Malachite

Writer side of Cohost, how do you recover your motivation when you spend over an hour writing a scene only to realize you've written yourself into a corner and have to (and want to) rewrite the entire scene to go differently?

Under the cut: A meandering digression about the place I'm in writing-wise and how it frustrates me. Also people keep comparing my story/setting The Eating of Names to Warhammer 40k and I don't know how to feel about it.

Was bored and without internet for a couple hours the other day, so I decided to get some Ren'Py practice in by using my Elder Scrolls fanfiction as a script. Unfortunately, Ghaurug and Anushipal are much more long-winded than your average visual novel character, and I had no visual assets to work with, so I couldn't do character sprites. I tried to circumvent this by snipping up their dialogue a bit and using Ren'Py's novel mode and the monologue mode for the same, but it still rendered each chunk of text overlapping with the one above it... Which led to things like this happening. This also happened when I didn't use monologue mode. I'm fairly certain I did something incorrectly, but I'm not sure where I went wrong. Probably when I decided to use my verbose fanfic prose as a script to practice making visual novels with...

Text transcription:
Eventually, the silence stretching out between the two of them became too much to bear.
Ghaurug: "It's late, Anushipal. I'm going to pay for our rooms and then get some sleep. You ought to rest as well. Soon--likely tomorrow or the day after--I'll make a day trip out of obtaining a handwriting sample from Vlarimil Orius's estate, and then we'll have a lot of work ahead of us."
Anushipal said nothing to acknowledge him, and simply stood up from the bed and left the room.
End transcription.
The text is not vertically aligned very well, with the portion "Vlarimil Orius's estate, and then we'll have a lot of work ahead of us." overlapping with almost all of the portion "nothing to acknowledge him, and simply stood up from the bed and left the room." and making both portions difficult to read.

And I’m gonna do it because this is the one place where I feel like I can talk about the speculative evolution of life on rotating habitats and the writing system of a race of sapient octopi and the world building I use to explain how magic nukes create hyper magic dragons.

Just need to pick where to start.

As a Children of Time fan: PLEASE

I haven't heard of this before but now I definitely must read this. And...okay, going to go a bit more into the premise of that one first.

For the Speculative Evolution project: The idea behind this shares something in common with Children of Time. Basically, in this timeline, humanity developed the ability to build a proper dyson swarm of O'Neill and McKendree Cylinders and set a bunch of automatons to do it for them. And they did...and then didn't stop until basically every rocky body in the solar system that wasn't the Earth or the Moon had been converted into habitats, not to mention a bunch of heavier metals and hydrogen were pulled via fusion candle from the gas giants, and they even started the process of starlifting to slow down the sun's death and get even more heavy elements. This meant a population of about 10 trillion humans had living space for close to a quadrillion. So they filled a bunch of the excess ones with various animals and let nanites accelerate evolution by inducing benign mutations at a much higher rate than nature allows for. Then humans left earth behind entirely to let our planet heal, and they left many of those cylinders with accelerated evolution to just do their own thing. Not long after, poachers went onto one of those hyper evolved habitats, caught a disease they had no resistance to, and it spread so rapidly it forced humans to go into suspended animation until automated systems could find a cure.

It almost didn't work. Most of the suspended humans died. But once the disease was completely gone nanny robots started to create new generations of humans and introduce them into some of the habitats to let them form societies of their own, but taught them nothing of what their ancestors knew - and also let them contract nanites and start evolving as well.

Thousands and thousand of years later, a single ship of Original Humans who survived the suspended animation are awoken, and get to explore these trillions and trillions of artificial worlds as well as the abandoned Earth.

Life, uh...has found ways. Many ways. And some of that life has even evolved to take advantage of some of the zero gravity environments that exist in cylinders who stopped rotating, and some of that life is even sapient and has advanced cultures but since they were on artificial habitats, couldn't get what they needed to progress past the stone age, and the nanites have undergone their own evolution and in some cases have formed symbiotic relationships with animals and in others formed their own parallels ecosystems and in still others are the only life form on habitats that lost their air or in other ways became inhospitable.

There's so much fun to be had in that project.

Also you’re gonna fuckin love the Children of Time books. I haven’t read the third one yet myself~!

Holy shit I need to read more about this speculative project of yours, this sounds amazing and right up my alley!