Argh, I forgot about today's post entirely!
😭😭😭😭😭
That sorta sums up my writing lately.
I've been distracted, forgetful, and unable to focus.
I think it's the heat.
The past three or four days, I've just opened my current project, read over bits of it to remind myself where I am...and then...nothing... 😭
I hope it's just the heat.
Someday, I will learn how to title posts effectively. Unfortunately, today is not that day.
I'm not at my best right now; I've had a (fairly mild) headache for almost two weeks at this point. I need to go to like the Urgent Care center or something, but in the middle of a heat wave on a sunny day is...well, I have serious heat issue, so I can't go unless someone drives me, and my ride is busy today, so...tomorrow, hopefully. (Which will be "today" when this post actually posts.)
Uh.
Anyway.
I think the suggested topic was about changes we would want to make to the publishing industry.
As I am determinedly an amateur writer, I don't have any contact with the publishing industry as a writer, but there is something I'd like to change as a reader!
I'm not sure when--just in the last few years, I think--someone decided that colons should be followed by capital letters, and it is driving me up the freaking wall. It's so wrong--no, so stupid! It's the same sentence, so why would it be capitalized?
I know that's pointless and shallow, but...
...I don't have much to say about my own writing, as my game jam VN script has turned into a slow slog through a not-jam VN script (because the concept didn't actually fit the jam) and other than that I've only been working on proofreading past works and planning future ones, so...there just isn't much to say.
Once again, no decent post title. 😭
Hmm.
What to talk about?
It's hard to concentrate; I forgot to prewrite and woke up at five in the morning and instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, I suddenly realized "ack, no post!"
Ugh.
Anyway.
I think the month's suggested topic was about where our ideas come from?
Weirdly, that's actually kind of hard to answer?
I mean, it's hard to recall mostly, somehow. A few ideas I remember where they came from, but for the most part...
I guess mostly they're just the product of me turning things I've just seen, heard or read over in my mind? Or otherwise just pondering things.
Like, for example, my series of books about the illegitimate daughters of Achilles and Odysseus. I had been thinking about the incident wherein, in the final weeks of Achilles' life, he needed purification after murdering Thersites. Since the Greek army didn't want to go without Achilles' spear, rather than trusting that he would be able to find a cooperative king in time to return quickly from his exile, Odysseus accompanied him to Methymna on the island of Lesbos so that he could perform the purification. I found myself wondering just what else would have happened while they were there, especially given that they were both...how to put this? Not exactly "lecherous," but..."sexually self-indulgent," maybe? Either way, I found myself thinking that even though they would be in Methymna only a single night (probably), they might have ended up leaving behind "presents" in a couple of the local girls...and before I knew it I was naming the two daughters who would be born and planning how they would escape and wander the world as heroines.
That always feels faster and simpler before I try writing it out... 😰
...
...
...I'm gonna go back to sleep now... 😅
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:
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!)
I normally pre-write these up to a week in advance, but for some reason I thought tomorrow was Wednesday?
🤷🏻♀️
Anyway. Thankfully I can for once lean on the monthly question...
April 1 question - If you have a playlist (or could put one together) that either gets you in the groove to write or fits with one of your books, what is it? What type of music or what songs?
Well, I sort of can lean on it. I don't have any playlists that fit what I write (unless I'm working on a fanfic and listen to the soundtrack of whatever it's a fanfic of), but I do have a lot of playlists I listen to while I write.
They're pretty much all soundtracks, though. Mostly video game soundtracks, with a few anime soundtracks as well. Lately I've been listening to various Shin Megami Tensei (and spin-off) soundtracks, in part because I haven't put as much of my music collection on the computer I now use to write. I ought to put more Final Fantasy soundtracks on there, since this is an anniversary year for the series. (I do have to be careful about some game soundtracks, because sometimes listening to them makes me want to replay the game, and I don't have time to drop everything and play a 40-80 hour RPG just because the music puts a hanker in me. 😅)
The main thing is that since they're usually not vocals (and if there are vocals, they're typically not in a language I speak) they don't distract me from my writing. (I remember one time, many years ago, since I was starting work on a book set in the '80s, I made a playlist of all my '80s music...and I spent more time singing along than writing. 😭 Not gonna make that mistake again!)
Another winner of a post title. 😅
I just can't title things, evidently. Been struggling with that a lot lately, actually.
Anyway, I'm still in a phase that's heavier on editing than writing, sadly, which doesn't leave me with much to say...
...except at least to be able to crow that I have finally finished the rewrite of book four of my Greek mythology series! Well, the heavy-duty rewrite of the 2014 draft, that is. I've been working on the rewrite (more a restructuring, really) for almost a year at this point, so being done with it is exciting!
Except...
Except that as I was preparing for it, I had to reread the first three to take notes on various particulars and details...and I saw so much wrong with them. So now I'm mired in trying to fix them. About halfway through book one now.
I realize that's a potentially endless cycle of perpetual rewrites, but hopefully this time I'll actually be getting the first three books into a properly acceptable state.
Hopefully.
Or at least less cringe-inducing, anyway.
(Book one especially needed it, because for its interactive version, I used TWINE instead of Ren'py, which means that the text is smaller, and the way I messed around with various settings to increase the amount of the screen that held the text had somehow disabled the ability to go back...which is especially agonizing considering that in the interactive version of book one I had for some reason thought it would be a good idea to insert all these choices where you could see one scene or another but not both, even though the reader of the plain text version of course gets both. (Spoiler: it was not a good idea. Not at all.) So the updated interactive version is going to be in Ren'py same as the others, and it will have properly working rollback and absolutely no evil "you can only see one of the scenes ha ha ha!" choices. Also the text should be bigger, which will hopefully make it easier to read. And the glossary will be better. Also the horrifically-bad, exceedingly-boring, unnecessary backstory-dump that took up four or five massive paragraphs at the start of the prologue is now gone, and good riddance to it!)
So, I've figured out how to add pictures to blog posts on my phone, as long as they're pictures I've used before. 😅
Uh.
More pertinently.
Once again, the suggested question for this month's post doesn't speak to me, so I'll be posting about something else instead...
But my writing life has been pretty stagnant lately, so I guess I'll write about that stagnancy? (Wait, is that a word?)
I'm not totally sure what the problem is that's making it hard for me to write lately. Lack of motivation, definitely lack of ideas (except for fanfic ideas), those are factors for sure, but are they the only factors?
I don't even know, nor am I sure how to figure it out.
It's making me feel like more of a failure than usual, though.
Without knowing quite what the problem is, it's hard to fix it.
In looking over my posts for the year, I realize I've been failing to get any significant progress made on the rewrite of book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books for the entire year. 😭 I really need to get off my backside and get that rewrite finished. If I can just power through into the climactic confrontation, it should be...um...possible? I dunno. I don't even know if anyone would care about it even being released. I had one comment on one of the AO3 versions of the earlier books in the series that indicated someone had genuinely read it all the way through and liked it, but... 🤷🏻♀️
So, once again, I don't really have a lot to say. The month's question doesn't really speak to me much, but my writing life is pretty stagnant right now, so I don't have a lot to say.
Unless I want to complain about my new laptop and how much I hate Windows 11, and how annoying it is to switch back to a two-laptop system where my internet access and my writing are on separate machines, but that's both very much a "me" problem and also distressingly bourgeoisie.
Anyway.
Uh...what can I talk about instead?
Apparently, NaNoWriMo is no more? Not sure what happened--but the last news I heard, they had aligned themselves with AI-bros on top of the scandal from I guess two years ago(?), so that's probably not too surprising--but I've been doing my own independent November writing challenge for so many years now that it doesn't really impact me much. I'm just doing my usual thing anyway, regardless of the absence of an official version.
I wonder if the collapse of the official NaNoWriMo is negatively impacting anyone else's November writing journey, though?
I've seen a lot of people on Discord asking around after tracking sites to keep track of their progress as they try to write independently. Haven't looked into any of them myself, though; I'm fine with just using my blog to track my word count.
Hmm.
Nope, I really don't have much to say this month. (Or maybe I'm just using all my words on my writing challenge progress and don't have any to spare for blogging?)
Anyway, after I do today's writing, I'll be adding my daily numbers to the end of the post below.
So, this month's question is
October 1 question - What is the most favorite thing you have written, published or not? And why?
Hmm. Can't say I like the phrasing "the most favorite" somehow, but that's just me. Anyway, it's actually kind of hard to answer. Not in a "they're all my babies--I can't choose between them!" kind of way, but just because I've never really thought about it before. Also I write in a lot of different categories that don't really smoothly compare to each other.
In the "things I've written that I wouldn't be ashamed to show to my parents" category, the sixth book of the Atalanta and Ariadne series is the only one that comes to mind. I did a lot of things in that one that I'm really proud of to this day (wrote the first draft in 2014), and I'm looking forward to someday fixing it up so I can release it. Assuming I can ever manage to finish rewriting book four. 😰 Anyway, book six's setting is mostly in Sparta, trying to deal with a potential succession crisis, as Menelaos wants his son by his Trojan concubine to inherit, but his daughter by Helen (who is married to Agamemnon's son, Orestes, as that's what happened in the myths 🤢) feels that she's the only proper heir. Menelaos calls on his old friend Odysseus to argue his case, and Orestes calls on Eurysakes (one of my three protagonists) to argue his case. What we see of the official debates (if you can call them that) is a fun exercise in trying to expose multiple people plotting various things, and considering one of those people is the master schemer Odysseus, I think I did a surprisingly decent job of it! Of course, a bigger part of the story is slowly exposing my novel's version of just why Helen went to Troy in the first place, which I flatter myself to think has a few elements to it that haven't been done before. (At least, not in conjunction with all the other elements I'm using, anyway. Can't really vouch for any of them being 100% new by themselves.) Atalanta and Ariadne also end up visiting Hades to see if he will allow them to talk to the shade of Bellerophon, since they need the winged horse Pegasos for reasons. 😅 I got to do a lot of fun stuff in book 6! (I know it seems especially self-indulgent and cliche to have them obtain the services of Pegasos--and it is!--but at least I foreshadowed it a bit all through the series, as Atalanta talks about the idea of getting to ride him on numerous occasions.)
But would I truly say that's my all-time favorite? No, not really. (Especially since it still needs at least one hefty rewrite.)
Moving into fan fiction, I have a few strong favorite contenders among my Velvet Goldmine fics.
There's "Celebrity," in which Arthur Stuart has a secret second life as a gay romance novelist, and one of his novels was actually a thinly veiled retelling of the Brian Slade/Curt Wild romance, only with a different ending where they stay together. The novel was both his long-term passion project and also a way to exorcise the ghosts of his glam past. But now his editor is once again pressuring him to write a sequel to it, however since he now knows what Brian's done in the intervening years, it's not that simple for him. Running into Curt again encourages him to write it after all, but that leads to further complications. It's pretty different from most of my other Velvet Goldmine fics, but I just really liked how it turned out. Unfortunately, I decided to experiment with posting the whole thing to AO3 at once (despite that it's eighteen chapters long) and that ended up giving it a pretty low view count somehow.
There are also the fusion fics: in response to a prompt to fuse Velvet Goldmine with one of the myriad other films by the prolific actors who played Curt and Arthur, instead of going for the obvious Star Wars and Batman angles, I went Jane Austen and Shakespeare instead. Didn't do justice to either of those authors, but I did produce a couple pieces I was pretty proud of, regardless. And there's the one where Curt becomes an actor, but...
Anyway. In terms of Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic, wow. I'm honestly pretty proud of a lot of it, but some of that may be because I'm still in the "madly in love with this novel" phase of my fannishness. 😅 How I feel about them whenever I cease obsessing about MDZS will be the real question. But who knows how long that will take?
Probably my favorite is "To Walk This Earth With You Again," in which Wei Wuxian was not revived, and didn't reincarnate until modern day. (To explain: Mo Dao Zu Shi begins with the death of Wei Wuxian, the novel's hero...and then goes immediately to him being revived (sort of) thirteen years later.) He has most of his memories from his previous life, and goes to an online support group for other people with past life memories (allowing me to finally complete something with a particular pair of reincarnations of Achilles and Patroclos that I used in about half a dozen incomplete works because I loved them too much to let them be dead backstory characters in a sci-fi "Trojan War repeating itself in space" thing) and it just really resonated with me somehow. I even went back and added two more chapters to it later, one in which Wei Wuxian's almost-but-not-quite-adopted-brother reincarnates with all his memories and they get a chance to work out the feud between them, and then another one detailing just why Wei Wuxian wasn't revived in this alternate universe, which features the villain's slow descent into madness. Honestly, that slow descent into madness for a villain who is the "always outwitting his enemies fifteen steps ahead of them" type was particularly satisfying! Though I also liked the online chat sections, too. (I even looked up someone's formatting code to make it look like Discord, so it looks really great on screen, too.)
Honorary mention has to go to "The Spark That Ignites the Embers," which is using the version of MDZS canon from its live-action adaptation, The Untamed, and centers on that not-quite-brother I was just talking about (in part in apology to him, because he died a rather humiliating death in "To Walk," though the final bonus chapter at least changed it into being murdered by the villain, which is probably slightly less humiliating?), and somehow ended up being 500k words long, far and away the longest thing I've ever written...and hopefully it will stay that way, 'cause man is that a crazy lot of words! It took me eleven months to write the first draft, and editing it was a nightmare, because it was really hard to remember some of the pickiest details of what happened earlier on. (Not to mention that Word takes quite a while to open a file that big!)
My last category that can't really be compared to anything else is that of the games I've written. It's not a super-large category (especially if you discount the lightly interactive version of the Atalanta and Ariadne books), but I'm still pretty proud of some of it. Though the one I'm most proud of is probably less for the writing than for the "everything else" about it. My most recent release, Orchid Duet, (which is actually also a MDZS fan game 😅) spent a long time waiting for the artist to finish up their work, and while I was waiting, I kept iterating through the game and adding more and more visual effects and little bits of polish, so I'm actually quite proud of it. (I've also played it through at least three dozen times in the last two months, so I'm likely not to touch it again for some time to come...😰)
Ironically, the one I'm next most proud of is actually called The Worst Visual Novel Ever, and was for a game jam specifically to create bad games. But somehow I ended up putting in a lot of silly, quasi-clever stuff in the writing, and I kind of love it despite how insane it is. Especially because of some of the really meta stuff, like the narrator becoming more and more unhinged the longer I spend writing the game, which only is obvious if you're looking at the script instead of the game, because the player might get the narrator breaking down on their first playthrough, instead of closer to the end of the script. The narrator actually even gets replaced a few times because its breakdown is that intense.
Hmm.
I feel like I went on too long and didn't really say much and...
...sorry. I think I'm a little nuts right now because I'm getting my butt kicked by the mold count in the air.
So.
I, uh, haven't been doing a lot of writing lately.
I'm not 100% sure why. Or rather I'm not sure which factor is the primary one.
Part of it is because I'm still working on a game jam entry. (The jam normally would have ended on the 1st, but it was extended for reasons that it's probably better not to go into.) Technically, the game ought to already be up, since I considered it to be all but "finished" like two weeks ago, but the artist who agreed to create a unique background and some other art for me has had a lot on their plate and still has only gotten roughs done. So I keep going in and fiddling with what I've got. 😅 In some ways it's a waste of time to keep iterating on it like that, but on the other hand it means I'm really pulling out all the stops I can in regards to little visual effects and stuff.
But I haven't been doing much with the writing, since I've considered the script more or less finished for quite a while now. I had to do some edits thanks to one of my two sensitivity readers getting back to me and recommending some improvements, but that's been quite a while now.
I think the most writing I've done all month was probably when someone on a writing discord server posted a link to this blog post with the most ultimate "character questionnaire" pretty much ever. I was actually going to fill it out on a blog post for one of the characters I've been writing about, but thought the better of it when I reached his answer to "What's the most evil thing you've ever done?" because I do not want someone seeing his answer to that question out of context and thinking I had done that! Because, yeah, that was a very evil thing he had done. (Even though he's usually a very good person. It's just that he went a wee bit over the edge after suffering a particularly brutal tragedy...)
That's sort of off topic, though.
The main thing I wanted to talk about, in terms of my "not getting much writing done lately" issue is the rewrite I have been bogged down in for what feels roughly like forever. The draft I'm trying to revise is really, really awful. And a lot of the problems are structurally baked in, so rewriting is a little like banging my head against a brick wall. Thus I have been doing almost everything else I can think of except working on that rewrite.
I know at this point a lot of people would probably advise me to just not bother; drop the project. But it's book four out of seven (and yes, I've written first drafts for the whole series), and I've already released books one through three on AO3 and itch.io, so it would feel a bit like breaking a promise if I just stopped. Besides, I'm eager to get to the later books, especially book six, which is when they go to Sparta and meet Helen (and I feel like I did some moderately unique things with her!), plus they also go into the underworld and meet Hades, albeit briefly, and it's so important to get more versions of Hades in the public sphere that aren't mutilating him into a "villain." (There is very little that ticks me off harder about modern mangling of Greek mythology than people who stupidly conflate Hades with the devil.)
So. Yeah.
Anyone else struggling to get through a hard rewrite? How do you handle it?
So, I don't have a lot to say about my writing as I've been distracted this month by health issues and the real world trying to force itself into my forcibly-sheltered life, but I can't talk about the latter because a) it would be bad for my heart and b) it might verge on the political. However, something someone said in replying to me in Discord has put a question in my head, one that others in the IWSG community might have reactions to. (I can't even try to address this month's suggested discussion question because I'm a purely hobbyist writer and thus don't follow the ins and outs of the publishing industry. Except a few minor things I notice as a consumer, but that's sort of a different issue.)
The question is this:
How do you feel about the idea of derivative works featuring your characters? More specifically, how would you feel about the idea of people selling fan art of your characters?
It came up because there was discussion of the sales of fan works of a particular novel being forbidden to be sold. The fan works themselves weren't being suppressed, just them being traded for money, and someone said that was the author's own will. This led to a discussion in which two of our more prolific members--it was a visual novel dev community--discussing their own feelings on the subject. One said that they were conflicted, because they don't want anyone else selling their characters but on the other hand they also don't want to quash the indie artist community. Another said that they would be thrilled if people were selling fan art of their favorites among their characters...and would in fact buy copies of said fan art.
Personally, I don't have all that many of my original characters that are super-important to me, in part because a lot of my original fiction over the last 10-15 years has been based in and around Greek mythology, so many of the characters aren't mine...which doesn't stop me having a lot of feelings about how other people use them, naturally enough! (Hence why I was very nervous about trying the game Hades, which thankfully turned out to hit all my sweet spots, so I absolutely love it.) Of the ones who are original and mean a lot to me, mostly Atalanta and Ariadne (and my version of Eurysakes may as well be an OC, given how little connection there is between him and the original version in the few myths that mention him)...I'm not sure how I would feel about derivative works. On the one hand, I would definitely be flattered if someone cared enough to want to draw them, but how would I feel if they drew them in some grotesquely wrong fashion or doing something horrifically out of character for them? I mean, no, I don't even have to ask that last question: if someone drew them doing something that is antithetical to their character, I would hate it. On the other hand, just drawing them, or drawing them doing something from one of the books, I would probably love that? Or maybe not. I don't know. One of the advantages of releasing only through itch.io and AO3 is that no one pays the least bit of attention to what I've written; it's comfortingly safe knowing that no one is looking. But if someone drew my characters, that would mean that someone was looking, and that might weird me out.
So, there's my answer to my own question: I don't even know. But I'm curious how other people feel on the subject!
So. The last month has been pretty meh for me as a writer. I started out bouncing between two projects, then came up with a third (which is a VN for a game jam, so it has a time limit) and now I'm bouncing between three projects. And the first two aren't even proceeding all that well. (The one that ought to be the priority, the rewrite of book four of my series from 2014, has been moving the slowest; I'm barely into the first chapter!) There hasn't been any particular obstacle to my writing--aside from summer heat, which is always an obstacle to everything, as I am not good at dealing with heat--it's just not been flowing very quickly by my standards.
Anyway, point is, I don't have a lot to say, so I guess I'll look into the monthly discussion question.
July 2 question - Is there a genre you haven't tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?
Hmm.
Well...not really?
Or rather, there are genres I've never successfully written a complete work in that I might like to someday? I've never written anything to completion that was sci-fi (aside from some Star Wars fanfic back in college, before I even knew the term "fan fiction"), and I would kind of like to someday, but I would need the right story idea before I even tried it. I can't really say that I "plan" on writing sci-fi someday, because I can never predict what kind of ideas I'll come up with before I come up with them. Although there was the "Trojan War in space" novel I tried to write, which I would like to get back to and rework and complete someday. That wouldn't end up as a novel, though; it needs to be something more along the lines of a hybrid strategy RPG and visual novel. Which in itself causes all sorts of problems since in addition to needing to be able to actually write the dang thing, I'd also need to find a programmer and one or more artists, but I don't work well with other people. (Which means it will probably never happen, even if I do manage to get the script written.)
Similarly, in the past I started an isekai VN script and a reverse-isekai fanfic, but didn't manage to finish either. I'm not entirely sure I actually want to work in either of those genres, though they do offer a lot of interesting possibilities, to be sure. Oh, actually, I started a different isekai work once, too, but didn't get very far into it because one of the only ideas I had for it was "isekai protagonist who is not the special and in fact has zero useful abilities and is just running an average store in town while someone else who merely passed through once or twice is actually the hero out saving the world" but that was going to be very boring. I'm not even sure if it was going to be an original work of fiction or if I was planning to make it a VN. I think the former, though.
I suppose if there's a genre that I've never touched at all that I might like to, it would be more along the lines of the "palace intrigue" novel. But it's unlikely that I'd attempt a genre like that. I don't even have much experience reading that genre. (The Apothecary Diaries could plausibly be called "palace intrigue," but that's pretty much the only one I've read, really? (And I've currently only read the first two out of I don't know how many volumes of it.) The novel that the hero of The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish transmigrated into was a palace intrigue novel, but I don't think that counts, since the novel I read was a transmigration danmei, so it would fall into the "isekai" genre (if it's not too deeply wrong to apply a Japanese word to define the genre of a Chinese novel) rather than palace intrigue.) I doubt I'd ever actually try my hand at the genre because my understanding of people is not actually what it would need to be to successfully write that genre. (Admittedly, that hamstrings my writing in all genres, but the less need there is for deep psychological understanding of highly complex characters the more chance that I can at least write something halfway decent.)
Hmm.
Another chaotic and pointless post from me.
I feel like I need to apologize to the internet as a whole for my own existence.
😭
So...
I am still having...issues...with my current rewriting project.
The project is to rewrite book four of my quasi-YA, Greek-myth-based fantasy novels about a young trio of adventurers living not quite twenty years after the Trojan War. I have made quite a few posts about these novels over the last year or so (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). I am up to book four...which is supremely problematic in all sorts of ways.
I went into a lot of it in the previous post (the last one on that massive list), so I'll skip a lot of the preliminaries. The short version is that because my research before I wrote the initial draft (in 2014) was using such outdated texts, almost everything I had "learned" in that research was wrong. My understanding of the setting is now improved, though still lacking the larger cultural picture I have for the Greek Heroic Age, because the surviving corpus of myths is so much smaller for Mesopotamia.
Of course, how I had coped with my lack of knowledge in the original draft was to write a book in which the trio of young heroes barely interacted with the locals at all. Can't get wrong what you don't write at all, was my thinking. Which I suppose isn't technically incorrect? (And yet I still managed to get a truly spectacular amount of things wrong!)
In the end, I ended up with a text in which the story is so centered around not interacting with the locals that I'm having trouble finding a way to restructure it in order to have them interact with the locals beyond their translator. (Who I had to jump through some pretty crazy hoops to keep from getting killed by the villain, even.)
That's not necessarily unworkable, of course. Maybe I won't even want to change it. But most of the next draft is going to have to be entirely new, and I'm kind of struggling to figure out how to make things work.
The original draft has the three heroes get individual divine visitations (in their dreams) from three of the Babylonian gods, and then all three of them met with Ishtar in person (though the situation was bizarre and illogical at best) and she gave them gifts to help them through the battle to come. Of course, none of those gifts belonged to Ishtar, and most of them were for Ariadne, but...
So I came up with the idea of coming up with a series of trials they go through to win the support of the Babylonian gods, but the trials are also contests, and after each contest, the one of the trio who "won" will get to speak to the god behind the trial and receive an object from them to help with the battle ahead. This would allow me to preserve some of the earlier dialog between the trio and the various Babylonian gods, by having the winner of each trial be the one who spoke to that god in the visitations in the original version of the text. A bit formulaic, but serviceable, and in dealing with such an ancient culture surely an older formula like that is actually kind of appropriate.
Problem, of course, is that for the most part the one who would receive the gift is not the one who would use it:
Okay, technically that's only half of them, not "most" of them, but it's still a problem!
Isn't it?
I don't know, maybe it's not a problem? I can't think of anything with this kind of formula off the top of my head to recall if the gifts were ever given to someone other than the one who would use them. (Closest I can think of is the gifts Galadriel gave to the Fellowship when they were leaving Lothlorien, but those were used by the people she gave them to. With the addition that Sam also used the vial of starlight she gave Frodo. But that's entirely different.) I feel like the basic formula of "do a favor for a magical entity and get a magical item as a reward" is usually one person meeting magical beings (or the same one in different disguises) as they travel, not multiple people in a party going to one deity after another in the same basic location. Which I'm not sure if it's better or worse that I'd be changing up the formula that way...
It just feels really off to have them given to the wrong person. But they're divine gifts, so they should be given by the god they belonged to, surely!
There's also the fact that Ariadne gets the largest number of gifts--bow, arrows and a vial of poison for the arrows--and Atalanta originally got no gifts whatsoever. I've figured out something Ishtar can give Atalanta that actually belonged to her (well, it's not so much something that belongs to Ishtar as the transformed body of one of Ishtar's enemies, but it's the only magic item I can figure out to add to the final confrontation that would be useful for Atalanta in any way, shape or form) but it's still pretty lopsided, and doesn't sound the least bit impressive: "Here, Ariadne, have the bow and arrows Ninurta used to defeat Anzu, and this vial of poison from Ea to make the arrows more deadly. Here, Eurysakes, have the net that Marduk used to ensare Tiamat. Here, Atalanta, uh...you can have this enchanted waterskin that used to be the woman who murdered Dumuzi."
It just doesn't...feel fair.
Admittedly, this book starts Atalanta's negative character growth arc, as all hints of her father's arrogance are pounded out of her and she becomes so depressed and convinced of her own worthlessness that by the end of book seven she kind of wants to die in battle to rid the world of herself. (Her father's spirit shows up to help her in the final confrontation of that book, which helps to restore her self-confidence, though, so it's not a total downer. (Her father being Achilles, btw.)) Still, having the Babylonian gods spurn her by giving her useless gifts is a bit too much, isn't it? It's not like they're spurning her for being female, after all: Ariadne is also female, and she gets the best gifts, plus she's the one who learns how to read and write cuneiform, which is the key to winning the final battle of the book.
Ugh.
It's like...like...like I need to write an entirely different book from the ground up and only keep the final battle, as that actually worked pretty well. But I have zero ideas what else to write that would build up to that final battle. Especially because I don't feel like I have all that good a grip on Late Bronze Age Babylon, not well enough to conjure up an entire tale set there. (Well, there's actually the opening couple of chapters that are back in Troy, then they have to pass through Tarsus and take a caravan from there to Babylon, but it's still the bulk of the book...)
It's honestly quite overwhelming, and I feel so daunted by the prospect that I don't even know where to start. And yet I know that if I don't start relatively soon, I'll forget everything I learned in my new research and I'll have to redo the research first.
(I would be ashamed of myself for being on about working on a non-Pride-related novel in June, but Atalanta is aromantic and asexual (not that those concepts were understood in her day!) and Ariadne is lesbian in the woman-loving-woman sense (as well as being Lesbian in the sense of "having been born on the island of Lesbos") so I figure this is at least somewhat Pride-related.)
Since I've had this post sitting around 3/4 finished since like the 10th of April, and since it's about writing, I figure I may as well use it for this month's ISWG post.
Instead of talking about the month's suggested question (the answer to that being mostly that I'm afraid of people actually reading anything I wrote, but simultaneously kind of afraid of them not reading it, too), I'm going to talk about endings.
Or, more accurately, what is it that I look for in an ending?
I ask because, well...where to start?
Okay, so in my previous post I mentioned a fantasy novel I had bought on a whim earlier, a book I had decided would be up next from my "to read" pile.
That book was fantasy in the sense of "historical setting but folklore is real." So nothing strictly speaking invented for the novel, that kind of thing.
When I finished reading it, I found the ending had left a bad taste in my mouth (in my mind?) but I'm not even sure why.
It wasn't a bad ending by any conventional definition: the heroes were triumphant, they didn't die, and their loved ones didn't die. So, it should have been satisfying, yes?
And yet, for some reason, it wasn't. Not for me. And I don't know why.
I can identify a few things that may have been factors:
Following soon on the heels of that, I finished playing the Dragon Quest III remake...and was left feeling very underwhelmed by the ending. Admittedly, Dragon Quest as a whole is not as story-intensive as some other JRPG series are (though the stories did become richer and more central to the experience as the series went on) and the endings are often pretty lackluster, but something about that particular ending left me particularly not satisfied. Again, I can't even put my finger on what about it I was unsatisfied with. Though the player character's lack of a homecoming didn't help...and the post-credits scene lost any punch it was supposed to have because although I was positive I had heard the name mentioned at the very end before, I have no idea quite where or who he was. (Logically, you would expect them to be setting up that he's the big bad of IV, only I'm pretty dang sure that was not the name of the guy who was manipulating Psarro, so...also, after the scene it went "To be continued in" the HD remake of the first two games, so...are they saying that III somehow took place before I and II? I am confused by that logic...but I just checked on the Dragon Quest wiki, and yes, that's what they're saying, which is very strange to me, but the end of Dragon Quest VI also seemed to be claiming that it was before IV and V, so...that's weird, but...)
Anyway, so double whammy of "endings that left me unsatisfied without actually being bad" in short order. (I was similarly dissatisfied with the ending of Zenshu, but in that case I know exactly why. Though it still wasn't a bad ending, per se. But that was a week or so earlier anyway.)
Net result, it has me wondering if I am applying a double standard. Am I being harder on the endings of works written by others than I am on my own endings?
Thinking about it logically...I should analyze my own endings and see how they fit the criteria I feel like I gathered in looking at why that novel and Dragon Quest III left me feeling less than pleased.
Setting aside fanfic for the moment, since there are always aspects there that are trying to tie together canon material with material of my own invention and thus making endings trickier to arrange, I'm going to look at series of books I'm 3/7 of the way through rewriting. But since this is now an IWSG post and a few people will actually read it, I'll be more vague than I was originally going to be.
Looking at all of those, I feel like only the first three would meet my current standards. Though of course books 4-7 are kind of more "part of a series" than the first three are. Or rather...how do I explain? Book 3's ending is where the heroes learn that they have a powerful enemy who's been involved with everything that they've had to deal with up until now. Book 4 starts out with them actively trying to learn more about this enemy, and that continues right up until they finally deal with said enemy in the climax of book 7. Because of all that, it's kind of like...the endings don't fully matter as much until reaching the ending of book 7? Which doesn't seem right, but that's definitely how my brain perceives it no matter what. (Maybe it's the side-effect of growing up watching the Star Wars movies constantly, and The Empire Strikes Back is the only one with an unsatisfying ending...)
Obviously, since I haven't yet started the rewriting process for books 4-7, I can do what little is available to me to fix the parts of the endings that aren't up to my current standings for an ending, but...for some of them that might require more restructuring than I really want to put into the process. Less like a new draft and more like a fully new novel, you know? I'd like to get the rest of the series finished and released (in what minimal sense the first three count as released, anyway) sooner rather than later, and having to do that much reworking would definitely delay me a lot.
I guess what most gets to me about this is that I'm not actually sure how much it matters. Or rather, I don't actually know what other people look for in an ending. Would most people be annoyed by getting through a novel and finding that the heroes' victory didn't do anything to change the status quo of the world around them? (Since this is the Late Bronze Age, said status quo is definitely not pleasant, but there's not much I can do about that, y'know? I'm not as confined by historical reality as the novel that set me onto thinking about all this, but I'm still bound to the larger aspects.)
Even more importantly, are readers going to get frustrated that the endings become less satisfying after the heroes become aware of the larger flow of events and the actions of the mysterious villain behind it all? I mean, to be clear, this is not an "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" situation with the same enemy just running off at the end of the book to come back working some new evil in the next novel. There are smaller villains they defeat each time (though I think in the current draft both 5 and 6 have the same sub-villain, who had left a lesser (but also physically much larger) sub-villain to be the final boss of book 5) so it's at least got that much satisfaction, but...gnh.
I'm not sure there is any real answer to this.
I'm also not sure how many people have actually read any of the first three, or how many people are going to read the remaining four whenever they're made available. And I guess it shouldn't even matter, since I'm making the books available for free on itch.io and AO3, so it's not like I'm trying to sell copies or anything. I guess I just don't want to disappoint anyone who might read them, you know?
I know one thing that probably turns people off who do encounter the books is the fact that the heroes are striving to protect the Olympian gods when a lot of modern works tend to want to get rid of them or at least change them since they were not, in fact, very nice, and did a lot of genuinely horrible things. But that's a very modern perspective on the Olympian gods. The people of ancient Greece did not think of them that way. Of course, we don't fully know how they did think of them, since they didn't write down their cultic practices, and thus the versions of the gods reflected in the myths are not actually the same versions that they actively worshiped. (This is especially the case for Hera.) Of course, in the end, I'm not trying to write about the actual religion versions of the Greek gods, but the mythological version, but that still comes down to the same thing, doesn't it? If I want to use the Heroic Age setting and not completely betray the epic poetry that this is supposed to be building off of (though my writing is nowhere near good enough to be mentioned in the same conversation as masterworks that have survived more than two thousand years!), then the heroes have to believe in and want to win the support of the gods, and if they ever disrespect the gods, they have to suffer because of it. Because that's what happens in the myths: you tick off a god, you suffer and probably die. (Unless you're Agamemnon, then when you tick off a god, you get hundreds or thousands of your own men killed (and/or your daughter) and you just sit there and survive it like a monster.)
So that's something I could in theory change that might make my works more palatable to more people, but I don't want to do that, because that's not what I'm going for.
I should probably write something else where I'm free to have characters tell the gods "get lost!" when they do the awful stuff they're known for. (I should write a visual novel where Zeus finally gets his for all his skirt-chasing. That would be epic.)
...I feel like I have wandered way off my original topic of "endings."
Given that I am very bad at them, somehow that seems appropriate.
Since I don't have much to say about my writing at the moment aside from an extension of the general "I can't seem to get anything done and my methods are feeling like they're interfering with my progress" that I was saying last month, I guess I'll do the suggested discussion question instead.
April 2 question - What fantasy character would you like to fight, go on a quest with, or have a beer/glass of wine with?
Well.
Given my current obsession, I feel like the obvious answer is "Wei Wuxian." But that's kinda cheating? Because technically who I would want there would be both Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji so I could watch them being all sweetly romantic with each other. (Though if they look like the actors from The Untamed then I would probably be satisfied with just Wei Wuxian because damn is he pretty! I mean, both of them are, but I could definitely stare at Xiao Zhan in Wei Wuxian mode all day and then some.)
As I try to think of others I might want to meet--well, I guess to answer the question properly it would have to be "go on a quest with" 'cause no hecking way am I fighting anyone, and I don't like alcohol in any form, so beer and wine are vomitously out--I am struck by how little of my recent fantasy reading/watching has actually been Western in origin. 'Cause my first thought after Wei Wuxian is Lina Inverse (a thought quickly rejected, ofc, because being around Lina Inverse can be pretty hazardous to one's health, particularly if it's the anime version of Lina rather than the light novel version, as she casts 'Dragon Slave' a lot more often in the anime than in the novels), and my next thought after that was Maomao but actually she doesn't count because The Apothecary Diaries is not a fantasy. (I'm not quite sure what it does count as, though. It's hard to call it 'historical fiction' since it's in a made-up setting that merely resembles Imperial China in virtually every respect, and it's not exactly a 'palace novel,' either, so...but either way there's no magic or monsters, so definitely not a fantasy.) Holo might also be fun to meet, especially if there was some reason for her to revert to her giant wolf form.
After that, my mind flits about to various video game characters, again mostly Japanese in origin.
Hmm.
Maybe the thing to take away from this is that I need to read more fantasy works that didn't originate in Japan or China. (Lately most of them have been Chinese, but I do have a big stack of the Slayers light novels waiting for me, though I wanted to wait until all of them are out physically so I can read the entire series in one giant binge.) Or at least that I should try to read some that are less "pop culture" and more "culture" if that distinction makes sense; light novels and web novels are kinda...I mean, they're less the sort of thing that my parents would look down on than manga and graphic novels, but they're still...they feel somehow less "legit"...but maybe that's just a generational issue and younger people don't feel like they're failing as readers to have shelves and shelves full of light novels...?
Though I did actually buy an English-language fantasy novel on a whim while I was picking up the first volume of Legend of Exorcism, now that I think about it. I should read that next. (Though the chances of any of its characters fitting the bill for this question are pretty slim...) Uh, when I say "English-language fantasy novel" I mean "fantasy novel that was always in English rather than one that's been translated into English" since I am absolutely rubbish at learning languages. (Also doesn't help that two of the three foreign languages I spent any serious amount of time learning were dead languages. Limited number of things to read in those.)
I mean, not to say that I haven't read a fair chunk of English-language fantasy in my time, but most of it has not really stuck with me aside from The Last Unicorn and the works of Tolkien, and to some extent the Prydain Chronicles. Oh, and several of the Discworld novels, but my brain tends to classify those more as comedy than fantasy, even though they are most certainly fantasy. (Wait, does Alice in Wonderland count as fantasy? I remember that and Through the Looking Glass quite well, too...) As to non-English-language (originally) but still Western works of fantasy...all that leaps to mind is that I've read The Neverending Story a couple of times (and even bought an untranslated copy back when I thought I was going to finally actually learn German during my studies for my Master's Degree) but mostly the details that stick with me are only the ones most closely connected to what's in the movie. (A shameful truth, but I've only read the novel a few times, whereas I've seen the movie countless times.)
...anyway...I guess...getting back to the original question...
I suppose the answer really is 'Wei Wuxian' at the moment. Either in the pre-fall of Lotus Pier teenage version or in the post-canon version, but definitely not any of the versions in between, as I'd want to feel sure that I would survive the 'quest' and also that I wouldn't have to witness the horrors of war or him acting all...well, I wouldn't want to see him at his lowest psychological point, because he got pretty grim and unlike his usual cheerful self in there for a while, and that would be very upsetting to witness. (One of many changes for the live-action drama was to tone that personality shift down to make for a more pleasant viewing experience...) The teenage version might be better for me, personally, since even post-canon there would likely still be a lot of fierce corpses involved in any 'quest' Wei Wuxian might go on, and I'm pretty squeamish, so I don't know if I could handle being around any fierce corpses (other than Wen Ning).
Getting to experience the world he lives in would really help me trying to capture very different worlds from my own in my writing, as would studying his behavior in person, as his cheerful, indefatigable, extroverted, extremely confident personality is pretty much the opposite of mine in most respects. (And yes, of course I would also want to watch him and Lan Wangji making eyes at each other, because who wouldn't want to watch that? Though if it was the teenage version of Wei Wuxian, then Lan Wangji wouldn't be there, but Jiang Cheng probably would be, and I do love the brotherly relationship between Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, so that would be fun to witness, too.)
Wait, y'know who else might be fun to go on a quest with? The Luggage from Discworld. It can carry basically anything you might need with you, and you could probably ride it if the need arose. 😅
As usual, I am having trouble writing. Also having trouble with everything else, but that's an entirely different issue.
One thing that's particularly frustrating me is that I've spent so long being a pantser that I kinda don't know how to write any other way any more, and I had a project I wanted to do that really needs to be planned out pretty carefully before I can start writing it.
So I got to a certain point in the planning process and just...stopped.
Not because I didn't want to do the project anymore, but because I just couldn't go any further.
I needed to fully define the supporting characters and plan out their side stories, and....I just couldn't. When I tried, I'd just sit there, staring at my planning document for a while, then give up and do something else.
This happened over and over again until I eventually stopped even opening the file.
I don't know how to rewire my writing brain. I've been writing the same basic way since the 1990s. Admittedly, things have changed a little, in that now I write my ideas down rather than trusting that I'll remember them, but they're still pretty nebulous, especially as they progress; I might have a pretty strong outline for the opening, and a relatively well-defined idea of the early middle, but the "outlines" always eventually devolve into "not sure where it goes from there, but the good guys win in the end" territory. And sure, eventually I get near the vague parts and find myself writing a new partial outline, which then takes me through another section of the story, but it's still more pantsing than plotting, you know?
Which is fine if it's just silly fan fiction or a novel I don't ever intend to show to others.
It's a different issue entirely when it's the idea for a visual novel that would require me to hire artists and such in order for the final project to be completed. I can't waste my money and/or their time working on a project that can never go anywhere because I can't visualize the details of the story until I've worked on part of the story.
Admittedly, I wouldn't want to hire artists until I'd written a full draft of the script anyway, but if I can't ever start writing it, then it's still wrecked up. And because it's something more complicated than I usually attempt--even though each story is planned to be linear, with only flavor text different based on player choice, the idea is still to have each major NPC have their own line of (mostly optional) sidequests to give them each their own story--I can't just say "well, heck with it, I'll just start writing and hope for the best!" because the best is not what would happen if I do. It would just be my usual muddled mess.
It's very frustrating and I have no idea what I can possibly do about it.
So.
Today's suggested question was about if we've ever wanted to go back and rewrite something, right?
For me that's kind of a "yes and no" thing.
Like anyone, I look back at my oldest writing and cringe. But I tend to write exclusively for myself in the sense that most of the things I've ever written have never been put before other people in any context. That being the case, if I ever want to rewrite something, there's nothing stopping me from doing so.
However, for the most part I wouldn't want to because the really old things I've written are things I now don't particularly want to interact with in terms of their story material.
Before I figured out I was asexual and aromantic, I often included heterosexual romance in my writing. Actually, that even continued on for a few years after I figured it out, in fact. But now I prefer to write about same-sex romance, if I include romance at all, so most of my old stuff is something I don't even want to interact with in any way. And since it's not out there being interacted with by anyone else, that's fine. It can continue to rot in digital oblivion. (Or something.)
On the other hand, I have been rewriting--and releasing!--a series of novels I wrote in 2014, so sometimes I do want to go back and rewrite older works. (Okay, if I really wanted to go to older works, I started writing back in the 1990s, so if any of those even still exist on any accessible hard drive, I could dive back into the ultra-cringe of things I wrote when I was still a teenager.) I need to finally get around to finishing up the research for the next rewrite in the series, though. It's hard to find books talking in sufficient detail about Late Bronze Age Mesopotamia...
