MDZS vs The Untamed

    Since I've finally finished reading The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Mo Dao Zu Shi)*, I thought I'd make the first of two posts comparing and contrasting the novel with its live-action adaptation, which was given the English title The Untamed, which I suspect is not an accurate translation of its Chinese title, Chen Qing Ling, but I don't know that for sure.  There's also an animated adaptation, but I haven't gone looking for a place to watch that yet, so I can't make any comparisons at this time.  I do plan on doing so in the future, though!  I say "the first of two posts" because this post is meant to be if not fully spoiler-free at least spoiler-light, while I want to make a more detailed post later that will have heavier spoilers.  (That second post may wait until I've reread the novel and/or rewatched the show, however.)

    * I should admit that "finished" may be something of a relative term here, and that there are some issues with how I finished reading it at the moment.  You see, I've been reading the official translations of all three of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's novels, the editions printed for the American market by Seven Seas.  But I was growing very annoyed at how long I was having to wait to get to the one thing that The Untamed denied me:  seeing the two leads get together romantically.  So, after reading volume 4 (of 5), I went ahead and read the contents of the fifth volume on WebNovel.  (My plan remains as it always was, to reread the first four volumes leading into the publication of the final volume, of course.  So yes, I will still be buying that one.  In case you were curious/worried.)  When I first learned that there was a translation on WebNovel, I looked up a little bit about the site (service?) to see if it was legit.  And the basic info I found--which was largely geared at writers contemplating publish their work there--said that it was, so I assumed that meant the version on there was also "official," and that the author would be getting a share of any profits that translation garnered.  This was stupidly naïve of me, as it turned out.  There were at least three full translations on the site, plus some others that hadn't finished.  Of those three, one only had the novel and none of the bonus content, while the others had differing amounts of the bonus content.  (I suspect there's at least one more bonus chapter, as there's an awful lot of official merch of the two leads in wedding clothes, but there wasn't a chapter with a wedding in either translation, so...either there's another bonus chapter neither included, or maybe the animated version had a wedding at the end?)  Both of the full versions with bonus chapters turned out to have copy-pasted the text from the same fan translation site.  🤬  So, as unofficial as you can get!  😖  I don't like anything about that being the case, but at least it was only one volume I read that way.  (Though I am now in quite a conundrum regarding Heaven Official's Blessing, which I had hoped to do the same thing with so I won't have to wait until September to find out how the story ends!  But I'm reluctant to even start reading any translations of it that might be on WebNovel now that I know they'd be unauthorized translations (and almost undoubtedly posted there by someone other than the translator!), so I don't know what to do about that. 😭  Fan translation sites are no good for that, though, because they pretty much always take down their translations once someone's licensed the property to do an official translation, meaning that any fan translations that are still available for Heaven Official's Blessing are likely ones that have been copy-pasted like those MDZS translations.)

    Okay, so the real post starts from here!  (If you haven't read or watched any of it and don't want to risk even light spoilers, leave now! 😁)

IWSG: I had something I wanted to say, but...

 

    Frustratingly, over the past week I came up with two or three things I wanted to say in this month's post.  Then I had a little health kerfuffle on Monday morning (slept on my arm wrong and cut off all the flow of blood to my hand for long enough that until I massaged the blood back into it I literally couldn't move my fingers 😱) and that kinda drove most of the thoughts right out of my head.

    I do remember one of the topics, though:

    I've been concerned lately about how one-dimensional and shallow the characters turn out when I try to write a villain, particularly of the grandiose "I'm going to conquer/destroy the world" variety that some of my fantasy plots require.  Admittedly, the absurdly over-the-top goals of such a villain are already rather far removed from any sense of realism, but doesn't that just make it more important to make their characterization less absurd?

    I came up with an idea to write a fairly simple game where you're actually playing such a villain (well, a villain-to-be, really), but I'm not sure if I'm actually going to get it off the ground.  It's at that planning stage where I know the basic elements of the story, but haven't defined any of the other characters beyond the fact that they have to exist.  😰  Sometimes I never manage to get plots past that point, because I just can't come up with any interesting characters who work in those particular story slots.

    Hmm.

    Now that I think about it, I've picked up some various character creation aids over the years.  Maybe I should use one of those to flesh out those ideas...not that they've ever worked before, but maybe there's a first time for everything...

    Overall, though, I really do have trouble making villains--and even non-villain jerks--into real, believable, breathing characters, rather than simple caricatures.  I need to work on that, but it's hard to know where to start.  (I mean, if you look at real-world villains and extreme jerks, the majority of them really do seem to be nothing but flat caricatures rather than fully rounded actual people...)

    Maybe what I need to do is write something that's sort of a mystery, where you know that one person out of a group is secretly doing this, that or the other terrible thing, but they all act like nice, sweet people, so you have to piece together the clues and find the one who's actually evil.  Except that doesn't really feel like it would accomplish the goal?  Maybe a mystery where they're all jerks, but one of them  is also evil, and you have to figure out which one.

    Hmm.

NaNo Rebel '22, Day 30: Big Finish!

        (Also, a phone-submitted blog post.  'Cause lazy.)

         So, I really wanted to pull out all the stops today!

         I had hoped to rewrite a full 20k of The Martial Maenads today, but alas, I only got through a bit over 15k of it.  Still, that put me at 33,599 words rewritten in three days, so I think that's a pretty strong finish!  (The draft I'm rewriting is a bit over 100k, so I'm almost a third of the way through the draft!)

         I also came up with yet another MDZS AU fanfic idea, which it took me another 1,769 words to describe, so that's a few more words for the NotNaNo pile!  😆  (And this time it's truly something I can't write yet, 'cause it crosses over with both of MXTX's other novels, so until I've read the rest of Heaven Official's Blessing, I really won't be able to write it.  There's probably whole characters who haven't even been introduced yet where I am now...)

          Anyway!  Final NotNaNo totals:

          Today's word count:  17,392!

           And....drumroll please....

                     🥁🥁🥁🥁

            Final word count for November...

                           99,068!!!

       .....dang.

       Maybe I should go back and write another 932 words to get that to an even 100k.  (Or 933 to get it to the perfect palindrome 100,001...)

        Hmm.

        That next scene in the book was about 775 words...

       .....HMMMMMMM.......

-------------------------------------------------------

          Yup.

           I went back in to do a little more.

           Added 933 words, so now my word count for the month is a perfect 100,001!  😆

NaNo Rebel '22, Day 29: Big Day, Late Post

     Today turned out to be a surprisingly huge writing day!

    Admittedly, the writing on The Martial Maenads is rewriting in a third draft, so there's large chunks that I'm just retyping rather than properly rewriting, but most paragraphs get at least a tweak, if not major changes, so...hopefully it counts?  ("Counts" I say, as if there was anyone who even could make rules for what "counts" in my totally unofficial personal NaNoWriMo that doesn't use their new, ugly site.)

    Got 11,518 words rewritten of The Martial Maenads today!  That may well be a personal best!  (Even for rewriting, I mean.  I'm pretty sure it far tops my best day for actual writing...though there was one day in an official NaNo where I got about 10k words written, so it doesn't win by very much.  That was probably the year that I broke 200k...)

    I also wrote down another MDZS AU fanfic plot after my bath, for an additional 1,251 words.

    Thus, my total for the day is a whopping 12,769!

    That brings my total for this November up to 81,676!

    I'm hoping that I can dedicate all day tomorrow to writing, so I can really beef up my numbers.  XD  (The fact that tomorrow is going to be totally freezing (after today was so warm I didn't even need a jacket) may help me stay in and just write write write write...)

NaNo Rebel '22, Day 28: Glass Onion

     I did all my writing this morning--redid the prologue of The Martial Maenads, to the tune of 6,458 words--because this afternoon we all went out to see Glass Onion, the sequel (sort of?) to Knives Out.

    OMG, so good!  (Which, really, is only to be expected, given how awesome Knives Out was.)

    I don't want to say too much about the movie, because it's definitely best not to have a lot of spoilers going in, but I can safely say that everything was just top-notch:  script, direction, acting, set design, costumes (omg, some of the costumes!!), everything.  Part of me wants to mention some of the cameos, but those, too, probably are best experienced as a surprise, so I won't.  Since it's made apparent so early in the film, though, I'll go ahead and mention that the movie also gets an A+ in "perfect release timing," because Edward Norton's character is essentially a parody of Elon Musk.  (Not 1-to-1, mind you, but close enough that the influence is obvious.)

    Thankfully, I don't write mysteries, so I don't have to feel pitiful by comparison.  ;)  (Now that I think about it, though, this makes both the last two movies I've seen in theaters murder mysteries:  the previous movie I went to see was See How They Run, which was in most respects just as good, but just didn't quite click with me for whatever reason.)

    Anyway, my NotNaNo totals:

    Today's word count, 6,458

    Words written in November to date:  68,907

    (Though I look at how I phrased that and feel like I ought to log into the NaNo site and get all my past November word counts, and all my word counts from my past NotNaNo Novembers, and add them all to this year's total and look at how many words I've written in the month of November over the last 11 years...)

NaNo Rebel '22, Days 26 & 27: One more task done(ish)

     So, yesterday I was sorta wiped, mentally, and didn't feel like booting up my internet computer (my novels are on my beloved 15+ year old laptop that has never once touched the internet), so I didn't post anything, but I did get my writing in!  Yesterday I added another 1,303 words to my total, exclusively working on the new content for The Golden God of Aiolia, most of which was in one big 940-word chunk!  (I handled making that battle interactive in a different way than I had in any of the previous ones, where each menu gives you two choices, and one of them leads straight to the end of the fight, but the other keeps leading to more choices until you finally get to one that either leads to a game over or to an altered version of the end of the fight; I've already forgotten which it was...😅)

    Then today I actually finished up the new content for The Golden God of Aiolia, another 713 words...plus I came up with a really good idea for how to develop the relationship in one of the MDZS AU fanfic ideas I'd had before, and wrote another 1123 words describing the idea. 😅

    I'm not sure where my word count will come from for the remaining three days of November, though, since my next task ought to be getting the new material for The Golden God of Aiolia coded into its Ren'py version, which isn't an adding words kind of thing.  (I mean, there will be some words of code, but it's not the same thing at all, plus there wouldn't be very many of them.)

    I suppose rather than diving right into the coding, I could start work on the next draft of book three, The Martial Maenads, but...honestly, I still have some questions about how to handle one of the new characters, and I don't know if I can get advice in time to start work already by tomorrow. 😰  I should probably also reread the current draft before I start on the next one.

    Technically, I spotted enough errors in The Golden God of Aiolia that I probably ought to read it over again to fix things, but if I do that, shouldn't I also go back and fix up book one while I'm at it?  It's sort of endless...

    ...so maybe I shouldn't try to do anything more than adding the interactivity and the new slight sub-plot (it's more just a background story thread than a proper sub-plot) right now and wait until I've gotten the entire series released and then do a proper fixing up on them all.

    Hmm.

    I'll have to think about that.

    Anyway!

    Word counts!

    November 26:

    Words written:  1,303

    Month to date:  60,613

    November 27:

    Words written: 1,836

    Month to date:  62,449

NaNo Rebel '22, Day 25: Finally moving on

     Today, I really did finally start working on the upgrade to The Golden God of Aiolia.  I redid the first Deidameia scene to imply that she's actually only into women and thus only liked Achilles because he was dressed as a girl, and I completed the first interactive bit.  Well, completed writing the new text for it.  It's not coded, and certainly not put into Ren'py yet, but...that's much faster than figuring out how the heck I wanted to go about adding interactivity to an already completed fight scene.  (Even worse, a fight scene between three young people and a twice-life-size stone statue with limited intellect.  Much reduced options for things to happen there, esp. when one of the people in question can't really take part in the fight.)

    The next scene on the schedule for reworking is the second spot to add some interactivity, a big battle scene...which I somehow managed to completely avoid adding an actual battle to the first time around.  😅  So, it kinda actually needed an upgrade there anyway.  But I suck at writing fight scenes in any way, so I rather choked on that and ended up stopping after the first section of new text.  (I'd had enough trouble adding to the first one!  Trying to write two combat scenes in one day was just too much for my poor brain!)

    Trying to count my words for all that was kinda crazy, though:  I had to just sort of highlight the new bits and get the word count for each individual new bit and then add them together.  (One of them was literally only one word!)

    Anyway, the word count I ended up with for today was 1,423, which would be bad if I hadn't hit 50k yet, but since I have, I think it's acceptable.  :)

    Total words written in November to date:   59,310

    BTW, I wanted to share something really stupid I did yesterday.  A brief quote:

"What is wrong with you?!" Wei Ying shouted!

    I have no idea why I put an exclamation point after "shouted," but it's so funny I couldn't bear to delete it yet.  😂  (I'll get rid of it when I edit the fic before posting it, though...)