Posted August 31, 2021 by brushmen
#progress
While waiting for further instruction for the paid freelance gig, I started working on chapter 10 draft. It’s a chapter about the main character trying to continue living, choosing what to sacrifice so they could achieve their goal, and maybe find some truths that they couldn’t otherwise obtain through conventional methods. Generally I prefer to keep my stories as grounded as possible, so I want to stay closer to wuxia instead of xianxia (genre). However, involving the underworld or the spirit world definitely crosses into xianxia territory a little.
The fantasy element is based on folklore that I’m not that familiar with, but it’s still cool to learn about pre-Buddhism beliefs regarding death (apparently no reincarnation?) in Chinese culture. Somehow I got the impression that it’s similar to what I learned from the movie CoCo, that there is a “second death” that people fear more - to be forgotten by the living, especially when their bloodline ends and they have no descendants to “keep the incense burning” (offerings of food or wealth would supposedly let the spirits in the underworld continue living their “second life”). This fear made sense when the belief at the time was that there is no reincarnation. It made me realize that the popular trope of souls reuniting after different lifetimes wouldn’t work in this context.
So far…