IWSG: um...March

    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.

I feel like I should be worrying

 It's what, the 29th of October?

And I'm still not sure what I plan to do for NaNoWriMo.  (I mean, other than my usual "participate unofficially" thing.)

I could try writing prompts.

I could try one of the fanfic ideas from my massive file of them.  (Leaning towards the one where Wei Wuxian is raised by the Lan Clan, but not sure yet.  I could also try the other CQL-canon fic idea I had, but...dunno, that one feels sorta meh.)

I could try writing the idea I have for a (possibly hybrid) VN that would be loosely inspired by the story motifs and general atmosphere of danmei novels (but in an invented world that while inspired by ancient China would be distinctly not actually ancient China (you know, like Avatar:  The Last Airbender)) only it would be a romance between two women instead of two men.

Or...

...um...

I could try writing prompts.

Or I could try picking up that partially-written MDZS fan VN, but I don't know if that would work.  I mean, pretty much the whole reason I never finished it was that it just wasn't gelling with me.  (It would have helped if the artist who made the sprites available had released more characters. The ones I have to choose from I don't have much to say about, not without more characters being in the mix.)

Or I could try writing prompts.

Or, I mean, truthfully, I could just not bother, but...

...I've been doing NaNo (officially at first, then unofficially for the last...like five or six years?) since 2011.  Stopping now would feel pretty pitiful.  Or wrong.  Or empty.  Or something.

Gnh.

I just got nothing, you know?

And it bugs me that my phone has started thinking my common typos due to my big fat fingers and the teeny tiny phone keyboard are things I want to write.  😰  It's actually started "suggesting" things like "somethibg" because my fingers have a tendency to hit one letter over pretty frequently.  😭  (I should add a screencap showing that later. Can't do it now because they've changed how pictures are added and that prevents me from adding them on my phone. 😭)

A to Z: Randomly, Ramses II

 

    Okay, not exactly "random," but...I admit that it's a pretty weird choice.  Only strangely enough I don't have very many characters of any note whose names start with R.

    He's also a weird choice in that most people would not put the Trojan War as during the reign of Ramses II, but I do.  Or rather, I did for the Atalanta and Ariadne books, which then bled over into Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, albeit only slightly.  (He sends troops to aid the Trojans in year...seven or eight I think, though he's only identified as "Ramses" so it could be Ramses III, who's more in the time frame typically associated with the Trojan War.  In any case, it's a one-time event with minimal repercussions no matter what you do...unless the feud between Odysseus and Palamedes is still going on at the time...)  There are reasons for my placing the date of the Trojan War when I did, and as I'm trying to be more relaxed about these posts now, I'm just going to quote what I had to say on the subject in the timeline section available at the end of the interactive version of Scions of Troy:

         So, there’s a lot to say here, and much of it could be spoilers for later books in the series, meaning I can’t say a lot of what I would ideally want to. There is a “traditional” date for the Trojan War: 1184 BCE. This would have the war either beginning or ending (depending on whether you see that as the start date or finish date!) less than a decade before the Bronze Age Collapse.
         I couldn’t use that for obvious reasons! Even more so than the “having the girls travel through what would be their equivalent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland is not what I wanted” reason, there’s also the fact that the myths firmly establish that a good deal of time passes between the fall of Troy and the fall of the other citadels. (Though the ancient texts are not consistent about just how much time, to be honest. And of course they had them all fall to Dorian invaders when most of them seem to have fallen more to earthquakes than to warfare.)

    My original drafts had assumed "about 1250" for the fall of Troy, but that meant that the girls were going to arrive in one of the locations for the later books at a time of great upheaval, and I preferred to avoid that.  So I shifted things around a little more, and put the start of the Trojan War at around 1267 BCE...which is about the same time that the Hittite Empire was going through upheavals as Hattusili III was overthrowing his nephew, Mursili III.  Meaning that the Hittites would have been much too busy to send aid to Troy!  I was so pleased by that coincidence that I decided that, as far as my personal headcanon is concerned, that simply was the date of the Trojan War.  (The deposed Mursili III fled to Egypt, btw, and the political wrangling and threats of war as Hattusili III demanded he be returned lasted for nine years, thus handily both proving that the Hittites had too much else on their minds and that Ramses would have been unlikely to get involved.)

    Even better than the upheaval among the Hittites was the earthquake that struck around Mycenae in about 1250.  This earthquake forced the rebuilding of the citadel walls and was when the grave circles famously looted excavated by Schliemann were brought inside the walls.  Which made for a perfect time for, say, Orestes to carry out his act of vengeance for his father's murder.  And more importantly made an excellent opportunity for Korythos to oust Aineias as the post-war king of Troy.

    In other words, I ended up with a time that fits the larger picture of the war's place in the Late Bronze Age world really well (aside from making the Dorian invasion take place several decades before the Bronze Age Collapse 😰), so I was extremely pleased with it.

    Corollary to all this, because Ramses II had an incredibly long reign (1279-1213 BCE), that means he's still seated on the Egyptian throne when Atalanta and Ariadne first escape slavery around 1239 BCE.  And that means if I wanted them to visit Egypt--and of course I wanted them to visit Egypt!--then he's the man in charge when they get there.

    And when they get there is in book five, so it'll be a while before it's been rewritten...and it's probably going to change a lot in the rewrite.  (Partially because I didn't put in as much research as I should have at the time. 😅)

    That's not the only reason, but I'm going to talk about that after I address how I characterized Ramses in the original draft.  (Which will probably not change too much in the final draft...)  Obviously, it's a tricky thing, trying to write fiction involving a real historical personage.  Even more so considering that the ancient Egyptians did not keep the kind of records that tell us much about what their rulers were actually like as people.

Should I be worried?

     I ask, of course, because I am a bit worried, regardless of whether I actually need to be.

    See, I tend to check the stats tab on my blog, because why wouldn't I?  I mean, what else is it there for but for me to check it, right?  And today I found this:

    It's like...why was someone from Google's corporate administration accessing my blog?  I tried following the link, and it was some kind of official-looking sign-in page.

    I mean...maybe it's just a routine thing, that the company periodically checks on what's being posted on people's blogs, to make sure it's not anything they could get in trouble for hosting?  But it's still creeping me out.

    I guess they would have sent me some kind of warning email if I'd done something wrong, but it's still just sort of creepy feeling. 😭  Like, now I'm worried my blog will be suddenly disabled or something, even though I haven't done anything wrong.  (Unless posting fanfic is against the rules, but that seems highly unlikely, since it's my own fanfic. I mean, sure, posting fanfic someone else wrote, yeah, that would be bad, but...)

The problem with being a Plantser

 It's like at this point this thing I'm writing is actively trying to sabotage me.

As it's long (245k and counting) and convoluted, I've had to make mini-outlines drawing the broad strokes story and then others detailing the immediate bits to come.

Where I am now in the story, a war and its immediate aftermath have just ended, and now our heroes have some down time before the work's ultimate foe shows his true colors by trying to...uh, actually I'm still fuzzy on what, exactly, he's going to try to do in the later parts of the story.  He wants to become the next xiandu--translated by Seven Seas Danmei sometimes as "Cultivation Chief" and sometimes "Chief Cultivator" neither of which I'm particularly keen on as terms, hence why I chose to just use "xiandu"--at any cost, but what his methods will be past the current outline phase, I'm not sure.  (But this outline phase will likely last me until December, so... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Future me can worry about it.)  In the current phase, the villain's plans are mostly political in nature.  (Hopefully, they'll remain largely politcal even after, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Anyway, until the villain makes his first move, the work's lead is unaware that anyone is plotting in the shadows...and since fighting to stop someone from seizing power is often a reactive process, particularly in the early stages, that leaves me with holes in the current activities of the work's lead.

The problem is compounded by the fact that this is a work of fan fiction, and the one who's the lead in what I'm writing is not the lead of the original work.  So I have this alarming tendency to gravitate towards the original lead, especially in the outlining process...and especially especially at this particular part in the story, because the original lead is about to set off on a very important sidequest (in RPG terms) that only he can do, while his adoptive brother (the lead of the fanfic) has to stay behind and run the clan.  Having them switch places or having them both go are not possible, but that also means that for a while the original lead has much more to do, plotwise, and that's no good!

I need to figure out what the lead's actual goals are both at this point in the story and overall, only the problem is that I feel like he genuinely hasn't got any goals more complex than the ones I had him outline to a potential new recruit early on in the war:

            “So the question is, what are your goals here, Jiang-zongzhu?”

            “My goals?  I want to avenge my parents and everyone else from my clan—I want to avenge everyone who was killed at Lotus Pier.”

            “And how will you know when you’ve avenged them?”

            “When the Wen Clan is destroyed and Wen Ruohan’s ashes are scattered to the winds, then I’ll know I’ve avenged them,” Jiang Cheng answered firmly.  If it wasn’t for Wen Qing standing right beside him, he would have said considerably more than that, but…

            “A bit much,” the youngest commented.

            “You’d feel the same if our parents had been murdered like that,” the middle one said.  They were brothers, then?

            “What do you plan to do after that?” the eldest asked.

            “After that…?”  The question took Jiang Cheng by surprise.  “Restore Lotus Pier, restore the Jiang Clan, make sure my sister finds a husband who treats her the way she deserves to be treated…”  He shook his head.  “I don’t quite understand why you’re asking.”

            “A man’s goals tell you a lot about the man’s character,” the eldest rogue cultivator said.  “Your goals tell me you’re not the type to plan very far ahead.”

            Jiang Cheng felt his face grow hot as the other two rogue cultivators laughed.

            “But there’s nothing wrong with that!” the eldest added, laughing himself.  “I was no different when I was your age.  And maybe there’s not much point in having far-reaching plans when you’re about to enter into a war.  What good is it having dreams if you end up dying before having a chance to act on them?”

So, yeah.  I mean, that pretty much summed up his goals at the time, and with the war over (and Wen Ruohan suitably killed) those parts of his goals are now achieved.  The only additional goal he's gained has been to see if he can get Wen Qing to marry him (which technically was already his goal then, too, only he couldn't say so with her standing right there (not that he'd have said it even if she wasn't, as he's very reluctant to ever admit what his feelings are (and sometimes that he even has them))) but that's got a long, slow ways to go before there's any action on it.  😅  (I kinda get the feeling from what little I've encountered of the original genre that any romance that gets to the "signed, sealed, delivered" stage before the final confrontation is one that's doomed to a horrible death.  (Though I plan to flout that very thoroughly in this fic with the background relationships...))

Anyway, so the major problem is that where the lead is right now in his own personal story, he's in a stagnant position where the ideal is to reestablish the status quo that his father had lived by (or at least to establish his own status quo in its place) and then work to preserve it.  Which is inherently dull. 😰  So it's like on the current outline, most of what I have for him to do is largely very dull, and/or just reacting to what others are doing.  And that seems like a no-no, especially since during the war he was leading his troops into battle all the time, making this an even more jarring shift.  I mean, I guess I could try to write him having some kind of psychological break because he'd gotten so used to fighting in the war and now that's been taken away from him, but the thing is that he didn't have any problem with it in the original work, in which the war was about twice as long, and even more horrible, and he was just as much in the thick of it, if not even more so.  So it feels out of character to have him be particularly heavily impacted in my thing.

Gnnnnh.

This is very frustrating.

I mean, it's obviously my own fault for a) not realizing just how massive this would end up being and rethinking the whole idea, and b) not planning ahead more carefully regarding the motivations of the lead and especially the antagonist, but...I've been working on it since spring and it's closing in on 250,000 words long, so I feel like I have to see it through or it'll be a total waste of all that time.  More than that, I just plain want to finish it.  I'm just at a little bit of a loss as to how to go about it.

Well, no, that's not strictly true, either.  I could just follow the current outline, virtually ignoring the supposed lead of the fic for most of the next 25k words, but that would produce an end result even more sloppy and disjointed than my usual writing.  And my stuff is bad enough already; I don't want to go out of my way to make it worse!

Honestly, with NaNo coming up (though I'll be doing my usual rebel thing and not actually entering the official NaNoWriMo process), I may mostly take a break from writing between now and November 1st.  Just sit down to work out what the heck I'm gonna do about the whole plot and motivation debacle, then rest my writing brain for a few days.

----------

So, everything above the line, I wrote last night, but couldn't post because getting the long-form quote to work on my phone just wasn't.  Therefore, I put off finishing the post until today, and in my morning bath I came up with a good next scene, which not only addressed the lead's lack of known goals (thus putting him to thinking about them as he moves forward) but also referred back to the scene I was quoting above.  Still doesn't fully answer what his goals are between now and when the antagonist starts making his moves (giving the lead someone to be working against), but at least if he's actively trying to figure out his own goals, that's something for him to do.

Naturally, this is all somewhat hampered by the fact that his goals in the original work at this point in the story pretty much were just "run the clan, restore its reputation, etc."  He's a very dutiful guy, all told, which unfortunately caused a lot of friction between him and the original work's lead, just at the time when he needed support the most. 😭  But that's why this fanfic is changing the course of events, so that I--like the mentally-immature individual that I am--can have a version of events where the characters I like don't die, suffer horrible loss (well, beyond the loss of their parents and so on) and suffer needlessly just because...well, if I try to go into that, it'll take all day.

Anyway, I feel like I've yammered on until I've lost the thread of what I was trying to say (if there ever was such a thread), so I suppose I should stop here...

Blogger and "Total Pageviews" ~ A Mystery

     Okay, so since I posted "A Hidden Road" on pages here on my blog (following my somewhat questionable decision to delete it from AO3 because of one truly upsetting comment), I've been paying more attention to the "Total Pageviews" number when you visit the blog (or, in my case, hit the "Preview" button from a post or page in the editor).

    This is because in that time it's gone up, a lot, while the number of views for the individual posts and pages have not gone up much at all.

    Meager photographic proof:

    (Wow, that partial screencap turned out to be enormous.)  This was what it said at 8:05 yesterday morning.

    This is what it said at 7:30 this morning.  (And as of about two minutes ago, that number had gone up to 7,834.)

    However, if I just add up the number of visits to the pages and posts, the total is only 1,435.  (Yes, I actually went through and added them all up.)

    Before I added the fic (and a link to the blog in my profile on AO3, in the hopes that someone would click on my profile, wondering where my fic had gone, and then follow the link to find it here, which might have happened once, but I'm not sure about that (even if it did, they didn't finish reading it, because the pages that had gained a view stopped a third of the way through)) that "Total Pageviews" number was somewhere in either the high 4,000s or the low 5,000s.  I think the latter, but I'm not positive.

    So where the heck did all those extra views come from, when most of them don't represent a view of a post?  (Especially considering that when I click "view post" from the post management screen, that makes the post's view counter go up one, so a lot of the 1,435 are actually me.  (Though it sounds like maybe I can turn that off, which would be sweet.  I need to look into that as soon as I'm done with this post.))

    Now, admittedly, just following the link to the blog will take you to a landing page that shows the full posts without counting on any of their view numbers, so some of that may be people clicking through from the Insecure Writer's Support Group and then not clicking on any individual posts, and the spike could (conceivably?) be something the whole IWSG has been experiencing, with some bot going through all the links on the IWSG's page, but then not leaving comments, or not leaving them on my particular blog because the landing page doesn't have a comment form, and the fact that it happened since adding the fic is coincidental.

    The only other theory I have is that maybe when a search engine grazes the page, that counts as a pageview even if the person who ran the search didn't actually visit the blog.  Given that I've been posting more and more about MDZS (which is very popular worldwide), that seems possible?  But it's weird to imagine that Blogger counts a search engine as a pageview.

    Obviously, none of this actually matters, since worrying about how many views my blog has gotten is 100% empty vanity (well, maybe not "vanity" exactly, but something akin to it) but I have to admit that it's weirding me out that my total numbers have gone up so much so fast (it's been like a month and a half, maybe?) compared to how much they went up in the preceding two and a half years.

    Anyway, that was just sort of sitting on my brain and bothering me, so I wanted to let it out.

    I may try futzing around with the settings to see if I can make it so the total only goes up in accordance with the posts and pages, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

    EDIT:  I just had a look at my stats page (lol, should have done that first!) and I can confirm from what I saw there that it is definitely a bot.  (Surprisingly, according to those numbers, the numbers shown on screen should actually be higher, which suggests that Blogger started cottoning on to it being a bot and stopped counting it after a while.)  The bot is using Mobile Safari on an Android device (weird in and of itself, considering Safari is the Apple browser!) and coming out of one particular country, but I feel like I'd be insulting the country if I said which one, so I won't.  The bot accounted for almost 5.5k pageviews.  There's also the possibility of a bot elsewhere for the "Other" views that were around 1.7k pageviews.  The ones that actually seem to be genuine views account for about 500 of the new views over the last month.  In itself that's already an unrealistically high number, imho, but not quite as shockingly so.
    (This makes me very glad I've never attempted to monetize my blog, because I would totally feel like a thief if I was getting paid because some bot is glitching out and loading my blog repeatedly.)