Lost in Lualand

I made a playlist for my own fic! Both to help me write it, and just because I'm vain haha.

If you're curious you can listen to it on Spotify over here!

If you want an idea of what I was thinking in terms of "which songs go with which characters/chapters," see below (asterisks indicate songs that I think vibe particularly well with the fic):

( Read more... )

courtesy of this random article i stumbled upon, which i do not endorse in its entirety, but did bless me with these random game development tidbits, so it's good for that much at least:

Now, the Accidentally Lesbians.

There was a point in this two-year development cycle when the character of Fang was some other character. This character had had a romantic relationship in the past with Vanille – and the change to Fang was done with minimal change to Vanille and her dialogue with some lines not even being rewritten, and, according to some sources, not even being rerecorded (which, if true, suggests they were recording game audio before the story was finalised). Fang was going to be a dude, and Lightning was going to be flirty, and they decided to change that by putting the lines from Lightning into Fang, making Fang a girl, and then giving Fang a need to protect Vanille.

All of this resulting in Fang and Vanille being coded as extremely gay, the kind of gay that’s so comfortable and present that nobody remarks on it, creating a sort of gayness-beyond-gayness, punching through the normal representational boundary and standing on the other side in a world where heterosexuality is so much not the default that it is literally unremarkable to find that default abrogated. Now, you may be a big fan of this, and if you are, cool, go team lesbian, but this was absolutely a complete accident and budget constraints, and not a byproduct of this mythos creating a space to wave the lesbian flag.

god, that's so good. i say this as a huge fang/vanielle fan. you're telling me we got that ship due to a late-game "whatever let's just genderswap this bitch" development snafu? hell yes gimme more game design clusterfucks like that lmao

also, far much less momentously but still entertainingly:

Did you know back in the original design combat was meant to be seamlessly integrated with the live map and Lightning was meant to have anti-gravity powers that let her transform the battlefield?

god. amazing. amazing!!! i love this big stupid game!!!

Naesala moves in with Leanne—and his (presumptive) future in-laws.

Naesala/Leanne, ~12k words.

Read here on AO3.

misc warblings about it under the cut

( author's notes )

an annoying thing about Writing Advice™ is that, once you know the basics of “how to write a grammatical sentence” and some general protips like “this is what a plot arc looks like,” “here’s a couple style rules you should probably follow unless you know what you’re doing,” and so on… the most interesting tips sound kind of “wisdom-y” in a way that’s hard to put into practice, and often don’t make sense unless you struggle through writing some stuff yourself. (also, i do sincerely believe the correct answer for most writing questions is “go read a novel that does it well & think about it really hard,” and there’s no real shortcut around that, sorry!)

worse, once you’ve struggled through figuring out how to solve a particular writing problem, you often can’t really express what tip/trick you were using when you solved it. it’s like those veteran birdwatchers who, when you ask how they identified a particular oriole via a 0.5 second glance of a heavily backlit in-flight silhouette, will shrug and say “it just looked like one.” augh!

i think trying to formalize these tips/tricks, as you notice them, can prove useful down the line (as in: when i’m facing a plot dilemma, i’ve occasionally gone down a literal list of “stuff i’ve done that’s worked before” and tried using each and every one, like someone desperately trying to find which screw in the toolbox will fit into a particular bolt). so here’s three new ones i came up with recently; use as you see fit:

VIEWPOINT, PLOT, THEME: PICK TWO GET ONE FREE

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

THROW IN FUN BITS HERE AND THERE, I THINK? ESPECIALLY BIT CHARACTERS?

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

THREE IS THE BIGGEST NUMBER

( makes some references to one of my fanfics, but in a pretty non-spoiler-y way that doesn't require any advance knowledge )

okay those are the three formalisms i came up with. but i guess i’ll mention the other one that i did not come up with, but which i use all the time:

GIVE YOUR READERS WHAT THEY’RE EXPECTING, BUT NOT THE WAY THEY EXPECT IT

( makes some references to some of my original fiction, but lmao you definitely don't need to have read them before )

okay, that's the end of cringe writing advice from a random internet fanfiction person, you may resume your normal reading pages now :P

I picked up this book because one person whose taste I trust said they loved it, and another person whose taste I trust said they hated it.

That's gotta be the fastest way to get me to read a book, by the way. What can I say? I'm the kind of gal always who wants to stick her nose right in the middle of a dispute and suss out who's right!!!

And I think my opinion of this novel fell somewhere solidly in-between those two poles—well, at least until I read the afterword that was tucked into the back of my edition, but let's death-of-the-author that right outta here and come back to it later.

SO. The Last Samurai is a novel suffering from a very unfortunate name collision—it has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie, nothing to do with Meiji-era Japan, nothing to do with war or battle or any such thing. (The novel came first, for what it's worth.)

Instead, The Last Samurai is the story of Sibylla, a young, charmingly-lowkey-deranged multilingual humanities academic in late-1980s Oxford, who gets PISSED OFF after putting in a lot of work to translate some scholarship that turns out to be SHODDY and ILL-FOUNDED, and in fact she is so pissed off by this that she decides to (1) fuck off from academia entirely, (2) hooks up with a foppish, callow, pseudointellectual guy she meets at a party, (3) gets pregnant, (4) decides to keep the kid but doesn't tell the dad about it, and (5) works a really-poorly-paid typing/editing job from home so she can raise the kid, Ludo, to be a piano/language/etc prodigy, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill.

( the good )

( the bad )

And, see, since that came right at the end this is making me sound way more negative about the book than I actually am. It was a fun ride! particularly in the first half! I'm glad I read it! but skip the afterword, jeez.