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?)

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?)