I had a title but I've forgotten it

     So, as I've been slowly chugging along on my crazy-long fanfic (at least, it feels crazy long to me, since it'll likely reach 300k or more, but strangely that sort of length doesn't seem as unusual in fanfic as in published works (possibly the lack of editors to say "whoa, dial it down!")), I've still been periodically turning to my homemade map.

    Though more for the sake of consulting it rather than working on it, typically.  Still, I did make some major changes lately!  This is the latest version I've posted here:

    Some obvious problems with it (aside from the fact that I didn't turn any of the different sets of lines invisible, so you get all the stages of the war at once), like the fact that the ground looks like dead grass and the label in the corner is half-obscured by the vignette filter.

    Well, as I entered into the post-war sequence, I realized I needed to update the map, because I needed to know how the land would be divided among the victors.  So I went in and made a new version...fixing up a few problems while I was at it...

    I think it's an enormous improvement!  (The fact that they added that "mist" vignette filter to the available options helped, obviously...)  I managed to make the ground look healthier, and found out how to make the filters not apply to all the levels.  I'm not sure about the color-coding by the borders; it might be too much?  (If you're wondering about the straight line right above the label, that's a mistake that I noticed and corrected shortly after exporting the picture.  I seem to recall fixing a few other things as well but I no longer recall what they were...)

    Hmm...looking at the map now, I can see I need to reduce the amount of land granted to the Yao Clan.  And maybe to the Ouyang Clan, too.  Mmm, no, on the other hand, the Ouyang Clan's extra land is cutting into the Jiang Clan's likely territory, so that accords with the way the other leaders don't take Jiang Cheng seriously because he's too young.  The bigger problem is that the Lan Clan's area is too small, but...enh, the whole point is that the Jin Clan is taking way too much for themselves, so I guess it's okay?  (Considering how long it'll be before I actually finish the fic, it certainly doesn't matter just at the moment.)

    Changing the subject...

    I'm really torn by titles lately.

    I have a super-short fic I want to post, only I can't think of a good title for it.  (Also having some trouble figuring out how to tag it and how to explain that the romance is skipped over in a massive time jump so it goes from "about to start" to "been lovers for years" because as someone thoroughly aromantic I'm not in the least sure how to write a romance in that setting that feels even slightly natural.  (It's a sort of Hades and Persephone/Beauty and the Beast type of situation.  I've only tried to write that sort of thing on a few very rare occasions, mainly when I was trying to write out all the Greek myths on my old blog, and what I ended up doing for Hades and Persephone was to literally crib from Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.  (Or maybe it was just from the traditional folktale version.  Which is kind of the same thing, really...))  I feel like it's still a pretty decent fic despite that, but it's hard to know how to describe it to others such that they'll want to read it.)  The working title for the fic was "Dragonji's prize" which made a lot more sense when I thought it was going to descend into smut after three scenes.  (Though I was going to have to find a co-author to actually write the smut part!)  I think the current title I'm considering is "The Dragon's Price," which...is better, but...🤷‍♀️

    And then there's the massive fic I'm working on.  The title on the Word file is, quite literally, "Jiang Cheng fic in need of a title.docx".  Which, yeah, sums it up perfectly for me, but whenever it's finished, I can't very well post it like that!  🤣  If it had any overall theme (apart from me trying to make it up to the character for having killed him off via heart attack in his late forties in one of my earlier fics) I might have a better time trying to come up with a title, but...I'm just too much of a pantser to be able to write to a theme rather than simply having an idea for a story and running with it.  If I'm lucky, a theme will come out as I go, or at least enough suggestion of a theme that I can add one on a second draft, but so far I'm not really seeing much of one.  (And when you aren't seeing a theme yet 226k words into a draft, there probably just isn't one.)

    Tch.

    I really didn't intend to turn this blog into "my fandom journey" but it seems like it's going down that road.

    Oh well.  It's just me shouting into the void anyway, so what does it matter what I happen to be shouting about?

    (In other news, the bot that for some reason viewed my blog over 11,000 times since this spring (peaking at 914 views in a single day last month) finally seems to have stopped.  I have no idea why someone set a bot to loading and reloading the main page of my blog (without ever viewing any individual posts) so many times, but...I guess it was a programming glitch?  It didn't even leave any spam comments, though maybe that's because the main page doesn't have a comment link on it, so...I don't know.  It's weird.  If I'm being honest, going back to the days when it's rare to have more than a handful of views a month will be a little depressing, but getting hundreds of views a day that don't have an actual person behind them is kinda creepy, so I guess it evens out?)

Writing and Mapping and (Fandom) Stuff

     I've had a weird half-week or so.  The major street that my street is off of has been undergoing road construction for about two years now, and they've been working on the section directly by my street for what feels like forever, but I suppose it's just been three or four months.  Every so often they end up doing work at night as well as during the day, and my house sadly is not noise proof.  (Or rather, it's great at keeping my noise in, and rubbish at keeping everyone else's noise out.)  And four days in a row I was losing sleep as they were doing super-noisy work from about 8:30 at night to about 3:30 in the morning.  I have noise-cancelling headphones, but they don't work perfectly, and I have trouble sleeping in them.  (I should get Bluetooth ones so I wouldn't have to worry about the cord, but those things are really expensive, and I don't need the headphones that often.  Although they would presumably allow me to use them for things that don't have a headphone jack, like my TV...)

    Anyway, because of that, until I had a good night's sleep last night, I was sorta the walking dead and unable to get much accomplished.  (Well, technically I got a lot accomplished yesterday in the video game I'm playing, but...that's sorta different...)  But this morning I was well rested and decided to sit down and write to try and, you know, accomplish something.

    At one point, I glanced down at my word count and found myself taking a screen shot to capture the moment:

    Terrifying thing is, there's still so much more to go!  (And by a half hour after that screenshot was taken, the number had already gone up to 174,367, placing no dent in the remaining story whatsoever.)  What I'm working on is an MDZS AU fanfic, based on The Untamed (CQL) instead of the novel (for reasons), in which I'm having to cover the whole Sunshot Campaign...and also trying to make it a little more like what little we got of the war in the novel, rather than what was in the show, a four month long conflict that Wei Wuxian took almost no part in.  He's not even the lead of this fanfic (for reasons), but I still let him do more in the Sunshot Campaign than CQL did.  (Not as much as in the novel, because part of the AU in this is that he never develops his demonic cultivation techniques, but he's still vital to the war effort, instead of just contributing on two occasions.)  Anyway, I'm still not done with the Sunshot Campaign at this point, though they've passed through a point of no return moment (not that they recognize it as such) so the war should only be about a month longer, but...yeah, writing that month is not going to be any faster than any of the rest of it.

    And then once the Sunshot Campaign is over, then we get to the political drama as Jin Guangshan tries to take over the cultivation world by attempting to discredit and turn the other clans against the Jiang Clan.  (Among other tactics.)  This thing is going to be truly monstrous by the time it's done. 😅

    But that's part of why I wanted to have maps so people can see where everything is and what the current situation is in the war.  Every so often, I refine the map a bit further, adding things here or there, and since the last time I posted about it, I added a filter to try and do something about how blank the edges of the screen seem.

    Overall, I think it's a great improvement, visually.  (Helps that I added more filters than just the vignette effect on the edges.)  With the slight problem that the filter also impacts the label in the corner. 😰  I can change that in GIMP after the fact, but eventually I may join the map-making site's Discord to ask if there's a way to keep that filter from impacting the label.  I did a mock-up of what it would look like unaffected by it:

    I think it's a definite improvement. 😄  The other alternative would be to move the label to the center of the bottom of the map, where the vignette filter would have minimal impact on it, but I feel like that would look pretty weird.  (Though I can definitely think of historic maps that have their legend/title in the center, so maybe?)

    In other writing news, I got to have a fun moment of a character exposing his own sheltered, misguided world view today.  For reasons, Jiang Yanli ended up meeting a bunch of homeless children, who she has decided are going to be taken back to Lotus Pier and raised up as Jiang Cheng's disciples, no matter what he has to say in the matter.  He, of course, does not want homeless orphans for disciples, but due to his sister complex he has trouble arguing with her directly.  Eventually, he tries to convince the children that they wouldn't like joining the Jiang Clan, and would surely much prefer that his sister find local families to adopt them.  After he's given them a description of the rigors of cultivation training, he's stunned when not one of them prefers to stay where they are and be adopted by a farmer/shopkeeper/what-have-you.  In reflecting on it in horror, the narration says this:

Jiang Cheng was at a loss for words.  Had he really miscalculated so badly?  How could that be?  How could jiejie have been right that these boys would honestly prefer the hard life of studying cultivation over a simple farm life?

    He totally exposes what a sheltered, privileged young master he's been his whole life, and totally doesn't even get that that's what he is.  (I don't even want to know what he thinks is involved in growing food if he thinks it's an easier life.  Probably thinks you just plant the seeds and forget about them until it's time to harvest them...)

    Jiang Cheng is such a fun character to work with, though.  He's so broken but thinks he's totally normal, and he's so co-dependent on his loved ones (which is, of course, why he's so awful in the novel's present, when he's lost all his loved ones) without even realizing it.  I don't think my fic is so far managing to capture just how broken he really is (his temper is certainly not as bad as it ought to be), but I always enjoy it whenever I manage to get close to doing justice to his many, many issues.

More Fanfic Stuff (MDZS/The Untamed)

     So, my heart is still giving me trouble, and I don't really dare go back to writing anything but light fanfic.  (Well, not all that light, given that I'm now trying to write about a war that no version of canon ever actually gave a detailed account of.  And I suck at the whole "war" thing...)

    In keeping with this being Pride Month, I kind of wonder how "right" it is for me to be writing stuff like this, and even if maybe there's something a little...how should I put it?  Mo Dao Zu Shi is danmei, which was largely inspired by the Japanese genre of BL/yaoi, and thus is largely (but not entirely) written by women for women, despite being about romances between men.  It feels like maybe that's actually sort of...wrong?  Like the sexuality equivalent of cultural appropriation?  (For that matter is it cultural appropriation for me to write fanfic set in ancient China when I'm of European descent?  The original work was written by a Chinese person, so...I have no idea if that makes it okay.  I mean, I'm kinda obsessed right now so I'm going to keep writing it anyway; I'm just wondering how guilty I ought to feel about it.  I am, at least, trying to depict the culture as accurately as I'm able (and I have done some research), which hopefully counts for something.)

    In my own defense, I'm trying for the most part to represent the romance between the two leads as realistically to an actual gay relationship as I can, but as I'm female, aromantic, asexual and not really very well versed in humanity (as I tend to hide in my house whenever possible because people are mean, scary creatures I would prefer to avoid at all costs), that's not really all that realistic, I fear.

    Ironically, the live-action adaptation, The Untamed, in some ways portrays the romance more realistically despite that it's been all but removed.  In the novel, we get a thoroughly narrated picture of how the hero is feeling towards his love interest at all times, and thus we see the rather hasty change from "he's practically my enemy" to "he's my friend" to "wait, was I teasing him all the time because I secretly liked him" to "I'm gonna marry him," with that last step taking about twenty-four hours.  (Maybe forty-eight, but definitely not more than that.)  In the drama, however, all we get to indicate their feelings for each other is a lot of longing glances, the occasional action to risk their lives for each other, the near-constant (in the second half) actions of the love interest to step in between the hero and anything that might threaten him, and a few moments that are decidedly suggestive of romantic affection (like when the love interest gets drunk and steals a couple of roosters to give to the hero as a gift 🤣).  By making it entirely subtext, it actually feels more natural, because we, the audience, can assign it the progression that seems most plausible to us, instead of being told a specific romantic chronology that might ring a bit more falsely to our individual perceptions.  (Which is why this current fic I'm working on is probably going to be the one with the most realistic romance of all the fics I'll end up writing for this fandom, because in this one the novel's lead is not the fic's lead, so his romance is in the background and we just catch glimpses of it at different stages, without seeing the progression of it at all.  (In fact it moves from "just friends" to "kissing but calling it energy transfer because we're not ready to admit how we feel yet" during a three month gap in which they're off traveling alone together.)  Not that I'm advocating for relegating romances to the subtext (unless they're straight romances), just saying that it's sort of ironic that the attempt to delete the romance actually made it in some ways better.

    In other random ramblings because I'm sort of blocked as to what the next scene should be and whose POV it should be in, last time I talked about this I showed the map I was working on so I'd have an idea of where various places were in relation to each other.  This was that map:

    Well, I've kept working on it periodically since then.  This is the current iteration:

    The biggest change is that I've fixed up the waterways.  I found a way to superimpose the river-specific maps from Wikipedia's articles on the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, so I was able to add a lot more and more accurate rivers and lakes.  And I think it makes it look like I actually got the cities in the right place, since all of them are either on or near water.  (Of course, it's also got rivers coming out of a freaking volcano, but...at least I established in the text that the volcano is actually a magical illusion created by the bad guys so they'll seem scarier.🤣)  Admittedly, I kind of wonder if maybe I went a little overboard on the rivers, but...if they're real, they're real, right?  Besides, I think it helps to give a sense of just how big an area this is covering.  (For reference, the real places of Qishan and Gusu are over 700 miles away from each other!)

    The next biggest change is probably adding the ominous effect around the mountain beside Yiling.  That's there to represent the Burial Mounds, a super-haunted mountain that plays a huge role in the hero's story.  Smaller role in this AU fic, but...🤷  I do hope to reuse the basic map for later fics...albeit with the volcano removed. 🤣

    I guess I didn't really have anything more to say than that.  I was just sort of hoping that if I wrote for a while I'd come up with a plan for the next scene, but I didn't. 😭  Hopefully I'll think of something by tomorrow.

Random Fanfic Stuff (MDZS/The Untamed)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Or, to put it more succinctly:

Wen-popo accidentally uses Reverse Psychology.

It is super-effective!

    🤣

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NaNo Rebel 2021, Day 5 - Ancient Greek Terrain

     So, it turns out I actually can access Blogger via my phone!  That may make things easier for me later on.  (I got annoyed with other stuff I was doing online and turned off my 'net computer before writing the day's post...)

      Anyway, today's writing featured the first of many modifications to the text based on the last leg of research that I only embarked on very shortly before NaNo began, namely my research into what the parts of Greece where the novel takes place actually look like.  (Okay, using Italics on the phone turns out to be almost impossible, so that's gonna hamper this whole phone post thing...)

     All I can say is "thank goodness for Google Earth!"  Because accurate topographic maps that include Late Bronze Age (or even Classical Era) towns rather than modern ones are pretty thin on the ground, y'know?  And admittedly Google Earth doesn't show any ancient sites, either (except when they're really large, like Delphi), but it does give latitude and longitude, so you can still find where they were.  More importantly, it let me figure out exactly what the terrain would look like where they landed on the shore beside Mt. Pelion (it even had photos of the beach in question!) and measure all the distances they'd be traveling, see just how steep the slopes are, etc.

   Ugh, I hate typing on my phone.  It is so much the absolute worst that I closed the tab in frustration and booted up the computer again.  So...yeah.

    *cough*

    Aaaaaanyway, this way I can at least show you some of what I was researching via Google Earth, yeah?

    

    This was one of the first images I grabbed, where I had to go in and label some stuff.  Specifically, cities no longer listed on the map (technically, Iolcos is listed if you get in close enough), and one where we don't actually know where it was (Phthia) and then I had to go in and mark an important river 'cause you can't really see it on the main map as it was. :P  Plus pick the site of a major plot event that isn't inside a town. ;)

    This one was actually relevant for today; it shows (roughly) the path they followed after landing, with distance measured.  :)  Of course, I was assuming (likely incorrectly) that they could walk that far without meeting anyone else at this particular point in the Late Bronze Age, but...unless there are major LBA archaeological sites along that stream bed that I didn't research enough to find out about, how can any of us even know if there would or wouldn't be people there at that time?  (More importantly, no one is gonna care.  In fact, very few people--if any--are even gonna read this thing.)

    So, this wasn't as good in terms of location research as it would have been to actually go there and see the mountain for myself, but how the heck would I manage to get all the way to Greece?  (Especially in the middle of a freaking pandemic!)  Even if I had the time and money, I couldn't get there because of my health issues, which would prevent me from being able to fly.  (So, technically, if I really had an absurd amount of time and money, I could cross the Atlantic in a boat (which could be an eco-friendly form of travel if it's powered by sails and/or oars) and get to Greece that way, but...yeah, not happening.  All around, just plain not happening.  So unless my condition improves/goes away, I missed my chance of ever getting to see Greece for myself.)

    All told, I have a folder on my hard drive now with two dozen screenshots from Google Earth showing me the terrain where the novel takes place from various angles.  I don't know how much impact a lot of it will have on the final book, since I'm not a very description-heavy writer, but...I feel better about it now that I'm not just randomly guessing what the landscape would look like.