My artist just told me this week that she’s too busy to do the artwork for Wedding Vows. 
Once again, I’m stuck without an artist. For the fourth time. In three years.
*sigh* I get so discouraged with this project sometimes. It’s so difficult to find people willing to invest their time and effort into something like this for free. Especially since I have a grand vision for a unified aesthetic experience, which I absolutey cannot carry out without an artist. Right now, I’m once again devolving as much as possible into using manipulated photographs to substitute… but it’s just not the same.
Also considering hiring an artist from DeviantArt to do the absolutely critical artwork. But that will take time and money. And I’m paring down the art requirements to the bone already. There are gaps in the artwork, where you can clearly see where drawings could go to enhance the effect. But I don’t know who else to ask to do it – or whether my budget could afford it.
Now the other major question is… should I get voice acting done for Wedding Vows? I’m pretty sure I can get someone to volunteer for the jobs from the Voice Acting Alliance, but will they be any good? And will my story benefit from voice acting, or not? Plus, it’s again more work… and I don’t know if I have the patience to manage this project any further. Even though voices may add substantially to the overall aesthetic experience, do I really have the time and energy for this hassle, when I’ve also got other things to worry about?
Yay! I just got back my first semester’s students’ accumulated comments and feedback. My scores were all averaging around 4 out of 5, putting me in the strong B category. I think I was scoring higher than the department and faculty averages for most of the indicators as well… by only a slight margin in most cases, though. Still, I’m happy. I guess the people around me were right after all… I do have a gift for teaching – at least in this field of games. I got a lot of comments about me being approachable, friendly, patient and going the extra mile to help students with their problems.
Of course, nice as they sound, I am taking it with a pinch of salt… I get the feeling my scores were significantly boosted by two things this last semester – one, the program we used was unexpectedly causing a lot more problems, so students were desperately grateful for any help they received, and two, I had huge amounts of free time to help students with the problems, because I hadn’t yet started my own Master’s studies and research. That’s not going to be the case this coming semester onwards, so I do expect a slight drop in my scores from now on.
Then, of course, we come to the more interesting comments – about how I could improve.
Huiting got married today! My closest friend in Singapore has now become Mrs. Christopher Soon, and will soon be moving to a new church and a new home with her husband. She’s the first of my really close friends to get married (though there’s another one coming in December!). Even though I’m happy for her and happy that’s she’s happy, I can’t help but have mixed feelings about this wedding.
For five years now, Huiting and I have moved very closely in the same circles. She was the one who brought me to my church in Singapore, and there introduced me to two subsequent cell groups… one of which I was co-leading with her (and now lead alone). We lived in the same hostel during undergrad days, then lived in the same neighbourhood down the street from each other after moving out. At one time, we were seeing each other four times a week – same Science Faculty cell group, same PGP hostel cell group, same church cell group, and then attending church service on Sunday together! My closest friend in Singapore, despite the huge differences in personality and philosophy of life (Doer vs. Dreamer, Rational vs. Romantic, Practical vs. Philosophical). The Girl Next Door, whom I grew up with (even though it was only five years, and both of us were well-grown by then).
And now, she’s getting married, and moving on to the next stage of her life, far away. I’m going to miss her, especially our quiet talks at night as we walked home from cell group. I hope she would be happy – can’t help but worry about her sometimes. I wish I knew her husband better, but I’ve only met him about half a dozen times, and even then, we never talked much in depth. Will he care for her, and lead her well? Will he comfort and support her in times of need? Will he be able to stand up to her, and help master all the quirks and faults in her personality? And even more so, I worry about her – she’s always been fiercely independent and resistant to change. Will she learn to depend on, submit and confide in him? Will she commit to building a new life together as a couple, not as two separate singles tied together by a ring and some vows?
Their relationship dynamics seem totally different from what I imagine my own relationship with my future wife will be like… but somehow, it just might work for those two people. I can’t fully understand it, but I’ve seen other couples like this who have managed to grow old together and raise a family. With God’s grace, any union can be blessed and bear fruit. And I pray it will be so for them as well.
Today, I wrote an essay about creating characters for a Visual Novel, by thinking about characters being defined by their relationships to each other. Posted it in at the Lemmasoft forums, which is a forum for amateur / hobbyist English-language Visual Novel and dating-sim creators, which I am a part of (with Wedding Vows as my project). You can view the forum post, and the discussion, here.
Be warned that it uses a lot of references to works that the casual / average reader won’t be aware of… but the theory of the article should be understandable even without the examples. It’s basically a theoretical piece reflecting on how to make deeper, more complex stories in the medium of Visual Novels.
It is rather strange – whenever I think of marriage, I don’t really think about what I expect my wife to be like. Other people may have dreams and expectations about what their perfect wife would be like, but I don’t do that very much. Instead, I find myself pondering more about it means to be a good husband. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read so many books on manhood, and how to be a good man. Or perhaps it’s because I spend so much time talking to girls about their love and relationship problems. I’m very very clear about what’s expected of a good man and husband. I’m almost totally ignorant about what it means to be a good woman and a wife.
Of course, knowing what it means to be a good husband doesn’t mean being able to live up to it. One of the main reasons I hold back from romantic pursuits at the moment is that I can see very clearly that I don’t measure up to the standards of a good husband. In other words, I don’t think of myself as worthy to be able to care for, provide for, love and support a woman in the way I think she should be. It’s perhaps a bit odd that I think this way, or care so much about it. I wonder if any other guys who enter into relationships think about this? Or do they just blindly plunge into it, and either trust that everything will somehow work out fine? Or do they just not think about it at all, or have lower expectations?
I find that I have a negative tendency to think of many members of my sex as irresponsible people who have double standards when it comes to marriage – they want a perfect wife to accept their imperfect selves, without bothering to work to better themselves for their wife’s sake. Any “improvements” are for show only, during the courtship stage, to impress her or her family enough until after the wedding ceremony, where he can finally drop the act and get back to his usual habits. While I reasonably deduce that this cannot be true (or else we would have a lot of marriages breaking up… wait, isn’t that happening already?), it nevertheless remains a strong stereotype in my mind. And I’m almost pathologically determined not to be that sort of man.
Which, of course, leaves me in a bit of a quandary – I either become the perfect husband, or never get married.
(… I wonder if there’s a girl out there who’s struggling as much with the question of being the perfect wife as I am with being the perfect husband? I’d like to meet her. It would be fascinating to hear the opposite point of view.)
In any case, what brought this on was my continued work on the Wedding Vows project. I’m currently in the process of trying to re-write one portion of the narrative, and I realised that I’ve covered pratically every theme I wanted to talk about in the work already. So trying to insert a new segment into the narrative, I have no relevant thing I want to say with it, mostly because I lack knowledge about the woman’s point of view.
However, looking at what I’ve written before, I still feel very pleased and proud of this work. Especially of the segment I wrote to replace an earlier part which I took out. The segment was entitled “Generations”, and it depicted the deathbed scene of the wife’s father. In the scene, the dying father entrusts the care of his wife and his daughter to his son-in-law. When I first wrote that scene, nearly a year ago, I knew it was a powerful one. I wasn’t exactly clear why it was so, yet I knew I should put it in, and that it was infinitely superior to the scene it replaced. Today, as I was musing, I finally got an insight into why.
I think every young woman, who has been raised by a good father, would naturally want their father to approve of their choice of life partner. The reason why is obvious – from their childhood, their definition of what it means to be a husband and a man is shaped by their father. The father sets the standard for the husband to follow. To know that their father approves means that he accepts the husband as an acceptable example of the standard of manhood that he has set for his family. But I went even one step further. In this scene, the father entrusts the care of his family to the son-in-law. The father views the son-in-law not only as an example of manhood, but the heir to his responsibilities to care for the household. He is not just accepted, he is trusted to continue the legacy of manhood in the family. He is worthy to step into the position the father has held for so long as the head of the household.
I’m very very happy that I wrote that. It expresses what I have to say about responsibility, which is the first and foremost characteristic that must define a good man, in my book. And I think that women would approve of it too… at least, the one girl who I’ve shown it to so far (my artist) says that she likes it a lot. Now the trouble I have is trying to write the female corollary to that theme – what is the duty and responsibility of a wife? And how can I express it in a idealised romance? (Or have I already done so?)
