In Review: A Fool's Goddess - Chapter Twenty

Greetings, you beautiful bastard. Here we are again, another Sunday of me looking over my past work in pursuit of good laughs and growth. Hope things are going well for you, or at least as well as one can hope during a quarantine.

I’m dandy as always, though I still haven’t gotten over my character crisis in Granblue Versus. I just can’t get myself to settle on any one character. I feel like I play Katalina the best, but I also want something a little less basic. Percival does that, but I’d need to work on keeping track of install stacks to do big-boy combos. Narmaya fixes that by swapping between two stances instead, but bouncing between styles mid-combo hurts my brain and my hands. Similar problem with Ladiva: I just can’t do a 360 input consistently on my Hitbox, so as much as I adore her character, I just can’t play her without swapping controllers and relearning almost everything. Thus, I’ve been sticking with Metera so far as I like being a zoning annoyance, her combos are easy to do and understand, and her personality is pretty damn funny.

But…I don’t particularly like any of her weapon or color palettes. Because of that, I can’t quite seem to commit to her.

Super fucking finicky, I know, but that’s the sort of guy I am, I suppose. Maybe it’s all just a sign that none of the presently available characters are truly for me, but I can’t help but keep looking for that one moment that’ll make me go, “Oh yeah, this is it!”

Here’s to DLC Pack 2, huh?

Other than my video game bullshit, I’m all good. I took a break from writing, but I’ll be starting the fourth draft of my latest novel tomorrow. Once that draft’s done, I’ll put ‘er on the cooldown again until the cover art is ready, but hopefully we’ll have it all properly preened and cleaned for your viewing pleasure within the next couple months.

So, since the future’s looking good, let’s tear into the past.

It says this in the post description, but this chapter marks the beginning of the story’s final act. Although it wasn’t how I initially planned it, A Fool’s Goddess ended up getting separated into three general sections: Lior as an apprentice, Lior as a fully-fledged sculptor, and Lior as a Master. Clean stages of growth partitioned by a vomit-inducing narrative tool.

The time-skip.

It’s been a long time, so pardon me if I’ve already gone over this, but, although I don’t think time-skips themselves are a bad thing, I’m actually quite dissatisfied with my use of them in this story. A time-skip is a good way to jump over empty space in a narrative and fast-forward to the interesting bits. This can be a few days, months, or, in my case, years, and so long as you give a decent explanation of what happened in the skipped time, they’re fine.

My problem comes from the fact that I did a major skip twice in this story. The first occurred shortly after Lior met Master Malka and was fine—I needed to get Lior up to a respectable skill level without boring people—but I can’t remember why I committed to the second skip. I’d guess it was so I could show Lior’s mountain sculpture in progress in a timely manner, but… Well, nothing I can do about it now. I just feel like I could have done this more elegantly somehow.

But, ignoring it’s unsightliness, the second time-skip does its job well. We’re able to move from Lior having just agreed to his deal with Tzofiya to being a full-fledged Master whose midway through proving his love for Tornara—all without needing another 100 pages. In that respect, I must begrudgingly admit that my past self made the right choice.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it! I-idiot!

More importantly, this chapter introduces a pair of new characters: Niv (“expression” or “fang” in Hebrew) and Libi (“my heart”), both of which are apprentices to Lior. The latter of which doesn’t get much screentime in this chapter, but I promise they’ll both get their bits down the line.

One of the things I’m always cautious of is writing too many characters into a story. I wanna credit it to Stephen King, but I remember reading somewhere that a good story can thrive on just two characters, typically your protagonist and antagonist. Most tales have 3-5 major characters, and there are plenty that work with dozens, though those are usually multi-volume series or 40+ hour RPGs. Then again, Kurt Vonnegut and Uchikoshi Kotaro seem to be able to toss any number of names or characters at you and still keep things comprehensive, so this could all be malarkey. Either way, I prefer to keep my casts smaller and more manageable.

I mostly got stuck on this concept because of a certain light novel I read. I’m not experienced enough as a writer to feel comfortable publicly calling it out (even on my own website) so I won’t share the title, but that novel had the problem of introducing half a dozen characters at a time, building to a cast of nearly twenty within fifty pages.

Twenty. Motherfucker, I can barely remember the names of everyone who works in my department, how the fuck do you expect me to give a shit about all these jobbers you just threw at me?

Granted, that novel had a myriad of other issues. An absolutely illogical setting, forced emotional tension, a bizarre fascination with using colors as a theme—I could probably shittalk it all day. The author did admit to his own greenness in the afterword, but it did nothing to salvage my interest. It is one of the few books I could not bring myself to finish, and it is also one of the biggest reasons I decided to become a writer.

Because if that crap could reach print, who’s to say my own garbage isn’t worth putting out there? As King did say—although I’m paraphrasing this—‘the two most important books you’ll read are the one that you’ll aspire to match and the one that you know you can outdo’.

I might not be there yet, but I firmly believe I can do better than that novel. And until I know that as a fact, I’ll keep pushing myself to improve.

Ah, but I digress. Let’s get back to the topic at hand.

My general point is that each name presented becomes information for your reader to maintain, so as a courtesy, a writer should avoid burdening people with unnecessary noise. As such, in my own work, I try to not have too many active characters at any given time, especially in conversational scenes. Back and forth is easy to write, but once you add a third character, you now need to take special care in denoting who is speaking so as to not confuse the reader. I also refrain from naming characters whose role is not significant enough to warrant such—though Tresety’s shaman is almost a reversal of that idea as he appears regularly despite how the lore dictates he has no name.

Another thing to keep in mind is that killing off a character does not necessarily remove them from the stage. Malka and Chen are still important to the story, though they’re more like concepts than characters after their deaths. In that sense, Master Idan suffered a more true demise; while he could very well be alive, he isn’t relevant to the rest of novel and devolves to a point of humor.

So, with all that in mind, I was cautious about adding Niv and Libi, but I did so to help establish Lior’s greater importance in the village and his growth as a master of sculpting. And as much as I love Hed, I don’t think I’d be able to hit all the story notes I’d want with just their banter. Adding in a stiff assistant and shy girl prodigy gives the studio more flavor and gives me more angles to work with.

Fun fact: there was originally a fourth apprentice. I’ve lost the name I gave him, but he was basically Hed’s childhood friend who also developed an interest in sculpting. I ended up removing him because he felt too similar to Hed and didn’t add anything to the story beyond being another name to follow. I think I got another four chapters in before I went back and removed him.

Don’t think I toss out this novice advice vacuously. It’s all shit I came to realize myself, usually after reading it from someone else and thinking I wouldn’t run into the same pitfalls because I’m a big dum-dum.

Other than that, I’d say I don’t have major issues with this chapter. It’s got the usual flaws I’m now skilled enough to see, but it does its job. Introduces the new characters, goes over what happened during the time-skip, and sets up for the future. Solid enough, I’d give it a C-, maybe C.

I am fond of that bit about Hed showing up hungover. It feels like a very ‘Hed’ thing, and having Lior play the boss was entertaining. It sort of illustrates how their relationship has both matured and remained as sarcastic as ever. In hindsight, I wish I included more scenes like this, but I wasn’t nearly as confident in my comedy back then.

And I think that about does it. Looking ahead, the next chapter is short, enough that I should have just rolled it into this one, so we’ll see how much I can blather on next time. But as always, I’ll find a way to fill the post. Worst case scenario, I’ll just bring up Final Fantasy 7 Remake. I kind of wanted to do that today, but after my Granblue tangent, I thought it’d be best to actually talk about the chapter.

I might be freewheeling here, but I got standards, you know?

Okey-zeme, that's all I got for now. Take care, drink your water, pick a top tier, and I’ll see you next week.

FINISH.