Mrs Muir's ghost

I mean, a little bit of offence taken, tbh. I don't think it's entirely fair to frame it as "not being bothered" - TMA had hundreds of characters over it's run and, for reasons I would hope are obvious, I rarely reread/relisten to my own work once it's published, so things like names don't tend to stick in my mind as much.

But I also think name analysis is something that tends to be a little limiting - at best it can gesture to what interests a writer about a character, their themes and their position in the work, but it rarely contains much to dig into in and of itself. With Rosie, for example, I was always fascinated by her position between complicity and ignorance, the place she found herself being trapped within a narrative she was helping fascilitate, but never centred within, so it makes complete sense I would have surnamed her after Zampano, whose metanarrative function in House of Leaves has a lot in common with hers. But while I broadly recall the themes that compelled me, the name didn't stick with me, because the name was simply a gesture at those themes, not the exploration of them.

I also think this is something of a misunderstanding of what it means to critically engage with art. Nothing "needs" to be critically analysed, but doing so is one of the core joys of what art it: there's no arbitrary level of "depth" or "literariness" required to make it worthwhile, and what one chooses to dismiss always says a lot more about the reader than it says about the work.

So yeah, please don't confuse my practical, and occasionally jokey or cynical, perspective on the process and craft of writing and creation as a lack of care for what I make.

(Sorry for the mistakes, I'm not a native speaker, but I really have something to say).

This is such a stupid thing to say (talking about the tags). I have made a whole visual novel with deep dramatic relationships between the characters. Everyone in it was important, no one was left without a meaning for the story. BUT. I absolutely forgot the surename of the third main character. Not because I didn't care, not because her role was small, no. It happened because the story had 14 different endings and I had been writing it for 3 years. I used her surename twice (and it changed constantly through all my drafts, oops). To find the mistake you had to play all the roots more then once and it was not an hour play, it was like DAYS of constant playing.

You have a whole mountain of details in your head which must interact correctly, so in the end of the day the surename is not the most important thing in it. It doesn't show your lack of interest in your own story, hell no, it just shows that the project is really really complex.

Thanks to this project I learned how to make a game by myself, learned a lot about writing and found some really great resources for planning something that complecated. I hope my next game will be much more interesting and will have less mistakes.