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: Strangely Superfluous S

 

    Again, my writing is weirdly low on S-named characters.  It's not that there aren't any, it's just that somehow they fail to be significant.  (This is made all the more frustrating because apparently "Sally" is my go-to random female name the way "Freddy" is for random male names; I found at least four of them just in looking over everything I had written in the last 10-12 years, and I'm quite sure there were more I just didn't stumble across.)

    So, like I did with Q, I thought today I'd just provide some quotes and tidbits about various S-named characters.  For whatever reason, they're all fan fiction characters.  Not sure why my original works don't feature any major characters with an S-name, but...🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the first S-named character I can talk about is Shannon Hazelbourne from Velvet Goldmine, about whom I ought to have a lot to say, yet somehow I don't really?  (Doesn't help that it's hard to treat her consistently...)  Any discussion of Shannon is going to be rife with spoilers for the movie, so tread carefully beyond the "read more" tag!  (After Shannon, there are MDZS characters (and spoilers) to be found...)

A to Z: Nie Huaisang

 

    Again, probably not a surprise to anyone following my April A-to-Z journey who already knows Mo Dao Zu Shi.  (W will also not surprise you, in that case.  🤣)

    It's hard to know how to talk about Nie Huaisang, for spoiler reasons...which in itself is a spoiler because from his early appearances in Mo Dao Zu Shi you'd think it impossible that he could even tangentially be involved in anything that could conceivably be considered a spoiler.

    ...

    Somehow, that seems very like him.  😅  I'll just throw down a "read more" tag and get on with it, then, shall I?

A to Z: Lan Wangji

    Given my post just a few days ago, I'm sure today's post subject comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Mo Dao Zu Shi.  For those not familiar, a crash course in the character in the original work before I start talking about how I've handled him in my fanfic.  (Oh, and there is now a glossary page on the side bar if any of the terms in this post need explaining!  😁)

    Lan Wangji, birth name Lan Zhan, sobriquet Hanguang-jun, also known as the Second Jade of Gusu (with his elder brother Lan Xichen collectively referred to as the Twin Jades), heir to the repressively strict Lan Clan cultivation sect based in the isolated Cloud Recesses, twenty li from the city of Gusu.  (A li is a distance of measure which I believe I read somewhere is about equivalent to a kilometer.)  As the love interest of MDZS, Lan Wangji is over-powered, being good at absolutely everything, and his character flaws are somewhat hidden.  The only strictly obvious flaw in him--the only reason he ranked second on the eligible bachelors list rather than first--is that he's very serious, almost incapable of having facial expressions, and that he doesn't talk much, so he has an icy air to him, unlike his brother, who projects a friendly warmth.  His hidden character flaws include massive jealousy issues, and being surprisingly horny.

Lan Wangji in the comic adaptation of the novel

    As a character, he's something of a mystery.  The author of Mo Dao Zu Shi, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, writes in a style that feels very unusual to me, though it may not be unusual for her genre.  (I haven't read enough danmei other than hers to be sure one way or the other.)  What strikes me as odd is that the narrator is omniscient except having little to no knowledge of what the love interest is thinking; this has been the case in all three of her novels.  (Maybe it's not that the narrator's omniscience fails there so much as that the narrator peevishly refuses to tell us.)  Combined with the fact that Lan Wangji does as little talking as he can and even when he has to speak he uses as few words as possible, it's sometimes hard to get a read on his personality beyond a few key aspects.  (It's slightly easier in the live-action drama, since the actor can't have a genuinely immobile face the way the character tends to be described in the novel, so he does have some expressions to read...also he manages to emote surprisingly well even without the broader expression changes available to his co-stars.)

The perpetually unamused Lan Wangji (played by Wang Yibo)

    Anyway, although we're never told directly what he's thinking the way we are with Wei Wuxian, the object of his affections, we do pretty quickly catch on to just how massively in love he is.  (Far more quickly than Wei Wuxian does, that's for sure!!)  And yet, we don't know quite when he fell in love, exactly, and since his love for Wei Wuxian seems to be his motivation for about half of what he does in the novel, it's sort of frustrating how hard it is to pin down exactly when and why he fell in love.  Was it a crazy-shallow "love at first sight?"  Did he not realize how he felt until Wei Wuxian was leaving Cloud Recesses again, or even later than that?  Did he have "lust at first sight" followed by months or even years of trying to deny his desires and the genuine feelings they were growing into?  There's really no way to be positive, and the few details we have that give us any insight into his thought processes are still vague up until a certain point in the story, by which time they had known each other for about three years in the novel. (Only about 7-9 months in the live-action version, because it compressed time a lot, partially because no way could those actors pass for being only 15 years old.  Even claiming they're 18/19 at the earliest point of the story is pushing it.)

    So, all that being the case, I have to admit that I don't feel like I have a very good grasp on the character so far as I've worked on my MDZS fanfic.  (Although possibly the biggest problem I have writing for him is that when there are large scenes of people talking, he tends to fade into the background and go unnoticed unless it's a rare case where he actually has something he wants to say.  Or unless someone seems like they might threaten and/or make advances on Wei Wuxian.  Then he leaps to life to intervene.  🤣)

A to Z: Ever-Enduring Eurysakes

    So, Eurysakes is both complicated and pretty simple.

    His character is the simple part;  he speaks slowly like his father did, he's big and tough and dependable like his father was, and he's vulnerable because when he was still a tiny child, his father died in a manner that ruined his formerly perfect reputation.  Where he becomes complicated is the fact that he's an actual character from Greek myth who I have gotten totally wrong. 😰

    You see, Eurysakes is the son of Aias of Salamis (better known by his Roman name, Ajax, which I hate because it sounds like a cleaning product) and his concubine Tekmessa.  Eurysakes is mentioned briefly in the excellent Sophocles tragedy Aias, as Aias leaves his shield with his tiny son (about three or four years old) before his death.  (The name Eurysakes, in fact, means "broad shield."  Because Aias was also known by the epithet "of the towering shield" as his enormous shield was one of his distinguishing features in battle, and helped him earn one of his other epithets, "the bulwark of the Achaians.")  That play is one of the only surviving works that even mentions Eurysakes.  The only other mention of him I'm aware of off-hand is in Plutarch, which I'll get to below.  (Oh, and a passing mention in Pausanias.)

    Now, most of the Greek myths are done by the time the Trojan War ends, but there are still a few stories that take place after the war, and even some after the Odyssey.  These mostly have to do with the fallout from the war in one way or another--the Orestes cycle, for example--though there's also the Heraclidae, the myth of invading Dorians that the Greeks used to explain why the society of the Heroic Age was so different from their own.  One of the tales of the fallout of the war is that of the return of the Salaminian contingent and the reaction of King Telamon to the news that his near-perfect son Aias is dead, and to the ignominious manner of his death.

    (Trigger warning:  to continue discussing this, I have to talk about how Aias died in the myths.  Therefore, I need to put a "read more" tag here for self-harm.)

A to Z: Dejected Deidameia

    So, today I'm talking about a straight-up character from Greek myths:  Deidameia of Scyros.  (Often transliterated as Deidamia.)  The eldest and most beautiful of the daughters of King Lycomedes, Deidameia is the mother of Neoptolemos by Achilles, who of course abandoned her to sail off to the war in Troy.

    And, surprisingly, there's not a huge amount about her in the original material that's constant beyond that.

    But there are some potentially triggering matters discussed in this post--because they're part of some tellings of the original myth--so I'm going to end the main page preview of this post after this paragraph.  I don't go into any details, but do briefly mention sensitive subjects, so if you have any concerns, maybe don't click on the "read more" link.

A to Z: Curt Wild

(If you're looking for today's IWSG post, it went up right before this one.)

    Today's post is the first time I'm posting about someone else's character.  Which is to say that today I will be talking about my fan fiction writing. 😅  That will happen a lot this month, I'm sorry to say.  (It will mostly be swapping over between my Greek mythology addiction and my recent addiction to a particular fandom...but that fandom's characters don't get the spotlight in these posts for a little while yet.  And there's one totally original character between now and then!)

    Anyway.  Back on topic, who I want to talk about today is the character of Curt Wild from the 1998 movie Velvet Goldmine, written and directed by Todd Haynes.  The movie is a fictional reimagining of the early '70s glam rock scene, told in flashback from a mildly dystopian 1984.  Curt Wild is the movie's equivalent of Iggy Pop, only much hotter because he's played by Ewan McGregor. 😍

    Curt is a complicated character to work with because he doesn't talk much, plus he spends most (or all) of the 1970s portions of the film struggling with a crippling heroin addiction.  We also don't get to hear his take on events, unfortunately.  The movie follows the Citizen Kane format of accompanying a journalist as he interviews people for a story on a controversial figure:  in this case, glam rock star Brian Slade, Curt's former lover.  The journalist, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale!), interviews Brian's former manager, Cecil, and his ex-wife Mandy, but doesn't get to interview Curt, so we only see the Curt/Brian relationship from the outside, from Mandy's perspective and from Arthur's own memories of being a glam rock fan at the time.  We do get to hear a little from Curt about everything that happened, but not the full story as he saw it.  So despite how much time he has on screen, he's also something of a mystery to the audience.  (Though in truth the same could be said for Brian, and he has more screen time than anyone else.)

    Consequently, writing for Curt is always a challenge for me, especially since I don't really know much about popular music, and I have never used drugs or even known anyone who used them.  And, actually, seeing as he also seems very sexually motivated, my asexuality probably makes it hard for me to connect with him as well.

    So why would I write about him at all?

    Well, two big reasons.  While I am asexual and aromantic, I do have some minor romantic/sexual interest, though it's all interest that I have less than no desire to act on physically.  In other words, I kind of like thinking about love, but only so long as I'm not involved.  Um.  Okay, no matter how I describe it, it keeps sounding creepy.  There's actually a term for it, as a subsection of asexuality, so let me just borrow the definition as set out by people better at defining things than I am.

Aego (also known as Autochoris) is an orientation prefix where one's attraction is centered around individuals other than oneself.^[1][2] The prefix aego is deriven from the Latin words a- meaning without, and ego meaning myself, resulting in the combined meaning of "sexual/romantic without myself".^[3][4][5]

The exact definition of this label is imprecise and has evolved over time. Definitions include:

• experiencing a disconnect between oneself and one's object of attraction;^[2]
• only experiencing attraction in vague third-person fantasies;^[6]
• enjoying relationship-related activities in media/fantasies without desiring to be a participant;^[7]
• only experiencing attraction to situations that does not involve oneself.^[8]

Aego individuals often use this term because they feel alienated both from the idea that the absence of attraction implies the absence of fantasies regarding relationships, and the idea that the presence of fantasies implies the possibility of attraction. Aego individuals' fantasies generally do not involve themselves, only other individuals.^[6][9]

(Definition quoted from the LGBTQIA+ Wiki page on the Aego orientation.)

    In my own case, rather than getting idle crushes on actors or singers, crushes never intended or expected to be acted on, I get crushes sometimes on fictional characters, specifically in the context of their romance with some other character.  (This has been the case ever since I was a small child:  my first crush was Han Solo, but it was always in the context of his romance with Princess Leia (even before The Empire Strikes Back came out!).  Of course, since then I have lost my tolerance for hetero romance...)  So, long story short (too late!), watching Velvet Goldmine gave me a crush on Curt Wild, with his partner in the crush of course being Arthur Stuart.  (I promise it makes sense in the context of the film.)  And when I get crushes on fictional characters, I like to write about them.

    But that's only part of it.  The other part is because I first saw the movie on Netflix in late 2015.  If I hadn't had Velvet Goldmine fanfic to write, with the heroic journalist exposing the corruption festering in the White House, all while he's having a very gay love story with a gorgeous rock star, I'm not sure how I would have survived 2016-2020.  It wasn't just fan fiction, it was also reassurance and even mild therapy.

    Okay, so enough background, let's talk about how I've handled the character!  There are a lot of things inconsistent from one of my Velvet Goldmine fics to the next, and how I characterize Curt has definitely been one of the inconsistencies.  But I can't really talk about any of that without talking about certain spoilers for the movie, so I'm going to put in one of those lines that cuts off the post from the main page before going on. 😅

Writing Style Alignments (+ awkward shilling)

     So, not too long ago, someone posted this "Writing Style Alignment" chart in a Discord server where I (mostly) lurk.  I thought it was something interesting(?) to talk about, so...

    What really strikes me about this is how I don't fit in any of those boxes.  I have elements of "Lawful Pantser," "Lawful Plantser," "True Plantser" and even "Neutral Plotter."

    So, let's look at those in sequence here.

• "Writes everything in order"
• This is 100% me.  If I try to write things out of order, it just doesn't work.  In the past I used to write little snippets as they came to me and then sew them into the narrative when I got there, but I eventually had to give up on that practice because it pretty much never worked out well.  Because so many little details change as I'm going along through the story that by the time I get to whatever scene I pre-wrote, various things no longer worked about it. 
          This is also why I hate having to go back and add in stuff to a scene later on, because the flow gets terminally wrecked by the addition.  For example, on "A Hidden Road," I realized belatedly that I needed Wei Wuxian's faith in his relationship with Lan Wangji briefly shaken by something someone had said to him (in order for it to be strengthened by a reassurance, of course), but I had gotten to the end of the first draft without ever having that moment, so I had to add that in on the second draft, and the only good place for it was in a late night conversation they already had on a different topic.  So I had him lying awake worrying about their relationship...and then had him want to talk about it, but try to start out on a "lighter" topic that ended up preventing his intended topic.  Which is to say they ended up having the same conversation they did originally, and it just started for different reasons.  Awkward af.
• "Uses the flashlight method to get to the end"
• I have no idea what the "flashlight method" even is.
• "Ends up in strange places"
• Nope.  I usually have a pretty strong idea of where I'm going by the time I actually start writing.  I may pass through some pretty unexpected places on the way there, but I typically get roughly the ending I was always aiming for.
          Though sometimes some things change.  Like on "A Hidden Road" I ended up changing who the villain was because as I went along I realized that the villain I had planned on using didn't really have much motivation to be villainous left after a few of the details I added in earlier scenes, so I made the henchman into the villain and the original villain into more of a red herring.  Or in "Scions of Troy," a character who started out as a minor role became one of Ariadne's potential future girlfriends.  (Which is to say that she's obviously interested and Ariadne seems a little interested.  But she's not scheduled to show up in any of the later books...though given the way I write, that could always change...)  But the larger picture of the ending in both cases (which can be summed up as "heroes triumphant") remained the same.
• "knows random details no one else cares about"
• Um...probably?  But really that sort of applies to the main story, as no one cares about what I write in the first place.

• "Knows the ending, writes towards it"
• Yup, this is absolutely me, 100%.
• "loves to worldbuild"
• Enh, not so much.  I like making up a few trivial details about the world, but mostly that requires a mind for the medium picture that I don't possess.  (Y'know the saying "misses the forest for the trees"?  That's totally me:  I see the trees and I see the continent, but I don't see the forest.  Can't, in fact.  It's part of the same mental block that prevents me visualizing things, I think.  (But I'm not sure about that.)  Hmm.  Actually, maybe it would  be better to say that I can see the forest and the leaves, but not the trees?  Well, you get the gist of what I'm saying either way, I hope.)
• "uses character bios/has definitely taken personality tests for their characters"
• Nope.  I've sometimes tried character bios, but I can't think up enough of the needed details on command for them to be useful; I kinda have to just summon up those details out of the ether as I write. 😅  I may have tried personality tests once or twice (probably for Atalanta and Ariadne), but typically I don't know enough about my characters' weird details and/or too much doesn't apply to them, so it would be wasted effort.  (For example, a common question on those sort of things is something along the lines of "how do they take their coffee?"  Which I can't really answer under any circumstances, 'cause I don't drink the stuff, but I might be able to make a half-hearted guess for someone in a modern setting, but for someone in an ancient setting?  Atalanta and Ariadne have never even heard of coffee, so how could I possibly answer that?  (The same would apply to the entire cast in any MDZS fanfic, outside of a modern AU.))

• "Starts an outline"
• Yup, often the case.  Or rather unless it's gonna be super-short, I'll at least have a paragraph or two summarizing what I want to do in the story.  Sometimes it gets expanded into a proper outline, or at least the early portions, and sometimes that doesn't happen for a while.  My outlines generally are more detailed at the start and eventually peter out into vagaries like "the war happens" "they win" "epilogue i guess?"
• "goes off script and ends up in unexpected places."
• Enh...sort of?  I mean, it's more like little details that get added in change the trajectory, but it's typically a pretty slight change.  Like the change to "A Hidden Road" I mentioned above about the villain change:  that happened because of one line that one character happened to say that opened the would-have-been villain's eyes to the fact that hey, maybe he shouldn't hate everyone quite so much, but the new villain's agenda wasn't much different than the old villain's would have been, so the actions the heroes take in response are pretty similar to what they always would have been.  Or this brief Dragonji story I wrote because it was screaming at me to write it (despite that I'm in the middle of a Jiang Cheng-centric, massively-long, CQL-based AU), which I started out with the assumption that after a certain, very early point I was gonna have to go look for a co-writer so it could turn into smut, only then I just had this one tiny, very canon-accurate moment where dragon-in-human-form Lan Wangji gets flustered on seeing an underclad Wei Wuxian, and it just seemed like so much more fun to have it turn into a more slow (and mercifully consensual) romance than the smutty thing it had originally been building towards.  But the "happily gay ever after" ending is still the same, so it's not that I ended up somewhere unexpected, just that I passed through an unexpected place.
• "but that's okay cause this is more interesting anyway"
• My fingers are itching to fix that, but it's a quote so I can't go in and add the apostrophe that needs to be in front of "cause."
          Anyway, that's not totally an actual point?  But I mean, yeah, my diversions from the original plan do tend to be more fun/interesting than whatever I had originally intended, but surely that would be the case for anyone who decides to pursue an alternate to their original plan, because why would they deviate from the plan if it was less interesting to do so?  (Though I guess it's debatable about that Dragonji story.  The smutty version probably would have been a lot more fun to read, but trying to find and work with someone else to get the smutty part written would have been anything but fun.)

• "Brief outline"
• Yup, definitely.  At least to start with.
• "Likes to use beat sheets"
• I don't think I ever even used those back when I was studying screenwriting in grad school.
• "Modifies and updates outline as they go."
• Yup, absolutely.  My outline for a long piece like the one I'm currently working on (over 160k at this point) becomes sheer chaos, but that's okay, because I mostly only consult the paragraph or two describing the next however many scenes.  (Right now, that paragraph is...actually, there's two sets of them.  One describes the next major push of the Sunshot Campaign, and the other outlines the whole rest of the war.  After which the rest of the fic will happen.  (The outline for that part is fuzzier, but the current plan (which will likely not change!) is for Jin Guangshan to be the big bad.)  Absurdly, I think I originally intended the post-Sunshot Campaign part to be the bulk of the fic. 😰)
• "Thinks about writing character bios, rarely does"
• Yeah, actually, that fits me pretty well. 😅

        In the end, I'm not sure what it means that none of the squares really fits me, or that I come close to fitting into boxes of all three of the major types.  I'm not sure if that says there's something weird about me as a writer, or if it means the person who made this chart doesn't quite grasp the way other people write.  I feel like after this got posted the only people who talked about it said they didn't quite fit any of the choices, so I think the person who made it missed their guess about how it should work.

    Anyway, it seemed something interesting to talk about, so I thought I'd talk about it. 🤣

    (If anyone out there is confused about the whole "alignment" thing, these charts are sort of a meme, inspired by the D&D alignment charts of Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic and Good/Neutral/Evil, with the center block being True Neutral.)

IWSG: Conflicted

 

    Amusingly (or not), this month's question is actually pretty much exactly what I would be talking about anyway.  (Funny how the universe often seems to work that way.  Like how everyone else is always arriving at the grocery store at the same time, and/or leaving it at the same time.)

August 2 question: Have you ever written something that afterwards you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it?

    So... so much to say.

    Technically, I can think of...well, actually, there are a lot of cases, really, but only two that lead anywhere.

    In the first one, which I think I ended up talking about last month as well, I had written a game for a game jam that was...more than a little questionable.  It involved a demon lord who got off on watching  as the handsome hero who had come to slay him died time and again on his way through the monster-infested castle of the demon lord...but the demon lord kept reviving him because he wants him to get to the top eventually, as the demon lord wants to have his way with the hero.  It's not graphic in any way--the deaths are text-only, don't go into any particular detail, and most of them have very little innate sexual component to them (the ones that do, though! 😰 I am honestly horrified that my brain was able to come up with some of that stuff, tame though it was)--but it was still just so innately wrong that I was hesitant to post the game.  Despite that it was for a game jam--with a fast-approaching deadline for submission!--I delayed posting it for three days because I was just so scared of what people would do when they saw it.

    So, yeah, I was very conflicted about that one.  But so far nothing's gone wrong from it being out there (except that it gets way more views and downloads than the rest of my games put together) and it's been out almost a year and a half.

    That isn't what I would have been talking about today, though.

    What I would have been talking about today regardless of the question of the month is the fanfic I started posting on AO3 about a month ago.  Going into posting it, I did have a few misgivings:

• Because the story starts out with the love interest locking up the main character to protect him from his enemies, it could look like Stockholm Syndrome when the hero realizes he's always been in love with the love interest, and yet we're supposed to be on board with this relationship.  (Technically, pretty much anyone who might read it should already be on board with the relationship, since they're the primary romantic pair from the novel it's fan fiction of.)
• It has three distinct arcs with very different tones and themes, so trying to find a way to tag the work on AO3 was somewhere between awkward and impossible.
• I remain a bit fuzzy on some finer details of how the magic system of the original novel works, so some of what I had happening was probably borderline impossible or otherwise contrary to canon.

    However, on the whole I was feeling pretty good about it.  And, honestly, I still think there's a lot to it that's good.  Or at least good for me.  I'm very aware of my limitations, and know better than to expect that I can just magically surpass them.  That being said, I even thought I managed to make it look at least somewhat like an actual romantic relationship, which is something I normally cannot do, having no real understanding of what those feelings are like, as I'm quite strongly aromantic.

    Anyway, I got up to the fourth chapter posted, and things seemed to be going acceptably; the comments were mostly positive, at least.  Then came a new comment in a single, enormous paragraph.

    This comment was, as far as I can tell, intended to be positive.

    The person was gushing about what they thought I was writing about.  About how happy they were to see the love interest's young self finally portrayed as selfish and controlling.  About how much they enjoyed watching the drama version of the hero suffer.  On and on.

    I couldn't believe it.  Someone had read what I had written and mistaken it that far?

    Sure, there was some truth to some of what they were saying.  There was, for example, a certain element of controlling to the love interest's character in the fic, just as there is in canon, but it wasn't intended to be his primary character trait!  But most of the rest of it was so far off that I didn't even know what to think.  The idea of the story wasn't to make the hero suffer (and in fact even in what I had already posted he wasn't doing much that could be called suffering!), it was just to take him out of the situation that was about to explode and lead to the death of his adopted sister and her husband, which would lead in turn to numerous other death, including his own--and I wasn't working with the version of the story from the live-action adaptation, but the original novel!  (Heck, I even opened the fic with a direct quote from the novel, which I properly attributed to the official translation, providing a page number and everything!)

    After spending maybe half a day deliberating, I replied to the comment, apologizing that my writing was so bad that the opening--which does admittedly have some unreliable narration from the POV of the hero who feels he's been betrayed by his best friend--had so mislead the reader into thinking the story was going one place when it was actually going somewhere radically different.

    But it was still bothering me.

    That I'd written something that could be so badly misunderstood as to invite character-bashing in the comments, expecting that I agreed with the bashing.

    I ended up deleting the fic off of AO3 entirely.

    And I felt really good about that when I did it.  I even managed to get past some of the writer's block I'm having in the current piece I'm working on.  (Most of which is due to the fact that to tell the story I'm trying to tell, I have to get the characters through a war.  Which it's like...I don't know what would happen in this war, specifically, plus I hate war and don't want to write about one?  It's making it slow as molasses to write, but it's going okay for a first draft.)

    In retrospect, I don't know if that was the right thing to do.  (Certainly, the people I spoke to in between replying to the comment and deleting the fic all told me "don't do it at all" when I asked for advice regarding whether I should finish posting it all really quickly, like two or three chapters a day, and then delete it, or if I should just delete it immediately.  I had thought, in response to what they said, that maybe I could leave it up if I just turned off the comments, but...by the next day I was convinced again that deleting it was the only path forwards.)

    It does feel like that by deleting something I had noted in the summary was already fully written and edited (which is true!) that people will assume I deleted it because it wasn't finished and I didn't know what to do next, and that they will thus never again believe me if I post something with a note on it saying it's already been written.  Which probably doesn't actually matter, of course.

    On the other hand, I do feel like if anyone actually cared about the story, they probably would have clicked on one of my other fics and left a comment asking what happened to the one I just deleted.  And so far they haven't.  (I also noted in the summary that I would be posting every weekend, so they know that a chapter is post-due.)  Although I'm not 100% sure how much of that is "no one gives a fetid dingo's kidney" and how much of that is "AO3 keeps crashing."  Though it's probably the former, not the latter.  (Though the fact that AO3 keeps returning a timeout error is alarming, to say the least!)

    It's an awkward situation where it feels like no matter what I did, it would have been the wrong decision.  Leaving it up would have been wrong, but maybe taking it down was, too.

    All this is probably not what I should be saying in response to this month's question.

    I should be trying to come up with some time that I was feeling like I'd gone in a wrong direction and so I rewrote and ended up with something better.  There have probably been times like that.  There have certainly been rewrites that were radically different than the first draft, and a vast improvement over it, but I don't recall off-hand if I felt conflicted about any of the first draft stuff that ended up being changed.  (And, like I said, I'd have been talking about this anyway, even if the month's question had been something like "have you ever sent your characters to the beach?")

Random Fanfic Stuff (MDZS/The Untamed)

     Because all I can write right now without my heart freaking out is light fanfic, I've dived back into that, because I hate not writing. 😅 So, I wanted to share a comment I left on the second draft of an already completed fanfic... (because yes, I use the Notes feature on Word in between drafts so I know what to change in the next draft, and sometimes just because)

    Hmm.  Not sure if that's legible without clicking on it.  😓  (It's a moment I'm really fond of, though; I often have difficulty writing anything even remotely romantic, so this sort of flirty stuff feeling even remotely natural is really rare for me.)  The reason for the comment is that I ended up showing my mother a .gif I had downloaded of the two leads from the drama, and she thought they both looked like girls. 😠😡😬  This is the .gif in question:

    Sure, they're both very beautiful, but they're also both very clearly men!  😠

    Anyway, the one I'm currently writing is actually based on the live-action drama The Untamed rather than the original novel, Mo Dao Zu Shi (The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation), because I am a deeply stupid person who commits to the strangest things, so when I initially interpreted my heart palpitations as the "curse" of one of the characters because in the rather dark fic I was then editing for posting on AO3 I had ended up killing him off via a heart attack when he was about my age my reaction to that assumption was to promise him that the next fanfic I wrote would make him the lead instead of the lead's adoptive (and later deeply estranged) brother.  Because of that, I wanted to work with the drama's version of the story because I have a list of characters who have to live if it's going to be a happy, fluffy (well, as close as you can get to fluffy in a story with death and war and zombies) fanfic of the sort I typically write.  And on that list are three characters from the Wen Clan.  In all versions of canon, the bad elements (read: majority) of the Wen Clan attack the lead's home and kill almost everyone there, making the lead and his two adoptive siblings orphans, and giving the adoptive brother in particular an especial hatred of all things Wen.  But in the drama, he already knew two of the three Wens who are on my "they must live" list, and in fact had a fairly adorable crush on one of them.  (Who, btw, is the only one of the three who actually dies in canon.  That novel is really hard on its female cast. 😭)

    Soooo, long story short, because of that, he doesn't quite hate all Wens as much in The Untamed, and is still carrying a bit of a torch for Wen Qing, therefore I could make him the lead and still save them if I used that version of canon.  Which required me to rewatch a hefty chunk of the drama (though I stopped before most of the tragic events, since they were going to be prevented by the alternate storyline of my fanfic and why should I do all that crying for no reason? (plus if I had watched the entire thing I wouldn't have finished it in time to start rereading the novel to celebrate the final volume coming out)) so I actually learned that I had forgotten a few details in the first episode when I wrote in an earlier post that there were some problems regarding the hero's revival.  It turned out that there were a few lines of dialog and voice-over to explain that no one in the household had seen the crazy young man's face as an adult, because he had taken to wearing a mask or heavy make-up ever since he returned home a failure, so that's why no one realized that he was gone and the revived hero with his own face had taken his place.  Not quite as simple to explain and digest as the version in the book, where the hero's soul just takes over the unfortunate young man's vacated body, but perhaps a tiny bit more palatable, and more simply allowing them to keep the same actor throughout the whole show.

    Aaaanyway, I also wanted to share a bit I just wrote from this new fic in the drama's version of canon, because I really liked it.  It goes like this:

Jiang Cheng and a few of the Lans hitched up three of the horses to the wagons, and by the time they were done, Wen Qing was lecturing them for not helping the villagers move their belongings into the wagons.

Why was he being lectured by someone he was doing a favor for?

…and why was he just doing what he was told?

Scowling, Jiang Cheng turned the idea over in his head several times as he was carrying an old woman's belongings to the wagon.  While she usually seemed quite mild in temperament, when she started ordering people around, there was perhaps just a little bit of his mother in the way Wen Qing acted.  Maybe that was why he was simply doing as she told him to.  It was just habit.  It would fade in time as he became more used to his new responsibilities.  But he shouldn't keep on doing this manual labor, especially not on behalf of Wens.

After he set the things in the wagon, Jiang Cheng turned back towards the rest of the village, planning to think up a good reason he could give to stop carrying these villagers' things around.  He found himself facing the old woman from the graveyard, who held the tiny child in her arms.  "Thank you so much for doing this, gongzi," she said, bowing as best she could while burdened by a squirming child.  "But a fine noble like yourself shouldn't have to be working to help common folk like us."

Was she giving him permission to stop?  What kind of insult was that?!  Did he look like a weakling who shirked his responsibilities?  Did she think he was a pampered little peacock?  Those reputations might not have bothered Nie Huaisang and Jin Zixuan, but Jiang Cheng wasn't about to settle for such a meager store of repute!

"The sooner the work is done, the sooner we can be on the road," he muttered, moving around her.

    Or, to put it more succinctly:

Wen-popo accidentally uses Reverse Psychology.

It is super-effective!

    🤣

    (Hmm, I may be too easily amused by my own antics.)

    Trying to work with the drama's canon has proved difficult in terms of physical logistics, I have to say. I'd already consulted several fan-made maps of China so I'd have a rough idea where the various locations from the novel are, right? There's a line in the drama claiming that the two locations furthest from the Wen Clan's home are the closest locations. These are all real places in China, I might add. Why are foreign fans getting the map better than the people in China who made the live-action version did? Mind-boggling.

    Anyway, because I was also going to rewrite the war (because the novel's 2-year-long war became a 4-month-long war in the drama...and the hero who was supposed to have been the biggest terror on the battlefield missed everything but the final battle!) I needed a map I could actually mess around with. So since I had an account on a map-making site (intended mostly for, like, DMs of tabletop RPGs and stuff), I decided to use that to make my own, using the map from the MDZS wiki, since it seemed like the best and most comprehensive. This is what I ended up with:

    It's not done yet, but this is the core map so far, the one I'm using for planning.  (I'm going to go ahead and post the final map when I post the fic to AO3, but in multiple versions, to show the stages of the war as the alliance against the Wen Clan pushes them further and further back.  Hence multiple lines to show the same thing.)  Of course, that volcano is a problem.  The drama went all out in wanting to make sure you knew at a glance who the villains were, so they (as I mentioned in an earlier post) literally went as far as to make the Wen Clan's home base on a cliff above a literal river of lava, in addition to them evidently having told their architects "make sure every detail reflects how maniacally evil I am, or I'll hurl you into the lava!"  I went ahead and looked up volcanoes in China, and none of them are anywhere near Qishan.  😰  I am astonished that they would do something so goofy.  Especially considering all the lava effects had to be expensive!

    Since one of the other maps (which didn't put anything in quite the same place as the wiki one did (none of the maps I found put anything in quite the same place as any other map did)) had literally just stuck the icons for the clans right onto an actual map of modern-day China, thus giving me modern town names for reference, I went to Google Earth and did some rough and tumble estimates of how far places are from each other, so I'd know how long to assign for travel times, yeah?

    Most of the major cities involved are about 450 miles away from each other.  Yiling and Yunmeng are like 170 miles away from each other.

    On seeing that, I begin to understand why this genre tends to have its leads fly everywhere on magic swords.  Going by land would take way too long!! 😲

    Admittedly, the last time I used Google Earth to figure out distances, it was to fine-tune some of the heroes' wanderings in one of my Greek mythology novels, and obviously a huge chunk of China is enormously large compared to about a third (or less!) of Greece.  But my point still stands!  (Especially if you're dealing with a war that suddenly lasts four months instead of two years:  you'd barely have time to get all the troops moved about before it was over!)

Good grief!

     It's like I'm made of solid procrastination these days.

    I need to take a break after I finish this piece I'm working on.  I am determined to finish it today--the scene I'm currently procrastinating on is the epilogue!--but it's currently over 132k words long, and I started it on January 5th...so, yeah, a lot of words in not all that long a time.  (Though I did once clock over 211k during NaNoWriMo.  But that only happened the once.  And I suspect that if I went back and reread I would find that they were very badly assembled words. 😅  However, due to life stuff, that work is now permanently off-limits.)

    Anyway.

    I'm writing up another post because I'm not sure how to handle the epilogue.  Or rather that I can't actually think of much to put in it?  In this scene of it, that is.  Technically, there's already been like two or three scenes that could qualify as epilogue in some sense of the word.  (The "sex" scene I was having so much trouble with yesterday was the first of them, in fact.)  In this particular scene, the final one, I need the hero and his family to attend the one month celebration for his sister's second child.  Major problem with that is that I have zero clue what a one month celebration would consist of and really don't want to have to go researching it for half a scene's worth of text.  (Even if I did, the information would only exist for modern China, not the unspecified period in which the original novel takes place, which the author actually admitted is based on the customs of several different time periods anyway...)  Especially since the main point of the scene is just to show that life is settling down again, and to describe what the hero made as a gift for the baby.  (Basically the same thing he made for her first child in the original novel, only in a different shape.  Of course, he never got to give the first child that gift in the novel, because horrible things happened and soon both the child's parents were dead, but that's why this is an alternate universe fan fiction in which most of the horrible stuff never happened and a lot of characters who died tragically get to live. 😁 )  So I'm sort of not sure what else to put in the scene and I am thus procrastinating from writing it by doing something else.  Which is obviously not productive (I mean, that's the point of procrastinating, being unproductive is) but maybe it will clear my brain a little.

    Doing something physically creative like working on the fine details for my boxed rooms will do a better job of that, of course, but I want to wait and do that after I've completely finished the scene.  (Also after the new flooring and the unfinished new furniture arrives that I ordered from a miniatures shop on Etsy yesterday...)

    Anyway!

    I did want to share a bit I wrote earlier today because I really liked it, and it will be a very long time before it gets posted on AO3 for anyone to see it in context.

    Who these characters are doesn't really matter much to this little snippet of the scene, except that they're a married couple (both men) with their adopted son.

            “Don’t carry me around!  I’m not a little kid anymore!” claimed the five-year-old child.

            “I’ll carry you around until you’re too big for me to lift!” Wei Wuxian insisted.

            “No fair!  Father, make him put me down!”

            Lan Zhan reached out and stroked A-Yuan’s hair.  “A-Yuan is still very portable,” he said, making the boy complain even as he smiled happily.

    Maybe it's just me.  But I loved the idea of describing him as "still very portable." 😊  (The one is "Father" because the other is "Daddy," btw.  In case anyone was thinking "Father" sounded a bit formal coming from a kid who's only five.)

    Aaaaaand I should stop procrastinating and just write that last scene.

   

    (Also, what I reported yesterday remains the case:  Goodsmile wants all my money.  Today they dropped the pre-order for a Nendoroid of the lead from Bocchi the Rock...)

    EDIT:  just finished that fanfic I've been working on.  133,158 words long. 😅  Not the longest fan fiction I've ever written, but the longest in quite some time.

Why do I do this to myself?

     I have a bad habit of trying to write things that I am literally incapable of writing.

    I like to come up with stories that result in climactic final battles, even though I absolutely cannot write combat.  (This is largely a genre issue, I think, as I tend towards adventurous stories, especially when I am working in a genre that's even tangentially fantastical.)

    I also often end up wanting to write about love stories and sexual encounters, despite that as an aromantic person I don't really understand love and as an asexual I have never experienced sex.  But for some benighted reason I still want to write about them.  (Sometimes.  Other times I gleefully ditch them and relish in making characters as ace as I am.)

    So last night I was writing out some notes about the scene that I am currently procrastinating in the middle of.

    The notes were as follows:

           Ooooookay.   Soooooooo.  Is it even possible for me to write a sex scene?

            In a fandom where I would not feel comfortable using most slang for sex organs?

            Uh.

            No.

            No, it is not.

            So...what do I do with this scene, then?  I don't want them reuniting with their son in scene 69.  That would just creep me out.

            So I suppose I do one of my usual half-assed "kinda a sex scene if you turn your head and squint" things?

            But…like….what?

            I mean, it's...like...not even an appropriate time, considering they were just in a battle where like ¾ of their army got wiped out!  Also...well, no, actually, that's the big one.  But it's big!

             Although I did already set up that LWJ is literally ready for sex every time he even looks at WWX (and I think canon will largely back me up on that) so I guess it's not too weird?

    I felt like sharing them because I thought they were kind of funny.

    Also because procrastinating.

    (Because I'm kinda sorta trying to write that almost-a-sex-scene and I maybe got to the point where I had to describe their position and I'm panicking because how can I possibly describe it that won't embarrass me to death?!  Why does sex have to exist?  Why can't we all be like Barbie and Ken dolls, with nothing under our clothes but smooth plastic?  (Okay, technically, these days Barbie and Ken have molded on underwear, but back when I was a kid, they were just smooth plastic under the clothes.))

    (How am I supposed to describe two men getting in position for mutual oral sex when I don't want to use any convenient term for sex organs but all the less convenient terms are super awkward and sound stupidly stilted?)

    Why do I do this to myself?!

    Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhh!!!!!!

    (The fact that this is for fan fiction only makes it stupider, of course...)

    (Speaking of complaining (not that I was speaking of it), Goodsmile Company wants all my money.  They just yesterday dropped the pre-orders for special Year of the Rabbit Nendoroid versions of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, and of course I had to preorder them because they are so flippin' cute it's unfair.  Their eye highlights are little bunnies and they come with bunnies that neatly stack on top of each other, and they're just so darn cute! 😅  A fan and her money are all too soon parted...)