't feel like there's a lot that can be easily trimmed away, either.  Once it's done, I'll have to see what happens with the second draft, I guess.  (That will be a long way off, ofc, because I like to let things sit for a couple of months after finishing them before I start editing.)

    Also, at this point it is categorically impossible for me to finish this fic before November, so I guess continuing it will be my NaNoWriMo rebel project. 😰  I can't believe how long I've been working on this thing...oh, but I did have an idea about how to name it, though I don't know if it'll pan out because I typically only think of it at times when I can't get up to consult the book.  But I'm hoping that I can come up with a title that's a play on the meanings of the names of the fic's lead and his love interest.  [EDIT:  just looked it up, and it totally won't work.  I mean, the meanings of their names could be combined to form any number of titles, but none of them would work for this story.  Ironically, some of them might work for the one-shot sidestory (to this fic) I've written that was a pitiful attempt at writing PWP for Wangxian, but...there it wouldn't even make sense!]

Heaven Official's Blessing, Season 2

     So.

    I went on YouTube last night for the first time in like a month.  (What can I say, I'm not a big "watcher."  I prefer writing, reading and gaming.)  And in the tier of suggested videos on the topic of Mo Dao Zu Shi there were two videos announcing Season Two of the animated adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing.  (This feels a little like the world laughing at me, since I put up a post barely more than a month ago that, towards the end of the post, said how I was sure they would never continue adapting it.)

    One of those videos had the Crunchyroll logo on it.

    As in, the same people whose subtitles were so awful that they rendered the US Blu-ray release of Season One entirely unwatchable.

    I have to hope and pray that they're merely saying "yes, we'll be simulcasting this" and not "hey, we have exclusive international rights to this" because I cannot watch the rest if they continue the garbage they pulled in the subtitles on the first season.  Admittedly, it shouldn't even be possible to continue trying to pretend there are no ghosts in adapting a novel wherein about a third of the characters are ghosts (and we actually see, in flashback, the progression of one of the characters from child to young adult to ghost flame to powerful ghost) but I don't trust these idiots to have the sense to realize that it's impossible.  It's certainly obvious that whoever was in charge of the subtitles had not read the novel.  (Are they going to keep on trying to pretend that Qi Rong is an epithet rather than a name?  What will they do when he shows up and becomes a major character?  I don't know how much of the novel will be included in Season Two (and don't actually recall precisely when Qi Rong first showed up in the ghostflesh anyway) but chances seem high that he'll be in it, whether in the present as a ghost or in a flashback to while he was still alive...though I think he did show up in the present first, then get shown in the past.)

    Honestly, rather than being excited about a second season, I'm depressed, even a little distraught.  I don't want to see it only released in the US in a butchered form.  In this day and age, why is butchery on that level even still a thing?  Who would think it was a good idea to hand over the rights to their show to a company who would rather invent the word "immor" than admit that a ghost is, in fact, a ghost?  (What is even up with that, anyway?  I mean, did the translation team at Crunchyroll look at the changes that were made to MDZS in the live-action adaptation and decide that meant that Chinese TV didn't like having the undead exist?  If so, they were being morons, because that was obviously done because whoever made the decisions about the live-action adaptation didn't want a hero who was a necromancer.)

    In further mockery of, like, everything, this morning, while this is all still fresh and stewing in my brain, I go to the VN dev server I'm part of on Discord, and see that someone has posted a Twitter thing about how Crunchyroll (allegedly) sold the private information of its subscribers, and has agreed to a class action lawsuit payment to all American customers.  Which will probably be about $30 each.  About half of what I wasted on that Heaven Official's Blessing Blu-ray. 😒

    Now, the flip side of "I may not be able to watch it due to ghastly subtitles" is that I might not want to watch it.  I know it's coming from the same animation studio that did the animated adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi, and from what I've learned of that adaptation (mostly by reading a fanfic set in the animated canon) I would likely hate it.  Especially because that adaptation has a real hate-on for Jiang Cheng (who I'm very fond of (admittedly in part because I watched The Untamed before reading the novel)), and makes all kinds of changes to make him worse (e.g. changing their mock duel to a real one) while simultaneously doing I don't even know what with the novel's actual villain (on top of entirely removing his time undercover in the Wen Clan, it seems they changed the sworn brothers oath to sometime during or even before the Sunshot Campaign?) on top of which it has "everyone has the same face" syndrome.  (Admittedly, that's a problem in the adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing, too:  Nan Feng and Fu Yao are literally just palette swaps of each other, but the different coloration helps to tell them apart a little, and their behavior most of the time does likewise...but when you get into the heat of the final confrontation in the ruins of the Banyue Kingdom, it's almost impossible to tell them apart because they're both concentrated on the business in hand and when they're all business they're virtually identical in behavior, plus it's at night so the low lighting makes their color schemes harder to tell apart.  But that's nothing compared to the notion of trying to figure out the difference between the members of the Lan Clan, who all dress identically!  That's the advantage of the live-action adaptation:  no one can look at the live-action Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi and get them confused, despite their identical garb.  Whereas in the comic, I have to flip back to an earlier page that specifies which is which and compare their slight differences in hairstyle to figure out which one is talking.  (Uh, sometimes.  Other times Lan Jingyi is obvious by his behavior because he's such a feisty little guy. 😆 ))

    Uh...okay, that paragraph just sort of took a side thought and ran with it until it died in a nest of parentheses.  Sorry about that.

    My attempted point was that there's every chance that, moving forward, they might make similarly devastating changes to the story and/or characters in Heaven Official's Blessing.  I can't know that they will, but it's a possibility.  Though admittedly I can't even think exactly what changes they could make that would be comparable to the ones they made to Mo Dao Zu Shi:  the closest equivalent to Jiang Cheng in Heaven Official's Blessing would probably be both Feng Xin and Mu Qing, I guess?  (Certainly, they've both got a bit of his tsundere vibe of "pretending not to care about the hero.")  But I don't even want to say anything about either of them right now, because as of the end of Volume 7, they're the two characters I'm most unsure about in terms of...well, everything.  I don't even want to say how I feel right now about them or what I hope will happen because what if that changes when the final volume comes out?  (I want so desperately to do what I did with MDZS and find a fan translation for the rest of the story so I can find out how it ends, only at some point Seven Seas stopped putting the online chapter numbers on the table of contents, so even if I did find one, I'd be at some difficulty figuring out what chapter to start with!  So I have no choice but to wait until late November! 😭)  As to the story, it's not as straightforward as the story in MDZS, so it's a little hard to know what changes would be most egregious to me.  (Also because I don't know the story as well, what with having only read 7/8 of it, as opposed to MDZS, where I've read the whole novel twice, watched the live-action adaptation once (and rewatched about 2/3 of it), and read the first half of the comic adaptation, too.  (Which reminds me, I wanted to do a post about the latest volume of that...)  Plus obsessively thinking about it an unhealthy amount of the time, because that is how my broken brain operates.)

    I feel like there's more to say here, but...I've run out of steam and lost my train of thought.  (What little train of thought I had to begin with, that is.)

    I guess, in conclusion, all I can say is to hope that the second season of Heaven Official's Blessing is as accurate as the first one, and that it's given better subtitles than the official Blu-ray of the first season got.  (Or, contrariwise, to hope that if the subtitles are every bit as bad, then that the adaptation is as awful as the subtitles.)

    I have to say, though, if the subtitles do turn out to be that bad, I may cancel my Crunchyroll subscription in protest.

I had a title but I've forgotten it

     So, as I've been slowly chugging along on my crazy-long fanfic (at least, it feels crazy long to me, since it'll likely reach 300k or more, but strangely that sort of length doesn't seem as unusual in fanfic as in published works (possibly the lack of editors to say "whoa, dial it down!")), I've still been periodically turning to my homemade map.

    Though more for the sake of consulting it rather than working on it, typically.  Still, I did make some major changes lately!  This is the latest version I've posted here:

    Some obvious problems with it (aside from the fact that I didn't turn any of the different sets of lines invisible, so you get all the stages of the war at once), like the fact that the ground looks like dead grass and the label in the corner is half-obscured by the vignette filter.

    Well, as I entered into the post-war sequence, I realized I needed to update the map, because I needed to know how the land would be divided among the victors.  So I went in and made a new version...fixing up a few problems while I was at it...

    I think it's an enormous improvement!  (The fact that they added that "mist" vignette filter to the available options helped, obviously...)  I managed to make the ground look healthier, and found out how to make the filters not apply to all the levels.  I'm not sure about the color-coding by the borders; it might be too much?  (If you're wondering about the straight line right above the label, that's a mistake that I noticed and corrected shortly after exporting the picture.  I seem to recall fixing a few other things as well but I no longer recall what they were...)

    Hmm...looking at the map now, I can see I need to reduce the amount of land granted to the Yao Clan.  And maybe to the Ouyang Clan, too.  Mmm, no, on the other hand, the Ouyang Clan's extra land is cutting into the Jiang Clan's likely territory, so that accords with the way the other leaders don't take Jiang Cheng seriously because he's too young.  The bigger problem is that the Lan Clan's area is too small, but...enh, the whole point is that the Jin Clan is taking way too much for themselves, so I guess it's okay?  (Considering how long it'll be before I actually finish the fic, it certainly doesn't matter just at the moment.)

    Changing the subject...

    I'm really torn by titles lately.

    I have a super-short fic I want to post, only I can't think of a good title for it.  (Also having some trouble figuring out how to tag it and how to explain that the romance is skipped over in a massive time jump so it goes from "about to start" to "been lovers for years" because as someone thoroughly aromantic I'm not in the least sure how to write a romance in that setting that feels even slightly natural.  (It's a sort of Hades and Persephone/Beauty and the Beast type of situation.  I've only tried to write that sort of thing on a few very rare occasions, mainly when I was trying to write out all the Greek myths on my old blog, and what I ended up doing for Hades and Persephone was to literally crib from Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.  (Or maybe it was just from the traditional folktale version.  Which is kind of the same thing, really...))  I feel like it's still a pretty decent fic despite that, but it's hard to know how to describe it to others such that they'll want to read it.)  The working title for the fic was "Dragonji's prize" which made a lot more sense when I thought it was going to descend into smut after three scenes.  (Though I was going to have to find a co-author to actually write the smut part!)  I think the current title I'm considering is "The Dragon's Price," which...is better, but...🤷‍♀️

    And then there's the massive fic I'm working on.  The title on the Word file is, quite literally, "Jiang Cheng fic in need of a title.docx".  Which, yeah, sums it up perfectly for me, but whenever it's finished, I can't very well post it like that!  🤣  If it had any overall theme (apart from me trying to make it up to the character for having killed him off via heart attack in his late forties in one of my earlier fics) I might have a better time trying to come up with a title, but...I'm just too much of a pantser to be able to write to a theme rather than simply having an idea for a story and running with it.  If I'm lucky, a theme will come out as I go, or at least enough suggestion of a theme that I can add one on a second draft, but so far I'm not really seeing much of one.  (And when you aren't seeing a theme yet 226k words into a draft, there probably just isn't one.)

    Tch.

    I really didn't intend to turn this blog into "my fandom journey" but it seems like it's going down that road.

    Oh well.  It's just me shouting into the void anyway, so what does it matter what I happen to be shouting about?

    (In other news, the bot that for some reason viewed my blog over 11,000 times since this spring (peaking at 914 views in a single day last month) finally seems to have stopped.  I have no idea why someone set a bot to loading and reloading the main page of my blog (without ever viewing any individual posts) so many times, but...I guess it was a programming glitch?  It didn't even leave any spam comments, though maybe that's because the main page doesn't have a comment link on it, so...I don't know.  It's weird.  If I'm being honest, going back to the days when it's rare to have more than a handful of views a month will be a little depressing, but getting hundreds of views a day that don't have an actual person behind them is kinda creepy, so I guess it evens out?)

IWSG post deleted

 So, apparently I did a really bad job expressing myself in this month's IWSG post.

All comments I got indicated that somehow I was coming off as pro-AI when I was anti-AI.

Therefore, I've deleted the post, because I don't want something hanging around on my blog misrepresenting me in my own words.

Also because I've decided I really don't want to even get into controversial subjects on my blog.  I want this to be a space where I can relax my brain, not one that will give me more stress.

Amazing Idea: Rental Museum!

     Okay, maybe it's not all that amazing an idea, but it came to me as a flash of "this is exactly what I need in my life."

    So, what is a "rental museum," you may be asking?  (Assuming you're not just rolling your eyes and clicking away...)  This is an idea I literally had like five minutes ago (well, longer by the time you're reading this, lol) so it's not very fleshed out yet, but it's basically a combination museum and rental storage place.

    More accurately, it's a place where people could rent space to display their collections and thereby free up space in their homes for more collection.  😅  (Who, me?  What makes you think I have a spending problem?)

    So it'd be like renting cases at an antique mall, except that nothing's for sale.  But the up side?  It would also be open to the public so that other people could come see the collections on display (among other things, this would mean you could show people your cool collectibles without having to allow them into your home) and there would be a small fee to get in to see the collections, right?  Then as they're leaving, the guests would have the option to fill out a small form about the collections they liked and didn't like (which would be identified to your liking, so it could be by name, by nickname, internet handle, whatever), if they were likely to come back again to see any of them, and if there was one in particular they came to see.  Being highlighted in these questionnaires as something people came specifically to see (or possibly just as something people would come back to see, or just as a favorite for the visit) would net a discount on the rental of the space, proportionate to the amount of attention gained among the visitors.  So, if your collection was popular, you wouldn't even be paying for the rental space, or not much anyway.  Plus your collection would be stored in a safe, guarded place, you could come and look at everything in pristine glory whenever you wanted, and it wouldn't be cluttering up every surface in your house.

    Obviously, there would have to be safeguards in place.  A collection would have to be vetted before the rental agreement could be signed, to ensure that it contained nothing offensive or dangerous.  That kind of thing.  Also, there would need to be a way of organizing the space, so you wouldn't have a doll collection sandwiched between baseball memorabilia and war memorabilia; you'd want all the dolls in one area, the action figures in a nearby area, the show business memorabilia in another area, etc.  This might mean either moving some collections around because a particular part of the facility was full, or even turning away potential collections because their particular type of collection belonged in a section that was full, but...like I said, this is an idea I only just had, so it's not fleshed out, and if it was really going to be a thing it would need to have all sorts of finely turned details worked out precisely as far in advance as possible.

    And, let's be real, I don't have the money, drive or social skills required to start something like this.  (And yes, social skills would be super-necessary to start something like this.  You'd have to be able to talk to a lot of people to get the funding, the location, the insurance and the staff to run such a complicated establishment.)  I just think it would be 100% a great solution to a few of my problems. 😅

    Case in point:  when I had to reorganize my Nendoroid "wall" because the Year of the Rabbit Wangxian Nendoroids arrived, I seriously found myself asking the question "which is better to go next to a ghost king, a vampire noble or the prince of the underworld?"

    (As you can see, I decided to go with the vampire.  Mostly because I thought his box fit better, thematically.  Although now that I think about it, Zagreus also would be less fitting on that row since he's from a video game, so he doesn't really fit in with characters from non-interactive media. (Okay, technically there evidently is a game based on MDZS, but it's like a cell phone thing?  I dunno; I saw it mentioned on the MDZS wiki, but I didn't look into the details at all.  (I also know of at least three fan games, but that's another matter entirely.))  Gotta say, though, the top row...that's like Lan Wangji's fondest dream:  sandwiched between two of Wei Wuxian. 🤣  He gets both the original and the Mo Xuanyu versions. 🤣  (And, ideally, someday I'll have the original Nendos of both LWJ and WWX, but I gotta find them affordably first.  Or Goodsmile could reissue them.  That would be ideal, 'cause then I wouldn't have to risk accidentally ending up with a knock-off.)

    Anyway, the fact that I had to ask that question is sort of a "send help, please" thing. 😅  (Or maybe the real "I need help" indicator is that I'll have to reorganize the whole thing again after the other Bocchi the Rock Nendos ship... 😰)