Busy Little Beaver

It is drizzling at 8:30 in the morning during the last full week of October in the Northeast of the United States. I should NOT be writing this post while still enjoying my front porch! I mean, I LOVE that I am, don't get me wrong, but.... um.... this should NOT still be my view while working on this post:

Especially since I'm just in a simple long-sleeve jersey tee. No sweater. No scarf. No jacket. I even have the sleeves pushed up a bit.

Silly Mother Nature.....

Anyway, it IS the tail end of October, which also means it is a week from Halloween. Well, thanks to me trying to get into the "Halloween Spirit" this month, I have been listening to my Halloween Playlist over on YouTube, and inspiration struck!

It was because of this lovely little easter egg song from the Left 4 Dead 2 video game. The Left 4 Dead series is a first-person shooter during the zombie apocalypse. For the second game in the series, the developers went to comedic song writer Jonathan Coulton, who was riding a new level of popularity after writing the song "Still Alive" for the closing credits of the Portal game. Coulton wrote a zombie-themed song that Left 4 Dead 2 ended up using as an easter egg song on a functioning jukebox within the game. If the players listen to the song long enough a horde of zombies shows up at the chorus.

Anyway, it's an amusing "group participation" song that I love listening to every October. Give it a listen yourself.

About two weeks ago, after listening to this song multiple times nearly every day for the first half of October, I just had this nagging thought about how much fun it would be to take the story already presented within the song and converting it into a written narrative. You know how writers keep commenting about waiting for that story to just "grab" you and "force" you to write it because you can't focus on anything else? Yeah. It was like that.

On top of that "need" to write this story, I had joined a fanfiction group on Facebook close to two months ago, and to celebrate hitting something like 2000 members, they came up with the challenge of writing something Halloween themed. I was so focused on the "Miraculous Ladybug" story for next month that I couldn't think of anything Halloween-themed that I wanted to do for a one-shot.

To finish the trifecta, there is another very popular fanfiction site other than fanfiction.net. It's called Archive of Our Own, or AO3 for short. The site only allows x-number of people to join at a time, and so it has a bit of a waiting list as more and more people decide to post there instead of on other sites, such as FF.net, largely due to the growing community and better site formatting; more user friendly. I knew of AO3 for quite some time now, but it was only recently that I was strongly encouraged to try to join. I've read some ML fanfics on AO3 without being a member, and the formatting just for reading did seem much better. Especially since you can download a PDF of the story, which is great for when I want to read it during my downtime at work, where I don't have wifi access.

After about a month on the waiting list, I got my letter of approval from AO3. I officially had my account, but wasn't sure what to post there. I could transfer over everything I had on FF.net, but I wanted to make sure of two things for AO3: 1) that the story was polished, and I didn't want to take the time to edit my older stuff to make sure it was up to par, and 2) that the story was complete. I didn't want AO3 readers left dangling like I did with my readers on FF.net or DA. I still had a few valid options to transfer over to AO3, and I did start the process of porting over my "Hey, Arnold!" stories a couple days ago. However, I wanted my first story on AO3 to be current. To be new. I figured I was going to have to wait until I was done with "Peeping Tomcat" before I could participate on AO3.

Then I had that story pop into my head thanks to Coulton's song. It just worked beautifully. It was kind of a palate cleanser after struggling with plotting out PT for so long. It could work for the Halloween-themed challenge on my Facebook group. I had something to post on AO3 to officially start up my account.

You can check out the story in either of my two original sites - DeviantArt or FanFiction.net - but you can now find it on AO3!

"RE: Your Brains"

On DeviantArt          On FanFiction          On Archive of Our Own

It's kind of exciting! Sure, I didn't get that many hits and I haven't gotten any "kudos" yet... the AO3 version of "favorites" I guess? Whatever the equivalent, it means other members really liked your stuff. Point is, I haven't really gotten much love for the story. Then again, it is such an odd bit of "fanfiction" that I wasn't even really sure what fandom to put it in. Coulton's songs actually have something like 50 stories on AO3 based on them, and mine is the second one based on the song "Re: Your Brains." Plus, people in the Left 4 Dead fandom aren't exactly going to look for a story based on a song that was an easter egg in the second game. So, the readership isn't there.

Still, I enjoyed writing the story, even if it isn't the best thing I've done. The tale is out of my head and I can move on. I have something up on AO3. I participated in the fanfiction challenge. I still have 36 hits since I posted it four days ago. I haven't received any hate on the story. That's enough for me.

Now to try to get back to the ML fanfic for next week! Yeah! NaNo is NEXT WEEK! A week from tomorrow I start working on trying for that 50,000 word goal again.

And yet, because I was so fixated on that zombie fic, I haven't really advanced much of anything for the Peeping Tomcat plot. I think I settled on the order of:

• Adrien, as Cat Noir, spies on Marinette
• Adrien becomes addicted to his innocent voyeurism
• Adrien begins to realize he has romantic feelings for Marinette, but isn't sure what to make of them since he still strongly believes he loves Ladybug
• As Cat Noir, Adrien discovers that Marinette is LB
• Adrien again has to sort through his feelings, but decides that he does love both sides of Marinette and is even more excited about the prospect of being with her finally
• Adrien realizes that LB doesn't have romantic feelings for CN, so even if he could woo her as Adrien - unknowing that he doesn't need to win her over - what would the point be if she doesn't like Cat Noir romantically?

I think I'm going to end it like that. Mainly, it's because, as dense as Adrien may be, once he realizes that Marinette and Ladybug are the same person he may realize that the reason LB has no interest in CN is because she loves Adrien. It's kind of like how Adrien didn't romantically give Marinette the time of day at first because of his love for his partner. I couldn't have Adrien realize Marinette likes his civilian half in this story. It would make things too neat for him to figure out.

Also, as I mentioned last week, I already have a "You've Got Mail" inspired sequel in mind called "One and the Same." I even got the DVD of "You've Got Mail" over the past week, so I'm all set to watch that and write the sequel. I just need to finish "Peeping Tomcat" first. I think, since Kathleen and Joe didn't realize the romantic feelings they had for each other at first, that having that last reveal for Adrien - that Marinette loves his civilian side - as well as having Marinette find out that Adrien and Cat Noir are one and the same will be nice layering for that sequel story. Plus, it cleans up some awkwardness for PT since I just can't figure out where to slot in Marinette's feelings for Adrien among his own discovery of his feelings for her and her being LB.

ONLY TWO REVELATIONS ARE ALLOWED PER STORY!

Anyway, for "One and the Same" I think it's going to be roughly:

• Headline akuma attack to remind Adrien how dangerous it is that he knows who LB truly is, and that he shouldn't just outright reveal himself either. This recaps PT for the reader to catch them up.
• Adrien, in his struggle to figure out how to get Marinette to fall for his CN personality, finds out that Mari loves his civilian half.
• Adrien uses this knowledge to his advantage and chaos ensues as he slowly works in some more of his CN playfulness whenever he can around Mari, while also having CN interact with Mari more to try to win her over that way. 
• The same way Joe wins over Kathleen before allowing her to know that NY152 is him. Again, I'm going to have to watch the movie to get a feel for how Joe does it, and therefore how CN should do it.
• I'll have to figure out a mechanic here so that Marinette thinks she could have a potential relationship with CN, which would never happen if she thinks he's still madly in love with only LB. Either all his Adrien-teasing has to be to LB instead of Marinette, or he has to tell LB that he's moving on.... I'll figure it out when I'm closer to writing this story.
• Right when Mari is about to break because she's torn between Adrien, who is finally showing romantic interest back to her, and her budding feelings for CN, Adrien reveals himself to be her superhero partner; making her elated that CN is exactly who she wanted him to be.

Oh, the plot bunnies! I STILL have the Varekai story to write as well! I'm going to be busy for quite some time.

On the Varekai front, not only do I have the show mid-November to watch, but I also created Icarus for a D&D campaign that I just joined with my Hubby. The DM is using the most recent version of D&D: 5.0. I had no clue what I wanted to do with this new version of the game, as well as for the campaign as a whole. So I did a "random roll" where I basically rolled dice corresponding to the amount of race options I had available. The first three that had their number come up thrice were the top contenders. I was then going to roll one last time to see which one's number came up three times first.

However, one of my top three contenders ended up being the race known as the Aasimar. They are basically descendants of angels.

The Varekai story was still tapping at the front of my brain, waiting for the ML ones to get out of the way. I also recently wore my Icarus Communications sweatshirt. I was drawn to this race and decided I was just going to make Icarus.

I haven't quite figured out MY version of Icarus, but he's a weird blend of four "established" versions.
He has the blue skin and orange hair of the Icarus Communications mascot:

Designed by the Icarus Communications art director
"Brought to life" by artist and animator Tom Pollock Jr

He has the arrogant bravery and unbridled call to impulsiveness that derives from the portrayal of the original Icarus of Greek mythology.

He also has the seemingly dimwitted but adorable sweetness of the Icarus from Disney's Hercules TV series:

While I'm not sure if I'm going to keep Disney Icarus' quick turn to anger out of spiteful jealousy, I am keeping his obsession over Cassandra, but making my Icarus obsessed over the Sun instead. In doing so, I might inadvertently give him a little of the Icarus personality from this artist's series:

Series "Icarus and the Sun" by Picolo-kun on DeviantArt
aka: Gabriel Picolo

His take is that Icarus is made entirely of wax. Such a heart breaking series. The guy is super good!

Anyway, the final official inspiration for my D&D Icarus is of course the Icarus of Varekai: a bit bewildered as to his new surroundings as he slowly tries to acclimate himself to the life he's now living; resolved that he will never return to his old life. What was his abandoned old life? I don't know. I'm hoping my Icarus will tell me as I play him more....

The point to all of this, aside from more character development practice -
YAY!
- is that it might help me better develop the Varekai Icarus and drive me to write that story.

So.... yeah... I have three main writing projects in the works, and more keep popping up. I STILL have to redo that darn fight scene between Trish and Devon!!!!

I'm going to be a busy little beaver the tail end of this year and the start of the next. That's not even including the fact that I still have to read 3 - possibly 4 or 5, depending on how I interpret the challenge - more books to finish off the "Reading Books Like a Boss" challenge.

I don't need to actually do things like socialize, play video games, or.... I dunno.... clean for the rest of the year, right?

I should probably get started on SOMETHING to chew away at everything I have on my To Do list. Until next week!

Get Even the Trash on Paper

We all know what this means for my writing, right?

It will go straight into the toilet....

Hacker Girl Facebook Sticker
by Birdman Inc

It already started this week. Sorta. Thursdays, Sundays, and Mondays are all going to be trash writing days, because I'm going to more-or-less go straight from work to watching a football game. I thought that maybe I'd put in my headphones and write while the game is on in the background; peeking every once in a while to keep on top of what's going on, but who am I kidding?

My writing and any nutritional eating just fall off a cliff the first week of football season, and it takes me a little while for them to heal and return strong.

I did try my darnedest to push myself to write the rest of the week, though. Didn't always work, and I didn't write nearly as much on the days I did write, but it's better than no writing.

My mantra this week.

You can always edit later. You don't have a story if it stays in your head, though. I mean, you DO, but what if you lose it? What if you wait to find the perfect words the first go and never find them? What if you need the whole story first before you can find the perfect words?

Just write. Get that story out of your head. Go from there. It may be a painful read through when you're done, but no one but you has to do that read. Then you polish until you're excited to share it.

Anyway, back to this week. I was coming off an awesome high. I had plowed through nearly 7000 words in one week, I wrote six out of the seven days of the week, and I wrote over 1000 words nearly every writing session.

Without the added drive of the challenges, though, I kind of went back into "research mode"... kinda.

OK, I spent the week more-or-less watching dubs of Miraculous fancomics on YouTube. I wanted to see how others dealt with the "big reveal" vs "one knows about the other, but both don't" and other such tricky plots. Mainly because I was stuck as to what everyone's reaction would be.

The last 1284 words I wrote in a desperate sprint to finish the Summer Challenge weren't terrible, but they weren't exactly good either. I saved them all in a separate document in case I want to revisit the feelings there, but then started over with that whole scene. It went in a semi-different direction that stayed more with Adrien than my original version did. I'm still not 100% happy with it, but it's better. It still needs more tweaking, but I think I just really need to lengthen this whole story into chapters. I feel like the story is getting way long, but moving at a breakneck pace at the same time.

Well, as I tripped my way through this scene in an attempt to move back into the ones that more-or-less wrote themselves, I managed a whopping 1347 words for the week. Whooo.....

I feel like I wrote more. I feel like I did something aside from this blog last Tuesday, but I forgot to log the words, and with all the editing I've been doing with my story, I couldn't confirm nor deny that I had advanced it at all on Tuesday.

I know for a fact that I wrote on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday... so there's that at least. Each session was under 1000 words, and nearly all three were less than 800 words. Still, I hid myself away, determined to write, and I did, at least for a little bit. I may not be excited by the scene I'm writing - which doesn't bode well for people reading it - but I'm at least getting it on paper. I'm pushing through.

I'm pretty positive that this month will just be a bunch of bouncing back and forth between working my way through this fanfic and redoing the fight scene for the STILL untitled Trish/Devon showdown story.

To help me out with the latter, I actually ordered a couple of things. Meet Body Kun and Body Chan.

They're flimsier plastic than I expected; aren't as easy to pose as I'd like; the stands fall apart easily, so you have to have a gentle touch; switching out the multiple different hands is harder than depicted due to the wrist joint moving abruptly while trying to snap on the hand you want; I had to pop Body Chan's shoulder back into socket when I first opened her up from the packaging; I couldn't find a proper hand to keep the pencil accessory from slipping to the table as soon as I let go; and I can't seem to get them to stand on their own like the pictures on the website suggests. All that being said, they are well articulated, have multiple hands to choose from, and you can do a fair amount with those stands, which double as storage for the accessories.

All-in-all, I'd give these guys a 7 out of 10. Not worth the $89.99 they are originally listed as, and may not even be worth the $39.99 they're currently on sale for as of this writing. However, they are worth the $45 package deal I got for them, I think. For nothing else, they're probably worth that much due to the accessories included. Whatever their value, I don't know how good they'll be for actual posing references for artists, but they should be posable enough for my purposes: visually "watching" fight scenes play out so they seem more realistic. We'll see if it helps.

Sadly, the one member of my local writing group who really pointed out my flaws is now studying abroad, so I probably won't see her again for a year or more. Maybe I can still convince her to give it a read-over via Google Docs or something.

On top of the new narrative projects I've got going on this month, I'm now on week three or four - I think - of a major work project. I'm apparently in charge of writing an orientation handbook for my job.

Technically, it wasn't an official order. It was more of the owner of the company asking my manager if I would mind writing one in between the other projects I have to take care of at work. I feel so over my head, and yet again I'm following the mantra of

I'm up to something like 40pgs - including the cover page, index, and about 10 pgs of appendices - and I'm just now getting to the meat of the handbook. I have everything else related to the job described and explained, but now I have to figure out what bits of sales itself I need to include.

Bun Facebook Sticker
by David Lanham

As of right now I'm dumping everything I can think of onto the page so I make sure I don't forget anything. I'll condense later. Might even gain some faith in potential future co-workers and assume they have some common sense. We'll see.

Either way, it's a tedious job that I kind of dread doing. I don't write non-fiction. I'm terrible at knowing what people need to know and what is overkill. I mean, even without the appendices and intro pages, it's still something like 25pgs of information, and I'm not done yet! Help!

At least I have my fiction writing to escape to over lunch breaks. As well as the book I picked for September's Book of the Month for the 2017 Reading Books Like A Boss challenge. Years ago for a birthday gift, my one friend got me the book "The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am" edited by Luke Cuddy. I haven't made it to the meat 'n' potatoes of the book, so I can't really say one way or the other what my thoughts are, but it's at least interesting thus far. I did get pulled out at one point because the author of a particular segment wrongly, and repetitively, called Link's home island in "The Wind Waker" Outcast Island instead of Outset Island. It made me wonder how much they really played the game before trying to philosophize, but aside from that....

I'm going to use it for the "outside comfort zone" category because I almost exclusively read fiction. The last time I read non-fiction that isn't a writing related was in college. Plus, I'm not enough of a "thinker" to really get into philosophy, but it's about Zelda, and I do have an open mind, or at least try to, so I'm intrigued. I'll keep you posted, and I hope this also gets me back on track for finishing up the year with all 12 books for the challenge read. I already know I have more than that read as well, between the mangas, fanfictions, and novels that don't fall into any of the categories.

Oh, and I might be going back to "Ready, Set, Novel!" soon to try to figure out my Varekai fannovelization. I even have a fancy new orange notebook to jot my thoughts down in. I blame my first job out of college, but I equate blue, orange, and white to Icarus: blue for the sky, orange for the sun, and white for the wings. But also because of our mascot: a blue-skinned ginger Icarus with attached angel-like wings so he wouldn't fall.

Logo designed by our then art director Julie Fox Moyer
Icarus design and commercial animation by Thomas Pollock

So I have three projects! Four if you count the work one.... Five if I find the time to finish the "Hey, Arnold!" fanscript of "The Jungle Movie" with ChibiSunnie before the official movie airs in November!

Um... I might be overdoing it with the WIPs....

Tanuki Facebook Sticker
by Yanare Ku

Mom is also coming back up at the end of this week to tackle two more of my chaotic rooms. I may have an organized apartment yet! It will also mean I might not get much writing done this weekend, or the start of next week. We'll see.

I did just state last week that I seem to do well with my writing when my time is limited. We'll see if I strike oil again.