So, this month's question is
October 1 question - What is the most favorite thing you have written, published or not? And why?
Hmm. Can't say I like the phrasing "the most favorite" somehow, but that's just me. Anyway, it's actually kind of hard to answer. Not in a "they're all my babies--I can't choose between them!" kind of way, but just because I've never really thought about it before. Also I write in a lot of different categories that don't really smoothly compare to each other.
In the "things I've written that I wouldn't be ashamed to show to my parents" category, the sixth book of the Atalanta and Ariadne series is the only one that comes to mind. I did a lot of things in that one that I'm really proud of to this day (wrote the first draft in 2014), and I'm looking forward to someday fixing it up so I can release it. Assuming I can ever manage to finish rewriting book four. 😰 Anyway, book six's setting is mostly in Sparta, trying to deal with a potential succession crisis, as Menelaos wants his son by his Trojan concubine to inherit, but his daughter by Helen (who is married to Agamemnon's son, Orestes, as that's what happened in the myths 🤢) feels that she's the only proper heir. Menelaos calls on his old friend Odysseus to argue his case, and Orestes calls on Eurysakes (one of my three protagonists) to argue his case. What we see of the official debates (if you can call them that) is a fun exercise in trying to expose multiple people plotting various things, and considering one of those people is the master schemer Odysseus, I think I did a surprisingly decent job of it! Of course, a bigger part of the story is slowly exposing my novel's version of just why Helen went to Troy in the first place, which I flatter myself to think has a few elements to it that haven't been done before. (At least, not in conjunction with all the other elements I'm using, anyway. Can't really vouch for any of them being 100% new by themselves.) Atalanta and Ariadne also end up visiting Hades to see if he will allow them to talk to the shade of Bellerophon, since they need the winged horse Pegasos for reasons. 😅 I got to do a lot of fun stuff in book 6! (I know it seems especially self-indulgent and cliche to have them obtain the services of Pegasos--and it is!--but at least I foreshadowed it a bit all through the series, as Atalanta talks about the idea of getting to ride him on numerous occasions.)
But would I truly say that's my all-time favorite? No, not really. (Especially since it still needs at least one hefty rewrite.)
Moving into fan fiction, I have a few strong favorite contenders among my Velvet Goldmine fics.
There's "Celebrity," in which Arthur Stuart has a secret second life as a gay romance novelist, and one of his novels was actually a thinly veiled retelling of the Brian Slade/Curt Wild romance, only with a different ending where they stay together. The novel was both his long-term passion project and also a way to exorcise the ghosts of his glam past. But now his editor is once again pressuring him to write a sequel to it, however since he now knows what Brian's done in the intervening years, it's not that simple for him. Running into Curt again encourages him to write it after all, but that leads to further complications. It's pretty different from most of my other Velvet Goldmine fics, but I just really liked how it turned out. Unfortunately, I decided to experiment with posting the whole thing to AO3 at once (despite that it's eighteen chapters long) and that ended up giving it a pretty low view count somehow.
There are also the fusion fics: in response to a prompt to fuse Velvet Goldmine with one of the myriad other films by the prolific actors who played Curt and Arthur, instead of going for the obvious Star Wars and Batman angles, I went Jane Austen and Shakespeare instead. Didn't do justice to either of those authors, but I did produce a couple pieces I was pretty proud of, regardless. And there's the one where Curt becomes an actor, but...
Anyway. In terms of Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic, wow. I'm honestly pretty proud of a lot of it, but some of that may be because I'm still in the "madly in love with this novel" phase of my fannishness. 😅 How I feel about them whenever I cease obsessing about MDZS will be the real question. But who knows how long that will take?
Probably my favorite is "To Walk This Earth With You Again," in which Wei Wuxian was not revived, and didn't reincarnate until modern day. (To explain: Mo Dao Zu Shi begins with the death of Wei Wuxian, the novel's hero...and then goes immediately to him being revived (sort of) thirteen years later.) He has most of his memories from his previous life, and goes to an online support group for other people with past life memories (allowing me to finally complete something with a particular pair of reincarnations of Achilles and Patroclos that I used in about half a dozen incomplete works because I loved them too much to let them be dead backstory characters in a sci-fi "Trojan War repeating itself in space" thing) and it just really resonated with me somehow. I even went back and added two more chapters to it later, one in which Wei Wuxian's almost-but-not-quite-adopted-brother reincarnates with all his memories and they get a chance to work out the feud between them, and then another one detailing just why Wei Wuxian wasn't revived in this alternate universe, which features the villain's slow descent into madness. Honestly, that slow descent into madness for a villain who is the "always outwitting his enemies fifteen steps ahead of them" type was particularly satisfying! Though I also liked the online chat sections, too. (I even looked up someone's formatting code to make it look like Discord, so it looks really great on screen, too.)
Honorary mention has to go to "The Spark That Ignites the Embers," which is using the version of MDZS canon from its live-action adaptation, The Untamed, and centers on that not-quite-brother I was just talking about (in part in apology to him, because he died a rather humiliating death in "To Walk," though the final bonus chapter at least changed it into being murdered by the villain, which is probably slightly less humiliating?), and somehow ended up being 500k words long, far and away the longest thing I've ever written...and hopefully it will stay that way, 'cause man is that a crazy lot of words! It took me eleven months to write the first draft, and editing it was a nightmare, because it was really hard to remember some of the pickiest details of what happened earlier on. (Not to mention that Word takes quite a while to open a file that big!)
My last category that can't really be compared to anything else is that of the games I've written. It's not a super-large category (especially if you discount the lightly interactive version of the Atalanta and Ariadne books), but I'm still pretty proud of some of it. Though the one I'm most proud of is probably less for the writing than for the "everything else" about it. My most recent release, Orchid Duet, (which is actually also a MDZS fan game 😅) spent a long time waiting for the artist to finish up their work, and while I was waiting, I kept iterating through the game and adding more and more visual effects and little bits of polish, so I'm actually quite proud of it. (I've also played it through at least three dozen times in the last two months, so I'm likely not to touch it again for some time to come...😰)
Ironically, the one I'm next most proud of is actually called The Worst Visual Novel Ever, and was for a game jam specifically to create bad games. But somehow I ended up putting in a lot of silly, quasi-clever stuff in the writing, and I kind of love it despite how insane it is. Especially because of some of the really meta stuff, like the narrator becoming more and more unhinged the longer I spend writing the game, which only is obvious if you're looking at the script instead of the game, because the player might get the narrator breaking down on their first playthrough, instead of closer to the end of the script. The narrator actually even gets replaced a few times because its breakdown is that intense.
Hmm.
I feel like I went on too long and didn't really say much and...
...sorry. I think I'm a little nuts right now because I'm getting my butt kicked by the mold count in the air.
