I’ve found it useful to envision human behavior as set of rotated normal curves. Pick some attribute and incorrectly assume a normal distribution of it. Now spin that curve around its peak. You get a normal “mound”. Each individual attribute is its own curve. The mound is all of them together. We’re each a point in there somewhere.
One of the purposes of society is to maintain the bulge in the middle that defines what’s normal. It doesn’t need to be actual. For example, people have a propensity to kill one another. Most societies like to pretend that killing folk is tail-of-curve behavior. It’s not, but if we all pretend it is, then it becomes so. That’s not the point of this post, though.
If we assign meaning to how the various attribute curves are arranged into our mound – the distance between/relative orientation of any two of those normal curves – something interesting pops out: It’s not the same for everyone. I may think/feel that jealousy is close to anger. Someone else may find it closer to calculated vengeance.
I’ve been pushing our intrepid werewolves out to the tail of a curve. Turns out, I’m pushing them into the tails of several curves. I find them closely related. My First Readers find them nearly perpendicular.
I’m accidentally writing 50 Shades of Wolf as M.R. Roquelaure.
That’s not necessarily a bad book to write, but if I’m going to write it, I want to do on purpose. That is not my purpose and it’s not the book I want to write. I wouldn’t mind reading it, but gay is a sufficient marketing hurdle. I don’t want to add BDSM to it.
I made good progress on chapter 18, last night, until I realized this. Today is going to be more structural as I pull those axes apart.
The orgasmically pleasurable level-ups need to go. I did it because everything’s always painful in LitRPG and I wanted to make something pleasurable. That interacts with other things too much. It’s got to go. I’m not going to swing the other way and make it painful. I’m thinking contentment. A feeling that all is right with the world. Make the System more subtly seductive.
First, brunch.
Marked Up 