A to Z: Perfect Patroclos

 

    Today's choice is going to be particularly obvious to anyone who knows me well, as I am a self-described Patroclos fangirl.  I actually have a surprisingly varied selection of works I could talk about, too.

    On top of the prologues of the Atalanta and Ariadne books (the prologues are always set in and around the war), there's Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the failed yandere visual novel I talked about with Deidameia, the play "Pyrrha," the visual novel set in the 1980s I talked about as the origin of Grant Nemo, the failed sci-fi novel I talked about (in the same post about Grant), and all its incomplete spin-offs.  There's also Ilios, my 2011 NaNoWriMo project, but...it's problematic.  😅  In the interests of not stressing myself out, gonna limit myself to just a few sources.

    One of my favorite parts of Better General is that Achilles has a madness meter (though it's a hidden stat), and for the most part the way you increase his madness meter is to separate him from Patroclos.  This can lead to him butchering you, or even the whole camp if the final blow to his sanity is Patroclos' death.  So there is actually a lot of material in there about them (though it's never enough!) and they can have some pretty romantic endings if they both survive the war...

Enraged at having had his concubine taken away, Achilleus left the war in the ninth year.  By the time the Achaian fleet returned to Hellas, Achilleus and his Myrmidons had unified the Hellenic people by conquering them all while the majority of their warriors and kings were still at Troy.  (This saved his descendent the trouble of having to do so nearly a thousand years later.)  Though Achilleus took several wives over the course of his long reign as King of Hellas, he had no children other than Pyrrhos, the boy he had fathered while he was hiding in disguise as a woman on Scyros; it was often said that his wives never conceived because he so rarely went in to them, preferring to spend his nights--like his days--with his faithful Patroclos.  The only serious threat to Achilleus' reign was the arrival of the Heracleidai, who attempted to take Hellas for themselves, but he was able to muster the survivors, sons and grandsons of his allies from Troy (even those who had initially fought against him) to work together to fight them off.  When he eventually died, his bones were enshrined in the same vessel as those of Patroclos.  Pyrrhos inherited his throne.

    ...or...

Outraged that you felt he was ruled by his desires, Achilleus returned to Phthia in a fit of anger, along with Patroclos, who had to spend days of intimate private time to convince Achilleus to spend even one evening in the company of other people, leading the gossip all throughout Thessaly to speculate that Achilleus had no use for anything other than his lover's bed.  Peleus was greatly distressed to see his son behave in such a childish manner, and swore he would not permit Achilleus to inherit Phthia if he did not begin to behave more appropriately, so Achilleus set off to the north with Patroclos to prove himself by conquering Hyperborea.  He never returned.

    ...or...

Achilleus returned to Phthia after the war's end, with many ordinary slaves, but no concubine to keep his bed warm.  Peleus set about trying to find a bride for his son, but Achilleus consistently rejected them all, and by the time Peleus died of old age, it was clear even to him that his son refused to take a wife because he wanted no one who could come between him and Patroclos.  Once his father was gone, Achilleus sent to Scyros for the son he had fathered there, and made him his heir.  When they eventually died, Achilleus and Patroclos were buried in the same grave.

    ...and a fairly romantic one if Achilles dies and Patroclos lives...

Patroclos remained behind when the rest of the Achaian army sailed back to Hellas.  He continued to tend to Achilleus' tomb until his own death, at which time a friendly local obeyed his wishes and placed his bones inside the tomb along with Achilleus'.

    But maybe what's most interesting is what can happen when the Trojan army is rampaging through the Achaian camp in the ninth year if you forced Achilles to be the first to disembark on the Trojan shores, and thus got him killed on day one.

A to Z: Odysseus, Obviously

 

    Honestly, who else, right?  I mean, he's already come up quite a bit as-is.  And I actually have a whole lot more to say about how I've written him, despite that I actually don't like the character.  (What with him being a serial adulterer who claims to be a devoted husband, etc.)

    So, there are three main works I can go to for talking about how I've written Odysseus.  (Unless I want to also talk about the version of Odysseus that is Grant, lol.)  But I can't really go all-out anymore on any of these posts, because it turned out that there was enough "timed pressure" element to April A-to-Z to trigger my heart palpitations.  😭  So, gonna be lighter from here on out.  (Also doing the bulk on my phone and only grabbing the quotes on PC.  Somehow my heart doesn't flip out as much when I'm on the phone.)

    So, those three works are Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, The Martial Maenads (which I had hoped would be released by now, but it turned out that I got so involved in writing these posts that I've barely worked on finalizing it for release 😰), and book six of the Atalanta and Ariadne series.

    Going in that order, Odysseus naturally gets a lot of unique text in Better General, for example the bit I mentioned about Aineias when I was talking about Idomeneus.  But perhaps the most unusual and truly unique sequence is his feud with Palamedes.

    In the actual myths, as is well-known, Odysseus was in some respects responsible for the Trojan War, because it was his idea that all of Helen's suitors should swear an oath to fight to reclaim her for her husband should anyone steal her away.  Also generally pretty well known is that when the time came, Odysseus did not want to obey the oath that had been his own idea, and tried to get out of it by feigning madness, hitching up a horse and an ox to a plow and then plowing his own garden, only to have the person who came to get him prove that he was faking it by placing Odysseus' infant son in front of the plow.  The man who thus exposed Odysseus' act and forced him to join the Trojan War was Palamedes, and naturally enough the traditional myths established that Odysseus took lethal revenge on Palamedes during the long war.  (Though other traditions held that Palamedes survived, and some even claimed the Trojan Horse was his idea, rather than Odysseus'.)

    The thing is, there are actually a few couple ways that Odysseus was said to have done away with Palamedes....so, since I was working in an interactive medium, I figured "why not do both?"

A to Z: Idomeneus

 

    Hmm.  You know, I bet I did an earlier April A-to-Z entry on Idomeneus.  (It's hard to come up with I-names, after all!)  Oh well.  This one is categorically different, as a good chunk of it will be talking about something I hadn't written yet the last time I took part in this challenge!  😆

    So.  Basics.  Idomeneus is the king of Crete at the time of the Trojan War.  He's a grandson of King Minos, and a cousin of Agamemnon and Menelaos.  He's a pretty tough warrior, but not quite in the top tier.  Frequently accompanied into battle by his nephew Meriones, who is particularly accomplished as an archer as well as with a spear.

    The main place he stands out in the Iliad is during the battle when the Trojans are burning the Achaian camp, when he pretty much stomps all over Deiphobos (who is both frightened of him and trying to dismiss him as irrelevant at the same time), only to be wounded by Aineias, who at least respected him as an opponent.

    As to what happened to him after the war, let's go straight to the quotes for that, because today I want to focus on my interactive fiction game Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? in which you play a random, generic king no one's ever heard of, who is for who-knows-what-reason offered the reins of the Achaian army when Agamemnon suddenly drops out right as the fleet is about to sail from Aulis.  There are ten decision points for each of the ten years (though some of them lead to further decisions within the decision point), and I'm sorry to say a lot of them actually don't matter in the least.  😰  (Even sorrier to say that by the time you get to the last two or three years, the game is buggy as heck.  It was doing all sorts of strange stuff like forgetting Achilles was alive and sending Odysseus on missions when he'd been sent back to Ithaca in disgrace. 😰  I had to replay the whole game to get quotes for this post, 'cause trying to extract them from the Twine program files is really awkward considering how much code some of the text is buried under.)  Anyway!  I tried my best, back when I was making the game, to give a lot of alternate possibilities for individual events, leading to some very different outcomes...meaning that when the war is successfully won, the game gives you a long scroll telling you what happened to each character in your playthrough, and what happened to them when Agamemnon was running the show.  And this is what that said about Idomeneus' original fate:

         Under Agamemnon, Idomeneus returned home safely, but traditions vary as to what happened next: some say he made a foolish promise to sacrifice whatever first greeted him (which ended up, of course, being his child), others say that his wife betrayed him and he had to flee, and others say he ruled on in peace. Whatever the truth of his fate was, more than a thousand years later, the locals would point out a building they said was his tomb at Knossos.

    Yeah, not terribly exciting.  (Strange side note:  those same locals also claimed his nephew Meriones was buried in the same tomb.  I'm not sure why.)  That level of variation in post-war fates is strangely not unusual.  A lot of the others who fought in the Trojan War had both "happily ever after" and "ran fleeing from an adulterous wife" endings.  Large numbers of the latter ended up in Italy, for whatever reason. 🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the difficulty of writing about someone like Idomeneus is that he hasn't got all that much personality in the original work.  (By which I mean the Iliad, of course.  Most other ancient works that mention Idomeneus are mythographic works that don't go into detail about anyone's personality.)  Still, since he's one of the bigger players, he comes up pretty frequently in the game.

    The first major event involving him is almost immediately after the Achaian fleet lands on the Trojan shore.  At that time, in the original myth, Menelaos and Odysseus went to the city to make one last try at diplomacy.  It, needless to say, did not work.  😅  Anyway, in the game, you choose who accompanies Menelaos on the expedition, and Idomeneus is one of the options.  This is the first part of what happens if you select him...

        As Menelaos and Idomeneus prepare to depart, you call Agamemnon's herald Talthybios over and instruct him to attend upon them in their errand. He swears to report to you immediately upon his return to the camp and faithfully relate everything that should happen in the city.
         They are gone overnight--as you were expecting, given how long it would take them to reach Ilios on foot from camp--and it is late in the day when Talthybios finally returns to your tent.
         "We have returned from the city, Lord Creon," the herald informs you.
         "So I can see. I do not hear any jubilation in the camp, so I assume the mission did not succeed?"
         "Indeed not, my lord. We arrived at the city gates shortly before nightfall, and were admitted into the home of Antenor, one of King Priam's trusted advisors. First thing in the morning, he accompanied us to see the king, and Menelaos stated his case, requesting the return of his wife, and promising to do without the gold that was stolen along with her, in recompense for the lives taken on the beach. Idomeneus also spoke, as Menelaos' kinsman, and [as] he who had been host to the funeral games that had given Alexandros the opportunity to thus rob Menelaos of gold and wife. His words were measured, just and wise, and I was certain they would sway the Trojan court to agree to Menelaos' requests." He sighs sadly. "We were sent back to the home of Antenor to await Priam's decision. Much time later, Antenor returned, full of worry. He reported to us that Alexandros arrived in the council chamber with Helen at his side, and that the prince's honeyed words convinced the Trojan elders to turn on us with a murderous attack. Antenor came to warn us and help us escape the city alive."
         "And?" you prompt, when he does not seem to want to continue.

    Thus far, aside from Idomeneus' contribution, this follows what happened in the actual myth.  But--even though this is still super early in the game--there are actually two possible outcomes to these events.  In most cases, this would be the result of sending Idomeneus along with Menelaos:

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. Alas, though we waited long in hiding outside the city walls, he did not emerge. Antenor sent word by one of his children that Prince Hector, though grievously wounded by Idomeneus, succeeded in killing the Cretan king."

    However!  The first (proper) decision you make in the game is who to have be the first man to disembark when the fleet arrives.  (Due to the fact that Thetis had warned/commanded Achilles not to disembark first, as the first to disembark would be the first to die.)  If you order Achilles or Aias of Salamis to disembark first, they're still the first to die, but they take Hector with them!  In which case, the result of sending Idomeneus with Menelaos is drastically altered...

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. After we waited in hiding quite a long while, Idomeneus finally emerged from the city, supported by one of Antenor's sons. He is badly wounded, but he proudly reported that he had killed Deiphobos, the second most powerful of Priam's sons."

    To be honest, until I replayed it to get these quotes, I had forgotten just how much variation I had managed to put in this game.  I really need to give it a proper glow-up at some point.  (And make it actually keep track of troop numbers and rations and such so that the smaller decisions will actually matter...)

A to Z: Atalanta and Ariadne

 

    I haven't done this challenge in quite a few years now (I'd have to go digging around on my old Wordpress blog to see which years I did, and I don't feel like bothering 😅) so I may be a bit rusty with it, but I'm going to try my best!

    You may be thinking, based on the title of the post, that you know who I'm about to talk about.  But actually you don't.  (Unless you're one of a very tiny number of people.  Which is unlikely.)

    Because I'm not talking about the famed huntress Atalanta, nor about Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos who helped Theseus through the labyrinth.  Nope, I'm talking about two original characters of mine who were named after those two.

    Allow me to take you back in time all the way to 2014.

    (Yeah, you were probably expecting a much older date there, huh?)

    I was pondering, as often I do, a miniscule part of a familiar tale and wondering about the details that might have happened around it.

    Specifically, on that particular occasion I was thinking about the time, late in the Trojan War, that Achilles was briefly exiled for having slain Thersites because Thersites was mocking Achilles for mourning the Amazon queen he had just killed.

    All murderers in the Greek heroic age had to be exiled, lest the stain of their murder cause plagues and other disasters, and then they needed to be purified by a king before they could safely return home.  Well, the Greek army at Troy didn't want to take any risks of Achilles being away for long, so they sent a king (specifically, Odysseus) with him to purify him so he could immediately turn right back around and return to the war with as little time lost as possible.  They made their way to the nearest non-enemy city they could reach, specifically Methymna on the island of Lesbos, which Achilles had conquered personally much earlier in the war.  (Not that that's saying much:  Achilles personally conquered most of the towns within a few days' reach of the Achaian camp!)

    Anyway, in the myth that's all there is to it:  they go there, Odysseus purifies him, and they go back to the war so Achilles can die a few weeks (or possibly days) later.  But--and here's where it got interesting to me--these are two particularly libidinous individuals, even for Greek mythology.  So I found myself wondering what happened while they were on Lesbos, away from all the prying eyes back in the camp.

    Even as I starting thinking that maybe they got a bit too 'friendly' with some of the girls serving them whatever refreshments the surviving locals provided them, I realized I was already naming the daughters they were going to father on said girls.  🤣

    Usually, when I find myself doing that, I accept the inevitable, and that's what I did this time, too:  I sat down to start writing the stories of those girls, Atalanta (the daughter of Achilles) and Ariadne (the daughter of Odysseus).

IWSG: Roller-coaster ride...but in a bad way

 

    So...August has not been a pretty month for me.

    (I mean, it never is, but worse than usual.)

    On the real-life side, a huge thunderstorm hit in the middle of the month, and a massive branch ripped the phone/internet line right out of the back of my house.  I was without electricity for about eight hours (as was like half the county, because it was a power station thing), and without phone or internet for a week.  This would be bad at any time, because it's surprising just how much I've come to depend on my WiFi (esp. since I have a very low data cap on my cell phone), but for it to happen while I was leading a team on a game jam...ugh.  So much extra stress that I did not need.  :(

    As to the game jam, that's where things get weird.  So, I was--of course--writing the game, a visual novel loosely based on about the first 2/3 of the Iliad.  (Well, on parts of the first 2/3 of it.  Like, you know, leaving out most all of the battles because it's being narrated by Patroclos...)  A visual novel, for anyone who might stumble across this post and doesn't know about them, is like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books from the '80s, only it's a video game, and there are pictures of the characters and locations.  (And there are typically a lot fewer choices to make.)  From a writing perspective, it's a lot like writing a screenplay with a very verbose narrator.  ;)  (Remember the Jim Henson TV show The Storyteller?  Writing a visual novel is a lot like writing a script for that would be, except no way would a visual novel ever be able to get John Hurt to voice its narrator. :P )

    I finished the script back in July--this game jam ran from July 1st to August 31st, and it's much like NaNoWriMo, in that you're supposed to start from scratch at the beginning and finish by the end, only in a game jam you're also supposed to turn it in when you're done, so everyone else can play it--and it was almost a full 50k.  (I may have unconsciously slipped into NaNo mentality there, and been subconsciously aiming for 50k, though I don't really know how much shorter I could have made it and still told the whole story.)  This meant I had fulfilled my primary role in the jam, yes?

    But since it was my story and I had become the de facto lead of the team, I couldn't just bug out and do whatever I wanted in the interim.  I had to be constantly in contact with everyone else (especially hard without reliable internet access!), and I had to deal with every little problem that came up, especially every little problem to do with all the incoming art, especially the background art.  (There are a lot of locations in the game, so a lot of backgrounds were needed, and although there are resources online to get free (or at least extremely affordable) pre-made backgrounds, almost none of them fit our needs, given that our game is set in the 1980s in a Detroit-like city, and most of the art assets for visual novels are modern and typically look like a Japanese suburb, and/or high school.)  There were a lot of problems, as you might expect, but eventually the art did all pull together, even if some of it is barely more than a placeholder.

    But then there's the coding side of things.  I've written a few games before, using a very simple engine called TWINE, which is designed to be pretty much nothing but text.  Here's an example from one of my previous games:

    As you can see, some images are possible, but it's not as big a part of the experience as this:

    (Yup, that's the game I've been working on for the past two months.  From left to right, that's Achilles (Ace Lee), Patroclos (Pat Rock) and A.J. the Axeman (the Greater Aias/Ajax)...so you can see I took more liberties than just turning them into '80s rock performers...)

    Anyhow, my point is just that coding with TWINE and coding with Ren'py--the engine for this visual novel--is very different, and the script I wrote would have been downright simple to code in TWINE.  (It's way simpler than Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the game that first screenshot is from, which I wrote for a much shorter game jam.)  It is not so simple to code in Ren'py, especially since some of the nitty-gritty stuff (like positioning the character sprites) can't really be done until all the art is in.

    Consequently, we were only able to submit a demo instead of the full game.  :(

    And the stress of this whole thing has murdered my diet.  I feel like I've put on twenty pounds.  (Dunno if I actually have, but it feels that way.)

    Not that any of that is even really the point here, or what I'm talking about in the title of the post.  This experience has been murder on my self-perception as a writer.  As I mentioned last time, at no time was I ever truly satisfied with the script of this game.  That has only intensified as the month has progressed.  In fact, I was so unhappy with it that I decided to break the seal on an old NaNo novel in an attempt to cheer myself up by the comparison.

    I should probably explain that.  See, my second NaNoWriMo novel did not go as I wanted it to.  In fact, by the time November 30th rolled around, I was so disgusted with it that I closed the file and never opened it again...until this past month.  (Not quite a full nine years later.)  My idea was to reread it and reassure myself that my writing has at least improved.

    Only...um...it hasn't.

    Now, don't get me wrong.  That old NaNo novel was terrible.  Half the cast--or more--was directly stolen from various JRPGs, and very blatantly so.  (Admittedly, half of them were ripped off from a more obscure JRPG, so most people would be able to read it and think they were actually original, though they certainly scream their original characters' identities at me.  The ones so very obviously based on Final Fantasy VII characters, on the other hand...)  What little of the heroine that was unique to her and not just lifted from Yuffie Kisaragi was very much, well, what's known in fan fiction circles as a "Mary Sue."  Not as bad as most--at least a large chunk of the cast genuinely didn't like her--but she was very much "the special" and...ugh.  It was just so bad.

    But way more happened in it than usually does in my novels.  Every chapter had new events, new places, new people, things happening.  Most of my stuff is slow as molasses.  Whatever it was that I tapped into for that novel that let me actually have things happen...I've lost it, possibly forever.  :(

    Finding that out--that my writing is actually getting worse with time--was supremely depressing.  Like, I've been on-and-off mentally composing this post for about a week now, and some of it was very much "I'm the worst writer in the history of ever" kind of melodrama.

    But getting to play through the first few scenes of the game I wrote, with the sprites and the music and the backgrounds all coming together...that was pretty thrilling.  And it did make me feel a lot better about myself, and about what I'd written for the game.  (Though I still hate that my stupid script is why we couldn't finish on time...)

    Which isn't to say that I'm feeling great about myself or my writing, but...I guess it's left me in a slightly better headspace.

    At least for now.

IWSG - It's like NaNo only twice as long and with art

 

    So, I am deep into the creation process on my visual novel.  Or rather, I'm out of my depth on the creation process on the visual novel.

    Aside from needing to make one tiny edit to the text to remove some extraneous descriptive material now that I know what the background will look like, the script--which is to say, my role--is done.  (And clocked in at nearly 50k, so the comparison to NaNo is an appropriate one.  Although the script also includes notes to the programmer, information about changing sprites and backgrounds, and when sound effects are called for, so the actual text the player will see is probably no more than 45k, maybe not even quite that much.  (I should delete all the notes and such to find out...only that sounds like a lot of work for zero reward.))

    That means, of course, that my job has become largely "artist wrangler" as I try to explain to people who can actually draw what I want things to look like and then try to make sure all the art gets drawn in time to be put into the game, which has to be uploaded by August 31st if it's going to count for the game jam.  (In a pinch, of course, the game can be uploaded with some graphics missing, using blank jpgs that just say "art in progress" or something.  Or for that matter it could be uploaded like a demo, only running partway through.  And, in a super-duper pinch, I could forget the pictures and music and all that and shove it into TWINE in a few days of hard coding, if I really, really, really had to.)

    What I am learning about myself through this process is that I am not a team player.

    I mean, I kind of already knew that, from my experiences at the museum, but this is a whole different ball of yarn.  Because this is "my" project, and as an unemployed person (who has enough money saved up that I can afford not to be hunting for work) I have all the time in the world to work on it.  Which of course makes it frustrating that no one else on the team dedicates all their time to the project.

    Which is, of course, totally unfair and unreasonable of me.

    I'm aware of that, but it doesn't make me any less frustrated by the fact.

    I am doing my best not to blame them--it's not their fault, or even a problem in any logical sense, that they have lives and I don't have one--and I don't think I've said anything to make them think that I am upset that the art is not done when the script is, but trying to stay calm and rational is not successfully preventing me from feeling like a caged tiger waiting for its first meal in days.

    However, I still like the idea of making a real, honest-to-goodness game that people can play, and which isn't 99.9% text.  And I have some ideas of things I want to do in future games.  (After I write the next draft of the second novel in my YA series, as the current draft needs soooo much more work!  I expect next month's post will be me fretting about how I'm going to work in all the characterization changes from the rewrite of book one that somehow didn't make it into the rewrite of book two...)

    So I'm thinking I'm going to learn how to code.  Not like heavy-duty coding, just low-level coding.  I'm going to do some minor episodic games using assets posted to itch.io for free use (or relatively cheap use; I'll give myself a budget of, like, the price of a single console game or something) and use them to teach myself how to do it.  So, like, a visual novel to learn Ren'py basics, and then maybe RPG Maker will be put on sale and I'll do an RPG chapter (sadly, I passed up a huge sale earlier this summer, when one of the older versions was like $5 or so) and then maybe I'll see what other programs are out there to make game making a little easier that might allow me to make a puzzle game or an adventure game or a strategy game.  Actually, I should probably prioritize strategy game, since I already tried futilely to make one in TWINE and it could use a remake to make it a proper game.  (Which I'm sure a talented developer could do in TWINE, but I'm not that smart, sadly.)  Plus I have another idea for a strategy game where Achilles...hmm, no, actually, gonna keep that idea to myself.  ;)  It's an extremely alternate take on the Trojan War, let's say, and leave it there.

    But the main thing I want to do is cut my reliance on other people.  Hence learning to code and using already available resources.  But eventually the resources will dry up, and then what?  (I mean, really, where am I going to find pre-made game assets based on Mycenaean Greece?  Classical Greece, sure, but Late Bronze Age?  Nope.  Don't think I'll ever find that.)  If only it was as easy to learn to draw or computer-generate art as it is to write!  *sob*

    Of course, if there wasn't a deadline, it wouldn't bother me so much.

    And of course none of this actually has to do with writing *cough* though it's certainly a lot to do with my insecurities!

    To get back on the topic of writing...I can't say I'm totally satisfied with the script.  I feel like it started getting lazier and lazier the further in I got.  Like, early on, when the player can read newspaper articles, I went to a fair amount of effort to say where in the paper the article was, and what it said, etc.  By the end, it was just a couple of lines summing up what was said.  Hopefully the player will look at that as reflecting the mounting panic the main character/narrator is feeling, but...yup, I'm not pleased with that.  (And yet the game's already so freaking long that I don't want to go in and expand on any of that!)

    On the other hand, the sensitivity reader said they liked the main character and his boyfriend and their interactions with each other, so I'm at least pleased about that.  :)

    On a weirder note, I was getting punchy when I wrote one of the daily events.  (The game takes place over the course of two weeks, and for about a full week of it you get to pick from a handful of daily events, which go through three shifts as the situation gets more dire.)  It's one where the narrator's boyfriend is going to be interviewed by the local newspaper, and since one of the lead characters in Velvet Goldmine (my favorite movie, which indirectly prompted this game) is a journalist, I couldn't resist giving him a quasi-cameo, in that the fellow who comes to interview him is gorgeous and sending off "gay" vibes to our two leads.  (There are many differences between the character in the game and the character in Velvet Goldmine, I hasten to point out, however.  The game character is not English, he's a bit younger, and he doesn't have Arthur's serious social awkwardness issues.  Also he works for the Rock City Bugle, not the New York Herald.)

    But now I want to write a fanfic wherein the Velvet Goldmine character really does interview the two leads of my game...

    ...probably the only reason that I won't end up writing it is that I can't see anywhere the story could go other than what is called in fan fiction circles "PWP":  "porn with(out) plot".  And I can't write smut to save my life.  (Which only makes sense, considering that I'm aroace and have literally never seen a naked man in person in my life.  Nor do I want to.)  Still, I wouldn't lay odds on me not eventually trying to write it anyway. ;)  (Just hopefully without attempting the smut part.)

IWSG: July

     Love that creative title post, right?

    *sigh*

    Yeah.  That pretty much sums up where I am right now.  The game jam started on June 30th, so I've been working on my visual novel script for a week now, and I'm making pretty good progress...except that the early scenes are much better than the later ones.  Like, as soon as the conflict started, it all just went out the window.  :(  I just can't write arguments to save my life, evidently.

    Which makes me wonder why I chose to write a visual novel about a guy having an extended temper tantrum over an argument.

    *cough*

    To start over at the beginning, since I don't think I ever outlined this on the blog, the idea for this visual novel is that I am adapting parts of the Iliad through a 1980s rock'n'roll filter:  instead of being warriors on the fields of Troy, Achilles and Hector are rock performers, and Agamemnon and Priam are their managers (though Priam is also still Hector's father).  The fight between Achilles and Agamemnon is pretty weird and artificial:  Achilles and Hector are up for the same award, it's given to Achilles, but then Agamemnon is informed that the announcer lied about whose name was on the card, and that it was supposed to go to Hector.  Not wanting the bad press of refusing to return the award, Agamemnon sends it back, and Achilles has a conniption fit, but he's blaming everything on Agamemnon instead of on the people who run the award or on Hector.  (As to the reason it's set in the 1980s, it's complicated, but stems out of its origin as the capsule description of a movie in a Velvet Goldmine fanfiction I wrote a while back.)

    It was going great until I got to writing him blaming everything on Agamemnon's willingness to capitulate.  Suddenly he makes no sense and is acting like a sullen twelve year old.  (Which, admittedly, Achilles always did.  Only, you know, a dangerous one with a spear and divine blood to make him stronger than normal men.)  His immaturity is made rather more awkward since he and Patroclos have had sex like three times already at this point in the game.  (Never on screen, though.  One of the two game jams I'm submitting this to doesn't accept 18+ material, and I would never be able to write a convincing sex scene even if it did.)

    The worst part, to me, is that I'm part of a team here.  Admittedly, since the whole thing was my idea, I kind of ended up in the lead of the team, but that doesn't change the "team" thing in its most important respect:  if my writing ends up being utter trash, then everyone else will have wasted their time and effort.  :(  I did at least give them all a link to my writing on AO3 before the jam started so they would have the chance to back out if they thought my script would be garbage, but that doesn't make me feel any less nervous about potentially wasting everyone's effort.

    Especially since our composer has already produced a number of pieces (none polished and perfected yet, but still), and they make me feel all the more incompetent as a writer, because they're just so good!  It's like, how can my mediocre-to-awful words be on screen while that awesome music is playing?

    So far, our artists have only produced sketches, so I can't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure the art, too, is going to overwhelm the words.  Which I guess is kind of the point, but...bottom line, I feel awkward and uncomfortable about it no matter how you slice it.

    On top of everything else, I'm afraid I'm getting sick.  Just an allergy-induced sinus thing, but still.  (It shouldn't be possible for it to be COVID-related, at least:  I'm fully vaccinated, and although a lot of people in my area aren't and the Delta variant has been making headlines as it tears through the local population, I've been careful about wearing a mask in public, so between the vaccine and the mask, I should be okay on that score.)  If I do end up sick, that could make finishing the game really difficult.  We do have two months, but sometimes my sinus things can hang on for weeks, even a full month if they're really nasty.

    (Also, yesterday morning a chipmunk decided to sit on my front porch and make annoying little chirpy noises that I fear are it trying to attract a mate.  I can hear it totally well through my front door (which is very near my standing desk), and it is super annoying.  It hasn't come back since I went and partially blocked its hole (leading under my front porch) with little rocks from the fill around my yews, but I'm sure it'll be back soon.  That is not going to help me concentrate on my writing.)

Released!

    So, this morning I finally released the lightly interactive version of the first of my kinda-YA Greek mythology novels.

    I ended up going with the title Scions of Troy, which was my original idea for the series title.  I had discarded it as a series title because it didn't do a very good job of representing the series (especially since it made it sound like they were the children of Trojans, not of the Greeks who had fought in the Trojan War), but as a title for this first novel...well, it's still not great, but I think it has a bit more pop than any of my earlier attempts to title this, and there is at least one character in the novel who is the son of one of the Trojans from the Trojan War, so...

    Yeah.

    Best I could do, I guess.

    Here's hoping at least a few people will read it.

    I'd hope that some people will enjoy it, but that's probably asking too much.

    (It can be found at this url if you're curious about just how bad it is.)

IWSG - Title Woes

 

            Everything about my writing life feels clenched up in knots right now.  From the simplest things—like that I got new glasses last week only to find out that I couldn’t read in them, because while my optician kept saying “bifocals bifocals” he didn’t actually explain that the muscles in the eyes start working differently when you hit mid-forties, so now I’m having to get new lenses with progressive bifocal lenses so I’ll be able to read and see things in the distance with the same pair of glasses—to the much more complicated situation regarding the upcoming release of the lightly interactive version of the first novel in my series about three illegitimate children of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War.

            A few days ago, I posted a question about how to handle one of the behind-the-scenes details of the release (which did not get a useful answer in the least, I’m sorry to say) on one of the forums at itch.io, in which I stupidly said that I was going to be releasing “in a few weeks.”  Now, this was not any kind of formal announcement, and likely no one who saw it is in the slightest bit interested in what I’ll be releasing—and the few people who are interested in it absolutely had no way of seeing that post.

            But I still feel like I’m bound to honor that date if I can.  (Without, you know, going insane.)

            And so long as I don’t have to do too much editing on the current draft, I should be able to, since the programming involved is minimal.  (It would help if my beta reader had actually read the darn thing and given me feedback, but it’s pretty clear at this point that no matter what he claims, he’s not actually going to do so.  And I promised him last time I brought it up that it would in fact be the last time I brought it up, so there’s no helping that.)

            Honestly, at this point, I’m more worried about the title than anything else.  I don’t think there’s too much I can do to improve the text without detailed feedback from a reader, after all.

            But the title!  OMG, it’s terrible.

            I have prepared a title screen for the game:

             So, yeah, you can see how bad that title is.  (The graphic behind the title is fine, of course, being a photo from Wikimedia Commons of a (heavily reconstructed) Mycenaean fresco.)

            I mean, it’s not necessarily a bad title, as such, but it sort of promises a different novel than the reader would get.  And it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the titles in the series:

            Bonds of Blood and Water (formerly The Vessel of Athene, then briefly The Walls of Troy)

            The Golden God of Aiolia (formerly The Golden God of Thessaly, only it turns out that the name Thessaly is anachronistic)

            The Martial Maenads

            The Tablet of Destinies

            Warriors of Pontos

            The Golden Swan (formerly The Goddess of the Cabieri)

            The Awakening (though that’s kind of a spoilery title and should probably be changed)

             Hmm, you know, looking at those titles, I feel like I was trying to pick out titles that would have worked for story titles on the original Doctor Who.  (Well, the novels did start out with the intention of being a YA series, and the original Doctor Who was viewed by the BBC as “children’s programming” so that’s not necessarily a bad metric to use.)  Which only makes the current title for the first one even more wrong.

            I released the first chapter already on itch.io as The Cousins, which actually feels like the best title for the novel so far, but it’s also very underwhelming.  I feel like the title really ought to at least imply the setting (hence the second title I briefly gave it) or do something to indicate that this is not set in the historic Late Bronze Age, but the Greek Heroic Age, in which the gods were very much real and took part in events.

            The plot of the novel can be summed up thus:

            Cousins Atalanta and Ariadne are brought up as slaves on the island of Lesbos (having been fathered during a single night’s visit by Achilles and Odysseus respectively in the final months of the war, probably at most a week before Achilles’ death), and on learning that their master is thinking of separating them, they decide to escape together.  (This makes up the portion already released.)  Following their escape in disguise as boys, they make their way to the remains of the Greek camp outside Troy, where they find a ship has landed for the night; among the men on board was young Eurysakes, the son of Telamonian Aias, first cousin of Achilles, making Eurysakes Atalanta’s second cousin.  Eurysakes was actually waiting at Achilles’ grave, having been told by an oracle that he would there meet companions who would help him repair his father’s honor and help his shade rest in peace.  Atalanta is eager to travel with him and help in his mission, but Ariadne distrusts him in every way; in spite of Ariadne’s misgivings, they do accept a ride on Eurysakes’ ship the rest of the way to the partially-rebuilt Troy, where they are welcomed as guests by the new king, Korythos, the son of Alexander.  (This may sound odd, but guest-friendship was very important in the Late Bronze Age.  Also, in my version (unlike in the original myths), Eurysakes has been raised by his uncle, Teukros, whose mother was Hesione, sister of King Priam.  So Korythos and Teukros are also cousins.  There are a lot of cousins in this book.  Though Teukros is only talked about, never present until many books later in the series.  And Teukros is now a king in Cyprus, which was the major source of copper in the region in the LBA, which made it supremely rich and powerful, since everyone needed copper to make the bronze they needed for their weapons and armor, so that’s also a very large part of why Korythos is so eager to welcome Eurysakes as a guest.)  There’s a little friction at the court between Korythos and one of the other nobles, Ganymede, but mostly their initial time in town just serves to set up the presence of a virtual army of bandits operating on Mt. Ida and terrorizing the region.  The trio decide to set off to fight the bandits, and following their successful return, things become surprisingly weird and fraught with tension.  It’s hard to sum up the rest from there, but they have to stop a plot that threatens the gods themselves.  (Though I’m sorry to say that I really did not do a very good job at setting up that possibility earlier in the text, even in the rewrite.  I did try as best I could, but…the problem with secret cults is that they tend to keep their secrets, well, secret!)

            Aside from the general theme of kinship, there are also themes of descent from watery gods (mostly just the king’s descent from the local river gods, and Atalanta’s being the granddaughter of a Nereid), guest-friendship, and the tension between trust and deceit (particularly deceit in the sense of people claiming to be someone or something they’re not).  The Trojan temple to Athene eventually becomes a very important part of the story, but its importance isn’t revealed until late in the book, hence one of the reasons the first title was something of a spoiler and had to be rejected.

            Unfortunately, I can’t even look to the ancient works as a suggestion of how to title it, because they tended towards very simple titles, often either the name of the lead character or a name adapted from that lead’s name (eg Odyssey from Odysseus).  While I’m currently planning on calling the series “The Adventures of Atalanta and Ariadne” (which isn’t very fair, since Eurysakes is just as big a part of the series) since I can’t come up with anything better, I can’t really name this after its “lead” because there isn’t one:  it’s very much a shared lead for the three of them.  Well, no, in this particular case, it’s more like Atalanta and Ariadne sharing the lead; Eurysakes doesn’t get full shared lead until book two.  (All seven novels were written back in 2014, btw.  These are just rewrites/adaptations.)

            So I am completely and utterly befuddled as to how to proceed in terms of the work’s title. :(

 

            I welcome any and all suggestions…

    (BTW, did you know that Chrome's onboard spell-checker does not recognize the name Atalanta?  It recognizes Ariadne, but not Atalanta.  WTF?)

IWSG: Good riddance, 2020!

     Yup, I haven't posted anything this year, so of course I had to start with a "thank god it's over" about 2020.  (Though my hopes are not high for 2021 being all that great, either.  Maybe it will be, but as long as it's better than 2020, I'll take it.)

    Since it's the first IWSG post of the year, this seems like a good time to reflect on what the past year was like for me as a writer, and what my writing-specific hopes for the coming year are.

    There were actually a lot of good things that happened for me as a writer in the second half of 2020.  No, more like the final third, maybe just the final quarter.  Well, whichever.  I not only started into a really serious and heavy re-write of a series of novels I wrote in 2014, but I also started writing video games.  Well, text games.  In fact, technically, the re-write is turning the novels into lightly interactive fiction (mostly you just read them like an ordinary novel, but periodically the two heroines go in separate directions, and you choose whether to find out what happened to one of them or the other (there's an undo command, of course, if you want to see both), and in a few key moments there's much more interaction (when they escape the slavery they were born into, and the novel's three big fight scenes) which can actually lead to losing the game if you screw up.  Although I plan on posting the final game version on itch.io for free, there is at least the possibility of someone donating money to me when they play it in their browser or download it for later.  (Such donations don't happen often, but evidently some people have in fact received money for free-or-donate titles.)  So, technically, I might, in theory, eventually see a tiny bit of money from that.  But more importantly, it's something that I'm working to improve (and improving a lot over its original incarnation!) and then putting it out there where people can actually read it.  And maybe some of them actually will.  I put up the escape sequence as a demo of sorts, and had some people start following my account shortly thereafter, so I think they at least are wanting to read the rest of the story.  Which is pretty exciting, I have to say!  It's also a good impetus to keep me working and get the finished product out there as soon as I can without sacrificing quality.

    And I have all the time in the world to write, since I lost my job to COVID, and as a former museum registrar/curator, I'm not going to be able to find a new one until museums start reopening and getting enough visitors to be able to hire more staff.  (Thus, probably not until 2022...)

    Which brings me around to the writing problems and drawbacks from 2020.  I spent a lot of the year in a writing funk because I was bogged down in one project after another that were just slow, hard going, and which I do want to eventually finish up, meaning more bogging down is in my future somewhere.  (Though thankfully not until after I finish these rewrites-into-games!  And since it's a seven novel series, that's a hefty chunk of time accounted for.)  My mental state has been one of shifting malaise ever since losing my job (and to a certain extent even before that), though the reception to the "demo" has helped to revitalize it a bit.  (Not as much as I'd like, but...)

    Unfortunately, my health has really deteriorated over the past year.  Last year's very first IWSG post complained about having just sprained my ankle, assuming it was going to go away in time like a normal sprain, even though I knew from the feel of it that it was anything but normal.  What happened was that a chip of bone broke off in the fall (not sure how exactly, I guess it's the part some ligament attached to or something?), and when the urgent care center saw that on the x-ray, they told me I should see a specialist.  Well, that specialist said "oh, that's totally normal in a sprain; that's why I tell people never to go to urgent care centers, because they just panic over nothing."  I am convinced that he didn't even look at the x-rays I brought from the urgent care center, because this is not normal.  And yes, present tense:  the bone chip is still slipping around inside my ankle, and frequently decides it wants to move in between proper bones and otherwise muck up the functioning of my ankle, which can make climbing stairs, walking and sometimes just standing an agony.  I have a feeling the only way it's actually going to get better is if I have surgery to remove the chip, but there's no way I'm having something like that happen while COVID is still a thing!  In addition to my obesity and generally iffy health, I also have asthma, so if I get COVID, it's likely to kill me, therefore I'm going to be very careful until the threat is over.  (Unfortunately, I'm likely to be very late to get the vaccine, because I'm not elderly, I don't have an important job (or any job at all), and I don't even have a personal physician at the moment, so I have no idea how I'd even get the shot at all.)  And the state of my ankle is very crucial to my writing because my various other conditions have become exacerbated to the point that on some days, the only way I can be comfortable is to stand up, because my legs have started to react to anything underneath them like it's super-heated sandpaper, and my upper thighs sometimes freak out at any touch of my stomach against them, which makes sitting a very difficult thing.  But I also get back pains from standing too long, and...well, it's very, very bad, and some days it stops me from getting anything done at all.  I'm still trying to develop working strategies to get around these issues, as well as trying to figure out the best way to safely and (hopefully) permanently lose weight.  Some days it doesn't interfere much with my writing, and other days it keeps me from accomplishing anything at all.  (For example, I am now writing this standing up, because I couldn't take sitting any longer.  But I don't know how long I can stand before my back screams me to death.)\

    Whew.  Okay, so...yeah.  2020 was not great for me, even as a writer, despite some promising stuff in the final months.

    But what about 2021?  Well, obviously, I can't know in advance how it's going to turn out.  (Rereading last year's IWSG posts on the old blog really drove the truth of that home!)  I'm hoping to finish with the rewrite of the novel I'm working on right now in time to post the game version sometime this spring, but I haven't made any commitments to or beyond that.

    After I finish that rewrite, I'll probably either dive right into book 2's rewrite, try to finish up some unfinished fanfiction, or...I dunno.  I'm always coming up with interesting new ideas, but most of them never get past the "something I'm idly tossing around in the back of my mind" stage.  It'll of course depend on, among other things, what the world looks like when I get there, and what my particular section of the world is like.

    I'm glad to say that my biggest worry on the rewrite right now (other than being able to find a position in which I can actually write it) is what to title the novel/game/thing.  The old title was The Vessel of Athene, which makes no sense until you get really late in the book and suddenly realize it's a massive spoiler.  Then I was going to call it The Walls of Troy, which is pretty much meaningless as a title, since although most of the book takes place in the partially rebuilt Troy, there's no much time spent talking about the walls of the city, and no time at all spent on them.  My current plan is to title it either Ties of Blood and Water or Bonds of Blood and Water, since there are a lot of kinship themes in the novel (the trio of heroes are cousins, or rather both of the other two are cousins of the main heroine, though only very distantly related to each other by their small inheritance of divine blood), and also a lot of talk about people descended from watery divinities, since our heroine is the granddaughter of the Nereid Thetis, and the new king of Troy is the grandson of a river god on his mother's side, and distantly descended from another river god on his father's side.  It also rather ties into the finale, too, which is good.  But it's kind of a weird title and doesn't signify "Greek mythology-derived", so...still not 100% on board with it.

    I also need to figure out a series title, so that the thumbnail summary for the game on itch.io will both indicate right away that it's the opening of a series (Book One of the *cough* series) and also give a hint as to what the main themes of the series are.  Which is where it gets really complicated.  Because I want the series title to indicate Greek mythology, first and foremost, and preferably something that suggests immediately post-Trojan War.  (My initial thought for the series title was "Scions of Troy" but that implies the children of the Trojans, not the children of the Greeks who were fighting against Troy.)  But two of the novels are spent primarily outside the traditional Greek myth region (they go to Babylon in one, and in the last one to a mountain range that's not really specified where it is, but my plan was for it to be the Alps, possibly the Swiss Alps, even), and one of the biggest themes throughout the series is the fate of gods whose worship has fallen by the wayside as its people moved on or died out.  There's also a subtheme of how the more gender-equal ways of the Bronze Age were being abandoned by the misogynistic patriarchy of the culture we know from the historical period of ancient Greece, but that's not really something I want to have imparted in the title of the series!  But how does one imply "dealing with fallen gods" in a series title without giving that away?  Because that...the villain's plan in the first book is basically to take down the Olympian gods, because he feels they've overstayed their welcome, and so he's trying to reduce them to the fallen gods that they ought to be by now in his estimation.  It's not until book two that we start meeting the actual "already fallen religions" theme, so I don't want it to be too obvious in the series title.

    The original plan when I wrote these novels back in 2014 was for them to be a Young Adult series, but one in which the teenage leads do not pair up by the end of the series, having somehow met their soul mates before turning twenty.  (Surprisingly, it wasn't until a year later that I realized that I was aromantic and asexual.)  I'm not sure if the end result is going to be at all YA in tone or more adult than that.  (Though the one heroine being asexual, the other heroine being unwilling/unable to accept or admit that she's in love with the first heroine, and the male lead having a girlfriend who is rarely present and who he would literally be killed for sleeping with (she's an Egyptian princess) does help to at least prevent there being any chance of sex to worry about!  (Except in the prologues taking place during the war. *cough*))  Anyway, I'd kind of like the title for the series to be one that could fit the kind of YA books that I read growing up, like the Prydain Chronicles, or...um...okay, actually that's the only YA series I read as a kid, now that I think about it.  Some individual ones, but mostly I kind of jumped right to regular fantasy early on.

    It's a very complicated situation, and titles are something I really, really, really suck at.

    Still, overall, I'm hesitantly optimistic about how 2021 will go for me as a writer.  And I'm hoping it'll be good for me in all other ways, but...not daring to be optimistic yet.  Hopefully by next month's IWSG post, I'll be optimistic again.  (Hopefully there will also be posts in between this one and that one, but the way I've been going, who knows?)

IWSG: Reflections on (Not)NaNo

 So, the same as last year, I didn't take part in the official NaNoWriMo this year, because I am still disgusted by the changes to the website.  (Honestly, I could have dealt with the hideous design scheme and the purposeful destruction of the forums if they hadn't mutilated our past project pages.  But that?  No, I was not going to do anything to give even the slightest tacit sign of approval to that.)  And I did my own thing, keeping tally on my blog.

Unlike last year, this time I went by hour count rather than word count, since I was working on multiple projects, one of which was a rewrite.

I think the biggest thing I learned from the process is that hour counts don't really work for me.  They're hard to keep track of (I kept forgetting to stop or start the timer when I had to get up and do something else for a few minutes, or answer the phone, or whatever), and they just don't feel very satisfying in the end.  In the future, I'm just going to have to try and make sure not to have this kind of project going on when I'm doing one of my off-the-books NaNo equivalent things.

Or rather, these kinds of projects.

I was working on a total of four projects over November:

1. Polishing up, adding images and a glossary to The Cousins, a game expanding on part of the first chapter of a novel I wrote back in 2014.  Most of the text for this game was written prior to the start of November, so all I was working on really was the glossary, edits to the text, all the image stuff, and some coding issues.  I posted the game to itch.io on the 12th.
2. Adding a glossary to my previous game, Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, and fixing the various coding errors in the game.  I got the updated version uploaded on the 17th...though I doubtless still missed some coding errors because it's actually much too complicated a game for my minimal programming skills. :(  (Well, I am a writer, not a programmer.)  There may be something wrong with one of the images, unfortunately, but I can't figure out what...
3. Love Allergy, a parody of the otome dating game genre, in which rather than playing a straight girl being offered the opportunity for a romance with one of typically about five handsome men, you're playing an aroace girl trying to avoid being pressured into a romance with I think it was four handsome men and one attractive character of uncertain gender.  I wrote the basic synopsis of the scenario and some bare bones character profiles, and part of the first couple of scenes, just the "setting the stage" material.  I wasn't really feeling it, so I pretty quickly set it aside and moved on to...
4. The Walls of Troy, or whatever I end up calling it, the full rewrite-as-interactive-fiction of the 2014 novel that The Cousins came from.  (Or rather, that The Cousins should be considered the demo of, since its whole text is wholesale part of this other project.)  This one I've been working on pretty consistently, and have gotten a pretty good length of text into, though I'm nowhere near a good chunk of the way through the story:  the villain hasn't even shown up yet!  (And he'll be making his appearance much earlier in this version than he did in the original version!)

Anyway, my initial hour count goal was 60 hours, but as I started falling further and further behind, I dropped that down to 45 hours, which I only barely met on the last day.  (Total was 45 hours and 18 minutes.)  However, I'm glad to say that if I had been worried about word counts instead, I'd be good!  The glossary for Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? runs 17,733 words, and what I have so far of The Walls of Troy is 38,826 words (much longer than I thought it was!), which add up to a total of 56,559 words, and I forgot to see how many words I'd written for Love Allergy; I suspect that was probably another 5k or so.

So at least I managed to get 50k without that even being my goal! ;)

And I'm feeling good about how The Walls of Troy is developing...although I want to change the title, because that's really not a good title for it.  I want it to be about kinship somehow, but I'm not sure specifically in what way.  I also want to make sure as I go along that I put in enough hints about the scale of the bad guy's plans along the way, because in looking back on it, I feel like the "ha ha ha my plan will kill the gods and then i'll become the father of the new gods" nonsense kind of comes out of freaking nowhere.  Admittedly, he's more than a little crazy, but that's no excuse for failing to provide setup for what's actually going on.

One thing that's bothering me, though, is that I'm starting feel like I'm not "really" being a writer anymore.  I mean, I never counted as a professional writer, since I've never been paid for anything I wrote.  (I'm not sure who it was that set out that qualification.  I'm wanting to say it was Hemingway or someone like that, but I could be totally wrong.)  But it's like, do I still get to call myself a writer in any way if I'm writing a video game, no matter how text-based the game is?

I think this was especially bothering me in the matter of the hour count for this Not-NaNo, because I was sometimes having to count time that didn't contain any writing at all, but instead consisted of me in PhotoShop trying to make the photographs taken on modern day Lesbos look as much as possible like they could be ancient frescoes.  (Sadly, they do not look like frescoes.  Like, at all.)  But it's a problem for me overall, as it makes me feel even more like a fraud than I usually do.

It also feels kind of like a colossal waste of time, since it's not going to get me a new job, but then again nothing is, and I just have to somehow remember what it was like in the days before I got my job at the museum in the first place.  (I would feel less useless if they would at least let me come back in as a volunteer, but they won't even do that!  That really annoys me, considering that I was volunteering there for five years before it turned into employment.)  I mean, at least I have a proofreading gig now, but it's not a paying one, so...well, it's a credit I can put on my CV, so there's at least that; it might lead to a paying gig later.  The writing is never going to lead to anything with money involved, and it never was, so it doesn't matter if I feel "genuine" or not.

Ugh, this has descended into self-pitying drivel now, so I think I'll stop before it gets worse.  I hope everyone else had a good November, and has a great December!

Not-NaNo Day 25: Behind in my posts

 I'm behind in my posts about my Not-NaNo, but not in my actual writing.  I just haven't been posting because...honestly, because I didn't feel like booting up this computer just to write a blog post.  (That was at least one advantage to staying with Wordpress, in that it had an app and I could just write the post on my phone, but there doesn't seem to be an official app for Blogger.)

Anyway, I've been continuing to work on the rewrite of The Walls of Troy, though I have only found one very minor place to add any interactivity to it.  (Then again, the interactivity in The Cousins was also very minor, so maybe that's all right.)

I'm posting first thing in the morning not because I've already done today's writing (lol, haven't even thought about it yet) but because I had to boot up this computer in order to look up a phone number for someone who would actually fix my basement door before all my pipes freeze, unlike the handyman who's been promising to fix it for two months now, and responded to my text yesterday with a rather dismissive promise to do something that wouldn't even remotely solve the problem, because evidently he'd forgotten what the problem actually was.  Ugh.  So now I'm waiting for an actual company to call me back about fixing it, and hopefully I won't have to turn off my water on Friday before the temperature can drop below freezing.  (Hopefully.)

I'm trying to think if I had anything to say about the way the rewrite is progressing, but I think I said most of it last time, really.  Because although I had gotten to Eurysakes' first appearance, I still had to write their entire first conversation with him, plus several conversations (practically a negotiation, really) with the captain of his ship, an older man who had fought with their fathers in the Trojan War, and followed Teukros into exile after the war ended.

Ooh, that brings up an interesting point, though.  See, I'm writing this novel from a perspective of intimate familiarity with the myth and its various tangential myths, but most people who will  be reading the novel/game are coming from a point lacking in that familiarity.  So, when I mention Teukros going into exile after the war, I know the whole story behind that, but most other people do not, and it's really hard to know when to insert the explanation into the novel.  Some of what needs to be explained (not just about Teukros, but about various portions of the larger Trojan War myth) can be explained in the work, because the girls wouldn't know the deep dark secrets of various royal families, but other things are going to be common knowledge.

Take Teukros, for example.  At the time when this novel is taking place, he is the founder and king of the city of Salamis on the island of Cyprus, and he's the half-brother of Aias of Salamis.  That much is common knowledge in-universe, and the girls cannot possibly feign ignorance of it.  Given his name, they must at least suspect that his mother was Trojan (Teukros was the name of one of the three legendary figures at the origin of the city, the others being Tros and Ilos), but they probably don't realize that his mother was Hesione, one of King Priam's sisters.  Which is important because that means the current king of Troy, the son of Alexander, is actually a cousin of Teukros, which makes it rather awful that he's been refusing to have any official dealings with him, I only just now realized.  (Thankfully, that wouldn't be something that any of Teukros' people would bring up, but the king will sure as heck bring it up, which he had not done in the original version!)  I can't have the girls feign ignorance about who Teukros is or the fact that he's the ruler of Cyprian Salamis, because you know that there would be chatter about him in a royal palace on Lesbos, so they would have heard all about him.  Or at least, that much about him.  (Realistically, at least one of them should probably have heard the rumor that his mother was a sister of King Priam's.  Ariadne, after all, had been singing to entertain at royal feasts for several years, and that's the sort of thing that might come up around the royal dinner table.)

But there's the matter of his exile.  That they don't know about, because it pertains to the death of his brother, which I've already established they don't know about.  What happened, for those who might happen to read this who don't know the Trojan War very well, is that Aias and Odysseus both claimed the armor of Achilles after Achilles finally died.  After much debate and argument on the subject, the armor was awarded to Odysseus, despite that he wasn't as good a warrior and despite that in most post-Homeric versions, Aias and Achilles were first cousins.  This situation was intolerable to Aias, and he kind of snapped, and decided he was going to go kill Odysseus, take the armor, kill Agamemnon and a few others who also made the decision, and then go home.  Athene didn't want anything happening to her boy, so she cast a veil of madness over Aias, and he slaughtered the herds instead of his comrades.  About dawn, her veil was lifted and he saw what he had done, and was horrified by his own actions, throwing himself on his sword as the only way to preserve what little honor he had left.  Sophocles' play on the subject is really brilliant, and I absolutely recommend it.  (Especially since it's a rare example of a version of Odysseus on the Athenian stage who is not the epitome of evil.  He actually shows remorse for having unintentionally caused Aias to do this, and he convinces Agamemnon to allow Aias to be buried.)  As this was all quite scandalous and distressing, the assumption in my take on the immediately post-Trojan War Greek world is that most of Aias' fellow princes did not want to spread the tale, and thus it is still relatively unknown, so the girls know he died about the same time as Achilles, but they don't know how.  (The problem with that is that it's actually important to the plot of the second novel, so I can't put it in the actual text, but I'm not sure if it's important for the readers not to know, so I'm not sure if I should put it in the glossary or not.  Not like my not putting it in the glossary will do jack-all, considering things like Wikipedia and Google exist.)

Anyway, when Teukros returned to Salamis at the end of the war with his brother's concubine and the son that concubine had borne him, and with the tale of his brother's ignominious end, his father Telamon was outraged at Teukros' failure to prevent the tragedy, and banished him.  (Here's where my version diverges from the real myth:  I misunderstood the single sentence that was the entire summary of a lost tragedy (I think also by Sophocles) about Teukros and his nephew following the death of Telamon, and for some reason thought it meant that Telamon had rejected his grandson as well as his son.  So in my version, Telamon wouldn't allow the concubine and her son into Salamis, either, though in the real myth he did.  (Though Plutarch also mentions another son of Aias, without saying where he came from, so I make it that Aias had a pregnant wife when he left for the war, so Eurysakes has an older brother, and that's why Telamon felt he didn't need his legitimate son's illegitimate son.))  In his banishment, Teukros ends up in Cyprus, where he marries the daughter of a local king, and sets up his own kingdom, which he names after his erstwhile homeland, Salamis.  The fact that he named his new home after his old one the girls know, but why he did so instead of just going home, they don't.  And I can't count on my readers knowing that, either.  Admittedly, that's one of the reasons I was liking the idea of going with this as a text-based game (or rather, a lightly interactive piece of fiction), because then I get to have a glossary to explain all this stuff, but...the question is always how much to try to put into the main text (since one cannot count on people looking for this stuff in the glossary) and how much not to bother with.

Though my more immediate concern is how much I want to try to salvage of the original version, and how much I want to just write from scratch.  My first task today (now that I have an appointment with someone to look at the door) is to go over the first version of the novel and see what needs to be kept, what I would like to keep, and what needs to be just tossed right out, and then make up a bit of a plan for the order of events.  I mean, I know I need, for example, the fight against the brigands which in the original version was how they first gained access to the palace, because they were being rewarded for having done so, but I need to keep it because it gave them their first chance to have a major fight scene together as a trio (actually, it's their first major fight scene at all period), and because it let them meet several people who had key knowledge that was going to be important to them later.  But now I need a reason for them to go out and hunt down these bandits, and I can't just have the king ask them to do so, because that's really rude behavior for a host.  And I know I need the scenes in the various temples within Troy itself, but do I also need the scenes in Thymbria, where they meet Chryseis, her husband and her daughter?  I feel like the only major callback to that entire sequence later on is the fact that when they stay the night there, Atalanta has a dream in which Apollo comes to speak to her (and no, she's not just dreaming that Apollo is speaking to her; he actually has entered her dream to speak to her) and that gets referenced a lot in the later books, but Chryseis and her family not so much.  (Obviously, I can remove or rewrite any later references when I get to those books, but I want to see if there's any important character development potential there, that kind of thing.)

I think I just had an idea of how to get them out there to deal with the bandits, but I'm not sure how well it will work out.  I don't know how any of this is going to work.  I have to walk a very dangerous line dealing with Korythos, since he has some secrets which are probably going to be pretty freakin' obvious to the reader no matter how I handle them (one of them being blatant,  because no matter how much I only speak of the instigator of the war as Prince Alexander, everyone already knows him by the name Paris, but I can't reverse those, since Alexander is the name that is historically one that was part of the Trojan royal family), and I feel like if I try too hard to obscure some of those secrets, I'll just be insulting the reader's intelligence.

That's a worry for later, though.  Right now I want to jot down my ideas before I forget them.

Laters! :p

Not-NaNo Day 17: One More Project Done!

 Well, I say "done," but I doubt it's genuinely done.  I've uploaded version 1.1 of Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, but it's probably still got lots of errors.  (I mean, I was checking that the graphics worked today and I already spotted the enormous-yet-not-worthy-of-an-update problem that I forgot to re-italicize The Iliad and Troilus and Cressida in Patroclos' Glossary entry.)  Still, I'm hoping it's not got any more howling errors, and can stay at version 1.1 at least long enough for me not to have to mess with again until at least next year. :P

And I did start work on Love Allergy, the parody of a dating sim game, where the point is to avoid getting a boyfriend.

Though I actually decided to make one of the...what should I even call them?  They're not love interests, since the point is to keep them away, but calling them antagonists doesn't feel even the tiniest bit right.

Well, whatever they are, I decided to make one of them less clear cut.  Instead of the household butler, the character is the live-in...uh...I'm not sure what term to use for it, to be honest.  "Live-in help" sounds horribly dismissive.  (If anyone knows a non-gendered equivalent of butler, please let me know!)  Anyway, the heroine (who is also the narrator) can't figure out if they're male or female, and doesn't want to pry, so she just uses they/them pronouns for the character.  Which is less cool than the character being specifically agender or nonbinary or whatever, rather than being mysteriously androgynous, but...given what I'm parodying, even this is almost revolutionary.

I didn't actually start writing the game, though.  I just planned out the bare bones of the scenario (beyond the even more bare bones stuff I'd already decided on) and figured out the characters' names, and a little bit of their character and history.  And by the time I had done that, I didn't feel like doing the actual writing.  (Dunno why.)

So, I'll start the actual writing tomorrow.

Anyway, I only got in about an hour and a half today, but I was ahead yesterday, so I'm still on track for 60 hours in November.

Oh, before I forget, here's my self-reward I mentioned yesterday:

Of course, in that form, it's not too clear what it is!  I couldn't actually assemble it, because it didn't have assembly slots/holes/etc, and needed to be simply glued together, but this photo might make it a little more clear:

It's a Chibi Trojan Horse model. :P  I saw that and just couldn't resist it! :D  I need to go to the site where I bought it and see if they recommend a particular type of glue to assemble it.  (And then once it's glued, I should probably paint it, since they used gray plastic...)