Rolfe's Ramblings

Howdy, folks! I'm going to show you some fanart.


I cannot begin to express how proud I am of this image. The pose is pushed to a ridiculous degree. The lineart is varied and interesting. The fonts... could probably still use improvement but they're much better than before.

I developed a bad habit growing up of thinking that I had to spend a bunch of time on a piece to get it right, and if I messed up in anything beyond the sketch stage, there was no going back.

I'll be honest: I knew this was a bad way to think! I had art teachers and how-to-draw books up the wazoo telling me to redo pieces I wasn't proud of. But with few exceptions I refused to do it. I was on a really high horse about art being a "sacred window" into the feelings you had at the time. Redoing it felt pointless, since you'd have different feelings doing the piece a second time.

I felt the same way about writing for just as long. If I started a story and it didn't "feel right," even if I still wanted to write the story, I'd just stop and write something totally different until I landed on something that was easier to write. 

Folks... this is the fastest way to make sure you don't improve.

I'm serious.

Turns out it's better to think of redoing a piece as a part of the editing process, not "starting from square one." A lot of times when you initially write or draw something, you're kind of just dumping your thoughts out onto the paper or screen. There's a real stream-of-consciousness effect where you might overlook a lot of elements that aren't working with your vision. 

Letting an image or story or song percolate for a few days and then looking at your piece with fresh eyes is vital to improvement. After a few-days break you start to forget the fine details of what you created. This is good! When you come back to it, you end up seeing a lot of errors and things you'll be unhappy with if you post it. In the case above, this meant starting the image over entirely because I wasn't happy with the base pose itself. In other cases, you can just chop up and edit those initial first thoughts until they reform into something cool.

When I write novels, I almost always have to rewrite my first chapter. I tend to info dump or write something that's irrelevant to the plot because I'm still getting a feel for what the characters are like and what mood the story should have, and this is a really common problem among authors. The best way to fix it is to step away from Chapter 1 for a week or so and then go back to it as if it was a piece you didn't write. This helps you pick out all the stuff that doesn't meet your standard of writing and get rid of it. Oftentimes this means erasing the first chapter entirely. (And, of course, you can do this for later chapters, too.)

But wait, there's more!

After a lot of this kind of revisions you start to pick out your more typical mistakes. Knowing them well means you can head them off in future projects, and you end up making better content quicker and with less revision time. Spiffy indeed!

I've learned to really love the revision stages because I like seeing my art and writing slowly form into the best that it can be. There's something fun about seeing something that looked "meh" become something that I want to show off to others.

(I'm apparently the odd one out here, but I even love editing my writing because I get all excited every time I think of a better sentence than what I had before...)

Anyhow, that's my piece for today. Hopefully it helps someone else out!

CW: Brief mentions of abuse by medical personnel 

(You can let out the breath you didn't know you were holding; I'm not talking about the current issues with the NaNo forum)

In October I got some sleep studies done. To nobody's surprise, I have a severe case of sleep apnea, so severe that the sleep tech actually told me it was like I wasn't actually sleeping at all because I kept choking on my own passageways. The result was a CPAP machine.

Ten years ago my dad was prescribed a CPAP machine and he hated it. It was too loud for him to sleep with, and the mask (which wrapped around his entire head) kept him up all night. So of course I had my reservations about the whole thing! But it turns out CPAP technology has progressed a fair bit in the last decade. The machine makes absolutely no noise when it's on and there are mask styles that don't make you feel like you're stuck in a cranium cage because you can sleep on your side while wearing them. 

Where am I going with this? Well, it's been a game changer for my productivity. My previous two NaNo attempts went the same way. I'd make quota the first day, then slip off because I was just too tired to put any words onto the paper. The fact that I got 13000 words down both years felt like a miracle writing feat. 

With the CPAP machine I no longer feel like I'm on the verge of collapsing. I don't feel like I'm going to throw up half the day and I don't get these waves of debilitating exhaustion where I have to lay down and take a nap immediately because I can't function. The result is making (and often surpassing) quota in a timely manner. I hit 5,000 words in the first 48 hours!

You'd think this would feel great, instead it just feels weird. The last time I was able to sit down and just get lost in writing for a long stretch, I was a scrawny 17 year old writing a vaguely racist YA novel about ninjas in America fighting demons called "Shadows." (Actually, I'd kind of like to make an improved version of that book at some point. There were a few cool ideas in there that I'd like to revisit.) That was 2009. Fourteen years ago! 
To say that I thought I'd never go back to that level of productivity is an understatement. The last year of high school was a crazy productive time for me. I was working on a book, a comic series, and an animated cartoon short that ended up being five minutes long--and all I had to make it with was Windows Movie Maker and MS Paint.

Then I went through a traumatic disaster at the beginning of 2010. The short version was that I rapidly fell to rock bottom due to untreated bipolar disorder (at the time my symptoms were so atypical that doctors didn't realize they were related to manic-depressive swings) and then was abused by hospital staff for a full month with no way to leave. I'll save the full story for another post when I have the energy to talk about it.

The takeaway is that I never went back to my teenage productive rate. After being discharged I kept getting bounced from medication to medication as "experts" tried to figure out how to treat my unusual symptoms. It wouldn't be until 2020 where I got properly diagnosed (THANK YOU DR. DUFFY) and actually reached a stability point where I could start to get my creative life back in order. Even then, the constant exhaustion I felt from poor sleep quality meant I couldn't make art at the pace I wanted to.

I really thought that the reason I couldn't keep up my art pace was because I was getting old. And I think that's a huge problem with the millennial generation; a lot of us, for whatever reason, tend to view aging from a teenager's perspective where if you're over 21 you're "old" and 30s is "ancient" because you're smack dab in the parental age range, and parents are uncool. (Side note: "rizzler" is absolutely the funniest tween/teen slang word of the year) Lots of people I could have gone to school with (myself included) complaining about easily treatable aches and pains as if they're chronic.

I'm starting to wonder how many of these "constantly exhausted because of my old age" people just need to get a sleep study done. Sleep Apnea is pretty common.

Sweet dreams, Popeye.

All in all, I feel like I've been given a second chance at being a creative entrepreneur, and I intend to take it this time. 25k words so far on my NaNoWriMo and I'm not even breaking a sweat. Hooray for being awake!

Anyhow, it's my day off and I want to go nuts doing art and music while I have the extra time. For now, here's this morning's illustration of Screwy the Gremlin, the unconventional love interest of my NaNoWriMo 2023 venture.

This is just me rambling to get some content on my blog to show that I haven't given it up, but I sometimes wish being a pantser writer was more predictable.

When I wrote Fated Maids and the Royal Slug, my characters sprung from my mind onto the page almost completely fully formed. There was no period where I decided which traits to give who, there was very little in tweaking their physical designs, and all in all coming up with situations to put my beloved Milky-Maids in was smooth sailing, once I convinced myself to sit down and write the chapters.

My next project, a novella, is technically my "previous" project -- I've written the entire thing and edited it many times, it just needs to see a professional editor at this point. But when I started writing it during the tail end of 2020 (yowza, has it been that long!?) I had a very hard time characterizing one of the lead supporting characters. I had no trouble coming up with the physical design; much like my maids he'd just sort of tumbled out of my pen and onto the tablet touchscreen. But personalitywise I drew a blank. I tried writing test dialogue with him but he turned out too childlike for a character who was supposed to be in his early 30s, and even if I "aged up" that kind of personality, it didn't mesh -- or harmoniously contrast -- the loud and outgoing personality of his best friend. 

Then one day, while I was browsing stock music for video projects, I found a niche psychedelic comedy track that was unlike any song I'd heard before. I thought to myself, "This is the kind of thing you'd hear off of a weird vinyl you took a chance on at the thrift shop."

And that did it. Suddenly in my mind was the image of my normally laid-back character jabbering away with his best friend about possible interpretations of the lyrics to a song nobody but them knew, like a grown-up geek version of a secret club code.

The rest of the character flowed easily from there. He became an artist, a toker, a kind soul but a bitter critic at the same time. And it all fits together naturally, I think.

I'm sure at this point some of you are thinking this is a brag about how easily I can come up with ideas, but it's really me expressing complete confusion. I honestly don't know what causes some characters to just appear all at once after months of puzzling over traits that just don't feel right.

There's this gag in Arthur where the titular character lies to his best friend Buster about coming up with a song really quickly (in actuality he copied it off of something his sister DW made up). Buster says something along the lines of, "That must be how all great art is made! Nothing, nothing, then, out of nowhere... something beautiful." I figure it's supposed to be a joke, but with certain characters -- sometimes entire short stories! -- it really does all just appear at once. That includes music, too -- Drink Me In! (the theme song for Fated Maids) appeared vividly in my head when I was nowhere near a computer and I had to loop it over two dozen times in my head so that I wouldn't forget it before I had a chance to write it down.

Which brings me back to the first point in this post... yes, sometimes I get these whirlwind inspirations where the creative process is smooth sailing. And then the rest of the time... nothing. Zilch. Nada. I stare at blank screens and everything I write turns out wrong, or it'll be decently written but the characters feel "off," or the story derails and goes somewhere it doesn't need to (infodump ahoy!). 

Then, after months, I'll find that "one thing..." and be off to the races again... 

...which is very bad when you're supposed to be pumping out steady content! The world is not fond of "one big burst every six months," I suppose.

I highly suspect this is an ADHD focus thing but can't be sure. If it is, I guess it can only be controlled by more coffee.

(Did you know caffeine is in the same drug class as Ritalin? But much tastier and safer to mix with other meds.)

Hey, Dreamwidth! It's good to be back, even though I'm pretty sure nobody's reading this stuff. This is just a quick entry with no fancy GIFs because I wanted to make sure I still looked active.

Imagine my delight when I was able to drum up 11 ARC READERS this month for Fated Maids and the Royal Slug! I realize this is small potatoes compared to other ARC teams in the three figures, but honestly, I'm surprised I have a team at all, especially considering the book itself got insta-dungeoned due to Amazon's new, stricter rules for hiding adult content. Word from the wise, you must have "view adult content" enabled AND be searching specifically in the Kindle eBooks category in order to find steamy books nowadays. Yes, I expect Amazon will be receiving a lot of pushback for this.

Over the last week or so the reviews have begun to roll in, and I couldn't be happier with the love that's already being shown for my humble little book about maids with big boobs. I'll admit that I keep refreshing my email at times hoping that another will have appeared. It's not just about getting praise and inflating your own ego, it's about knowing someone not only took the time to read through your entire book and ended up loving it. It makes you feel like you did a good job and that maybe you've got a shot at this author thing after all. At least, that's how I see it.

I also set my book preorder price to 99 cents in hopes of getting a bit of pocket money. Sadly, TikTok has not decided to open its collective wallet for me. This is partly because I haven't been making TikTok videos, I presume. 

In any case, for those of you who are browsing blog entries today, you can find my book at tinyurl.com/FATEDMAIDS

Quick blog post before I turn in for the night. It's been a lazy day and I couldn't go to work due to medical issues, so I spent most of the day napping and messing around with chatbots instead of being productive.

Those of you following my TikTok may have already heard the good news--I've sent my book to an editor! I found her on Fiverr which, as many know, can be hit or miss especially with editing related matters on a site saturated by ESL listings and scammers. But this particular seller offered what any good editor would: a complimentary sample edit of the first 1000 words. I was pleased with the results I got from her and, when pitted against several other editors, she had the second most professional editing technique. (The top spot was for someone who was sadly out of my budget)

So the book is currently being picked apart and scrutinized. I know I'll be depressed for a few days once I see all those red marks on the pages, but it will be well worth it when I'm able to provide a better finished novel for my readers.

And, if this editor is as good as I suspect she is, I'll likely give her a recommendation post here as well. SEO bump!

This entry involves a lot of thought-dumping but I felt I had to get something down, at least.

A long time ago, back when my age probably still ended in -teen, I found a recipe for Yeto's Superb Pumpkin and Goat Cheese soup on a blog called The Geeky Chef. This recipe appeared years before the "official" Nintendo version. Comments resassured me that it was very good.

But I hesitated. First of all, the recipe was supposed to take hours--my stomach is notoriously impatient. Second, it contained pumpkin and goat cheese, which, while game-accurate, was a combination of two foods I'm not really fond of.

Still, my curiosity kept returning to the soup every time I had a Zelda phase. Yesterday, after over 12 years of putting it off, I decided to make it.


I've noticed that in a lot of my more recent works I've shied away from coming up with new foods in my stories and have stuck to familiar American foods (or, rather, Americanized foods) like burgers, salad, pasta, etc. I think I'll try to change that for my next story.

Now that I think about it, I already did come up with a huel-like drink for my hero Captain Honeycomb, so maybe I'm on the track to food creativity after all.

For anyone who wants to try making this scrumptious soup, the recipe is here: www.geekychef.com/2008/12/yetos-superb-pumpkin-and-goat-cheese.html

Quick entry tonight because I want to get this down for the record before anyone accuses me of anything stupid.

One of the main tropes in my work is transformation. In fact, when it comes to my novels and novellas, I don't have a single one that does not include my main character involuntarily changing into a nonhuman being. This has been one of my favorite tropes my entire life and I don't think people utilize it nearly enough outside of horror circles and the fetish community.


Then the early 2010s came along, and there was this awful trend of using my favorite trope as a way of indicating to an audience that people of color were subhuman. Specifically, the implication was that in order for black characters to be palatable to a white audience, they had to appear in an animal, alien, or otherwise less-than-human form for the majority of the film so that we didn't have to look at their blackness.

This is not a message I want anyone to read into my work.

I don't stand by racism and never have. Transformation, for me, is a way for me to play with ideas of what it means to be human and what it means to become a better version of yourself. So my main characters stay white in order for me to preserve my intended messages, and the supporting cast instead becomes my canvas for expressing the diversity of people I have known.

(Next time I'll probably talk about Sesame Street music again because why not?)

After much internal debate, I think I'm going to ramble a lot about how my gaming-drenched childhood influenced the kinds of stories I write today. 

There was this fear when I was a kid that if someone played too many games, they'd lose most of their language prowess from disuse. It was a myth my parents believed firmly, despite young me gravitating towards text-dense games. To put into perspective just how much my love of reading influenced the way I played, I would walk around in Paper Mario every day for weeks with no intent of actually beating the game. I just wanted to read all of Goombario's dialogue. He had an entire paragraph of unique flavor text for every individual character and every individual segment of the map (and occasionally some of the objects, too). For a kid who loved to learn and read, Goombario just made sense. For every other player, he was probably a useless little chestnut to ignore forever as soon as Bombette joined the party.
 

Chatty Chestnut Child

Paper Mario had a positive impact on the way I write dialogue in my prose, and to this day I cite it as some of the most skillful dialogue writing in gaming history. But there is another game that impacted my writing in a much bigger way.

Backstory first: my earliest experiences with video games were "restricted." Mom allowed me to play games using my teenage brothers' consoles, but I had to promise not to save over their files. So, because I couldn't start my own file to see the game from the beginning, I didn't realize that some games were story based. (My earliest experience was a Pac-Man arcade machine and a few rounds of Super MarioKart...not exactly lore heavy!) 

This restricted gaming worked out well with the platformers my brothers liked to play. It was fun to hop from area to area and simply challenge yourself to beat different levels at my own pace. Donkey Kong Country quickly earned a spot in my heart.

It worked out less well with games where watching the story is necessary for experiencing the game. As a result, for a long time I thought Ocarina of Time was an open world game... lots to explore, loose plot that could be ignored most of the time. I couldn't make sense of the Temples at all. It was only when I rented a copy from Blockbuster for myself out of curiosity ("but Mylo, we have that game at home") that I discovered an entire new layer I hadn't seen before. Enamored by this new idea of stories and games combined, I'd rent Ocarina of Time every chance I could, just to see how far I could progress before returning it.

And I was awful at it. It took over two months for me to realize I had to light the spiderweb on the floor on fire to get to Gohma and I'm sure I'm forgetting other dumb stuff I did too.

As you might expect, I made lots of fan art and cute little kid fan fiction about the game, even a guidebook called I Am a Kokiri. Then Majora's Mask came out, and I knew from just the first ten minutes of playing that this was going to be an adventure I'd never forget.

First off, the game started with a character undergoing an involuntary transformation into a nonhuman being. Metamorphosis in general is a fantasy trope which has fascinated me for my entire life and continues to appear in most of my work to this day. The back of the box promised even more of it, and the fact that the NPCs reacted differently to the different forms you could take was like direct shots of dopamine to my brain.

The game also revolved around masks, a mostly-cosmetic item from the first game that I was very fond of. I love masks in general, and by extension all sorts of costumes. Some of the masks looked hysterical on Link, others made him look cool, and there was nothing I wanted to do more than fill every slot on that Mask subscreen. I'm still amused by the way the "sexy" Great Fairy head looks on Links little body. 

The biggest surprise--and the most welcome one--was the elevation of the Deku. In Ocarina of Time, Deku Scrubs--which are like Octopus/Ent hybrids--were a simple projectile-spitting baddie within the Deku Tree. The Business Scrub variant (much taller!) appeared in a few hidden locations and sold overpriced items upon defeat, while Mad Scrubs (more aggressive) guarded the entrance to the Forest Temple.

I loved them from the instant I saw them thanks to their cute appearance. What captured my imagination most was that, unlike the other monsters in the game... they talked!

At some point early in my childhood--too early for me to remember exactly when--I became fascinated by "henchman" characters in cartoons. It was partly because I identified with them--they weren't pretty or "perfect" like the hero characters. They were often loudmouthed and clumsy. And they did things that got them into big trouble. (I was a troublemaker!) It was probably because of this internal identification that they seemed like "missed opportunities" storywise. I started looking at these characters differently and wanting to know... what was their culture like? How often did they train? When they weren't making trouble, what did they do all day? What kinds of foods did they eat? What games did they play? In the case of things like Koopas or Kremlings, were there enough of them to fill an entire city, or just a small village?

Tangentially related, there's a fantastically stupid episode of Chalk Zone that covers the "rigorous" training of big bad Skrawl's minions, the Beanie Boys. It even explains why they all look alike. Am I happy this content exists? You betcha.

Giving villainous characters any sort of three-dimensionality wasn't typically on the mind of most children's creators at the time, so I had to just make things up to quench my thirst for "minion content." With Majora's Mask, my prayers were answered for the first time!

Nintendo brought me a shrubbery in the best way possible. The Deku were finally given their own agency as a race of swamp-dwellers in Termina, with their own Royal Family and even a butler with a deeply tragic secret. Not only that, Link's Deku Scrub form turned them into a playable race--completely unprecidented! This was a huge leap from the Deku's inclusion as one-and-done enemies in Ocarina of Time. I'm not sure what posessed Miyamoto and the Zelda dev crew to decide to develop such an unusual enemy into a full-blown people, but I've never once complained about it. It's a bit of a pity they've been shelved for the fan-favorite Koroks... but I like those, too.

Setting the Deku aside, many years after getting Majora's Mask I dusted it off as a teenager to try to finally beat the game. When I did, I discovered a somber story, but not one that was so bleak that it was without its humor. It touched on a lot of mature themes that I'd missed as a kid--for instance, it not only depicted the looming threat of the moon, but showed the way each character coped (or didn't cope!) as it got closer, even with a lot of blink-and-you'll-miss-it content hidden in those last five minutes. Even the "recycled" content like character models are built upon with brand new animations much livelier than the ones in Ocarina of Time, with Link's model given a huge makeover with new animations that showcase his skills as a hero carried over from his last adventure. The game is so rich in both content and story, especially in its dialogue, that I consider it Nintendo's masterpiece.


Majora's Mask is the kind of story I aspire to create: one that has an underlying darkness underneath all the whimsical characters and upbeat music, one that gets darker as the story progresses, and one that still has its happy ending despite it all.

I don't think I'm skilled enough to write this kind of story yet.

But I'd like to be.

So to go back to my original point, I love story-heavy games and everyone who told me I couldn't improve my storytelling by playing video games is a closed-minded dummy and that's that.

(Phew... I think I'll try to write a shorter post next time.)