Progress Report (02/09): Settling In

I bring you a more sizeable update than usual this month. Sadly, I missed the update in early august due to being busy with moving, and I figured I would do a solid update this month instead to compensate.

I’d intended to accompany this update with a lore post, but said lore post is seeing some major rewriting and adjustments right now due to feedback from a collaborator (mentioned later in this post). Ideally, I will be releasing it sometime this next week. I’ll have time to work on it in the weekend, and I might be able to snatch some time during the working days of next week. At the very latest, I should be able to finish it by next weekend.

Things to report

In terms of progress on the story itself, not much has happened on the writing front, but many things have happened on the development front. A whole slew of issues have been resolved:

• I now have a fairly comprehensive overview over how exactly it is that chakra works, its characteristics, all of its states and variations, and how it is used to perform techniques and create written seals.

  With this system, I could now take most, if not all, techniques from canon and describe roughly how they work, which seals are necessary and how they are performed by the user. Or I could gauge how one might achieve certain effects with written seals. It also conveniently explains why inventing techniques is far more difficult than performing them, and why certain kinds of things are doable with hand seals but not with written seals, and the reverse.

  In short, I finally have something to base all of the Naruto brand “magic” on instead of just hand-waving everything with “magibabble” and bullshit-on-demand, as is the general trend. While I will generally not be going into much detail, even privately for myself, I will now be able to constrain myself to operating within the rules of this system, so that I know that I can always generate detailed post hoc explanations if necessary. As a result, the story will see an overall increase in consistency even without belabouring the reader with any technical explanations of anything.

  It should be noted that I have had an explanation for the existence of chakra (and all other ‘supernatural’ elements) for some time now; this is different. This is not the interior of the chakra black box, this is what the exterior looks like to the people who use it. It will be the subject of a later lore post, in the guise of excerpts from an academy textbook.

• There’s been a total rework of the Sharingan, its exact nature, and how exactly its various abilities work — it is now seriously cool, while still remaining at its core fundamentally the same.

  Like many other things in IFF, the low-level nature of the Sharingan has been tweaked so that it logically results in high-level behaviour that is very similar-feeling to canon, but which is ultimately far more grounded in the ‘reality’ of the world, so to speak.

  For example, I now know exactly how one might go about doing things like implanting Sharingan abilities with highly complex, hidden triggers into other Sharingan users, something which I’d previously had great trouble explaining. Also, Amaterasu will finally be given its due justice.

• Events that must happen in volumes two and three have always had some prerequisites, both in terms of foreshadowing and elements that must have been introduced in the story before in order for said events to be able to occur.

  Before, I was not sure exactly how I would meet some of these prerequisites, but I now have a much better idea of how I am going to foreshadow certain things, and the exact nature and timing of the elements that must be introduced.

  Sadly, explaining more about this would be rather spoilerish and would give some heavy hints towards what kinds of events we’re going to be seeing in the story’s endgame, so I’ll refrain from going into any detail.

Introducing: the mysterious collaborator

All of the world building and story work on IFF has not been done solely by myself. Much of what is described above is a result of collaboration with another person, who is also working on a Naruto story of their own. This collaborator shall remain unnamed for now as I’ve not asked their permission to identify them, but they will likely feature heavily in the future of IFF. This person has been instrumental in developing many parts of IFF, pointing out flaws and offering possible corrections, and has introduced countless ideas and concepts into the work, like the meat of the Sharingan rework. The effect they’ve had cannot be understated.

And of course, some of my time has also been occupied with performing the same role for them. In the course of our countless long, rambling discussions, I’ve been the cause of some similarly major changes (and improvements, I think) to their story. So even when it looks like IFF is standing still, I’ve still been productive in other ways.

In the future

I moved at the very end of July, and I spent most of August settling in and working. Said settling in is still not quite done with, but every day becomes more routine. While I still make no guarantees regarding IFF, which is difficult to get started with, I can only say that I am writing more and more every day. Whenever I get the chance and feel the inclination, I sit down and write something. Anything at all. I’m doing more and more of this every day, and I can only see it as promising. My muse is still weak, so I pounce upon any idea that strikes my fancy even remotely, but the muse is still returning, slowly but surely.

Many times now, while writing, I will feel a vague urge to open up the ever-present Scrivener tab in my taskbar and begin getting to grips with IFF again. I feel more and more like returning to it, every day, and I feel more and more like I’m beginning to have the energy to do it as well.

So that bodes well!

The next progress update shall be sometime in early October (I have learned that I cannot keep precise deadlines, so I will state something fuzzier instead). But before that, I shall see you sometime soon for the lore post on the modern ninja in the elemental nations, and the history of ninja in general, featuring excerpts from The History of Ninja, 3rd Edition, by Takumi Kichirou, a well-known historian from the Land of Fire.

Until next time!

Progress Report (12/06): The Procrastinator Strikes Back

Sorry about the late update. I’ll try to keep this update brief; lots of stuff happened last month (and the first third of this month), but sadly, not much of it has to do with IFF.

I’ll get the IFF stuff out of the way first: I have not even opened the IFF project files in Scrivener since the last update. Hence, no words have been written for a while, now.

Most of it has to do with the fact that I will soon be moving halfway across the country, and this occupies some mental space. More importantly, I recently learned that my company will receive a year’s funding to work on what is essentially a dream project of ours – so that’s great. There’s a lot of paperwork and such related to that. Still, that uncertain future I talked about last update has just become a lot more certain, at least for a bit more than a year.

I’m still not sure exactly how much time I’ll have in the future, but this was pretty much the best case scenario for what could happen on a lot of levels. The stability this will afford me is bound to benefit IFF.

So on that note, I’ll beg off for this month, and next month’s update in around three weeks. Don’t count on seeing much progress for the next month and a half, what with moving, getting the funding rolling, and a major family trip looming. After that, though… well, right now it seems like things ought to settle down right around then, but I’ve been saying that things will settle down in a few months for over a year now, so I think I’ll just hope for the best, but expect that I’ll find myself super busy with something like usual.

Until next time! (Which will be in august.)

 

Progress Report (03/05): Reasons & Ruminations

Hello everyone. Today, a slightly different kind of update.

First, however, I’ll quickly start with the regulars. IFF has seen perhaps 100 words or so written, so not much. I poked at the next lore post, and wrote about 500 words there. This month was busier and more stressful than I anticipated, so work on IFF suffered correspondingly.

I have a deadline this week, which has been pressing me for almost a month, now. However, past this deadline lies at least a week or two of planned company-wide chill time. Still work, but not concentrated crunch work. Rather, work on whatever pleases and interests me, and keeping more regular hours. I hope this will prove a boon for writing, as I can get away with being more distracted at work.

With that out of the way, let’s get on with it…

The Unholy Trinity

I think I am finally beginning to really grasp the reasons why I’ve been at a standstill for so long. I’ve talked about some of this before, of course, and mentioned certain experiments trying to counter it. But now I’m laying it out: this appears to just be how it is, at least for now.

I see a trinity of reasons that interweave to block my efforts: 1) quality, 2) complexity and 3) concentration.

Quality

After a few attempts at writing more IFF this month, I decided to try to kickstart my writing process back up by just writing literally whatever came to mind. So I have, this past month, written the first chapters of two self-inserts, three Worm fanfics, one Harry Potter fanfic and two original stories. All told, this is easily about 15-20k words (at a guess, I haven’t counted), written over half a dozen late evenings.

So, what gives? Why isn’t that 15-20k of IFF right there? Well, these stories were all objectively horrible. I just hold IFF to a higher standard than I do these stories, which means that writing it is much harder and requires me to get a groove going of far higher quality than usual. It’s very difficult to think “well, I’ll fix this in revisions”. It’s a mindset I haven’t managed to get down yet.

Complexity

The next arc is kind of complicated. I’ve tried to trim it down a lot, and even wholly removed one party’s involvement that I decided I could do without, just to simplify things.  I’ve spent hours and hours with a beta, going over everyone’s motivations and actions, trying to ensure it all made sense and that nobody was holding an idiot ball.

But even so, it’s still not exactly easy to credibly pull it off. I even fear it might seem rather straightforward. It’s not that bad, on the outside. At least, I suspect it won’t appear as such, reading it. I might be overthinking the behind-the-scenes happenings, of which there are a lot, but nevertheless, here we are.

So, in short, if past-me walked up to present-me and suggested the current plot, present-me would punch past-me in the face and go, “You’re trying to be too clever! Haven’t you ever heard of KISS?!”

I do, however, still think that writing this would be completely awesome, so I am still totally going to do it.

Concentration

Back when I was really pumping out words, I was doing nothing but that. The first draft ~50k words of IFF were written pretty fast, and the ~130k version before that went even faster. I constantly walked around thinking about the story and how it would go and how everything fit together. I can’t do that right now; my job just takes up too much mental space. I am out of working memory.

It remains challenging to keep the entire plot in my head while writing, especially since practically every time I try to write, I have spent the hours immediately prior preparing pitches, or mulling over marketing material, or worrying about funding, or trying to hold an entire program architecture in my head while I solve a weird bug, or trying to fathom the oddities of the user’s mind. It’s a difficult context switch to make. At least, I’ve yet to master it.

Essentially, I need an entire day or two of peace, doing nothing but ruminating on IFF and going over old material, before I can actually start writing properly. I know this because the few times I’ve done it, the words began flowing much more easily and previously impossible-to-write scenes were vanquished before my keyboard like so much dust.

The problem is that I very rarely get this time. A weekend is not quite enough, and I have not had a consecutive three days truly off more than once or twice going on almost a year, now.

Prophesying the Future, or Some Such

So, you ask me: “What does all this mean? I simply sense more authorial excuses and whining about being busy.” And, well, yes, in a way you’re quite right. Trying to predict solid IFF progress is trying to predict to predict my future work environment.

But it turns out that even I don’t have a clue where my future work environment is going right now. Trying to start a company is busy work. Trying to start a game company is very busy work, and completely insane on top of that. Every time I talk about my much-desired vacation year, my partners wince. And so it is put off by another month. Or made implicitly conditional on whether funding for this or that project is forthcoming or not.

And that sort of thing is rather difficult to predict.

So I suppose, in the end I can only shrug and say, “Well… I’ll keep writing when I can, because I still want to. And I’ll keep updating the blog, because that’ll keep me on my toes and assure whoever cares that I am not gone.”

That’s really all I can promise for now. And really, that’s essentially what I’ve been doing so far anyway, so the status quo hasn’t changed. This is simply me informing you of the reasons behind the status quo.

And there they are.

And so, whoever you are, reading this, I’ll see you next month, for your regularly scheduled IFF update.

Progress Report (03/04): San Francisco beckons…

Okay, it doesn’t quite do that, but it did occupy most of my month. First preparation, then the actual trip, and then follow-up. I had meetings at Game Connection SF with dozens of publishers to pitch my game, and have been following up on that since I came home. Needless to say, this is consuming work, especially when there’s also actual game development to be done. On top of me being a part-time teacher and some family events occurring, I’ve had little time to do any writing.

I have written a little bit to whet my appetite, but I’ve only really nibbled at IFF this month and not gotten anything tangible done; this is largely as I expected. The SF trip will luckily be the last large event to occur for quite a while, as far as I’m aware, so things should begin to get a bit more sedate and routine for me.

Of course, none of this is what you want to hear. I’m afraid it’s the best I can do, though.

Over the next month, as things calm down a bit and I start getting back on top, energy-wise, I can hopefully start making some slight amount of progress on the writing. I’ll see if I can knock a weekend free to dedicate solely to the story and nothing else. The eventual end-goal is to be able to actually concentrate on it regularly, but I’m not quite there yet.

Until next month!

Progress Report (05/03): Work, work…

This update is a bit delayed, because I’ve been rather preoccupied preparing for my business trip to San Francisco this month; I’m attending Game Connection, an event held in tandem with GDC (Game Developer’s Conference). A lot of planning and up-front work is involved, and we’re crunching hard to get our game presentable in time. It looks like we’re going to make it, but it is uncomfortably close.

In short, my workload has picked up again this past month and is spiking this week and last week, but is set to calm back down in a couple of weeks for a much longer period of time – as far as I currently know, at least.

That said, I did have a less busy period in the beginning of this month, and the story saw some progress in that time: ~2.5 k words were written in sessions spread out over a week. The words I write are still rather loosely distributed over the next arc (and a few hundred words fell beyond even that), rather than concentrated on the next chapters specifically, but progress is progress. Alas, the lore post saw no work at all.

As I was still a little busy and preoccupied with work even back then, I see this as a positive indicator for the future, though it’s still nowhere near the speed of writing that I would like to maintain when all this fuss calms down, as it is indeed beginning to.

For now, though, the hiatus remains in effect. The light of day is slowly eating away the dark night of hiatus, the horizon brightening as the sun creeps closer – but it’s not quite dawn yet.

Until next time.

Progress Report (01/02): School’s up!

So I graduated this month, bewildering befuddled examiners with my dazzling technical wizardry. (Translation: I graduated in computer science, and it went well.)

This means that things are beginning to calm down a bit, for me. I now only have one major thing to worry about, which is my company, but that’s generally more manageable. Still, being an entrepreneur is busy work, so don’t count on major amounts of progress just yet. Yet for once, I can finally say that things are less busy than they were last month.

This means that on the story front, I’ve actually touched the story for the first time in a while this month, and it felt… good. I’ve had legitimate non-guilty impulses to just sit down and write because I felt like it. What I wrote was just a bit touching up here and there, rereading bits of the story to freshen it up in my mind, and one small new scene of around ~1100 words.

I think I might actually start writing regularly at a relaxed pace, this next month. We’ll see where that goes.

On the topic of the lore post, it will probably be included in the above-mentioned impulses. For me to keep writing right now, I have to stick to the stuff that I want to write, get back into the rhythm again, and not just slog along. Whether the lore post gets attention or not remains as yet undetermined – it depends on whether I feel like that or the story itself.

And once again, I’m sorry for all this hiatus business. It really has been an enormously busy time for me, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel now, and things are looking up.

Until next month!

Progress Report (02/01): Happy new year!

Hello everyone, and happy new year!

I’ve been trying to get my writing started again in any way possible, generally just by writing literally anything that comes to my mind, whatever it is. Often the beginnings of weird fanfic premises, or mood/character snippets of various original stories and settings that I’ve been mulling over. It does feel nice to get some of it out of my mind, though I never get far with any of it, currently. I’m somewhat less quality-conscious when I write these things since I’ll certainly never publish any of it, which helps. It also takes less effort because there’s less variables and characters to keep track of in my mind, unlike with IFF where I’m at least going for something a little more complex. It’s a pleasure to just be writing anything again, though most of the things I’ve written make me grimace afterwards.

Mostly, though, I’ve been too busy to really get anything done at all, let alone writing. This month I’ll be finishing off my (current) education and beginning to focus on the game I’m developing with a few others, and the company that we founded to go with that. The break I’ve mentioned will hopefully come a bit after we publish that game, so that’s the progress on that front.

Other than that, there’s no progress to report, I fear. The hiatus continues for now.

See you next month!

Progress Report (02/12): Crazy Times

So, I missed the update last month. I missed this one by a day as well. Work in the two weeks surrounding the beginning of November was particularly insane, and eventually I’d missed the update so badly that I decided to just skip it entirely. As you might surmise, when I can’t even write updates properly, there’s hardly any work being done on the story. A little bit has happened, but it amounts to little more than a few hundred words and some notes, written one night when I couldn’t sleep right and had nothing better to do.

The reason is that I’m currently busier than ever. I keep saying that, and yet it’s still true. It’s just been ramping up steadily for a while. I already have trouble enough keeping up with work, so frankly, I’m in no state to be making any promises about how much I can work on the story for the next few months. The lore post that I was working on (“On ninja in modern society”) hasn’t been touched at all this past month.

The post, for those curious, includes one of the topics suggested in the comments two months back: ninja economics. In fact, it’s quite a bit broader than that. It covers the history and origin of ninja and their techniques, the rise of the ninja villages, the general internal organization of ninja villages (it differs a lot in specifics from village to village), general ninja village economics and culture, and finally various facts about the kinds of lives ninja lead and the roles they serve in society, both culturally, politically and militarily. The main focus is on Konoha as it’s the focus of the story and also the first, biggest and strongest ninja village around, but there’s also a bunch of information about the other villages since they’re each unique in their own interesting ways. It’s a big chunk of info, but it all fits in together so I’d rather not split off the currently finished parts and publish those separately.

I’ll work on it when I get the energy and time to do so, but since my plans of one lore post a month have already slipped so far, I won’t make any promises that I can’t keep. It will get there when it gets there. Right now I won’t commit to more than an update around this length every month.

That’s all for now. See you in the new year!

Progress Report (04/10): Slogging onwards…

Progress is, as ever these days, slow. Ever since my summer holidays were cut short by a month (eliminating exactly the time I’d planned to spend writing, and catching me off guard in the process) I haven’t really been writing well, or much, at all. The half-an-hour a day initiative I’ve tried hasn’t been working out very well. I only ever have time to write in the evenings, and evenings are strangely also the time of day when I am the most tired, after working all day. When I hear my alarm in the evening, I am rarely motivated enough to actually sit down and write something.

Write or Die does help – whenever I use it, stuff gets written. However, I find that I don’t use it very much, precisely because it is so punishing – which is its most obvious drawback. I will most likely continue using it occasionally, but sadly it’s not a catch-all solution for writing every day.

But enough about my problems.

So how are we doing?

The word count has increased by 1.592 words. That’s two hectic half-hour Write or Die sessions, plus miscellaneous. Words get deleted sometimes, too; the actual written word count is often larger. It’s not much, but it is a bit.

The next month…

Wait… what? Yes, you read that right: month. Progress is slow, and I am perpetually busy with work. Writing updates every two weeks means that nothing much happens every update. From now on, there will be longer updates every month instead, with hopefully larger progress increments to report. Right now I find myself recalling every other sunday evening, “oh, right, I have to post an update”, and then I spend a small while writing down the past two week’s progress. It’s haphazard and ad hoc, and I don’t like doing it like that.

I want to make a bit more out of them. I intend to spend a few days writing an update, instead, and mean to accompany each update with a lore post of some kind, however large or small that might end up being with the time allotted. If there are any topics that interest you in particular, say so in a comment, and I might just decide to make the post about that.

Updates will from now on post on the 1st of every month, whichever day that will happen to be. Comments on this decision are welcome, of course – I do listen to the ones who comment. If you appreciate the two-week update schedule a lot, drop a line, and I’ll definitely consider what you have to say.

Finally, thank you for reading, and remember to subscribe if you want to be kept up to date on IFF’s progress without having to remember to check back here occasionally. You will not be spammed; you will only get notifications when new content or updates are posted.

Progress Report (21/09): So conferences are tiring…

I’ve had a very eventful time since last update – but sadly, this means little has happened with the story.

This week, I attended Sweden Game Conference, to present a video game I’m working on. I spent the week before that preparing stable, playable builds of the game. A chinese publisher actually got excited about the game and decided to pick it up, and there’s been a bunch of negotiation and preparatory stuff there.

As you can hear, eventful week. But bad for writing.

So how are we doing?

It’s not outright catastrophic. I didn’t actually get my half hour in most days as I was just too busy in general and too tired in the evenings, but I did get some writing done. I’ve written almost a thousand words since last update. It’s not much, but it is at least something.

The next two weeks…

Now that Sweden Game Conference is in the past, things should hopefully slow down a little again. I’m sure more crunchy deadlines await in the future, but the immediate time ahead of me is clear. While at SGC, I saw Chris Avellone speak (he wrote for some of the best-written games out there, like Planescape: Torment – *fan squee*), and he strongly recommended something called Write or Die.

This is an app that will push you to write, or it will punish you by, for example, showing creepy pictures of spiders, playing unpleasant sounds and, oh, deleting what you’ve already written. If you do keep up, though, you will get pleasant sounds and backgrounds for writing. I’ve tried it, and it is utterly brutal. In the thirty minutes I tried, I pumped out 800 of the roughly 1000 words I wrote these past two weeks. It just completely freaked me out when the screen turned red and it started deleting text, but it was also pretty fun. The stuff I wrote definitely has to be edited, of course, since it was written under duress and in a darn hurry, but it’s getting the meat of the text written that’s hard.

I intend to combine my daily half hour – which I hope to be able to keep up better now there’s less stress at work – with this blessed tool of the devil, Write or Die. I shall report the results in two weeks.