Forgot a few things!

     I forgot a couple things on my previous MDZS-related post.

    First, I wanted to mention that I not too long ago watched the anime Raven of the Inner Court.  Like The Apothecary Diaries, it originates in Japan but its setting is inspired by ancient China.  Unlike the other, though, I was pretty disappointed by Raven of the Inner Court.  The body count of bystanders was pretty high, the romantic elements were far too highlighted and far too shallow (at least in Apothecary Diaries Jinshi is trying to pretend he's not head-over-heels for Maomao, plus he actually has a personality and is extremely entertaining to watch), but I think my biggest problem with Raven of the Inner Court is that the anime's pacing is terrible.  They were clearly rushing to get through as much of the plot from the light novels as possible; if they'd spent twice as many episodes on the same amount of story, it would have surely been better, or at least had a lot less of "wait, who's that again?" syndrome.  (Having better character designs with more distinction between characters and a higher animation budget would definitely have helped, too, of course.)  However, as some of my problems with the story were definitely built-in to the original work, I'm not going to bother reading the light novels to get the original version, since I plainly wouldn't be satisfied with it, either.  And I'm obviously not its primary audience (since I prefer queer romance), so that's fine.

    So why do I mention it?  (And especially in a MDZS context?)  Because two of the male characters in it had names that made me sit up and take notice, especially in connection with each other.  Now, keep in mind that this is their names as written in the subtitles.  Unlike Apothecary Diaries, which gives its characters Chinese (or possibly just Chinese-like) names that can be pronounced in Japanese, Raven of the Inner Court gave its characters...how do I put this?  The Japanese versions of actual Chinese names.  If you ever do something like look for MDZS merch on a Japanese storefront like Mandarake, you sometimes find the names transliterated as they're said in Japanese, which gives really weird different names for some of the characters.  (I think "Lan" becomes like "Aoi" or something, going on the meaning of the character used (blue), instead of matching the sound.)  So, there is some uncertainty in my mind as to whether the names in the subtitles on Raven of the Inner Court should be viewed as the names intended by the author of the light novel or not.  (And since I don't actually care, I haven't bothered to look into that.  I would expect that it's either easily found out just on Wikipedia or something...or it's basically impossible to find out because nothing's ever been said in print.)  But either way, whether it's just the subtitles or the author's intent...

    ...two of the male characters are named Wei Qing and Wen Ying.

    Given that the lead of MDZS has the birth name of Wei Ying and one of the major female characters is Wen Qing, it feels like that cannot be a coincidence.

    It still could be a coincidence, of course.  (Or it could be someone in the translation-to-English pipeline deciding to throw in some MDZS references.)  But it's just so weirdly overlapping that it's hard to look at it as coincidental.  (And I did at least look up when the light novels started being published, and it was definitely after MDZS was published, so it's not impossible.)

    Then the other thing was....

    The other thing was...

    ...

    ...I've forgotten it.

    😭

Various MDZS-related thoughts

     So...a week ago Monday, I started rereading MDZS.

    Like, I actually did nothing else on that Monday except read MDZS; no internet, no TV, no games, nothing but reading.  I thought reading a gay romance novel from China in which two tyrannical dictators and a couple more would-be tyrants were thoroughly defeated was a good way to show my spite and disgust at something else that was happening in the real world that day.

    I ended up getting partway into volume three of the official translation in that first day.  (They had just defeated the Xuanwu of Slaughter when I finally stopped reading and went to bed.)  So, in one day I got through about 2 and 1/3 volumes.  The remaining 2 and 2/3 volumes took me six more days to get through.  😅  (I.E., I finished on the following Monday.  Well, except some of the bonus chapters.  Those were still pending and didn't end up finished until yesterday.)  Admittedly, I barely even opened the book at all on Saturday because I ended up having to spend most of the day out of the house actually doing things.

    Anyway.

    Rereading the novel really jammed my face down into the reality that I have been doing a very bad job in trying to recreate the characters in my fanfiction.  (It also really forced me to notice how sloppy my memory was of various things about the novel, including that I had been convinced the Yi City arc ended in volume one when it was actually entirely in volume two.)

IWSG - postless post

 

    Not sure what to write here today.  I'm not really feeling the monthly suggested question, either.

    I'm having trouble writing lately.  Not writer's block, per se, just...I don't know.  Lack of motivation, inability to concentrate, inability to pick a new project, lack of inspiration...I don't know what it is.

    I do have a new project that I'm planning--the script for a game, rather than standard fiction--but I'm still just muddling along in the planning stages, not finished defining who the characters are or even exactly what the place is where it's set.

    Today it's also not helping that it sorta feels like time was shut off a few days ago:  it started snowing late Saturday night and finished in the wee hours of Monday morning.  Who knows when I'll next leave my house.  😰  (Thankfully, I do have plenty of food.  And if I run out, it's not that far to the grocery store, like half a mile at most.  I could walk it if I wasn't so badly out of shape.)  As of right now (early Tuesday), the street still isn't properly cleared, and my driveway is not likely to show itself for a very long time.  I have heard very few cars leaving the other houses in the subdivision, and no mail was delivered yesterday; it really feels like time has simply stopped because of the storm.  That makes it even harder to focus on writing.

    But the lack of a project grabbing me and saying "write me!" is the biggest problem.

    And that's a hard one to conquer.

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.  🤣

A Random (Fandom) Thought

     Okay, so back in April, I mentioned the fact that it had long been my assumption about/reaction to Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen that they were supposed to be a reflection of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, or more specifically that they actually are what most everyone else in the story sees when they look at Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji together:  an evil demonic cultivator harassing a pure and proper cultivator.  And that meanwhile Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen are also a reflection of the true relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, only one where the tragic ending remains in place, with no revival stepping in to reunite them.  (Okay, actually, looking at that post again, I didn't so much mention that as tangentially imply it.  But that was what I thought on reaching the later portions of the Yueyang sequence in The Untamed when I first watched it, that the three of them provided a double mirror of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji.  Um, except at that time I didn't know that Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen's story would end in tragedy. 😭)

    And I still do think that's the case, no question.  Those parallels are absolutely there.

    But in thinking about the chapter of my fanfic that went up yesterday, I realized that Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan serve as mirrors to another situation within the main plot of MDZS:  that of Wei Wuxian with Jiang Cheng.  (I mean, the clue's right there in their names, even!  Jiang Cheng and Song Lan are the only adult characters in the novel (as far as I can recall, anyway) who are consistently referred to by their birth names by the narrator.  Oh, uh, no, duh, there's also Wen Ning.  Okay, so that breaks the birth name part of the comparison a bit.  (And then there's Wen Xu and Wen Chao, whose only known names sure sound like birth names, but that makes zero sense all around unless the Wen Clan uses courtesy names differently from the other clans.))

    Let me sum up my thinking on this thusly.  Um, after a "read more" tag just in case somehow someone stumbles on this post who hasn't read (or watched) the whole story.  (Unlikely, I know, but...)

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, final day

     Well.

    I've decided to stop writing for the day because I can't really come up with what to have the characters say next.

    This fic is so far so much talking that even by my standards it's mind-numbing to have them talk so much.  If I ever finish it, massive sections of it will have to be torn out and replaced with something that is less...well....boring.  The amount of infodumping is especially awful, but because I'm working with alternate history and alternate versions of the work it's a fanfic of, it's going to be very tricky to find a way to get that information out there without it just being an infodump.  But I guess I can worry about that if and when I finish the first draft.

    Anyway.  I wrote 2116 words today, all on that one fic, which is now up to 16,033 words.

    My total for the month is 57,696 words, which may be the smallest number I have ever written during November since I started doing NaNo in 2011.

    The final chart for my progress is:

    And the day by day chart is:

    ...which is just really alarming to look at.  At least, that's how it seems to me, anyway.

    Although maybe it's not too much worse than last year's:

    ....nope.  Nope.  This year's is much worse, no matter how you look at it.

    I don't know how much of it is due to the horror of real life events, and how much is because I didn't have a strong project to work on.  (A small amount of it is due to not-necessarily-horrible real life events intervening, but there's really only a few days like that.)