IWSG - So...I'm an idiot....

 

    So, I got so caught up in the stress of getting my game jam entry finalized and submitted that I also went ahead and posted the IWSG post I had been working on about the experience (working in the down time while I waited for the team's programmer to get the next build ready) a day early, because somehow my brain thought it was already the first?

    I don't even know what happened.

    But rather than try to find a way to take the post down and then post it again, I figured "enh, why bother?"  If anyone wants to read my post about the game jam experience and the roller-coaster it sent my writer's brain through over the month of August, it's still there, so feel free.

    For once, I'm actually gonna answer the optional question, because I don't have much else to say right now.  *cough*

    So, the suggested question is "How do you define success as a writer? Is it holding your book in your hand? Having a short story published? Making a certain amount of income from your writing?"

    (OMG, why did it copy the formatting?  How do I make it not copy the formatting?)

    For me, success as a writer is something for other people.  Which sounds defeatist, so let me try to find a different way to phrase that.

    "Success" is not what I'm aiming for as a writer.

    I enjoy writing, and I love the process of forming up stories out of vague ideas.  And, of course, those ideas would just take over my brain willy-nilly if I didn't write them.

    But I'm not trying to be "successful" in any meaningful way.  Yes, there was a time when I dreamed of publishing my novels, and then there was a dream of being a successful screenwriter, but those dreams died a long time ago.  And not in the "oh, no, I'll never make it!" way so much as in the "wait, why did I even think I wanted that?" way.

    Which is not a bad thing.

    But it is a hard thing to explain to people.  (Especially my mother.  Ugh...trying to explain that to her is like trying to pull out my own teeth with my bare fingers.)

    I don't even want to try to make money off my writing anymore.  I don't like the idea, in part because I've seen what you have to do to your work in order to make any money off of it--and what can happen to you and/or your work if you do start making money.  Honestly, it's that latter part that really frightens me.  I don't like the idea of too many people seeing what I write.  A small handful, yes, that's great--and I admit that there's a part of me that longs for more people to read my words--but when you get too many people, then you just get attacked by noisy hateful people who just want to tear you down simply because you exist.  I'm too thin-skinned and much too susceptible to verbal attacks for that; I wouldn't survive it, possibly literally.  So long as I'm only putting a few tiny things out on the internet for free, and so long as none of them somehow go viral, I should be safe.  I can write what I want, and not have to worry about trolls coming after me.  "Success" is like a magnet for trolls; I don't want that magnet anywhere near me.

    That probably sounds cowardly, and maybe it is cowardly, but it's what feels right for me.  Just putting my writing out in tiny, free contexts has let me find a few kindred spirits, and that's more than enough for me.

    Honestly, that's probably the biggest reason I'm unlikely to do any more game jams:  you get too much attention out of it.  (There's also the stress, of course, but the attention is something that doesn't go away after the jam is over.  Well, it will eventually dwindle, but people do go back to old, long-completed game jams and just browse over the entries.  I've seen it happen with my other game jam projects.)

IWSG: Roller-coaster ride...but in a bad way

 

    So...August has not been a pretty month for me.

    (I mean, it never is, but worse than usual.)

    On the real-life side, a huge thunderstorm hit in the middle of the month, and a massive branch ripped the phone/internet line right out of the back of my house.  I was without electricity for about eight hours (as was like half the county, because it was a power station thing), and without phone or internet for a week.  This would be bad at any time, because it's surprising just how much I've come to depend on my WiFi (esp. since I have a very low data cap on my cell phone), but for it to happen while I was leading a team on a game jam...ugh.  So much extra stress that I did not need.  :(

    As to the game jam, that's where things get weird.  So, I was--of course--writing the game, a visual novel loosely based on about the first 2/3 of the Iliad.  (Well, on parts of the first 2/3 of it.  Like, you know, leaving out most all of the battles because it's being narrated by Patroclos...)  A visual novel, for anyone who might stumble across this post and doesn't know about them, is like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books from the '80s, only it's a video game, and there are pictures of the characters and locations.  (And there are typically a lot fewer choices to make.)  From a writing perspective, it's a lot like writing a screenplay with a very verbose narrator.  ;)  (Remember the Jim Henson TV show The Storyteller?  Writing a visual novel is a lot like writing a script for that would be, except no way would a visual novel ever be able to get John Hurt to voice its narrator. :P )

    I finished the script back in July--this game jam ran from July 1st to August 31st, and it's much like NaNoWriMo, in that you're supposed to start from scratch at the beginning and finish by the end, only in a game jam you're also supposed to turn it in when you're done, so everyone else can play it--and it was almost a full 50k.  (I may have unconsciously slipped into NaNo mentality there, and been subconsciously aiming for 50k, though I don't really know how much shorter I could have made it and still told the whole story.)  This meant I had fulfilled my primary role in the jam, yes?

    But since it was my story and I had become the de facto lead of the team, I couldn't just bug out and do whatever I wanted in the interim.  I had to be constantly in contact with everyone else (especially hard without reliable internet access!), and I had to deal with every little problem that came up, especially every little problem to do with all the incoming art, especially the background art.  (There are a lot of locations in the game, so a lot of backgrounds were needed, and although there are resources online to get free (or at least extremely affordable) pre-made backgrounds, almost none of them fit our needs, given that our game is set in the 1980s in a Detroit-like city, and most of the art assets for visual novels are modern and typically look like a Japanese suburb, and/or high school.)  There were a lot of problems, as you might expect, but eventually the art did all pull together, even if some of it is barely more than a placeholder.

    But then there's the coding side of things.  I've written a few games before, using a very simple engine called TWINE, which is designed to be pretty much nothing but text.  Here's an example from one of my previous games:

    As you can see, some images are possible, but it's not as big a part of the experience as this:

    (Yup, that's the game I've been working on for the past two months.  From left to right, that's Achilles (Ace Lee), Patroclos (Pat Rock) and A.J. the Axeman (the Greater Aias/Ajax)...so you can see I took more liberties than just turning them into '80s rock performers...)

    Anyhow, my point is just that coding with TWINE and coding with Ren'py--the engine for this visual novel--is very different, and the script I wrote would have been downright simple to code in TWINE.  (It's way simpler than Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the game that first screenshot is from, which I wrote for a much shorter game jam.)  It is not so simple to code in Ren'py, especially since some of the nitty-gritty stuff (like positioning the character sprites) can't really be done until all the art is in.

    Consequently, we were only able to submit a demo instead of the full game.  :(

    And the stress of this whole thing has murdered my diet.  I feel like I've put on twenty pounds.  (Dunno if I actually have, but it feels that way.)

    Not that any of that is even really the point here, or what I'm talking about in the title of the post.  This experience has been murder on my self-perception as a writer.  As I mentioned last time, at no time was I ever truly satisfied with the script of this game.  That has only intensified as the month has progressed.  In fact, I was so unhappy with it that I decided to break the seal on an old NaNo novel in an attempt to cheer myself up by the comparison.

    I should probably explain that.  See, my second NaNoWriMo novel did not go as I wanted it to.  In fact, by the time November 30th rolled around, I was so disgusted with it that I closed the file and never opened it again...until this past month.  (Not quite a full nine years later.)  My idea was to reread it and reassure myself that my writing has at least improved.

    Only...um...it hasn't.

    Now, don't get me wrong.  That old NaNo novel was terrible.  Half the cast--or more--was directly stolen from various JRPGs, and very blatantly so.  (Admittedly, half of them were ripped off from a more obscure JRPG, so most people would be able to read it and think they were actually original, though they certainly scream their original characters' identities at me.  The ones so very obviously based on Final Fantasy VII characters, on the other hand...)  What little of the heroine that was unique to her and not just lifted from Yuffie Kisaragi was very much, well, what's known in fan fiction circles as a "Mary Sue."  Not as bad as most--at least a large chunk of the cast genuinely didn't like her--but she was very much "the special" and...ugh.  It was just so bad.

    But way more happened in it than usually does in my novels.  Every chapter had new events, new places, new people, things happening.  Most of my stuff is slow as molasses.  Whatever it was that I tapped into for that novel that let me actually have things happen...I've lost it, possibly forever.  :(

    Finding that out--that my writing is actually getting worse with time--was supremely depressing.  Like, I've been on-and-off mentally composing this post for about a week now, and some of it was very much "I'm the worst writer in the history of ever" kind of melodrama.

    But getting to play through the first few scenes of the game I wrote, with the sprites and the music and the backgrounds all coming together...that was pretty thrilling.  And it did make me feel a lot better about myself, and about what I'd written for the game.  (Though I still hate that my stupid script is why we couldn't finish on time...)

    Which isn't to say that I'm feeling great about myself or my writing, but...I guess it's left me in a slightly better headspace.

    At least for now.

IWSG - It's like NaNo only twice as long and with art

 

    So, I am deep into the creation process on my visual novel.  Or rather, I'm out of my depth on the creation process on the visual novel.

    Aside from needing to make one tiny edit to the text to remove some extraneous descriptive material now that I know what the background will look like, the script--which is to say, my role--is done.  (And clocked in at nearly 50k, so the comparison to NaNo is an appropriate one.  Although the script also includes notes to the programmer, information about changing sprites and backgrounds, and when sound effects are called for, so the actual text the player will see is probably no more than 45k, maybe not even quite that much.  (I should delete all the notes and such to find out...only that sounds like a lot of work for zero reward.))

    That means, of course, that my job has become largely "artist wrangler" as I try to explain to people who can actually draw what I want things to look like and then try to make sure all the art gets drawn in time to be put into the game, which has to be uploaded by August 31st if it's going to count for the game jam.  (In a pinch, of course, the game can be uploaded with some graphics missing, using blank jpgs that just say "art in progress" or something.  Or for that matter it could be uploaded like a demo, only running partway through.  And, in a super-duper pinch, I could forget the pictures and music and all that and shove it into TWINE in a few days of hard coding, if I really, really, really had to.)

    What I am learning about myself through this process is that I am not a team player.

    I mean, I kind of already knew that, from my experiences at the museum, but this is a whole different ball of yarn.  Because this is "my" project, and as an unemployed person (who has enough money saved up that I can afford not to be hunting for work) I have all the time in the world to work on it.  Which of course makes it frustrating that no one else on the team dedicates all their time to the project.

    Which is, of course, totally unfair and unreasonable of me.

    I'm aware of that, but it doesn't make me any less frustrated by the fact.

    I am doing my best not to blame them--it's not their fault, or even a problem in any logical sense, that they have lives and I don't have one--and I don't think I've said anything to make them think that I am upset that the art is not done when the script is, but trying to stay calm and rational is not successfully preventing me from feeling like a caged tiger waiting for its first meal in days.

    However, I still like the idea of making a real, honest-to-goodness game that people can play, and which isn't 99.9% text.  And I have some ideas of things I want to do in future games.  (After I write the next draft of the second novel in my YA series, as the current draft needs soooo much more work!  I expect next month's post will be me fretting about how I'm going to work in all the characterization changes from the rewrite of book one that somehow didn't make it into the rewrite of book two...)

    So I'm thinking I'm going to learn how to code.  Not like heavy-duty coding, just low-level coding.  I'm going to do some minor episodic games using assets posted to itch.io for free use (or relatively cheap use; I'll give myself a budget of, like, the price of a single console game or something) and use them to teach myself how to do it.  So, like, a visual novel to learn Ren'py basics, and then maybe RPG Maker will be put on sale and I'll do an RPG chapter (sadly, I passed up a huge sale earlier this summer, when one of the older versions was like $5 or so) and then maybe I'll see what other programs are out there to make game making a little easier that might allow me to make a puzzle game or an adventure game or a strategy game.  Actually, I should probably prioritize strategy game, since I already tried futilely to make one in TWINE and it could use a remake to make it a proper game.  (Which I'm sure a talented developer could do in TWINE, but I'm not that smart, sadly.)  Plus I have another idea for a strategy game where Achilles...hmm, no, actually, gonna keep that idea to myself.  ;)  It's an extremely alternate take on the Trojan War, let's say, and leave it there.

    But the main thing I want to do is cut my reliance on other people.  Hence learning to code and using already available resources.  But eventually the resources will dry up, and then what?  (I mean, really, where am I going to find pre-made game assets based on Mycenaean Greece?  Classical Greece, sure, but Late Bronze Age?  Nope.  Don't think I'll ever find that.)  If only it was as easy to learn to draw or computer-generate art as it is to write!  *sob*

    Of course, if there wasn't a deadline, it wouldn't bother me so much.

    And of course none of this actually has to do with writing *cough* though it's certainly a lot to do with my insecurities!

    To get back on the topic of writing...I can't say I'm totally satisfied with the script.  I feel like it started getting lazier and lazier the further in I got.  Like, early on, when the player can read newspaper articles, I went to a fair amount of effort to say where in the paper the article was, and what it said, etc.  By the end, it was just a couple of lines summing up what was said.  Hopefully the player will look at that as reflecting the mounting panic the main character/narrator is feeling, but...yup, I'm not pleased with that.  (And yet the game's already so freaking long that I don't want to go in and expand on any of that!)

    On the other hand, the sensitivity reader said they liked the main character and his boyfriend and their interactions with each other, so I'm at least pleased about that.  :)

    On a weirder note, I was getting punchy when I wrote one of the daily events.  (The game takes place over the course of two weeks, and for about a full week of it you get to pick from a handful of daily events, which go through three shifts as the situation gets more dire.)  It's one where the narrator's boyfriend is going to be interviewed by the local newspaper, and since one of the lead characters in Velvet Goldmine (my favorite movie, which indirectly prompted this game) is a journalist, I couldn't resist giving him a quasi-cameo, in that the fellow who comes to interview him is gorgeous and sending off "gay" vibes to our two leads.  (There are many differences between the character in the game and the character in Velvet Goldmine, I hasten to point out, however.  The game character is not English, he's a bit younger, and he doesn't have Arthur's serious social awkwardness issues.  Also he works for the Rock City Bugle, not the New York Herald.)

    But now I want to write a fanfic wherein the Velvet Goldmine character really does interview the two leads of my game...

    ...probably the only reason that I won't end up writing it is that I can't see anywhere the story could go other than what is called in fan fiction circles "PWP":  "porn with(out) plot".  And I can't write smut to save my life.  (Which only makes sense, considering that I'm aroace and have literally never seen a naked man in person in my life.  Nor do I want to.)  Still, I wouldn't lay odds on me not eventually trying to write it anyway. ;)  (Just hopefully without attempting the smut part.)

Some Thoughts on Ancient Burial Practices

             So, lately (when I’m not working on my visual novel), I’ve been reading a book about the royal tombs at Ur.  Specifically, it’s an out-of-print book I found at the antique mall near my house; the book was the one that was published to accompany the national tour of the artifacts from said tombs when their home museum was being renovated about twenty years ago now.  (Ugh, I feel old.  I remember being awed by the artifacts when that tour came to town here…after I had moved back home after dropping out of my first attempt at getting a Master’s Degree.)

            Anyway, while the book has me pondering a lot of different things—mostly regarding the appropriateness (or rather lack thereof) of a bunch of European and American archaeologists going around digging up everyone else’s ancient kings and then toting (many/most of) the grave goods back home (as Hergé pointed out in The Seven Crystal Balls, how would the people of Europe feel if a bunch of Egyptians came and started digging up all their kings?), also wondering just what those ancient dead would actually think about the matter if you could travel back in time and tell them what would happen to their graves a few thousand years later—what I just read last night has put me on a more precise and yet also highly speculative train of thought.

            Specifically, what I read late last night was about Ur’s excavator, Sir Laurence Woolley, trying rather futilely to explain why one of the “Royal Tombs” had more than seventy other bodies in it, apparently the bodies of retainers sacrificed at the time of the king’s burial.  This was accompanied by various more modern scholars trying to explain it—with a four page sub-essay on some literary examples from recovered Mesopotamian texts (a sub-essay that was not marked out in any way as different from the rest of the text, so it looked like a page was simply deleted from the file pre-printing)—and ultimately the only answer anyone could come up with was “well, we don’t really know why so many people were sacrificed, but it’s not like other cultures didn’t do the same thing, even if 70+ is a lot more than the usual number.

            It got me to thinking, though, about just how such a practice could have gotten started in the first place.  Because, if you think about it, funerary human sacrifice is typically found in the cultures whose technological level is still pretty low.  They’re stratified—obviously!—and certainly highly sedentary and agrarian, but it’s not the sort of thing you normally find in a culture that has, say, developed the steam engine.  The kinds of cultures that usually practiced funerary human sacrifice were typically also cultures where you would expect human life would be pretty highly valued, since life was so hard; why throw away a strong, healthy young person who could help the civilization survive?  (It would be another matter entirely if the extra bodies in these tombs typically belonged to old, sickly people!)  Now, yes, of course they’re more valuable as sacrifices for exactly that reason, because of their value to the society, and yet if you think about the typical items buried with regal dead, they’re things with artificial value, rather than true value.  All the gorgeous gold jewelry in the world has very little true value in a survival sense:  its value is based entirely on aesthetic reasons, nothing utilitarian.  (And, now, educational value when the jewelry in question is ancient, of course.  But that’s our civilization, not theirs.)  Sure, the dead were often buried with weapons, but they were often elaborate ones that were decorative more than functional.  It’s not a perfect point for a great many reasons (even when you only look at cultures and funerary human sacrifices that fit my basic point) but I hope the core of my logic at least makes sense:  I’m more trying to set up the reason that the entire practice, world-wide, feels like it’s a bit off and could do with some theoretical explanations that come from outside the box.

            Most of the modern scholars trying to explain the phenomenon, in terms of the particular examples at Ur, were really bogged down in typical archaeological theory.  One even structured it as a change in the nature of kingship, etc.  The kinds of reasons that are only applied by scholars at great remove from the subject in question.

            I want to look at the notion from a more human, more “in-world” view, even if it’s also far more speculative and entirely unscholarly.  Though what I’m about to go into is purely in the case of those cultures that didn’t also practice non­-funerary human sacrifice:  when human sacrifice is already part of the culture’s everyday operating parameters, applying it in a funerary context is going to seem far more normal.  (And it is, of course, extremely possible that some of these ancient cultures did, in fact, practice non-funerary human sacrifice, but only in a way that left no material traces, or at least none that archaeologists have so far discovered.  Or that they practiced such sacrifice at a time in their even more remote past, and it was that which shaped the funerary version, which remained part of the culture long after the non-funerary version ceased.)

            So the question is, what would make a culture decide to kill the healthy in order to bury them with the dead?

            The typical scholarly answer is usually “so that they may attend on the deceased in death as they did in life” in one form or another.  The form of service varies—household servants, concubines, guards, etc.—but that’s the basic motivation that’s usually used as an explanation for the sacrificial practice.

            And I’m not saying it’s wrong.  It’s probably right…but that’s after the practice was established.  How did the practice get started?

            Like so many questions, it’s one that can’t be answered (without a time machine).  But I feel like I’ve hit on some possible explanations.

            Take a culture where the king (or other powerful/wealthy male) was often buried with his concubines, lesser wives, maybe even his primary wife.  How did that get started?

            There are a couple of possible explanations, or rather two major pools from which many possible explanations can be derived.  The most charitable one would be to assume that the first king (or whatever) who was buried with one or more of his concubines/wives/etc. was buried with concubines/wives/etc. who had loved him so much they took their own lives in mourning at his death; their suicides might have been covered up and called a sacrifice, particularly if suicide was viewed as shameful for the culture.  A less charitable (and more likely, in my opinion) explanation would be along these lines:  king (or whatever) dies without issue, but a handful of concubines/wives, with whom he was known to have been intimate not long before he died.  His successor does not feel secure in his position, and worries that if one of the dead man’s concubines/wives turns out to be pregnant, then the baby would be a threat to his position.  The solution?  Sacrifice all the concubines/wives before they have time to figure out if they’re pregnant, and then the dead man’s potential children die with him, and the successor’s position is secure (at least from that particular threat).

            How about a culture where the king (etc.) is buried with his household staff.  What might explain that?

            There are a lot of possible explanations for the start of that one.  Maybe he was assassinated, and his household staff needed to be silenced quickly lest news get out…or the assassin-turned-heir be fingered as the responsible party.  Or maybe he was assassinated and it seemed to be an inside job, but no one was quite sure which member of the household staff was responsible.  Or maybe he died of a particularly nasty illness and it was worried that it might be a plague (or it just plain was a plague) and his household staff was judged likely to be contaminated—or maybe they were in fact visibly suffering the same illness—and needed to be put to death to keep the disease from spreading.

            And one where the king was buried with some of his soldiers?

            The easiest explanation is that the soldiers in question were deemed too loyal to the old king, and likely to turn on the new king, particularly if the new king was not the old king’s son.  Or maybe the old king died in battle, and the soldiers in question were those who failed to save him (though depending on the culture, it might seem like rewarding them for their failure).  The assassination possibilities from the household staff bit above could also easily apply here, too.

            Of course, all of these describe individual incidents, not an entire cultural tradition.

            But see, that’s the kicker.  All of these also involve secrecy, right?  The new king doesn’t want anyone knowing he’s killing the old king’s concubines in fear that they might be pregnant, so he says he’s “sacrificing them so they can continue to serve his late majesty in the next world” or whatnot.  So what happens when he dies?  His own heirs, remembering what he had done for the previous king’s funeral, decide they should emulate it, because surely he knew what he was doing, since he was king and all.  Then the heirs’ heirs do the same thing, and it becomes tradition, accepted into the culture’s basic beliefs.

 

            Obviously, I’m not saying “yes, this is what happened!”

            I’m saying “this makes sense to me as how this sort of thing may have gotten started.”

            I could be so totally wrong that no civilization ever went through any of these steps.  Or maybe it happened once or twice, but most of them came to their funerary human sacrifice in radically different ways.  (Maybe those cultures originally had non-funerary human sacrifice practices that we just don’t know about because they were just too old.)

            But I thought it was an interesting “what-if” kind of theory.

            Also the kind of thing I might use in some piece of fiction at some point.  If I ever have a situation where it might apply.  (Probably more as world-building than as a direct incident in a story...or maybe not.  Who knows?)

            And I thought I’d post it to the blog because…hey, I need to start posting things that aren’t just the monthly Insecure Writers’ Support Group stuff, right?

IWSG: July

     Love that creative title post, right?

    *sigh*

    Yeah.  That pretty much sums up where I am right now.  The game jam started on June 30th, so I've been working on my visual novel script for a week now, and I'm making pretty good progress...except that the early scenes are much better than the later ones.  Like, as soon as the conflict started, it all just went out the window.  :(  I just can't write arguments to save my life, evidently.

    Which makes me wonder why I chose to write a visual novel about a guy having an extended temper tantrum over an argument.

    *cough*

    To start over at the beginning, since I don't think I ever outlined this on the blog, the idea for this visual novel is that I am adapting parts of the Iliad through a 1980s rock'n'roll filter:  instead of being warriors on the fields of Troy, Achilles and Hector are rock performers, and Agamemnon and Priam are their managers (though Priam is also still Hector's father).  The fight between Achilles and Agamemnon is pretty weird and artificial:  Achilles and Hector are up for the same award, it's given to Achilles, but then Agamemnon is informed that the announcer lied about whose name was on the card, and that it was supposed to go to Hector.  Not wanting the bad press of refusing to return the award, Agamemnon sends it back, and Achilles has a conniption fit, but he's blaming everything on Agamemnon instead of on the people who run the award or on Hector.  (As to the reason it's set in the 1980s, it's complicated, but stems out of its origin as the capsule description of a movie in a Velvet Goldmine fanfiction I wrote a while back.)

    It was going great until I got to writing him blaming everything on Agamemnon's willingness to capitulate.  Suddenly he makes no sense and is acting like a sullen twelve year old.  (Which, admittedly, Achilles always did.  Only, you know, a dangerous one with a spear and divine blood to make him stronger than normal men.)  His immaturity is made rather more awkward since he and Patroclos have had sex like three times already at this point in the game.  (Never on screen, though.  One of the two game jams I'm submitting this to doesn't accept 18+ material, and I would never be able to write a convincing sex scene even if it did.)

    The worst part, to me, is that I'm part of a team here.  Admittedly, since the whole thing was my idea, I kind of ended up in the lead of the team, but that doesn't change the "team" thing in its most important respect:  if my writing ends up being utter trash, then everyone else will have wasted their time and effort.  :(  I did at least give them all a link to my writing on AO3 before the jam started so they would have the chance to back out if they thought my script would be garbage, but that doesn't make me feel any less nervous about potentially wasting everyone's effort.

    Especially since our composer has already produced a number of pieces (none polished and perfected yet, but still), and they make me feel all the more incompetent as a writer, because they're just so good!  It's like, how can my mediocre-to-awful words be on screen while that awesome music is playing?

    So far, our artists have only produced sketches, so I can't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure the art, too, is going to overwhelm the words.  Which I guess is kind of the point, but...bottom line, I feel awkward and uncomfortable about it no matter how you slice it.

    On top of everything else, I'm afraid I'm getting sick.  Just an allergy-induced sinus thing, but still.  (It shouldn't be possible for it to be COVID-related, at least:  I'm fully vaccinated, and although a lot of people in my area aren't and the Delta variant has been making headlines as it tears through the local population, I've been careful about wearing a mask in public, so between the vaccine and the mask, I should be okay on that score.)  If I do end up sick, that could make finishing the game really difficult.  We do have two months, but sometimes my sinus things can hang on for weeks, even a full month if they're really nasty.

    (Also, yesterday morning a chipmunk decided to sit on my front porch and make annoying little chirpy noises that I fear are it trying to attract a mate.  I can hear it totally well through my front door (which is very near my standing desk), and it is super annoying.  It hasn't come back since I went and partially blocked its hole (leading under my front porch) with little rocks from the fill around my yews, but I'm sure it'll be back soon.  That is not going to help me concentrate on my writing.)

IWSG: Unease

     This isn't going to be much of a post.  My glasses problems still aren't fully resolved (I have new glasses en route that are more or less the same prescription as my old glasses, which should let me work on a computer without eye pain and without looking through the fog of scratches on the old lenses) so I haven't been able to do much writing over the last month.  And most of what I've been doing has been preparing for a game jam I'll be participating in during July and August.

    A game jam--for those who don't know, which I kind of expect to be most people seeing this, as they're rather a niche thing--is a lot like NaNoWriMo, except that they have different time limits (this one is two months, but some are only a weekend!) and the goal is to produce a game.  (Typically a video game, but sometimes it's to create a tabletop RPG.)  I'm going to be writing a visual novel, and have gotten together with a programmer, two artists (one for characters and one for backgrounds) and a composer, so I'm actually going to be under huge pressure not only to get it written but to do it well, because these four other people's entry into that game jam is dependent on what I write.  And I'm beginning to wonder if I'm capable of writing anything good enough. :(  But I'll probably devote next month's IWSG post to talking about the game (and likely August's to talking about how it's going), so that's not actually what I want to talk about here.

    So, I've been posting both fan fiction and some mythology-based fiction to AO3, a major site that hosts such works.  And I've been reading some of what others write, which is often a frustrating experience, since so many people don't have a very good grasp on how English works.  (Sometimes this is because it's not their native language.  Unfortunately, in just as many--possibly in more--cases, they don't have that excuse.  But it would seem rude to point it out either way, so I just have to suffer in silence.  Or more accurately, rant about it to the empty room I'm sitting in and then not post anything online about it.)  And in the case of mythology-related works, a lot of people have some bizarre and frustrating misunderstandings about various aspects of Greek mythology and/or ancient Greek culture, particularly where the Trojan War is concerned.  And again, most of the time I feel like I can't say anything about it, and often it doesn't seem worth it, because there's not much to the work in question.

    But then there was a work-in-progress that was really good, except for the grammar and mythological confusion.  I didn't say anything about the grammar, because I got the feeling from it that English was not their native tongue, but I did mention some of the mythological problems, accompanied by compliments on various aspects of the work that I enjoyed.

    The compliments were not enough.  The author replied, having taken considerable offense.  (And based on the grammar on display in their reply, English is their native language.)  And yes, my phrasing was not good, which made the situation worse.  I have a terrible tendency to get too comfortable in a place--real or digital--which makes me relax and then causes me to say or do something thoughtless and inappropriate.  This was that moment for AO3, so I am suddenly feeling very uncomfortable about being there, and have neither read anything else there nor posted anything (despite that I had a work in the process of going up at the time) since then.

    What bothers me most about the author's reply is the formulaic nature of it.  It was exactly what I had heard people on the "pet peeves" threads in the fanfic forums on the NaNoWriMo site complaining about before the site was ruined and I abandoned NaNo in disgust.  The author first said how not all fanfic authors want criticism, and then said that they didn't need to improve their work because they were doing it "out of love."  It's one of those things that I wanted to think was made up just to complain about it.  How can someone claim that being motivated by love is license to create a shoddy product?  When something is a labor of love, you're supposed to work extra hard on it, because you want it to be perfect, because it's something you love.  Using love as an excuse for laziness and unwillingness to improve...has the meaning of love changed, or am I just such an old fogey (at 45) that I cling to ancient and abandoned practices?

    Whatever the explanation, I am left feeling like I don't belong on AO3, like it's the home of the "I don't want to improve my craft because it doesn't matter to me even though I claim to love it" tribe, a tribe which is necessarily hostile to me, an inveterate over-proofreader of and eternal fiddler with my own work.  I mean, is that secretly the reason my fics don't do well, because I actually go in and fix 99% of my grammatical errors before I post the piece?  (I know it's not:  the reason they don't do well is because I suck as a writer.)

    The bigger question, though, is what do I do with my writing if I don't post it there?  I've kind of gotten to liking sharing it with the internet, even though the 'net is entirely uninterested in it.  Maybe I should start a third Blogger blog and post my novels there instead of on AO3?  (Or just post it to this one since I'm barely even using it anyway?)  I've seen people on Kickstarter trying to fund print editions of their novels who have said that the full text of the novel is posted on their website already, so maybe posting a novel to a blog isn't that strange a practice.  I don't know, though; it feels like a weird thing to do somehow.  Fortunately, it doesn't matter yet, since I haven't finished the rewrite of book two anyway.

    In sum, I'm just generally feeling weird and off.  Hopefully, my mental situation will improve once my new glasses arrive and I can start writing again.

IWSG: "Progressive" Bifocals

 

    Ugh.

    I've actually had these new glasses for over a month, but I stopped wearing them entirely within a few days...only it took me a month to get up the nerve to call the optician's to see if I could get some other arrangement going to allow me to see properly.

    I kinda got a serious lecture out of it. :(  And I sorta promised I'd wear them for a week without switching back to my old glasses to try and get used to them.

    Which means I basically can't write now, because I can't read the computer screen.  I mean, I can kind of read it, but I keep having to shift my head around up and down because the "sweet spot" moves every time I blink.  And even when it's lined up right, it's still...it's hard to describe the problem, but do you know how it is when you're at the eye doctor and they're doing the "better 1 or better 2" thing and one of them is just off even though you can't quite pin down what's wrong with it?  It's like that.  Only it's what I've got.  And just looking at the screen long enough to write this far has already made my eyes hurt a lot.

    So although my writing had been doing a little bit okay, it's now about to drop off a freaking cliff until I can get these glasses sorted out.

    I want smart glasses that change the prescription on the whole lens to suit the distance of what you're looking at, darn it!  Or at least ones that have three settings which you can change at the touch of a button.  It shouldn't be that hard to do, should it?   (I'd settle for having my magnetic sunglasses' lenses replaced with reading or intermediate level lenses, too.  That wouldn't be as easy, but it would work better than this catastrophe!)

    Anyway, due to the stupid glasses thing, I'm posting this about six hours early.  Sorry.  I don't want to have to deal with this again so soon.