IWSG: no title has been prepared

    So.

    I, uh, haven't been doing a lot of writing lately.

    I'm not 100% sure why.  Or rather I'm not sure which factor is the primary one.

    Part of it is because I'm still working on a game jam entry.  (The jam normally would have ended on the 1st, but it was extended for reasons that it's probably better not to go into.)  Technically, the game ought to already be up, since I considered it to be all but "finished" like two weeks ago, but the artist who agreed to create a unique background and some other art for me has had a lot on their plate and still has only gotten roughs done.  So I keep going in and fiddling with what I've got. 😅 In some ways it's a waste of time to keep iterating on it like that, but on the other hand it means I'm really pulling out all the stops I can in regards to little visual effects and stuff.

    But I haven't been doing much with the writing, since I've considered the script more or less finished for quite a while now.  I had to do some edits thanks to one of my two sensitivity readers getting back to me and recommending some improvements, but that's been quite a while now.

    I think the most writing I've done all month was probably when someone on a writing discord server posted a link to this blog post with the most ultimate "character questionnaire" pretty much ever.  I was actually going to fill it out on a blog post for one of the characters I've been writing about, but thought the better of it when I reached his answer to "What's the most evil thing you've ever done?" because I do not want someone seeing his answer to that question out of context and thinking I had done that!  Because, yeah, that was a very evil thing he had done.  (Even though he's usually a very good person.  It's just that he went a wee bit over the edge after suffering a particularly brutal tragedy...)

    That's sort of off topic, though.

    The main thing I wanted to talk about, in terms of my "not getting much writing done lately" issue is the rewrite I have been bogged down in for what feels roughly like forever.  The draft I'm trying to revise is really, really awful.  And a lot of the problems are structurally baked in, so rewriting is a little like banging my head against a brick wall.  Thus I have been doing almost everything else I can think of except working on that rewrite.

    I know at this point a lot of people would probably advise me to just not bother; drop the project.  But it's book four out of seven (and yes, I've written first drafts for the whole series), and I've already released books one through three on AO3 and itch.io, so it would feel a bit like breaking a promise if I just stopped.  Besides, I'm eager to get to the later books, especially book six, which is when they go to Sparta and meet Helen (and I feel like I did some moderately unique things with her!), plus they also go into the underworld and meet Hades, albeit briefly, and it's so important to get more versions of Hades in the public sphere that aren't mutilating him into a "villain."  (There is very little that ticks me off harder about modern mangling of Greek mythology than people who stupidly conflate Hades with the devil.)

    So.  Yeah.

    Anyone else struggling to get through a hard rewrite?  How do you handle it?

IWSG: Still Floundering

 

    So...

    I am still having...issues...with my current rewriting project.

    The project is to rewrite book four of my quasi-YA, Greek-myth-based fantasy novels about a young trio of adventurers living not quite twenty years after the Trojan War.  I have made quite a few posts about these novels over the last year or so (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).  I am up to book four...which is supremely problematic in all sorts of ways.

    I went into a lot of it in the previous post (the last one on that massive list), so I'll skip a lot of the preliminaries.  The short version is that because my research before I wrote the initial draft (in 2014) was using such outdated texts, almost everything I had "learned" in that research was wrong.  My understanding of the setting is now improved, though still lacking the larger cultural picture I have for the Greek Heroic Age, because the surviving corpus of myths is so much smaller for Mesopotamia.

    Of course, how I had coped with my lack of knowledge in the original draft was to write a book in which the trio of young heroes barely interacted with the locals at all.  Can't get wrong what you don't write at all, was my thinking.  Which I suppose isn't technically incorrect?  (And yet I still managed to get a truly spectacular amount of things wrong!)

    In the end, I ended up with a text in which the story is so centered around not interacting with the locals that I'm having trouble finding a way to restructure it in order to have them interact with the locals beyond their translator.  (Who I had to jump through some pretty crazy hoops to keep from getting killed by the villain, even.)

    That's not necessarily unworkable, of course.  Maybe I won't even want to change it.  But most of the next draft is going to have to be entirely new, and I'm kind of struggling to figure out how to make things work.

    The original draft has the three heroes get individual divine visitations (in their dreams) from three of the Babylonian gods, and then all three of them met with Ishtar in person (though the situation was bizarre and illogical at best) and she gave them gifts to help them through the battle to come.  Of course, none of those gifts belonged to Ishtar, and most of them were for Ariadne, but...

    So I came up with the idea of coming up with a series of trials they go through to win the support of the Babylonian gods, but the trials are also contests, and after each contest, the one of the trio who "won" will get to speak to the god behind the trial and receive an object from them to help with the battle ahead.  This would allow me to preserve some of the earlier dialog between the trio and the various Babylonian gods, by having the winner of each trial be the one who spoke to that god in the visitations in the original version of the text.  A bit formulaic, but serviceable, and in dealing with such an ancient culture surely an older formula like that is actually kind of appropriate.

    Problem, of course, is that for the most part the one who would receive the gift is not the one who would use it:  

1. The bow and arrows could come from Ninurta (they were Marduk's in the first draft, but Ninurta is better known for the use of bow and arrow), but they would be awarded to Eurysakes even though Ariadne would be the one using them.
2. The net is the one Marduk used to contain Tiamat, so obviously Marduk would be the one who handed it over to the heroes, but Atalanta is the one who spoke to Marduk, yet it's Eurysakes who used the net.

    Okay, technically that's only half of them, not "most" of them, but it's still a problem!

    Isn't it?

    I don't know, maybe it's not a problem?  I can't think of anything with this kind of formula off the top of my head to recall if the gifts were ever given to someone other than the one who would use them.  (Closest I can think of is the gifts Galadriel gave to the Fellowship when they were leaving Lothlorien, but those were used by the people she gave them to.  With the addition that Sam also used the vial of starlight she gave Frodo.  But that's entirely different.)  I feel like the basic formula of "do a favor for a magical entity and get a magical item as a reward" is usually one person meeting magical beings (or the same one in different disguises) as they travel, not multiple people in a party going to one deity after another in the same basic location.  Which I'm not sure if it's better or worse that I'd be changing up the formula that way...

    It just feels really off to have them given to the wrong person.  But they're divine gifts, so they should be given by the god they belonged to, surely!

    There's also the fact that Ariadne gets the largest number of gifts--bow, arrows and a vial of poison for the arrows--and Atalanta originally got no gifts whatsoever.  I've figured out something Ishtar can give Atalanta that actually belonged to her (well, it's not so much something that belongs to Ishtar as the transformed body of one of Ishtar's enemies, but it's the only magic item I can figure out to add to the final confrontation that would be useful for Atalanta in any way, shape or form) but it's still pretty lopsided, and doesn't sound the least bit impressive:  "Here, Ariadne, have the bow and arrows Ninurta used to defeat Anzu, and this vial of poison from Ea to make the arrows more deadly.  Here, Eurysakes, have the net that Marduk used to ensare Tiamat.  Here, Atalanta, uh...you can have this enchanted waterskin that used to be the woman who murdered Dumuzi."

    It just doesn't...feel fair.

    Admittedly, this book starts Atalanta's negative character growth arc, as all hints of her father's arrogance are pounded out of her and she becomes so depressed and convinced of her own worthlessness that by the end of book seven she kind of wants to die in battle to rid the world of herself.  (Her father's spirit shows up to help her in the final confrontation of that book, which helps to restore her self-confidence, though, so it's not a total downer.  (Her father being Achilles, btw.))  Still, having the Babylonian gods spurn her by giving her useless gifts is a bit too much, isn't it?  It's not like they're spurning her for being female, after all:  Ariadne is also female, and she gets the best gifts, plus she's the one who learns how to read and write cuneiform, which is the key to winning the final battle of the book.

    Ugh.

    It's like...like...like I need to write an entirely different book from the ground up and only keep the final battle, as that actually worked pretty well.  But I have zero ideas what else to write that would build up to that final battle.  Especially because I don't feel like I have all that good a grip on Late Bronze Age Babylon, not well enough to conjure up an entire tale set there. (Well, there's actually the opening couple of chapters that are back in Troy, then they have to pass through Tarsus and take a caravan from there to Babylon, but it's still the bulk of the book...)

    It's honestly quite overwhelming, and I feel so daunted by the prospect that I don't even know where to start.  And yet I know that if I don't start relatively soon, I'll forget everything I learned in my new research and I'll have to redo the research first.

    (I would be ashamed of myself for being on about working on a non-Pride-related novel in June, but Atalanta is aromantic and asexual (not that those concepts were understood in her day!) and Ariadne is lesbian in the woman-loving-woman sense (as well as being Lesbian in the sense of "having been born on the island of Lesbos") so I figure this is at least somewhat Pride-related.)

Stymied

     So.

    I am:

• Overwhelmed.
• Lost.
• Confused.
• Frustrated.
• All of the above.

    You see, I'm trying to get to work on the rewrite of book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books.

    Precis version:  I wrote the original drafts (for all seven books!) of these quasi-YA Greek-myth-based fantasy novels back in 2014.  During 2020's COVID lockdown, I re-visted them and decided they were worth salvaging, unlike most of what I was writing back then.

    Since 2021, I've managed to get the first three polished up and released, both on AO3 as plain text and on itch.io in a slightly interactive form.  (Though having just re-read the AO3 versions, all three still need a lot of work.  😭)  Anyway, having gotten book three out of the metaphorical door, it is now book four's turn.

    And.  Um.

    See, in book one, my heroic trio are mostly just in the region of Troy.  In book two, they return to their roots and go to mainland Greece.  In book three, they visit Athens, Aiaia (home of Kirke (aka Circe)), and then spend most of the novel in Thrace, which I had to give a fairly Greek-adjacent cultural setting, because it had to fit the myths of Heracles' visit to deal with the man-eating mares of Diomedes of the Bistones.

    Book four, however, is when they start doing a little globe-trotting.  (Or the closest you can get to same in a Bronze Age setting, anyhow.)  After visiting a trading town, they head to Babylon, looking for information on the big bad of the series.

    So.  Um...

    Mesopotamia is not my region of expertise.  (Technically, I have no region of expertise, being at best an amateur and at worst an unqualified hack.)  I needed to research it before I could write the first draft.  And I did research it.  Not as much as I needed to, but I did do research.  I read the Enuma Elish (not realizing that it probably wasn't written until several generations after my novel takes place 😰) and I looked at quite a few books in the library of the university where I had just started working on my MA in History.

    I was aware, of course, that the books were not the most recent, as the university hadn't been keeping all that up to date on history and archaeology in general, and particularly not Mesopotamian history and archaeology.

    If I was also aware of how much of a problem that actually was, I had forgotten in the intervening decade.

    I, um, I'm aware of it now.

    Having read both a general survey of Mesopotamian history and a specialized history of Babylonia itself, I dived into rereading the latest draft of book four so I could make notes on what needed to change for the next draft.

    Basically...everything.

    Apparently most of those books I used back in 2014 were approximately as old as I am, maybe older.

    Virtually everything that can be wrong is wrong.

    Whole sequences are centered around traditions that either I made up out of whole cloth or that someone else made up out of whole cloth.  Wherever they came from, what they are is completely incompatible with what is actually known of Bronze Age Babylon's culture.

    If it was just little things, I wouldn't have too much of a problem.

    But like...there's so much that's so weird that I have no idea what to use to replace it.  For example...

    For some reason, I had decided that it was "typical" for supplicants to sleep in the temples to request divine visions in their dreams.  This cannot be much more wrong:  temples in Mesopotamia were such sacred spaces that no one except priests and the most upper of upper echelons of society were allowed inside.  Random people--particularly foreigners!--absolutely would not have been allowed even to set foot in one, let alone sleep in one.  But I have to do something, because the trio had not so much visions as actual divine visitations, and these were vital to communicating the plot to them.

    Which, really, maybe is super-weak and I should do something else.  But what?  That's the problem, you know?  I have to put something in there to let the trio learn what they need to learn.

    And honestly I don't want to let go of some of it.  I love the visuals of Ariadne's visions, in which she's confronted with a giant blank expanse of clay and words and shapes appear before her to show her what the god in question wants to communicate to her.  (Which requires him to divinely teach her cuneiform so she can understand him!  And that's vital to what follows...)  And in Atalanta's dream, which starts out as a nightmare, she has a vision of an enormous ziggurat filled with praying statuettes (which I thought were still a thing in their day, despite that they were long outdated by then) which come to life and surround her and grow and chase her, and it's actually a pretty effective nightmare sequence, one which I have some interesting ideas about how to give the sequence a bit of a visual punch in the Ren'py version.  Eurysakes, as I recall, just has a conversation with the god he talks to.  That one's not particularly interesting, tbh, and could easily be disposed of.

    Another sequence that is both vital and kind of weirdly pointless is one in which they encounter a procession taking the statue of Ishtar to a temple to the underworld gods, at which time the goddess literally enters the underworld (again)...for apparently no reason whatsoever?  On top of me misunderstanding just why Ishtar went into the underworld in the first place (suggesting that the book I read that talked about her descent into the underworld was especially ancient, considering the full text that explained it was discovered in like the early 1950s), did I think she did it repeatedly, or that it was that important a part of her cultic presence?  Because...no.  None of that.  Additionally, the statues of the gods were essentially their physical forms to the ancient Mesopotamians, and while there were a few rituals that involved moving them around, they wouldn't have been wandering the countryside in the care of merely a few...a few...I don't even know who those people were accompanying the statue, because my original draft didn't make it clear, but they certainly seemed to be absolutely nobody!

    As a sequence, it's not necessary, but it accomplishes some important things, especially in that it's the final part of the Babylonian gods giving the trio gifts to ensure that they can triumph over their enemies--the enemies, in this case, more of the Babylonian gods than the trio--and is directly addressing Ishtar as the Lady of Battles, a function her Hellenic counterpart doesn't have.  Honestly, I need to address Ishtar's unique qualities more, since she has both masculine and feminine qualities, and in that respect she is actually kinda similar to Atalanta and Ariadne.

    Realistically, if they're going to get gifts from the Babylonian gods who want them to defeat the threat that looms over Babylonia, then they should have to do tasks to earn them.  (Admittedly, they did at least fight off enemies who were attacking that procession carrying the statue of Ishtar, but it was never explained why those enemies were attacking it, nor why Ishtar had on hand Marduk's bow and quiver to give them.)  They should have to seek out sites in the wilds where those items have been carefully hidden away, but...I don't know of any appropriate sites for that.  What they're being given are weapons the gods themselves used to fight their own foes, so it's not like they're things that mortals would normally have in their possession.

    Hmm.

    It would be a massive amount of new text, but it's gonna need that regardless, so maybe I do just need to invent challenges for the Babylonian gods to set before them, and for each challenge they pass, they get one of the weapons they need to defeat the villain-du-jour, plus a fraction of the information they need.

    It's a bit formulaic--especially compared to the earlier books--but it's a tried and true formula that's literally been around since ancient times.

    In the current draft, Atalanta--and only Atalanta--is taught "Babylonian" by Marduk so that they can communicate without him having to lower himself to use her language.  (I'm not sure if I didn't know at the time that the language was called Akkadian or if I figured she wouldn't know and it therefore didn't matter.)  I'm not sure how plausible it is for only her to learn it in the new set-up I just described, and yet I feel like certain points aren't going to work very well if they all know it.  (Not sure why Ninurta didn't have to teach it to Eurysakes when they spoke.  It doesn't seem even slightly probable that Ninurta would know Mycenaean Greek...)

    <sigh>

    I feel like this one draft is going to be the hardest part of adapting, rewriting and releasing the entire seven book series.  (They do visit Egypt in book five, but that's just a brief stop-over, more akin to visiting Aiaia in book three, rather than being the major portion of the novel.  Plus Egypt was better understood culturally at the time the books I was consulting were written.)

    Anyway.

    Final, bizarre parting note.

    In 2021, I had taken the most recent drafts of the novels (they had mostly just received minor rephrasings and such since their completion) and left annotations on them in the form of comments in Word.  For rereading book four, I opened up that annotated version in Google Docs so I could read it on my phone and leave myself further notes.

    For some reason Google Docs decided that all those comments I left on the document were made on December 31st, 1969.

    Which is:

• Before there were home PCs
• Before Microsoft Word existed
• Before Microsoft existed (as far as I know)
• Before the novels were ever written
• Before I was born
• Insanity
• All of the above

    Yeah.  Just wanted to share that.  (It's definitely not an error on the file or a dating error on the computer I was using when I left those notes, because when I open the same file in Word on this computer, each comment has the correct date from 2021.)

IWSG: What's in an ending?

 

    Since I've had this post sitting around 3/4 finished since like the 10th of April, and since it's about writing, I figure I may as well use it for this month's ISWG post.

    Instead of talking about the month's suggested question (the answer to that being mostly that I'm afraid of people actually reading anything I wrote, but simultaneously kind of afraid of them not reading it, too), I'm going to talk about endings.

    Or, more accurately, what is it that I look for in an ending?

    I ask because, well...where to start?

    Okay, so in my previous post I mentioned a fantasy novel I had bought on a whim earlier, a book I had decided would be up next from my "to read" pile.

    That book was fantasy in the sense of "historical setting but folklore is real."  So nothing strictly speaking invented for the novel, that kind of thing.

    When I finished reading it, I found the ending had left a bad taste in my mouth (in my mind?) but I'm not even sure why.

    It wasn't a bad ending by any conventional definition:  the heroes were triumphant, they didn't die, and their loved ones didn't die.  So, it should have been satisfying, yes?

    And yet, for some reason, it wasn't.  Not for me.  And I don't know why.

    I can identify a few things that may have been factors:

1. There is a sword in the novel.  It comes up early on and is brought up periodically throughout to ensure the reader hasn't forgotten its existence, then in the final climactic confrontation it's revealed to be the legendary sword itself!  Problem:  because this novel was based in real world folklore, said legendary sword is a very famous one from actual folklore and so I clocked it literally as soon as it was first mentioned.  Where it had been found signaled it as absolutely that sword and no other.  So what was probably(?) intended to be at least a little surprising was instead a "ho hum" moment because it was so incredibly obvious.
2. There's a fake-out moment (more than just a moment, really; it's maybe a chapter and a half long) before the final climax where our first-person narrator makes it sound like she's killed one of her companions.  That leaves a nasty feeling behind even when you're relatively sure she's lying.  I don't like that nasty feeling, and it definitely soured me on the entire thing, despite that it did turn out that she had not killed her friend.
3. The ending is very "restoration of the status quo" despite that the status quo in question was definitely not nice.  Obviously, as it was a historical setting (+folklore being real) the author was not free to change up the status quo beyond maybe changing things in that one village, which was made clear not to be the case.  But it just...it definitely left me feeling like "why didn't they accomplish more?"  Even if there really wasn't much more they could have accomplished.

    Following soon on the heels of that, I finished playing the Dragon Quest III remake...and was left feeling very underwhelmed by the ending.  Admittedly, Dragon Quest as a whole is not as story-intensive as some other JRPG series are (though the stories did become richer and more central to the experience as the series went on) and the endings are often pretty lackluster, but something about that particular ending left me particularly not satisfied.  Again, I can't even put my finger on what about it I was unsatisfied with.  Though the player character's lack of a homecoming didn't help...and the post-credits scene lost any punch it was supposed to have because although I was positive I had heard the name mentioned at the very end before, I have no idea quite where or who he was.  (Logically, you would expect them to be setting up that he's the big bad of IV, only I'm pretty dang sure that was not the name of the guy who was manipulating Psarro, so...also, after the scene it went "To be continued in" the HD remake of the first two games, so...are they saying that III somehow took place before I and II?  I am confused by that logic...but I just checked on the Dragon Quest wiki, and yes, that's what they're saying, which is very strange to me, but the end of Dragon Quest VI also seemed to be claiming that it was before IV and V, so...that's weird, but...)

    Anyway, so double whammy of "endings that left me unsatisfied without actually being bad" in short order.  (I was similarly dissatisfied with the ending of Zenshu, but in that case I know exactly why.  Though it still wasn't a bad ending, per se.  But that was a week or so earlier anyway.)

    Net result, it has me wondering if I am applying a double standard.  Am I being harder on the endings of works written by others than I am on my own endings?

    Thinking about it logically...I should analyze my own endings and see how they fit the criteria I feel like I gathered in looking at why that novel and Dragon Quest III left me feeling less than pleased.

    Setting aside fanfic for the moment, since there are always aspects there that are trying to tie together canon material with material of my own invention and thus making endings trickier to arrange, I'm going to look at series of books I'm 3/7 of the way through rewriting.  But since this is now an IWSG post and a few people will actually read it, I'll be more vague than I was originally going to be.

1. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is not (though as of the ending it's not clear how much of a shake-up it will be, and it's later books that illuminate that)
2. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is improved
3. Heroes triumph, divine status quo is upheld, mortal status quo is partially upheld and partially improved
4. From here on, I haven't done the rewrites (I'm working on the final research for book 4 now, in fact), so the endings aren't set yet.  Heroes triumph, divine status quo upheld.  The mortal status quo feels like it wasn't particularly even involved in this book.  In large part because my ancient Greek heroes were visiting Babylon, and I didn't have enough information about Late Bronze Age Babylon and its culture (plus I hadn't readjusted the chronology, so I thought they would be visiting in a period when Babylon was under Assyrian control, which was going to get heckin' awkward to write about without way more information than I had available to me).  Even with the new research I've done, I feel like I won't be able to connect events much to what's going on among the actual human beings because the current version is so disconnected that even in the new version the rest of humanity won't too be much impacted by the heroes winning the day.  (Aside from, you know, not getting exterminated by the machinations of the villains.)
5. There's a lot about the ending of this one that I don't even remember.  (I wrote the originals in 2014...and last reread the old drafts in 2020...)  I know the heroes triumph and that the divine status quo is mostly upheld (the villains of the series are trying to off the Olympian gods, ya see, so that comes up a lot), but I can't recall if there's any impact on the status quo of the mortal world at all.  I feel like this one, too, is a bit divorced from human society, though not as much so as the previous book.  They travel a lot in this one, too, but the travel isn't as responsible as in book 4, since their travel is mostly to Egypt and Crete, and I was able to research Egypt a lot more easily at the time, and I'm following the myths to treat Crete at this period as being basically the same as mainland Greece (which is probably not actually the slightest bit archaeologically accurate for this period, but I figured the myths needed to outweigh reality for a myth-based setting).
6. Heroes triumph but at a cost, divine status quo sort of maintained and sort of shaken up, mortal status quo not enormously altered but at least slightly improved.  Sort of.  (I mean, an inheritance issue that could have led to warfare and/or fratricide/sororicide is settled peacefully.  That's something, right?)
7. Heroes ultimately (if only barely) triumph, and the divine status quo is as protected as it can get when you realize that the gods are powered/created by human belief and the Late Bronze Age has about a generation left before its impending collapse.  (And yes, that's actually a minor plot point in the novels.  Or maybe more of a talking point a few times.  It comes up, anyway.)  Again, this one as I recall it is not enormously connected to the actions of other people, in part because they're really going all over the place in this one; they hit a large number of places, including stuff much further north where I had pretty much zero clue what the culture in the region would be at that time.  (I still don't fully know, even though I've done a little more research since then.)  There is at least a little improvement of the mortal status quo--if only for a small slice of it--though, so that's something?

    Looking at all of those, I feel like only the first three would meet my current standards.  Though of course books 4-7 are kind of more "part of a series" than the first three are.  Or rather...how do I explain?  Book 3's ending is where the heroes learn that they have a powerful enemy who's been involved with everything that they've had to deal with up until now.  Book 4 starts out with them actively trying to learn more about this enemy, and that continues right up until they finally deal with said enemy in the climax of book 7.  Because of all that, it's kind of like...the endings don't fully matter as much until reaching the ending of book 7?  Which doesn't seem right, but that's definitely how my brain perceives it no matter what.  (Maybe it's the side-effect of growing up watching the Star Wars movies constantly, and The Empire Strikes Back is the only one with an unsatisfying ending...)

    Obviously, since I haven't yet started the rewriting process for books 4-7, I can do what little is available to me to fix the parts of the endings that aren't up to my current standings for an ending, but...for some of them that might require more restructuring than I really want to put into the process.  Less like a new draft and more like a fully new novel, you know?  I'd like to get the rest of the series finished and released (in what minimal sense the first three count as released, anyway) sooner rather than later, and having to do that much reworking would definitely delay me a lot.

    I guess what most gets to me about this is that I'm not actually sure how much it matters.  Or rather, I don't actually know what other people look for in an ending.  Would most people be annoyed by getting through a novel and finding that the heroes' victory didn't do anything to change the status quo of the world around them?  (Since this is the Late Bronze Age, said status quo is definitely not pleasant, but there's not much I can do about that, y'know?  I'm not as confined by historical reality as the novel that set me onto thinking about all this, but I'm still bound to the larger aspects.)

    Even more importantly, are readers going to get frustrated that the endings become less satisfying after the heroes become aware of the larger flow of events and the actions of the mysterious villain behind it all?  I mean, to be clear, this is not an "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" situation with the same enemy just running off at the end of the book to come back working some new evil in the next novel.  There are smaller villains they defeat each time (though I think in the current draft both 5 and 6 have the same sub-villain, who had left a lesser (but also physically much larger) sub-villain to be the final boss of book 5) so it's at least got that much satisfaction, but...gnh.

    I'm not sure there is any real answer to this.

    I'm also not sure how many people have actually read any of the first three, or how many people are going to read the remaining four whenever they're made available.  And I guess it shouldn't even matter, since I'm making the books available for free on itch.io and AO3, so it's not like I'm trying to sell copies or anything.  I guess I just don't want to disappoint anyone who might read them, you know?

    I know one thing that probably turns people off who do encounter the books is the fact that the heroes are striving to protect the Olympian gods when a lot of modern works tend to want to get rid of them  or at least change them since they were not, in fact, very nice, and did a lot of genuinely horrible things.  But that's a very modern perspective on the Olympian gods.  The people of ancient Greece did not think of them that way.  Of course, we don't fully know how they did think of them, since they didn't write down their cultic practices, and thus the versions of the gods reflected in the myths are not actually the same versions that they actively worshiped.  (This is especially the case for Hera.)  Of course, in the end, I'm not trying to write about the actual religion versions of the Greek gods, but the mythological version, but that still comes down to the same thing, doesn't it?  If I want to use the Heroic Age setting and not completely betray the epic poetry that this is supposed to be building off of (though my writing is nowhere near good enough to be mentioned in the same conversation as masterworks that have survived more than two thousand years!), then the heroes have to believe in and want to win the support of the gods, and if they ever disrespect the gods, they have to suffer because of it.  Because that's what happens in the myths:  you tick off a god, you suffer and probably die.  (Unless you're Agamemnon, then when you tick off a god, you get hundreds or thousands of your own men killed (and/or your daughter) and you just sit there and survive it like a monster.)

    So that's something I could in theory change that might make my works more palatable to more people, but I don't want to do that, because that's not what I'm going for.

    I should probably write something else where I'm free to have characters tell the gods "get lost!" when they do the awful stuff they're known for.  (I should write a visual novel where Zeus finally gets his for all his skirt-chasing.  That would be epic.)

    ...I feel like I have wandered way off my original topic of "endings."

    Given that I am very bad at them, somehow that seems appropriate.

IWSG: um...March

    As usual, I am having trouble writing.  Also having trouble with everything else, but that's an entirely different issue.

    One thing that's particularly frustrating me is that I've spent so long being a pantser that I kinda don't know how to write any other way any more, and I had a project I wanted to do that really needs to be planned out pretty carefully before I can start writing it.

    So I got to a certain point in the planning process and just...stopped.

    Not because I didn't want to do the project anymore, but because I just couldn't go any further.

    I needed to fully define the supporting characters and plan out their side stories, and....I just couldn't.  When I tried, I'd just sit there, staring at my planning document for a while, then give up and do something else.

    This happened over and over again until I eventually stopped even opening the file.

    I don't know how to rewire my writing brain.  I've been writing the same basic way since the 1990s.  Admittedly, things have changed a little, in that now I write my ideas down rather than trusting that I'll remember them, but they're still pretty nebulous, especially as they progress; I might have a pretty strong outline for the opening, and a relatively well-defined idea of the early middle, but the "outlines" always eventually devolve into "not sure where it goes from there, but the good guys win in the end" territory.  And sure, eventually I get near the vague parts and find myself writing a new partial outline, which then takes me through another section of the story, but it's still more pantsing than plotting, you know?

    Which is fine if it's just silly fan fiction or a novel I don't ever intend to show to others.

    It's a different issue entirely when it's the idea for a visual novel that would require me to hire artists and such in order for the final project to be completed.  I can't waste my money and/or their time working on a project that can never go anywhere because I can't visualize the details of the story until I've worked on part of the story.

    Admittedly, I wouldn't want to hire artists until I'd written a full draft of the script anyway, but if I can't ever start writing it, then it's still wrecked up.  And because it's something more complicated than I usually attempt--even though each story is planned to be linear, with only flavor text different based on player choice, the idea is still to have each major NPC have their own line of (mostly optional) sidequests to give them each their own story--I can't just say "well, heck with it, I'll just start writing and hope for the best!" because the best is not what would happen if I do.  It would just be my usual muddled mess.

    It's very frustrating and I have no idea what I can possibly do about it.

IWSG - I should probably come up with a title for this post but I'm bad at that

 

    So.

    Today's suggested question was about if we've ever wanted to go back and rewrite something, right?

    For me that's kind of a "yes and no" thing.

    Like anyone, I look back at my oldest writing and cringe.  But I tend to write exclusively for myself in the sense that most of the things I've ever written have never been put before other people in any context.  That being the case, if I ever want to rewrite something, there's nothing stopping me from doing so.

    However, for the most part I wouldn't want to because the really old things I've written are things I now don't particularly want to interact with in terms of their story material.

    Before I figured out I was asexual and aromantic, I often included heterosexual romance in my writing.  Actually, that even continued on for a few years after I figured it out, in fact.  But now I prefer to write about same-sex romance, if I include romance at all, so most of my old stuff is something I don't even want to interact with in any way.  And since it's not out there being interacted with by anyone else, that's fine.  It can continue to rot in digital oblivion.  (Or something.)

    On the other hand, I have been rewriting--and releasing!--a series of novels I wrote in 2014, so sometimes I do want to go back and rewrite older works.  (Okay, if I really wanted to go to older works, I started writing back in the 1990s, so if any of those even still exist on any accessible hard drive, I could dive back into the ultra-cringe of things I wrote when I was still a teenager.)  I need to finally get around to finishing up the research for the next rewrite in the series, though.  It's hard to find books talking in sufficient detail about Late Bronze Age Mesopotamia...

So, I've started a new project

     It's a visual novel.  Or possibly a VN/cozy-farming-sim hybrid.  Not sure yet.  I mean, the story is what it would be in a hybrid, but I might use RPGMaker and just fake the farming sim aspect with cutscenes showing the player character going about farm tasks in between the VN scenes.  (Which would have the bonus of allowing me to easily add some turn-based combat periodically.)  Whether or not I do that will largely depend on how well the script turns out; if it seems really good, then I might actually go to the expense of hiring a programmer to make a farming sim to integrate it with.  (Presumably this would also mean using some engine other than Ren'py.  Like Unity or something.)

    All that is for later, though.  I'm still just working on the script.

    No, not even the script yet.  I'm still in the planning phase, actually.

    I've gotten to the point where I'm deciding on the other people in the village, who they are and what they do.  (Fortunately, unlike normal cozy farming sims, there's only one love interest, and the MC will fall for her regardless of the player's wishes.)

    Anyway, since the story and two leads are inspired by danmei, I'm basing the setting on ancient China, though it's a fictional world.  (Like with Avatar:  The Last Airbender, you know?)

    I like what I wrote today about one of the NPCs for the town where the heroine settles down:

Village Head – a dotty grandpa type.  Seems senile because he is.  But very friendly and warm, loved by all.  Just don’t expect an intelligent answer to your question.  The type to misquote philosophy rather than tell you what you want to know.  (Ack, I’m going to have to invent a Confucius-analog and write countless aphorisms of his!)

    I'm not looking forward to the whole "inventing a Confucius-analog" part, but I still love that character description.  🤣

IWSG: last IWSG of the year

 

    There's a creative title for ya.  😰

    Uh.  Anyway.  This month's discussion question is

December 4 question - Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

    And my answer is "No, I do not."  (To the first question.)

    I'm not a fan of cliffhangers in general; I like to wrap up the major story threads or it doesn't feel like it's actually finished.  Even in my series of seven novels (of which only three have been polished up for any kind of release, despite that I wrote the first drafts ten years ago 😭), I never had cliffhangers.  There were times after the leads had started learning about the overarching plot of the series that story threads from the larger plot were necessarily left unresolved, but the story of the individual novel was still neatly concluded.

    As a reader, I've mostly been fortunate enough not to run into them.  (Cannot say the same thing about as a watcher, but that's another question entirely.)  I think a particular novel I read last year that I really didn't like had something of a cliffhanger ending, but I disliked the whole work so much that I couldn't care in the slightest about the cliffhanger in that context.

    The closest I can think of to encountering a considerable number of cliffhangers as a reader is that I've been reading a lot of danmei novels (Chinese web novels featuring romances between men) in translation, and most of the chapters tend to end on cliffhangers, meaning that typically each volume of the novel ends on a cliffhanger, and that can be insanely frustrating.  Mitigated by the fact that there are mere months between volumes (since the novels are not licensed for translated publication until after they are complete) instead of the potential years there would be if one was waiting for a full novel to be written from scratch.  (Also if one is confident one will like the novel, one can buy all the volumes and not read it until it's complete.  At this point, I have decided not to do that unless I'm already familiar with the author's work.)

    I think if I did come across a writer who consistently preferred to end their works with cliffhangers, I would probably avoid their work, because yes, that would definitely be a turn-off to me as a reader.  Doing so once in a while because the larger plot of the series required it, that much I could live with, but doing it every time...I'd nope outta there.

    Changing the subject radically and probably pointlessly, there was a long discussion in a discord channel that got deleted the other day because it was instigated by someone being a bad actor.  Which is a pity, because the conversation started out with some really useful comments and suggestions by regular users of the channel.  I bring it up because one thing that someone said was so brilliant that it must be recorded somewhere for posterity, and this isn't the greatest of places, but...it's what I've got.

    They suggested that someone could write a character who knits socks with designs inspired by their favorite heavy metal bands.

    That would be epic.  Someone needs to write a character like that.

    (Unfortunately, I typically do not write in a modern setting these days, so it's unlikely to be me.)

NotNaNo '24, day 23 - breaking silence

     I haven't wanted to face the permanence of a blog post for quite a while.  Still don't, really, but...

    Anyway, I have still been writing every day, though there were a few days that I didn't even reach 500 words.  One day I didn't even reach 100.

    I've accomplished little things, though?

    I started the month trying to be hopeful and upbeat, so I was working on a happy fic, an AU for MDZS in which Wei Wuxian was raised at Cloud Recesses and so got to spend most of his life with Lan Wangji, and it was a No War AU, so everything was happy and hopeful all the way through.  (Which actually made it sort of boring after a while because that removed the entire plot of the novel and most of the conflict, but...)  I finished it a while back, and it rounded out at 19,513 words.

    I was also working on a pre-existing My Time at Sandrock fic, but that's been sort of...meh.  I don't know if I'll ever finish it, because it's turning out a little too much like "here's the plot of the game" and not sufficiently "here's my own story about the game's characters and world."

    After finishing the WWX-raised-in-Gusu fic, I decided to do a canon compliant AU based on The Untamed's version of MDZS, one in which Wen Qing survived, having been held as a prisoner by the Jin Clan for the last sixteen years.  (And which also ends with Wei Wuxian confessing his love to Lan Wangji, who of course has loved him from the day they met, so happy romantic ending there.)  That one I finished a few days ago, and it came to 11,177 words total.

    So, after puttering around pointlessly on the Sandrock fic for a while, yesterday's words were actually all just brainstorming words for the new fic I started today, which took some working out, because it's a massive and complicated idea.  (No idea how long it will end up being, but the idea is still massive and complicated.)

    It's a crossover between a modern AU of MDZS and Velvet Goldmine, inspired by the anime Ya Boy Kongming, in which a dying Zhuge Liang is transported to modern-day Tokyo (and youthified in the process, thankfully) where he helps a young singer with her career.  As I was watching that show, I had wanted to find a way to do that with MDZS, making Lan Wangji the one to be transported to the modern world.

    I figured out a way, and it's a multi-fandom crossover event, in that there will be a lot of other bands who are cameos from other fandoms, but the Velvet Goldmine connection is major, because Wei Wuxian's band is trying to enter a contest that will net them a contract from the record label owned by the now-septuagenarian Curt Wild.  And Wei Wuxian lives in the Chinatown of a fictional city that is actually the setting of my first visual novel, A Song of Warriors...just because.  (That visual novel was itself heavily inspired by Velvet Goldmine, which is kinda meta in and of itself, but...)

    I bring this up because it's particularly mind-boggling in connection with what happened today.

    There's a tradition in my family of family visits on the weekends.  Used to be on Sundays only, but it gets moved around a lot these days, and so today my brother and I went to visit my parents even though it's Saturday.  We made the rash decision to eat out for lunch instead of getting take-out somewhere, and that was crazy because there were mobs of people everywhere.

    After we ate, we went back to my parents' house to watch some TV together, because for some reason that's what we do.  And what we watched was the first episode of the Hulu show Interior Chinatown.  Which is set in the Chinatown of a fictional city.

    After that, my brother wanted to watch the 1980s-styled opening credits for the Obi-wan Kenobi mini-series that someone had put on Youtube a while back.  And that starred Ewan McGregor.  Who played Curt Wild.  (And the present-day sequences of Velvet Goldmine took place in the 1980s.  As did my visual novel, in fact.)

    This level of coincidence is just too weird, you know?

    Kinda freaks me out.

    It's like proof that we don't live in the real world, we live in a Matrix-like fake world.  One that I suspect has a very nasty virus.

    Uh.

    Yeah.

    Anyway.

    Here's my current NotNaNo graphs.

Current total is 44,048 words.  The by-the-day chart, though...

    It just shouldn't look like that.

    At all.

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 3: Day 3 hates me

     I'm gonna put a read more tag on here straight away, on account of talking about very normal things that make some men squick out because men are just too fragile.

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 2: yup, it's day two all right

     Not much of a title, I know.

    Anyhow, I mean, it was both a good day and a bad day for writing?  (Though something started that really should no longer be a thing anymore at my age, which really, really, really, really, really, really sucks...!)

    I got through a fair chunk of words--over 4k--and through several scenes.  Including, appropriately enough, the scene wherein the ghosts of Wei Wuxian's parents are raised to identify him.  (Since he's still a small child and doesn't remember who his parents were.  Which is canonically the case:  by the time he was found in the streets of Yiling, all he remembered was that his name had a "Ying" in it.)  Which is, of course, appropriate because today is the Day of the Dead.

    On the other hand, I'm not sure if I need to put anything else in there to fill in the gap between him being eight years old and him being fifteen years old.  Since it's at fifteen that the story really picks up, what with that being when the rest of the cast comes to study at Cloud Recesses.

    I figure I'll worry about that later, though.

    Still haven't decided if I want to use something else to keep track of my progress, or even if I want to bother with a chart like I did last year.

    For right now...

    Words written as of yesterday:  2,700

    Words written today:  4,348

    Total words written in November to date:  7,048

NaNo Rebel '24, Day 1

     So...yeah, I could actually be doing this differently this year.  Someone in the writing channel of the game dev Discord server I'm in provided a link with a list of alternative writing challenge/tracking sites for November, and some of them looked pretty promising, but I didn't really feel like actually dealing with any of them today.

    I'm exhausted for a lot of reasons.

    First, the night before Halloween, a tornado warning ripped through here, and I was torn out of my sound sleep at about two in the morning by my phone blaring a tornado warning at me, and I didn't get back to sleep until about five in the morning.  (Ironically, despite being awake, I didn't hear the actual tornado sirens, because the TV show I had going to put myself back to sleep drowned them out.)  So yesterday I was operating on a sleepless night bookended by about two hours of sleep on either end.

    Needless to say, I was a total wreck yesterday.  And although I did get a good night's sleep last night, that wasn't really enough to make up for it, so I'm still not on top of my game today.  (Even worse, there's no leftover Halloween candy!  The local grocery store had already gotten rid of it all by this past Monday, and I of course went to my parents' house as usual so I wouldn't have to personally deal with trick-or-treaters, and they didn't buy enough so they actually ran out.  So I get no candy today! 😭)

    Then my brother and I went and tried to vote early.  It took us forever to find a parking place--literally the last one there--and then we went inside past the stupidly offensive signs (the anti-abortion people are desperate and making up the dumbest lies to encourage people to send us sliding down along the path towards The Handmaid's Tale)--and found that the line inside looked like it was at least an hour and a half long.  We were neither of us in any condition for that, so we just got the heck out of there.  Apparently the early voting will also be available over the weekend, so we're hoping that maybe it won't be too bad on Sunday morning, but...

    Anyway.

    Only by lunchtime did I manage to start writing for the day.  (Though I did actually write the first scene on my phone before lunch.  It's only a bit under 600 words, though.)

    It's a promising start for the fic.  (I decided to go with an AU where Wei Wuxian is raised among the Lan Clan.  Probably been done lots of times before, but...🤷  Probably most MDZS AU ideas have been done before in some capacity or another.  But it's not like any two fanfic authors would ever put exactly the same spin on the same idea, so I figure there's no point in worrying about it.)  I don't think it's shaping up to be very long, which is very good considering how long the last one ended up being!

    Anyway, I'll worry about how to properly keep track of my progress tomorrow.

    For the moment, I'll just use words/numbers on the screen:

    Goal for the month:  50,000 words

    Today's words:  2,700 words

    Total for the month:  2,700 words  (obviously!)

    And now I finally get to play My Time at Sandrock for the first time in about a month, because the 1.4 update is finally out on the PS5, so hopefully Fang will actually deliver his special line at the end of "The Goat," as that bug is allegedly fixed in 1.4.  (If he doesn't, then there wasn't a heck of a lot of point to me waiting all this time.  Though at least this way I'll get his romance mission from the new DLC before marriage instead of after.  Which is something, I guess.  Wish my Builder didn't have to be quite such a tiny little guy, though.  It's hard for Fang's mouth to reach his lips.  I shudder to think of the contortions they have to put the really tall love interests like Owen and Logan through!  (Though I'll definitely do a Logan playthrough eventually, so I guess I'll find out in due time...))

I feel like I should be worrying

 It's what, the 29th of October?

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

I could try writing prompts.

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

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

Or...

...um...

I could try writing prompts.

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

Or I could try writing prompts.

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

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

Gnh.

I just got nothing, you know?

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

IWSG - July 3, 2024

 

    Well.  Imaginative title, no?

    *cough*

    Anyway.

    I don't really have much to say, since my writing life is still in a bit of a lull (all the more so now that I have a pinched nerve in my shoulder and can't really do anything without pain), so I'll just answer the monthly question:

July 3 question - What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?

    I don't know if "favorite" applies as such, but I typically use Microsoft Word, just because it's what I'm used to.  Once, years ago, I tried downloading the demo for Scrivener, since NaNoWriMo always gave out half-off coupon codes for it to winners, but at that time I was put off by the always online nature of it, and it was also too complicated at a first glance.  I might not be as bothered by the latter now, and I'm definitely used to the former by now (though I still prefer the offline nature of Word over anything that's always connecting to the 'net) so who knows what I might think if I tried it again.

    I also use Google Docs pretty heavily because that way I can write on my phone but still have access to it on my computer.  (There are probably ways to do that with Word, but that would likely either not be possible with a phone as old as mine (I am now almost a full 10 versions of iPhone behind the current model) and/or would require the subscription-model Word, whereas I have the one-time-purchase-in-exchange-for-no-updates-model of Word.)  Sometimes if I'm writing a short, simple VN I might write directly into Ren'py, and in the past I've written in TWINE to make use of its easy branching feature, but mostly it's either Word or Google Docs.

    I've heard good things about Obsidian, though.  Keep meaning to look into it, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

    As to "why do you recommend them"...I'm not sure I'd say that I do recommend them, just that I use them.  My use of Word is pretty no-frills; almost anything that can accept text could do the same things.  I use it because I'm used to it.  I don't know that any of its features are especially outstanding, unique or even necessarily worth the cost of the program.  On the free end of the spectrum, Google Docs is convenient, but I've heard horror stories about people losing all their work because something happened to cause Google to delete their account, and I've also heard that they feed documents from Google Docs into AI training programs, so that's horrible.  (The plus side to that is that if they feed my docs into an AI training program, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot:  Half my files in Google Docs are just my nebulous, random, sprawling thoughts, complete with messy counter-thoughts inserted in brackets in the middle of a sentence, as well as words or entire passages that are in strikethrough in the middle of paragraphs or sentences, leaving things that an AI would treat as, for example, a sentence with two verbs back to back, because it wouldn't recognize that one of them was struck out because I picked a new word I liked better but didn't want to delete the old one yet.  There are also quite a few that are half or more in Ren'py code, a lot of them that have Chinese words inserted into them willy-nilly because they're Mo Dao Zu Shi fan fiction, and so on.  There's even one that has both Ren'py code and Chinese words all over the place, being the partial script of a fan game. 🤣)

    I don't think I'd say any of them are my "all time favorite" or that I "cannot live without," but I do use Word pretty much every day that I'm planning to do any writing.

IWSG: um

    I an at a weird lull in my writing life.

    It's not writer's block, though.  It's more like being without a project.

    I mean, I kinda have a project, in that I started the script for a goofy visual novel, but...it's not really the same thing, since I feel no particular obligation to finish it, not even an obligation to myself.

    I do have a lot of story ideas sitting around waiting for me to start working on them (or in the case of most of them, "start fleshing them out to be sufficient to work on"), but...most of them are likely to turn out to be really long.  Hopefully not as long as the one that I spent eleven months writing, but it's not impossible.  (There is also the terrifying possibility that some of them might end up even longer.)

    That massive work is kind of one of the reasons I don't want to start any potentially long projects, actually.  Because I plan to start work on its second draft in August (it's fan fiction, y'see, and I plan to rewatch the source material starting near the end of June) so I don't want to be deep in the middle of some other project.

    Probably what I should do with the intervening time is to start the heavy research that I'll need to put in before I can rewrite book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne series.  In that book they visit Babylon, so I need to know what it was like in approximately 1237 BCE.  (Yeah, I actually have a date that specific.  Though it's never used in the books themselves, obviously.  But I needed to know what year it was to know what else was going on in the world during their travels.  (Also, I had to assign specific years to a great many events in the past in order to have a definite chronology for the most pertinent events in Greek mythology so that the novels will remain consistent on those various points.  Also so I'd know how old the various surviving Greeks who took part in the Trojan War are.  And how long it had been since various events like the exploits of Heracles, etc.)  Especially when they visit Egypt in book five.  😅  Fortunately, that'll be a lot easier to research when I get there, since I just have to look up the late reign of Ramses II.)

    For the moment, I am (somewhat to my shame) mostly just letting my brain unwind with video games. 😅  Though that kinda makes me feel like a fraud as a writer...

    I realize that this has not been much of a post, but unfortunately this month's suggested question is not one that I have anything to say about, so...I didn't really have anything else to talk about.

IWSG - Yikes!

 

    Normally, I pre-write these days in advance, but this month I've been so distracted by April A-to-Z that I totally forgot. 😰  So I'm gonna have to hasten out a post that will likely be even sloppier and more disjointed than usual.

    I've been in a bit of a muddle all month, but it got worse about...hmm...I want to say about a week and a half ago?  Somewhere around there.  Unlike on my computer, on the browser on my cell phone, I keep a whole bunch of tabs always open so I don't have to mess around with bookmarks and stuff.  And one day I opened the tab that is always aimed at the back-end of this blog so I could keep working on my April A-to-Z posts when it gave me this message that it couldn't load any of my data.  The posts, pages and even statistics all said that.  I wrote it off as a momentary glitch, and went about my business, but then it still said that four or five hours later.  Everything was still there--if I clicked the "view my blog" button, I could still see all my content--but I couldn't access anything, so I was afraid my blog had been frozen pending deletion, or at least pending an investigation into whether or not it needed to be deleted.

    So at that point I absolutely started panicking.  I tried using the help page to see if my blog was disabled, and came to the conclusion that my account was disabled (despite that I could log into my email just fine) and tried to start the appeal process, only since the account was not, in fact, disabled, obviously that didn't work.  After freaking out for a couple hours, I managed to download a full back-up copy of my blog....and then noticed a new help page indicating a way to get an indicator that a blog (rather than an account) was disabled and how to appeal that decision, so I went back to the back-end page...and everything was totally back to normal.

    I still have zero clue what happened.

    What I do know is that I figured that if my blog was going to be disabled, it would be because of the work of (fan) fiction I had posted on some pages, so I reverted them all to draft and across three days painstakingly copy-pasted the text from the blog (where it had received various minor edits in the year it had been up) to AO3.  (Where, ironically, it's gotten more kudos than it got views on the blog...)

    Anyway...my heart palpitations are definitely exacerbated by stress (at this point, I think it's safe to say they're not caused by it, though I still don't know what did start this condition) so that needless to say caused my heart to start misbehaving for a couple of days straight.  (And that was after I'd already had some issues because I was working too hard at the April A-to-Z process!)  So that was all kinds of not fun.

    Um.

    That's so not a writing thing, even though it's tangentially related.

    I didn't mean to go into so much detail.  (This is why I normally pre-write, so I have time to start over if I get derailed and run off on a tangent like this.)

    Anyway.

    I'm also very distracted because I'm in the final stages of getting The Martial Maenads, the third in my more-or-less YA series, ready for release.  I finished writing the glossary for the interactive version, but I'm using a different program for code entry now (because I learned the program I used to use has a habit of accidentally deleting your saved code!) and it was giving me all kinds of problems yesterday, triggering another heart palpitation, from frustration more than stress.  (Doesn't help that my computer is evidently too much of a potato for that program, and it chugs constantly when it's open...)  I should be able to finish getting the glossary into the code today, and then I just need to write a couple of post-novel mini-essays, maybe, or maybe I just need to write up that pre-novel essay on the alternate theogony that got introduced in book two?  Well, either way, that shouldn't take too long.  And then I only have to reread the novel twice--once in the Ren'py version and then once after posting the text online, since I find I can spot a lot of new errors by looking at it on my phone on AO3--and make any needed changed, then it can finally be released into the world that doesn't actually care in the slightest about it.

    I'm looking forward to finally getting that released, because I told myself "no more writing new things until after the release!" to force myself to stop goofing off by writing more fanfic instead of working on my actual release.  (Bad enough that I was putting so much into blogging over April that I barely touched it until the blog posts were all written...)  It's kind of weird how not writing can cause just as much stress as writing can.

    Aaaaaaand I feel like I have said nothing of any relevance to anyone, but I can't think of anything else to say. 😭  I'll try to get next month's post pre-written so it will be less of a gibbering mess.