Episode 3: Character Creator
Topic du jour
Is "character creator" not just another term for a fiction writer? No it's not nobody says that
ANYWAY I've been thinking a bit about names lately. One good bit about being trans is that you have a strong impetus to think about names, what name you want for yourself, etc. Of course, anyone can just change their name if they want, but transition is a pretty clean reason. I spent a lot of time poking at and picking my name. Naturally, naming things is hard no matter what, but with that context I at least feel alright about putting together people names. But I struggle with place names. There are a bunch in Vapormage that I'm not happy with, with names pulled straight from cosmic geography (valles on Mars or plains of Venus, for example), and after watching some YouTube videos on the topic... yeah I'm gonna want to rename them. My current names are kinda lazy, and everyone deserves a good name, even a place.
Neat!
Surely I can muster one interesting internet thing a week, so let's add this segment to the newsletter and make things less about me. For this week: running parallel to NaNoWriMo is NaNoGenMo, where you write code to generate a 50k word novel. Or, code to muck about with 50k words, as is the case with ████ ██ Ishmael, which prints out a novel (like, say, Moby Dick) where every subsequent use of a word after the first is redacted. Kinda feels like it could be a good writer's tool for examining your word choice. (h/t Andy Baio)
Postin'
If you don't follow me on Cohost (which I'm using as a blog currently), then I don't blame you, because here's all I've posted:
Supposedly
The more something comes up in the world, the more likely someone's going to name it. And the idea of "a thing that seems useless, so you get rid of it, only to find out it wasn't useless, and you done fucked up" apparently has the name Chesterton's fence--named for the guy who discussed the idea a bunch, and not for some guy named Chesterton who hated fences and eventually met his downfall as a result. Though that would be a much better story.
Hey, listen
I am, to the annoyance of my bandmates, a fan of math rock. Instrumental or vocal, both are good at different times. Recently, I was bouncing around similar artists from two groups I've known for a while (and seen live!): Mouse on the Keys and toe, both from Japan. That led me to tricot and this music video, visually riffing on an artist who painted people to look like impressionist paintings and whose name I have forgotten (let me know if you remember what I'm on about!)
Vapormage Update
Checkboxes! I've gotten a bunch of scenes wrapped up one after another, so things are actually flowing nicely at the moment. Still feels slow, but I've been doing revision tweaks as well. I'm trying to not go back and lose myself in feedback too much, but there's definitely noodling to do. It's just, there's also 3 more chapters to do.
Scrivener says the word count is currently 70,164 of an expected 90,000, for progress of 2,885.
That's all for now, ta ta,
-- Zoe