Stymied

     So.

    I am:

• Overwhelmed.
• Lost.
• Confused.
• Frustrated.
• All of the above.

    You see, I'm trying to get to work on the rewrite of book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books.

    Precis version:  I wrote the original drafts (for all seven books!) of these quasi-YA Greek-myth-based fantasy novels back in 2014.  During 2020's COVID lockdown, I re-visted them and decided they were worth salvaging, unlike most of what I was writing back then.

    Since 2021, I've managed to get the first three polished up and released, both on AO3 as plain text and on itch.io in a slightly interactive form.  (Though having just re-read the AO3 versions, all three still need a lot of work.  😭)  Anyway, having gotten book three out of the metaphorical door, it is now book four's turn.

    And.  Um.

    See, in book one, my heroic trio are mostly just in the region of Troy.  In book two, they return to their roots and go to mainland Greece.  In book three, they visit Athens, Aiaia (home of Kirke (aka Circe)), and then spend most of the novel in Thrace, which I had to give a fairly Greek-adjacent cultural setting, because it had to fit the myths of Heracles' visit to deal with the man-eating mares of Diomedes of the Bistones.

    Book four, however, is when they start doing a little globe-trotting.  (Or the closest you can get to same in a Bronze Age setting, anyhow.)  After visiting a trading town, they head to Babylon, looking for information on the big bad of the series.

    So.  Um...

    Mesopotamia is not my region of expertise.  (Technically, I have no region of expertise, being at best an amateur and at worst an unqualified hack.)  I needed to research it before I could write the first draft.  And I did research it.  Not as much as I needed to, but I did do research.  I read the Enuma Elish (not realizing that it probably wasn't written until several generations after my novel takes place 😰) and I looked at quite a few books in the library of the university where I had just started working on my MA in History.

    I was aware, of course, that the books were not the most recent, as the university hadn't been keeping all that up to date on history and archaeology in general, and particularly not Mesopotamian history and archaeology.

    If I was also aware of how much of a problem that actually was, I had forgotten in the intervening decade.

    I, um, I'm aware of it now.

    Having read both a general survey of Mesopotamian history and a specialized history of Babylonia itself, I dived into rereading the latest draft of book four so I could make notes on what needed to change for the next draft.

    Basically...everything.

    Apparently most of those books I used back in 2014 were approximately as old as I am, maybe older.

    Virtually everything that can be wrong is wrong.

    Whole sequences are centered around traditions that either I made up out of whole cloth or that someone else made up out of whole cloth.  Wherever they came from, what they are is completely incompatible with what is actually known of Bronze Age Babylon's culture.

    If it was just little things, I wouldn't have too much of a problem.

    But like...there's so much that's so weird that I have no idea what to use to replace it.  For example...

    For some reason, I had decided that it was "typical" for supplicants to sleep in the temples to request divine visions in their dreams.  This cannot be much more wrong:  temples in Mesopotamia were such sacred spaces that no one except priests and the most upper of upper echelons of society were allowed inside.  Random people--particularly foreigners!--absolutely would not have been allowed even to set foot in one, let alone sleep in one.  But I have to do something, because the trio had not so much visions as actual divine visitations, and these were vital to communicating the plot to them.

    Which, really, maybe is super-weak and I should do something else.  But what?  That's the problem, you know?  I have to put something in there to let the trio learn what they need to learn.

    And honestly I don't want to let go of some of it.  I love the visuals of Ariadne's visions, in which she's confronted with a giant blank expanse of clay and words and shapes appear before her to show her what the god in question wants to communicate to her.  (Which requires him to divinely teach her cuneiform so she can understand him!  And that's vital to what follows...)  And in Atalanta's dream, which starts out as a nightmare, she has a vision of an enormous ziggurat filled with praying statuettes (which I thought were still a thing in their day, despite that they were long outdated by then) which come to life and surround her and grow and chase her, and it's actually a pretty effective nightmare sequence, one which I have some interesting ideas about how to give the sequence a bit of a visual punch in the Ren'py version.  Eurysakes, as I recall, just has a conversation with the god he talks to.  That one's not particularly interesting, tbh, and could easily be disposed of.

    Another sequence that is both vital and kind of weirdly pointless is one in which they encounter a procession taking the statue of Ishtar to a temple to the underworld gods, at which time the goddess literally enters the underworld (again)...for apparently no reason whatsoever?  On top of me misunderstanding just why Ishtar went into the underworld in the first place (suggesting that the book I read that talked about her descent into the underworld was especially ancient, considering the full text that explained it was discovered in like the early 1950s), did I think she did it repeatedly, or that it was that important a part of her cultic presence?  Because...no.  None of that.  Additionally, the statues of the gods were essentially their physical forms to the ancient Mesopotamians, and while there were a few rituals that involved moving them around, they wouldn't have been wandering the countryside in the care of merely a few...a few...I don't even know who those people were accompanying the statue, because my original draft didn't make it clear, but they certainly seemed to be absolutely nobody!

    As a sequence, it's not necessary, but it accomplishes some important things, especially in that it's the final part of the Babylonian gods giving the trio gifts to ensure that they can triumph over their enemies--the enemies, in this case, more of the Babylonian gods than the trio--and is directly addressing Ishtar as the Lady of Battles, a function her Hellenic counterpart doesn't have.  Honestly, I need to address Ishtar's unique qualities more, since she has both masculine and feminine qualities, and in that respect she is actually kinda similar to Atalanta and Ariadne.

    Realistically, if they're going to get gifts from the Babylonian gods who want them to defeat the threat that looms over Babylonia, then they should have to do tasks to earn them.  (Admittedly, they did at least fight off enemies who were attacking that procession carrying the statue of Ishtar, but it was never explained why those enemies were attacking it, nor why Ishtar had on hand Marduk's bow and quiver to give them.)  They should have to seek out sites in the wilds where those items have been carefully hidden away, but...I don't know of any appropriate sites for that.  What they're being given are weapons the gods themselves used to fight their own foes, so it's not like they're things that mortals would normally have in their possession.

    Hmm.

    It would be a massive amount of new text, but it's gonna need that regardless, so maybe I do just need to invent challenges for the Babylonian gods to set before them, and for each challenge they pass, they get one of the weapons they need to defeat the villain-du-jour, plus a fraction of the information they need.

    It's a bit formulaic--especially compared to the earlier books--but it's a tried and true formula that's literally been around since ancient times.

    In the current draft, Atalanta--and only Atalanta--is taught "Babylonian" by Marduk so that they can communicate without him having to lower himself to use her language.  (I'm not sure if I didn't know at the time that the language was called Akkadian or if I figured she wouldn't know and it therefore didn't matter.)  I'm not sure how plausible it is for only her to learn it in the new set-up I just described, and yet I feel like certain points aren't going to work very well if they all know it.  (Not sure why Ninurta didn't have to teach it to Eurysakes when they spoke.  It doesn't seem even slightly probable that Ninurta would know Mycenaean Greek...)

    <sigh>

    I feel like this one draft is going to be the hardest part of adapting, rewriting and releasing the entire seven book series.  (They do visit Egypt in book five, but that's just a brief stop-over, more akin to visiting Aiaia in book three, rather than being the major portion of the novel.  Plus Egypt was better understood culturally at the time the books I was consulting were written.)

    Anyway.

    Final, bizarre parting note.

    In 2021, I had taken the most recent drafts of the novels (they had mostly just received minor rephrasings and such since their completion) and left annotations on them in the form of comments in Word.  For rereading book four, I opened up that annotated version in Google Docs so I could read it on my phone and leave myself further notes.

    For some reason Google Docs decided that all those comments I left on the document were made on December 31st, 1969.

    Which is:

• Before there were home PCs
• Before Microsoft Word existed
• Before Microsoft existed (as far as I know)
• Before the novels were ever written
• Before I was born
• Insanity
• All of the above

    Yeah.  Just wanted to share that.  (It's definitely not an error on the file or a dating error on the computer I was using when I left those notes, because when I open the same file in Word on this computer, each comment has the correct date from 2021.)

A thought about the juniors in Yi City

 Okay, so this post is going to contain a lot of spoilers for Mo Dao Zu Shi (aka The Untamed), so please don't read further if you haven't finished reading/watching it.  (I mean, I'm assuming no one would even want to read further if they're not the least bit interested in MDZS...)  This is relating to a background element of the Yi City arc, in the context of the revelations made at the end of the novel.

IWSG: What's in an ending?

 

    Since I've had this post sitting around 3/4 finished since like the 10th of April, and since it's about writing, I figure I may as well use it for this month's ISWG post.

    Instead of talking about the month's suggested question (the answer to that being mostly that I'm afraid of people actually reading anything I wrote, but simultaneously kind of afraid of them not reading it, too), I'm going to talk about endings.

    Or, more accurately, what is it that I look for in an ending?

    I ask because, well...where to start?

    Okay, so in my previous post I mentioned a fantasy novel I had bought on a whim earlier, a book I had decided would be up next from my "to read" pile.

    That book was fantasy in the sense of "historical setting but folklore is real."  So nothing strictly speaking invented for the novel, that kind of thing.

    When I finished reading it, I found the ending had left a bad taste in my mouth (in my mind?) but I'm not even sure why.

    It wasn't a bad ending by any conventional definition:  the heroes were triumphant, they didn't die, and their loved ones didn't die.  So, it should have been satisfying, yes?

    And yet, for some reason, it wasn't.  Not for me.  And I don't know why.

    I can identify a few things that may have been factors:

1. There is a sword in the novel.  It comes up early on and is brought up periodically throughout to ensure the reader hasn't forgotten its existence, then in the final climactic confrontation it's revealed to be the legendary sword itself!  Problem:  because this novel was based in real world folklore, said legendary sword is a very famous one from actual folklore and so I clocked it literally as soon as it was first mentioned.  Where it had been found signaled it as absolutely that sword and no other.  So what was probably(?) intended to be at least a little surprising was instead a "ho hum" moment because it was so incredibly obvious.
2. There's a fake-out moment (more than just a moment, really; it's maybe a chapter and a half long) before the final climax where our first-person narrator makes it sound like she's killed one of her companions.  That leaves a nasty feeling behind even when you're relatively sure she's lying.  I don't like that nasty feeling, and it definitely soured me on the entire thing, despite that it did turn out that she had not killed her friend.
3. The ending is very "restoration of the status quo" despite that the status quo in question was definitely not nice.  Obviously, as it was a historical setting (+folklore being real) the author was not free to change up the status quo beyond maybe changing things in that one village, which was made clear not to be the case.  But it just...it definitely left me feeling like "why didn't they accomplish more?"  Even if there really wasn't much more they could have accomplished.

    Following soon on the heels of that, I finished playing the Dragon Quest III remake...and was left feeling very underwhelmed by the ending.  Admittedly, Dragon Quest as a whole is not as story-intensive as some other JRPG series are (though the stories did become richer and more central to the experience as the series went on) and the endings are often pretty lackluster, but something about that particular ending left me particularly not satisfied.  Again, I can't even put my finger on what about it I was unsatisfied with.  Though the player character's lack of a homecoming didn't help...and the post-credits scene lost any punch it was supposed to have because although I was positive I had heard the name mentioned at the very end before, I have no idea quite where or who he was.  (Logically, you would expect them to be setting up that he's the big bad of IV, only I'm pretty dang sure that was not the name of the guy who was manipulating Psarro, so...also, after the scene it went "To be continued in" the HD remake of the first two games, so...are they saying that III somehow took place before I and II?  I am confused by that logic...but I just checked on the Dragon Quest wiki, and yes, that's what they're saying, which is very strange to me, but the end of Dragon Quest VI also seemed to be claiming that it was before IV and V, so...that's weird, but...)

    Anyway, so double whammy of "endings that left me unsatisfied without actually being bad" in short order.  (I was similarly dissatisfied with the ending of Zenshu, but in that case I know exactly why.  Though it still wasn't a bad ending, per se.  But that was a week or so earlier anyway.)

    Net result, it has me wondering if I am applying a double standard.  Am I being harder on the endings of works written by others than I am on my own endings?

    Thinking about it logically...I should analyze my own endings and see how they fit the criteria I feel like I gathered in looking at why that novel and Dragon Quest III left me feeling less than pleased.

    Setting aside fanfic for the moment, since there are always aspects there that are trying to tie together canon material with material of my own invention and thus making endings trickier to arrange, I'm going to look at series of books I'm 3/7 of the way through rewriting.  But since this is now an IWSG post and a few people will actually read it, I'll be more vague than I was originally going to be.

1. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is not (though as of the ending it's not clear how much of a shake-up it will be, and it's later books that illuminate that)
2. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is improved
3. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is partially upheld and partially improved
4. From here on, I haven't done the rewrites (I'm working on the final research for book 4 now, in fact), so the endings aren't set yet.  Heroes triumph, divine status quo upheld.  The mortal status quo feels like it wasn't particularly even involved in this book.  In large part because my ancient Greek heroes were visiting Babylon, and I didn't have enough information about Late Bronze Age Babylon and its culture (plus I hadn't readjusted the chronology, so I thought they would be visiting in a period when Babylon was under Assyrian control, which was going to get heckin' awkward to write about without way more information than I had available to me).  Even with the new research I've done, I feel like I won't be able to connect events much to what's going on among the actual human beings because the current version is so disconnected that even in the new version the rest of humanity won't too be much impacted by the heroes winning the day.  (Aside from, you know, not getting exterminated by the machinations of the villains.)
5. There's a lot about the ending of this one that I don't even remember.  (I wrote the originals in 2014...and last reread the old drafts in 2020...)  I know the heroes triumph and that the divine status quo is mostly upheld (the villains of the series are trying to off the Olympian gods, ya see, so that comes up a lot), but I can't recall if there's any impact on the status quo of the mortal world at all.  I feel like this one, too, is a bit divorced from human society, though not as much so as the previous book.  They travel a lot in this one, too, but the travel isn't as responsible as in book 4, since their travel is mostly to Egypt and Crete, and I was able to research Egypt a lot more easily at the time, and I'm following the myths to treat Crete at this period as being basically the same as mainland Greece (which is probably not actually the slightest bit archaeologically accurate for this period, but I figured the myths needed to outweigh reality for a myth-based setting).
6. Heroes triumph but at a cost, divine status quo sort of maintained and sort of shaken up, mortal status quo not enormously altered but at least slightly improved.  Sort of.  (I mean, an inheritance issue that could have led to warfare and/or fratricide/sororicide is settled peacefully.  That's something, right?)
7. Heroes ultimately (if only barely) triumph, and the divine status quo is as protected as it can get when you realize that the gods are powered/created by human belief and the Late Bronze Age has about a generation left before its impending collapse.  (And yes, that's actually a minor plot point in the novels.  Or maybe more of a talking point a few times.  It comes up, anyway.)  Again, this one as I recall it is not enormously connected to the actions of other people, in part because they're really going all over the place in this one; they hit a large number of places, including stuff much further north where I had pretty much zero clue what the culture in the region would be at that time.  (I still don't fully know, even though I've done a little more research since then.)  There is at least a little improvement of the mortal status quo--if only for a small slice of it--though, so that's something?

    Looking at all of those, I feel like only the first three would meet my current standards.  Though of course books 4-7 are kind of more "part of a series" than the first three are.  Or rather...how do I explain?  Book 3's ending is where the heroes learn that they have a powerful enemy who's been involved with everything that they've had to deal with up until now.  Book 4 starts out with them actively trying to learn more about this enemy, and that continues right up until they finally deal with said enemy in the climax of book 7.  Because of all that, it's kind of like...the endings don't fully matter as much until reaching the ending of book 7?  Which doesn't seem right, but that's definitely how my brain perceives it no matter what.  (Maybe it's the side-effect of growing up watching the Star Wars movies constantly, and The Empire Strikes Back is the only one with an unsatisfying ending...)

    Obviously, since I haven't yet started the rewriting process for books 4-7, I can do what little is available to me to fix the parts of the endings that aren't up to my current standings for an ending, but...for some of them that might require more restructuring than I really want to put into the process.  Less like a new draft and more like a fully new novel, you know?  I'd like to get the rest of the series finished and released (in what minimal sense the first three count as released, anyway) sooner rather than later, and having to do that much reworking would definitely delay me a lot.

    I guess what most gets to me about this is that I'm not actually sure how much it matters.  Or rather, I don't actually know what other people look for in an ending.  Would most people be annoyed by getting through a novel and finding that the heroes' victory didn't do anything to change the status quo of the world around them?  (Since this is the Late Bronze Age, said status quo is definitely not pleasant, but there's not much I can do about that, y'know?  I'm not as confined by historical reality as the novel that set me onto thinking about all this, but I'm still bound to the larger aspects.)

    Even more importantly, are readers going to get frustrated that the endings become less satisfying after the heroes become aware of the larger flow of events and the actions of the mysterious villain behind it all?  I mean, to be clear, this is not an "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" situation with the same enemy just running off at the end of the book to come back working some new evil in the next novel.  There are smaller villains they defeat each time (though I think in the current draft both 5 and 6 have the same sub-villain, who had left a lesser (but also physically much larger) sub-villain to be the final boss of book 5) so it's at least got that much satisfaction, but...gnh.

    I'm not sure there is any real answer to this.

    I'm also not sure how many people have actually read any of the first three, or how many people are going to read the remaining four whenever they're made available.  And I guess it shouldn't even matter, since I'm making the books available for free on itch.io and AO3, so it's not like I'm trying to sell copies or anything.  I guess I just don't want to disappoint anyone who might read them, you know?

    I know one thing that probably turns people off who do encounter the books is the fact that the heroes are striving to protect the Olympian gods when a lot of modern works tend to want to get rid of them  or at least change them since they were not, in fact, very nice, and did a lot of genuinely horrible things.  But that's a very modern perspective on the Olympian gods.  The people of ancient Greece did not think of them that way.  Of course, we don't fully know how they did think of them, since they didn't write down their cultic practices, and thus the versions of the gods reflected in the myths are not actually the same versions that they actively worshiped.  (This is especially the case for Hera.)  Of course, in the end, I'm not trying to write about the actual religion versions of the Greek gods, but the mythological version, but that still comes down to the same thing, doesn't it?  If I want to use the Heroic Age setting and not completely betray the epic poetry that this is supposed to be building off of (though my writing is nowhere near good enough to be mentioned in the same conversation as masterworks that have survived more than two thousand years!), then the heroes have to believe in and want to win the support of the gods, and if they ever disrespect the gods, they have to suffer because of it.  Because that's what happens in the myths:  you tick off a god, you suffer and probably die.  (Unless you're Agamemnon, then when you tick off a god, you get hundreds or thousands of your own men killed (and/or your daughter) and you just sit there and survive it like a monster.)

    So that's something I could in theory change that might make my works more palatable to more people, but I don't want to do that, because that's not what I'm going for.

    I should probably write something else where I'm free to have characters tell the gods "get lost!" when they do the awful stuff they're known for.  (I should write a visual novel where Zeus finally gets his for all his skirt-chasing.  That would be epic.)

    ...I feel like I have wandered way off my original topic of "endings."

    Given that I am very bad at them, somehow that seems appropriate.