In Review: A Fool's Goddess - Chapter Fifteen

Good morning, ya’ll. There’s a good amount I’d like to explore in the associated chapter today, but I’ll start off with some unrelated shit because I’m too lazy to write up a separate post.

The main thing is that I finished the first draft of my next novel a week and a half ago. It’s a very different project from what I normally do, notably being a light novel instead of a traditional one, but I still had a lot of fun creating it.

The basic premise is a demon who can’t use healing magic aspires to become a healer in a modern-fantasy version of the gig economy. She eventually moves in with a scylla idol who gets canceled on Twitter, and the two endeavor to survive the terrors of overpriced rent, dumbass adventurers, and maybe some serious stuff. I’ve got a working title that I might stick with, but as I’m still not entirely confident in it, I hope you can forgive me for withholding that information for now.

It’s about half as long as I normally go for, but I think it worked as a fantastic lesson on pacing and necessity. It was also very interesting to study a cousin style to the novel and take in the differences. It still has all the maturity and immaturity I prefer, but it does have a greater focus on humor and comedy than my prior works—which turned out to be a lot harder than expected.

Now, although I usually prefer to wait a month before giving it a once over, I’ve actually started my first round of edits on that light novel right away. This is mostly because I ended up burning myself out a couple times during its writing, causing me to become afraid that the basic story didn’t have the tonal consistency I wanted. My problem was that I kept trying to make every day a ‘good’ day—one where I’d spend four hours writing after my day job—and stressing out when I couldn’t do that.

Obviously, that was incredibly stupid.

I don’t know how I got into that mindset, but I wish I could go back in time and kick my own ass. When I got serious about writing, I told myself that one hour a night was good, and I typically do two or three these days. Somehow, I decided that I didn’t need to relax and play video games or read or even sleep a decent amount so my mind and body eventually began to fail, leading to depression and fear about my creative endeavors.

I’m fine now, by the way. I’ve realized my own stupidity and am now actively working to maintain a healthier balance. I’ll definitely have to keep all this in mind when I start my next project, but for the next couple weeks or so, I plan to take it easy and stop myself the moment I begin to feel tired. Might not hit the efficiency levels I want, but I’ll take not dying in the process as a win.

I mean, what’s the point in doing four hours one night, burning out the next, and feeling miserable when I could just do two hours each night and remain sane?

But yeah—new novel done, hope to talk more about it soon. Once I finish that second draft, I’ll then be working towards finding an artist for the project. I plan to prepare some documents to help with their work so that’ll probably consume my time while I’m chilling.

And that wraps up Varnicrast’s personal shit. Thanks for hearing me out. Now then, let us taste of the chapter.

As far as structure goes, it’s pretty similar to the last one. Lots of dialogue, some descriptive shit, and a lot of punctuation styles that I now know were not done properly. I’ve said it a million times before, but goddamn do I wish I knew about proper quotations and ellipses use back then. I promise—I will go back and fix all this sometime in the future.

Ignoring that, however, I can say I’m still happy with the content of this chapter as a good chunk of it is close to my heart—mostly the stuff about creativity and understanding your own desires. I believe this was touched on back in Chapter Five, but seeing as Lior is now revisiting the subject as a journeyman and not a student, I’d like to cover it more thoroughly.

The first thing I’ll speak on is the fact that Lior is reluctant to call himself a master of sculpting. Though he’s been doing it for years and is clearly skilled, he hesitates in elevating himself to the same level as Malka. This is something I also feel in regards to labels that may apply to me, and some consider it a facet of Impostor Syndrome.

Basically, despite having written (and I use that term loosely to describe what led to A Fool’s Goddess) a novel, I do not feel I qualify as an “author” or a “writer”. I will describe myself as such as a way of quickly conveying what I do, but it feels wrong to lump myself under the same term as my favorite authors. I feel I have too much more to learn to share a label that belongs to the true masters.

Of course, many people will call themselves writers for doing much less, and I’m not trying to say they’re arrogant or incorrect. By definition, a writer is just someone who writes. The boundaries I’m describing are completely of my own design and I’m not nearly enough of an asshole to force someone else to meet my standards. My point is that I don’t feel I’m worthy of such titles yet.

Hopefully I’ll outgrow that sentiment one day.

Moving on, we then get a scene of Hed making his first attempts at sculpting, only to grow frustrated with his inability. I know plenty of people have gone through that feeling, and I was no different.

A couple years ago, I was churning out short stories to learn how to write like a half-competent chimpanzee, with one of my firsts being something called A Fleeting Desire. It’s a story about a man who discovers he has the ability to travel along and across infinite timelines, leading to him indulging in some of life’s simplest pleasures for centuries on end and doing other things a godly entity might enjoy. I think it ended up being like forty pages long and was a decent experiment.

However, I am unsatisfied with how that story turned out. Despite my vision for it, I could not forge that tale into what I wanted it to be—I simply lacked the knowledge and ability to do so, as uneducated as I was back then. My good buddy Steven assured me it was fine enough as it is, but I couldn’t accept A Fleeting Desire in the form I gave it. It wasn’t what I saw in my head, so like a heartless parent, I grew to despise it.

It still sits among my documents, untouched and unloved.

But, though I do not look back at that story proudly, it was one of the most valuable experiences I’ve ever had. The two stories I wrote prior to that left me feeling like I could do anything, so having to accept that I wasn’t some sort of unknown literary savant was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. As an ancestor of mine said, “Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.”

I cannot overstate how important it is to have humility—especially in writing. You have to exist outside of your own mind so that you can perceive your own creation with the eyes of a reader in order to reach the level of perfection those true literary gods achieve. So as much as it hurt to see my inability, I am eternally thankful for my attempt at A Fleeting Desire.

Frankly, I’d very much like to revisit that tale and the rest of my short stories one day—take the time to clean them up and put them together in a collection. I doubt that they’re very good, but perhaps they have value as lessons for other aspiring creators. It would probably be a good laugh for me at least.

But just like the young Hed, that failure was vital to helping me find my vision, the reason I want to write. As I’ve mentioned before, I got serious about writing due to the influence of Doki Doki Literature Club (I’m of the mind that the source of inspiration is inconsequential in the face of the motivation it has granted, but even a weeaboo like me understands how silly that title looks when you call it “influential”—especially to those who haven’t played it). However, it wasn’t until I hated something I created that I was able to figure out why I wanted to persist.

Normally, motivation can be an ephemeral thing. People get into fads or hobbies for a few months and drop them when they get bored. But seeing as I’ve been writing almost daily for two years now, there has to be more to it than ‘I wanna be like Dan Salvato’. Ultimately, feeling like I had failed as a writer forced me to ponder what got me going in the first place, and through that, I was able to see my own fire.

My reason for writing is that I want to repay this world for filling me with inspiration. It has become my dream to help others find their passions in the same way others helped me find mine.

As such, I’ve made it my goal to stain this world with the stories I want to see in it. No one else can write the novels I lug around in my mind, so it falls to me to make it happen. Subsequently, nothing would make me happier than finding out my stories are something someone else wanted to see as well, and that reading them drove them to create their own.

Doing so would mean I’d have fulfilled my dreams, though hopefully I wouldn’t decide to stop then and there. I’ve got a lot of tales to share, so future Peter better not be quitting anytime soon.

Admittedly, I also have the occasional daydream of finding great success, but I try not to indulge in such thoughts. Creating with the goal of becoming rich or famous is hollow and rarely finds its goal, so I try to focus on just writing whatever makes me happy. I’ve met some folk who think writing under such an un-entrepreneurial mindset is foolish, but if I wanted to see my name in lights, I’d be doing a lot less typing and a lot more cocksucking.

…Not to say that I do any cocksucking right now, that is.

Anyways, I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s important to think about why you want to write, draw, sculpt, or whatever. Even if your goal is simply to become famous, knowing your drive is vital to getting maximum enjoyment out of your work.

If you just want to draw big anime titties, do that. If you want to write about some dumbass who obsesses over a dead goddess, do it. Serve those fleeting desires. and you’ll find the motivation to keep at it. With any luck, you’ll make someone else happy in the process.

Alright, I think that about wraps up this chapter. Only other thing I’d mention is that Lior’s talk about the clay is meant to be symbolic of his opinion about Tresety village in general, but I’m only pointing that out here in case it wasn’t obvious enough in the story. Peter the Novice tries really hard to be subtle, often to the point of invisibility, so I’ll pull down the curtain this once.

When we next meet, I’ll have finally gotten my hands on Granblue Fantasy Versus, so you can expect a couple paragraphs on my feelings about being a baby fighting game player alongside the review. Maybe I’ll even find some way to align it with what happens in the chapter—who knows.

Okay, I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s updates and anecdotes. Quite a chubby article today, despite not having much chapter-y content, but I do love my rambling. Hope it made you happy as well.

Enjoy your week, my dearest reader.