Down the Storm God Rabbit Hole

 

I'm still working on my fanfiction story that has been my main focus for the last several November NaNoWriMo's, titled the Nerima All-Stars.  I generally don't work on it except around NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writer's Month) time, but I want to try and finish it and get it published so that I don't have to think about it anymore.   That means working on it in December as well, and probably January and February.

I haven't written much since Dec 1st, but I picked it back up this week.  I was thinking:  every character ought to have something they're passionate about.  This was advice that I'd read recently, and it makes sense, it makes your characters more interesting and memorable.  And I have this one character in my story, her name is Jin -- she's a storm controller, but she's kept her abilities a secret her whole life.

And -- what I'd written so far, she really didn't stand out.  I imagined her as a kind of mousey recluse who worked from home and did most of her socializing online.  But I had figured out what she was passionate about, it just didn't come through in my writing.  Jin is a fan of a made-up magical girl anime series called Mahou Shoujo Stormbringer Akari.  She owns figurines and drama cds and all kinds of merchandise from the show, and she even writes Akari fanfiction.  I had decided that when her house gets destroyed, along with her precious collection, this would be a dramatic moment when she decides to unleash her power over storms and weather, to announce herself to the world, to "fight back" at the villain who was mostly responsible for this destruction.

The problem was, I had failed to write her as actually passionate about this anime.  At first she didn't even mention it.  Later I had her mention it in an off-hand manner, but this was hardly good enough.  A true fan will talk about the show, compare things to the show, quote the show, say things like, "this is just like that episode where Akari did X!"  When you meet her, you should learn at least this one thing about her.

Of course, it's hard to refer to a show you know nothing about.  What do I know about Mahou Shoujo Stormbringer Akari?  Her name is Akari.  She controls weather.  She's a magical girl.  That's it, and that's all in the title.  I knew literally nothing more.

So I decided to work on background info for my made-up anime show.  Often, working on background info is a way for me to "start writing" before I actually add to the story.  It's always useful in the end.

I gave Akari a full name -- Akari Harada, and I came up with two names for her best friends.  I came up with the name of a local police officer, a young man she is infatuated with.  Then I needed her major enemy.  "The Queen of Storms", I thought.  A weather-controller magical girl who battles with a weather-controller villain, why not?  As for a name?  I'd been picking names at random from lists of Japanese first names and surnames, but a villain required something more unusual.  Like, all of the villains in Sailor Moon are named after gemstones.  I needed something like that.

I decided that "Montana, Queen of Storms" sounded good.  Why not name her after a U.S. state?  It sounded like an anime thing to do.  Her minions could be other states -- not Washington of course, and not California, that's too famous.  How about Arizona, Colorado, and Dakota?  I imagined they were like the three storms from Big Trouble in Little China -- Wind, Rain, Thunder.  Dakota of the Wind.  Yeah.

So far I had some basic details but didn't know much about the story or the background of the character.  I decided, maybe she's the daughter of a storm god, and that's where her powers come from.  So I did some research.  Raijin is the Japanese storm god; he always appears with his brother Fujin.  He's kind of a trickster god, kind of associated with death and destruction.  That doesn't sound like a great father figure, although of course while storms bring death and destruction, rain also brings forth life so there are two sides to his character.  But he also has a son who is a storm god as well, Raitaro.

So I figured, maybe Akari is the child of Raitaro.  There's not a lot of information on him really, he's just the son of the thunder god, so Akari might be better thought of as the granddaughter of the storm god.  In Japan, I think "storm god" usually just means Raijin.

There's also a storm beast called Raiju, who appears as a lightning wolf or dog but also as just about any other animal in existence.  So, her magical girl guide/companion would be a cute puppy named Raiju, or a puppy who was a raiju but not necessarily the raiju.

So far so good!  I wrote up a short paragraph about how Akari grew up, and how she discovered that she's really the granddaughter of the storm god (Raiju shows up and tells her of course), and she is forced to become a magical girl and battle with evil forces (who are also mostly storm based).

But there was also a paragraph about Raijin that compared him to other storm gods -- they all have similar powers and tempermants.  It compared him to Leigong, Chinese god of thunder, and to Parjanya, Hindu god of rain, thunder, and lightning.  It compared him to Thor (Norse god), Zeus (Greek) and Taranis (Celtic).  And also to El, or YHWH, who historically was a Semitic storm deity before he evolved into the god of everything.

My first thought was:  Oh, she needs to discover other daughters or granddaughters of other storm gods!  That would be cool!  Let's just go all in in the weather controller thing!  So I came up with names:  Penelope, a granddaughter of Zues; Damini, a granddaughter of Parjanya, and Keshet, who was descended from the Hebrew storm god.

And then I was like -- do I really want to declare a character the daughter or granddaughter of Yaweh?  I was well familiar with  the idea that Yaweh was a storm god first, and god of everything later.  But did I want to treat the Christian god as just another mythological deity?

I did some research on Yaweh the storm god, and I was still debating whether to do it when I realized that I've really fallen too far down the rabbit hole.  This is a side character to a fake anime that will only be mentioned in passing in my story because one fairly minor character is a fan of said anime.  Like, let her be the grandchild of Yaweh, it's not going to even get mentioned in my story anyway!

I still need to come up with a few key phrases that Stormbringer Akari regularly says, some "In the name of the Moon, I shall punish you!" mojo, but for the most part I have my anime background.  I realized part way through this that I can just make the rest up as I go along.  Saying "This is just like that time Akari battled the demon Zograag in the Rainbow Kingdom!" does not require me or anyone to know anything about the anime episode in question, and the more outlandish the situation referenced the better.  I can borrow famous scenes or battles from other anime or movies or science fiction shows or whatever, change the names, and it will sound like this magical girl has had some outlandish adventures that we will never get to know anything more about.

So... mission accomplished I guess?  Now I actually need to rework actual scenes and dialogue in my actual story... you know, real writing.

NaNoWriMo 2022, and the Wrong Way to Write a Plot

 

I haven't written much about my writing this year, and in part that's because I've accomplished very little in my writing.  I've struggled on and off to rework or move forward on my current Grandpa Anarchy Story Arc, but it's been very difficult and at most I've rewritten parts of stories or completed a few paragraphs on this or that story, and that's all I've managed for most of the year.

I really wanted to work on NaNoWriMo though, and I wanted to "finish" my unpublished fanfic story Nerima All-Stars.  I tried to work on it in September and October, but I really wasn't able to get anything accomplished until NaNoWriMo started.  The pressure of getting something written every day for NaNoWriMo has helped kick-start my writing and to date I'm behind but cruising along and I think I'll be able to manage 50,000 words in the next few days.

So let's talk about this story, because as always I'm trying to feel my way forward with the plot.

The story, in short:  some gods and goddesses and one demon decide to play a "superhero" game where they transform a Ranma 1/2 world into the kind of universe where superheroes exist.  Then they each pick one of the main characters to transform into a hero, while the two people on the "bad" team get to pick someone to become a supervillain.

This was the entire idea for my original story, which consisted of the first few scenes as setup, and which I wrote quite a few years ago -- more than twenty years ago now.  Originally I thought, I'll make a few heroes, we'll have a fight, maybe I'll write sequels involving one or two more villains.  But when I finally decided to work on the story in earnest, it became evident that I was incapable of writing even one single battle with a villain that didn't take me multiple years to write.  Currently my document is over 250,000 words and I'm not close to done -- although this does include a lot of research notes at the end of the document, because NaNoWriMo.

My story takes some weird twists and turns that probably do not make for a good way to tell a tale, but I keep following my instincts and writing what seems best to me at the moment.  To whit:

I set my heroes up to fail, because I knew it would be funniest if Ranma Saotome was supposed to somehow become a sorcerer supreme and Akane Tendo was meant to be the next Tony Stark/Iron Man.  Then I wrote the inevitable confrontation with the villain, and of course they failed.  That's okay, heroes aren't supposed to succeed at first -- but I began to realize that there was no believable way to transform Ranma into a competent sorcerer in just a few weeks. He couldn't believe in himself enough to overcome his shortcomings.  Same for the other characters.

So i wrote a very long chapter in which Ranma is placed in another universe where he can spend ten years learning magic.  This seemed like a workable solution, and I enjoyed writing it, and it involved Lina Inverse which was fun because Lina and Ranma make a fun combination (and they had the same voice actress in Japan, so there's one drawing of Lina where they gave her a long braid and leaned into the Ranma resemblance).  But!  This chapter is kind of a side-step narratively -- instead of dealing with the main plot, now we're going off to another world and having some adventures there.

But I enjoyed writing it and I assume it will be fun to read.  This became Chapter Six of my story, titled Sorceress.  Yet that only fixed things for one character.  I had to come up with something to explain why Akane and Nabiki suddenly got much better as well, so I wrote two more very long chapters involving them doing something similar -- I stuck them in heaven to learn their powers, again as a kind of "time here doesn't count back on earth" setup.  These were Chapter Seven:  Temporary Goddess, and Chapter Eight:  Spider's Web and Shattered Globe.

Two years ago I was working hard on Chapter Nine:  Time Stands Still, which I had planned to be the next "real" chapter in the story, but I had a lot of plot threads to tie up from my previous two chapters and so this chapter became a third straight chapter of things happening up in heaven with all of the characters there.

So my story does not flow in a very direct manner, plot-wise.  We have four long chapters where characters go off to other places to become good at what they do, before a final showdown with the villain.  But I really thought that after this we would dive right into the big conflict.

As I wrote Chapter Ten:  Asleep in Nerima, I came to realize that just explaining how all of the heroes prepared for the big fight was a chapter in itself.  So I still wasn't even to the point of the actual battle.  I've rewritten this chapter and rearranged things a few times, and I did some of that this November, but I think the chapter's pretty firm as written right now.

I've been working on Chapter Eleven:  One Night in Nerima.  Last year I did a few scenes that take place at the start of the final battle, so to speak, but in the meantime it had become apparent to me that my heroes had become immensely powerful in the last several chapters, and I would need to also explain why  the villain was powerful enough to still be a threat to them.  So I came up with yet ANOTHER time manipulation trick, in which the villain has a sorceress place the heroes within a time bubble, which gives him about three months with no interference during which he takes over Tokyo and most of Japan.

And... I was originally just going to have them wake up next day and discover that all of this has happened.  But it seemed to me that I should document his rise to power a bit.  It gives me a chance to show how he becomes powerful, and what his allies are capable of, before the final fight.

That's the current chapter I've been working on, and until recently I was struggling to write it.  It wasn't interesting.  I decided that this was because there were no sympathetic characters to follow, and I had two that I could write about -- Akane's friend Yuka, and a storm controller named Lady Leviathan who really just wants to be left alone.  So I tried writing chapters involving these two, and this included going all the way back to chapter three or four, so that I could introduce my storm controller as a character who just might have some interesting abilities, and establish that she and Yuka had met.

I wrote a few scenes, and it was still pretty boring.  Yuka hides out in a library.  She lives on the streets.  She evacuates to a shelter when Nerima is placed under a state of emergency.  She meets Lady Leviathan again, and they talk.  All very boring.

One of my problems was that I've written scenes in which Yuka finds her friend Sayuri in a bombed-out Nerima, and Sayuri is dying, and at this point she is offered power by a demon and decides to accept in order to save her friend's life.  And I was having trouble figuring out why she goes back into Nerima after she's already evacuated.  I mean, she wants to save her friend, but then why hasn't she tried to do so before now?

And I told myself, the way to make a story interesting is to imagine what's the worst thing that can happen to your character, and try doing that.  I was writing Yuka as being a reasonable citizen -- avoiding any confrontation.  She can't save her friend, so why have her even try?  Well, because that's more interesting, yes?  

So I came up with a secondary reason for her to return to the Tendo Dojo, where the villain is holding court, and suddenly the story was more interesting again.  And I thought, what if she accidentally discovers Akane's secret base?  And that sounded interesting, so I did that.  She escapes from certain capture by finding the entrance to the base in the back of Akane's closet.  Then I thought, what's the worst that can happen now?  The villain's henchmen -- a demonic assassin and a powerful sorceress -- get into the base.  So I did that.

Then I had to figure out how Yuka avoids becoming ensnared a second time.  The base has an A.I. that controls several spare suits of armor, and there's a robot there as well, and they help fight the villains and allow for Yuka to escape.  Behind her, the base explodes, which prevents the villains from following her.  

Anyway, I think I've crafted a more interesting story -- at the very least, it was more fun for me to write.  It's turning my "Dr. Pineapple takes over Japan" chapter into a massive section of the story that might need to be broken up into 2-3 chapters, but if it's interesting then I guess that's okay?

2021 Wrapup

 So for 2021, I wrote:

413  I Swear

414  Collateral Damage

415  I, Gardener

416  Maid Ex Machina

417  Infinite Dojo

418  Princess of Pluto

419  The Return of Normal

042  Hot Stuff

420  Get Down Tonight

421  Free Advertising

422  Inevitable

423  All I Ever Wanted

424  A Different Me  (formerly My Clone Sleeps Alone 2)

427  Girl Squared

432  Wrong Number

436  Doomscrolling

433  Endorsement

435  Transformations

437  Frills and Bows

438  Mating Ritual

449x  Afterglow  (moved to "unusable")

441  My Own Daughter

442  Ambassador

443  Real Girl

445  Academy

444  Hate Crime

446  Revenge

447  Powerslave

428  Amaranthine Shores

429  The Spice of Life

425  Buttercup

426  Chaos Theory

430  Good Vibrations

431  Woofy

434  Optimal Performance

439  For One Night

439b  Stranger Danger

440  What I Yam

461  Wisdom and Badassery

448  Library of Dreams

449  Tutti Frutti

Technically, I wrote a couple of other stories that were also retroactively tossed into the bin of "unusable" -- Mother's Treasure, Trust Mother, Orphan White.  But I hadn't listed those as completed stories because I rejected them almost immediately, while Afterglow was a story I considered good for several months before deciding I didn't like it at all.

So that's 41 Grandpa Anarchy stories last year, give or take.  I also wrote approximately 20,000 words on my fan fiction story Girl's School, and roughly 50,000 words on my fan fiction story Nerima All-Stars.  Neither reached a point where I was ready to publish anything, but progress is progress.  I only really wrote three Grandpa Anarchy stories after July, so most of what I accomplished in the second half of the year was that work on my fan fiction stories.

My goals for the coming year include getting both of those fan fiction stories to a point where I can publish what I have, and to write more Grandpa Anarchy stuff.  At the moment I've decided to backtrack and try to finish up some of my unfinished work, so I'm working my way through the stories in Book 12, A Bomb In Heaven.  I've completed one story so far and I'm completely rewriting another.