Hello again. This past month has been more about exploration than technical implementation. Plus catharsis in between. Explains a bit why there weren't any updates. It's because it's a slowish process with little to say other than "thinking things through" four times over. But here are my notes for the month collected into this one post. Enjoy, I guess?
Music, I feel, plays an important role in my creative process. If it doesn't match the mood I want to set, it just becomes that much harder to create something. So I put my trip-hop/glitch-hop playlist on standby and moved towards something towards hard guitars. I've been listening to some post-rock and post-metal and have landed on a few that matches the mood of what I want to inject into the isekai.
Here's what I've found:
The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull - Earth
F♯ A♯ ∞ - Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Weighing Souls with Sand - The Angelic Process
And of course, in the past week Fear Inoculum came out. So of course the album is in the mix. How could any Tool album not be? Pneuma in particular speaks to a specific emotion I want to evoke in the story, and I'll be relying heavily on it to develop quite a few scenes.
I've also been struggling with my notes. There's always been something lacking with mind maps that causes idea generation to stagnate with interactive fiction. That, particularly, is the inability to branch and rejoin - mind maps by default are designed to continue branching to eternity. So I've been looking for a decent flowchart designing software and came across Draw.io. I've been playing with it a bit during my morning commute. It is, in a word, awesome.
Finally, I've had to adjust my mindset in regards to writing these kinds of pieces. I had seriously forgotten why my older pieces felt more vibrant. I used the techniques I learned writing them to help me develop myself commercially and professionally. But I kind of left behind the reasons and motivations for doing so in the first place. The reason why my first completed written work still feels powerful is because at the time, I wrote it for just one person. And the same has to be for this work - I have to craft every word of this isekai with the intent that the only person who will read it is the one I'm writing it for in the first place.
