The Long Way Round

Which I suppose isn't all that surprising, really.

Particularly, all of the recent RPG heavy-hitters seem to be European. CDPR is Polish. Larian is Belgian. I suppose even Owlcat could charitably be called European. Plus of course ZA/UM, which was Estonian. And the new Fable is rather appropriately being created by an English studio.

How incredibly well it creates the atmosphere of "Northern/Northeastern Europe in June", to the point where it's incredibly familiar to anyone from this part of the world.

The forests and the fields, the swamps and the glades, the very specific quality of light (including the haunted dusk of the Skellige nights that anyone Nordic will recognize), the cuckoo calling in the woods, the woodpecker knocking on a tree, the wind rustling through a copse of birch trees, or through the tops of pine trees on a ridge...

Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.

Reason 1, both sides are genuinely atrocious. The Brimmed Caps actively torture and experiment on people, prey on them, and their current plan involves a lot of child grooming, which is. Bad. On the other side, the Pointed Caps society is deeply ableist and stagnant to change, standing by and watching people suffer without doing anything to help, not to mention their justice system is blind to the point of stolidity. Which is also bad. So it's like, unstoppable force meets immovable object with a tiny little girl in the middle of it, which makes for very compelling world-building and storytelling.

The second reason is that it's genuinely hard not to see the similarities with our world, because anyone who ever read upon the history of medicine knows that it's LITTERED with atrocities. It's like, if we saw the atrocities Nazis scientists did during WWII and the two outcomes were either 1) eugenics and human experimentation are cool actually, or 2) any study of genetics, genic therapy or genetic testing should always 100% be forbidden and we'll pretend people with genetic conditions actually don't exist 85% of the time. Which is absolutely insane and I just want to see how the conflict evolves over time.

For me it’s like this: (regardless of language)

This is the guy who wrote an incredibly detailed and pretty convincing looking foreword about how he 'came by' and 'translated' the manuscript that 'served as the basis' of The Name of the Rose. Citations, manuscript numbers and all. Just for the love of the game.

• the board is in front of a classroom, and the Math is waaay too advanced for whatever level of pupil these kids are supposed to be; like having the calculus integral in front of kindergartners, or relativistic physics in front of high schoolers.

• the board is in front of Criminals, who are Planning Something, and by all rights there ought to be no Math there to begin with. Like. You’re planning a Heist why do you have the Full Lagrangian on there. Are we taking a rocket to the bank.

Absolutely. I think every writer hits this Buyer's Remorse-ish thing occasionally, and it's deeply annoying when it happens.

What's worked for me in the past has been (first) to just sit with the issue for a little. Once the realization of something-not-working has turned up, don't get in a fight with it right away! Go forward and do some writing on which you're not having any conflicts. Give the suddenly-annoying thing, or things, a few days or a week to settle down.

Then revisit the troublesome issue and see if it's calmed down at all. If it has, and seems less troublesome now, fine: just go on as you were. This kind of sudden flash of uncertainty or dissatisfaction isn't at all uncommon. They can come and go with great speed.

But it it hasn't calmed down or gone away, and is still kicking up a stink, the best way to get through the difficulty seems to be to make it explain itself.

You do this by putting your Editor Hat on—every writer has one—and writing an editorial-style note to yourself; explaining, in detail, what seems not to be working about the plot point or piece of character business or whatever: and why. Don't be curt or brief with yourself; lay it all out in detail, as if your potential note-reader had no idea at all what was going on. And tell yourself exactly what's bothering you about it. Can't work this issue out immediately? Take a day or so off and do other things, and then come back to it. The ability of the Writer Brain to keep worrying away at stuff in the background while you're doing other things is a never-ending wonder.

My experience with this approach has typically had one of two results. While writing the note (or while considering it, completed, later) I've routinely started seeing ways to fix the thing that seemed wrong. Sometimes the insight has taken a day or two to materialize after writing the note. The plain-language clarification of the details of the issue often seems to help suggest ways around or through them: or to lay increasingly open a sense of what the problem really is, so that a way through it starts becoming clearer.

...At which point you take your own advice: get in under the hood of your plot and start tinkering with the things that you feel you can fix to resolve the problem. (And it's okay to have to flail around a little among the opportunities at this point before finding the fix that works best. Try one and see how it settles in: if it doesn't, pull it out, shove something similar-but-different into the opening and see how that works.)

Or alternately: while writing that note, I've started feeling that the problem in question wasn't actually one that needed to be solved at all—that the original concept was just fine as it was. (This realization has routinely started to betray itself when writing the note about "what's wrong" starts becoming difficult because the reasons I was being bothered by turned out to be just unfocused "plotting anxiety" and weren't really all that problematic to start with.) ...At which point you file your note away (because who knows when you might need it for the resolution of some other problem?) and get on with the work at hand.

I've found this approach pretty useful. In a lot of years of work, I've only ever had to sit down and write a second note about an issue once, and that one cleared things up really conclusively. (It revealed something crucial that I'd been failing to deal with, and eventually required the insertion of a smoked-lamb,-potted-goose-and-white-bean casserole into a key chapter of The Door Into Sunset—a fabulous recipe that turned out to have a lot more in it than fiber. And which I'll post over at the Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms site sometime in the next month or so.)

So I very much recommend this approach. Give it a shot and see how it works for you. Trust yourself.

hello friend. a mavka, navka or nyavka is an undead forest spirit, one of type which ukrainians call the covered dead (заложні мерці) — spirits of people that died of unclean, improper death, and therefore couldn't finish the transition and weren't allowed to the orherworld. the name covered undead comes from the fact that in old times they weren't properly buried, and were left in forests covered by leaves and twigs.

generally mavky are envisioned as beautiful girls, although in some regions there are beliefs about male mavky (sometimes called didky). mavka looks perfectly human except for the fact that their backs lack skin and muscle, exposing their innards and spine. they aren't malicious, but are obliviously playful and can hurt people during their plays — tickle or dance you to death, drown, ward you off your tray. in some western regions it's also believed that time goes faster when encountering them — what is felt like several hours could actually be several hundred years.

navky live in forests and mountain caves, and they like to dance, weave, play and prank wanderers, especially young men. to ward off mavky valeriana, garlic and wormwood are used, as well as wearing your shirt inside out. like most undead spirits in ukrainian mythology, navky are most active during the green festival/rusalka week.