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As the few of you who are left in the TB/X fandom have probably noticed, the updates on the Decagram have slowed to a crawl - even for my usually glacial writing speed.
An email by a friend about her rediscovering the joy of writing made me reflect on why that may be case.
In short, I'm not writing stories for the praise from my audience, but because I enjoy writing and exploring that foreign world behind the words. In that, each fandom I ever wrote in (Galaxy Rangers, the Emperor's Edge, and yes, TBX) has its own special appeal for me. For the Decagram with its setting in real world Tokyo of 2000 that was the research, the mental wandering of Tokyo's streets imagining how it would have looked for the characters, for the demons, for... If you are a fan of TBX (and the Decagram?), you'll know. :)
When I started writing the Decagram in 200x that meant endless web searches equipped with a babel fish, a cheap city map (on paper!) of Tokyo, and even haunting the abysmal small section of my city library for books on Japan and modern Tokyo.
The more the Decagram progressed, the more detailed its world got, the more indepth research was needed - but the webtools had gotten better: there was Streetview with its countless photographs, Wikipedia with and -media with sometimes whimsical articles about niche topics that were fun to study and helped figuring things out. And yes, still the open web with the babelfish via copy & paste to get the gist.
When I resumed writing the Decagram last year, all that was pretty much gone. The open website were a mess of slop photos, the Tokyo newspaper archives were behind paywalls - or captchas - "helpful" bots autotranslate their content, incidentally erasing and slopifying the information I sought, and Streetview is an -equally autotranslated- mess of advertising for shops I won't ever visit because they are literally on the other end of the world. I was there for the photos, not the prospects, thank you. I have a full time job, and the local library has opening hours made for pupils and retirees. And a lot of the whimsical articles on Wikipedia have been "dewhimsified", making them more serious sources, but incidentally removing what I used for inspiration.
In short, what had been the main fun in writing the Decagram had become an arduous chore: the research to get the setting right. (You really don't want to know through how many loops I had to jump to get any reliable information about Rebun-to, because the damn bots tend to mix it with a different island much further south.)
In contrast, with Galaxy Rangers I explore(d) how excruciating circumstances form character and worldviews, making my writing there essentially what you may call "closed source", meaning the ancient DVD set I have is all the material I need for writing cohesively in that fandom, making it much more resilient to the garbage dump the web has become.
All this results in me currently enjoying writing Galaxy Rangers stories much more than writing the Decagram, even though the GR fandom these days numbers in the single digits, judged by the access numbers of the new stories on the AO3.
I still have the Decagram story in my head, and I still want to write it, but until I find resources to do the research needed to get it right without wading through all the icky slop it will likely stay there.
An email by a friend about her rediscovering the joy of writing made me reflect on why that may be case.
In short, I'm not writing stories for the praise from my audience, but because I enjoy writing and exploring that foreign world behind the words. In that, each fandom I ever wrote in (Galaxy Rangers, the Emperor's Edge, and yes, TBX) has its own special appeal for me. For the Decagram with its setting in real world Tokyo of 2000 that was the research, the mental wandering of Tokyo's streets imagining how it would have looked for the characters, for the demons, for... If you are a fan of TBX (and the Decagram?), you'll know. :)
When I started writing the Decagram in 200x that meant endless web searches equipped with a babel fish, a cheap city map (on paper!) of Tokyo, and even haunting the abysmal small section of my city library for books on Japan and modern Tokyo.
The more the Decagram progressed, the more detailed its world got, the more indepth research was needed - but the webtools had gotten better: there was Streetview with its countless photographs, Wikipedia with and -media with sometimes whimsical articles about niche topics that were fun to study and helped figuring things out. And yes, still the open web with the babelfish via copy & paste to get the gist.
When I resumed writing the Decagram last year, all that was pretty much gone. The open website were a mess of slop photos, the Tokyo newspaper archives were behind paywalls - or captchas - "helpful" bots autotranslate their content, incidentally erasing and slopifying the information I sought, and Streetview is an -equally autotranslated- mess of advertising for shops I won't ever visit because they are literally on the other end of the world. I was there for the photos, not the prospects, thank you. I have a full time job, and the local library has opening hours made for pupils and retirees. And a lot of the whimsical articles on Wikipedia have been "dewhimsified", making them more serious sources, but incidentally removing what I used for inspiration.
In short, what had been the main fun in writing the Decagram had become an arduous chore: the research to get the setting right. (You really don't want to know through how many loops I had to jump to get any reliable information about Rebun-to, because the damn bots tend to mix it with a different island much further south.)
In contrast, with Galaxy Rangers I explore(d) how excruciating circumstances form character and worldviews, making my writing there essentially what you may call "closed source", meaning the ancient DVD set I have is all the material I need for writing cohesively in that fandom, making it much more resilient to the garbage dump the web has become.
All this results in me currently enjoying writing Galaxy Rangers stories much more than writing the Decagram, even though the GR fandom these days numbers in the single digits, judged by the access numbers of the new stories on the AO3.
I still have the Decagram story in my head, and I still want to write it, but until I find resources to do the research needed to get it right without wading through all the icky slop it will likely stay there.
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