Announcement: Hiatus

Dear Internet,

          Can you guess what time it is, Internet?  No?  It is time to go back on hiatus.  I know, I know.  I have only been re-corresponding for some two months now.  I wish I could keep up this writing, or better yet go back to the original five day format, but life has a happy little way of getting in the way of what we want to do.  Attempting to try and keep my current rate of letters would be quite frankly impossible due to a number of circumstances that are well beyond my control.  Do not weep for me, Internet.  You will get your servers wet if you leak that much coolant.  I cannot say just when I will return to finish my latest review or update anything in vein of the visual novel project, but know this.  I will return eventually.  In the mean time, just keep replaying those kitten videos and amuse yourself in the mean time.

Yours in digital,
BeepBoop

Entry 137: "The Worm Ouroboros" Pt. 1

Dear Internet,

                Now, I am as much of a fan of fantasy stories as the next person down the line.  Stories of exiled and kidnapped kings, elven folk parading across the forest, dwarves smelting alloys lost to the knowledge of man, and magic being used at the risk of the life, or very soul, of the user are tales that capture not only my own imagination but also those of many others.  There is something wonderful about a narrative that goes far into the depths of human wonder while going far off into the realms of the impossible.  A fantasy story, specifically the kind that need to create another world to be told, must remember not to weigh the reader's thoughts down but also remember to allow for some imagination to occur naturally from the information put forth.  But what does this have to do with "The Worm Ouroboros" you ask?  Well, I may be getting ahead of myself.

                I came across this book in the most shameful way possible.  I was pulled in by a praising quote printed on the cover.  I know, I know.  Being taken in by one of the cheapest tricks out there is a terribly pathetic excuse to reading a book.  For this, I should perhaps lose my critic license.  Thankfully, my critic license is already overdue for a renewal after having not blasted any piece of work as being "a detriment to society" for some time, so it does not matter much.  The only thing that I can offer in my defense is that the cover quote is from J.R.R. Tolkien, and he says "[T]he greatest and most convincing writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read."  Hopefully, Internet, you can understand why my curiosity was piqued from such a quote.  It did not help my curiosity at all that the back cover had even less to say about the book's content, instead chronicling more of the book's influences than its actual plot.  With that being said, let me try and fill in some of the holes that the cover leaves open like potholes in a back-street.

                "The Worm Ouroboros" tells of the four lords of Demonland and the kingdoms around them.  The lords Juss, Goldry Bluszco, Spitfire, and Brandoch Daha rule their kingdom of men peacefully after having finally put the final sword to the Ghouls, a race that had razed the land time and time before.  During the celebration of the birthday of Lord Juss, an ambassador from Witchland requests an audience with the court.  The lords allow the audience and welcome the ambassador in.  Once in, he delivers a message from the king of Witchland, Gorice XI.  The message dictates that the lords of Demonland swear allegiance to Gorice XI before the world and that the realm of Demonland belongs to Gorice XI.  Naturally, the rulers of Demonland are furious at this proclamation of subjugation.  They in turn give a message to the ambassador.  They challenge Gorice to a wrestling match with Lord Goldry being the representative of Demonland.  The winner would determine if a war should break out between the two kingdoms.  What occurs during the match and the events following lead to a conflict that splits the land apart.

                The book has got a few things going for itself right out of the introduction.  First and foremost is the book's language.  Having been written almost one hundred years ago, the novel is going to instantly separate itself away from modern works or even modern speech.  A good number of the words contained here are no longer spelled in the same manner.  The use of "wrastling" made me do a few double takes at first and made me wonder if the book was written a few years ago in Alabama rather than in England in 1922.  Written tics aside, there is still an eloquent use of language here.  The manners that the individuals speak reflect the fantastical setting that the book sets forth.  But the book takes one step more than just interjecting a few "doth"s and "thine"s.  A number of lyrical breaks made by the characters reciting poetry or song are written more in the manner of Chaucer than in Shakespeare.  It can be a bit subtle, but the impact is there with the much older spellings and usage.

                The language of the novel goes further with the settings and their descriptions.  The halls of kings are not the straw huts that house peasants.  Flawless marble, amethyst, jasper, pearl, and many other materials decorate the walls and ceilings.  Pillars of stone seem to make the ceiling as high as the sky while stone sculptures hold aloft support beams upon their backs.  The clothes that decorate the characters are not of low leather or tin melt plates.  They are elaborate gold stitch works that reflect the person's standing within the kingdom.  The book is not afraid to describe such rarities or even let them be.  Too many works, even fantasy genre ones, attempt to paint a drab picture where the ruling class have no wealth, no color, no beauty, and are as dirty as goats.  While I do not wish to attempt to discredit such a view, which is best left to historians to squabble about like stockbrokers, I will say one thing about such a written portrayal.  It is drab.  It is the kind of drab where the lack of luster ends up affecting any sort of extravagance that the plot wishes to showcase.  If you make a drab world with no glimmer of glamour, you make a drab story.  It is perhaps one of those Modernist inventions that try and trick the reader into thinking they enjoyed the work when they clearly did not.

                I shall leave you with this small letter for now, Internet.  I hope to write to you again, soon.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Log 006

Dear Internet,

                You probably cannot tell how much I am scraping the bottom of the barrel that is my mind right now.  I do not have much else to talk about in the general sense of visual novels.  That being said, I will still find some way of writing some 500 words here.  I am not sure how, but it seems that whenever I say that I have little to say, I end up writing too much.  It is a weird quirk of mine.  Or maybe it is just that I lack a certain skill in my writing ability.  Oh look, 100 words.

                One thing that I seem to have done while attempting to convert a simple short story of seven pages into a kinetic novel is explode a small plot into a full on multiple sub-plot intertwining novella.  Ignoring formatting issues, which of course make everything disproportionate, the currently far from finished script is now at 32 pages.  I say disproportionate because measuring a short story against a script is like comparing a dollar store to a big box outlet.  One is going to have a ton more returns than the other.  Counting words, which is by far a more accurate method, I have made 2,770 words grow into 7,517, give or take a handful.  That is an increase of approximately 170%.  I make this comparison because at the point that I am now in converting the script, I have caught up with what I have previously penned.  Everything from here on out is added story that I have not yet developed.

                This is a bit exciting and at the same time horribly terrifying.  It is like being handed only half a book to be read to a group of children.  Eventually you are going to run out of pages.  The children in turn will expect the story to continue and come to an end fitting the story.  You must then try and connect all the loose ends while continuing the central plot.  There is the danger of leaving a loose end that will be evident to everyone except yourself and will be called out on it.  There is the danger of making the rest of the story inadequate to balance out the complexity of the first.  And there is the temptation of making it all anti-climactic to the point of cheating the audience.  It can make you understand Scheherazade's dilemma, just with less chances of jugular drafts.

                These are the faces of the danger that I am staring into right now.  Thankfully, or rather foolishly depending on who you ask, I know how to face such danger.  The trick is to just add more content and work on it.  It is not an easy answer.  Sure, I could end the story abruptly or just leave plot holes bare, saying I want to "leave it open for interpretation," but that sounds too much like a cop out.  I would rather just try and do a better job of it.  There is 500.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Current Assets

Writing: ~750 lines

Coding: ~35 lines

Art: 0%

Audio: 0%

Entry 136: "Four Faultless Felons"

Dear Internet,

                Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a writer of paradoxes.  The various novellas, novels, and short stories he penned are filled with them.  Just about anything that you pick up by the man has a paradox at its core.  Not to be confused with the oxymoron which is more a contradiction in the purest form, Chesterton's paradoxes require the two things that they present to be both true yet seem like they contradict one another.  For example, the courage of a soldier when caught behind enemy lines can only save his life by throwing away his concern for his life and risking death.  If he stays still, he will surely die, but if he risks his life, he may save it.  Another example would be Chesterton's arguments for the smallness of man against God yet hugeness to that of the rest of the universe.  But I will not go on and on since you are most likely wondering what any of this has to do with "Four Faultless Felons."  The title of the book probably holds a clue.

                "Four Faultless Felons" is a collection of four novellas or shorter tales telling of four individuals who are more than mere criminals.    Each of the four men tells his tale to reporter Asa Lee Pinion, an American reporter gone to England to find a story on Count Raoul de Marillac.  Pinion goes to London hoping to learn about the extravagant lifestyle of the count.  In one way, he is not dissapointed.  The count frequently eats expensive dishes and goes out to see the newest bawdiest plays that are being produced.  It is only when the reporter is left alone with the four men that he learns the truth.  The count is in fact living a rather penitent lifestyle.  All the dishes he eats are counter to his tastes, and he goes to the plays because they are boring and uninteresting.  The men that tell Pinion this truth about the count have each committed a crime of sorts, but there is obviously more to each tale.  The crimes committed are murder, fraud, theft, and treason.  Like the count, each man is counter to what he originally appears.  Together, the men form the "Club of Men Misunderstood."

                The stories are told in a classic detective manner with the catch that there is usually no crime being committed.  The reader is privy to this understanding just from reading the title of the book.  It is understood right from the beginning that there is going to be mysteries that go beyond the immediate ones being told, but that does not mean that those mysteries are going to be easy to solve.  I do not wish to even go into the details of each story since doing so will end up giving away a clue or two.  So, you will just have to take my word that the tales are each riveting and play out well.

                The book is less like a detective novel than I might be leading on.  A normal detective story flows in a rather strict formula.  The various characters are presented, giving each just enough of a presentation that the audience can understand them in an instant.  The setting is likewise given such treatment.  Afterwards, the crime is committed.  The clues are presented either at this point or in the following moments.  Depending on the length of the story, a number of false accusations and incorrect attempts to the solution are presented.  Eventually, the mystery is solved with the truth being presented to the audience at least and the various characters at most.  In "Four Faultless Felons," just one of these elements is skewed.  The crime itself is given scrutiny.  The crime itself is called into question.  The crime itself is brought forward to testify in the witness chair.  If anything, the book is more of a vanishing act.  The crimes, not the criminals, pull escape acts.

                I have already done a review of Chesterton's more famous mystery stories, the Father Brown books.  It would be probably best to compare this book with those stories since the Father Brown stories are more widely recognized.  In the same way that the Father Brown stories center around the criminal rather than the crime, "Four Faultless Felons" center on why the individuals act in the manner that they do rather than merely figuring out how they pulled off their actions.  It is not enough to know how the action is committed but to figure out why it is committed in the first place.  The motive is what lays down the groundwork for each tale.  Without motive or intent, a crime is usually just an accident.

                Unlike the Father Brown stories, which are usually less than twenty pages, the stories here average near the forty five page mark.  Also, the four stories are broken into subsequent chapters.  This means that each of the stories is given a wide birth to be built, examined, and solved.  This of course leads to a number of notable characteristics.  With the lengthening of the story, there is much wider chance for the audience to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed.  Yet at the same time, the story can become much more intertwined and complicated.  Chesterton walks right down the middle without leaving the reader ensnared in the thicket of connecting lines.  The added lengths do not make the stories convoluted.  They allow the stories greater depth and life, but they also allow Chesterton a greater ability to explore a specific theme.  In the Father Brown stories, most of the themes would end up being a short speech delivered out by the amateur sleuth at the end each story.  They were very much "and the moral of the story is" type of deliveries.  This was due to the brevity of the various stories.  Here, Chesterton is able to dig into the themes well before the solution is presented.  He is able to have the characters expand their positions well before the curtain is going to set.  The antagonistic characters are even able to express themselves without being curtly cut off or summarized.  

                "Four Faultless Felons" is a great small collection of mystery stories.  The only thing that I wonder is why it went out of printing for so long.  The most immediate answer in my mind is that it is so similar to another book by Chesterton.  "Manalive" is right next to this book in how it handles crime mysteries.  Unlike this book, "Manalive" attributes all the crimes to a single individual instead of four.  "Four Faultless Felons" can be considered a continuation of the same themes, but the breaking up of the crimes allows a small variety of settings and characters to be created.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next week is "The Worm Ouroboros."

Log 005

Dear Internet,

                When I last I left off, I was going to talk about voice acting.  It is safe to say that my project will have none of that fluff.  As a one person team, I would have to do every single voice.  While this would no doubt be quite humorous, it would alter the mood of most scenes.  Let me say that I am not an individual of a hundred voices.  I barely have a single voice, and it would make things quite strange if that same voice acted out a number of parts, many of which would require a pitch that I just cannot throw.  Maybe for a short comedy visual novel I would, but not for this.

                I do not mind voice acting in visual novels.  The only problem is that the only time I have heard it done well is with the Japanese voices.  That itself is a problem because I am mostly unable to tell if it is even being done right in Japanese.  They may be doing a horrible job at it, but I cannot tell.  Either way, I usually just let the voice acting play out as long as it keeps up with my reading speed.  If the reading of the lines get too long and the text is just sitting there, I will go ahead and keep reading without waiting for the voice to catch up.  But this is only when I have the Japanese voices on.  I treat it as background sounds at best.  

                English voice acting for visual novels falls into two categories.  Either a voice acting veteran or a horrible amateur is doing it.  In the case of the veteran, you will end up thinking about all the other characters that the actor has played, making your mind wander away from the scene and words.  In the case of the amateur, you will get a refreshing and new voice at the cost of, well, a high chance of wanting to mute the whole thing altogether.  If you cannot mute the voices specifically but want to listen to the music, you will end up reading the text as quick as it can display, jamming the advance button, and forcing the speech clips to shorten into lengths of two words apiece.  It creates a mildly amusing sound as everyone sounds like they are gargling marbles.

                Then there is the worst case scenario.  That is when the voices do not even match up to the text.  "Lux-Pain" is the greatest example of a visual novel kind of game where the localization went absolutely down two dead end streets.  From what I could gather messing around forum boards, the translation had been split up between two to three teams.  This meant that location names not only were different in one half of the game as compared to the other half, but the voice acting did not even match up to what was being displayed.  I think there was even a section where the player had to answer questions, recalling information that had been relayed to them.  Those questions asked about some of these mixed up translation errors, which left the player not even knowing whether the info they were told was accurate.  

                There is one thing that I want to mention concerning voice acting in a visual novel format.  Line length when using spoken dialog needs to be properly balanced out to ensure proper pacing.  This falls back into the pacing issue when using just text that I mentioned in an earlier Log.  If the spoken text is excessively long to the point that it slows down a fact paced scene, it needs to be reworked.  If the spoken text hurries onward when the scene needs to be stretched out, it needs to be reworked.  The best instance I can think of when this gets done poorly is when a character has to scream or cry.  What happens is that the voice actor has to make a long cry or yell when the text that is being displayed is vastly shorter and gets displayed quickly.  The reader ends up sitting there with a fully displayed text bubble and has to wait for the exceptionally long moan has to be delivered.  The scene's flow has to instantly stop while the voice actor finishes a single line.  There has to be a middle ground where the scene continues its flow without compromising the two elements, text and sound.

                Thankfully, having none of this in my project means that I do not have to worry about it.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Current Assets

Writing: ~650 lines

Coding: ~35 lines

Art: 0%

Audio: 0%