So I wanted to focus hardcore on novel outlining, and then my Department of Visuals whacked me over the head with an idea. And then it demanded said idea to be used as fodder for style study. Three weeks of grumbling and headscratching alternated with the blissful downhill slide of form and volume falling into place, and here we are. That's the sound of me leveling up as I perform the Done at Last Deskflop.

KOEI went joyously apeshit with fun anachronistic costumes for Dynasty Warriors 7. First came the school uniforms - more recently, fairy and folk tales. I imagined that Huntsman Lu Meng and Robin Hood Xiahou Yuan would have a friendly rivalry over the merits of bullets vs. arrows, and there you have it.

( Shoot That Poison Arrow - Lu Meng & Xiahou Yuan, fairy tale costumes )

Also on deviantArt as usual, and named after a New Wave song that I unironically love, awkward dancing and gold lame suits and floating geometry and all.

This took on a storybook illustration feel that I like very much. I pushed the value range and line weight further than my prior inclinations, which was also fun when I figured out how to beef up outlines to enhance the form instead of smashing it flat.

After two months of practicing anatomy on shirtless men, my brain craves words and stuff. I really should do small sketches and whatnot to keep myself fresh. I admit to having a serious motivation problem when I'm not studying for a specific piece.

I'm poking at some Mass Effect 3 ending fanfic. The mood is a cross between the Guardian Legend introduction and Nine Inch Nails' A Warm Place. Incongruous as that sounds, it works in my head, and I'm sure it will work once my notes congeal into actual prose. Said notes largely consist of disjointed snippets of conversation, scenery, and internal exposition. Say hello to pretty much my entire writing process.

Sometimes lightning strikes and I see a full scene all at once: the gist of conversation and expository balance, the intended mood, relevant plot development, any deeper symbolism or allegory that happens to belong there. More often, my inspiration comes piecemeal. I know what development I need, but I have no compelling idea on how to sell it. Or I have conversations and scenery floating around with no place to go. To plan the FIRST DRAFT FOR REALS THIS TIME of Arise, I have the following set up in Scrivener:

• Basic list of shit going on: actions, character frustrations, primary circumstances driving the conflict. This keeps track of cause and effect propagation and helps ensure that it all makes sense at its most fundamental level.


• Any scene ideas I can come up with, from specifics to development that eventually needs to be put somewhere. These are roughly ordered at best. A bunch are repurposed from the better fruits of my NaNoWriMo draft.


• List of unanswered questions and relevant rambling. This includes research topics and undecided motivations and plot points.

To rebuild my foundation, I refined my basic plausible conflicts to strongly evoke the setting. Gao Feng Tao took over his uncle's handbag factory, but I didn't know the circumstances. Further research turned up the perfect solution - Tao stole the chops. In China, business and financial authority is conferred via stamps that are difficult to forge and respected as official word regardless of whoever is using them. It's a wonderfully specific detail, and it poofed into my head with a dramatic confrontation scene. Bonus!

As you may gather by my constant rambling about the brilliance of the show, I took yet more cues from The Wire. I found more court cases and business news to inspire tidbits of character back story. I rethought conflicts to arise from basic problems, such as supply chain price increases and the cutthroat competition inherent in the trucking industry. I got a better handle on understanding my characters' mentality of copying and skimming as fair game - it's just business and all. At around 60% sketched, my revised plot already feels closer to the natural result of an ecosystem than it did in the NaNo stage.

I'm almost ready to dig into Rough Draft 1.0. (NaNo was 0.1a.) I have enough scene specifics to work on, lots of promising rough prose to polish, and placeholders for undecided development including lead-in needed for the final act. There's enough to do that won't be invalidated by further research and planning. Chums up let's do this! (Again.)

So last year I really got into Mass Effect. I finished the first game and made it through a bunch of the second before being distracted by novel brainstorming and my related marathon of The Wire. With the third game impending, I kept meaning to pick it back up. I was psyched to finish the story of Kira Shepard and her red beehive of mostly paragon no-bullshittery, especially due to developer promises of said story diverging with the choices I had made in the early games. The first two endings were limited to set up a trilogy. The third had no such constraints, and Bioware's creativity promised to knock it all out of the park.

I ran the other way from the script leak posted some months back. After certain rumors began to trickle in, and the vague hints only piqued my curiosity, I caved and spoiled myself for the details. Good news doesn't ruin much for me because a summary is nothing like the personal experience of gameplay. And if the news turned out to suck, I wanted to be forewarned.

Reactions incoming, yo.

Mass Effect 3 ending spoilers. You have been warned.

( The tl;dr version )

( The macro spam version )

I spent the second half of last year writing or researching or chasing my tail in novel-related frustration. I missed art, but had neither focus nor inspiration, so I included illustration study in my rotation of casual reading. I pored over pro illustrators' sketches to learn about capturing volume, form, and gesture in that crucial rough phase. I read Andrew Loomis' work for more examples in that vein. I found a fantastic gallery of muscle photography free to use for hobbyist work.

I referenced one of those pictures for a quick piece of fan art in response to a prompt. And shocked myself with that heady feeling of Wow, I Can Draw.

I did decent art in high school, but I was never much of a visual thinker. I also focused on still life and dreamscapes rather than the bodies and faces that I had to learn from scratch when the drawing itch hit me some four years ago. My sporadic art practice has been dragging myself out of rustiness while wrapping my head around the fundamentals that I'd never truly internalized, even when I could produce a reasonable representation of my hand or a leafy plant or a display of glass fruit. Human anatomy is a harmony of distinct lines and shadow shapes, of quirks and irregularities that must be maintained to preserve a sense of naturalness. Now that I've turned a corner with Getting It, I'm beginning to feel the blissful flow that I get from my best writing.

The following picture took about 12 days from initial sketch to completion. A year ago, I would have required double the time for half the nuance. Now to continue outdoing myself in the future.

( Calm Before the Storm - Lu Meng, shirtless )

deviantArt submission with photo reference credit

I did this Manga Studio drawing with the reasonably successful aim of loosening up my style and improving the realism of my facial features. My hair remains stylized, but I like it that way. Pen doodling is the shit when you have an undo button.

( Cao Ren in Pen )

I'm back to planning Arise, my modern day legend of Cao Cao. The NaNoWriMo draft got me some great scenes and broad strokes of subplots. Its general concepts are sound, but the motivations and conflicts need to be sharpened and finalized before the next draft. This involves a plot brainstorming file and a list of questions and sticking points. Some fundamentals of the story appear in my head as fuzzy and dreamlike - believable at viewing distance, but as yet hollow. I need to bring them into focus with full confidence in what lies beneath the surface. Rough drafting can flesh that out to some satisfactory initial extent, but NaNoWriMo taught me the limits of writing on the fly. Prose and conversation can and should be banged out - scene ideas can be explored and set aside if needed. Threads can be sparked with a rough idea, as in when I sent my main man to mahjong and wound up with a segue into his real estate endeavors. Yet their full realization requires more thought than I'm in the mood to bullshit without structure in mind.

On the subject of fiction, you may recall that I overhauled Tempered Will for hopeful inclusion in a wuxia fiction anthology. Said anthology fell through, but I got this lovely comment in response.

Thanks for your submission. It's a good story, from someone who obviously knows the subject. Have you submitted it to any magazines? I think it would do well.

I just might take him up on that suggestion.

So I eventually got DW7 because it was in the bargain bin and I liked what I heard about the upcoming Xtreme Legends. The vanilla game had all the misgivings I gathered from watching live streams and not much in the way of hidden "it" factor to compensate. I never made it through all the stories, and conquest mode was a sheer borefest. I appreciate the largely successful effort to tell each kingdom's story coherently, and I'm not sorry I tried it out. Even so, DW7 was such a mishmash of promising ideas and phoned-in horseflop.

The spousal unit randomly found XL the other day, and holy shit does it feel good to be enjoying Dynasty Warriors once again.

In the classic era, special weapons and character-boosting items were unlocked by doing specific challenges within battle. DW7 failed by chucking this out in favor of samey samey gold grinding. XL brings the awesome back to the collect-a-thon. Unlockable weapons! Unlockable character-specific power-ups! Even more unlockable weapons on the all-new Self-administered Groin Punch difficulty level! It also fixes a poorly implemented weapon proficiency system which gave squeaky loli dolls a broader range of skills than some of the best historical fighters.

KOEI also paid some attention to fan feedback about weapons. In the upcoming DLC, Cao Ren gets his shield back. On steroids.

Spousal unit: What do you want for $HOLIDAY?
Me: I just ordered myself another textbook. That counts.
Spousal unit: I want to get you something.
Me: I really don't need any more toys- Is that the Skyrim collector's box?

Yep.

( Two books on China )

( Bethesda crack, fantasy style )

Christmas road trip family baked goods overload, plus homebrew from the in-laws' neighbors. I even managed to keep my 6 a.m. - 12 p.m. vacation sleep schedule. Tomorrow my ass goes back to the gym.

I also spent a great deal of time dinking around with my shiny new Dreamwidth layout. (Peanut gallery: What's Dreamwidth, Uncle G-Funk?) It's based on a fork of Livejournal's code, and here's why I jumped there.

You may have noticed that Livejournal's comment page design has shat the bed. Massive customer outcry has had little effect, and signs point to worse interface mangling in the future. Between LJ higher-ups' disdain for its userbase and Dreamwidth's reputation for respecting its own, I figured it was about time to start mirroring. Until the end of the year, you can sign up free - no invite code required. In the future, I should have some invites to hand out. I'm not entirely sure how that works.

I will continue to cross-post, so feel free to stay with LJ if you prefer it. Just extending the offer is all.

I spent the last few days in the glorious realm of Nothing Constructive Whatsoever. Sort of. NaNoWriMo left me with a whole mess of ideas to refine and rework, so I've been poking at all the unanswered questions it raised. This is all quite encouraging and fun - reminiscent of the August/September heyday when my Wire-fueled brain was happily chewing on high level concepts with help from zeriel, which must have horrified the post-lunch elevator passengers privy to our musings on money laundering. Perhaps I should finally make that disclaimer sign proclaiming that I'M WRITING A NOVEL.

Tempered Will is a wording redundancy once-over away from submission. I found yet more prose to clean up, a bit of awkwardness from overzealous culling on the previous round. I grabbed the NaNo trial of Scrivener - which I fell in love with and will totally be buying with my winner's discount - and I'm using it to compile this manuscript as well. Scrivener even comes with a short story template for the standard format suggested by the wuxia anthology I'm after. I'm also organizing the story into fewer, more sensible chapters for reuploading to my usual fiction sites.

Now to boot my brain into psychological horror mode somehow. It will be done.

Good riddance, Textual Sword of Damocles. I'm glad I stepped up to the challenge, but I can't say I enjoyed it as much as Years of NaNo Past. I did get about half a novel's worth of useful disjoint material, a solid first arc, a strong head start on plans and sketches for the rest, and far better rough prose than I used to be capable of at this pace. I call that a win, even though my word count involved a cracktastic outtake of a Russian smuggler accidentally crashing my guys' special manly personal time with contraband hidden inside a Meat Lovers pizza delivery. And you should have already guessed that I made note of the double entendre.

Things I learned, Cliffs' Notes version:

• Holy balls do I overanalyze character development. I need to remember that people's actions and viewpoints aren't always thought out exhaustively, and don't have to stand alone as a convincing position paper.


• Scene development can and should be separated if it doesn't all come at once. You might think of a conversation or conflict without knowing where it takes place or what other exposition needs to be interwoven. Just write what you have and build on it later.


• Write raw conversational exchanges first, then deal with adding action and gestures to prevent Talking Head Syndrome.


• Outtakes are made of win. Not enthused by a conversation? Shove it aside and rewrite it in another context. The original might have some development or nuance for you to repurpose elsewhere. This especially applies to the comment about scenes. Some conversations take off into good scenes. Others fall flat. You might not know the difference until you write them out.


• It's difficult for me to break the short narrative habit of super efficient scenes. I need to rewatch some Wire to help me spread out and split up my development while drawing in more nuance. I improved over this month, but I'm still new to thinking in long form.

So when's this holy mess going to be cohesive and roughly presentable? Give me several months at the very least. I need a break and a rotation of hobby variety. I especially need more research on various whatnots I had to BS over NaNo, such as investigative police procedure (namely, what evidence and approval would be required to start a sanctioned dig up a counterfeit chain from the retailer up, and how some overzealous upstart might accidentally fuck it up with illegal surveillance or useless evidence) and conventions of business interactions at different levels of formality. I want more detail on the economic climate as well. I recently learned that China's export sales are down, hence manufacturing is trying to shift toward more domestic production to be bought by the expanding middle class, which is actually quite serendipitous for my main man's goal of being his own brand.

In the near future, I'll be putting the finishing touches on the Tempered Will rewrite and returning to art. Manga Studio awaits, as does some ideas for new work.