Not-NaNo Day 7 (Insert Clever Title Here)

 Yup, it's only the seventh of November.

And it was almost eighty degrees here today.  That's summer weather.  In November.

Ugh.

On the plus side, I was somehow able to get in about two hours of work in between getting my car, going out to a celebratory lunch with my family now that the election results are finally official, and going to the mall to return some jeans that didn't work out and buy some stuff at Lush and also waste a lot of time and money in the new anime-and-other-fun-stuff store that just opened up next to Lush.

I say "about" two hours because I really goofed up on the timer a lot today.  There were times I forgot to turn it on and times I forgot to turn it off.  But I think they more or less evened out.  (On the whole I'm more likely to forget to turn it on than to turn it off.)

It was mostly more fiddly work with getting the glossary into the TWINE setup than any actual writing, though.

On the plus side, the escape game is now more or less finished.  I want to spend a long time with it tomorrow or the next day  or the next day just playing it over and over to look for any mistakes in coding or wording or anything else, but it's more or less done.  Enough that I can start focusing on the glossary for the other game instead. ;)  (Thankfully, the game jam's due date is the end of the month, so I have tons of time to play through the game and make sure it's all okay.)

Not-NaNo Day 6: Well...this has been a day...

 Ugh, and what a day it's been!

It started last night, actually.  My brother invited me to come over to his place to watch some stuff and have dinner.  Totally normal.

Only then my car didn't start.

So this morning I had to call AAA, have them come take a look at it, and nope, they couldn't fix it.  They could get it going, but they couldn't just replace the dead battery.  I had to take it to the dealership.

So I leave the car at the dealership, and my brother and I go out to get some lunch and run some errands while it's with the dealership.  And I get the call that it's ready to go while we're out...

...but before we're done with our errands, I am hit by...I don't know quite what to call it.  I suppose it was just an extreme reaction to eating greasier food than my stomach is used to, but it was so severe I was afraid it might be food poisoning.

Consequently, I was left so incapacitated that I was unable to go pick up  my car.

I was even feeling so out of it that I didn't think I'd be up to any kind of further work on my project, and ended up turning on Disney+ to watch a movie with the four slices of toast that made up my dinner.  Thankfully, the toast seemed to help a lot, so I was able to get back to work after the movie was over (and after I finished looking up some of the voices on imdb, lol), and I managed to get some more work done on the escape game, even if it was mostly boring grind work.

Before having to deal with the car, of course, I had done the graphical work I'd needed to do yesterday, and also written up one small part of the glossary for the previous game.  (Okay, technically what I did was copy-paste the glossary from the escape game, deleting, shortening and extending various entries as needed.)  So at least I did  a little writing as well as coding.  And being sick to my stomach. :(

But now I'm in this annoying situation where I still have to go get my car tomorrow.  (This is especially annoying because I had double-checked with the person I checked the car in with that I would be called when it was ready, because I hadn't been last time, meaning I hadn't been able to pick it up until the next day...and so what happened this time?  I still ended up not picking it up until the next day...)

Anyway, at least I did manage to get in two hours of work today, so that's something. :)

Not-Nano Day 5: Steadily Climbing...

Actually, I didn't do much writing today.  I spent my roughly 2 and a quarter hours working on coding, mostly.  Largely in bashing my head against the brick wall that was me trying to figure out how in the blue blazes to force TWINE to let me get rid of my pretty text box for one passage so I could have a full-screen title splash.  (It would help if I had any understanding of CSS rather than merely adapting a template a helpful individual posted on itch.io, of course...)

But the good news is that I did eventually figure out how to do it.  (It helped when I finally noticed that "~=" is CSS for "=" not for "does not equal".  That sped things up enormously.)

I also remembered to go back into my glossary and add in an explanation of why I describe Achilles as having red hair, which is rather unexpected since a) he's described as a blond in the Iliad, and b) most ethnically Greek people tend to have dark hair.  (Of course, with his descent from an ocean goddess and his linguistically non-Greek name, there's not really too much reason to think he's ethnically Greek...)

Oh, and thanks to a suggestion from someone on itch.io, the escape game now has a name!  Yay! :D  I even found a way to express the name in Ancient Greek for the title screen. :)

I also prepared all but one of the images I'm going to use, thanks to my old computer still having an ancient copy of Photoshop on it.  (The new graphics programs have been made impossible to use, having way too many buttons and way too little text to tell you what the *#@&$*T%& the buttons do.  When I got this new computer up and running, I downloaded the latest version of GIMP, but I can't use it for much more than changing image sizes, because they've made its functions too obscure.)  I needed one more change of time image, though, and I've downloaded the base image for that, so I'll be able to get that done tomorrow.

I'm going two routes for the images.  One route is genuine ancient art (well, some of the Mycenaean frescoes are very heavily reconstructed, but...they're as close as we can get to genuine at present) and the other is graphically manipulated photographs of locations on Lesbos (where the game takes place) to make them kinda-sorta look a little bit like frescoes, maybe.  (All the images are from Wikimedia Commons, of course, and I'm going to have a credits page in the game crediting the people who took the photos and there will be links to the download pages, too.)  The "Photoshopped photograph" is not the most professional of looks for game graphics, needless to say, but as this is a free game I'm uploading for a game jam, I'm hoping people will forgive that. ;)  The hardest part was that one of the photos I wanted to use had a modern road smack dab in the middle of the picture.  Fortunately, it also had a tall tree in the foreground...so now it has two tall trees in the foreground. :P

Tomorrow I'll finish up that last image, and then I'll probably do a little work on the glossary for the earlier game before I switch back to this computer and keep coding.  (It may sound absurd to have two working computers, but the thing is that my "good" laptop, the one I use for writing, is at this point so old that I'm not sure when I got it.  (I know for sure I already had it in 2008, but I don't remember for how long.)  It's lasted so long because it never, ever touches the Internet, and I'm going to keep it that way.  So while I probably paid more for this new computer I'm writing on now, it's still not my "good" computer.  Heck, this one still has all the paint on its keys!  And they're not all shiny from having been pressed a zillion times, either.  What kind of proper computer keyboard still has all the letters visible, and the keys aren't smooth and sweet to touch?  No kind at all!)

IWSG - Not sure what to say

 

I'm going to get this posted before I go check the election results (if there even are any results yet), so I'm a little too on edge to have much to say about my current writing projects, so instead I guess I'll answer the optional question for this month, which is:

November 4 question - Albert Camus once said, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Flannery O’Conner said, “I write to discover what I know.” Authors across time and distance have had many reasons to write. Why do you write what you write?

In some ways, I'm not even sure what the answer is.  I mean, I know I write because I have stories inside me that want to get out, but as I typically don't share the stories with people (except when they're fan fiction, which I do post online), it's not like I can claim any great purpose behind them.  (I like that Camus quote, though.  That's great.)  Sometimes I do vent my fears, frustrations and (social) desires into fiction, but...more often than not it's mere empty escapism.

What I do know is that if I don't write--even if I'm writing in a non-traditional way, like my past things written in screenplay form, or my current dabbling in interactive fiction--it's mostly something to keep me sane.  I feel like if I don't write, I'll lose whatever small semblance of sanity I have.  (Possibly due to the excess of stories banging around inside my head.)

Hmmm.

Feels like I should have a longer, deeper answer than that, but I can't really think of one.  (It's hard to think at all right now.) 

I guess, in closing, I want to apologize to anyone who sees this and left a comment on last month's post, because I was so completely overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to put in on my game jam project that I ended up not checking for comments until after the jam ended (on the 25th!) at which point answering comments felt sort of, uh, weird, to say the least.

Not-NaNo Day 3 - Well...

 So, to start with, I totally goofed in yesterday's post.  I didn't "almost do two hours" yesterday.  I almost did three hours yesterday, so yesterday I was actually ten minutes short of being caught up to doing two hours a day.  How I missed that, I do not know.

Anyway, I did about two and a half hours today, and finished up the glossary for the escape game.  I still need to rework the one scene I got feedback on, and then replace Thessaly/Thessalian with Aiolia/Aiolian, and run the spellcheck on the glossary, but mostly the writing is done for that one and I can move on to getting it coded and getting it ready graphically.

The glossary, btw, clocks in at 7,101 words, so if I was counting words, I'd be in good shape for 50K!  That says, to me, that my choice of two hours a day seems like a good one; if I stick to that, I should be at the equivalent of my usual 90-200k words for November.  (Okay, I only broke 200k once, and it was for a trilogy of novellas, but still, it did happen!)

I'm actually surprised that I managed to get in two and a half hours, considering I lost an hour to going to vote, and then another three or so to having lunch with my brother, watching the first episode of season two of The Mandalorian (promising start to the season, btw), and then watching some random Rifftrax stuff.  We had planned on watching something with Sean Connery in it as a tribute, but then stuff happened and we decided to put that off for another day and watch short things instead so I could be home in time to eat my own food instead of his (and/or instead of eating out for two meals in a row).

.

..

...

....

Needless to say, I'm antsy about how the election is going to turn out.  I did what I could by voting and by giving some money to the candidates I support, but I couldn't give much money because I'm out of a job, and I'm too socially phobic to do any volunteer work, so...I mean...ugh, it's just all so...I don't even know what words to use to describe it all.  Other than, you know, a bad dream.  (I was seriously afraid to go to the polling place because I was worried there would be gangs of men with massive guns trying to intimidate people out of voting.  I should have known not to worry about that, of course, because I live in a middle class neighborhood that's mostly white people; the gangs of armed white supremacists will have been out menacing low income people of color, not middle-class white people.  And I hate that we live in a world where people can do that--a world where they actually do that.)

I'm probably going to stay up late and do my IWSG post shortly after midnight, so that I don't have to try and be coherent tomorrow morning when preliminary results may begin showing up.  (Though realistically, we can't know the actual results for days, if not weeks, given all the mail-in ballots.)

Not-NaNo Day Two: Nothing to Report

 Of course, the thing about having to post daily to update my status on the Not-NaNo progress is that there isn't actually usually anything for me to post about.

I almost did the full two hours today that I was thinking I probably want to do, which still puts me an hour behind.  (I likely would have done more if I hadn't had to do things like stop for lunch.  Also to log onto the computer to make sure that my payment went through to the sewer district, 'cause they called me to say "oh, you're still late on your payment!" even though I knew I had already paid it (and according to my bank's site, the payment went through today) and other tedious things like that.)

I will probably either end up making up the difference and then some tomorrow or fall further behind.  Depends what happens when I get back from the polls.  (I know, I should have already voted, but the creep in charge of my state's election board sent out this smarmy notice about all the ways you can vote with this big, bolded statement of "Make sure your vote counts!" beside Nov. 3 at the polls, with the not-so-subtle implication that he's going to do everything in his power to throw out every single vote cast in every other way.  And this election is too important for my vote to get pitched out by a corrupt creep.  So I have to risk my life going to the polls tomorrow.  (And no, that's not an exaggeration.  I have asthma and am in generally not great health, plus being obese, so if I get it, it's over.))  I may want to immerse myself in writing fiction as escapism, or I may huddle on my brother's couch to escape into watching something as escapism, or...who knows.  I'm trying not to think about it right now because there's not really anything I can do at this point.

Anyway, I guess I never did talk about the other game I'd like to make someday.  It wouldn't be very writing heavy, though, so I'd have to be working with at least one other person and probably at least two, and I'd write the text and then they'd do the art and actual game design.  Because the other game would be a Metroidvania with quasi-rogue-lite elements.  (And if you don't understand those words, probably best to just skip the rest of this post.  I'm about to go all weird and gamery.)

See, I was messing around with the Randomizer Mode in Bloodstained, rather than play something new, because it was less likely to grab me and tear me away from my writing.  And when I took Miriam in to get a haircut, I noticed the short twintails hairstyle, and without even thinking about it, I was suddenly making the main hair color a very pale blonde, and the tips blue, then heightening the red and black in her costume, making her almost-but-not-quite Harley Quinn....and then it hit me that it would be so freaking cool to have a co-op Metroidvania with Harley and Poison Ivy as the main characters.

Now, obviously, that would never happen for real.  But an indie game with a hyperactive female clown and a plant-controlling lady who are in no way or shape possibly even slightly connected to said copyrighted characters...*cough*cough*...no problem there, right? ;P

So, yeah, that's the Metroidvania I want to write.  Specifically, the not-actually-Harley character and the not-actually-Ivy character are lovers, and you start out in control of one, trying to rescue the other from...uh...whoever the bad guy is (haven't got that far in my very idle conjectures yet) and whenever you lose all your health, then she gets captured, but guess what?  Her girlfriend had managed to escape, and so she has to go right back in to try and rescue the one who was trying to rescue her in the first place!  And so on, so that every time you want to swap characters, you have to get KO'd first.  (Obviously, that would mean that you wouldn't want any completely game-breaking differences between them.  Maybe one is a little faster and the other a little tougher or something, but both would have to have equivalent abilities in terms of movements, attacks, etc.  So while the not-actually-Ivy would be able to use a thorn whip to swing on posts or pull herself up to higher levels or whatever, the not-actually-Harley would have, I dunno, like springs in her boots or something, something to achieve the same results but in a different way.)

Not-NaNo Day One: Enter the Double-Rebel

 So, it's the first of November.  And as people around the world are hunkering down to work on brand new novels, I am hunkering down to...write whatever the heck I feel like.

Last year, in my one-woman boycott of the official NaNoWriMo (due to the horrible new site), I still counted words and worked on traditional fiction.

This year, in my continued one-woman boycott, I am changing to measuring time and working on games.  Because that's what I happen to be into working on right now.  (They're text-heavy games, though.  An interactive reworking of one of my old novels, and possibly a visual novel after that.)

So...that's where I am right now.

I only put in one hour and six minutes today, which is probably less than I really want to do in a single day.  (Haven't made up my mind what my goal is yet.  I think at my rate of writing, I probably need to do about two hours a day, minimum, to do approximately the same amount of work as it takes me to get to 50K on a novel.  So my goal may be 60 hours.  But I'm not sure yet.)

Biggest hurdle in the near future is deciding what in the world to title the game.  It's the first chapter of the old novel, in which the two teenage heroine on the island of Lesbos in the terminal Late Bronze Age escape from the slavery they were born into, and board a Phoenician boat on its way (though they don't know this when they board) towards the partially rebuilt Troy.  (And their fathers were two of the most important heroes among the Greek army that destroyed the city, so that's a big deal!  Not that they ever met their fathers, having been fathered on slave girls during the one night their fathers were staying in that city on Lesbos, but...the one who's Achilles' daughter is very fond of telling all and sundry who her father was.)  I think I'm currently planning on calling the whole novel (and/or the game version of it) The Walls of Troy (which is not a particularly good name for it, but better than its original title, since the original title was incomprehensible until you find out what's going on, and then it becomes a spoiler), but what to call the game version of just this one chapter about them escaping slavery...no clue.

Another hurdle is that I'll have to decide if I want to count working on the graphics towards my hour count or not. :P