@200kyenpot
gau's unimpressed face will stay with him forever.
Posts
8143
Last update
2023-12-06 08:16:59
    fozmeadows

    the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

    dduane

    Absolutely all the above, with only minor variations.

    seeingteacupsindragons

    Re: writing something like shounen manga: From my observation and experience, it requires a lot of vulnerability and a little bit of stupidity. It means getting silly, going entirely over the top, making mistakes, and stepping far out of your comfort zone.

    Oh, those aren't the parts I have problems with. The parts I have problems with come in a couple parts:

  • The serial nature / arc format of most shonen, especially the longer running ones. Manga is just a very different format that novels or even short stories get these days in Western Trad Pub. You cannot have things parceled into Discrete Chunks--they're very structurally different, and leaning too far into the episodic nature fucks up a novel's pacing.
  • The expansive worldbuilding that just doesn't fuckin' matter. Worldbuilding is not a thing I'm good at, particularly, but there's a way a lot of shonen just makes sure you know there's endless places to explore. You can Feel the 500 million places left unexplored in HxH. You know there's a billion more aliens species in DBZ. You know you don't know everything because something new and random is always waiting to be introduced. This is hard to keep contained in a novel format and also make it not...distracting?
  • So, so, so many shonen feature protagonists with the vaguest goals ever. Adventure! Exploring! Becoming The Number One Hero! Doing Various Jobs for the Underworld when they send them to you! I honest to god have no idea how to replicate the potential openness of that.
  • It's not the Power of Friendship I struggle with. It's not the Raw Human Gutsiness I struggle with. It's not the genuine emotional heart and enthusiasm and fun. It's the Exploration and Potential. I don't know how to do that.

    200kyenpot

    Have you ever experimented with serial writing? In my personal experience, that's done a lot for me in developing those skills. Disclaimer that I know that won't work for everyone, but it might be worth a try?

    seeingteacupsindragons

    Sure. I used to do that on fictionpress back in college. The problem is:

    There's basically no way whatsoever to actually publish that in current anglosphere publishing model. None. Patreon, maybe, but that requires already having an audience. No one reads short serial fic. Which is sad, because I'm fairly certain people still enjoy it immensely. But there's no outlet for it.

    And I still would have the issue translating it to a novel format. Sure, novels can come in series, and do, and there's some of that you can keep. But they are....loooong installments.

    200kyenpot

    There are enough examples of enduring classics that came into existence because of serialized writing that it might be worth exploring using it as a way to build up plenty of material to edit through.

    Also, I think there's still a small audience for serial writing, especially in sci-fi and fantasy publications, but anyway, beside the point. In my opinion it helps to dip back into serial writing to build those spontaneous expansive worldbuilding skills.

    seeingteacupsindragons

    Re: writing something like shounen manga: From my observation and experience, it requires a lot of vulnerability and a little bit of stupidity. It means getting silly, going entirely over the top, making mistakes, and stepping far out of your comfort zone.

    Oh, those aren't the parts I have problems with. The parts I have problems with come in a couple parts:

  • The serial nature / arc format of most shonen, especially the longer running ones. Manga is just a very different format that novels or even short stories get these days in Western Trad Pub. You cannot have things parceled into Discrete Chunks--they're very structurally different, and leaning too far into the episodic nature fucks up a novel's pacing.
  • The expansive worldbuilding that just doesn't fuckin' matter. Worldbuilding is not a thing I'm good at, particularly, but there's a way a lot of shonen just makes sure you know there's endless places to explore. You can Feel the 500 million places left unexplored in HxH. You know there's a billion more aliens species in DBZ. You know you don't know everything because something new and random is always waiting to be introduced. This is hard to keep contained in a novel format and also make it not...distracting?
  • So, so, so many shonen feature protagonists with the vaguest goals ever. Adventure! Exploring! Becoming The Number One Hero! Doing Various Jobs for the Underworld when they send them to you! I honest to god have no idea how to replicate the potential openness of that.
  • It's not the Power of Friendship I struggle with. It's not the Raw Human Gutsiness I struggle with. It's not the genuine emotional heart and enthusiasm and fun. It's the Exploration and Potential. I don't know how to do that.

    200kyenpot

    Have you ever experimented with serial writing? In my personal experience, that's done a lot for me in developing those skills. Disclaimer that I know that won't work for everyone, but it might be worth a try?