Post Oblivion Rant

Double post much? There's of course a good reason for that: this is the traditional post-NaNoWriMo rant. And I don't really want to have it conflated with that other thing that I was talking about earlier.

This year's NaNoWriMo concept had been vague. I was reading H. P. Lovecraft's works earlier in the year, and his eldritch happenings gave me the idea to rethink of them as some kind of five-dimensional creatures. The Illuminatus! trilogy did little to turn me away from that idea, and so that was how the concept was born.

Initially, it was supposed to be a series of short stories based on a five-dimensional prankster---let's just call him F for short. F was supposed to be the unseen protagonist, and each short story would involve some poor soul (different across stories) who was afflicted by a particular five-dimensional nonsense from F and how that fella lived through his life.

Naturally, that's not what happened in the final execution.

``A series of short stories'' requires more planning than I care to, and the number of five-dimensional gimmicks I could come up with was insufficient to carry through the 50k words needed. So I switched it a bit, and made it into some kind of α versus β story. You can of course view the result from here.

That last bit shall remain a mystery for now. Kudos to those who can read and understand it.

I'm not as proud of this as some of the older entries I have, but I'm not complaining. A win is a win---50k words were reached in around 14 days(!) and I am satisfied with the story. And that marks my seventh NaNoWriMo win. I'm not sure about the eighth NaNoWriMo, but I'm sure whatever I'm reading in between should give me inspiration on what to write next.

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I'm not really a fan of using fan fiction as a source for NaNoWriMo; it feels a little... cheap. The taking of characters that had more than twenty thousand prior words to characterise them and clobbering them together to compose a series of hijinks feels hackish. Of course I do not disparage the use of fan fiction for NaNoWriMo; it's just that I will try my best to avoid doing that myself. Part of the fun of writing up new characters is to allow the said characters to grow, to become what circumstances have made them to become. In some ways, fan fiction limits the character's growth because such work often emphasizes the ``canonical'' traits and behaviours of the character, unless there is an actual attempt to revisit the character's traits and behaviours from a completely new environment and do an interpretation there. That latter is excellent for writers because it forces one to make evaluations and decisions on directions that can be exciting, instead of the long drawn out bore that an in-universe styled fan fiction tends to end up becoming.

Anyway, rant over. Head over and download that first draft of Oblivion.