Hey, you! I need your help!
The first draft of my ongoing project, Paranormal Accounts (PA), is almost complete! I'm super close. At least, writing wise. And then I need to revise the text, maybe multiple times. And make all the media elements. So basically, I'm super close!
Because of this, I've put up the entire first half of the segment - the linear portion, before things start getting really weird. Here's where you come in:
I would really appreciate some feedback! Not even high-concept professional writing advice, *necessarily*, just whether you liked a certain moment, or if one of the stories felt kinda boring to you, or how you reacted to some of the mysterious elements (or if my website code is buggy). It's just not possible for me to read my own work from the perspective of a reader.
Yeah, I know it can feel awkward to offer advice on somebody's piece of art. You don't really get anything out of it. Trust me, anything you say will be doing me a favor. So, at the bottom of every PA page, I've added a temporary link which you can use to provide anonymous feedback.
If you give any feedback, thanks! If you just read what I've written, I'll really appreciate it! If you're not going to read it... then... I'm honestly a little shocked you're still reading this, honestly.
Oh, we're here again.
This is the section of the blog where I will once again try to talk about my own piece of art in a way that is informative or entertaining to you, the reader. (Sometimes I think everything I do warrants a feedback form.)
So far in the process of writing PA, I've learned a few things.
It's obviously difficult to foreshadow a story if you aren't sure how exactly things will play out. What I didn't expect to struggle with in the same way: characterization. How different characters act and speak. Most characters in PA don't show up more than once, but many of them need to reveal character details about the Host, who shows up quite a few times.
Everything in a single page of PA kind of needs to serve a double purpose. I want each poetic piece to stand on its own, telling its own story and communicating its own themes, but they also all need to have throughlines into the main story, connecting somehow to you, Ruse, or the Host. It's a puzzle I am not yet good at solving... but that's fine. At any given point, I would rather prioritize the mood and the effect of separate pieces as they are. That's more important for this project, I think, than stringing them together. For now, we'll shoot for both happening, and temper our expectations.
That's another one of the challenges, actually. Learning when to say yes or no to my own ideas is a skill I will probably never ever master. It's helped me to try and shape themes, or come up with guiding concepts, and try to play around with them as much as possible. For example, most of the pages start as a single sentence that I'll then try to build around, make feel impactful. For the host's introduction, the sentence was, "we are here to tell their stories." For the UFO story, it was, "After I saw it, everything changed." Actually, *that* sentence didn't even make it into the current revision of the story. It wasn't necessary anymore, so I deleted it forever. Pro tip: delete unnecessary text. Don't hold onto it in any way. If you need it later, you will find it again.
And now, for something completely different.
Animated text! I honestly have a lot of fun writing the front page updates, so I wanted to add more ways to be expressive with text. Here are the styles:
Everything's just gravy.
You did WHAT!?
oh fiddlesticks
Don't tell, but I was already using this style.
The animating was honestly really easy. It's just three steps: Down, up, down. Then, they each have their own animation speeds. It wasn't all smooth sailing - getting each letter to move at an offset is sooo cumbersome. If you don't believe me, just hit Ctrl + U and look for yourself. Basically, every single letter needs its own giant box to sit in so it knows when it should start moving. I could probably make it really easy with an automated javascript on a more dynamic web host than Neocities, but... Not today, thank you. This was confusing enough.
You see the vision. You get the picture. Please open your eyes.
OK, that's all for this week! I'd love to add more, but I keep becoming busy in real life. It's fantastic. Enjoy the start of Paranormal Accounts, and I'll see you soon!