shannor

Thank you very much Triksyness, I really appreciate your help, and thank you very much for the link, I'll be sure to read it

To add more to this for the benefit of other writers, I can honestly say my friends and I never tried it. I know some of my friends tried it with other friends, they told me as much. But not me. I didn't really fit in with the girls, I was always one of the guys, and it would just have been a million shades of awkward all around. (Fast foward a couple decades, and I'm more or less sure I always was one of the guys, even if I don't look like one on the outside.) When I experienced my first kiss, I felt nervous in an 'oh man, what if we get found out?' kind of way. Honestly, I didn't much enjoy it, it was awkward, clumsy, crude, exactly what you'd expect for two first-timers. Yes, there was the rush of the forbidden, kissing in school was very definitely forbidden, but that's all there was to it for me. The guy I was kissing was more into the actual kissing than I was. It never really became one of those things I enjoyed though, I still don't much enjoy it, and tongues are right out! Love hockey. Hate tonsil hockey.

...dubiously fictional, but... Ragnar Lothbrok. He has that look he does when he's about to do something crafty, gets me hot under the collar everytime!

Ah, I see what you mean, yes, that would make them seem out of character. Out of curiosity, is there any real guideline to when "hai" would be an inappropriate response? I think "hai" would be rather a terse reply to a question that requires a slightly more detailed answer, but since I don't speak Japanese beyond the smattering of words I've learned from anime and manga, I honestly don't have a clue.

Honestly, I think there may be a middle ground here. To me, it seems perfectly reasonable that simple one word responses like "yeah" could instead be "hai" for a newly arrived and/or distracted/tired/sick native Japanese speaker in a story written in English. Similarly, the reflexive pleases and thank yous that are culturally expected may be blurted out in Japanese before the brain has time to go "hey, wait a minute, you're in an English speaking country, speak English!". Even though I moved from one English speaking country to another, I'm still using a lot of British English turns of phrase and confusing the Americans, and I've been here going on ten years now - I'd imagine it's just as difficult with an English as a second language speaker. Example time: The kitsune yawned. He hated red-eye flights. He hated LAX too. As he followed the throngs of people leaving the airport, he bumped into someone, a small old lady, grey haired and wrinkled. "Sumimasen deshita!" he said, almost reflexively. Now speaking a sentence that's a jumble of English and Japanese, that's problematic, unless you intend to have the character casting about for the proper word in English. Bad example time: "I saw a black cat enter the..." the kitsune paused, brows knitting together in concentration, "...ie?" "House," the vampire said. "Ah, yes, house, thank you. I saw a black cat enter the house."

I used to write without planning, and still do for short stories, but for longer stories, it resulted in a lot of discarded stories. For longer stories, I write one sentence outlines of scenes I want to include, in whatever order they come to mind. Once I've got a good stack of them, I arrange them into a somewhat coherent plot. At that point, I start writing whatever scene appeals to me to write first, which works as my first exploration piece, helping me to solidify the setting and characters in my mind. I take a couple of loose notes about that so I have a cheatsheat to refer back to. The only plan I have when I start writing proper is a very loose outline to go on, each chapter is written without much thought; I usually take notes of major events for each chapter once it's written, which helps me to make sure I tie up all loose ends by the end of the story. Working with such a vague plan allows me a lot of wiggle room, and often results in scenes being shuffled even more, because sometimes a chapter just begs for a scene that was originally outlined for later in the story to be moved forward. Before I settled on the loose outline method, I tried very tight outlines for my longer stories, but they ended up being restrictive, and killed just as many stories as having no plan - they also make me prone to over-researching, because I absolutely love research work. If I'm researching, I'm not writing.

I just wanted to throw in my two cents in case someone else at AFF wants to check out Ren'py. I've been playing around with Ren'py for a little under two months now, and I have to say I like that it's fairly intuitive, though I've had a few arguments with it because I'm trying to do things with it that it's not ideally suited to. Having never worked with python before, Ren'py has been a pretty good intro to it. The community on the Ren'py forums seem nice so far, very helpful, and there seems to be someone online pretty much all day everyday.