December 10, 2023

The irony of these update blogs is that it used to be named The Daily Current without it being updated daily, lmao, so I decided to just rename it to: The Current. Anyhow, let's get to today's volume.

I have been less active on here than I'd like to be. I've been feeling a little down, and the lack of interaction with my stories contribute to that massively. I'm starting to doubt whether I should even be giving too much attention to them. As of now I'm thinking of multitude of ways to promote and widen their reach, but then I start asking myself, am I being overbearing? Is this too much...for a fic? But that's the thing: I don't see them as just fics. In fact, I do revere my works in the same way I would an original fiction. And they are that, in more ways than one. I guess I'm just going to wait for them to gain traction organically, instead of driving myself insane asking questions I don't have the answers for.

In the same vein of trying not to drive myself insane: I wonder if I can do this more often, you know, talk about my works and the behind the scenes of them. I need to vent my frustrations and share my excitement. It's healthier, right? But you know how they say don't talk about your plans, because they tend to not get finished? Maybe I'm just a very secretive/private that I just don't do that anyway, or that I just don't know what to say. Honestly, I think I just feel silly talking about these things one-sidedly. 

But for the sake of trying, allow me to raise a thinkpiece: I think this is only because I'm actually delving deeper into writing, and treating my works more as actual novels rather than just fanfics. I've always wanted to write one, and fics are a good place to practice, but when I started to plan more, and make the plots more intricate and give the characters more than just their idol counterparts' personalities, I started to see that these actually do take a lot of work and effort to bring to life. Not saying that this isn't the case for fics, it just tends to be more self-serving and for leisure, and that's good too. But take this as an example: the character of Minghao in Blackmouth, called Howie, now has more depth than I would picture Minghao in a fanfic with Blackmouth's plot. And what I mean by that is that he isn't just made to fit into the mold of a character I made him to portray, but that there are more nuances and subtleties that aren't always visible, but drives the character's motivations and influences their actions whether they are explicitly expressed in the story or not. Howie is a thinking, living being, and even I get to ask him what he would do in the situations I put him in. And that applies to other characters as well. It's fun, but also, kind of bizarre. Again, it's a lot of work, but it's an interesting look into creative writing and my own personal journey with it.

And on the topic of personal journey, I would just like to say, I do have a lot of WIP stories that I should also be putting the effort into bringing about, but I do have a terrible case of scatterbrained-ness that I wish I could focus on multiple things at once, and work on multiple stories at the same time, but I just get overwhelmed that I only end up hating working on them instead. I'm figuring out how I can navigate these issue, so that in the (near, hopefully) future I can finish ongoing stories first before I start new ones.

Before I forget, I also changed the names of the characters that I talked about in the first volume, lol. I came across a scriptwriting tip that advised against naming characters with the same first letters, and you know how many A characters I have in Nevergod. Now it's minimum of 2 same first letters, since there are a lot of them. I wonder if having a lot of characters in a fic factors as a deterrent for readers to not click on them or read further, but eh, that's just the same problem as wondering whether the stories are good enough or not. The answer will always be: they are good actually, and the number of characters won't take away from the quality of my stories, so, again, I'll just wait for them to garner the attention and appreciation they deserve. 

Well, you've reached the end of this volume. I don't know if this is going to be a more regular thing. I don't usually have a lot to say anyway. But we'll see. Thank you for reading The Current! Be sure to check out my stories as well. Have a nice day. <3