#and then I've been picking through archive dot org for the last few weeks looking at this stuff | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

doedipus · 8 months ago

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a large amount of time I've been spending on -untitled undefined scope original fiction project- since the last time I posted about it has been trying to develop the protagonist concept I came up with last summer or whatever into like, a character that would feel real and era appropriate.

it's fun research to do. naturally a lot of the details I assigned to her are things that I already think are cool, so it's been a lot of fun trying to trace her traits back through the relatively recent past, getting reminded of how much things have changed, or where the gaps in my intuition are, and then doing a flurry of reading to get a sense for exactly how someone like her and the people around her could have happened and what her life was probably like leading up to her present day. hopefully this results in some good good verisimilitude.

#I wrote a short story from her perspective over the holidays and then didn't know how to continue it #and then I got distracted by real life stuff for a few months #I forget if I posted about that #and then I've been picking through archive dot org for the last few weeks looking at this stuff #the last big rabbit hole was trying to get a better feel for era appropriate ts/tv subculture #the current one I'm looking at is how she would've gotten into language learning and how that would've worked #nettle has been prodding me about the setting thing lately so I've been thinking about that more too #probably the biggest hurdle by far is figuring out how I want to play that #and how I want the thing to be divided up #since the original coc scenario I'm developing this out of is centered on a flight from LA to honolulu #and the airport dungeon was definitely meant to be a hook for a larger campaign #some amount of it is going to cover protag lady's failed life in LA and some of it is going to be worse things happening in hawaii #but it's like. how much do I want to balance it one way or the other #and realistically how much does the aesthetics of 20th century air travel add to the story #besides me personally thinking it's compelling ofc #a lot of what I find compelling about hawaii is that it's an east/west cultural crossroads and realistically that's also true of socal #and I can wax poetic about socal as much as I want without worrying all that much about mishandling something #and there's also a lot of socal specific history along similar parallels to pull from that I'm more familiar with #I guess it comes down to whether curiosity re: 'doing it right' is enough of a motivator to do the increased amount of research #which I guess it has so far with the above character details. so hopefully that will continue #but it also feels like using machine translation a bit yknow. it's hard to know how effectively I'll be able to sanity check #although depending on where this goes I might be able to get other people involved to sensitivity read down the line #with most of the creative things I do I just have a tendency to always rely really heavily on figuring things out myself #I also want protag lady to have a Cool Car and idk how to get that from point a to point b narratively #this is like an entire second or third post's worth of tags but I don't feel like unfucking this so whatever. suffer. I guess.

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