So, I've started a new project

     It's a visual novel.  Or possibly a VN/cozy-farming-sim hybrid.  Not sure yet.  I mean, the story is what it would be in a hybrid, but I might use RPGMaker and just fake the farming sim aspect with cutscenes showing the player character going about farm tasks in between the VN scenes.  (Which would have the bonus of allowing me to easily add some turn-based combat periodically.)  Whether or not I do that will largely depend on how well the script turns out; if it seems really good, then I might actually go to the expense of hiring a programmer to make a farming sim to integrate it with.  (Presumably this would also mean using some engine other than Ren'py.  Like Unity or something.)

    All that is for later, though.  I'm still just working on the script.

    No, not even the script yet.  I'm still in the planning phase, actually.

    I've gotten to the point where I'm deciding on the other people in the village, who they are and what they do.  (Fortunately, unlike normal cozy farming sims, there's only one love interest, and the MC will fall for her regardless of the player's wishes.)

    Anyway, since the story and two leads are inspired by danmei, I'm basing the setting on ancient China, though it's a fictional world.  (Like with Avatar:  The Last Airbender, you know?)

    I like what I wrote today about one of the NPCs for the town where the heroine settles down:

Village Head – a dotty grandpa type.  Seems senile because he is.  But very friendly and warm, loved by all.  Just don’t expect an intelligent answer to your question.  The type to misquote philosophy rather than tell you what you want to know.  (Ack, I’m going to have to invent a Confucius-analog and write countless aphorisms of his!)

    I'm not looking forward to the whole "inventing a Confucius-analog" part, but I still love that character description.  🤣

A Random (Fandom) Thought

     Okay, so back in April, I mentioned the fact that it had long been my assumption about/reaction to Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen that they were supposed to be a reflection of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, or more specifically that they actually are what most everyone else in the story sees when they look at Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji together:  an evil demonic cultivator harassing a pure and proper cultivator.  And that meanwhile Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen are also a reflection of the true relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, only one where the tragic ending remains in place, with no revival stepping in to reunite them.  (Okay, actually, looking at that post again, I didn't so much mention that as tangentially imply it.  But that was what I thought on reaching the later portions of the Yueyang sequence in The Untamed when I first watched it, that the three of them provided a double mirror of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji.  Um, except at that time I didn't know that Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen's story would end in tragedy. 😭)

    And I still do think that's the case, no question.  Those parallels are absolutely there.

    But in thinking about the chapter of my fanfic that went up yesterday, I realized that Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan serve as mirrors to another situation within the main plot of MDZS:  that of Wei Wuxian with Jiang Cheng.  (I mean, the clue's right there in their names, even!  Jiang Cheng and Song Lan are the only adult characters in the novel (as far as I can recall, anyway) who are consistently referred to by their birth names by the narrator.  Oh, uh, no, duh, there's also Wen Ning.  Okay, so that breaks the birth name part of the comparison a bit.  (And then there's Wen Xu and Wen Chao, whose only known names sure sound like birth names, but that makes zero sense all around unless the Wen Clan uses courtesy names differently from the other clans.))

    Let me sum up my thinking on this thusly.  Um, after a "read more" tag just in case somehow someone stumbles on this post who hasn't read (or watched) the whole story.  (Unlikely, I know, but...)

IWSG: last IWSG of the year

 

    There's a creative title for ya.  😰

    Uh.  Anyway.  This month's discussion question is

December 4 question - Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

    And my answer is "No, I do not."  (To the first question.)

    I'm not a fan of cliffhangers in general; I like to wrap up the major story threads or it doesn't feel like it's actually finished.  Even in my series of seven novels (of which only three have been polished up for any kind of release, despite that I wrote the first drafts ten years ago 😭), I never had cliffhangers.  There were times after the leads had started learning about the overarching plot of the series that story threads from the larger plot were necessarily left unresolved, but the story of the individual novel was still neatly concluded.

    As a reader, I've mostly been fortunate enough not to run into them.  (Cannot say the same thing about as a watcher, but that's another question entirely.)  I think a particular novel I read last year that I really didn't like had something of a cliffhanger ending, but I disliked the whole work so much that I couldn't care in the slightest about the cliffhanger in that context.

    The closest I can think of to encountering a considerable number of cliffhangers as a reader is that I've been reading a lot of danmei novels (Chinese web novels featuring romances between men) in translation, and most of the chapters tend to end on cliffhangers, meaning that typically each volume of the novel ends on a cliffhanger, and that can be insanely frustrating.  Mitigated by the fact that there are mere months between volumes (since the novels are not licensed for translated publication until after they are complete) instead of the potential years there would be if one was waiting for a full novel to be written from scratch.  (Also if one is confident one will like the novel, one can buy all the volumes and not read it until it's complete.  At this point, I have decided not to do that unless I'm already familiar with the author's work.)

    I think if I did come across a writer who consistently preferred to end their works with cliffhangers, I would probably avoid their work, because yes, that would definitely be a turn-off to me as a reader.  Doing so once in a while because the larger plot of the series required it, that much I could live with, but doing it every time...I'd nope outta there.

    Changing the subject radically and probably pointlessly, there was a long discussion in a discord channel that got deleted the other day because it was instigated by someone being a bad actor.  Which is a pity, because the conversation started out with some really useful comments and suggestions by regular users of the channel.  I bring it up because one thing that someone said was so brilliant that it must be recorded somewhere for posterity, and this isn't the greatest of places, but...it's what I've got.

    They suggested that someone could write a character who knits socks with designs inspired by their favorite heavy metal bands.

    That would be epic.  Someone needs to write a character like that.

    (Unfortunately, I typically do not write in a modern setting these days, so it's unlikely to be me.)