IWSG - A New (Writing) Year

 

    First post of the year!  (And it only took almost a week, lol!)

    Lately, I've been struggling with the eternal competition between my drive to write (which is a necessary part of keeping a grip on what little sanity I have) and the dread of other people reading my awful writing.  Which shouldn't be a problem, since I know my writing is terrible, and therefore the last thing I should be doing is putting it somewhere that other people can read it.

    But I somehow ended up doing just that.  I've been releasing fanfic on AO3 for quite a while now (and used to post snippets and short stories on the earlier version of this blog), but that auto-corrected for my lack of skill, in that most people just didn't read it.

    Only now I'm releasing games on itch.io, visual novels and other interactive fiction.  And mostly that still auto-corrects and no one reads plays them, but sometimes they do.  And--in some ways worse--whether they actually read my words or not, some people download the games (albeit not in large numbers) and unless they were to leave a comment saying "this sucked i stopped fast" or something, I'll never know if they actually read it or if they just walked away quickly.

    Which, I suppose, doesn't really matter, except for matters of my sanity.  But there's also that one last pathetic shred of my childhood dreams of being a famous author.  (Or actress.  Or an astronaut...although, actually, that one died back in the late '80s...)  That pitiful little shred makes me want to keep going and putting things out there for people to read even though I know what I'm putting out there is awful.

    I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do about any of that.

    (I mean, I know gamerjocks would say "git gud", but it's not like I can write better by just writing a lot; if that worked, I'd be brilliant by now.)

    I know I should probably just stop posting my stuff, but...how can I when I've released the first novel of a series of seven, all of which were first written years ago?  If there's even one person who's read the first one to completion (I have no idea if there are, but there have been people who have played the interactive version, a few who downloaded the interactive version, and even one who downloaded the .pdf of the non-interactive version, so there might be) then I feel obligated to make sure the whole series is released.  And, honestly, I am kinda proud of some of the stuff in the later books; I feel like I came up with a truly original explanation for why Helen accompanied Paris to Troy.  (And considering how much has been written on the subject, that's really saying something!)  And I really like the way I handled Hades; the character gets such a bad rap in modern media, so I want to put more positive versions out there!  (Gotta give mad props to the game Hades on that score:  despite that he's the final boss (who you fight over and over and over and over again), their version of Hades is probably one of the best modern interpretations, and fits the actual lore quite well.)

    There's also a sense of accomplishment that comes from releasing a video game.  Even if it's free and not good.

    There probably aren't any easy answers to my dilemma (aside from putting a stop to all public releases of my work), which only makes it worse.

    I'll probably keep worrying about it for a long time to come.

IWSG - I feel exhausted

 

    So NaNoWriMo--or, in my case, rebel status of doing NaNo without actually using the ruined NaNo website--has come and gone.  I did well:  122k written, encompassing one full novel's rewrite, a new prologue for a later novel in the series, and the prologue and roughly a third (or a bit more than that) of the first chapter of the script for a visual novel.

    This was the second big rewrite for that novel, and I think it's finally approaching the form I want it to be in for initial online release.  I'll probably want to fix it up more even after that, but...it's been quite a while since I released the first one, and just in case anyone out there wants to read book two, I do want to put it out there for them.  (It's hard to judge how many have actually read book one based on view counts on AO3 and itch.io, but there may be as many as four or five people who have actually read the whole thing.  Maybe it's even possible that there could be as many as six or seven.  That's probably the max, though.  And I don't know if any of them care about the rest of the series; no one has left any feedback one way or the other.  (Well, aside from one anonymous comment on AO3 that I'm 99% positive came from someone I know on Discord who just left it in a misguided attempt to be supportive.))

    The new prologue for book four in the series (I wrote all seven of the novels years ago, but they all needed massive amounts of work before anyone else could be allowed to see them) is a vast improvement over what it had, but it doesn't quite tie into the novel as well as I'd like, and it's possibly a little too risque, so it still needs some work, but I can worry about that when I get to the rewrite of book four! :P

    As to the visual novel script...wow, I've bitten off a lot with this one, as usual.  I've often tried to explain visual novels as "like Choose Your Own Adventure books but with pictures," only in this case it's more or less accurate.  Normally, in a visual novel, your decisions have a limited amount of impact:  maybe it sends you to a new scene or two, but after a while you get back to the old story.  (Unless it's a dating sim, in which case eventually you're deciding which love interest to go out with, in which case you do get sent into a separate path from the other love interests.)  But a while back I picked up one of the reprints of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from the '80s, and I was struck by how it worked:  every time you chose to do a and go to page x or to do b and go to page y, you were off on a new course, and the courses almost never overlap or rejoin each other.

    So, this time I decided to do that.  It is challenging to write, to say the least.  And, as you might expect, it sends you to a lot of dead ends.  (I'm going to have to put a warning on the game along the lines of "you're going to get a lot of game overs" so people won't be too frustrated.  Or will at least be expecting the frustration.)

    It's really making me question my decision to do it this way, I have to admit.  I can see why people don't usually do it.  There's a lot of extra text I have to write that I wouldn't have to if paths just reconverged after a while.  (Okay, admittedly, they do converge again, but only at the start of the next chapter.  It's not like every one of those branches led into completely different later chapters.  That would be a truly insane amount of extra writing!)

    Where it stands (18,165 words in the game script so far), the prologue has two successful outcomes and five game overs, of which three are fatal.  What I have of chapter one has one successful outcome (there will be at least two more), and four game overs, of which only one is fatal (there will be a lot more of both of these).

    It's an experiment on my part, and I think the main thing I'm learning from it is "don't ever do this again."  But it's important to try different methods, and I can put make this script another notch on my belt, as it were, consider it another tool to pull out when necessary, just not to make it the central mechanism of advancement again.

    It's funny, though:  writing standard fiction can make me long for the simpler mode of writing a script (no need to describe things, no need for dialog tags!), but writing a game script often makes me long for nothing more than the simplicity of writing straight-up fiction!  I guess the grass is always greener.  Or the words are always flowing smoother?  (Eew, that didn't work at all!)

Last Day of NaNo!

     To get the actually on-topic stuff out of the way from the start, today I wrote 2,701 words, making for a total of 122,078 words in November.  Not bad.  Though I'd have preferred to get further into the VN script than I did, but...I'll take it.  :)

    Since I'll be talking about my NaNo experience tomorrow for IWSG, I thought I'd talk about Black Friday-Cyber Monday instead in this post.  Because I feel like it. :P

    I set myself the goal of not spending too much time or money on the various sales this year.

    I didn't really live up to that very well.  Particularly the time part. 😅

    Spent more money than I'd have liked, too, but at least the two of the three really expensive purchases were clothing I actually needed, and most of the purchases were from small retailers.

    So there was the two clothing purchases--one from a major chain that has stores in most malls, and the other from a small business that I found out about when I supported their Kickstarter some years back--and I bought a couple of albums on Bandcamp, not because they were on sale, but because I think they were having one of their days where the creator gets all the money, also one of them actually released on Black Friday, so it was literally the first time it was available, and I wanted to help it have a nice strong release day.  :)

    I also bought a couple of games on sale in the Switch store (I meant to buy some games on itch.io, too, but somehow I forgot 😭), one from a major publisher and the other from an indie developer.

    That was going to be the extent of it--it was already probably too much, since both clothing purchases were over $100--since I figured out a work-around with stuff I already had at home so I wouldn't need to buy an actual standing desk.

    But then yesterday the people across the street from me declared war on the tree in front of their house.

    By which I mean to say that this happened:

    8:00, I wake up (yes, I know, that's late, but I'm self-employed/online-freelancer, so who cares when I get up?) to the sound of a big truck idling in the street in front of my house.  I look out the window and grimace to see that it's owned by a tree-trimming company.  By 9:00, there are two of them, and there's a wood-chipper waiting between them.  Both trucks have their engines running, btw.  At no time were the engines on those trucks off.

    By the time my brother came to pick me up and take me to his house to escape from the noise (I couldn't drive myself because the stupid trucks were across from my driveway, making it pretty much impossible to get a car out of the driveway, because why would they care if they're inconveniencing someone who isn't paying them?), it's maybe 9:30, and they've already started chainsawing branches off the tree and feeding them into the wood-chipper.

    When I come home again mid-afternoon, they're still at it.  They ended up lopping off every leaf-bearing branch of that tree.  Not that they cut off the whole branches, I mean, just that they cut off the parts that bear the leaves.  So next spring, that tree is going to have to work a thousand times harder to survive, because it has no way to put out any leaves without growing new sections.  It looks like the skeleton of a tree for a particularly cruel Halloween exhibit.

    So it's not so much that my neighbors decided to wage war on that tree as that they wanted to wage war on the entire planet in miniature.

    Because in order to murder that poor tree, they also had two huge trucks running their engines for at least eight hours.  So on top of preventing that tree from doing its part to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, they also paid someone to have those trucks spewing out even more CO2 into the air, plus they were supporting the destructive fossil fuel industry in order to run those trucks in the first place!

    I already hated those people because their guests always park across from my driveway despite countless other places they can park, but now it goes beyond that.  Like, now I know that they are truly evil as well as thoughtless jerks.

    Sorry.

    I just had to vent about that.

    Anyway, because I was so ticked off at what was happening, I ended up deciding to give myself a present for surviving it.

    Which ended up being two dolls from Pullip Style, and became my most expensive purchase of the extended weekend.  But there was a coupon code on the order for 10% off, and both dolls were a lot cheaper from Pullip Style than direct from the manufacturer (in fact, one of them was cheaper new in her box from Pullip Style than the loose sample doll being sold by Groove!), so I feel like it could have been a lot worse.  (Scratch that, I know it could have been worse:  if I'd gotten the Sailor Saturn doll from Groove, I'd have paid more for her alone than I did for both dolls at Pullip Style.  Of course, now I need a Chibi-Moon to go with her, but...)

    I had thought about buying one of the "pop statues" from Today is Art Day, but the problem with that was that the sale price wasn't that much lower than the regular price, plus the statue I like best (Nike of Samothrace, of course) had the absolute worst color scheme by a mile.  Like, it's got the only bad color scheme in the bunch, in fact.  :(  Hence I ended up going with dolls instead.  Also I wasn't sure where I'd put the statue:  whether I'd gone with Nike of Samothrace or Venus de Milo, either way it would have fit in neatly with my Minoan axe goddess and Athene statuette, but there's no room on the shelf with them unless I move Poison Ivy or the Sailor Uranus/Sailor Neptune duo.  (Yes, I have statuettes of ancient goddess surrounded by pop culture figurines of tough, sexy ladies.  What's wrong with that?)

Phew. Glad November's almost over.

     It's been an interesting few days.

    (And I'm sorry to say I've spent too much at all the online sales...though at least two of the biggest purchases were actually necessary clothing items that I'd merely held off on buying until they were on sale, because saving money.)

    So, didn't post yesterday, but I did write!

    As of the 27th, my total written for the month was 114,827 words.

    On the 28th, I added another 1,430 words (ugh, below NaNo par!) for a total of 116,257.

    And today I wrote 3,120 words, making the month's total 119,377.

    Today felt like something of an accomplishment, though, because I successfully completed one route through Chapter One.  (Each decision the player makes creates a new branch through the chapter, and no branches ever join back up again, so there are a lot of dead ends (many literally so), and the amount of extra writing is crazy.  But it's an interesting experiment in controlling information flow, since players will necessarily have to see various of the failure branches as well as the success branches (unless they decide to stop playing before getting to the end), so I don't want there to be too much information that they learn repeatedly...but I can't guarantee that any player will want to see the different successful paths through each chapter (the Prologue had two, Chapter One will have at least three), so I have to make sure each successful path contains the same basic information, so I don't have to worry about if the players know something once the paths finally join up again at the start of the next chapter.

    I doubt I'll ever do it this way again, but it is, as I said, an interesting experiment.

Oops, fell behind in posting!

     I didn't fall behind in my writing, though, so that's something!  :D

    So, the last time I posted my word count for my NaNo rebel progress (those handy-dandy graphs are the one thing I truly miss about taking part in the official NaNoWriMo process), it was the 24th, and I was up to 109,131 words between the main novel, the prologue for a different novel, and the start of my next visual novel.

    On the 25th, I wrote a measly 1,700 words in moving forward on the visual novel, moving my total up to 110,831.  (I call it "measly," but I think that's actually about the "suggested" number of words per day for the official NaNo...)

    On the 26th, I had another slow day and only added 1,962 words to my visual novel, bringing my total up to 112,793.

    Today, I added another 2,034 words to my visual novel's script, bringing my November total up to 114,827.

    Clearly, my output has dropped dramatically since I moved from standard fiction to visual novel script.  I was writing much more slowly when I was working on my other visual novel, A Song of Warriors, too, so I think part of this is just that it's a slower, harder process to write a visual novel's script than to just write a novel or short story or whatnot.  You have to worry about how much needs to be said and doesn't need to be said regarding non-dialog (do you describe the action in detail, give it a lick and a promise, or say nothing and plan on there being special art to show it?), and of course trying to figure out how to handle dialog choices and branching storylines.  (And this one is super-heavy on the branches!)

    This one--which still hasn't got a title yet--is particularly tricky, because it's a "yandere" take on a Greek myth, turning half the cast (or more) into mentally unstable individuals who gladly kill over the one they love.  Now, this is not actually as crazy and wrong as it sounds at first blush.

    Especially since one of the people being made into a yandere is Achilles, who canonically goes on a bloody rampage and spends more than two weeks torturing a corpse because of the man he loves.  Granted, that's in vengeance rather than "how dare you talk to my boyfriend!" but the principle is not so different.  Likewise, Thetis happily asked Zeus to visit death and destruction on the other Greeks in order to avenge the insult to her beloved son's honor, so she's clearly quite eager to visit harm on every other mortal if it will protect her son in any way.  Neither of them is mentally unstable in the myths (well, Thetis isn't, at least), but...they're probably not really unstable enough in my VN to count as proper yanderes anyway.

    The main thing is, I'm not really good at writing violence, crazed behavior, or jealousy that doesn't come off as shallow and pat, so it's a good challenge for me...but it also makes writing it slower. 😅  Still, I think the idea is pretty fun, and I'm enjoying some of what I've come up with so far, so there's that.  :)  Trying to do the art for the game myself is going to be a challenge in and of itself, but the game jam this is for isn't until February, so hopefully I'll have enough time to get at least the prologue and first chapter finished by the time the jam ends, if not the whole thing.

Moving on...

     So...a lot of the cell phone thing was my own fault for misreading a form.  :cough:  It's all cleared up now, anyway.

    And on the NaNo rebel front, I started work on my next visual novel last night, because I was so unsettled over the whole cell phone issue that I couldn't really focus on Shin Megami Tensei V, despite all the cool discoveries I made when I arrived in Ginza, so...yeah, ended up writing another 1,285 words yesterday, which brings yesterday's total words written up to 105,198, a total of 6,882 written yesterday alone.

    Then today I brought the game's script up to 5,218, which makes for a total word count of 109,131.

    Meaning today I wrote 3,933 words.  Which isn't great, but isn't bad, either.

Mixed

     On the one hand, my cell phone woes continue.  My new provider needs a "port out pin" in order to transfer over your phone number.  My old provider has never heard of such a thing, and all they have is my regular pin or my account number.  Neither provider will tell me which of those it wants.  Furthermore, my old provider guards account numbers with far more zeal than the government guards our social security numbers, and I had to jump through a lot of annoying hoops to get my account number in order to submit that, only to hear back that the account number is "incorrect".  Meaning either the person at the service provider who gave me my own account number got it wrong, or it wasn't the number the other carrier wanted.  This is patently absurd.  They're holding our account numbers hostage in order to force us not to leave.  I've been getting cell phone service from a yandere service provider.  That's actually really freaky.

    On the other hand, I finished the current draft of The Golden God of Aiolia.  Which meant rewrites of six lore scenes and writing two new ones.  Plus figuring out where all the chapters were going to end (since many of them are no longer ending where they originally did) so I could put the lore scenes in the right place instead of in a separate file or tacked on at the end.  The complete draft came to 102,005 words.  (Without the lore scenes, it was 96,408.)

    So, for my current NaNoWriMo rebel numbers:  yesterday, my total words written for November so far was 98,316.

    Today's total word count is 103,913.

    So, today I wrote 5,597 words.  Wow, those two new lore scenes were even shorter than I thought...