Scene by Scene breakdown

I learnt the original form of the scene by scene summary from the UBC novel writing courses on EdX and it has the following elements:

  • One line summary of events
  • What do each character want in the scene? 
  • The emotion transitions for the characters involved (you can do the full transitions if you are really up to date on character feelings or you can just do the opening and closing emotion in the form of A goes from feeling A to feeling B)
  • The direction of emotion movement (does this scene go from positive to negative or vice versa or positive to more positive etc.) 

As time goes by and I read more writer craft books I had come to think that for me at least, what the characters want is often not foremost on my mind and I have to do really hard work to dig it out. So I’ve switched to replacing character wants with stakes for the scene- what the character stands to gain or lose, which is a concept I can relate to far better. 

So in my recent attempt to downsize my WIP back into index cards again, I have changed the breakdown to having the following elements:

  • One line summary of events
  • Stakes for the protagonist
  • Emotion transition for the protagonist, just the opening and closing emotions. I had previously tried to track the moment to moment or at least broad feeling transitions. But to be honest, even with the help of a feelings wheel which gives a set of predetermined words to summarise a broad range of feelings, I’m using apprehensive as a feeling most of the time whenever I’m really stuck. So I think just tracking the opening and closing emotions for me personally is probably the best I can do. 
  • Movement the scene goes in terms of emotions 

Now there are other ways you can break down a scene, this is just one method. Drop me a comment if you want to discuss alternative methods or just want to hear about alternative frameworks I have come across.

Moonlake’s Book Discoveries: June 2025

Science Fiction

Defy the stars by Claudia Gray

This is part of my mini reading challenge for this year, book 1 of the Constellations trilogy. I’m not much of a science fiction reader but this is really more speculative futuristic solar system space opera featuring the blossoming of a romance that is just right for me. I mean, I am just very against soppy or melodramatic romance and there is none of that here so I am 100% on board. Some dry, perhaps dark, humour here. I was pleasantly surprised by this book and went on to book 2. 

Defy the worlds by Claudia Gray

This book has really ramped up the stakes for the protagonists from the start right up to the very end. I think that is enough said. 

Defy the fates by Claudia Gray

The author has really worked on stakes since the grand finale ups it again for Neomi and Abel. I do find the conclusion satisfying in a hopeful type of way. I don’t think there will be another series featuring these two and I might not be that tempted to read it but it’s a good point to leave things at. 

Children’s fiction 

The Same Stuff as Stars by Katherine Paterson

The second book for my mini reading challenge that didn’t turn up in my initial search. I was actually waiting for Gideon the Ninth and am currently 10th on the reservation list. So this was the tie-over book. 

This book is for you if you like heartwarming stories featuring family and/or stars. So far, I’m pretty happy with what has turned up for my mini reading challenge this year. 

Mystery

Girl, Forsaken by Blake Pierce 

I feel like I am actually getting 2 for 1 with this novel in that it alternates between two female cops which I wasn’t expecting from the blurb (well, one is the actual protagonist of the series and the other is her partner). It’s an engaging read overall and I might be tempted to read more of the author and this particular protagonist. 

The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz (audiobook narrated by Jennifer Vuletic) 

I wanted a light reading to tie me over after my EU trip so I got back to audiobooks but so far I’m zoning out on this. 

23 Minutes by Vivian Vande Velde

I think this is actually classified under urban fantasy since the protagonist has a special power but I see it more as a thriller (and the majority of thriller I read is mystery so hence I put this book under mystery). 

It has short chapters and a fast pace, a good twist. 

Fantasy 

The Wilderwoman: A Novel by Ruth Emmie Lang

I think this is the supernatural sub-genre of fantasy and I would probably later reclassify it as mystery. It’s about two sisters trying to find their missing mother from the blurb. So far it reads okay but I won’t have more to report until I get to the end. So stay tuned for the September post. 

Moonlake’s Writing Updates- June 2025

After a rest of about a week after my recent trip, I went back to my drafting but there was no juice to it. So sometimes towards the end of last week, I decided I would remake the WIP into a scene by scene summary on index cards. 

Why am I doing this and what do I hope to get out of it? Well, one thing about the WIP is that I currently have a block of old scenes when my extensive outline was made in not quite but almost two years and then a block of new scenes added through the iteration of my decimal drafts and the successive rounds of structural analysis. Not surprisingly, the new scenes are not as well-formed and sometimes I’m struggling to see where a particular scene is going to fit amongst the actual draft I’m working on which is full of meta-writing and notes to self which bounces between the last scene and the current scene at the point of writing but then no longer applies after the addition or amendment in a later round. Therefore, the thought emerges to turn everything, old and new scenes, all into the same form: index cards. 

Then, hopefully, I can pull up specific index cards and see what is going on within there. I am going slowly with this because there is really no point rushing and get down all the wrong things about a scene. So I am doing 2 chapters per day, 5 days a week. I am up to chapter 10 from the current draft and I’m doing a bunch of new scenes that I haven’t yet integrated into the draft in a different colour. The WIP currently has 85 chapters so this exercise will occupy me until the middle of August. I am hoping that it would give me greater clarity and fast track my progress with the WIP so that there will be more positive news for my September update. Stay tuned. 

Remarkable Women in Ancient China (24)- Xun Guan

Who is She? 

  • A girl who lifted a siege at the age of 13 

Notable Life Events

  • The fifth generation grand-daughter of Xun Yu, a major advisor to the warlord Cao Cao who won the titanic struggle of the famous Three Kingdom period at the end of the Han dynasty, Xun Guan was born in 303 AD in the Jin dynasty to Xun Song. The Book of Jin described her as having an exceptional spirit since young. 
  • In 315, a rebel leader laid siege to Wancheng, the city base of her father and the only viable option was for someone to lead a party to break through and seek out reinforcements. Guan volunteered for the job, successfully led several thousand of men through a pursuit by the rebel group and reached reinforcements at Xiangyang. The siege was successfully lifted when reinforcements arrived. 

Why is She Remarkable:

We don’t know anything more about Xun Guan but just that feat at the age of 13 is awesome, right? I don’t think anything more needs to be said 

Moonlake’s Thoughts on Her:

I don’t have any more thoughts. This seems more a fictional or folklore type of story but is not so what more is there to say? 

English reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xun_Guan

22 days train trip in Spain and Portugal- Spain part 1

We landed in Barcelona around 8:30am after an overnight stay at Dubai for connecting flights. It was too tiring an experience to repeat- two very early morning flights over two days. As a result, the first day was basically nothing. We basically just took a few pics amongst the crowd at Casa Battlo (see pic above) which was right across the street from our hotel and then found Casa Mila which was further along on a straight road and just called it a day. We had a pretty good dinner at El national Llotja of oysters, Iberian ham and octopus, so much that we booked for dinner again the day after. 

Day 2 was mainly Park Guell and surroundings in the morning and Basilica de la Sagrada Familia and misc. in the afternoon. But as is our wont, we basically only visited Park Guell and the Basilica for the whole day. I joined a skip-the-line tour for Park Guell but Mum was not quite happy about it since we were stuck in the crowds for photos so we ended up leaving the group half way. On the other hand, I basically could not get individual tickets from the official website- it was sold out the day it was released in the 16 hour difference between Barcelona and Melbourne so I bought two skip-the-line tour tickets from Viator. This is also the only tour from Viator that I didn’t like because the meeting point information was not well organised- we almost missed the meeting time because the guide did not arrive before hand and we had no idea where to look for the person until we asked one of the park staff and they pointed us to the blue umbrella or something. But multiple groups had this same issue for the exact same time slot. We visited Carrer de Verdi for lunch and also because it was supposedly a good photo spot. We had lunch there as planned but there was nothing to photo. We made our way successfully to the Basilica in the afternoon and were supposed to go onto Gaudi Avenue etc in a straight path. But we ended up just photographing both sides of the Basilica from the metro station exits and really could not find where to go from the Basilica. But we just contented ourselves from that and called it a day. I booked at Vivo Tapas and we had sauteed clams and red shrimp paella for 2. Clams are one of my favourite Western dishes so far and it did not disappoint. The paella was okay which already said a lot for picky eaters like us. I was expecting half-done rice or else soggy but the paella was actually the first time in a non-Chinese country that had rice which I deemed okay to eat for me. The taste wasn’t great by any means but certainly not horrible. Red prawns weren’t anything special compared to Australian banana prawns but they were fresh. We were content with this meal but also content not to try any more paella on this trip. 

Day 3 was Sitges day trip and I was yet again conned by the weather forecast to bring two raincoats along with us that ended up baggage to carry on the day in my backpack, not to mention that we wore too much (again due to the weather forecast). Most of the morning was spent trying to find the way to Placa de Belaud and being unsuccessful with the help of Google maps and even after asking locals. At the end, we changed goals and aimed for the church. Then, we got pulled into side streets such as the Greek mimicking Carrer Fonollar (blue doors and stuff) etc. We also took photos at the place with the three door-way looking windows above an arched door that looked similar to the Bishop’s Bridge at Barcelona’s gothic quarters (lucky we did because we never found the Bishop’s bridge at the Gothic quarters when we visited it the day after). The church was actually under maintenance so I only took a faraway shot of it. By this time, we had forgotten about the original goal of Placa de Belaud but at the end we took a faraway shot of it by itself without bothering to take the stairs to go down to it. We didn’t think there was much to see at Sitges but the photos were not bad and it’s a nice beach town if that’s what you are looking for. We also had an ultra expensive lunch at Sitges (I believe the most expensive on this particular trip): 55.4 Euro for sauteed clams and codfish cakes, 2 juices and a coffee but I guess that’s because Sitges is a tourist town. We made our way back to Barcelona early and spent the afternoon trying to find Plaza de Catalunya which was just 5 mins from our hotel and La Rambla beyond. However, due to me being direction blind and walking the wrong way, we had made a big loop and accidentally found the Plaza on the way back to the hotel. We had given up the idea of going on to La Rambla since we are not really wanting to shop. For our second dinner at El Nacional Llotja, we again had excellent oysters, scallops and the angler fish stew which actually contained more seafood including one prawn, one mussel and one clam but it had two pieces of angler fish meat so was called the angler fish stew. Both the scallops and the angler fish stew were pretty good, well worth the 200 Euros we spent (by coincidence, also our most expensive dinner for the trip). 

We made a late start on the fourth day because we heard that the Gothic quarter at Barcelona was not quite safe so we decided to travel with the crowd. We basically made the Barcelona Cathedral the main attraction for the day. I had created a map but we decided to just wander randomly and only found a number of the attractions I had planned and we found most of these other places dark and grey and not much photographable (Mum’s all into putting herself and me into the foreground whereas I’m all into scenery capturing but we both found dark buildings to be dull material for either purpose). I did take a picture of Palau del Lloctinent. For dinner, we decided to randomly cruise La Rambla de Catalunya which was the eating street near us. Mum didn’t much like the environments (small stalls, street food type of eating). We ended up ordering chorizo and baby squids, both of which are food I wanted to try. We both found the chorizo too salty for our tastes but the baby squids were fine. 

And that concluded the first leg of our Spanish trip.

Fictionalising Historical Figures in Chinese culture

I don’t think Chinese is the only culture that fictionalises historical figures. I mean, this is a practice that is still ongoing when we think about historical fiction as a genre whenever it leverages a well known historical figure. But this is the focus of this post given the nature of this blog. 

I’m not going to discuss why this practice arises or the implications but rather focus on describing notable Chinese historical figures that have been heavily fictionalised. And I will start with part of our creation myths. So there is a saying that Chinese are all ‘’descendants of Yan and Huang (Flame and Yellow)”. Who are Yan and Huang exactly? They are basically the leaders of separate tribes that modern Chinese were said to be descended from. 

How have they been fictionalised? According to Wikipedia, Just Emperor Huang alone had two extraordinary birth stories: one where he was conceived due to his father being aroused by a lightning bolt from the Big Dipper and another where he was part of the human earthen statues placed at the cardinal points of the world due to energies that created the world merging with each other. As for Yan, there was debate on whether he was the same person as Shennong but I think recent Chinese scholars agree that they were either the same person of Yan was a title that passed on within the tribe and Shennong was one of the Yans. Then, there was also disagreement on the relationship between Yan/Shennong and Huang, regarding Shennong being Huang’s father or just a kinsman. Mythology also featured a major struggle between Yan and Huang before the two reconciled and effectively the Yan tribe was merged into that of Huang, creating the collective Yanhuang tribe from which modern Chinese descend from. 

In addition to his, a bunch of historical figures had been ‘immortalised’ into deities such as Guan Yu of the Three Kingdoms period. This apparently began as early as the Sui dynasty and he was seen as a symbol of loyalty (to his sworn brother Liu Bei) and great military prowess. As far as I know, coming from Hong Kong, he is worshipped heavily by police and mafia (at least in movies) alike for the concept of loyal brotherhood. The other notable person was Bi Gan of the Shang Dynasty, who was said to have become the God of Wealth. It’s less clear to me what’s the linkage between this assigned deity position and the real person who was said to be a loyal retained slain by his Emperor. 

GM attempt for Spelljammer, Gaming and Travel

I did mention GMing previously but the truth was that I basically just managed to run two single session games of the episodic nature before one of the players (the same person every time) had to quit for real life reasons. But now due to what I’ve come to call the Fiasco due to the aforementioned person that resulted in an end to 10 years of Internet friendship (it did lead to the creation of a new Discord channel reuniting us with long lost connections off a website we all used to frequent and subsequently broke away from) and a Spelljammer inspired campaign that is not done, I am now officially taking over as the GM for that particular Spelljammer campaign to run in FATE core. 

We invited a new player into the group since we initially thought that we are now minus one PC character now that I have become GM but actually now I have decided to become a PC-GM i.e I am both player and GM (I don’t think how that’s going to run in practice and I will report in on a future date if that has particular interesting issues but in theory it shouldn’t be a problem in the FATE environment). Current progress is that we have concluded many session -1s to talk through FATE rules (because we are a bunch of FATE newbies) and are wrapping up character creation. The actual game is only starting after I come back from my upcoming May trip to Spain&Portugal (For those curious, we have 6 bases, 3 each across the two countries: Barcelona, Madrid and Seville for Spain and Faro, Porto and Lisbon for Portugal. I concluded the last EU trip was a little too ambitious in scope so trimmed down on the number of bases to make the trip more leisurely in pace). 

However, I got myself into a play by post AD&D game in Discord. I also dived into the deep end in this game by declaring that I would determine my character class by the first dice roll and not buy myself into any particular one which our GM allowed us to. The result is that I am now a bard since my dice rolls came out to be quite well balanced. Somewhere along the way during our character creation, I was also handed an electronic copy of Central Casting and I ran wild with dice rolling. So now, my character who is currently a jaw-dropping beauty in AD&D terms has 4 romances, all with once intense rivals until she/they realised suddenly that the rivalry stemmed from mutual love. I decided that two romances were actually with the same guy whose family forbade our love. She also has 4 siblings: 3 elder brothers and 1 young sister. The eldest brother was killed as a child and the two remaining brothers all got kidnapped by interplanar humanoids and came back washed of all their memories. The young sister got adopted by a wealthy family (I decided before I rolled the dices for Central Casting that I was an orphan so my 4 siblings must have been in the orphanage with me). But the following was the best part of the dice rolls for me: my second brother tattooed a word on his face while my young sister tattooed a claw on her face in their adolescence because that was the fashion trend in Qin, the AD&D equivalent of ancient China. 

Finally, not sure if I’m taking May off in terms of blogging or scheduling ahead to cover for it.  We will see- it depends on whether or not I am inspired enough in terms of writing up blog posts for designated headings. 

Leveraging Gaming in Fiction Writing

In a bid to rejuvenate my WIP, I have started to leverage gaming into fiction by turning all of the main characters in the novel into character sheets under FATE Core (more on this in the post next week), a particular system for text based roleplaying. 

So far, my protagonists went without hitch and I can feel my level of energy being heightened substantially in that previously I kept leaving working on the WIP to the afternoon before this but now I always get to this task before lunch. To be honest, there is no word count difference from working in the morning versus the afternoon or evening as far as I can determine from real evidence but I just feel like I’m more of a morning person.  

The other thing that I’m importing from gaming but has not put into use yet for fiction is the Central Casting book which allows you to create whole character backgrounds from dice rolls (again, details of what I did with it will be shared in next week’s post so stay tuned). 

That’s it for this mini update on writing. Stay tuned for next week’s post where I talk about gaming and more.

Oriental Fantasy 2025

I am now eyeing Song of Silver, Flame Like Night by Amélie Wen Zhao and Strike the Zither by Joan He. The former is apparently more romantic fantasy/historical fiction/mystery whereas the latter is more reimagined Romance of the Three Kingdoms with female characters. I’m actually leaning towards the latter right now. 

Since I am going to Europe on an upcoming May trip I will do this reading sometime between June to the end of this year. I don’t feel like doing another search on this topic so gut feeling is that I’m going with Strike the Zither.