Today's word count may be lesser than usual, since I had to come online and post a chapter to AO3 first, meaning that my computer time has been divided and the new laptop unfairly got a share of it.
I guess since I'm on a computer, though, I'll talk briefly about the videos I didn't end up talking about yesterday. Two Youtube videos in a row, both about 45 minutes long, and both on the subject of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. The first was Overly Sarcastic Productions' summary of the novel, which Red said was 300k words long! (Or was that in the other video? Hmm...no, it was Red who said that. The other talked about page count, not word count.) Wow, though! Despite now knowing the whole plot, I kind of want to read it now, despite that revenge stories are not really my cup of tea. (Neither is tea; maybe I should say "not my glass of soda" instead?) Of course, the fact that the overall message of the novel is anti-revenge rather than pro-revenge helps that, naturally. But mostly it's because of how amazingly convoluted the hero's plans are, really.
Among other things, it gives me an idea of how I want to approach one of the fanfic ideas I have, specifically one that's supposed to be canon-compliant but focusing on Nie Huaisang's long, drawn out revenge plot (and his coincidental saving of Wen Qing in the process, of course). MDZS set him up as a brilliant schemer, even beyond the schemer that is the novel's villain (he'd have to be if he's going to out-think the villain, after all!), so the idea of giving his personal tale of revenge as many schemes and twists and disguises and alter-egos as the one in The Count of Monte Cristo is decidedly tempting! (Might lessen the canon-compliant angle a bit, but...)
Anyway, the second video I watched was of course the Lost in Adaptation on the same novel, which went up within 24 hours of the OSP one. (And in fact started with a plug for the OSP summary, since it would be more comprehensive!) He covered three different adaptations of the novel, and wow, watching those would be woefully insufficient to experience the story. Especially the most recent one in the video. Yikes. However, that video gave some context to the novel that Red didn't, specifically that the hero's initial suffering was inspired by something Dumas' father went through. (Neither video mentioned that Dumas wrote a similar novel prior to The Count of Monte Cristo that featured a hero who, like Dumas himself, was of mixed ancestry, the only novel he wrote that didn't feature exclusively white people in the leading roles. That one must have been even more inspired by his father's ordeal.)
However, that also prompted me to check and see if the anime adaptation was available to stream on Crunchyroll, and it turns out it is. It's got a bit of a sci-fi setting instead of the novel's early 19th century setting, and I seem to recall it was praised at the time it came out. I think I had turned up my nose at it because at the time I thought anime adapting a 19th century novel was an absurdity or inappropriate or whatever else I thought, but now I'm thinking I want to give it a try. If nothing else, a 24 episode anime would have enough time to do that lengthy story justice (or to come closer to doing it justice, at least), unlike a two hour movie! 😅
But enough of that. Let's move on to my independent November writing challenge! (I'm not even sure if I should consider hitting 50k to be "succeeding" since that's a pretty easy task for me. But I feel like I'll be setting myself up for failure if I make finishing a project the goal. My MDZS fanfic often get ludicrously long (once even longer than the original novel!), making finishing my current fic this month not necessarily physically possible. And I doubt I'll have the willpower to set it aside long enough to finish the rewrite of Tablet of Destinies...and who knows if I'll even start my new VN script, let alone finish it...)
Current numbers!
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