Negrek

Been a while since I've gotten a commentary post together. Figured I might as well take a few minutes to reflect on Chapter 51, since I think it exemplifies a lot of the qualities present in this current run of chapters--roughly 49-53.

( Read more... )

Doing a retrospective for NaNo 2020 and NaNo 2021 this year. I intended to do one last year, but then ended up... not, lol. I had to go through my NaNo 2020 output in order to work on NaNo this year, so it's fresh in my mind once again.

This year's NaNo went pretty smoothly, all things considered. I lost almost a week early on due to travel, which made the rest of the month a little exhausting, but I've had much worse situations before (starting halfway through the month, for example?). I didn't at any point doubt that I was going to get to 50,000, and if anything this was one of my better challenges in terms of discipline. No 12k words on the last day here! But I can only continue to dream of a November where I do the actual prescribed word count every single day and don't end up with at least 5k to go on November 30th, heh.

For both NaNos I was working on pretty similar material: the rest of the Orre part of the story, out through the end. Reading back through the work from NaNo 2020 really got me enthused about what's to come. Lots of fun stuff, and I think even most of the scenes that were spontaneous during that last big writing session hold up well. At the end of last year's NaNo I felt as though I'd done a good exploration of what wouldn't work and had driven a couple of the character arcs in exactly the wrong direction. Looking back at it this year, I could see that in a couple places--and there are a couple big scenes that I devoted a fair number of words to that straight-up aren't going to work, so I'll be doing some throwing away. But on the whole I was pretty pleased with how it all shook out, reconsidering it a year later.

One thing that I was rather frustrated but amused by last year was the fact that I managed to go 50k and not mention Absol once. It was like, I see you lurking over there! This is your arc! Get out here and do your thing already! For this year I prioritized getting a couple of Absol scenes in, but I definitely have further to go with that. She's a slippery one for sure.

This year my focus really should have been on proximal chapters in the 50-55 range, but alas, I found myself really digging some of the *very* endgame chapters instead. A lot of this is just uncertainty; the next 10-15 chapters are very difficult in the way that the tournament arc was difficult. There are essentially multiple storylines progressing in parallel, and while it's easy for me to map out what needs to happen in each one, as cause and effect play out strongly to dictate scene order within each thread, it's much harder for me to place those threads correctly relative to each other. They affect each other rather minimally until they start to come together at the end of the arc (which, surprise, guess what section I ended up actually writing part of?), so there's no clear guide about how they progress relative to each other and therefore the timing of scenes on the whole. I don't want to end up in a scenario where oops I dropped this plot thread for a couple chapters, so now I need three scenes of it in a row to catch it up with the others, etc.

By contrast, the final arc of the fic, once everything comes together, is *very* straightforward in terms of progression and contains many of my favorite scenes. I indulged and wrote one of them (indeed the entire chapter it belonged to) at the beginning of NaNo while I was still trying to figure out where I was going with everything, which was fun. There are some parts of it that will need to be reworked, but I like some other elements that I discovered in it, and overall I think it'll serve as a solid starting point for getting to a finished chapter. Wrote another really fun little scene from towards the end of the fic and pushed on into uncharted territory with some of the ending-ish bits that I knew had to exist but hadn't done any writing on whatsoever. Good stuff!

Towards the end of the month, I gained some discipline and circled back towards the earlier parts of the arc and took care of e.g. a couple Absol scenes, made sure I didn't totally neglect her this year. Wrote one really fun and unexpected scenes. And it was pretty gratifying, as I was getting into the last couple days and running out of chapter, to realize that oh shit, what do I even have left to write that I haven't done already? Where I ended up at the end of this year is similar to where I ended up at the end of the last, with a pile of fun scenes that still need to be put in order. Which is good! But especially given the nature of the problem with the proximal part of the fic, wasn't perhaps the most productive use of time. I really would have benefitted from sitting down before NaNo started and trying to put everything I had in order, see where I was still missing scenes, and working to untangle the ~chapters 50-60 range and having a more targeted idea of what I ought to tackle in writing rather than going with my usual "draft whatever." That works pretty well when I just need to race forward really fast, but is less useful when I have a lot of material but am not sure how it all hangs together yet. Alas, my October was pretty crazy this year, and although I did a little organization, I ultimately wasn't very prepared.

For my next fanfic, there will be three main characters we will follow exclusively and that is it. :P

In any case, here were a few fun things that emerged from my NaNos this year and the last:

- Mewtwo doesn't understand picnics
- Mewtwo goes to therapy
- A tyranitar sculptor
- Another raticate because no one can stop me

I have a bit of organizing to do, then, with all this new material! All in all, it was a good couple NaNos. Rereading the output from 2020, in particular, was a great time and really left me excited for the fic and where it's going. There is a lot in here for me to enjoy... Now I just have to do the work of getting it out there for other people to enjoy, too. :P

Next year's NaNo is going to be interesting! I do wonder if it'll be the first one in a long while where I'll be working on something new. We'll have to see... I have a lot of plans for the new year!

("Sun's Chosen" commentary will resume and complete soon! I'm nearly done with Draft 3, and there's only one more after that. Everything gets put on hold for Nano, lol.)

I participated in the second annual Zoroark Games this year, and I thought it would be fun to talk a bit about how I approached my imitation entry this year. I meant to do this for my imitation last year as well, but didn't manage to pull it together (or even a properly completed version of the fic, lol)--perhaps someday. For now, anyway, I'm going to post the various drafts of this story and talk a bit about why I made the choices I did--what I was trying to do in order to make my story feel like a kyeugh fic.

For context, the Zoroark Games are a fanfic exchange and writing exercise where the goal is to fool the other players by writing a story in another person's style! This involves writing two one-shots, one "real" one that's simply your own writing in your own style, and one "illusion," a story written in the style of another (randomly-assigned) author in the group. The goal is to fool as many people as possible into thinking your illusion story was written by the author you're imitating, while also correctly identifying who wrote as many of the other stories as possible. I had a great time, if an abysmal showing, last year, so I was super excited to participate and hopefully not embarrass myself quite so badly this time around!

As I mentioned earlier, this year my assigned writer was kyeugh! With the author assignments made and this year's list of prompts posted, my first task was to figure out generally what kind of story I would be writing!

( Read more... )

After some chapters of nothing much happening, suddenly everything happens in this chapter! What is a pacing and can you eat it.

( Read more... )

Hrrrk, this chapter.

This chapter is possibly the one I've written the most out of any in the fic, and unlike the others I've written multiple times, that's not because I really enjoy it and sometimes just want to write it again despite having already done that. I have tried many times to get this chapter to work, and it has never worked.

( Read more... )

I thought it would be fun to talk a little bit about the latest chapter of Salvage (right here!), and hopefully future chapters as well! Knowing me this'll be the only one that gets done, but hey, at least it'll be one! There's nothing particularly spoiler-y in this chapter that will be revealed as such, but if you're interested, it's probably better to read the chapter before reading this.

( Read more... )

Editing is already underway on Chapter 45. It's a pretty beefy chapter, but also a big favorite for me--which hasn't necessarily made editing easier, but I think I'm going to enjoy the finished product. Shooting to have it out in two weeks.

Happy new year! Here's to a happier 2021 for everyone.

I took a break with NaNoWriMon in 2019, since NaNo revealed their updated website (and lack of wordcount API) late enough in the game that it would have been pretty tight for me to update my code in time for the November challenge. I'd also hoped (but didn't feel super optimistic that) they would reinstate the API in time for the 2020 event, so there'd be some documentation available for it and some kind of official blessing indicating it was okay to build on. No such luck! Some kind soul did write a small library for connecting to the API, and one of the NaNo tech staff (I think?) did give a person their blessing to build an application that would use it, but it's still very much on the down-low. And I'm keeping the NaNoWriMon on the down-low as well, not doing much promotion of them; hoping that keeping it to dozens of them this year, rather than the usual hundreds, might make anybody watching the API traffic a little less grumpy and inclined to cut me off. There are well over 11,000 NaNoWriMon that have been created to date, which is completely wild!

In addition to rewriting the code to use the new API, I also needed to add Gen VIII pokémon and the ability to gigantamax. I've always pictured the NaNoWriMon code as a mess primarily held together by Scotch tape and prayer, and digging back into it to make large changes... definitely confirmed that! Updates took much longer than expected, and largely due to problems that already existed in the code that I kept accidentally running into rather than problems added as a result of the new content.

A small sampling of the kinds of issues I encountered:

- For some reason the apostrophe in farfetch'd and sirfecth'd was a smart single quote instead of an apostrophe in the data dump I was using for Gen VIII. I can only hope that this is how it's actually represented in the game's text (but why tho?). No one was trying to open/edit this big JSON file in MS Word, right? Right??
- At one point I decided that pokémon with multi-word names (e.g. Tapu Bulu, Mr. Mime) would use hyphens instead of spaces, e.g. tapu-bulu, mr-mime for their internal identifiers. Then, later, I decided to simply delete the space in the name (e.g. tapubulu, mrmime) without realizing I'd already settled on a different way of handling this. The hyphenated solution worked with the new Gen VIII pokémon sprites I was using, while deleting the space did not. I changed everything to hyphens, in the processes breaking all of the pokémon that had previously had the smushnames.
- I apparently just never bothered adding the various Arceus and silvally forms, oops.
- Meowth couldn't evolve into Alolan persian (regular persian was fine). Instead, tentacool evolved into Alolan persian.
- Pichu had been entered as part of an evolutionary family that didn't even exist (pikachu and raichu were fine), which meant that it could never evolve. And this was a preexisting issue? How long had people just not been able to evolve pichu and nobody ever said anything??

All in all, the codebase really needs a thorough rewrite. I already did one, a few years ago, but GameFreak keeps introducing more fancy stuff that violates the assumptions baked into the current version (like mega evolution even existing, lol, or only final-stage pokémon being able to "battle evolve"). It's really a mess in there, in part due to a lot of bandaid fixes made under time constraints, in part due to weird constraints due to originally being implemented in a shared hosting environment. This is why the images are actually served through the application rather than being links to the underlying PNG's, for example--I didn't have any ability to change the caching on the server, so I had to route images through a view that could add the necessary headers instead of serving them directly. And then there are the fixes that are just dumb and bad, like the code that was having issues with database locks that was changed to... try to write, and if the database was locked, wait a bit and then try writing again in hopes that it might have opened up.

Of course, there are many parts of the site that desperately need a full rewrite or are already in the process of one, including, notably, the metronome generator, which is why it's still not updated for Gen VIII. When exactly am I going to find the time to get all my coding work done? The eternal question. I was actually doing a pretty good job making progress on web stuff back in August 2018 only to abruptly stop once I got a job offer, oops.

At least I did have to 100% rewrite the code for interacting with the API, and it's much nicer now!

Anyhow, after all that nonsense, here's my guy for 2020:



I realized how annoying it was that I couldn't readily tell what year my various old NaNoWriMon are from. Which was the year when I had Gina the charizard, for example? So I figured I'd try including the year in the NaNoWriMon's nickname.

Saturday was a very busy day even outside of last-minute scrambling to get all this accomplished. I've since spent most of my time on actual writing, and I really need to get back into reviewing as well. My reviews especially took a backseat to coding toward the end of October, and I've been itching to get back into things. There are still a couple known bugs in the NaNoWriMon code, though, one of which is pretty severe, so no big break for me--I'll have to get back to work sometime this week. (Plus Crown Tundra stuff needs to get in there as well; looks like there are finally data rips out in non-horrible formats for me to use!)

Currently working on the monster amalgam of Chapter 44 and 45. This scene here already got kicked out of Chapter 43 and doesn't really seem to have a home in these chapters, either, so out it goes. I've got to get this beast under 20k words somehow!

Anyhow, it stands alone just fine, so I figured I'd get at least some use out of it. Under the cut for your reading pleasure.

( Read more... )