IWSG: dunno what to call the post, as usual

    So, once again, I don't really have a lot to say.  The month's question doesn't really speak to me much, but my writing life is pretty stagnant right now, so I don't have a lot to say.

    Unless I want to complain about my new laptop and how much I hate Windows 11, and how annoying it is to switch back to a two-laptop system where my internet access and my writing are on separate machines, but that's both very much a "me" problem and also distressingly bourgeoisie.

    Anyway.

    Uh...what can I talk about instead?

    Apparently, NaNoWriMo is no more?  Not sure what happened--but the last news I heard, they had aligned themselves with AI-bros on top of the scandal from I guess two years ago(?), so that's probably not too surprising--but I've been doing my own independent November writing challenge for so many years now that it doesn't really impact me much.  I'm just doing my usual thing anyway, regardless of the absence of an official version.

    I wonder if the collapse of the official NaNoWriMo is negatively impacting anyone else's November writing journey, though?

    I've seen a lot of people on Discord asking around after tracking sites to keep track of their progress as they try to write independently.  Haven't looked into any of them myself, though; I'm fine with just using my blog to track my word count.

    Hmm.

    Nope, I really don't have much to say this month.  (Or maybe I'm just using all my words on my writing challenge progress and don't have any to spare for blogging?)

    Anyway, after I do today's writing, I'll be adding my daily numbers to the end of the post below.

November writing challenge, day 4

Nothing much to say today, so...

 Current numbers!

Words written previously this November:  14,590

Today's word count:  4,469

Total word count to date in November:  19,059

Projects, with starting and current word counts:

Untitled MDZS fanfic w/time-travel elements

Starting word count:  21,100

Yesterday's word count:  35,690

Today's word count:  40,159

The Tablet of Destinies, Atalanta and Ariadne book 4

Starting word count:  26,418

(Not touched yet, aside from opening the file to get its current word count.)

Untitled sci-fi VN, not yet started.

November writing challenge, day 3

     Today's word count may be lesser than usual, since I had to come online and post a chapter to AO3 first, meaning that my computer time has been divided and the new laptop unfairly got a share of it.

    I guess since I'm on a computer, though, I'll talk briefly about the videos I didn't end up talking about yesterday.  Two Youtube videos in a row, both about 45 minutes long, and both on the subject of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo.  The first was Overly Sarcastic Productions' summary of the novel, which Red said was 300k words long!  (Or was that in the other video?  Hmm...no, it was Red who said that.  The other talked about page count, not word count.)  Wow, though!  Despite now knowing the whole plot, I kind of want to read it now, despite that revenge stories are not really my cup of tea.  (Neither is tea; maybe I should say "not my glass of soda" instead?)  Of course, the fact that the overall message of the novel is anti-revenge rather than pro-revenge helps that, naturally.  But mostly it's because of how amazingly convoluted the hero's plans are, really.

    Among other things, it gives me an idea of how I want to approach one of the fanfic ideas I have, specifically one that's supposed to be canon-compliant but focusing on Nie Huaisang's long, drawn out revenge plot (and his coincidental saving of Wen Qing in the process, of course).  MDZS set him up as a brilliant schemer, even beyond the schemer that is the novel's villain (he'd have to be if he's going to out-think the villain, after all!), so the idea of giving his personal tale of revenge as many schemes and twists and disguises and alter-egos as the one in The Count of Monte Cristo is decidedly tempting!  (Might lessen the canon-compliant angle a bit, but...)

    Anyway, the second video I watched was of course the Lost in Adaptation on the same novel, which went up within 24 hours of the OSP one.  (And in fact started with a plug for the OSP summary, since it would be more comprehensive!)  He covered three different adaptations of the novel, and wow, watching those would be woefully insufficient to experience the story.  Especially the most recent one in the video.  Yikes.  However, that video gave some context to the novel that Red didn't, specifically that the hero's initial suffering was inspired by something Dumas' father went through.  (Neither video mentioned that Dumas wrote a similar novel prior to The Count of Monte Cristo that featured a hero who, like Dumas himself, was of mixed ancestry, the only novel he wrote that didn't feature exclusively white people in the leading roles.  That one must have been even more inspired by his father's ordeal.)

    However, that also prompted me to check and see if the anime adaptation was available to stream on Crunchyroll, and it turns out it is.  It's got a bit of a sci-fi setting instead of the novel's early 19th century setting, and I seem to recall it was praised at the time it came out.  I think I had turned up my nose at it because at the time I thought anime adapting a 19th century novel was an absurdity or inappropriate or whatever else I thought, but now I'm thinking I want to give it a try.  If nothing else, a 24 episode anime would have enough time to do that lengthy story justice (or to come closer to doing it justice, at least), unlike a two hour movie! 😅

    But enough of that.  Let's move on to my independent November writing challenge!  (I'm not even sure if I should consider hitting 50k to be "succeeding" since that's a pretty easy task for me.  But I feel like I'll be setting myself up for failure if I make finishing a project the goal.  My MDZS fanfic often get ludicrously long (once even longer than the original novel!), making finishing my current fic this month not necessarily physically possible.  And I doubt I'll have the willpower to set it aside long enough to finish the rewrite of Tablet of Destinies...and who knows if I'll even start my new VN script, let alone finish it...)

Current numbers!

Words written previously this November:  8,778

Today's word count:  5,812

Total word count to date in November:  14,590

Projects, with starting and current word counts:

Untitled MDZS fanfic w/time-travel elements

Starting word count:  21,100

Yesterday's word count:  29,878

Today's word count:  35,690

The Tablet of Destinies, Atalanta and Ariadne book 4

Starting word count:  26,418

(Not touched yet, aside from opening the file to get its current word count.)

Untitled sci-fi VN, not yet started.

November writing challenge, day 2

 So, last night I watched some videos that I was going to talk about right now, but then I went on one errand that ended up being like five of them, so I no longer have the strength.  Maybe I can talk about them tomorrow.

Current numbers!

Words written previously this November:  3,420

Today's word count:  5,358

Total word count to date in November:  8,778

Projects, with starting and current word counts:

Untitled MDZS fanfic w/time-travel elements

Starting word count:  21,100

Yesterday's word count:  24,520

Today's word count:  29,878

The Tablet of Destinies, Atalanta and Ariadne book 4

Starting word count:  26,418

(Not touched yet, aside from opening the file to get its current word count.)

Untitled sci-fi VN, not yet started.

Another November, Another Not-NaNo begins

     So.

    I haven't done the official NaNoWriMo in a very long time, but I do love the whole "write 50k in a month" challenge.  (Though that's never been much of a challenge for me, because when I write I am often verbose.  Despite that I am quite the opposite IRL.)  From what some others were saying in one of the game dev Discord servers I'm in, it sounds like the official NaNoWriMo no longer even exists, so my unofficial thing is now the only way for me to continue.  (Unless I seek out others doing their own replacement for NaNo, but that sounds like a lot of hassle for no benefit.)

    In the past few years, since I stopped entering the official NaNo, it hasn't been a problem to use my blog to keep my results posted.  Or rather to use the blog to keep track of them in a public manner so as to keep myself from fudging.  (Equivalent to the accountability of posting one's daily numbers to the NaNo site back when that was actually a good idea.)

    This year, though.

    See, with the end of support for Windows 10, and knowing that my laptop would likely be bricked by Windows 11, I decided to grit my teeth and buy a new, more powerful laptop, which would be good for my game dev hobby as well as being more secure than using a no-longer-supported OS online.

    And so I did.  I even bought an (on sale) gaming laptop so that it would have the power to last a while.  Also to run Unreal Engine to use pre-made locations from the UE store in order to make visual novel BGs, something a few other devs already do with fantastic results.  (I have yet to actually try this out, who knows if I'll be able to do it myself.)

    This has.  Um.  Not been a great experience.  (But I have gotten a few laughs out of the fact that the people who named this laptop's model apparently do not speak Latin, and thus do not realize that they named their gaming laptop "Conquered."  It conjures up images of people attempting to play competitive online games only to lose every single time no matter how skilled they are.  Which is admittedly a satisfying image.  Anything to discourage the scourge that is competitive online gaming.)

    I cordially hate Windows 11.  Everything about it annoys me.  It's even worse than Windows 10.  (TBH, I have not actually liked any version of Windows since, like, Millennium Edition, and I'm not sure I'd even say that I truly "liked" that one, either.)  Everything about it is bad, from the idiotic way that it puts the taskbar icons in the center instead of at the side, to the way you can no longer get an uncluttered glance at your desktop wallpaper by putting your cursor in the corner of the taskbar, to the way the start menu is now this hideous wide lump that you mostly cannot control instead of an entirely orderly menu, to the gross new version of File Explorer, to the cursors not looking right.  Heck, even the emojis look bad now.

    Consequently, I have been doing all my writing on my old laptop in airplane mode, and I've only even turned on the new one like four times since I bought it.  (In fact, I didn't even take it out of the box for nearly a week after I bought it, because I was dreading the change-over process so much!)

    That's not a problem as far as the writing challenge aspect goes--in fact, I am having so much trouble with the keyboard on this new laptop that I can see that attempting to write 50k on this thing would quickly drive me crazy, as the keys are not spaced the way my fingers prefer--but it is a problem for the blogging aspect of my unofficial version of the challenge.

    In the last few years, I was making charts in Word to post on the blog, a way to recapture the fun of watching the chart develop on the NaNo site when you posted your daily numbers.  I can still make those charts, of course, but posting them would require booting up this new computer solely for the purpose of posting those charts.  (I can't even make them on some website on my phone and then transfer the charts over via the phone, because changes to the way Blogger handles images have meant that I cannot add pictures to a post when I'm on my phone.  Which sucks, because until that happened, it was a fast and easy way to transfer pictures from my phone to my computer.  Now I guess I'll have to depend on Discord for that.  Especially since I still haven't set up Dropbox on the new computer yet.  Haven't gotten Word installed, either.  I've been really dragging my feet on the whole "finish setting up the new computer" thing...)

    Anyway.

    I just felt like for this first post, I should explain (to no one) why most of November's posts are going to be excessively bare bones.  If I do end up bothering to make a chart, I'll probably only post it on December 1st as a "looking back at November's progress" kind of a thing.

    As to what I'll be writing...

    Well.  It's going to be a mixed bag.  I'll be counting anything I write in November, as usual, and my current list of projects is:

1. Rewrite of book 4 of the Atalanta and Ariadne novels; this rewrite has been ongoing for quite a while, but in October I did finally get past one of the first major stumbling blocks, so hopefully I can put quite a dent in it over the course of November.
2. A new fanfic I started in the last week or so of October.  A MDZS fanfic with some time-travel elements, which will eventually go so far off the rails that demons get involved.  😅
3. The new VN I've been working on planning out.  I'm hoping to get started on the script at some point this month.

    Those are the planned projects at the moment, but knowing me something new could enter the field at any time.

    And I have used up my "communicating with others" energy for the day, so I'll leave off pre-writing this post.  On November 1st, after I've done my writing, I'll come back and fill in the numbers for the first day's writing, and then finally hit "publish" on this post.

Words written today:  3,420

Projects, with starting and current word counts:

Untitled MDZS fanfic w/time-travel elements

Starting word count:  21,100

Today's word count:  24,520

The Tablet of Destinies, Atalanta and Ariadne book 4

Starting word count:  26,418

(Not touched today, aside from opening the file to get its current word count.)

Untitled sci-fi VN, not yet started.

IWSG: favorites

    So, this month's question is

October 1 question - What is the most favorite thing you have written, published or not? And why?

    Hmm.  Can't say I like the phrasing "the most favorite" somehow, but that's just me.  Anyway, it's actually kind of hard to answer.  Not in a "they're all my babies--I can't choose between them!" kind of way, but just because I've never really thought about it before.  Also I write in a lot of different categories that don't really smoothly compare to each other.

    In the "things I've written that I wouldn't be ashamed to show to my parents" category, the sixth book of the Atalanta and Ariadne series is the only one that comes to mind.  I did a lot of things in that one that I'm really proud of to this day (wrote the first draft in 2014), and I'm looking forward to someday fixing it up so I can release it.  Assuming I can ever manage to finish rewriting book four.  😰  Anyway, book six's setting is mostly in Sparta, trying to deal with a potential succession crisis, as Menelaos wants his son by his Trojan concubine to inherit, but his daughter by Helen (who is married to Agamemnon's son, Orestes, as that's what happened in the myths 🤢) feels that she's the only proper heir.  Menelaos calls on his old friend Odysseus to argue his case, and Orestes calls on Eurysakes (one of my three protagonists) to argue his case.  What we see of the official debates (if you can call them that) is a fun exercise in trying to expose multiple people plotting various things, and considering one of those people is the master schemer Odysseus, I think I did a surprisingly decent job of it!  Of course, a bigger part of the story is slowly exposing my novel's version of just why Helen went to Troy in the first place, which I flatter myself to think has a few elements to it that haven't been done before.  (At least, not in conjunction with all the other elements I'm using, anyway.  Can't really vouch for any of them being 100% new by themselves.)  Atalanta and Ariadne also end up visiting Hades to see if he will allow them to talk to the shade of Bellerophon, since they need the winged horse Pegasos for reasons. 😅  I got to do a lot of fun stuff in book 6!  (I know it seems especially self-indulgent and cliche to have them obtain the services of Pegasos--and it is!--but at least I foreshadowed it a bit all through the series, as Atalanta talks about the idea of getting to ride him on numerous occasions.)

    But would I truly say that's my all-time favorite?  No, not really.  (Especially since it still needs at least one hefty rewrite.)

    Moving into fan fiction, I have a few strong favorite contenders among my Velvet Goldmine fics.

    There's "Celebrity," in which Arthur Stuart has a secret second life as a gay romance novelist, and one of his novels was actually a thinly veiled retelling of the Brian Slade/Curt Wild romance, only with a different ending where they stay together.  The novel was both his long-term passion project and also a way to exorcise the ghosts of his glam past.  But now his editor is once again pressuring him to write a sequel to it, however since he now knows what Brian's done in the intervening years, it's not that simple for him.  Running into Curt again encourages him to write it after all, but that leads to further complications.  It's pretty different from most of my other Velvet Goldmine fics, but I just really liked how it turned out.  Unfortunately, I decided to experiment with posting the whole thing to AO3 at once (despite that it's eighteen chapters long) and that ended up giving it a pretty low view count somehow.

    There are also the fusion fics:  in response to a prompt to fuse Velvet Goldmine with one of the myriad other films by the prolific actors who played Curt and Arthur, instead of going for the obvious Star Wars and Batman angles, I went Jane Austen and Shakespeare instead.  Didn't do justice to either of those authors, but I did produce a couple pieces I was pretty proud of, regardless.  And there's the one where Curt becomes an actor, but...

    Anyway.  In terms of Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic, wow.  I'm honestly pretty proud of a lot of it, but some of that may be because I'm still in the "madly in love with this novel" phase of my fannishness. 😅  How I feel about them whenever I cease obsessing about MDZS will be the real question.  But who knows how long that will take?

    Probably my favorite is "To Walk This Earth With You Again," in which Wei Wuxian was not revived, and didn't reincarnate until modern day.  (To explain:  Mo Dao Zu Shi begins with the death of Wei Wuxian, the novel's hero...and then goes immediately to him being revived (sort of) thirteen years later.)  He has most of his memories from his previous life, and goes to an online support group for other people with past life memories (allowing me to finally complete something with a particular pair of reincarnations of Achilles and Patroclos that I used in about half a dozen incomplete works because I loved them too much to let them be dead backstory characters in a sci-fi "Trojan War repeating itself in space" thing) and it just really resonated with me somehow.  I even went back and added two more chapters to it later, one in which Wei Wuxian's almost-but-not-quite-adopted-brother reincarnates with all his memories and they get a chance to work out the feud between them, and then another one detailing just why Wei Wuxian wasn't revived in this alternate universe, which features the villain's slow descent into madness.  Honestly, that slow descent into madness for a villain who is the "always outwitting his enemies fifteen steps ahead of them" type was particularly satisfying!  Though I also liked the online chat sections, too.  (I even looked up someone's formatting code to make it look like Discord, so it looks really great on screen, too.)

    Honorary mention has to go to "The Spark That Ignites the Embers," which is using the version of MDZS canon from its live-action adaptation, The Untamed, and centers on that not-quite-brother I was just talking about (in part in apology to him, because he died a rather humiliating death in "To Walk," though the final bonus chapter at least changed it into being murdered by the villain, which is probably slightly less humiliating?), and somehow ended up being 500k words long, far and away the longest thing I've ever written...and hopefully it will stay that way, 'cause man is that a crazy lot of words!  It took me eleven months to write the first draft, and editing it was a nightmare, because it was really hard to remember some of the pickiest details of what happened earlier on.  (Not to mention that Word takes quite a while to open a file that big!)

    My last category that can't really be compared to anything else is that of the games I've written.  It's not a super-large category (especially if you discount the lightly interactive version of the Atalanta and Ariadne books), but I'm still pretty proud of some of it.  Though the one I'm most proud of is probably less for the writing than for the "everything else" about it.  My most recent release, Orchid Duet, (which is actually also a MDZS fan game 😅) spent a long time waiting for the artist to finish up their work, and while I was waiting, I kept iterating through the game and adding more and more visual effects and little bits of polish, so I'm actually quite proud of it.  (I've also played it through at least three dozen times in the last two months, so I'm likely not to touch it again for some time to come...😰)

    Ironically, the one I'm next most proud of is actually called The Worst Visual Novel Ever, and was for a game jam specifically to create bad games.  But somehow I ended up putting in a lot of silly, quasi-clever stuff in the writing, and I kind of love it despite how insane it is.  Especially because of some of the really meta stuff, like the narrator becoming more and more unhinged the longer I spend writing the game, which only is obvious if you're looking at the script instead of the game, because the player might get the narrator breaking down on their first playthrough, instead of closer to the end of the script.  The narrator actually even gets replaced a few times because its breakdown is that intense.

    Hmm.

    I feel like I went on too long and didn't really say much and...

    ...sorry.  I think I'm a little nuts right now because I'm getting my butt kicked by the mold count in the air.

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?