November is known in some circles as National Novel Writing Month, a challenge where you try to write 50k words in one month. The point isn’t to win, it’s to try, to actually create something. So I’ll be trying, making another go at a story I’ve had in its earliest forms since Middle School, though completely changed from that origin point.
Because of this, the posting schedule for November will be different from usual. Non-fiction will be suspended for November. Instead I’ll be sharing excerpts from my NaNoWriMo project. And Battles Beneath the Stars will take some time to start running again, the vote for the next protagonist is tomorrow, so I don’t even know whose story I’ll be writing this time.
In other news, I’ve gotten some new work. It adds another challenge to both running the newsletter and NaNo, but I believe I can handle it. This is another factor for why the non-fiction is getting suspended, there will still be a lot going on for me to juggle.
Side note, Hyperion, Aris, and Metrophanes in Battles Beneath the Stars are all from one of my prior unpublished NaNoWriMo projects, the Saga of Hyperion. Lunis and Xilaman also first properly appeared in another unpublished NaNoWriMo novel about a family of lycanthropes immigrating from Lunis to Xilaman, now I’m not sure if lycanthropes are still a thing in the current vision of Hybridis.
Basically if you’ve read Battles Beneath the Stars, you’ve been exposed to some things that can at least trace a lineage to something written in NaNo. It’s a notable part of the behind the scenes history of the setting.
Recap of Last Month
Quantum Devil Saga
Quantum Devil Saga is something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while, so I’m glad I finally pushed it out. Wasn’t entirely pleased with the end result, but so long as it helps spread the word of QDS, I’ll have done what I set out to do. And revisiting the first book for reference was fun.
In the future I’d like to talk about more things in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, like the Devil Survivor games. Especially since I’m on a bit of a monster collector kick at the moment partially prompted by videos on the older games in the franchise.
This is another post that had been somewhat in the works for a while. At first I wanted to just write about the scene in Pokémon X and Y, but it kept on sprawling. So I made it part of a compilation talking about different scenes, which all ended up being from JRPGs.
I had to keep myself from inserting a joke about Thanos when mentioning Lysandre’s different motivation later in the game, because both basically subscribe to Malthusian economics and I find it really weird how Marvel (unintentionally?) popularized its talking points. As well as keeping from being too aggressive about my stance on the current state of the Pokémon franchise.
Since I couldn’t get videos covering some specific scenes, I decided to just keep the whole thing imageless for the sake of consistency. It felt counterintuitive, but consider this my own way of resisting how image and video heavy the internet is.
Between Persona 2 in this post and the post about Quantum Devil Saga, October was a good month for me writing about Shin Megami Tensei media with complicated English release histories. Funny how that turns out, I’m only drawing the connection now.
That’s all for now. Thank you for reading the Warthog Report, and I hope you stick with me through the change in schedule for this month.