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deaths-bounty · 2 years
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Sorry babe, the thigh garter holding my daggers stay on during sex
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deaths-bounty · 2 years
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My favourite type of movie is “period piece romance but fantasy-horror hijinks happen and now everyone has to adapt to the new genre or die,” ala Curse of the Black Pearl, Anastasia, The Mummy (1999)
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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That jump is the funniest shit
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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Akari on left, Lucas on right Autumn in the sling
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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Which one was your favourite?
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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3.14.21 Status Update
Going well so far. The perspective changes are working, the writing is feeling more natural, and it even spawned some nice Hannas banter in the middle of another chapter.
I need to review Arc 1 again at some point to determine whether these changes need to be made there as well.
Chapter 14 is in pretty good shape and I have some vague ideas for what to do in a spot between it and the old chapter 15, which is pretty much being scrapped. Some of those scraps may find their way back in but I'm revising the whole approach while reconsidering the whole angle of it from a broader plot perspective. There are other mission candidates that might prove to be better openers. They'd also be strategically simpler, which makes inserting Akari into them a more believably sound decision.
This is all quite vague, I know, but a lot of the details are just up in the air.
Progress is being made though, and the perspectives have given me additional insight and awareness into some of our characters that should help propel the story onward, as well as a new perspective in general, with the idea of being aware of the set of core perspectives being cycled between at different points of the story, allowing various character arcs to come and go from particular character perspectives.
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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Defining Akari (and mastering 3rd Person)
Some time ago, we made the decision to scrap Akari’s multiple personas. I prob made a blog post about it here. Don’t remember. 
Anyway, I’ve been revisiting her characterization after realizing I never really confronted what she turned into after that big decision; it was the aspect that was used to drive her, the way I would write her motivations and thoughts and drive her to act, and now, in its place, was nothing more than a vague idea.
As always, these development note posts will inevitably contain some spoilers, so read at your own risk!
Upon taking the time to break down what she had become, I was surprised to discover that she had almost become something of a self-insert, which I found particularly funny because way way back near the start of this project, over half a decade ago, her love interest was originally a self insert before eventually getting rebuilt from the ground up as an actual character with some interesting characteristics.
So, after some thought and analysis of other chapters I had already written, I came up with the following character description:
Akari is a polite young woman whose greatest strengths are her empathy, ingenuity, and stubbornness. She’s also headstrong, and can be reckless, especially when she’s decided that combat or brute force is the way to go for a situation. 
She’s naturally curious, which is serendipitous, given her amnesia. She wonders at everything, but can tend to stick to her initial judgments of things. 
She’s a force of nature. Be it in trying to encourage a loved one, to make her point, to stand up for herself, or to get out of someplace, she’s relentless and powerful and not afraid to make a mess, though she’ll likely feel contrite about it afterwards. She has a temper that isn’t always in check, but she can also be the sweetest thing if in a good mood. 
Much of this came to the forefront of my attention when my cowriter, @therailz​, and I were discussing strategies for making the prose less stiff. We came to the conclusion that it was because I was still approaching it like a script, a neutral 3rd person omniscient narration (albeit with information hiding) which attempted to show everyone's perspective, and as such never really connected with any one character or felt grounded in any way. It was a third-party observer, existing outside of the scene and relaying the experience as opposed to being the experience.
This wasn’t so difficult in the earlier chapters, particularly the first arc, but I think that's also because those chapters never really had more than two or three active characters per scene, and it was one or two on average. It wasn’t hard to handle, and, on top of that, it was mostly from Akari’s perspective anyway for various reasons; Lucas was still this mystery-shrouded figure who we didn’t know well, and the best way to make a character seem mysterious is to not disclose their thoughts or motives, just what little we can see from the outside, and thus, we have a 3rd person narrative told from and colored by a single perspective.
Once we hit Arc 2, however, the dynamic shifted drastically, into one that might be the case for much of the rest of the narrative. There’s now a varied and colorful cast of characters, most of whom all know and interact with each other together. There were so many names and people to introduce, nicknames and inside jokes and all manner of things necessary to understanding the way they naturally interacted with one another, and I didn’t want to miss anything; unlike the earlier case with Lucas’s mystery, I wanted to convey everything, all at once.
When you put it that way, it’s no wonder it became such a mess. So far, chapter 15, the most recent one and one which I've been most concerned about, features seven characters for most of the chapter’s duration, seven characters with those complex social dynamics and all their nuances. Some of them were still being introduced for the first time as well. 
Honestly, I may need to rewrite the whole chapter and re-plan this whole part of the narrative (I’m bullshitting my way through military strategy and radar stealth technology, and I don’t think I’ve been doing so too well). I went in without really even fully planning the mission they’re on. The characters realized it before me, honestly, and we’ve been trying to improvise our way through it together. We’ve also had a mild casualty and another character had to stay behind to look after them, but they were also the two characters that Akari could really talk with. It runs like some sort of military strategy video game mission gone wrong to the point that the player’s about ready to reload a save.
So I might do that (might also back up a bit further) and I’m going to try to stick to one character’s perspective at a time, hopping around as needed, but making an effort to stick to them. It just might help me get into the mindset.
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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Translation: “wait what? what are you waiting for? eh? curry? did you make curry (in the bathtub)?” “ya, want some?” “yeah”
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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Get to Know Me - [1 / 5] Series ↳ Black Lagoon
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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deaths-bounty · 3 years
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Outlines are like Over-Planned Vacation Itineraries
Was going to attach this to the status update post but it kept going wheeee so instead of sticking a spoiler on it, I yeeted it over here. 
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My process for organically writing things is almost entirely incompatible with the idea of strict outlining. Perhaps this is an obvious observation to some; I personally have no way to know if it is an inherent result or a consequence of my chaotic writing style/habits. The longest-running thing I’ve written is an unfinished (as of this writing) 130k word Frozen fanfic, which I had a blast writing the first 10 chapters of without any sort of planning, after which I took some notes and defined some loose guidelines. The bulk of it all was written within the first year and it has slowed as I both lost interest in the fandom and became more focused on outlining and structuring it.
Outlining is incredibly fun on its own of course; as a writer, it was quite an instantly-gratifying experience because you get to fly through the narrative at lightning speed—comparatively—while glossing over whatever you don’t feel like focusing on and covering chapters in mere sentences because in your own outline, you don’t necessarily have to convey what you, the writer, already know.
What is most certainly not fun, however, is referring back to an outline when it comes time to write the prose. All the fun and creative freedom of telling a story of your own creation is sucked away when you realize your outline is just an overplanned vacation itinerary. It’s too much, it will likely not work as planned in practice, and you will either come out of it more stressed than before, won’t have time to do everything you planned, or in the worst case, you’ll cancel it prematurely and just go home.
DeBy’s latest outlines, while better (which is to say more loosely-written) than previous ones I have put together, are still inherently a problem. I write first drafts in the moment, and once you get into the moment, instead of seeing it from a bird’s eye view like in the outline, you’re on the ground, in the scene, and what feels right and what makes sense changes, sometimes drastically. I also get lost in it, and come out with 20 pages that I love but which often take a 45 or 90 degree turn from the outline. So now I have, essentially, 2 diverging parallel universes that I both like and want to at least reconcile the highlights from. Switching tack to rewrite the outline everytime this happens totally kill my momentum and motivation, however, so it’s gotten tricky. 
I think I’m just going to go back to using narrative waypoints and vague ideas and steer my fleshy 5 lb neural network in the desired direction like some of those deep learning algorithms seem to do.
The still-extant outline will be demoted from near-gospel to become yet another parallel universe to continually pull suggestions from, not unlike what happened with what my co-writer and I call Season Zero, a very old draft from high school (6+ years ago at this time) that we've deviated from so far that it's nearly unrecognizable as the progenitor of the current iteration of the project. It was 99% utter crap as a collective whole but contained some occasional gems and interesting insights that we still sometimes pull from (and reference despite the fact that no one would ever get them, unless I for whatever insane reason decide to release the Season Zero outline). 
The difference for the present-day iteration is that the main plot points are all still fine, it’s just that some (or many) of the details of how things play out, and in what order, has just proven to be nonsensical, or at the very least not interesting enough to subject the reader to.
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