IWSG - March 2

    

    OMG, I totally forgot to pre-write this month's post! :O

    Fortunately, I actually have an answer to the monthly question (which is good, 'cause I don't have much to talk about on my own initiative aside from the usual complaining).

March 2 question - Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not?

    Yup, I have definitely been conflicted about writing individual scenes of a story.  Not sure if I've ever been conflicted about a whole story, but individual scenes, for sure.

    Typically, these scenes involve things I don't want to have happen in a story--character deaths, mostly--and the only thing to do is just to force my way through it.

    Sometimes I've found it's indicative of something bigger than just "don't make me kill my darlings!"  Like, the first time I wrote a Velvet Goldmine fanfic, the story as I had planned it out involved Curt showing up drunk to Arthur's apartment (don't worry about who the characters are; I just thought it would be easier than "character A" and "character B" in telling the story here), and they get in an argument, and Curt calls Arthur something particularly offensive.  Just a basic insult, really, and one that Curt used several times in the movie, but it's a word that just bothers me for some reason, which I have only personally used like twice in my life, both times to exceptionally awful strangers who could not hear me.  I had a huge amount of trouble writing that scene and made it upset Arthur terribly (too much, in fact), and spent hours looking at the IMDB pages for the actors as a way of putting it off.  I did eventually write it, but it was rather agonizing to do so.  The ironic part of all this is that one of the first things I did in the second draft was to cut that scene, because it should never have been there in the first place, because things should have gone differently in an earlier scene, thus preventing that one from going that way at all.  (Curt still showed up drunk at Arthur's apartment in the second draft, but there was no fight, because they'd already had a sober mini-argument on the subject, which was 95% a misunderstanding in the first place.)

    Because of that, I've started to interpret my own personal conflicted feelings about a scene as my subconscious telling my conscious mind that there's a better way.  The project I had been working on for a game jam this February had a similar situation:  there was a pretty ordinary-seeming sequence that I had put in the chapter I was working on, and every time I started trying to write it, I just couldn't motivate myself to write it, to the extent that it was clearly that I just plan didn't want to write it.  The situation was this:  a young warrior was serving in the palace guards, and his boyfriend kind of accidentally ended up in a relationship with the king's eldest daughter, and when she found out her boyfriend was much more in love with another man than he was with her, she decided to get the other man killed, and after an attempt to kill him with booby-traps in the forest (it almost made sense in context), she decided to hire some mercenaries to pretend they were invading the kingdom, and then made sure he was put in charge of the troops sent out to drive them off, so that they could kill him.  The basic situation--young man leads a small force to deal with invaders--is something I've written before, and while I'm not good at nor particularly enjoy writing combat scenes, there was nothing about it that should have been causing me so much anxiety to write.  Given that, I decided to step back and analyze the situation, figure out why it was bothering me so much, and if that was an indicator that maybe I just shouldn't include the scene.

    As a result of that, I realized that yeah, there was something deeply wrong with the scenario.  Several things, in fact.  In many other times and places, a princess hiring a band of mercenaries just to off her romantic rival would work fine, maybe even seem normal (in a particularly twisted way).  But this story was set in Late Bronze Age Greece (because it's me writing it, lol), so there are two major things standing in the way of a princess hiring mercenaries.  First, money hasn't been invented yet, so how is she paying them?  Second, her culture's writing is quite honestly one of the most awkward and unwieldy systems of writing ever developed by mankind (not only are the letters too complex and sometimes hard to tell apart from each other, they also don't fit the Greek language very well), and thus was only used by highly trained scribes, and was frankly not well-suited for sending clandestine instructions regarding things like the intended targets of assassinations.  (Though if the tale of Bellerophon is as old as its telling in the Iliad suggests, then that writing system might well have been used for it anyway, but...uh, actually, yeah, I guarantee it was, even if Homer invented that wrinkle in Bellerophon's story.  Humans are terrible creatures who will always find a way to use anything to cause death and destruction.)    Oh, actually, a third--if slightly less convincing--problem with it was that this princess (and heir to the throne!) was completely okay with having large numbers of her subjects killed just to get rid of one man.  Not necessarily something that a king of that time period--or any other, unfortunately--would bat an eye at, but a teenage girl probably should have had at least some hesitance to do something that callous. Anyway, due to my analysis of the situation I decided to cut that scenario, and only have her make two attempts to kill him in that chapter, instead of three.

    And then, wouldn't you know it, I also took a further step back and realized that the whole script was total garbage and that no one would want to play the game (especially since I was making the graphics myself by tracing over photos of ancient frescoes and then trying somehow to tweak them to make them do what I wanted) that resulted, so I cancelled the whole project. 😅

    So, yeah, long story short, I've come to see my own conflicted feelings as being a reason to re-analyze what I'm trying to write and see if maybe I shouldn't be writing it.

    Sometimes I feel conflicted for different reasons, though.  I ended up still joining that game jam (which was actually about mentally unstable characters who frequently employ violence because of their romantic feelings) with a different, much simpler game.  Simpler, but much more risque, to the point where I felt super-conflicted about releasing it, because it was so unlike me to write something like that, and I worried about how people would react to the content in it.  (Though, really, it's tame compared to pretty much everything else in its genre...)  I spent like two days fretting about releasing it, and then a further two days fretting after releasing it, and when I finally got the nerve up to go to look and see what the reaction to it was, it's been getting way more hits and downloads than anything else I've ever released.  (Like, it's been up for four days and has almost surpassed the number of downloads of the big game I released last August, which is still my most popular title, having more than double the number of the next most popular.)  So, in that case, my conflicted feelings were just nerves, and I'm glad I didn't assume them to be "I shouldn't be doing this, throw it all away!"

    Hmmm....

    I feel like I have spent this whole post driveling nonsense.

    But I'm not sure if I can see a way to bring it all around to make sense.

    Honestly, my brain's still not recovered from the whole should-I-shouldn't-I about releasing the game, not to mention the freaking out after having released it.

    *shrug*

    Anyway, I'm planning on getting back to working on an actual novel soon.  I just have to finish writing a fairy tale first, but then I'm going to finally do the next draft of one of my YAish novels. :D

The Mathematics of Love

     Something I wasn't particularly aware of until reading A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities, selected/edited/translated by J. C. McKeown, was that the Ancient Greeks had a very particular way of expressing numbers with letters.  (No details are given regarding why, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't just for "number games," but was for actual mathematical purposes--much like the Roman system--since numerals as we think of them didn't exist yet, not in Europe, anyway.)

    The numbers 1-9 were represented with the first eight letters of the Greek alphabet, with the archaic digamma (Ϝ, "w") for 7, presumably indicating that its position (before being excised from the language) was in between zeta and eta.  Then you had the tens:  10, 20, 30, etc., with the next nine letters of the Greek alphabet, including the archaic koppa (ϙ, "k") for 90.  And finally the hundreds started with rho and went up past omega to end with the archaic sampi (ͳ, "ts" or "ss") for 900.  (The inclusion of these archaic letters presumably means that this numeric process was not only developed before those letters (and their associated sounds in the case of digamma) were dropped from use , but was so firmly established that changing it just because the letters were no longer used was simply impractical, if not downright unthinkable.)

    However, unlike the Roman letters-as-numbers system, the Greek system meant that every word and phrase had a numerical value.  And evidently they liked to play around with figuring out the values of various words and phrases, and comparing them to the values of others.  (For example, he cites one ancient source that had gone to the trouble of finding two (contiguous) lines of the Iliad that added up to the same number.)  While a number of these equivalencies are listed in the book, one of them particularly gave me a case of the warm fuzzies:

Αχιλλευς φιλει Πατροκλον (no accent marks 'cause I couldn't find some of them)
Achilleus philei Patroklon
Achilles loves Patroclos

    The first word and the second two both add up to 1276.  The number is immaterial, and even the fact that the phrase adds up isn't what makes me smile:  it's the fact that someone first went to the effort of calculating it, and then felt the need to share that with the world by writing it down.  On top of that, their work was then preserved (in the form of one of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, so only barely), so it's just sort of extra exciting.  :D

    I guess I just can't help sort of squeeing when other people are fans of the same ship I am.  :P  (To put it in modern terms that would baffle any ancient mind...)

    (Their story in Hades also makes me squee uncontrollably:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt7FWky4jh0)

 

    But now, in honor of the day, I plan to download and play the number one most appropriate game:  the demo for the anti-dating sim I Just Want to Be Single.  (From what the devs have posted on discord, it's going to be fantastic.  I've been looking forward to it a lot...)

IWSG - Malaise

 

    It's hard for me to get much writing done right now, because it's hard to concentrate on anything.  I've been struggling with why that is, and I think the only realistic explanation is a general malaise and implosion of any sense of self-worth (not that I was ever deluded into thinking I had all that much worth) due to the state of the world, in general, and the loss of my job, in specific.  For a long time, I was okay with my lack of skills and anything most people would consider a life because I had a job I (mostly) enjoyed and which served society in the form of historic preservation.

    But since I was booted from the job due to reduced budget because of the pandemic forcing the museum to close for the better part of a year and to cancel all the year's fundraising events, suddenly I don't have the job that was such a lifeline for my sanity and sense that I wasn't wasting my life.  Now all I have is my writing.  Which would be fine if my writing was actually good, or people wanted to read it.  But it's not good, and no one wants to read it.

    Maybe if I was in a better headspace, I might be able to improve at least some aspects of my writing, but without that external force bolstering me, I can't get into the necessary headspace to actually accomplish such a difficult task.  I can barely even get any writing done.  (Seriously, it felt like a major accomplishment to write a fairy tale-like story of less than 2k words.  That would not, normally, have felt like an accomplishment.  Now, getting it "animated" in Ren'py, that will be a genuine accomplishment...)

    Seems like all I'm good for right now is moaning about my pitiful lot in life, which is particularly galling considering how little I truly have to complain about.  (I mean, despite losing my job, I'm in no financial difficulties, for a start.  I should just be thankful for that, and nothing else, you know?)

    So...yeah...I don't really have much to talk about, because I'm barely connected to myself right now, if that makes any sense whatsoever.

    (On a lighter note, the date 2/2/22 is pretty cool.  Wish I had something interesting or entertaining to say about the all-twos nature of the date...)

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.