Update #111 Musing on zesty pizzas

Hello? Is this 911? No? Oh, then I dialed the wrong number, sorry. What? The gunfire in the background? Oh, don't worry about that. I was actually calling about an abscess on my toe. Hello? Helloo? Did they hang up on me? Just like that? How rude. Who has a number like 111 anyway? Must be some real muppet.

...

Huh. I looked it up just now, turns out New Zealand actually uses 111 as their emergency number. Which is completely useless to know since, of course, they redirect 112 and 911 to their real emergency line.

I suppose it might be useful to know if you're from New Zealand, since I don't know if 111 calls get redirected properly. If they do, my entire opening paragraph simply doesn't work, thus I will ignore any and all evidence to the contrary.

Look, Donkey! A muppet!

Bit of a slowish week. Been real tired for some reason, and that's despite sleeping and exercising alright. I don't know, some weeks are just like that I guess.

Still managed to finish scene 3, so progress was reasonable. Scene 4 is a short one, while scene 5 gets spicy, so ideally I finish scene 4 and start scene 5 during the coming week.

Scene 3 here has some of our cast out and about in town, now that they're no longer confined to a mere luxurious mansion. Nice to have a bit of change in scenery, even if a lot of the scene mostly shows off that stone wall. What? It's a fancy stone wall.

Outdoors lighting is far trickier than indoors lighting, I find. I think it's because when you try to simulate lighting from the sun, it makes it harder to make the scene feel quite as three dimensional. A brazier or torch can cast a light that's brighter up close, and gradually fades as you get further away. But being ten meters further away from the sun has a tendency to not alter the amount of light your receive overly much.

That makes it especially annoying when characters have wildly different skin tones, and thus look good in different levels of brightness. Through wily tricks and lots of trial and error per scene, I do think I'm slowly getting the hang of it at least.

When was the thumbs-up invented anyway? Is it a modern thing? Am I being anachronistic?

Finished The Spear Cuts Through Water the other day, also finished Jade City which I was reading alongside it. I liked both of them quite a lot, for very different reasons. But didn't quite love either for the same reason.

That reason being that I didn't get entirely attached to the characters, which is a necessity for me to get properly invested into a story. It's a shame, because it's not that I thought the characters were bad. In fact, if I look at it objectively, I think both stories did well in that regard. Subjectively however, there's just something missing... I don't know quite what it is to be honest. Just a bit of pizzazz, perhaps.

Sidenote: pizzazz is an amazing word. Up there with mojo and zest.

Three familiar faces return. Again.

I wasn't really planning on having our three former bandits show up again. But recurring characters are fun, as long as they don't overstay their welcome. Bandit #2 is especially fun to write, but she's one of those characters that would for sure get tedious with too much time on the screen.

And that's the thing, isn't it? It's damned hard to write compelling, interesting, and believable characters, while also making them not tedious to read in the long run. In my creative writing courses it's been made clear to me that my main characters get mixed responses, while side characters that show up for just a few pages often get strongly positive reactions.

I think it has to do with that pizzazz, it's easy for a character to have some real interesting vibes, a unique mojo, when they only show up for a short stint. Keeping that up over the course of a story is exceedingly difficult.

So I think that's something I really want to work on, to manage to maintain something like that in a character for an entire work. An entire work being something along the lines of a novella.

Stupid fact of the day: In Swedish a novella is referred to as a novell, while a novel is called a roman. That can make discussions about books a wee bit confusing at times.

Anyway, that's about all I had today.

Thank you so much for your support, and I wish you a zesty week!