A to Z Reflection

 

    Hmm.

    What to even say?

    I mean, a lot of the individual posts were things I had fun with, though I'm not sure how well I fulfilled my intention on the theme I chose for myself.  I mean, yeah, I wrote 27 posts about characters I have written about, one for each letter of the alphabet, but it ended up being more of a parade of "I enjoy this quote so much" and less of an actual discussion of the character or any facet of writing for them.  In that regard, I think the F and R posts were probably the most successful, because I actually did address more points than just "I enjoy this passage about this character."

    The fact that it mostly just swapped back and forth between my Greek mythology-inspired novels and my Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic was also not cool.  Unfortunately, I don't actually have that much else that fit the qualification of "available online or hopefully will be available online someday."  I guess if I'd tried harder--or been willing to accept smaller characters--I could have found characters from more diverse works to use.

    So, it's like...I finished the challenge but I also kind of feel like I failed somehow?

    More importantly, I was so fixated on it that I got very little else accomplished over the month of April, and was so exhausted by the process that I barely ended up visiting anyone else's blog--though I did at least visit a few!--so it sort of...defeated the purpose?  Even worse, I was getting stressed enough about it that I ended up triggering my heart palpitations, so that's excessively bad.

    Overall...

    Overall I think I can't even contemplate doing this again unless my heart condition ever becomes truly resolved, instead of merely "less intrusive," which is where it's been for the last...I dunno, six to eight months?  (Doesn't help that my doctor is no longer with the hospital (the reasons for her departure were not explained to me) and I have way too many social phobias to be able to easily call another one.  Plus all the tests indicated that there wasn't actually anything wrong with my heart, so it's like...wtf?)

    *sigh*

    This has not been much of a post.

    But I don't really feel like I have much else to say, either.

    (But that's why I won't be entering it into the Reflections bloghop.  No point in subjecting other people to the boredom...)

IWSG - Yikes!

 

    Normally, I pre-write these days in advance, but this month I've been so distracted by April A-to-Z that I totally forgot. 😰  So I'm gonna have to hasten out a post that will likely be even sloppier and more disjointed than usual.

    I've been in a bit of a muddle all month, but it got worse about...hmm...I want to say about a week and a half ago?  Somewhere around there.  Unlike on my computer, on the browser on my cell phone, I keep a whole bunch of tabs always open so I don't have to mess around with bookmarks and stuff.  And one day I opened the tab that is always aimed at the back-end of this blog so I could keep working on my April A-to-Z posts when it gave me this message that it couldn't load any of my data.  The posts, pages and even statistics all said that.  I wrote it off as a momentary glitch, and went about my business, but then it still said that four or five hours later.  Everything was still there--if I clicked the "view my blog" button, I could still see all my content--but I couldn't access anything, so I was afraid my blog had been frozen pending deletion, or at least pending an investigation into whether or not it needed to be deleted.

    So at that point I absolutely started panicking.  I tried using the help page to see if my blog was disabled, and came to the conclusion that my account was disabled (despite that I could log into my email just fine) and tried to start the appeal process, only since the account was not, in fact, disabled, obviously that didn't work.  After freaking out for a couple hours, I managed to download a full back-up copy of my blog....and then noticed a new help page indicating a way to get an indicator that a blog (rather than an account) was disabled and how to appeal that decision, so I went back to the back-end page...and everything was totally back to normal.

    I still have zero clue what happened.

    What I do know is that I figured that if my blog was going to be disabled, it would be because of the work of (fan) fiction I had posted on some pages, so I reverted them all to draft and across three days painstakingly copy-pasted the text from the blog (where it had received various minor edits in the year it had been up) to AO3.  (Where, ironically, it's gotten more kudos than it got views on the blog...)

    Anyway...my heart palpitations are definitely exacerbated by stress (at this point, I think it's safe to say they're not caused by it, though I still don't know what did start this condition) so that needless to say caused my heart to start misbehaving for a couple of days straight.  (And that was after I'd already had some issues because I was working too hard at the April A-to-Z process!)  So that was all kinds of not fun.

    Um.

    That's so not a writing thing, even though it's tangentially related.

    I didn't mean to go into so much detail.  (This is why I normally pre-write, so I have time to start over if I get derailed and run off on a tangent like this.)

    Anyway.

    I'm also very distracted because I'm in the final stages of getting The Martial Maenads, the third in my more-or-less YA series, ready for release.  I finished writing the glossary for the interactive version, but I'm using a different program for code entry now (because I learned the program I used to use has a habit of accidentally deleting your saved code!) and it was giving me all kinds of problems yesterday, triggering another heart palpitation, from frustration more than stress.  (Doesn't help that my computer is evidently too much of a potato for that program, and it chugs constantly when it's open...)  I should be able to finish getting the glossary into the code today, and then I just need to write a couple of post-novel mini-essays, maybe, or maybe I just need to write up that pre-novel essay on the alternate theogony that got introduced in book two?  Well, either way, that shouldn't take too long.  And then I only have to reread the novel twice--once in the Ren'py version and then once after posting the text online, since I find I can spot a lot of new errors by looking at it on my phone on AO3--and make any needed changed, then it can finally be released into the world that doesn't actually care in the slightest about it.

    I'm looking forward to finally getting that released, because I told myself "no more writing new things until after the release!" to force myself to stop goofing off by writing more fanfic instead of working on my actual release.  (Bad enough that I was putting so much into blogging over April that I barely touched it until the blog posts were all written...)  It's kind of weird how not writing can cause just as much stress as writing can.

    Aaaaaaand I feel like I have said nothing of any relevance to anyone, but I can't think of anything else to say. 😭  I'll try to get next month's post pre-written so it will be less of a gibbering mess.

A to Z: Zenais!

 

    I am so excited for today's post!  Not because it represents the successful conclusion of the challenge, but because it's about Zenais!  😁

    She's a character I added to the new draft of The Martial Maenads, and I am super-proud of her.  (Even if she is rather blatantly, erm, inspired by someone else's character...)

    But first, a little background on the situation in which Atalanta and Ariadne meet her.  They've been sent to Thrace to deal with the threat of Bromalios, an imposter god claiming to be equal parts Dionysos and Ares.  (Hence the title of the novel, lol!)  After they're accepted into the cult's headquarters--which is more the ancient version of a cult than the modern version, I hasten to add--the girls find they're required to be given lessons in "dance" and song in order to be capable enough to be properly initiated into the cult itself.  And one of the "dance" instructors is Zenais, granddaughter of Heracles.  (Her name essentially means "daughter of Zeus," though in this context it's obviously not strictly literal.  (She is genuinely the great-granddaughter of Zeus, though!  Because these are novels in which the Greek gods are very real...))

A to Z: Y?

 

    It's kind of funny, actually.  I have a decent number of Y-named characters, but they're none of them much to talk about.  (Once again proving that I did not really give "characters I have written about" enough thought as an April A-to-Z theme...)  For lack of any stronger choice, I'm going to go with the various members of the Yu Clan who show up in the massively long (and currently unedited) Mo Dao Zu Shi fic that I spent nearly a year working on. 😅

    Ideally, it'd be great if I could also talk about the canon Yu Clan (ex-Yu Clan?) character, Yu Ziyuan.  Unfortunately, most of the fics I've written so far started after her death.  😰 The sole exception to that--no, there's two exceptions.  The first one, the 1980s AU, has her only vaguely present because I did not think I could write her the way she was written in canon, nor did it seem appropriate to do so anyway, and I wasn't sure how she should behave in the modern setting, so she's more of an off-screen idea than an actual character.  And in the recently written "Last Loop," she's still alive, but none of the scenes are at Lotus Pier, so there would be no reason for her to show up. 😅

    Instead, I'll just have to talk about the OC family members I gave her.  😅  Though in my own defense, at least two of the four named Yu Clan relatives I introduced existed by definition:  when Lotus Pier is attacked, Yu Ziyuan tells her son to flee to Meishan to his grandmother so Yu Ziyuan's mother is canonically still alive at that time, and one of Yu Ziyuan's other names means "third daughter" so she must therefore have two older sisters (though I only used the elder of the two).  The further two Yu Clan OCs I introduced are Yu Ziyuan's nieces, though only one of them is even the slightest bit fleshed out.  (All of this post is talking about the still untitled Jiang Cheng fic that I spent most of the last year writing, btw.  I gave Yu Ziyuan a different OC relation in another fic, but he's not really worth talking about.)

    To go by order of age, let's start with Yu-zongzhu, Yu Ziyuan's mother.  (Who isn't quite a full "named" character since I didn't pick a given name for her. 😅)  Given that Jiang Cheng was told to go to Meishan to his grandmother rather than his grandfather, most fans have assumed that the Yu Clan is matriarchal.  This is epic, so I went with it.  😆  Therefore, Jiang Cheng's grandmother is the leader of the Yu Clan during the massive fic.  She doesn't show up all that often in the fic, though, as Jiang Cheng mentions to the other leaders early on that his grandmother and aunts tend not to pay much attention to the other clans and anything they happen to get up to.

A to Z: Xue Yang

 

    Yeah...this was...I mean, he's the obvious choice because X-names are kind of few and far between in European languages (unless I want to dedicate a post to one of Achilles' horses) and there's not actually a lot to say about Xiao Xingchen (other than that he deserved the happy ending that was denied him) so...I guess we're goin' yandere today!  (Because yes, Xue Yang is absolutely a yandere.  I am intractable on this point.)

    Xue Yang is a very popular character with Mo Dao Zu Shi fans, which I suspect is largely due to the fact that the actor playing him in the drama is extremely hot:

It was quite hard to find an image that captured both his hotness and the character's obvious mania (played by Wang Haoxuan)

    He gets a surprisingly large amount of time devoted to him in volume one of the novel, but despite his tragic backstory there's not much depth to him as a character, in my opinion.  Where he has depth is his role in the story:  he actually is all the things that Wei Wuxian's enemies think Wei Wuxian is.  Thus, Xue Yang's fingerprints are all over an assortment of terrible past events, especially things related to demonic cultivation, so despite that he dies in volume one, he keeps coming up as a concept (and is present in a certain flashback) throughout the rest of the novel.  (He also features in a bonus side story that's centered on Jin Guangyao, but that's another matter.)

    I know I've expressed this basic idea somewhere in text before (not sure if it was on this blog or in an author's note on one of my fanfics on AO3), but I'll try to go into more detail here to justify the repetition.  😅  There's a fantastic line in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Belloq tells Indy that "I am a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light."  And that's what Xue Yang is:  he's the shadowy reflection of the already shadowy Wei Wuxian.  They're both skilled at cultivation and swordplay, they're both capable of showing great ingenuity, and can think quickly on their feet, coming up with new plans and schemes as the need arises.

    Their past histories have remarkable similarities, but also major differences.  They were both homeless orphans whose life was changed after an encounter with a cultivator at similar ages (8 in Wei Wuxian's case, 7 in Xue Yang's) but the actual change wrought was significantly different:  Wei Wuxian was taken home and raised in luxury by the cultivator he encountered, while Xue Yang was tricked, beaten and had his hand crushed, resulting in the loss of one of his pinky fingers.  They both single-handedly commit a horrific mass slaughter through the use of demonic cultivation, but in Wei Wuxian's case, the slaughter is of Wen Clan soldiers who had taken part in the massacre at Lotus Pier, whereas Xue Yang slaughtered not only the cultivator who had maimed him as a child but also his entire household, from his family to the servants to their dogs.  (Okay, technically, Wei Wuxian was definitely single-handedly responsible for more mass slaughters than that.  But the massacre of the Chang Clan by Xue Yang is very deliberately an echo of the slaughter of Wen Chao's men by Wei Wuxian (despite that the reader/watcher encounters the death of the Chang Clan first) so I still feel the comparison works.)  And they both become obsessed with a white-clad, pure cultivator, but Wei Wuxian's obsession is expressed first as teasing then as friendship and finally as love, whereas Xue Yang's obsession is variously expressed by seeking vengeance against, tormenting, controlling and then attempting to revive in order to further torment and control Xiao Xingchen.  (And yes, I am of course aware of the romantic/sexual component of Xue Yang's obsession with Xiao Xingchen, but as I'm not sure Xue Yang is consciously aware of it...)

    Anyway, moving from "describe the character" to "talk about how I've written about the character" (since my April A-to-Z theme is "characters I've written about," after all).  While I get his purpose in the original story very well, Xue Yang's character is a hard one for me to work with, so I have a tendency to try not to have any of his scenes be too long or too filled with dialog.  Not so much a "less is more" situation as a "fewer opportunities to get him wrong" kind of thing.  😅

A to Z: Wei Wuxian

 

    The most obvious of obvious choices, to the point that I've already outright said this is who I was going to be talking about today. 🤣  Because I can't help loving this adorable little gremlin.

Just look at that cute little gremlin face!  (played by Xiao Zhan)

    So...as per most of my other Mo Dao Zu Shi-related posts this month, I won't bother trying to explain the plot of the original novel, and will just give a brief encapsulation of the character and how I've written him in my fan fiction.

    Being the lead of the original novel, there's obviously a lot to say about who Wei Wuxian is and what he's like.  And I won't do a very good job at summing that up, because I have a tendency to fall flat on such matters. 😰  Um.  Anyway.

    Wei Wuxian is his courtesy name, and his birth name is Wei Ying.  To describe who he is kind of requires talking about where he came from and how he was raised, so prepare for a long diatribe that MDZS fans already know all the details of. 😅

    His parents are the wandering cultivator Cangse-sanren and Wei Changze, and even before he was born he was already causing trouble, in a way, because his mother's arrival at Lotus Pier made the young Jiang Fengmian (who was either the heir to the Jiang Clan or its young leader at the time, not sure which off-hand, if we even know) fall in love with her, despite that he was already engaged to Yu Ziyuan.  We don't have the full story on what happened, but at some point after Jiang Fengmian broke off his engagement Cangse-sanren eloped with Wei Changze (whose position in the Jiang Clan is translated as being a "servant" but I don't think it's quite as low a position as the word "servant" would indicate in, say, a Medieval Europe setting) instead, despite that (or maybe because) both of them were likely 100% aware of Jiang Fengmian's feelings.  But then Cangse-sanren and Wei Changze died when their son was very small.  (The live-action drama specified that he was four; I don't recall off-hand if the book gave an exact year, but probably in that general age range there, too.)  With no relations around, little Wei Ying ended up living in the streets of Yiling and having to fend for himself, including living off of scraps of food out of the garbage.

    Around the time he was eight, Jiang Fengmian found him, though by this point he had been living alone in the streets so long that all he could remember was that his name had a "Ying" in it.  😭  Jiang Fengmian brought him back to Lotus Pier, where he raised the boy alongside his own two children, Jiang Yanli (then about twelve) and Jiang Cheng (then about eight), though since he had ended up married to Yu Ziyuan anyway, he wasn't allowed to officially adopt Wei Ying, because she was punishing the child for problems caused by his mother.  😰  Jiang Yanli took to her new not-quite-brother straight away, but Jiang Cheng was bitter after having his three puppies taken away (because Wei Ying had become deathly afraid of dogs after being bitten by stray dogs so many times as they also wanted the scraps of food in the garbage) and only after nearly driving Wei Ying to run away from Lotus Pier did he finally also accept him as a part of the family.  Yu Ziyuan never did accept him, though, forcing Wei Ying to address her husband as Jiang-shushu rather than as his adoptive father, or even as his clan leader or teacher.  (Because the teacher/student relationship is an inherently paternal one (in terminology, if nothing else) that would have meant she was accepting a maternal position in regards to the boy if she allowed him to address her husband as his teacher.  And she was having none of that.)

    However, despite Yu Ziyuan's animosity, Wei Wuxian grew up happy at Lotus Pier, and as soon as he started his cultivation training, he proved himself not only the best of his generation at Lotus Pier, but one of the best his age in any clan.  That gave him a decided arrogant streak, on top of his self-indulgent whims, his competitiveness, and general happy-go-lucky attitude most of the time.  However, he also has a temper, which at first is only vented at anyone who would dare to insult his precious shijie, Jiang Yanli.  After the plot gets going, his temper turns from minor fights with Jin Zixuan to wreaking bloody and sometimes outright horrifying revenge on anyone who dares to harm those Wei Wuxian cares about.  In the final year or so of his life (the life he loses at the start of the novel, only to promptly get a new one in the next chapter, though that's over a decade later), he spirals into some very dark places, mentally, and his behavior can be exceptionally off-putting in that period.  (Fortunately, that period is a pretty short part of the novel...)

    He likes to style himself as a "bad boy" (especially in the second life that is the novel's present, where he seems to delight in the fact that many of his past actions are "nefarious") but he's actually quite dutiful (eg when returning to Lotus Pier for the first time in roughly fifteen years, one of the first things he wants to do is to go to the Ancestral Hall and pay his respects to Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan as if they were his real parents (despite the way Yu Ziyuan treated him his entire life)) and very concerned with doing what's right and protecting the innocent.  He's friendly and outgoing until someone crosses him, and then look out!  Up until he realizes he's in love with Lan Wangji, he's a terrible flirt with almost every pretty girl he sees, though he never attempted to do more than flirt with any of them.

    Okay, so I think that managed to sum up most of his personality and the situations that led him to become the way he is.  So that means I can finally discuss my own attempts to write about him.  (Though I still struggle to get him characterized correctly...)

A to Z: Very Vexing, Verena

 

    You would think that with fairly common names like Vincent and Victor out there that I wouldn't have any trouble finding a V-named character for today.

    Problem is, in an older phase of my writing journey, I used to write fan fiction for certain JRPGs like Final Fantasy VII and the Suikoden series.  In the former, one of my favorite characters was Vincent Valentine, and in the latter one of my favorite characters was Viktor.  Consequently, I wrote about those characters a fair amount, and it's made it between hard and impossible for me to use those names (or variations on them) in other contexts.  So, I don't have any characters by those names, and I really didn't want to have to cite any writing quite that old, because it was really, really, really, really not good.

    That's left me with the character of Verena to write about.  She's from the untitled novel I wrote for 2012's NaNoWriMo.  Which I posted in entirely unedited form on AO3 a few years back just as a way to preserve it.  Because in many respects it is utterly awful--I hated it so much that as soon as I finished writing it, I never even opened the file again for almost ten years--but in some respects it's actually better than what I write now, because at least things actually happen in it, and with a lot less chatter in between events.  I think some of the pacing is due to the narrative style, actually, that and I was thinking of it as a JRPG.

    Somewhat hilariously, considering what I said just two paragraphs ago, the novel is actually a rewrite of and expansion on an unfinished Final Fantasy VII fanfic.  I had written a very brief story wherein Yuffie Kisaragi ended up transported into the real world, where she kept finding all these signs that maybe her world was just a dream, but they didn't quite add up, and then some FBI agents visited her about some attacks in her area, and she reluctantly told them the whole story of FFVII, since she shouldn't have known their faces for them to be in her dream.  (Her telling of the story was of course skipped over, and the narration merely said that the tale took her several hours to relate.)  But then I didn't know how to handle the final confrontation as Sephiroth attempted to enter the real world, so the fic just sort of died unfinished (as is not unusual for such things).  Anyway, so in the NaNo novel, it was standard third person narration for the plucky young girl being dragged into the ocean by monsters and emerging inside a bathtub in our world, then most of the novel was first person narration as she tells the tale of the grand adventure that had taken place prior to her dunking to the two agents who came to her door.  In addition to borrowing liberally in terms of story elements and character types from Final Fantasy VII (though the one filling Vincent's story role didn't really have much in common with him aside from being hot and taciturn) a lot of the characters were painfully blatantly based on Suikoden characters...though mostly characters from Suikoden III, so Viktor wasn't one of them.  (One other borrowed thing, which I think was unintentional, was that when I needed a name for a water buffalo-like animal, I ended up calling it an armu.  That, it turned out, was the name of a large grazing herbivore in Xenoblade Chronicles, but I guess it had been long enough since I had played that on the Wii that I had forgotten.  😰  Having not too long ago finally gotten around to playing the HD remastered version on the Switch, I now remember that name. 😅)

    Anyway, long story short, it was really bad and excessively derivative.  I don't think I was wrong to just dump it as unworthy of the effort of rewriting.

    But it is something I can talk about and say "here's a link to it" at the end, so...🤷🏻‍♀️