IWSG: (clever title goes here)

 

EDIT: evidently if you put < > brackets around part of your post title it just gets ignored by the system. 😓  I've replaced the < and > with ( and ) so hopefully now the whole post title will show...

    As my health problems are starting to stabilize (or at least I've realized that they're coming every two weeks, which suggests that maybe my high school friend was right when she suggested it might be connected to menopause), I'm going to try answering the monthly question for a change.

June 7 question - If you ever did stop writing, what would you replace it with?

    I've spent so much of my life writing, it's hard to imagine what I'd do if I stopped!  (Other than totally lose my mind.)  I suppose I'd have to depend on one of the other creative endeavors that I have occasionally flirted with:  maybe making things with resin, maybe working more on making box rooms (though I'd need a bigger house first if I wanted to have a place to store/display them!), or just devote myself to game dev.  (Though game dev is also writing for me, since I'm a writer and you have to write the game before you can make it, but...)  I could maybe actually dive into one of the two Humble Bundles I've bought with content to teach a person how to use Blender (one a set of video courses and the other a set of books) and maybe finally learn how to do 3D art and hope that I'd be less garbage at it than 2D art.  Maybe I could keep mucking around in that mapmaking program until I got to be slightly less awful at it.

    I suppose I could also just lose myself in my non-creative hobbies, but I feel like that would get old pretty quick.  These days, I can't even make it all the way through a turn-based JRPG without finding myself wanting to do something else while the battle animations play.  (And until my heart issues are resolved, I don't know if I can play anything that isn't turn-based.  Though hopefully I could at least handle the low-level action combat in, say, Stardew Valley, or its myriad imitators.  Hopefully.  (I'm in trouble if I can't, 'cause I've backed a lot of them on Kickstarter and some of them may actually release this year (if I'm lucky)!)  But maybe I'd finally get back to trying to learn another language (probably German, 'cause it's easiest, plus many years ago I bought an untranslated copy of The Neverending Story and I am determined to someday actually read it!) and actually follow through for once.

    But yeah...mostly I think I would go insane if I stopped writing.  Unlike a lot of other writers, I don't have any intention of trying to publish my work, aside from releasing a few things free on itch.io or AO3, so I sort of approach it differently than many others.  I write because I have stories jostling around in my head and wanting to get out; I write to get them out of my head so maybe it'll be less cluttered in there.  (Of course by the time I finish writing one story, five or six more have taken its place, so it's a never-ending struggle...)

More Fanfic Stuff (MDZS/The Untamed)

     So, my heart is still giving me trouble, and I don't really dare go back to writing anything but light fanfic.  (Well, not all that light, given that I'm now trying to write about a war that no version of canon ever actually gave a detailed account of.  And I suck at the whole "war" thing...)

    In keeping with this being Pride Month, I kind of wonder how "right" it is for me to be writing stuff like this, and even if maybe there's something a little...how should I put it?  Mo Dao Zu Shi is danmei, which was largely inspired by the Japanese genre of BL/yaoi, and thus is largely (but not entirely) written by women for women, despite being about romances between men.  It feels like maybe that's actually sort of...wrong?  Like the sexuality equivalent of cultural appropriation?  (For that matter is it cultural appropriation for me to write fanfic set in ancient China when I'm of European descent?  The original work was written by a Chinese person, so...I have no idea if that makes it okay.  I mean, I'm kinda obsessed right now so I'm going to keep writing it anyway; I'm just wondering how guilty I ought to feel about it.  I am, at least, trying to depict the culture as accurately as I'm able (and I have done some research), which hopefully counts for something.)

    In my own defense, I'm trying for the most part to represent the romance between the two leads as realistically to an actual gay relationship as I can, but as I'm female, aromantic, asexual and not really very well versed in humanity (as I tend to hide in my house whenever possible because people are mean, scary creatures I would prefer to avoid at all costs), that's not really all that realistic, I fear.

    Ironically, the live-action adaptation, The Untamed, in some ways portrays the romance more realistically despite that it's been all but removed.  In the novel, we get a thoroughly narrated picture of how the hero is feeling towards his love interest at all times, and thus we see the rather hasty change from "he's practically my enemy" to "he's my friend" to "wait, was I teasing him all the time because I secretly liked him" to "I'm gonna marry him," with that last step taking about twenty-four hours.  (Maybe forty-eight, but definitely not more than that.)  In the drama, however, all we get to indicate their feelings for each other is a lot of longing glances, the occasional action to risk their lives for each other, the near-constant (in the second half) actions of the love interest to step in between the hero and anything that might threaten him, and a few moments that are decidedly suggestive of romantic affection (like when the love interest gets drunk and steals a couple of roosters to give to the hero as a gift 🤣).  By making it entirely subtext, it actually feels more natural, because we, the audience, can assign it the progression that seems most plausible to us, instead of being told a specific romantic chronology that might ring a bit more falsely to our individual perceptions.  (Which is why this current fic I'm working on is probably going to be the one with the most realistic romance of all the fics I'll end up writing for this fandom, because in this one the novel's lead is not the fic's lead, so his romance is in the background and we just catch glimpses of it at different stages, without seeing the progression of it at all.  (In fact it moves from "just friends" to "kissing but calling it energy transfer because we're not ready to admit how we feel yet" during a three month gap in which they're off traveling alone together.)  Not that I'm advocating for relegating romances to the subtext (unless they're straight romances), just saying that it's sort of ironic that the attempt to delete the romance actually made it in some ways better.

    In other random ramblings because I'm sort of blocked as to what the next scene should be and whose POV it should be in, last time I talked about this I showed the map I was working on so I'd have an idea of where various places were in relation to each other.  This was that map:

    Well, I've kept working on it periodically since then.  This is the current iteration:

    The biggest change is that I've fixed up the waterways.  I found a way to superimpose the river-specific maps from Wikipedia's articles on the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, so I was able to add a lot more and more accurate rivers and lakes.  And I think it makes it look like I actually got the cities in the right place, since all of them are either on or near water.  (Of course, it's also got rivers coming out of a freaking volcano, but...at least I established in the text that the volcano is actually a magical illusion created by the bad guys so they'll seem scarier.🤣)  Admittedly, I kind of wonder if maybe I went a little overboard on the rivers, but...if they're real, they're real, right?  Besides, I think it helps to give a sense of just how big an area this is covering.  (For reference, the real places of Qishan and Gusu are over 700 miles away from each other!)

    The next biggest change is probably adding the ominous effect around the mountain beside Yiling.  That's there to represent the Burial Mounds, a super-haunted mountain that plays a huge role in the hero's story.  Smaller role in this AU fic, but...🤷  I do hope to reuse the basic map for later fics...albeit with the volcano removed. 🤣

    I guess I didn't really have anything more to say than that.  I was just sort of hoping that if I wrote for a while I'd come up with a plan for the next scene, but I didn't. 😭  Hopefully I'll think of something by tomorrow.

Random Fanfic Stuff (MDZS/The Untamed)

     Because all I can write right now without my heart freaking out is light fanfic, I've dived back into that, because I hate not writing. 😅 So, I wanted to share a comment I left on the second draft of an already completed fanfic... (because yes, I use the Notes feature on Word in between drafts so I know what to change in the next draft, and sometimes just because)

    Hmm.  Not sure if that's legible without clicking on it.  😓  (It's a moment I'm really fond of, though; I often have difficulty writing anything even remotely romantic, so this sort of flirty stuff feeling even remotely natural is really rare for me.)  The reason for the comment is that I ended up showing my mother a .gif I had downloaded of the two leads from the drama, and she thought they both looked like girls. 😠😡😬  This is the .gif in question:

    Sure, they're both very beautiful, but they're also both very clearly men!  😠

    Anyway, the one I'm currently writing is actually based on the live-action drama The Untamed rather than the original novel, Mo Dao Zu Shi (The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation), because I am a deeply stupid person who commits to the strangest things, so when I initially interpreted my heart palpitations as the "curse" of one of the characters because in the rather dark fic I was then editing for posting on AO3 I had ended up killing him off via a heart attack when he was about my age my reaction to that assumption was to promise him that the next fanfic I wrote would make him the lead instead of the lead's adoptive (and later deeply estranged) brother.  Because of that, I wanted to work with the drama's version of the story because I have a list of characters who have to live if it's going to be a happy, fluffy (well, as close as you can get to fluffy in a story with death and war and zombies) fanfic of the sort I typically write.  And on that list are three characters from the Wen Clan.  In all versions of canon, the bad elements (read: majority) of the Wen Clan attack the lead's home and kill almost everyone there, making the lead and his two adoptive siblings orphans, and giving the adoptive brother in particular an especial hatred of all things Wen.  But in the drama, he already knew two of the three Wens who are on my "they must live" list, and in fact had a fairly adorable crush on one of them.  (Who, btw, is the only one of the three who actually dies in canon.  That novel is really hard on its female cast. 😭)

    Soooo, long story short, because of that, he doesn't quite hate all Wens as much in The Untamed, and is still carrying a bit of a torch for Wen Qing, therefore I could make him the lead and still save them if I used that version of canon.  Which required me to rewatch a hefty chunk of the drama (though I stopped before most of the tragic events, since they were going to be prevented by the alternate storyline of my fanfic and why should I do all that crying for no reason? (plus if I had watched the entire thing I wouldn't have finished it in time to start rereading the novel to celebrate the final volume coming out)) so I actually learned that I had forgotten a few details in the first episode when I wrote in an earlier post that there were some problems regarding the hero's revival.  It turned out that there were a few lines of dialog and voice-over to explain that no one in the household had seen the crazy young man's face as an adult, because he had taken to wearing a mask or heavy make-up ever since he returned home a failure, so that's why no one realized that he was gone and the revived hero with his own face had taken his place.  Not quite as simple to explain and digest as the version in the book, where the hero's soul just takes over the unfortunate young man's vacated body, but perhaps a tiny bit more palatable, and more simply allowing them to keep the same actor throughout the whole show.

    Aaaanyway, I also wanted to share a bit I just wrote from this new fic in the drama's version of canon, because I really liked it.  It goes like this:

Jiang Cheng and a few of the Lans hitched up three of the horses to the wagons, and by the time they were done, Wen Qing was lecturing them for not helping the villagers move their belongings into the wagons.

Why was he being lectured by someone he was doing a favor for?

…and why was he just doing what he was told?

Scowling, Jiang Cheng turned the idea over in his head several times as he was carrying an old woman's belongings to the wagon.  While she usually seemed quite mild in temperament, when she started ordering people around, there was perhaps just a little bit of his mother in the way Wen Qing acted.  Maybe that was why he was simply doing as she told him to.  It was just habit.  It would fade in time as he became more used to his new responsibilities.  But he shouldn't keep on doing this manual labor, especially not on behalf of Wens.

After he set the things in the wagon, Jiang Cheng turned back towards the rest of the village, planning to think up a good reason he could give to stop carrying these villagers' things around.  He found himself facing the old woman from the graveyard, who held the tiny child in her arms.  "Thank you so much for doing this, gongzi," she said, bowing as best she could while burdened by a squirming child.  "But a fine noble like yourself shouldn't have to be working to help common folk like us."

Was she giving him permission to stop?  What kind of insult was that?!  Did he look like a weakling who shirked his responsibilities?  Did she think he was a pampered little peacock?  Those reputations might not have bothered Nie Huaisang and Jin Zixuan, but Jiang Cheng wasn't about to settle for such a meager store of repute!

"The sooner the work is done, the sooner we can be on the road," he muttered, moving around her.

    Or, to put it more succinctly:

Wen-popo accidentally uses Reverse Psychology.

It is super-effective!

    🤣

    (Hmm, I may be too easily amused by my own antics.)

    Trying to work with the drama's canon has proved difficult in terms of physical logistics, I have to say. I'd already consulted several fan-made maps of China so I'd have a rough idea where the various locations from the novel are, right? There's a line in the drama claiming that the two locations furthest from the Wen Clan's home are the closest locations. These are all real places in China, I might add. Why are foreign fans getting the map better than the people in China who made the live-action version did? Mind-boggling.

    Anyway, because I was also going to rewrite the war (because the novel's 2-year-long war became a 4-month-long war in the drama...and the hero who was supposed to have been the biggest terror on the battlefield missed everything but the final battle!) I needed a map I could actually mess around with. So since I had an account on a map-making site (intended mostly for, like, DMs of tabletop RPGs and stuff), I decided to use that to make my own, using the map from the MDZS wiki, since it seemed like the best and most comprehensive. This is what I ended up with:

    It's not done yet, but this is the core map so far, the one I'm using for planning.  (I'm going to go ahead and post the final map when I post the fic to AO3, but in multiple versions, to show the stages of the war as the alliance against the Wen Clan pushes them further and further back.  Hence multiple lines to show the same thing.)  Of course, that volcano is a problem.  The drama went all out in wanting to make sure you knew at a glance who the villains were, so they (as I mentioned in an earlier post) literally went as far as to make the Wen Clan's home base on a cliff above a literal river of lava, in addition to them evidently having told their architects "make sure every detail reflects how maniacally evil I am, or I'll hurl you into the lava!"  I went ahead and looked up volcanoes in China, and none of them are anywhere near Qishan.  😰  I am astonished that they would do something so goofy.  Especially considering all the lava effects had to be expensive!

    Since one of the other maps (which didn't put anything in quite the same place as the wiki one did (none of the maps I found put anything in quite the same place as any other map did)) had literally just stuck the icons for the clans right onto an actual map of modern-day China, thus giving me modern town names for reference, I went to Google Earth and did some rough and tumble estimates of how far places are from each other, so I'd know how long to assign for travel times, yeah?

    Most of the major cities involved are about 450 miles away from each other.  Yiling and Yunmeng are like 170 miles away from each other.

    On seeing that, I begin to understand why this genre tends to have its leads fly everywhere on magic swords.  Going by land would take way too long!! 😲

    Admittedly, the last time I used Google Earth to figure out distances, it was to fine-tune some of the heroes' wanderings in one of my Greek mythology novels, and obviously a huge chunk of China is enormously large compared to about a third (or less!) of Greece.  But my point still stands!  (Especially if you're dealing with a war that suddenly lasts four months instead of two years:  you'd barely have time to get all the troops moved about before it was over!)

IWSG - The Heart of the Problem

 

    Or rather, "the heart is the problem."

    Or, more accurately, my heart hates me or something.

    Last month, I mentioned having heart palpitations which stopped me from finishing a script I was working on.

    Well, they haven't really gotten better.  I mean, they're sort of coming and going now, but at the end of the day, they're still stopping me from really applying myself to anything, because as soon as I start really concentrating, my heart starts pounding like mad or decides to slow down to a terrifying degree, and then I just have to stop what I'm doing and try to find something more relaxing to do instead until my heart calms down.

    (Even worse, I went to see a movie, and the beat of the song in the ending credits was just heavy  and loud enough that it was literally making my heart beat in time to it, and it was a fast song.  Terrifying stuff.)

    I'm able to get a little casual writing done, but not much.

    I have an appointment with a cardiologist in a couple of weeks, so hopefully by next month I'll be back on track.  (My primary care physician ran a bunch of tests, but couldn't figure out what the problem was. 😭)

    It's getting to the point where it's hard to think of myself as even a hobbyist anymore, because I can barely do any writing.

IWSG: Stalled by Health

So.

March was horrible.

Not even midway through the month, I started experiencing heart palpitations.  (I'm not quite 48, btw, so this is not normal.)

After a few days of suffering anxiety over this, it slowly dawned on me that this was likely being caused by the stress of working on my script for the game jam.  I stopped working on it for a few days and the symptoms got better.

Of course, when I resumed working on it, they sure enough started up again.  😫  I had started the month hoping to write the entire visual novel's script in the first month of the jam and then get the programming done in the second month.

Because of this heart thing, I'm not even quite to the point I had decided would be a good stopping point for a demo version. 😭  Fortunately, there's another place that a demo can stop, but... 😖

It just really annoys me that my own body sabotaged me like this.

Honestly, if I hadn't spent ~$65 on various art assets for the game, and two artists hadn't generously donated their time to make character sprites, I'd just cancel the thing and say "well, this just means no more game jams!"

Admittedly, I've still taken a "no more game jams" policy, but...I can't just cancel the game now.  I'm just not sure how I'll ever finish it. 😩  (I can, at least, find someone else to do the programming, but the rest of the writing...that's harder to deal with.  Though at least that part won't have a time limit.)

I am going to spend so much time writing fanfiction to de-stress after this.  (Which sounds crazy, writing to de-stress from writing, but...🤷🏻‍♀️)

I think what most irks me about this is that I put off working on one of my novels to do this game jam, after rushing to try and get its next draft and release prep done first.  That may have added to the stress, actually... 😰

Ugh.

My life is just a wreck.

That's the short version.  Even my hobbies are bad for me.

(On the other hand, this forced me to finally get a new primary care physician, so small win?)

IWSG: March like a hare

 

    Wow, so that title makes no sense. 😰

    Anyway...

    March 1 question - Have you ever read a line in novel or a clever plot twist that caused you to have author envy?

    This is a short answer:  all the freaking time!  😭 

    Not so much lines and plot twists so much as general sense of character and story, though, honestly.  It's the big picture that more impresses me than the little details, and I'm even worse at the big picture than I am at the little details.  (Which is not to say that I'm good at the details.  I suck at those, too.)

    I'm currently feeling even less talented than usual, of course, which isn't helping this post.  (I keep starting to say things and then deleting them because they're too pitiful to admit to.)

    That being the case, I think I'm just going to stop here before I end up saying something that will make me wince later. 😅

Good grief!

     It's like I'm made of solid procrastination these days.

    I need to take a break after I finish this piece I'm working on.  I am determined to finish it today--the scene I'm currently procrastinating on is the epilogue!--but it's currently over 132k words long, and I started it on January 5th...so, yeah, a lot of words in not all that long a time.  (Though I did once clock over 211k during NaNoWriMo.  But that only happened the once.  And I suspect that if I went back and reread I would find that they were very badly assembled words. 😅  However, due to life stuff, that work is now permanently off-limits.)

    Anyway.

    I'm writing up another post because I'm not sure how to handle the epilogue.  Or rather that I can't actually think of much to put in it?  In this scene of it, that is.  Technically, there's already been like two or three scenes that could qualify as epilogue in some sense of the word.  (The "sex" scene I was having so much trouble with yesterday was the first of them, in fact.)  In this particular scene, the final one, I need the hero and his family to attend the one month celebration for his sister's second child.  Major problem with that is that I have zero clue what a one month celebration would consist of and really don't want to have to go researching it for half a scene's worth of text.  (Even if I did, the information would only exist for modern China, not the unspecified period in which the original novel takes place, which the author actually admitted is based on the customs of several different time periods anyway...)  Especially since the main point of the scene is just to show that life is settling down again, and to describe what the hero made as a gift for the baby.  (Basically the same thing he made for her first child in the original novel, only in a different shape.  Of course, he never got to give the first child that gift in the novel, because horrible things happened and soon both the child's parents were dead, but that's why this is an alternate universe fan fiction in which most of the horrible stuff never happened and a lot of characters who died tragically get to live. 😁 )  So I'm sort of not sure what else to put in the scene and I am thus procrastinating from writing it by doing something else.  Which is obviously not productive (I mean, that's the point of procrastinating, being unproductive is) but maybe it will clear my brain a little.

    Doing something physically creative like working on the fine details for my boxed rooms will do a better job of that, of course, but I want to wait and do that after I've completely finished the scene.  (Also after the new flooring and the unfinished new furniture arrives that I ordered from a miniatures shop on Etsy yesterday...)

    Anyway!

    I did want to share a bit I wrote earlier today because I really liked it, and it will be a very long time before it gets posted on AO3 for anyone to see it in context.

    Who these characters are doesn't really matter much to this little snippet of the scene, except that they're a married couple (both men) with their adopted son.

            “Don’t carry me around!  I’m not a little kid anymore!” claimed the five-year-old child.

            “I’ll carry you around until you’re too big for me to lift!” Wei Wuxian insisted.

            “No fair!  Father, make him put me down!”

            Lan Zhan reached out and stroked A-Yuan’s hair.  “A-Yuan is still very portable,” he said, making the boy complain even as he smiled happily.

    Maybe it's just me.  But I loved the idea of describing him as "still very portable." 😊  (The one is "Father" because the other is "Daddy," btw.  In case anyone was thinking "Father" sounded a bit formal coming from a kid who's only five.)

    Aaaaaand I should stop procrastinating and just write that last scene.

   

    (Also, what I reported yesterday remains the case:  Goodsmile wants all my money.  Today they dropped the pre-order for a Nendoroid of the lead from Bocchi the Rock...)

    EDIT:  just finished that fanfic I've been working on.  133,158 words long. 😅  Not the longest fan fiction I've ever written, but the longest in quite some time.