IWSG: I want to make a "May" pun but I can't think of a good one

 

    Yet another post without a decent title.  :<

    Well.  Anyway.  I don't have anything to say about this month's suggested question, so...

    Hmm.

    I have to admit that I kind of feel like I'm spinning my wheels a bit lately.  My "top priority" is still supposed to be the Atalanta and Ariadne series, since I've been working on getting it released since 2021.  (And I wrote the first drafts of all seven novels back in 2014!)  But that is sort of...both frustrating and slow?

    I'm currently working on the next draft of book four, but as soon as I finish it, I have to go back in and fix up book two.  I did, at least, get version 2.0 of the first book released during the past month!  That was a big milestone, as I made some epic upgrades to the text, as well as changing the engine the interactive version was released in.  Ooh, actually, I can share a sample of the upgraded text!  Here's the old version, as released in TWINE:

(Comparison is just the two paragraphs from "The interior of the cave" onward.)

    And here's the new version, which is in Ren'py:

    Not all of the text was changed that radically, but...yeah, it was a pretty drastic change.  I don't know if the second and third books will get that much alteration (and they won't get more than a text change in the interactive versions, since they're already in Ren'py), but...I still want to get those changes made.  In between working on drafts of book four.  It's exciting to be able to point to something like this and be like "my style has improved so much in the past five years!" but it's also depressing to think I released something that badly written, plus the new version is still only mid at best, and it's generally a draining process having to do this.  So...yeah, it leaves me in a weird place mentally, I guess?

    In other news(?), in between releasing version 2.0 of the first book and getting to work on the next draft of book four, I told myself I could have one fun little fanfic project.  All my standing ideas for fanfics were guaranteed to be long, though, so I had to come up with a new one that I hoped would be short.  (It ended up being somewhere in the neighborhood of 45k, so...not really short, but at least it's well under 100k?)  I wanted to experiment to see if I was capable of writing a murder mystery, since I've read a few of them lately.  (I joined a Discord book club, and the first book we read was The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (and then during the book club meeting, people who had looked into it talked about just how garbage the Netflix adaptation was, including changing who the killer was!), and on learning that the heroine, Bundle, had been introduced in an earlier book, I hunted up a copy of it and read that, too!)

    So, I ended up trying my hand at a murder mystery fanfic.  Naturally using the cast of Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, aka The Untamed in its live-action adaptation)) for the story, because I've been obsessed for years now.  😅  (Ugh, these Windows 11 emoji are so ugly! 😭  Eew, especially that one...)

    Anyway, it's not really much of a murder mystery, I fear.  Especially not for anyone who knows the fandom, because there's pretty much only three possible suspects, since most of the cast would never commit a murder unless they're acting direly out of character.  But I think my story's biggest problem as a murder mystery is that everyone the investigating character talks to is being honest.  Usually, suspects lie even when they're not the murderer.  (Don't they?)  But again, that's partially a limitation of the fanfic situation, since most of those characters are typically honest.  I did, at least, manage to get a lot of inconsistencies between different characters describing the same events, since their perspectives are different and their opinions alter how they think of things, but...

    Well, for a first attempt, it's at least decent?  I'll certainly be posting it on AO3 eventually (there's a lot of other fics waiting their turn to be edited and released first, though, so it'll take a while), in any case.

    Sometime, I'd like to write a more proper mystery, though.  (Maybe not a murder one?)  Either something original (in which case it'd probably be a visual novel) or something with a fandom that's a little more flexible so there would actually be some genuine mystery to it.  (Because really, "was it Jin Guangyao, Su Minshan or Xue Yang who murdered Jin Zixun?" is not much of a mystery...though I guess not making Su Minshan the killer would at least surprise people a little?)

    ...hmm.

    Disjointed as always.

    *sigh*

    Maybe I can chalk that up to the pain-killers I'm on because of the dental surgery I went through a few days ago.  (My cheek is still swollen, and it hurts to touch it!  It sucks so bad!)