NaNo Rebel '22, Day 4: Fighting on

     "Fighting on" because a large chunk of today's writing involved a fight scene. 😂  (The combatants varied as the scene progressed, but the good side had a minor god and a dragon, and the evil side had a ghost and a woman the ghost had possessed.  Which makes it sound way more exciting than it actually was...😅)

    Anyway, not the greatest day's work, overall, but at least I got through my word count just on the visual novel script.  XD  (And in real world news, I finally got my water meter replaced like the water company's been pestering me to do for about two months now.  Or rather I let the service tech they sent to my house into my basement so they could replace it.  Not like I did anything other than make an appointment and open a door.)

    Anyway, my NotNaNo totals!

    Words written today:  1,906

    Words written in November up to this point:  8,163

    (And, just for the record, if I was on the NaNo website looking at their graphs, their suggested word count by today would be 6,668, so I'm pretty much a day ahead, despite how slowly I write when I'm working with VN scripts.  So that seems like a win.  😁)

NaNo Rebel '22, Day 3: Sorta progress?

     It's like, progress but not progress at the same time.

    I got some good progress on the script, then sort of smashed into a wall and couldn't really move further, even though I know exactly what has to happen next.  It's a confrontation scene, so I guess that's why it was more difficult to write.  (Violent type of confrontation, that is to say, between the hero and the villain.  Uh, if either of those terms properly can be said to apply.)

    I tried to move forward on the fanfic to fill in my word count for the day and managed to write one whole word!  Wheee!

    (Actually, it wasn't even a word, but...Word counts it as one, so...)

    On the other hand, last night, after I posted my progress, I'd had an idea for a really interesting AU fanfic (an idea which is so obvious that there's probably already at least 15-20 on the same theme on AO3 alone) and writing out the plot idea took more than a thousand words, so I figure I can count those, 'cause that was too many words to just throw away.  (If I get desperate to reach 50k, I will absolutely be adding in all these blog posts, needless to say. 😅)

    Anyhow, today's stats!

    Yesterday's total: 3,905

    Today's total (counting the plot idea from last night): 2,352

    Total words written in November to date: 6,257

IWSG: NaNo Rebel '22, Day 2

   

        So, this month's question/suggested post topic is about whether or not you (have) participate(d) in NaNoWriMo.  And my answer is "Yeah, I used to, but I hate what they did to their website when they changed it over a few years back, and I'm not going to officially participate again unless they change it back to something less ugly and that's more respectful of our projects."

    But I still kinda participate in the form of being a NaNoWriMo Rebel, meeting the challenge of writing 50,000 words in the month of November, just without officially entering on the NaNo website, or using it to keep track of my words.  (Blogs are useful for the latter, though I have no way to make a chart graphing my progress.  At least, none I know of.)

    However, that'd be a short and boring post, so I want to talk about my main project for NotNaNo. XD

    I mentioned in an earlier post that I was really struggling with the visual novel script I was working on.  That continued to be the case until I started chatting in Discord about the format I was planning on using for the routes (for the dateable characters), asking some more experienced visual novel writers about if that format sounded like it was going to work.  (I have loads of experience as a writer of standard fiction, but am still pretty new to interactive versions, only a little over a year.)  The more I talked it over with them, the more I realized that not only was the format I had planned (which was designed to make the branching easier to write) problematic, the whole thing just felt off.

    The plot of the game, you see, was that you were playing an immortal being in ancient China, one who had once been mortal.  When the Jade Emperor's son runs away from home, abandoning his duties in the heavens, you're sent down to the mortal realm to find him and bring him back.  Of course, you don't know what he looks like (and he can shapeshift anyway), so you have to go undercover at the location where you know he's been residing.  It's...well, the original idea was for it to be a school, but since schoolwork at that time would have been solid memorization and recitation (thus simultaneously super-boring and something we couldn't show, because all the good translations for the classic texts are too recent to be public domain), we opted for a handful of disciples following a rather eccentric philosopher.  The idea was for the game to be a mystery, and you're trying to figure out which of the disciples is the runaway, while simultaneously potentially romancing one of them.  (With the rather awkward situation that if you choose to go down the runaway's route, you're screwed, because it's a trap route, and you can never win his heart, because the whole reason he ran away was because he'd fallen in love with one of the philosopher's disciples.)  On top of the fact that the structure I picked was mostly going to be easier to write but would make for very boring replay there was the fact that my collaborator (project lead, the other writer, etc) seemed to view the runaway's love interest as "the" love interest, rather than any of the characters the player could romance.

    So I approached my collaborator and explained my concerns about the structure, and everything that the others had said in the chat, and suggested that we change our plans--someone, either my collaborator or one of the other devs in the earlier chat, used the term "pivot" for it, and it's really the perfect term--and instead of writing about the immortal who's trying to bring the runaway home (forcing the player into an unpleasant situation, making them choose between the runaway's happiness and his extremely important heavenly duties), we should make the game about the runaway instead.  I had hoped that would mean my collaborator wouldn't have to pay for so many sprites, but they'd already promised to buy a certain number, so apparently I didn't manage to save them any money on that score. 😓  The important thing, though, was that as soon as we made that decision, a lot of stuff just fell into place, and by the time we were done brainstorming the new version, we were both feeling like it was going to be so much better than the original would have been.  (And the MC I had so much fun making up a crazy backstory for isn't gone for good; we're planning to do two games, and he'll be the lead of the second one, which will still feature him being sent down to recover the runaway, only the runaway will just be like "nope, not going!" and it's actually something else keeping the MC on earth long enough to court one of the philosopher's disciples. 😁 )

    The script is still coming along more slowly than I'd like--VN scripts always do that for some reason--but it's flowing much more naturally than before, and I think it's actually coming out better, too.

    I'm hoping the NaNo boost will let me finish the script this month.  Well, the first draft, anyway.  My part of the first draft, that is.  (My collaborator is writing the really romantic parts, and a few other bits.)  Then I'll be able to go back to my novels, as I have one that I actually realized needed another subplot after I put it out there, so it's been sitting there with a "hey, FYI, I'm going to change some of this as soon as I have a break in my writing schedule" since like February.  And the next book in the series has been waiting for its next draft for just as long. 😭  This VN project has really taken way longer than I originally intended...

NaNo Rebel '22, Day 1: The Saga Starts to Begin Again (Or Something)

     Sooooo....it's November.

    And the NaNoWriMo site still thinks that its randomly assigned cover art is more deserving of attention on our past writing projects than our words, so I am doing what I've done every year since they destroyed their own website, and officially participating only in an unofficial way.

    Which is to say, I'm just gonna write 50,000+ words in November and use my blog to keep track of how many words I've written, and there's absolutely nothing that NaNoWriMo can do to stop me, so there! 😛

    (Why is there no emoji of the Hitchhiker's Guide planet?  I totally needed one of those right there...)

    Anyhoo, since I'm bein' a rebel and all, I'm going all-out on my evil scheme, and writing something that (gasp!) isn't a novel, and which I already started, and I am even (brace yourselves!) working on more than one project!!

    Yes, you heard me right.

    For this month of November, I am officially evil incarnate as far as NaNoWriMo goes.

    Uh, okay...

    ...so that's sorta an exaggeration.

    I mean, it's not like I'm plagiarizing or anything.  Or lying about my word count.  Or writing anything, you know, evil.  (Though there are some evil characters, if that counts?)  One of the projects is fan-fictions, though, so that's sorta evil...only NaNo actually has a whole category for that, so not particularly, I guess.

    Anyway, two projects at the start of this year's NaNo rebel exercise, which may spread to three or more after I finish one of them.  (Ideally, I'll finish both, but...not gonna count on that.)

    The main project is the script for the still-untitled visual novel I'm co-writing.  It's set in ancient China and doesn't particularly feature any branching in the new version (technically, it's more like a prequel to the previously planned game, but in such a way as to prevent several aspects of the old plan when we finally get to that point, thus making it much simpler both to write and code), but does feature a sweet romance between a son of the Jade Emperor and the nephew of a Daoist philosopher.  Also some ghost-fighting.  :D

    The secondary project is a 1980s AU fan-fiction of The Untamed, which I had watched for research purposes to help me get acquainted with the ancient China setting, and now I'm totally obsessed with. 💖  The fan-fiction is set in the 1980s (and in New York's Chinatown) partially because that made it so much easier for me to write, and partially because that's a setting where it's easy to tell all sorts of stories with no one dying.  (Not to say you can't write a story in that setting where loads of people die, 'cause obviously you can.  But it's much easier to avoid than in the original's magical ancient setting.)

    I got off to a late writing start today because I had errands to run this morning (grocery shopping and a super-important trip to the bookstore to pick up the final volume of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System), but I still managed to eke out a tolerable first day total of 1,791 words, of which 1,262 were on the VN script and the other 529 were fan-fiction.  I will probably finish the latter pretty soon, 'cause I'm on the last scene already. XD

    Anyway, I had a pretty quiet Halloween.  (I just feel like sharing this info.)  I followed my usual procedure of fleeing my house long before any trick-or-treaters might end up in the neighborhood.  (Look, I have serious social phobia issues.  And I can't handle kids, 'cause I can't even understand what they're saying half the time, and then I'd have to talk and say things and like compliment their costumes but without accidentally saying anything creepy?  Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it!)  As usual, went to my parents' house for dinner and to watch a vaguely Halloween-related movie.  Then, on returning home, I decided to round out the evening by revisiting the Yi City arc of The Untamed...which would have been a lot easier if its episodes had been more neatly contained:  there's two episodes' worth of content there, but instead of two episodes, it's the last fifteen minutes of one episode, all of the next, and the first half hour of a third.  Very awkward.  (And of course I had to watch all of that first episode, because it contained the big "drunk Lan Wangji" sequence, in which he steals chickens as an utterly unexplained love gift for the very, very, very confused Wei Wuxian. 💕💗💕 I love that moment so much!  (Especially as a Greek mythology fangirl, 'cause roosters were the primary courtship gift men gave to youths they were courting.  And the show actively calls attention to the fact that they're roosters.))

My Nendoroid Doll rendition of the "get drunk and steal a chicken" scene :D

    That probably sounds like a strange thing to watch, but that arc has lots of very Halloween-appropriate things:  walking corpses (of both the intelligent and brainless variety), super-creepy paper effigies (which in the book the hero brought to life to fight the walking corpses, but the show kinda skipped over that, which makes sense considering how hard that would be to do well), a regular corpse, and kinda a ghost sort of?  (There's one character who's a ghost in the book, but in the show is...either an intelligent walking corpse or just an infected live person.  It's not totally clear which...)  Admittedly, the brainless walking corpses have a much bigger role in some other parts of the show--and had a bigger role in the Yi City arc in the book--but I guess they sort of cut a few corners on it because it was much less relevant to the overall plot?  (And yet, you'd think they wouldn't have wanted to cut corners on it, given how they cast someone extra-sexy as that arc's villain.)

    But I'm totally off topic now, so I guess I'll stop. XD

WTF, Etsy? Again!?

     Hey, a sequel post! :P

    So, I posted before about Etsy's algorithm doing weird stuff, putting in recommendations for things that are totally unlike anything I've been looking at/buying.

    Well, it's still at it.

    Here's my recent activity feed on the main page:

    As before, it's all MDZS merch, most of it cuddly romantic images of the two leads, and most of it in cute chibi versions at that.  (For those who happen upon this post unaware, MDZS is short for Mo Dao Zu Shi, typically translated as The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, a danmei novel (the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese genre called Boy's Love), and the basis of the very popular (and excellent) live-action drama The Untamed.)

    Now, my most recent purchase, admittedly, was not MDZS.  It was a bit of Persona 5 fan art:

    You will note that again, it's cute, chibi, and depicts the true love between two male characters.  (And yes, I feel justified in calling it true love, even though the game as it is does not allow you to romance Fox, because there's way too much evidence that he was originally supposed to be not merely a romanceable character, but the romanceable character.  I am intractable on this point.  Joker/Fox (or Fox/Joker, whichever floats your boat) simply is love.)

    So...the recommended items on the top of the page were a mix of MDZS and MegaTen items, which is reasonable enough, especially since I've bought MegaTen fan merch on Etsy before, and will certainly do so again.  (MegaTen is short for Megami Tensei, the super-series that the Persona series is part of, though in the US it's all released as Shin Megami Tensei, which is technically incorrect, because that is itself a different sub-series.)

    But lower on the page, it picks out a few "categories" that it thinks you're interested in, and points out some examples within those categories that it thinks you'll like.  And here's where it gets very messed up.  Because these are the ones it showed me:

    Again, I can only say "WTF, Etsy?!?"

    I do not buy things that sexualize women.  (I mean, not unless you count Barbie dolls.  And that is a very different level of sexualization than we're talking about here.)  And I haven't bought anything that could even remotely count as an action figure from Etsy since 2019!  I've bought some acrylic standees recently...but they were romantic ones depicting two men.  (Mostly Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, the leads of MDZS, of course, but I also bought a fantastic one a while back depicting the versions of Patroclus and Achilles from the game Hades.)  I may have looked at a few figures/figurines since then, but those were more MDZS merch.

    Furthermore, while much of what I've bought has been romantic, none of it has been erotic, so why is it showing me things that are so NSFW that the site feels the need to censor them?  (A few of the shops I've followed do sell some NSFW items, but only ones depicting men.)

    I mean, I guess I get it, to a certain extent.

    Persona has become a very popular series since it was restructured with the release of Persona 3, and Persona 5 is especially popular.  And there is a broad misunderstanding within our culture of gaming as the near-exclusive domain of the heterosexual male, especially the subset of heterosexual males who cannot obtain the love of real women, and thus pour out their desires onto absurdly sexualized representations of women.  That subset certainly does intersect with the subset of the population of gamers in the Venn diagram of the general populace at large, but it is merely a small intersection, not a complete overlap.  The grotesque assumption that "gamer = horny straight male loser" is disgusting and repellent.

    You would think that their algorithm would at least get the difference between art depicting women for the male gaze and art depicting men for the female gaze (or for non-gender-specific gaze, like in the case of the Hades fan art I've bought).  Or if that's too much for it, it could at least note the difference between male-presenting characters and female-presenting characters.  I don't think that's too much to ask for!

    Sorry.

    I realize there's no actual point to this post aside from me complaining, but...sometimes you just have to say these things, somewhere, to someone, even if it's just shouting into the void like this.

    Besides, really, how does one chibi keychain of two male characters hugging lead to having the algorithm suggest that I'd be interested in an erotic statuette of a furry woman with her chests hanging out?  It makes no sense!!  (The oversize figure of a robot soldier from the Star Wars prequels also makes no sense, but at least it's not erotic.  Though actually I might prefer an attempt to eroticize those silly-looking things to some of what the site has been pushing at me.)

IWSG - On Genre

 

    So, I totally have nothing to talk about this month, because I still feel like I'm being put through a very slow wringer by this VN I agreed to write. 😭  Therefore, I'm just going to tackle the month's suggested question instead of trying to dredge up my own topic.

October 5 question - What do you consider the best characteristics of your favorite genre?

    Alarmingly, a few moments' intense concentration on this question has led me to a question of my own:  "What even is my favorite genre?"

    Pre-contemplation, my instinct would be to say that my favorite genre is fantasy, but I don't actually write all that much fantasy, and even when I do, it tends to be a very splintered section of fantasy that some might not even consider fantasy anymore.  (My Greek mythology-based novels, for example.  Or the series that I initially intended to be steampunk but which morphed into a Victorian-tech-level, animal-powered airship tale with a few magical creatures and magic-like alchemy, but otherwise not particularly fantasy at all.)

    This realization is actually rather alarming.

    In any case, if we assume that the answer really is fantasy, the best characteristic is definitely the flexibility:

• Don't like the laws of physics?  Toss 'em and write new ones!
• Think humans are dumb?  Don't need 'em!
• Ever wanted to be able to fly?  There's a potion for that--or a spell--or maybe all your characters have wings!
• Want a society that's more egalitarian?  Write one!
• Etc.

    It's great being able to invent the entire universe of a story from scratch, not needing to worry about whether you're accurately portraying a time or a place.  (Which isn't to say that you shouldn't research any societies that might be similar to what you're going for.  You absolutely should still do that.)  And it's great to be able to make a world where everyone's nice to each other, or where women have always ruled, or where homophobia/transphobia/racism/bigotry-in-general just plain doesn't exist.  Or where bigotry does exist, but then your protagonist is "the special" and able to defy the whole world to prove their worth despite that the whole world hates them for being whatever it is that the world judges against.  (That trope should, of course, be used sparingly in works you plan to share with others, but it's very satisfying to write.)

    Ironically, I saw a similar question about favorite genres in a VN-dev space not long ago, and my first thought was to ask if LGBTQ+ counted as a genre. 😆  The same flexibility applies there, too, but even more so, since every other genre can be included within it.  So I guess that means I really appreciate a genre where I'm not constrained by anyone else's rules.

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

    In a related/unrelated thing, someone posted a link to one of those personality quiz things in discord.  This one is about figuring out the emotion that drives an artist/writer to create their art:  https://uquiz.com/quiz/p0u5c3/what-emotion-do-you-create-from

    My result was "Discontent":

You create from discontent.  Most of your life has been spent being uncomfortable in your own skin.  This body is just another house that's never felt like home.  You don't know how to be at ease in this world or this life.  Art is a way of running away, of forgetting yourself and escaping to a more comfortable place.  To cope with an unhospitable reality, you create more welcoming worlds to consume your work and your waking hours.  But the foundation of your art has always been your discontent with the real world and your life within it.  Lurking behind the inviting scenery you desire to be anywhere but here.  It is a world constructed as a respite from this one.  Such vivid fantasies are the dream of one who considers reality a prison.

    As one of the others in the discord commented, I feel like I'm being called out by these results.

    It's eerie, especially considering how many of the questions left me going "none of these answers apply to me!"

    And it also feeds disconcertingly well into everything I said about why I enjoy working with the fantasy genre...

    (The big lesson here, I think, is probably to stop pre-writing these posts.  I wrote the first half on Monday, then discovered this quiz right before bed on Monday night, and am now adding this second half of the post on Tuesday morning.  Obviously, I should just make it a habit of getting up early on the first Wednesday of the month and writing the post that day, instead of scheduling it from a day or two before.)

WTF, Etsy?

     Etsy really needs to improve its algorithm for recommendations.

    When you navigate to the main page, it shows you a handful of recommended items and searches based on your recent activity, right?

    So, here's my recent activity:

    And yeah, that's representative of what I've been looking at lately, on account of being mildly obsessed. 😅  I mean, there's also been some miniatures--partly to go in the miniature rooms I'm trying to get finished up, and partly to be accessories to go with the Nendoroid dolls of these two characters--and some doll clothes (also for the Nendoroid dolls), but mostly it's just been MDZS merch.  Because, you know, obsession.

    Here's what it showed me today on the front page as the recommended items at the top:

    As I said in the title of the post:  "WTF, Etsy?"

    Seriously, I have never in my life purchased a print of a disgustingly over-breasted woman, not from Etsy or anywhere else.  Nor have I ever purchased anything on Etsy that was sexualizing women at all!  On top of which, almost everything I've been browsing lately has been female-gaze merchandise of a female-gaze-oriented gay romance.

    So what POSSIBLE excuse can their algorithm give for putting that nasty cow-bikini print on there?  I mean, okay, it would admittedly be funny to see how Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji would react to such a sight (the latter would definitely be horrified, and might attack her on the assumption that she was a demon), but...ugh.

    So gross.  Why do some people want to see drawings of women where each breast is as large as (or larger than) her head, anyway?

    I will never understand it.

    (I could also ask that Etsy provide a "don't show me this item again" slider to go with that print that's showing on the thumbnail to search for "the untamed," as I don't think it's right to sexualize a character being horribly beaten, but at least that's actually related to what I've been looking at.  And, actually, there might be such an option on there somewhere and I've just never figured out how to use it, now that I think about it.)

    (Speaking of the recommended search thumbnails, I find it mildly hilarious that the thumbnail for the "Mo Dao Zu Shi pin" search shows a pair of figurines, and that the "mdzs" search's thumbnail shows a mug which appears to have an illustration for Heaven Official's Blessing on it rather than one for Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation.  But as they're both by the same author (and goodness knows I'm definitely looking forward to the new volume of Heaven Official's Blessing that's due out on Tuesday with its steamy cover) that at least makes some degree of sense, unlike the bikini print.)