a little self-knowledge

Progress:

• Prototype: I figured out a mechanical hinge (made-up term) that was much simpler than I was thinking of initially, in number theory terms! More shortly as I continue to fuss with paper prototyping. 🙂
• Naninovel: I ascertained that out-of-the-box this supports dynamic layout output (e.g. export to portrait or landscape mode if you’re exporting for both desktop and mobile)!
• ToonSquid: I’m using this for the 2D animation component(s). I found some terrific brushes (this reddit post) since ToonSquid supports Photoshop (.abr) brush import, which opens up a ton of options! But later this month, I’m hoping to budget for True Grit Texture Supply’s The Rusty Nib: Distressed Inking Brushes. In real life, with a “tinted ‘inked’ lineart” style, my brush needs are pretty modest at the moment. :3
• For the morbidly curious, I’ve added Appendix E: The VST Hoard as a partial listing of my VSTs (sampled music libraries, mostly, with some synths). I have some interesting (fun!) decisions to make about sound design/instrumentation. :3

It turns out a little self-knowledge is both delightful and dangerous.

One of the gifts (?) that lingering sickness has brought me is clarity. I mean, I’d also rather not be lingeringly sick! My husband Joe says regularly that if he had Lay on Hands for healing, he would use it on me.

Me: “But couldn’t you use that on someone who matters or is important in the grand scheme of things? Like a world political leader??”

Joe: “…”

Joe: “I’m married to you. There are LOTS of politicians out there. They can manage. Besides, if a politician goes down, there are plenty of replacement politicians. I want to use Lay on Hands on you.”

Me: “Those poor politicians!”

Joe: “…”

(We are trolls around here. 🙂 It’s okitty!)

I’ve known for a while that writing novels, while they’re something I can do, is not ideal as a production modality for me. It was only recently that I pinned down why.

People have a lot to say about the “gig economy” and the curses of late-stage capitalism. For me, however, those aren’t the fundamental problem although they are certainly problems in general.

I am perhaps a weirdo, but I find the challenge of writing for money—commercial writing—frequently energizing. I enjoy the game and the money is how I keep score. I don’t make any claim to be writing literature, or work with literary merit. It would also be Something for me to claim to hate everything about capitalism given that I have hit the point of making low six figures in writing, having paid off my student loans with royalties. Absolutely this is a position of financial privilege, and even then I recommend a hard look at the math if you’re trying to make a living from writing fiction; I was publishing short sf/f for seventeen years (first sale: “The Hundredth Question,” published in F&SF, Feb. 1999) before I sold a trilogy (the advance for Ninefox Gambit (2016) was $8,000 USD, for something I spent 2012-2015 writing/revising, so you do the math). During that time, I was either the stay-at-home parent or working part- or full-time at, y’know, regular jobs.

I should add that at the point where the ~authorial insert in The Nibelungenlied is reminding the audience to pay the minstrels lots of money, be sure to pay them well!—”how do I make a living as an artist?” is a problem that predates capitalism, or anyway if the problem with making a living as a minstrel during the time/place when The Nibelungenlied was coalescing was late-stage capitalism, that’s news to me.

See:

[38, Mittelhochdeutsch] Diu hôchgezît, diu werte / unz an den sibenden tac.
Siglint diu rîche / nâch alten siten pflac
durch ir suns liebe / teilen rôtez golt.
si kundez wol gedienen, / daz im di liute wâren holt.
(the Reclam edition of The Nibelungenlied, 16; I’ve added slashes for the caesuras since I can’t figure out how to add non-breaking spaces in WordPress! Or blockquotes, apparently.)

[38, Neuhochdeutsch] Das Fest dauerte bis zim siebenten Tag. Die mächtige Königin Sieglinde verschenkte nach altem Brach aus Liebe zu ihrem Sohn rotes Gold. Sin konnte leicht erreichen, dass ihm die Leute freundlich begegneten.
(the Reclam edition of The Nibelungenlied, 17)

[38, English] And so they passed away the rest of the day, while the traveling entertainers seemed to be constantly in motion. They played tirelessly for the rewards that were amply bestowed on them all.¹² Siegmund and his entire country grew in renown on account of such munificence.

¹² The poet, here and elsewhere, can’t seem to help but put in a plug for his brethren entertainers and singers and the rewards that they deserve for their part in making the festivities memorable.
(William Whobrey’s English prose translation, from The Nibelungenlied with The Klage, 5)

In any case, I don’t mind working hard and I like playing the money game. So those aren’t, by themselves, reasons that the novel-writing career modality doesn’t work for me!

There are various things that make novel-writing psychologically difficult for me (and others), but the real issue is that I have ADHD, diagnosed a few years as an adult. (It turns out that I was walking around with an incorrect diagnosis of bipolar I due to a messy differential diagnosis situation. But empirically, my psychiatrist says, I don’t respond significantly to bipolar meds and I respond extremely well to ADHD meds, so as far as today’s medical science is concerned, the issue is ADHD. Good to know?)

Do you know what I can do, but find miserable? I hate routines. I hate doing the same things every day, and I hate doing things on the same schedule every day. Absent some external structure or motivator, on my own, I can sustain “a consistent schedule” for three days, tops, before I become murderously irritable and I break the schedule just to do something new. I’m great at getting shit done when my health isn’t on fire. I’m really great at getting shit done if you let me structure it for variety rather than my being forced to do the same thing on the same schedule every day (or “only” weekdays, whatever)

I’ve been sitting here wildly switching up writing mode (longhand with a fountain pen, in a locked blog post, on a manual typewriter, in different notebooks, in Scrivener, in a text editor I jankily coded, in Microsoft Word, in Google Docs, the list could go on), moving writing location around the house and between the library or various cafés, switching up the time of day, and so on.

None of this addresses the problem for me that writing novels to a deadline means that I have to show up, day in and day out, for months, chained to the same essential task. I mean, sure, the individual scene or characters will change, but fundamentally, it’s all novel-writing. And this goes on for months while I go out of my mind with boredom/aggravation from the simple fact of doing the same task over and over for months regardless of how interesting the book itself would be otherwise, and contracts mean deadlines mean that there are limits to how long I can go do something else. Unfortunately for me, I also don’t tend to write novels to a consistent formula or overarching structure—absolutely no shade if you do, that’s often a strong commercial writing decision/ability!—so while that small amount of variety soothes my brain a little, it also inherently means that I can’t take “shortcuts” to shorten the writing process on structural grounds. Each book is its own thing! (That’s often true even when you’re writing to formula anyway, is my understanding.)

Ninefox Visual Novel Nonsense may not, in itself, go anywhere as an end product. I may never release it! But what I have a few years of grace period to explore (modulo State of the World and personal life/health considerations) is a project that inherently involves wearing many hats. And if I’m doing all the essential work, it’s all…work that has to be done, even if I’ve carefully scoped it to be possible to do by one person who is me.

So Ninefox VN lets me switch hats between:

• writing
• narrative design
• game design
• game development/coding
• UX design and usability
• accessibility and accessible design
• 2D art
• 2D animation
• cinematography and storyboarding
• video editing
• composing
• sound design
• game audio implementation
• …marketing, if that mattered, down the line; probably good to look into in terms of understanding the process rather than expecting sales (lol).

So I can dive into Unity, and when my brain wants a break, I can go look at sprites, or research, or compose fragments, or poke at the game mechanics. The project inherently offers a variety of different kinds of tasks that I have to do. But I love learning how to do things, I love learning how to create things, I prefer to stay busy with interesting work (I last about twenty-four hours on enforced-idle-mode vacation before I need to DO SOMETHING ANYTHING). So as far as personal therapy goes, this is ideal! There’s no one externally I need to answer to. But it’s also an opportunity to explore a way to branch out into an endeavor that may be much more congenial to the way my brain works.

Due to health reasons alone, I’m likeliest to switch to novel-writing on spec, on a slower schedule, anyway. It also turns out that the kinds of books I like to write, coupled with my process—those books benefit from more time to breathe (some writer friends call this “composting”!), and sometimes that’s a multi-year process. Ninefox Gambit benefited (?) from composting going back to the weird idea I had about weapons in a mystical arsenal taking on human form that I had in 6th grade, going back 20+ years. Books that I have to garden to completion in less than a year aren’t able to develop the same kind of complexity, for good or ill. I know you haven’t read it (unless you’re one of a handful of beta readers), but Code and Codex (forthcoming, probably, in 2026), my adult linguistics sci-fantasy/space opera, did in fact benefit from my getting extra time to develop the ideas.

By way of contrast, Revenant Gun, as a novel, was a disaster because we were flooded out (actual natural disaster, Louisiana floods of 2016 [Wikipedia]), I had two books due (Dragon Pearl was the other), and suddenly what had been a very manageable workload became my hauling ass to turn in Dragon Pearl on time while we were in a temporary apartment after a stint in a shelter, and searching for a new rental that would accept a catten and be livable for our school-aged daughter at a time when everyone was competing for rentals, which meant I had to ask for a six-week extension to turn in Some Placeholder Draft for Revenant Gun. I was only four weeks late and Rebellion/Solaris was extremely kind and gracious about it, for which I will be forever grateful; but I was too preoccupied with family survival to give that book more attention and we were all emotionally wrecked.

Revenant Gun was never going to be the book I would have liked it to be if there hadn’t been the natural disaster that also destroyed my beloved student viola from middle school in Houston, my classical guitar, my mandolin, my panpipes, my Hohner chromatic harmonica, my digital piano, my synthesizer, and approximately 800 physical books along with all my original notes for Ninefox Gambit and sequels. To be honest, losing my musical instruments was more devastating than the books. I’m a writer, so this sometimes startles people; my interlocutors often seem more distressed about the loss of the books than I ever was.

But: the world is full of books. I can go to the library and read some other books. It’s okitty! But I still haven’t replaced the chromatic harmonica because it’s spendy, or the viola. I am going to mourn a stupid student viola that had a snapped neck glued back on (it came that way, which was probably the only reason my parents could afford it) a thousand times more than I’m going to mourn a hard copy of a book, which is a weird thing for a writer to say, but it’s not like my collection included a Gutenberg Bible or some ancient copy of the Heart Sutra. Losing my viola felt like my heart was ripped out, which I guess is still a weird statement for a writer who isn’t even a musician, but there it is.

So, you know. Life happened. My husband and daughter and catten and I all got out, which is the important thing, but it wasn’t an event with zero emotional impact.

But what I’ve also realized, beyond complicating factors like :waves at the world:, is that I need to stay out of series, let alone multi-book contracts with their inherent attached deadlines, because they’re not psychologically sustainable. Goodness knows, the question of “standalone book or series?” is cursed anyway because if you write a standalone and people love it, some percentage of readers will want sequels, and if you write a series, some percentage of readers won’t pick it up until it’s completed or they’ll simply hate something about the sequels; some percentage will hate it if it’s “the same” as book 1, but some percentage will hate it if it’s “different” or the status quo changes from book 1. (See also: there will never be a Phoenix Extravagant sequel, for multiple reasons. Sorry.) There is no universal win condition here, so I might as well please myself.

Ironically, short stories sidestepped this because…look. If I’m loafing at 1,000 words/day, a short story of 5,000 words is only a week of writing. In real life they take longer, of course, but they’re over much more quickly and therefore less frustrating! Too bad it hasn’t been possible to make a living off sf/f short stories since before I was born.

Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL