Ninefox Gambit Visual Novel

Ninefox Gambit VN: Prelude: text-only prototype, some cuss words, about 5 minutes to play (“choose your own adventure” or “hyperlinked game” style), with NOTES to myself in bold + italics. Drafted in Inkle Studios’ Ink (narrative scripting language).

I do have some graphics, sound/music, but for prototyping purposes, it makes sense to separate them for now.

Comments/feedback appreciated: please send to yoon@yoonhalee.com – also let me know how (if at all) you’d like to be credited for testing/feedback.

Progress lately:

• animation: firearms research (poses etc). Jedao is going to have a revolver, because Reasons. Cheris, as a Kel officer, is going to have a semi-automatic. That kind of thing.
• game design: calendars and narrative scripting (see above), with thanks to Chris Chinn for brainstorming help!
• music: more piano tomfooolery, with special thanks to Baton Rouge’s game store Little Wars and its delightful piano. :3 Also abuse of innocent VSTs.

When I’m scoping a project in a new- or newish-to-me endeavor, I think a lot about extensible design.

Have you ever taught a lesson, especially to a group of people? Not necessarily in the context of a classroom class—cooking, knitting, religious study, how to pet the catten.

One thing I struggled with as a student teacher (for secondary math education), and that I suspect many teachers do when we’re just starting out, is knowing how long each part of a lesson will take students to complete. Sometimes I could make an educated guess. Sometimes I wildly underestimated and sometimes I wildly overestimated. I’m good at improvisation (a useful skill for teaching high school math anyway!) so I could compensate, but I was often taken aback by what students figured out instantly and what they spent all hour unraveling. Sometimes the deficiency was my teaching or lesson preparation, but sometimes it was just inexperience. Every group of students is different, but after a few runs with a specific lesson, we get a better general sense of this.

When I scope a project in a new- or newish-to-me endeavor, in some sense I’m both teacher and student. I don’t know what will take a lot of time, what will be difficult, what will be nothingburger easy mode, problems that I didn’t even know to ask about, fun (or terribad) side quests. Fortunately, for a personal project, I can be lenient!

My main goals include “therapy” (in the sense of a fun hobby) and learning. For these specific goals, a certain amount of “inefficiency” is not only expected, but generative. Among other things, as I’ve said before, I’d rather be doing the R&D/exploration early in a project, not when I’m 73% “done” and dealing with sunk costs. I imagine people are all over the map on this, but for creative projects and processes, I’ve rarely found a straight-line algorithmic learning path to work well for me. I also like to give myself permission to ditch something for a better idea!

I get bored if I don’t have a specific goal or thing I want to make/produce. I envy people who are more process-oriented, but one positive of having a goal is that it provides a clarifying lens. I can organize my learning and/or planning and/or work around: Does this get me closer to the end product? Sometimes I decide I just want to explore something fun (again, remembering that this is a personal project) and that’s all right! But that lens enables me to self-direct my efforts.

I also prefer goals that are more ambitious in scope—there really is no rush like bringing a twenty-year plan to fruition—but I probably only have one more twenty-year plan in me at best because, y’know, human lifespan. :3 So I want to set a target that’s high enough to feel ambitious yet is theoretically within my grasp with hard work.

And this is where extensible design comes in: I want to leave room in the plan to expand the project in ways that are doable, if it serves the project and/or my goals, as well as room to shrink the project where I see scope creep or obstacles that I’m not able to surmount with my current resources and/or knowledge and/or skill. This will shift over time, and that’s okitty!

My experience from writing is that the best way for me to do this is by editing structure. I mean, there are things one could do to scope up or scope down that don’t involve the equivalent of structural edits (e.g. “placeholder piano soundtrack played by me” vs. “piano soundtrack as performed by a highly paid concert pianist”). For narrative, though, I’m looking at a structure that can be made more or less fractally complex. For example, if you’re creating a 5,000-word short story that’s in some sense encapsulating two hours of television (or the scripts thereof), you’re not just “cutting spare adjectives” anymore. You will have to change the narrative structure. This is a real example from a work-for-hire job I did in short-story-izing the four-episode Umbara Arc from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, by the way! (For starters, I chopped everything down to a single POV, Rex, because 5,000 words was a hard limit and there was no room for anything else.) For a more mundane example, one reason my first IF (interactive fiction) game, Moonlit Tower, was a tower: if I had time, I could add more levels; if I didn’t, I could get away with fewer. (As fantasy settings, dungeons also have this property!) Or one can structure an episodic story with mini-arcs, that kind of thing. But if one’s going to do this, I want to plan in the accordion nature of the structure right from the beginning.

That’s one reason I enjoy this kind of work: designing, manipulating, and revising this type of overarching structure is something I’m comparatively good at seeing and that I love digging into. A visual novel can be technically scoped up or down (…I could ditch the graphics entirely and write a text adventure, come to that) as well as narratively scoped up or down in ways that feel satisfying and play to my strengths. Also, I needed another hobby?

Oh, and favorite inks:

• India inks generally (dip pens)
• J. Herbin’s Emerald of Chivor and Vert Atlantide (fountain pen shimmer inks)
• Diamine Syrah (fountain pen ink)
• Colorverse Gravity Wave (fountain pen ink, which I obtained because my husband works for LIGO!)
• Montblanc Alfred Hitchcock (fountain pen ink, sadly long since discontinued)
• De Atramentis Document Black (fountain pen ink, reasonably waterproof)

Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL

Latest progress over the past several days, achieved doodling during Gundam Seed (“Bad Anime Date Night” with my husband Joe, which is often not bad, not always anime, and not at night!) or other interstices between working on a novel.

• git repository setup, initial commit with Joe’s help. I might have been able to figure this out on my own, but not on two hours of sleep…
• game design noodling (see first photo in this post, above). Need to review Euler’s totient function and Vigenère ciphers, sorry not sorry.
• narrative script outlining. I want to go back into Inkle Studios’ Ink to prototype that. (I love Ink’s IDE!) This and WWISE are where I’ll focus my next efforts, when there’s time.
• prologue music both in my DAW as well as preliminary recordings using Little Wars‘ venerable acoustic piano (see the second photo in this post, above!) with its beautiful rich tone, by arrangement with Little Wars (thank y’all!); and my Yamaha Arius YDP-103. The Yamaha is an entry-level digital piano (a discontinued model), but that suited me: I could afford it, and I play for personal enjoyment and composition sketching rather than performance. I’d like to grab some more takes and experiment with EQ and sound design! I also have Plans involving different orchestrations of the same theme.
• animation progress in ToonSquid.
• background and splash screen progress in Procreate. I’m pretty happy with the palette I generated!

I promised I’d talk about the iPad Air and Apple Pencil I’m using!

ThinkSpace Education apparently sends out periodic? surveys to students about the experience. I’m usually active on the postgraduate Discord but was alarmed that I was getting mentions because I hadn’t poked my head in for a couple days due to Circumstances and I was wondering if I was in some kind of trouble. (You can tell what kind of grade schooler I was…)

No—I was startled to learn that I’d apparently won the iPad Air drawing that one got entered into for returning the student experience survey. Startled and very grateful. I am one of those people who names their devices, so I named it ThinkSpace Fren. :3 (I hope they forgive me the jokey spelling…)

The punch line is that, in a spirit of helpfulness (or helpiness, depending), I returned the survey before they announced the iPad Air incentive. So I really wasn’t expecting this!

I had a rather older iPad + Pencil, which was still perfectly functional, and which was the reason I hadn’t upgraded! In a spirit of paying it forward, I passed that on to a friend who wanted to learn digital art. :3

Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL

Latest progress accreted over a few days:

• Further work hashing out the math behind the mechanics of the tactical end; the intent is a hybrid VN that includes a turn-based tactics game component. Is anyone going to want this? Who knows. I do. 🙂 I might as well at least paper prototype it and see what happens. In the meantime, I may have nefarious plans for the Euler totient function . 🙂
• I got Naninovel Scene Assistant running, which will help with the (admittedly minimal) graphics handling. The instructions are pretty clear!…but not when you’re recovering from medical diagnostic stuff, lolsob.
• ToonSquid test animation progress. I futzed for a while customizing a brush and am pretty happy with “vector but with inked lines vibes” it has going on. 🙂
• I got audio working in Naninovel proper; its audio handling uses Unity’s built-in audio engine. (Pro tip: make sure Unity audio is enabled in the configuration!) There are already basic dynamic game audio tasks I want to achieve for which WWISE (or Fmod) will likely work better, so my next step is looking into coding custom commands in C# for use in Naninovel scripts in conjunction with WWISE. The current mp3 is a placeholder I had lying around of Some Other Orchestral WIP in Sibelius NotePerformer output. 🙂
• I did a piano sketch of the VN’s prologue music eventually for looping. I’d considered taking it into my DAW tonight (Cubase Pro 14) but my daughter had a project video call so I decided not to be that much of a noise-making nuisance. :3
• Semi-relatedly, I looked longingly at chromatic harmonicas that are out of my budget right now, having made the mistake of listening to a glorious video play demo for the Seydel Symphony Grand. I fell in love with the timbre and the apparent responsiveness, even allowing for a professional player vs. me! I used to own a cranky Hohner 16-hole chromatic from the 1990s; flood casualty. That said, a Bushman Game Changer is (much) more achievable; I’m especially intrigued by “Paddy” pop tuning or possibly “bebop” C6; my diatonic harps have all been in Richter (“blues”) tuning, and my late lamented Hohner chromatic was in solo tuning. Someday!

This VN isn’t using the mechanics from my design of Ninefox Gambit RPG, but one thing I did want in that game as well as this VN was some sense of individual numbers as consequential. Of numbers with personality or emotional valence—you might laugh, but “critical failure” (e.g. 1 on a d20) and “critical success” (e.g. 20 on a d20) is something we already have in (USAn) gamer culture! Thirteen (13) is “unlucky” in the US; the parts of my childhood in S Korea involved elevators having a floor F instead of 4 because 4 = “death.” That idea of emotional valence is something I want to make use of, even if it doesn’t take the same mechanical form, because that entanglement between number and culture/history is core to the themes of Ninefox Gambit.

Meanwhile:

I’ve seen the advice to mine everything and anything in your life for game design material, which is congenial because that’s how I approach writing short stories and novels. Ninefox Gambit‘s influences included the late Marcia Ascher’s pioneering work on ethnomathematics, Planescape: Torment, Mage: The Ascension, Legend of the Five Rings lore (Alderac Entertainment Group) and the Rokugan 2000 fanfiction by Rich Wulf, the apocryphal story of Winston Churchill’s “decision” to sacrifice Coventry in WWII, Harlan Ellison’s “The Paladin of the Lost Hour,” and the late Ross Anderon’s magisterial Security Engineering; for Phoenix Extravagant, the curious history of the watercolor pigment PO49, known as quinacridone gold (one account and another), the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), and the history of my grandparents, one of whom was a collaborator who attended university in Tokyo; for the short story “Warhosts,” a BattleTech and/or Mechwarrior: Living Legends habit (I played as Maratai!), a lifetime of being tormented by skeeters in Houston and Seoul, and childhood reading about malaria and infectious disease (my father used to be a surgeon, medical researcher, professor of medicine).

Naturally, for Ninefox Gambit, I wanted to mine math.

My ongoing joke (…true) has been that Ninefox Gambit got bounced by the major publishers of sf/f because, among other reasons, people panicked when they spotted a vestigial use of the word “diagonalization.” But for a VN, why not lean in? Especially if I can figure out an interface to help people visualize/conceptualize the underlying (simplified) math?

In particular, I admire the pilot of the TV show Numb3rs for how elegantly it handled this. Let’s face it: the US audience is not notable for a high proportion of people who adore and understand high-level math. (I’ll spare you my rant on ways math pedagogy in the USA is frequently dysfunctional despite the best efforts of some teachers/schools.) The math professor character is supposed to be a math genius, I imagine at Fields Medal or equivalent level. (Fun fact: there is no Nobel Prize in math; the highest honor is generally regarded to be the Fields Medal, which no one outside of math has ever heard of. I’m not even a mathematician and I’m salty about this!) In real life, I’m pretty sure a lot of working mathematicians in other math subfields fields would find a Fields Medalist’s work to be tough going, let alone whatever you can stuff into a TV episode? I’ve never attempted even a layperson summary of Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem [Wikipedia], which has a reputation of being notoriously “deep” and difficult for actualfax mathematicians. If you’re going to represent “brilliant at math” on TV, you’re stuck finding a way to do so in a way that’s accessible to your viewership of, presumably, more than the population of math profs and grad students.

That pilot, instead, shows people falling to a common fallacy about the behavior of “randomness” and the mathematician believably pointing it out in a way that’s easily visualized for the screen. I guess this is a spoiler, but the math component hinges on the “random” attacks being evenly distributed rather than randomly distributed. The mathematician illustrates this by having people “place yourselves randomly in this room,” but humans being human, they space themselves evenly, which is not what you would expect in a random distribution! (Or: it’s possible but low odds. I’m having thoughts about Poincaré’s recurrence theorem, which I used in a short story once.)

I’d spent a while searching for a way to angle the “core mechanic” on the VN’s calendar side. This consisted of noodling on JSTOR after papers on abstract algebra and number theory and Nim; revisiting some beloved abstract algebra textbooks; Knospe’s A Course in Cryptography; thinking about modern public-key encryption (RSA!); playing the board game Turing Machine, which is a delightful glorified logic puzzle engine with an incredibly beautiful and elegant physical design; poking around pedagogy books on using games and game design to teach math.

I realized on Monday (Feb 10, 2025) that I’d been looking too hard and overcomplicating the problem!

Instead, I remembered when I was a student teacher (I got my M.A. in secondary math education from Stanford) and one of the lessons I taught under supervision was about prime factorization and the Sieve of Eratosthenes [Wikipedia].

One thing I remember vividly is asking everyone in the class, for demonstration purposes, to write down on some piece of paper the counting numbers from 1 to 100. One girl, L, argued with me that this would take too long to do and it was unreasonable for me to ask the class to do this. (Everyone else did it!) As she spoke, I stood there scribbling in my notebook. When she had completed her argument, I showed her the notebook: in the time it had taken for her to say her piece, I’d written…the counting numbers from 1 to 100. She got the point. :p (L was a terrific student, by the way. I’m not in a position to complain about occasional argumentativeness…)

I’ve said in the past that I’d pulled out my abstract algebra and number theory textbooks in the hopes of creating, for lack of a better term, an abstract algebra combat engine for Ninefox Gambit when I started writing in 2012. My husband talked me out of it because he felt it would limit the book’s marketability, and he was correct. (My husband is a Caltech staff scientist working at LIGO; he has a PhD in astrophysics from MIT and a B.A. in physics from Cornell. So he’s not motivated by fear of math!)

You might ask, beyond matters of handwavium military science fantasy/space opera game engine reasons, why anyone would care about abstract algebra or number theory or modulo arithmetic (“clock arithmetic”). You’re in luck! Did I mention my M.A. is in secondary math education? A side-effect is that it exacerbated my preexisting tendency to collect Interesting Weird Math Applications (dating back to middle school) because no one is more skeptical of “Is this useful to us?” than a high schooler in a math classroom. :p To say nothing of the mock interview in which the interviewer, in real life a principal, with an air of “gotcha!”, asked me what use logarithms were in real life. (All the people I know in audio/music are sobbing now.) I should add that this was via Stanford’s School of Education, so I looked him in the eye and said, “We’re in California. I hear the Richter scale gets referenced a lot in these parts.”

As it turns out, modern asymmetric encryption hinges on this area of number theory! Do you have a bank account? A credit or debit card? Are you using a computer and/or the internet to read this? Congratulations: all of these interact at some point with number theory and various kinds of encryption. The handwave summary is that many such encryption methods rely on the asymmetry between it being computationally “easy” to multiply real Lorge Integers but typically “hard” to factor Lorge Integers back to the constitutent primes. (For example, see the RSA paper, “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems.”)

(Yes, post-quantum cryptography, elliptic curves, etc. are active areas of research, is my understanding as a non-mathematician with only a B.A. in math; but until someone coughs up hard evidence that a number larger than 21 has been factored purely by Shor’s algorithm or quantum computing equivalent, i.e. without classical pre-processing, I’m not losing any sleep.)

Remind me sometime, also, to discuss the surprisingly vexed question of “What is a mathematical proof?” and “When do we know something is mathematically true vs. false?” (What can I say: I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid at an impressionable age, along with Theoni Pappas, Martin Gardner, and Raymond Smullyan, among others.)

I also wanted to gesture at numerology and a secular yet quasi-religious foundation for Hexarchate sociocultural interactions around and conceptions of math, which looks, perhaps, like an eccentric choice; except the history of math and science and technology (or “natural philosophy” if you’re referring to a certain time and place) hinges on mysticism and religion. Astronomy has historical foundations in astrology; number theory has historical foundations in numerology; modern Western medicine has foundations in Galen and humors and miasma. (Listen, if you don’t have microscopes yet, how would you come up with a coherent germ theory of disease?) Have you ever looked at Japanese temple geometry? (Hat-tip to author and former anthropologist/folklorist Marie Brennan, who has a Patreon on worldbuilding.)

I’m reminded of Robert Jordan’s assertion that there’s very little “organized religion” in his Wheel of Time novels (despite the cultural and religious syncreticism that is fundamental to the premise!) because if magic is “real,” there’s no “need” for an explicit religion. I always think of the amount of arguably superstition-adjacent cussing I see around A/V equipment and computers, and I say this as someone who names and talks to my devices and musical instruments. 🙂

In any case, to return to the Numb3rs pilot, one thing I’m reminding myself of is that a game that produces literal groundbreaking number theory (or requires it to play) is wildly unlikely to be playable. What I want is enough of the flavor—the “vibes,” if you will—to communicate that feeling to the player. Trying to do this for both a hypothetical audience of mathy people and non-mathy people is hard mode, but this is a personal project; I can take my time and figure out what is, in fact, achievable here, or if I need to reduce the scope.

There’s an accessibility angle I’m thinking about as well: in the book, General Shuos Jedao has dyscalculia, which was based on an account I’d read of a geometer with dyscalculia. (I’m pretty sure someone in point-set topology wouldn’t be slowed down much, if at all, by dyscalculia.) Dyscalculia and its multiple presentations are not entirely well understood even today, according to neurobiologists I talked to, let alone when I was researching in 2012; I have at least one friend now who has almost exactly Jedao’s form of dyscalculia (and other friends with vastly divergent forms of it), but it does look like there are multiple presentations that go under that term today.

One of my goals is to gesture toward math-based “warfare” per the book while keeping the game theoretically playable by players who are math-shy for any reason. (This can include Joe and me, by the way. Between us we have four STEM/adjacent degrees, and we nope out of “too much math, too much like work, not fun anymore” games by mutual agreement.) I think, with the computer/game engine handling some of the annoying computations and a suitably designed visual/audio interface, this is achievable although (probably) tricky as a design problem. Certainly this is an area where all my goals might not be realistic with the toolset I have, so a reduction in scope is likely, and where I’d want to do user testing down the line to see if the results cohere.

In the meantime, I’m chipping away at the smaller proof-of-concept goal of prologue + first gameplay tutorial, step by step, so that I have a microcosm of the development pipeline for the larger project and just how much I want to plan for in what’s functionally an extensible design. If I have learned one thing from calculus (Latin: “small pebble”), it’s that even infinitesimals may sum up to something significant.

Next time, I might talk about the value of literal paper prototyping even for a hybrid VN where, in principle, prototyping could happen in a tool like Inkle Studios’ Ink, Twine, or Inform 7.

Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL

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

I had this whole thing written (which I’ve preserved at the end in a postscript) about why my current hardware solution was not one but two devices: a LincPlus LincStudio S1 pen computer and my trusty MacBook Pro (my main writing machine). Instead, I was handed what may be a better software solution that lets me switch one of the devices!

On Saturday, February 8, 2025, the universe gave me a gift! Not me specifically, but I’ll take it. 🙂

Let me back up.

One of the reasons I picked up the S1 was due to the vexed problems that I wanted to do hand-drawn-style animation, which was going to require a graphics tablet, display tablet, or pen computer (see below more discussion). Currently the big players in these spaces include Wacom (the venerable but pricier leader), more recent (more affordable) challengers like Huion and XP-Pen and others; for pen computers, you can also look at Android tablets or an iPad. I’m mostly discussing Wacom examples because that’s what I have the most familiarity with, but please know that there are a lot of options and look at reviews if you’re in the market for one of these!

• a graphics tablet, i.e. the non-display thing you plug into your computer to draw on with a stylus while looking at the computer monitor, e.g. a Wacom Intuos. I had an ancient one for over a decade, built like a tank, only had to give it up because the built-in cable wore out. These are terrific, much more affordable than the other options (see below), and often more ergonomic because you can have the drawing surface where your hands are vs. wherever you set your display height. They also tend to be lighter. My daughter, an accomplished digital artist, still has the one I got her almost a decade ago and she loves it. A common difficulty—certainly it was mine—is that there is a learning curve for having the drawing surface and the artwork/display be separate. I never managed to adapt.
• a display tablet, i.e. the display thing you plug into your computer so you can draw directly on the display with a stylus. These are rather pricier, although prices have come down. I tried a couple of these and ran into the difficulty that some of them, especially the less expensive or older models, have a non-intuitive multi-cable setup and possibly also a separate power brick. Some of the more recent offerings, like Wacom’s Movink 13, have a single cable but even that can be fraught due to power or other requirements. But these do solve the problem of the separate drawing surface vs. artwork/display learning curve. For what it’s worth, I still have my Movink 13 and I love it. It doesn’t have as much sensitivity or resolution as a professional-level display tablet, but it’s smaller and lighter (so much lighter), and some of my health issues mean that I have to cut to aggressively cut the weight of things I use and carry. If you don’t want/need to be aggressive about using light-as-possible devices, of course, your options open up! The professional offering in this area is something like the Wacom Cintiq series. I don’t need that level of device, but a friend of mine has one so I have seen her Cintiq. It’s GINORMOUS (…I joke that it’s bigger than I am) and requires a special desk arm mount to safely hold it for repositioning and so on. But she’s a professional artist and designer, so absolutely that makes sense for her. 🙂
• I’m coming to the last option, which is a pen computer, and now we’re at an all-in-one device that you don’t have to plug into something else to provide the computer part but you can draw with a stylus directly on the device’s display. Examples include the Wacom MobileStudio Pro, which received mixed reviews and hasn’t been updated in a while; tablets running Android or straight-up iPads; tablet/laptop hybrids like the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 (I’ve never used any of these); or more uncommon devices like the LincPlus LincStudio S1, which is what I originally went for and still own. This is a vexed solution in that the devices are pretty pricey, and if one part of it fails, you’re stuck replacing the whole device. Getting one primarily for digital animation or art is pretty niche!

You may ask why I’d go for a pen computer, and why that specific one. A few reasons:

• Guess who has an adult diagnosis of ADHD! Surprisingly small logistical steps will derail me hugely. I discovered that I’d stall for literal weeks because the step of figuring out where I’d stashed my Movink and plugging it in would derail me that much. For various reasons, my primary writing device is a MacBook Pro, and for ADHD and/or work reasons, I end up moving the laptop a lot throughout the week, so simply leaving the Movink plugged in wasn’t feasible. I know this is ridiculous! But I came to the conclusion that for animation, the cost of an all-in-one device (pen computer) would in fact be offset by my…actually getting some !@#$ work done more regularly.
• My original preference was an iPad! They’re sufficiently light, the battery life is sufficiently good (since I can’t work long sessions anyway), I like the drawing experience with a Pencil fine although some people dislike the “slick” glass surface. The biggest issue here was software. I dislike file management on iPadOS and, at the time I was originally considering the hardware problem, there wasn’t a sofware solution I found entirely satisfactory. Clip Studio Paint EX has a subscription model and its iPadOS interface is a PITA; RoughAnimator is a terrific app and I often recommend it to people who want to get their toes wet, but it’s straight-up designed for pencil tests as part of a larger workflow—for example, there aren’t any custom brushes, it’s basically lines and fills. Procreate Dreams doesn’t include a bunch of basic functionality I consider necessary although I’m definitely keeping an eye on it to see how it evolves. I’ve done short, simple straight-ahead animation in regular Procreate and I’ve seen people (even people who are not Aaron Blaise! :grin:) create amazing work in Procreate Dreams, so genuinely, no shade if it’s what works for you. 🙂
• You might ask why I went for a niche S1 instead of one of the more common Android tablets. The answer, again, is software. I’m not super familiar with Android and prefer the iPad in that I already have a bunch of hardware in the Apple ecosystem. But Android doesn’t appear to have some wildly better animation software option either. There isn’t a macOS-based tablet, so now we’re at Windows pen computers/tablets that can run the software options I care about. In my case, I’ve been using TVPaint 12 Pro. I dislike Windows 11 but I can tolerate it; I do have a Windows 11 desktop as my main music production rig!

I should add that at this point, unless something changes, the MacBook Pro is a non-negotiable part of my setup for writing and other purposes. I’m currently budgeting for a new one down the line but with maxed-out RAM so that I use it for writing and music production.

Why macOS and not a Windows or other OS laptop, you ask?

• I do want a laptop because it enables me to take my setup with me, including when I’m traveling for extended periods of time!
• Some of my writing apps, such as Scrivener and Vellum, are smoother on the Mac or only exist for Mac.
• I’ve used both Windows and Mac machines for a while, but the Mac is more comfortable for me at this point in time. (To be honest, my favorite Windows was probably, like Windows ’95 and I dislike Windows 11.) I’ve owned Macs since the PowerBook 1400cs 20+ years ago, so a lot of my work setup is based on a familiar-to-me OS. That’s not nothing!
• I have other Apple ecosystem devices (iPhone, iPad).
• Why not Linux/other? A non-trivial amount of my software doesn’t exist for Linux/etc. In particular, the audio software I need for my M.A. doesn’t exist. Sorry. :] It does exist for Windows or macOS.

The difficulty is that the particular music I compose and produce (and am in a media composition M.A. for!) is sampled orchestration + hybrid orchestration. This is one of the music types with the highest hardware requirements, since orchestral VSTs eat SSD space like whoa and they gobble RAM like whoa. (I don’t actually want to disclose the size of my VST hoard or what’s in it, even though almost all of it was bought on sale, because it’s embarrassing even for someone in a media composition M.A.) I can get around file storage with fast external SSDs, but while workarounds exist for lower RAM, they’re pretty miserable. For this kind of work, 64 GB RAM is a working minimum and 128 GB (or higher, if you can swing it?!) is preferable. (No, please do not argue with me about this unless you are a working professional in this domain.) There are types of music production you can do smoothly on 16 GB RAM! But sampled orchestration is not one of them. Unfortunately, Apple’s current design philosophy where you can’t upgrade RAM afterward as a regular user even in desktops means that I’m stuck shelling out for RAM up front. My current MacBook Pro is overkill for writing and will even run digital painting or animation software fine on 16 GB RAM. But it can’t handle sampled orchestration due to the RAM issue.

Why do I want to consolidate to a single (much) pricier device for both writing and music despite the expense and single point of failure? (Yes, I back up on paranoia mode!) Again, being able to transport my work setup in case of extended travel (work or vacation) or even, like, going to a local café. Having my writing workflow and my composition workflow on the same machine would reduce a huge amount of technical friction shuffling files back and forth.

Okay, so what about this gift from the universe?

A few days ago (February 6, 2025), ToonSquid (animation app) released version 2.0 after closed beta. It will run on iPadOS and adds a staggering number of features. The reason I’d decided not to go with ToonSquid a few years back was the lack of easy cycles. It has that now! They’ve also added a ton of useful things (perspective/warp animation and non-destructive effects with keyframes) as well as things that are useful to others although I don’t currently have a need for them. I suspect for many people, the addition of inverse kinematics and bones rigging will be huge; I do hand-drawn “tradigital” frames, which is why I went with TVPaint for desktop (look, I find it weirdly chillaxing?!) so I don’t currently care about this, but others do! The brush engine will import Photoshop .abr brushes! The library/import system is thoughtfully designed to mitigate iPadOS filesystem limitations!

This is $15 USD for a one-time purchase, not a subscription. I am currently road-testing this to see if it will work, but…hell. At $15 USD for something that will run on the iPad I already have, of course I’m trying this! The iPad’s advantage for me specifically is that it’s basically an instant-on-from-sleep device, it has a reasonably good on-screen keyboard, there’s a Magic Keyboard available for faking laptop mode (I don’t own one but am considering budgeting for one), I have a Pencil, and it’s really light. Again: I have health issues that mean I have to be aggressive about cutting the weight of my devices.

If ToonSquid delivers on all of these features and works reasonably smoothly, at $15 USD, this or similarly capable apps will be no-brainers for many hobbyists.

Also! My digital art is done in Procreate and that’s also on the iPad, so having both available on the same device will make life easier (e.g. for environments or quick doodles). (I like Rebelle a lot, but it’s desktop-only.)

If ToonSquid + iPad don’t work out, I can go back to my LincStudio S1! I’m keeping the device since a likely workflow is doing the bulk of the animation in ToonSquid + iPad, then taking a PNG sequence into TVPaint 12 Pro then DaVinci Resolve on the S1 for postproduction. It’s also a lovely device in its own right.

By the way, I have a story about my current iPad, as well as further notes on the Unity + Naninovel + WWISE front, but I think I’ll save that for later as this post is getting long! This also buys me time to cough up (a) a couple placeholder backgrounds, (b) give Cheris a better revised sprite :3, and (c) spend more time on paper prototyping the game mechanics.

Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL

P.S. earlier version of this post

Other accomplishments include:

• installing Rebelle 7 Pro onto my animation device, a LincPlus LincStudio S1. I love this device although I’m wondering if it’s discontinued; regardless, I’ll use it while it lasts.
• setting up a hotkey on the LincStudio S1 for the on-screen keyboard for keyboard entry without having to hook up the keyboard folio thingy. 😀

I’ve been trying and failing at an all-in-one solution, but I may be able to get my “travel studio” down to two devices:

• LincPlus LincStudio S1 pen computer for 2D art and animation
• MacBook Pro for everything else (Unity, WWISE, music, etc.)

Having a digital painting solution on the S1 that’s not Procreate will allow me to drop the iPad Air from my setup, not because I don’t love it (I love it!) but because I have health stuff that means that I need to lighten my backpack as much as possible. (Not very, unfortunately. Among other things, the iPad is the lightest device, but iPadOS won’t comfortably run a bunch of software I need, so…) I’ve played with Rebelle in the past and really enjoy it.

You may ask why I don’t go all in on the S1 alone for Unity, WWISE, etc. There are two big reasons:

First: the MacBook Pro is my primary writing machine. This includes apps like Scrivener and Vellum that are either “better” on macOS or straight-up don’t exist for Windows. I also dislike Windows 11 (I’ve gotten along better with previous Windows iterations) and prefer macOS overall, which is not to say that it’s perfect either, but for the software I need for this, it’s either Windows or macOS. That said, if it were just a matter of writing, I could suck it up and switch the necessary tasks to the S1 using Windows.

Second, the deciding factor: I’m eventually looking to switch to a new MacBook Pro for my primary music composition/production machine. My current MBP is overkill for writing but inadequate, unfortunately, for the specific kind of music I do, which is sampled orchestration and hybrid orchestral music. :3 The difficulty is that this specific type of music has high SSD and high RAM requirements. One can get away with external SSD storage, but not so much RAM. For reference, 64 GB RAM is pretty much a working minimum in this realm. (Please don’t argue with me about my hardware requirements unless you do this kind of media composition, thanks.)