Annabelle Aesthetics—

Aesthetic Collection/Blog for upcoming supernatural-scifi book(?) series Death's Bounty. Run by TheVertigoMaster and TheRailz

[deaths-bounty]

Oh shit, this blog is still here (6-1-25)

Still working on this book series, if you can believe it. Currently gradually grinding away at it in-between both a somewhat demanding day job and the rewarding trials of being a new stepdad. Last year I got book one's chunk of the story demarcated out into an actual self contained narrative arc, finally! We have a solid feasible target for the first release. We also have act 1 fully drafted, and it's been revised and edited enough that I no longer want to vomit when reading it, so that's nice. I just still need to write the prose for the rest of the first book, for the most part.

Looking like 5ish acts so far? For book one, at least. With how stuff is shaping up we're realistically look at more of a saga than a trilogy, but I have no many books we're looking at. Maybe 4, maybe 5, idk. Hell, maybe I'll end up cutting most of it for side stories and it'll deflate into something more digestible. We've made a huge universe for this—so much so that I have been designing a Powered By the Apocalypse TTRPG within the setting (currently with a prototyped ruleset combining bits of Impulse Drive and Monster of the Week), and my indie game project (a 4x strategy/(Action) RPG Space Opera "simulator" game that may or may not ever see the light of day) is slated to use the setting's mythos and lore as a quick piggybacking point. Realizing I've spent the past several years in drafting hell, unlearning all the crap I had learned in school in order to just write an effective narrative instead of a college paper or a flowery english lit assignment. I'm unlearning the rules and discovering how instead use them as tools, which is helping a lot. I'm just writing all the shit down and trying to ignore it until we've written it all, at which point we will finally have a rough draft. Winter's Guardian was such a pain to write (fun, but a pain) because I was insistent on it coming out perfect the first time, likely contributing to the burnout 2/3s in (that and me discovering the inherent woes of writing and releasing a serialized narrative as you go)

-|- Also found a fun toy that's been helping - if you're an Obsidian fan, check out the Longform plugin; was built for screenwriting but it works well for any kind of narrative work, honestly.

The most help part has been that it makes it very easy to instead break your story up into scenes or whatever chunks you want, not necessarily chapters, and then makes it super easy to organize, nest, and otherwise rearrange those segments. There's also a "compiler" that you can set rules in for how to automatically compile your scenes into a manuscript, so you can have it automatically cut out metadata headers, footnotes, links, etc.

That, Canvases, and my beloved typewriter plugin have been helping a lot.

[muresetivoire]

Sorry babe, the thigh garter holding my daggers stay on during sex

[thestuffedalligator]

My favourite type of movie is “period piece romance but fantasy-horror hijinks happen and now everyone has to adapt to the new genre or die,” ala Curse of the Black Pearl, Anastasia, The Mummy (1999)

[kyraneko]

"everybody has to adapt to the new genre" is really criminally underutilized in general

[ampervadasz]

[uncle-beanbag]

That jump is the funniest shit

[cutecutejames]

it took me a LONG time to work out that this is “life on a boat” and not like, “physics just said fuck you today”

[syanah]

So THAt’s what sailors mean by sea legs

[argumate]

something about reference frames

[sindri42]

there’s a reason traditional sailing vessels had hammocks instead of bunk beds.

[deaths-bounty]

Akari on left, Lucas on right Autumn in the sling

[tikkety-tok]

Which one was your favourite?

[deaths-bounty]

3.14.21 Status Update

Going well so far. The perspective changes are working, the writing is feeling more natural, and it even spawned some nice Hannas banter in the middle of another chapter.

I need to review Arc 1 again at some point to determine whether these changes need to be made there as well.

Chapter 14 is in pretty good shape and I have some vague ideas for what to do in a spot between it and the old chapter 15, which is pretty much being scrapped. Some of those scraps may find their way back in but I'm revising the whole approach while reconsidering the whole angle of it from a broader plot perspective. There are other mission candidates that might prove to be better openers. They'd also be strategically simpler, which makes inserting Akari into them a more believably sound decision.

This is all quite vague, I know, but a lot of the details are just up in the air.

Progress is being made though, and the perspectives have given me additional insight and awareness into some of our characters that should help propel the story onward, as well as a new perspective in general, with the idea of being aware of the set of core perspectives being cycled between at different points of the story, allowing various character arcs to come and go from particular character perspectives.

[deaths-bounty]

Defining Akari (and mastering 3rd Person)

Some time ago, we made the decision to scrap Akari’s multiple personas. I prob made a blog post about it here. Don’t remember. 

Anyway, I’ve been revisiting her characterization after realizing I never really confronted what she turned into after that big decision; it was the aspect that was used to drive her, the way I would write her motivations and thoughts and drive her to act, and now, in its place, was nothing more than a vague idea.

As always, these development note posts will inevitably contain some spoilers, so read at your own risk!

Upon taking the time to break down what she had become, I was surprised to discover that she had almost become something of a self-insert, which I found particularly funny because way way back near the start of this project, over half a decade ago, her love interest was originally a self insert before eventually getting rebuilt from the ground up as an actual character with some interesting characteristics.

So, after some thought and analysis of other chapters I had already written, I came up with the following character description:

Akari is a polite young woman whose greatest strengths are her empathy, ingenuity, and stubbornness. She’s also headstrong, and can be reckless, especially when she’s decided that combat or brute force is the way to go for a situation. 

She’s naturally curious, which is serendipitous, given her amnesia. She wonders at everything, but can tend to stick to her initial judgments of things. 

She’s a force of nature. Be it in trying to encourage a loved one, to make her point, to stand up for herself, or to get out of someplace, she’s relentless and powerful and not afraid to make a mess, though she’ll likely feel contrite about it afterwards. She has a temper that isn’t always in check, but she can also be the sweetest thing if in a good mood. 

Much of this came to the forefront of my attention when my cowriter, @therailz​, and I were discussing strategies for making the prose less stiff. We came to the conclusion that it was because I was still approaching it like a script, a neutral 3rd person omniscient narration (albeit with information hiding) which attempted to show everyone's perspective, and as such never really connected with any one character or felt grounded in any way. It was a third-party observer, existing outside of the scene and relaying the experience as opposed to being the experience.

This wasn’t so difficult in the earlier chapters, particularly the first arc, but I think that's also because those chapters never really had more than two or three active characters per scene, and it was one or two on average. It wasn’t hard to handle, and, on top of that, it was mostly from Akari’s perspective anyway for various reasons; Lucas was still this mystery-shrouded figure who we didn’t know well, and the best way to make a character seem mysterious is to not disclose their thoughts or motives, just what little we can see from the outside, and thus, we have a 3rd person narrative told from and colored by a single perspective.

Once we hit Arc 2, however, the dynamic shifted drastically, into one that might be the case for much of the rest of the narrative. There’s now a varied and colorful cast of characters, most of whom all know and interact with each other together. There were so many names and people to introduce, nicknames and inside jokes and all manner of things necessary to understanding the way they naturally interacted with one another, and I didn’t want to miss anything; unlike the earlier case with Lucas’s mystery, I wanted to convey everything, all at once.

When you put it that way, it’s no wonder it became such a mess. So far, chapter 15, the most recent one and one which I've been most concerned about, features seven characters for most of the chapter’s duration, seven characters with those complex social dynamics and all their nuances. Some of them were still being introduced for the first time as well. 

Honestly, I may need to rewrite the whole chapter and re-plan this whole part of the narrative (I’m bullshitting my way through military strategy and radar stealth technology, and I don’t think I’ve been doing so too well). I went in without really even fully planning the mission they’re on. The characters realized it before me, honestly, and we’ve been trying to improvise our way through it together. We’ve also had a mild casualty and another character had to stay behind to look after them, but they were also the two characters that Akari could really talk with. It runs like some sort of military strategy video game mission gone wrong to the point that the player’s about ready to reload a save.

So I might do that (might also back up a bit further) and I’m going to try to stick to one character’s perspective at a time, hopping around as needed, but making an effort to stick to them. It just might help me get into the mindset.

[lofidelitea]

[catchymemes]

[deaths-bounty]

[urban-hieroglyphs]

[deaths-bounty]

[fresh-and-hot-tiktoks]

Translation: “wait what? what are you waiting for? eh? curry? did you make curry (in the bathtub)?” “ya, want some?” “yeah”

[xtec]

me feeding the homies after society collapses

[gerrynagatani]

[spike-spiegels-deactivated20220]

Get to Know Me - [1 / 5] Series ↳ Black Lagoon

[absolutelymadness]