Visual Novel Nonsense and Other Nonsense
Howdy!
I decided, partly for fun and partly for accountability, to start a development blog diary for Ninefox Gambit Visual Novel Nonsense. I’m (ab)using Unity and Naninovel, and about to figure out WWISE integration—wish me luck!
Meanwhile, shout-out for Zilla Novikov and Rachel A. Rosen’s The Sad Bastard Cookbook, for which sequels are in progress, if you’d like to get involved!
I’m new here. What’s a Sad Bastard Cookbook?
Glad you asked! We wrote a cookbook full of judgement-free recipes you can make when you’re suffering from mental illness, physical disability, poverty, or anything else late-stage capitalism throws up that makes basic self-care feel impossible. Some of the recipes were our own, some we collected from the community.
The ebook is free–you can download a copy here if you wanna check it out.
I’m a community! Or at least, a Person! Can I contribute my recipe for survival food?
YES PLEASE.
See link for more details!
(The world is still A Lot. Take care of yourselves.)
FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
What are you working on?
CROWNWORLD, still, despite continued Life Complications. Still dealing with health stuff. That said, my friend mathematician-writer-poet-artist Ursula Whitcher, author of the terrific collection North Continent Ribbon, gave me the gift of space and time to aid and abet this endeavor!
In other news, I sold my short story “Cutting Corners” to Reactor! Likely to appear sometime in 2026, but it hasn’t been scheduled yet.
The story behind the story is that I wrote the original draft of this in uni (sophomore year?). Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF bounced it, noting that it was a fine story but IIRC noted weaknesses in the worldbuilding and character handling. At the time, F&SF was, weirdly, the only zine I was selling to, with my first sale freshman year (the story itself, “The Hundredth Question,” ran in Feb. 1999 because of publication lag, and was written for a writing course during HS).
I set the story aside intending to revise and submit elsewhere, then lost track of it, and then, thanks to a combination of Life, computer deaths, disorganization, and WP changes (I used Mariner Write throughout uni), lost the file with the entire last half of the story for twenty years. I’m capable of, y’know, writing a whole new ending, but I couldn’t remember the ending, and I knew, despite not remembering it, that the ending had been good. (It turns out that I was right to hold out for the original ending.)
Thanks to a friend having saved a copy ages ago from when I sent it to them for comments, I recovered, miraculously, a complete draft in 2024. Hilariously, I then proceeded to not read the ending until a couple months ago, so I still didn’t know how my own !@#$ story ended!
Then I dusted it off, considered that it might still be a perfectly good story with revisions and twenty years of (one hopes) having learned to Write Better.
Also, most importantly to me, now I know how it ends.
What are you reading lately?
I have my grabby hands on a terrific sf novella ARC, which I’m enjoying tremendously—more soon!
What are you listening to lately?
K-pop: Minnie’s new album Her! I love it so much.
What’s a game you’re playing lately?
Still obsessed with Mechabellum, a sci-fi-themed autobattler that has the odd and delightful distinction of being only the second videogame I’ve encountered in over thirty years for which reading West Point textbooks on battle deployments and analyses plus the history of warfare is actually useful in gameplay terms. There are almost certainly RTSes for which this applies as well (my husband says the entire Total War series?), but I generally can’t play them due to RSI and/or interface issues. (Anything that requires obsessively rapid-clicking over and over in real-time is a No.) But you can get through a lot of Mechabellum with “we’re refusing the left flank” and “let’s set up artillery fire from enfilade” and “these light units will screen the tanks.” I may have forced my poor husband to sit through my five-minute fake TED talk on Epanimondas of Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra and his use of the oblique order.
Otherwise, Joe (husband) and I are considering resuming World of Warcraft after, uh, quite some time away, inspired by composer & singer-songwriter Tony Manfredonia’s WoW hardcore Twitch stream journey.
For perspective, Joe was on WoW early enough to score the username Ulysses for his…hunter? ranger? on one of the first servers. (He reports that “Odysseus” had already been taken.) He went around with an owl familiar named Athena. :) I played a mage named Maratai.
What are you watching lately?
My husband and I went back for Gundam Seed, which we’d never seen despite being Gundam fans!
I’m sharing this (reposted from Bluesky) since it’s not like this is a spoiler for anything Gundam:
“Nooooo this admiral is competent, pays attention to strategic context & tactical objectives, pays attention to logistics & supply chain issues, is a good human who cares about ethics fighting for victims of aggression, gonna die this episode nooooo.”
Face it, this is Mood for pretty much every Gundam show I’ve ever watched! One thing I enjoy about the franchise is that despite the objectively ridiculous (delightful!) Giant Robots and high melodrama, the theme of “war is hell” is treated with genuine gravitas and attention.
At some point I have to go back for the very first Gundam show to figure out why the heck Char is into bird masks?!
I have a foxy question you haven’t answered here!
Sure, please email ninefox@ninefoxgambit.com and I’ll get back to you!
Meanwhile, Shinjo the morin khuur says hi, along with Foxglove the kitsune plushie!
And the obligatory catten tax:
The starship artwork in the background is John Harris’s Spectral Lines, one of his illustrations for my story “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel,” Reactor, Aug. 10, 2011—scroll to the end. It is a treasure of my collection.
Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL