Category: Thoughts

2020 Retrospective

~ Duth Olec ~ 2 Comments

Well! That was a year, wasn’t it?  Let me start as usual by looking at what I said I’d do this year in my 2019 retrospective:

  • Got Wandering Fortunes all up, but most the rest was “probably won’t do this”. I did say I was doing one page a week for my wikified novel notes but that’s become one or fewer a month. Odemon, the Pokecomic, all that is still a glacial pace.
  • My new focus, the romance/erotica, has done very well! I started SUB FIFTY FOLLOWERS?!? I started this year with under 50?????????? I… Okay, I guess… No, I started the new Twitter in August of last year, apparently it took about six months to hit 50, and then 10 months later I’m past 500! Like, I’m mostly surprised because I was saying I had traction a year ago but I didn’t even have 50 at that point I guess? And now it’s like, oh! It’s. It’s weird. More on this in a bit.
  • I did not succeed in my new year’s resolution to hold a snake.

So all in all I pretty much hit all my goals for this year, with the exception of the one that required me to interact with people to get access to a snake, because, oh yeah, THE PANDEMIC. 2020 was one big mess of a year and

and

also my best year ever.

I mean, flatly firstways, I have readers now. I have people reading what I write, and it’s enjoyable writing! I wrote like… 2 or 3 solo stories, 3 or 4 chapters of a longer story, plus numerous sections for a split-timeline series, and a bunch of microstories. This alone makes 2020 my best year ever, and everyone’s been great and supportive!

Add to it I started commissioning art of my characters related to those, some beautiful, cool, wonderful, and gourd what i’m horny for artwork! Six characters, 20 pieces of art, plus six more either fan art or gifts or raffle such. More to come, and people love the characters and I’m so happy they do.

Honestly, I’ve loved getting the art so much I’m making plans to start getting official art drawn up for the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos characters.

So anyway 2020 is also a good year for me because the job I started late last year moved to remote at home, so I’ve been working almost all year and getting to nap on a bed on my breaks. It’s weird because this is due to the pandemic, which is horrible and awful and I’d trade it for there to not be that… but, hopefully when that’s over the company I work for won’t drag us all back to the office? We’ll see.

I haven’t actually done much CCC work this year at all, but I do plan in 2021 to get going on that again. I actually have a short story I wrote and tried to get accepted in a publication, but that never went anywhere, so I might go over it with my perspective from this year and then post it. It involves an issue that doesn’t really effect me anymore, so it’s a bit weird. I’d also like to actually finish at least one CCC short story this year, it’s a bit of a weird one but it’s a story style I’d like to experiment with.

As noted, I’d like to start getting “official art” (by which I just mean, I get a piece of art of just the character I use to show them to others) of CCC characters, but I’ll probably try to finish my wiki notes before I commission those.

As for the romance/erotica, I really want to get final work started on an audio adaptation of something I wrote this month. I want to keep working on writing, though I wanna take a month off (I overworked myself the last several months of last year), and get more art. Generally I don’t have too many specific plans since I leave the next story up to votes–keep getting audio adaptations made as more proof of concepts leading to an audio-visual novel eventually.

And yes, I will get the hypno hotel story written. That should be in February.

And lastly, should the pandemic lift away, I’ll go hold a snake.

2019 Restrospective

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Man, it’s been a long time. It feels like… 3 years since I did one of these. As usual, I divide this into 3 parts: what I said I’d do last year, what I actually did, and what I hope to do this year.

  • Continue work on Wandering Fortunes, which I did. I finished the primary edits. I did not finish editing it in full though, nor did I get started on novel 4. More on that either in a bit or a looong while.
  • Continue Odemon: Yeah. After I started a new job though it reduced to one a week. Given the amount of new Pokemon per gen these years I should, in theory, be able to finish this someday. SOMEDAY. I also did continue the Pokecomic; I only got about 10 comics done but that’s what I expected so whatever. I’ll finish it when gen 12 is out.
  • I very much did not get all my novel notes transferred to wiki format, but I didn’t really expect to it seems. I’m going pretty slow at it these days but I’m slowly chipping away at it.
  • There’s not gonna be a Darmenzi audiobook.
  • I did get a freelance job but not much came of it, and then the website I went through changed how it works to stupid pay-for-play basically so I started looking for a regular job, went crazy, and then out of nowhere succeeded in September.
  • I legitimately can’t remember how many short stories I wrote, or even edited, and I certainly didn’t get any published.

The anaconda in the room is I started writing erotica. Have I mentioned that explicitly yet? In early summer I started thinking about stuff, about my gender and sexuality, and somehow that led to me thinking about writing “hypnosisnakerotica”. In… June, I think? I wrote a long Mastodon/Twitter thread about how I can barely be said to have a gender or sexuality, and how I don’t think about it much, and ended by concluding the internet is full of weirdos so there’s no reason to be afraid, and I shouted that snakes and hypnosis are sexy, my brain married a fictional character (the cool kids call this having a “waifu”), and I started writing erotica. (By the way, it’s made me have to think more about exactly what my sexuality is, exactly. Unfortunately it’s not meant for this Earth…)

This has gone. Confusingly well? I honestly had more traction in a few months than I did in half a decade of the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos. I mean, I guess it makes sense. A lot of people are horny. It’s also more niche, which means more people will go looking for what they can find, and if it turns out a writer who is basically trained in writing novels starts writing about it… woo. If it turns out you like that stuff or are just curious it’s all here, it’s all SFW, non-lewd, it’s honestly just erotica because it’s steeped in kink/fetish, it’s really more romance, which is actually stranger for me to think about me writing than erotica for some reason!

My new day job has been going well enough, I’m evaluating book manuscripts to see if there are legal issues (libel, copyright issues, etc.) I’m still slow at it after 3 months and I make mistakes but um. I can hope things go well.

I also released Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmail 1! The idea besides this being fun was that visual media might get me more noticed but by the time this got finished I was already getting into writing erotica and having more success there, so I still haven’t actually made a section on this website for comics. Ah well. It’s still a good comic and I love it.

Now then… what do I plan to do in 2020?

Not a lot for the CCC, actually.

  • Wandering Fortunes should be all up mid-year. No estimation on final book release, though.
  • Right now for the CCC I’m focusing on organizing my notes. I only have time to do one page a week now and there’s honestly more than 50 left I think so this is going to take a while. Probably more time than I should bother with to be honest but… oh well. OCD.
  • I don’t intend to start more editing on Wandering Fortunes or write the fourth book until I finish those notes, so that’s on hold.
  • I will have another new story in a few months, definitely not something I’ve done two years in a row now…
  • Odemon and the Pokecomic will continue at their glacial pace.
  • If not obvious yet, I’m going to spend 2020 more focused on what I’ve actually gotten some traction with. It’s fun and people like it and wow! I’m going to have a post about that at the DeviantArt I post that stuff at, so if you want to know about that check it there.
  • Also my New Year’s Resolution is to hold a snake. For obvious reasons, I think.

That’s about it. Things are weird now. It’s fine.

Writing an Epistolary Short Story

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

So I just finished the first draft of a short story done entirely as a text chat group conversation. This technically makes it an epistolary short story, though many of those are letters–ONE person writing at ONE time, usually but not always to ONE other person. This short story? Nine people writing to each other all simultaneously. It was a bit maddening.

As I wrote I realized I’d started forgetting about the “main” character, who I’d originally come up with mostly as a way into the more important characters. The problem with that, I realized, is there can’t really be such a character–you don’t see anything from their point of view. You just see the words on the screen. You get no insight about it, only what they literally say. While this “main” character is notable, it’s mostly at the beginning, and I could probably merge them into someone else. Other merges and cuts could ease up on how many characters are here, because it’s probably a bit overboard right now. (I mean, realistically it’s probably a bit below average, but realistically we’re not reading real people’s chat messages unless we’re the NSA or something.)

The major thing I plan to do while editing this though is to read it repeatedly, each time from the point of view of one of the characters to get a better idea of what and how long they might be thinking and typing to make it flow more naturally. Then in places where I kinda forgot about them in the first draft I can have them chime in more or have them send a brb message to explain the disappearance. This is kind of the idea I probably had when I came up with the “main” character, but it’s not how anybody will actually be reading it.

This whole story is in part a test, too. Some years down the line I’d like to write an entire epistolary novel in this chat text program style. But dang, it’s pretty difficult when you’re juggling a lot of characters! I think I have a new respect for Andrew Hussie (Homestuck) now.

The Rig Veda: Creationism

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been going through my old college textbooks of stories and other written works from various English classes. We never looked at everything in them, which in retrospect means what we read was largely up to the views of the professor, but now that I don’t have to discuss it or write about it and can just read it on my own time, I want to go through everything! But I’m reading other authors and books too so I’m going through it pretty slowly, but I finished the Odyssey sometime last year, which was the last thing in this textbook I read. Then I put Top in it!

So according to this the Rig Veda is part of the Vedas, the sacred texts of Hindus in India. The Rig Veda is partly about the origin of the universe, and it discusses questions about before the gods and how they didn’t create the universe and the origin and stuff.

In this day and age creationists might say, “what was there before humans? what was there before the universe? it was GOD.” And maybe someone will respond, “What was before god?” And a creationist might say, “THERE WAS NO BEFORE GOD GOD WAS FOREVER”

Glad to see Hindus thought about it 3000 years ago.

It’s 2019, is it still cool to even talk about creationists? I mean, it’s about a decade after I read this stuff for college, and now I do want to write about what I’m reading, so I’m not going to let something like timeliness stop me!

Technology in Stories

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

As TV Tropes has an entire page about, cell phones are still hard to work into stories for some reason. Maybe we’re all still used to them being part of the future, like in sci-fi TV shows and such. One of my favorite books about writing, How Not to Write a Novel by Howard Mittlemark and Sandra Newman, makes mention of this–in the past nobody had cell phones, and there are lots of stories from back then that would be totally different with cell phones. If you’re writing in an era that has them though, you at least need to remain aware that at least someone probably has one–unless you’re dealing with my dad in which case he might’ve forgotten or intentionally left it at home. Or you’re dealing with me, who hates all phones and refuses to have one. But I still have a tablet, and I’m at least gonna email somebody, even if they don’t respond.

My first two novels, Slubes and Darmenzi, featured protagonists from a small village–only a couple characters even have regular phones. So that wasn’t much of a big deal… except in retrospect I’m not sure why Zeth didn’t have one, but does have a phone in his vehicle. Ah well, what’s past is past. Maybe he was trying to hack his phone and install wings on it or something and he broke it. He doesn’t live at a place where he could buy another one, anyway.

In Wandering Fortunes, the protagonists again begin living in a very rustic area, so they have no cell phones. Then they move to the big city… so of course they’re going to get cell phones! Now I have to deal with this malarkey! Well, the first time it really becomes pertinent it actually makes more sense for them to not have them–they’re put in prison, of course their stuff’s going to be confiscated. But for the most part I actually have a note while editing, and one of my passes I actually keep cell phones in the back of my mind. “They have them, is there a reason to use them?”

Now then, the reason I didn’t call this “Cell Phones in Stories” is I also apparently have trouble remembering that cars are a thing. At New Zhopolis the main characters are always running around; initially they don’t have a vehicle, and at a big city I suppose I can imagine traffic being so bad that it’s easier to get around walking. It’s also particularly troublesome when there are few parking spaces. But you know what probably does exist? TAXI SERVICES. Buses! And if you’re going halfway across the city you’re probably not gonna run there!

A lot of times this probably doesn’t matter because you’ll show the characters once they’ve arrived, not on the way, but you’d better believe I had a chapter where they ran halfway across the city and when I started editing I was like “why are they running halfway across the city?? they’re in a hurry so they won’t wait for a bus but did you know there are services now where you can call (maybe with a cell phone??) and someone will drive to where you are to drive you somewhere??? I’ve used one before! what? no i’m not talking about uber. i think these are local. although an uber service would definitely be something you could easily have in a story, but honestly the only difference between it and taxis i can imagine is one of them probably isn’t unionized, and obviously you should make sure your fictional characters are properly unionized. what were we talking about? who are you, anyway?”

Anyway. Check your email. Then check your spam folder. Thank you.

Character Recurrence in Novels

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Something I’ve noticed when reading old Charles Dickens novels is that many stories of his have some character who appears early but is gone after a few chapters. They’re named but they’re not really important, and they disappear and are forgotten soon after.

And then 80% of the way through the story they return, out of nowhere, and it’s mentioned they knew this one character from the beginning of the story. Does this happen in stories anymore? I’m particularly thinking of Dickens stories that take place over a character’s whole life, which is actually probably most of them, but this is something I tend to notice a lot in Dickens books but not so much in more modern tales.

It’s an interesting part of stories. I’m holding things like this in reserve for the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos as a series, though that’s over multiple books where a character who appeared in one might appear unexpectedly in another, and that’s more notable for full-series readers than having a character return in a single book.

What started me thinking on characters returning within a single book was a chapter I was editing recently. My original draft had the main character meeting with some unnamed characters for a conversation just for a bit of world building, but there really wasn’t anything to it. As I’ve been working on a lot of story notes regarding characters related to where this meeting took place, I realized a couple characters who’d appeared earlier could easily appear instead, connecting the world and time in the story more. These don’t appear at the beginning–not until more than halfway through, in fact–but it’s still a bit of an “oh yeah, them!” moment.

The weird thing about Wandering Fortunes as you can see with what chapters I’ve put up is the second half is a different planet. With an entirely different setting, there’s not much call for characters from the first half coming back. My fourth book will be a little like that too, in fact. But in future books this happenstancing of old character return meetings is something I might experiment with. It’s probably easier both to do and make significant if it’s planned from the outset, and I do write outlines before I write stories, but in the case of Wandering Fortunes the meeting was both added in the editing phase and spur of the moment.

Character Creation: Random Element and Character Interaction

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

(what am i actually doing this okay here we go)

CHARACTER CREATION! For most, this is no mere hypothetical. The Latin Alphabet is composed of 27 characters… or is it 26? 14?? I don’t know. But this is irrelevant. I am referring to characters in a story. Most stories have them. Stories that don’t exist may even have them. Stories that don’t exist as well. These two sentences are saying different things. Where am I going with this? WELL. Even the shortest, saddest story has characters, even if some of them are dead. Do baby shoes count as characters? Well, that depends on what kind of story you’re writing. Has anyone ever written from the POV of the baby shoes?

Longer, more involved stories, novels particularly, have a lot more characters, some of them even named! These characters are usually dealt with for so long that some backstory is in order. Sometimes it’s as simple as where they were raised; other times it’s a dark and brooding history of death and loss and that’s why they have this scar and this edgy haircut and wear a mask.

But in my case, I don’t just don’t have involved stories, I have an involved figgin universe. Lord of the Rings had a lot of history and only a few books. Discworld had over 40 novels and quite a bit of backstory, but I’m not sure how much. I forget if Rincewind’s parents are ever mentioned. But many writers, especially of a series with multiple books, write more backstory than ever gets mentioned in books. Having all this solidified lets the writing be more consistent; you won’t have a character mention their childhood on the farm and then in a later book we meet their high-profile business consultant parents. No, you decide early on their parents are owners of a taco stand, and you stick to that. Well, unless you come up with something better later, but then you have to make sure it doesn’t contradict what you have written into books, unless you just don’t care, because honestly, are we sure most readers are gonna care?

Anyhoo, how does character creation work? Well, you start out with a setting and generally have an idea of what kind of character you need. Meek accountant? Beefy accountant? Clownish accountant? Someone who’s not an accountant?? Maybe a small business owner who shows kindness to the protagonist, or a small business owner whose churlish attitude just shows them further how dismal the city they’ve arrived at is. A military general to fight in a war, or a cool kid friend to balance the nerdy friend. There’s lots of characters to choose from, and the general idea isn’t that hard to start from. Then you do a whole bunch of stuff like names and design that I don’t want to talk about today. I am going to touch on it, though. Because:

RANDOM DECISIONS: So the thing is that in real life a lot of peoples’ information is arbitrary. Not always–names might change based on who their parents are, date of birth might make when events in their life happen different, gender probably changes stuff. But for the most part a character can have any number of these things and still basically be the same. How do you decide? Um I just pull up a random number generator and let it decide for me. Names I’ll usually look at a list of names and choose one at random but like, date of birth? Random number. Gender? Random number (and yes, that’s on a spectrum–depending on the number, this character may be trans!) Do you need glasses? WELL YOU DON’T GET TO CHOOSE IN LIFE IF YOU NEED GLASSES, SO I WON’T CHOOSE FOR THESE CHARACTERS. Maybe. I have different species and some have naturally better eyesight. Maybe better eyecare is available for the affluent? You know, I use random number generation but still pull things in various directions.

And then there’s character interactions. Characters interact with other characters, usually, and having a backstory means they meet other characters. Once again I use a random number generator to go through my list of existing characters and find out–have they met in the past? If so, when? From this I get a clearer idea of a character’s history. (And in one case got a potential short story idea for the future!) Once I know who they’ve met I determine who they’ve met long enough to get an opinion or history with, and then–you guessed it–RANDOM NUMBER GENERATION. I get a random number, and the better the number, the better their relationship.

So for example, a group of senior generals for a kingdom’s military. Get a variety of personalities, some good, some bad. Maybe use RNG for this, maybe not. One of the generals is a nice guy, very jovial, everyone loves them and they’re one of the most personable generals. They have a family, they’re well-known and respected, and then as you’re grabbing random numbers to determine their relationship to characters they’ve met their spouse rolls a ONE. This loved character has the worst possible relationship with their spouse.

And so that’s how a well-respected, noble, adored general is secretly beating their spouse.

Not all is well in random number generation land. Sometimes it makes characters and settings harder–harder to figure out, harder to write. But realistically? I think adding the random element makes it more real. And it adds another dimension to a character and their history that wasn’t there before.

I mentioned characters meeting other characters in their past, and I’m actually going to talk about that more next week. After all, once you’ve put all this work into a character, why only use them once?

Waluigi

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

If you follow me on Twitter or Mastodon you may have noticed I started writing a Waluigi story a few weeks ago. His disclusion from Smash Bros. is a disillusion on my part. I mean, I can identify with the guy. Not the mean, nasty parts–well, not all of them–but his self-pitying feeling that everyone does better than him. If he can just find something to give him an edge, that one thing to give him a boost (which for him is usually cheating), he can show the world that he’s the greatest and then lord it over everyone who said he’d never make it!

Of course, I’d never do that, noooo.

Anyway, if you follow anything Nintendo you’ve probably heard of the memes, the rotten memes, the harassing, but maybe you’ve also heard of the more artistic, good stuff. This is none of that. This is more of a look at Waluigi. I was talking with a friend about him the other day and thought the resulting discussion was interesting.

WA more

A brief story of grunkiness

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Grunkiness is basically what I’m calling how I’ve been feeling kinda depressed lately. For various reasons that all may just be capitalism, but let me tell you about myself this morning.

I stopped drinking disposable bottles of water a while ago. Bad for the environment, you see. I just use an old reusable water bottle and fill it from the tap. Except it’s a little bit leaky when you shake it. Well, I drink Crystal Light, so when I shake it up it kinda leaks, so I usually screw the lid on tight. Anyway I screwed it on too tight and the bottle’s dumb straw got dislodged and I couldn’t open it and I gave up on it and chucked it in the sink and just went to lie down because I’m sick of the dang thing.

In my annoyance I forgot that I actually do have bigger packets you mix into a pitcher of water, but I usually end up not actually making some because it’s such a hassle and annoying and I never feel like I have any time anyway. Except. While I was lying down I told myself that, really, it’s not that big a deal to do it. And my brain responded, “yes it iiiiiis.”

so anyway is that a sign of depression

That said I made myself get up to make some, told myself that when I’m out I’m going to start immediately making some, and

I feel kind of happy now??

I’ll take it!

The First Pokemon Trainer

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So like

were the first people in Kanto and the surrounding areas from Pallet Town? And the first-ever Pokemon Trainer was REALLY BAD AT NAMING THINGS?

So this first Pokemon Trainer leaves Pallet Town, no one has ever ventured outside it, no human, they probably arrived to the region on boats to the south shore of it, and this person just goes into this field with some birds and rats and says “this path shall be named! Route 1.”

They move on to more fields and a forest area and declare, “this path shall be named! route 2.”

They keep going until they hit mountains. Nope, not gonna climb that. Head east. “this! name! route 3.” They hit another mountain but find a path through it, and upon emerging they declare route 4. Then they head south for some reason, that’s route 5. And the routes are just numbered in the order they visited? For some reason they didn’t notice 24 and 25 until everywhere else, and then after they mapped it all out they headed back home only to notice more stuff to the west and they headed to route 26 and Johto? I guess they went back to the mountains for route 28 and then route 29, etc.?

After they mapped Kanto and Johto, and maybe subsequently Hoenn and Sinnoh in that order, people left Pallet Town and began to build new towns. These people were better at naming things. They were kind of creative but derivative and homesick so they springboarded from pallet.

Obviously in Unova, Kalos, and Alola there was a different First Pokemon Trainer who was also usually pretty bad at naming things. Everything not named route _ was named by someone else later.

The Pokemon World is weird. Yes, the naming conventions of locations is what makes it weird.