Words have meanings, and they matter

 So.

Bit of a rant here.

I'm still slogging my way through the novel I started in June, the one that promised me a lesbian love story in and around the epic fantasy novel.

And it's clear that yes, eventually there will be romance between the two female leads.

Though given the number 1 on the spine of the novel (which I somehow didn't notice until I was over 100 pages into the book) it may not get very far into said romance until a later book in the series.  (If so, I guess I'll miss out on it, 'cause it is not working out between us.)

This morning, I got to a passage exposing a secret of the sinister woman who (without specifically meaning to but also without caring in the least) ruined the girls' young lives.  Said woman always wears gloves, and did at one point move to take them off in a threatening way, but events prevented her from doing so.  Well, she finally took one off, and of course exposed a hand that was not human.

Well, duh.

But the way that hand is described?

In the paragraph where she takes the glove off, it's described as being "amphibious."

On the next page, it's described as "reptilian."

Those are two, completely different, mutually exclusive adjectives!!!

ARGH!!!!!!!

{pant, pant}

Okay, sorry.

I'm calm now.

But that really gets to me, because they're both powerfully evocative words, and they call up wildly different images!

Amphibious:  soft, smooth, moist, possibly slimy, porous, and without any kind of claws or nails.

Reptilian:  hard, scaly, dry (usually), typically with claws.

But this book wants it both ways.  How?!  How could that ever be possible?!?

Since the initial description says the hand has razor-sharp "talons" (which are a bird thing, not a reptile thing, unless you're talking dinosaurs), I'm guessing that "reptilian" was the word the author actually wanted, but I shouldn't have to guess that!

The editors on this book were really sleeping on the job, and I don't just mean the amphibious/reptilian gaffe.  I mean cases where two words or phrases were used when only one was wanted.  I don't recall where any of the passages were in the 356 pages I've slogged through so far, but I can give a very close approximation.  Things like "She turned to look at the girl young woman and smiled."  So, you know, cases where the author changed their mind about what word to use and forgot to delete the old one...and then somehow no one noticed.  (Goodness knows, I've done that myself, but I'm not a professionally published author!  And I typically notice that kind of mistake before posting something to AO3 or itch.io.)

And that happened more than once, along with other annoying little errors that wouldn't bug me so much if I was actually enjoying the book.

...sigh.

I shouldn't be complaining, of course.

It's a sprawling fantasy with two female leads, both strong in different ways, both determined to control their own lives, etc.  And they're in love with each other, which is great.

It's just...

...well, the prose is a lot.  So much more description than we really need.

Though I think what really soured me on it was when we caught up to one of the girls after their separation and learned that she was actually half-succubus.

I'm sorry, but I don't want a lesbian heroine who sleeps with men to drain them of their energy and turn them into her slaves.  That is just a no-go for me.  (Honestly, I'm not sure I'd want to read about a straight woman who did that, either.  Magical seduction is not cool all around, as it's decidedly borderline on the whole consent issue.)

Okay, I'm done now.

I just needed to vent.

(I won't be identifying the book, obviously, because that's pretty uncool, to post nasty things about a book and thus discourage people from reading it.)

EDIT:  I did eventually finish reading the novel.  And, as I had feared, the two heroines didn't get much more than a few kisses before they were separated again, and they were still separated at the end of the book.  But one of the final scenes.  OMG, talk about the editor falling down on the job!  One of those scenes literally referred to one of the heroines by the other heroine's name.  Seriously.  Any good will the last 75ish pages had given me (as the story finally started, you know, going somewhere) was blasted to smithereens with that one.

IWSG - no idea for a title this month

 

    My heart thing is still stopping me from working on any of my original projects (had a massive flare-up due to writing out the idea for a no-pressure, not-jam-related game!) so I don't have much to talk about in my own writing life right now, so I guess I'll be answering the monthly question instead.  (Though I will be seeing my doctor again next week, and I'm hopeful that my friend was right and menopause might be playing a role in it.  That would both give a direction for treatment and guarantee that the problem would eventually go away on its own.  Also it would mean not dealing with being tested for sleep apnea.)

    Anyway!

July 5 question - 99% of my story ideas come from dreams. Where do yours predominantly come from?

    Most of my story ideas come from things I encounter in my daily life...though that includes things I "encounter" by reading about them, seeing them on TV, etc.  Sometimes that's a pretty straightforward process (I do end up writing a lot of fanfiction, after all, so there's a lot of "what if the hero's parents didn't die?" or "what if the characters from this show met the ones from that movie?" type of things), while sometimes it's also more of a train of thought bouncing around off of something I've seen until it's something new.

    I'm trying to remember a good example, but...that's the sort of thing that--oh, no, I have one!

    So, there's this game called Persona 5 Strikers in English.  (Its Japanese title is slightly less stupid, maybe, if you squint.)  The plot of the game is way too much to explain, but it involves a group of teenagers (and one cop after a while) literally entering someone's mental landscape to find out why it's gone screwy and to alter it so that they'll stop doing terrible, slightly supernatural things to others.  (Not a very good description of the story, but...)  In one case, they've entered the mind of a guy who wrote a really awful, exceedingly generic fantasy novel, which has become a massive bestseller because he's essentially magically brainwashed thousands of readers.  In order to defeat his mental image of himself (it almost makes sense in context) they have to get into the Demon Lord's castle from his novel.  The only one of them who actually read the novel explains that if it works the same way as the castle in the novel, then they'll have to go to all these other places and do these other things to open the way in.  One of the others in the party asks why the Demon Lord wouldn't just have a door that can't open so the hero trying to kill him can't get in.

    My immediate response to that character was "well, he must be into the hero, obviously!"

    That, uh, was not the explanation in the game.  But it set my mind in motion with "what would that be like, if the demon lord allowed the hero out to get him into his castle because he wanted to bang said hero?"

    That led me to write a rather questionable visual novel wherein the player is the Demon Lord who decides that the Hero looking to kill him is very handsome and totally his type, so he allows him into his castle and revives him every time he gets killed by the assorted minions so that eventually the Hero will fight his way up to the top floor of the castle and the Demon Lord can have his way with him. 😅

    This, um, is not typical of my writing.  But it was fun to write something so different from my usual fare.

    And more importantly, hopefully that illustrated the way I derived a more-or-less original story idea from something else.

    (Not gonna share the link to the game, 'cause it's exceedingly embarrassing, as it's technically NSFW because the descriptions of some of the hero's many deaths are fairly sexualized. 😰  I was so embarrassed by it that it took me three days to post it after I finished the game.  (Humiliatingly, it's by far the most popular thing I've posted to my itch.io account.))

Pride Month '23 Reading Recap

     (Or something.)

    Actually, my reading over the month of June was been pretty light, in part because I've spent a lot of time writing, which cuts into the reading time, ya know?  Anyway, I did get to some Pride-appropriate reading, so I'll just sum that up because...well, because it gives me something to write a post about. 🤣

    So, this barely counts, but on the first of the month I was still reading Heaven Official's Blessing, volume 6...barely.  Which is to say that I started reading it after lunch on May 31st and finished reading it after lunch on June 1st, so... 😅  As it's volume 6 out of 8, we're far enough in the novel that the love between the leads has become text instead of just very obvious subtext (as in MXTX's other novels, the love interest is in love first, devotedly/obsessively, and we're not really privy to his thoughts, just those of the protagonist, who is much slower to realize his own feelings), and I think the romantic arc is improved over her previous novels.  Without going into spoilers, the short way to put it is that in her first novel, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, the protagonist never really seems to return the love interest's affections properly, just to submit to them out of a more sedate and non-romantic type of affection (and/or fear that the love interest will go yandere and murder him if he doesn't).  In the second novel, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (currently my fav of them, and likely to remain my fav unless the last two volumes of Heaven Official's Blessing are really stupendous), that the hero returns his love interest's affections is undeniable...but he also goes from "wait, do I have those kinds of feelings for him?" to "I'm gonna marry him" in about twenty-four hours.  (Maybe forty-eight, but not more than that.)  So, like, the trajectory is fine and believable, but the speed of travel is absurd. 😅  As of the end of volume 6 of Heaven Official's Blessing (or really its halfway point, because the second half of the volume was a flashback to events 800 years earlier rather than tell us how the protagonist was going to get out of his current danger 😭), the arc and speed of the protagonist going from oblivious to in love feels much more normal to me as a reader.  (Others may feel differently; dunno.)  Anyway, danmei is sort of sketchy as Pride Month reading since it's gay (male) romance mostly written by women for women.  (At least, MXTX is a woman. I don't know about the authors of the other danmei novels Seven Seas is translating.  But I do know that danmei, like BL, has that reputation in general.)

    I'm not sure how much better the rest of my Pride Month reading is, though.  😰  (The fact that most of it is manga doesn't help...)

    Or actually not all manga, because there's a volume of...uh...what was the Korean word?  Manwha?  Hmm, actually, according to the front of the volume, it started out as a webtoon.  Which kind makes sense, actually, in that it's very unlike a lot of what I'm used to seeing in m/m romantic material from East Asia, so if it didn't have to fit in with a publisher's notions of what sells, that would be why.  Anyway, it's called On or Off, by A1, and it starts--much to my surprise--with the prelude to a sex scene, in which our young protagonist, Ahn Yiyoung, seems to be a somewhat unwilling participant.  So it makes you think it's the usual "passive young straight guy seduced/coerced by handsome older/larger man and then somehow assuming that means he's in love" and you start getting worried, yeah?  But then it goes into a flashback of how he got there, and you learn two very crucial details:  our young lead was gay to begin with, and what's making him uncomfortable about the scene is that it's basically a very sketchy add-on to a business deal that went sour.  So it's not that he doesn't want to sleep with the guy (in fact, his first reaction to seeing him was to try to ask him out!) it's that he doesn't feel right about doing so in that context.  Even better, in the explicit sex scene that follows the flashback, it very carefully shows the use of both condom and lubricant, something that I've seen left out all too frequently.  (Especially the lubricant.  The frequently seen "self-lubing asses" are kind of a meme among Western readers...)  And it's not sex = love, because afterwards things are really sour between them for various very logical reasons regarding how they ended up doing it in the first place, so the rest of the first volume is them sort of going from "what a creep he is" to "wait maybe he's not quite so bad?" and I presume the rest of the volumes (I was in the bookstore yesterday and saw volume 4 on the new release table) are moving from "he's not so bad" to some form of love or at least romance.  🤷  I'm not sure if I'll be buying the rest of the volumes, given the business context isn't enormously of interest to me (honestly, I'm sorta surprised I bought even the first volume) and my shelf space is limited these days.  (Or more accurately, my shelves are all full and I now have towering stacks of books leaning against the walls in various places because I need a house three times the size of the one I've got, but where the heck would I get the money for that?)  I did feel like the character motivations and actions were much more realistic than a lot of what you sometimes see in these things, though, so I still might check out the rest.

    Next, actual manga, three volumes of Catch These Hands! by murata.  This one is very sweet and also pretty funny.  A twenty-something former girl delinquent is trying to shake her old tough-girl image, and in going to the store to try to buy some more normal clothes, she runs into her former rival from another school.  The rival gives her a business card on the way out with a time and place for a meeting, and when they meet up there, she challenges her to a fight, on the condition that if our former-delinquent loses to her rival, then she has to date her!  (And, obviously, she does lose, because otherwise there would be no story.)  Which, again, sounds like a set-up ripe for awful things happening, but the rival is actually the sweetest and is determined to give them a nice, happy, normal relationship despite the weird way it started, and of course our protagonist cannot understand why her ex-rival suddenly wants to date her...though by volume three the feelings were starting to be mutual, if not fully acknowledged/understood.  I'm actively looking forward to reading more of this one.

    Finally, two things I haven't finished.  One is the only novel on my Pride Month reading for this year, but...well, it's really long and glacially slow (so far), so I've been having trouble getting into it.  Also, the back of the book promised me a romance between the two girls it describes on the back, but so far it has not delivered.  (The fact that it started out when one of them was a literal infant and she's now only eighteen (by page 186!) is not helping.)  If it ends up delivering on that lesbian romance after all and it seems worthwhile, I'll post about it after I finish reading it.  (Not sure when that'll be, though, considering it has only periodically managed to grab me in that first 186 pages.  But I have to finish it by September at the latest, 'cause that's when the next volume of Heaven Official's Blessing comes out, and I need to know how Xie Lian is gonna get out of that situation!)

    Second unfinished thing is actually a bound fanzine for all three of MXTX's novels, but I didn't want to look at the part for Heaven Official's Blessing since I can't finish reading it until the final volume is published in English.  Anyway, the artist is credited on the zine as Bones, and their Etsy shop is here.  (I'd link to the bound zine, but it's sold out.  There's a pdf version, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's another print run, considering the one I bought was already at least the second run.)  The part I could look at was good. 😆  I loved that the Scum Villain section focused more heavily on the side pairing of Mobei-jun and Shang Qinghua rather than the two leads of that novel, since I never really felt "sold" on the novel's main pairing. 😅

    So, yeah, I didn't really do much for Pride Month, I guess. 😰  I'd say "but I was working on a fanfic for a gay romance novel"...only the main pairing for the fanfic is actually straight. 😱  (In my own defense, I must point out that the novel's main pairing--Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian--is still in the fanfic and has actually so far gotten more attention than the fanfic's main pairing, because I'm much more into the two of them as a couple than trying to follow the drama's unachieved pairing of Jiang Cheng with Wen Qing.  (I can't help it; when I started planning the fic, the only way I could see to have Jiang Cheng be the fic's lead and not have Wen Qing end up dead was to use the drama's version where he's got a crush on her!))  On the other hand, I've supported various fan works that are appropriate for Pride Month?  I've ordered two MDZS zines that just haven't arrived yet, and I bought several pins for lesbian relationships (although actually I bought those yesterday so technically Pride Month was already over, but I can't help that it took me that long to find a good Lumity or Korrasami pin! (or that it took me that long to even look for Enid/Wednesday (is there a ship name for them?) stuff on Etsy))

    Gah, that paragraph died in a cluster of parentheses.

    Rest in peace, paragraph.

    ...

    Okay, I think my brain may have given up the ghost.

    I'ma go now.

    Oh!  Wait!

    There was one other thing I wanted to say!

    I was pretty excited at the bookstore yesterday, because the whole table that particular Barnes & Noble dedicates to MXTX's novels (I'm assuming an important staffer there is a fan, 'cause neither of the other locations around here do that) also had a Blu-ray copy of the animated show of Heaven Official's Blessing!  I picked it up immediately, not so much because I felt like I needed it (it only covers the first volume of the novel, so it just sorta stops at the end of the arc rather than coming to any true conclusion) but because I wanted to encourage the release of more of the danmei adaptations on physical media in the US.  (Specifically, I want a well-translated release of The Untamed, the live-action drama version of Mo Dao Zu Shi/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, because while deeply flawed as an adaptation, it's still got a lot going for it.  Especially the gorgeous cast.  But also it captured most of the characters really well, and helps to flesh out a sense of what that world is like; you get to see things like how the locals who set up stalls outside the hero's childhood home react to him and his adoptive brother, stuff like that.  Just little details that would bog down a novel, but that help it feel lived-in as a world.  Also the set designs, locations and costumes are all gorgeous.  (Well, except the Wen Clan's home base, which was too much "here's the evil lair of the baddies!" and not enough "here's the home of a powerful group of actual human beings.")

    Anyway, so, yeah, if anyone actually reads this post (chances are against it, I realize) and is into any of this stuff, please support the release of the Heaven Official's Blessing show so the corporate types who make the decisions will get it through their skulls that there's a market for these shows in well-translated official releases.

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.