Camper Challenge

10/3/24

What is my writing motivation? Usually it’s external rather than internal. I like reading other people’s things rather than my own.

I feel like I probably give off a more pretentious secular view of not enjoying the general state of things on my other writing spot in spite of knowing that my work isn’t that great either but a lot of times to be inspired you have to either motivate yourself or be motivated by something else to write and so far there hasn’t really been a “something else” to make me want to write anything interesting aside from the fact I’ve had files sitting on my hard drive that I don’t want to have die on my hard drive. I’ll admit it too, I’m not so different about the things I complain about either. I think ultimately that any idea that is put down can be good, it’s just the way that the idea is executed that can lead to it being all over the place. This isn’t just a fanfic thing because I’ve felt like that over published books or video game stories as well.
I find my own writing style and art style to both be rather average but in terms of like literary analysis I can kind of do that since I'm primarily an English major with a degree that is aimed towards the art of language (I was originally supposed to be a game developer but it fell flat when it was discovered I couldn't code for a fig.)
And ultimately this whole lack of a writing style or motivation is primarily my fault for not reading anything since graduation aside from manga and fanfic, but the thing is now I’m no longer in college slacker mode but like this vaguely described “adult world” where I have adult responsibilities and things like books are ultimately frivolous and anything I’m invested in will be easily interrupted because in adult world I am reduced to a subordinate lackey who lives only to serve other people. No time for reading when you’re mentally exhausted, so I end up going with the easier route of watching a show because that is easier for the brain to parse. Doesn’t really help with the writing style outside of dialogue though. I feel like primarily being an artist means I can be more motivated by images and memes and random things I see in my day to day life versus writing where if I need to write something that isn’t just a joke post or for something like my cohost (RIP) or neocities I simply only write down notes for an idea which I will fill out later. I’ve only got notes.

So I’ve decided to go back to basics. I’ll be trying to look through books I already have saved that would make me “tick” as a writer. Why did I save or buy these books? What do I want to write? Why do I want to write it? When do I want to write it?
If I can’t really answer that soon then maybe I just admit my fate is that I’m better off as an ideas person and that most of my writing would be better off for like, drawing material or something.

Mons!

9/3/24

Been thinking about digimon because of the pokemon masters lore thing again. Muddy memories of merchandise driven shows flowing back in my mind
Bakugan was pretty good for season 1 with their whole “aliens and humans getting along” and the whole like secret thing being unveiled by a main character’s mother when her son got sent to hell but I don’t recall later seasons as well, there were aliens. They put less emphasis on the core 6, it was mostly the boys. Completely sucked, Alice was too good for that show.
Beyblade was unhinged especially the metal versions because they had like super beyblade spirits and evil dragons and like dragon satan spun left and the evil villain sounded like an internet troll you’d find in a lobby attacking Ginka and friends and then there was like a meteorite that had super duper Satan but the power of friendship defeated him

Digimon is absolutely bonkers. Digimon and pokemon are like apples and cantaloupes the only thing they have in common is the fact that they have “Mon” in their name Digimon lore is fascinating because you think about how in pokemon you have to actually struggle to like get a Mon outside of the standard first starter/partner but in adventure 1 and 2 they are basically coded to bond to a chosen child and it’s never questioned why these random aliens are willing to die for these random aliens they just met They’re lines of code. Tamers especially bluntly bonks this with how different the gogglehead dynamic is with his deviantart OC Digimon coming to life but it’s been years since I watched tamers and the most i remember is how Juri nearly caused the apocalypse because Leomon died because that Mon has a quota to fulfill

A lot of adventure to 02 story leaving people like “what the heck was any of that supposed to mean” did not help with the fact that the directors of 02 were fighting over what they wanted the show’s direction to be AND a lot of lore for 02 was tied to an untranslated wonder swan game and then tri has other stuff and like I’m still here like “what is homeostasis, what is the dark ocean, does any of that actually matter” and the answer is “maybe?” Ryo is like the most confusing guy because like he hops canon and milleniumon is a living time paradox and like none of this is in English whatsoever you either have to play the game yourself or hope a YouTuber has the entire thing right and like the story of the hero tied to the villain not by choice but by like fate and it’s like “damn that’s a good story premise” only for the execution to be like a roulette of “how does this work.” Remembers Ryo shows up in tamers Actually it was multiple wonderswan games You think a Ryo OVA would probably fix this, but it seems like all the new movies going forward are more about “adults and Digimon have a totally different dynamic compared to children and Digimon where the point is they might need to separate and we will have multiple movies for this premise”

I kinda miss the older designs, Tri mostly just had them in school uniforms and like if you put the art style of adventure next to tri you’d be like “huh?” They made a new girl and her Digimon was like all the dead Digimon but she was a catgirl and I was like “yeah that checks out gatomon/tailmon is pretty popular” but like I could not tell you anything else about Digimon because I watched majority of my Digimon stuff when I was like 12. Maybe 13. I don’t know. One of the guys punched a Digimon, I think. Adventure got a reboot but they did not extend the same favor to 02. I don’t even know what happened with ghost game, apparently none of the internal companies were talking to each other so the animation didn’t have like a major evolution show up whatsoever.

You’ll hear me gripe about this every time I see a rotom phone past gen 8 but i am not a major fan of digital sentient beings surpassing their programming. Miku is fine though. It'll pop up in stories if I ever get to them instead of everything else on the site. You think about Megaman battle network and it’s like that game is 100% the definition of why I am as an adult the kind of person who is wary about smart fridges and smart ovens and being like “we should not have that stuff connected to the internet.” Then there’s the issues of netnavis where it’s like if you want to upgrade your netnavi to a new one after it gets deleted then you’re basically killing the old one off entirely and the data still lingers on the net as ghost data. It’s like the ultimate ship of Theseus for me. Don’t even get me started on the premise of the fact that the titular Megaman.exe is framework for a dead child’s soul. “But robots are fine for you?” Yeah, robots are fine because they’re solidified. I don’t like purely sentient data, that’s like ghosts. I’m scared of ghosts.

Chosen Ones

9/1/24

The concept of a chosen one in my personal preference is a lot cooler when it’s played for horror.
Because it’s like I know some people would love to be like told they have a grander purpose and destiny and like a lot of times “chosen one” defaults to being the paragon of virtue and goodness and going on a wonderful adventure based on the whims of fate deciding that you are the most important person in the world! You now have a Purpose and you will be defined by it.
What if the chosen one thing is a scam? What if it’s all made up and there’s no chosen one at all? Or you know, what if the chosen one’s role was actually being a sacrificial lamb. Being the chosen one for evil and watching as your actions only makes things worse. Having the people around you know your fate and purpose in life but not tell you anything as to not derail the world’s purpose. You are chosen for the sake of the world! Put aside how you ultimately feel about leaving everything you’ve known behind, put aside the fact that people you might have trusted might not have told you the truth of the matter, put aside your morals, this person has to die because they’re trying to defy fate, which has guided us here. You were chosen, and you will change, and you will suffer.
You’re the chosen one! You don’t have a choice.

New theme!

8/19/24

I've set up a new theme for the writer log! Of course, this won't be seen until after the 2 week revamp. I feel like a lot of people here either set up their site with sadgirl templates or with repth, meanwhile I've got a mix of both lol.

Welcome to the new writer's log! Purely for writing. No more pokemon!
I have more to talk about aside from pokemon but sometimes it severely slips containment and I end up sounding crazy. My favorite minor detail is that the above image is super serious right but it's actually the kirby anime version of it.

What do I use?

8/12/24

A basic kind of question. I used to mostly write on on wordpad or MS Word before going to libreOffice, then I switched to google docs right up until their AI integration thing, then I moved to Notion for notes until they ALSO started doing AI integration, I tried out Obsidian but I kind of like being able to cross write between devices without payment, and standard notes is alright, but I have to constantly be sorting through all my notes to make sure that they're in the right spot and category. (I’m not paying $120 for the premium plan though, that’s nuts.) Then if this couldn't get anymore confusing, I sort all of those notes back onto my libreOffice documents. I do not want AI integration near any of my stuff, it's very simple, which sucks, because Notion was my best app and then they started pulling that shit. I want a crossposting app I don’t have to pay money for. Then Evernote did too, and I really did want to transfer there at one point... oh well. But as you can tell by the end result, it's a very stupid system. Better than handwriting though, my handwriting is unreadable.

For drawing, it used to be tayasui sketches, but now I’ve been attempting ibis Paint X. Idk how that works. Mostly i just use pencil and pen and paper but I need to use those more often because I have years of blank sketchbooks I never drew in. And stickers. Love sticking stickers onto sketchbooks.

Music wise, I use VLC on my desktop with various songs I’ve found, YouTube for long playlists and being annoyed by ads, and Spotify, but it doesnt really work out much. I have radio apps, but I don’t really use them that frequently. I tend to try to write depending on what I think works best like some pumped up rock music but honestly my best ideas tend to come when I’m not trying to write, so, when I’m bored as shit trying to learn or do job hunting. Lately I've been using Azali and M2U music to imagine cool fight scenes. I think maybe I'll look up sprite animations and see if they have their music sources saved as a playlist so I can spend more time imagining scenes to embody the stories.

My work is normally wrapped around a single image or concept that encompasses the story and then the rest of the story is getting to executing that concept or image. "Couldn't you just write the scene instead of buildup" Well, it wouldn't be that much of a story if it was just the one fight without context. It's like that time in one club where they showed us a random episode of HxH to go "see it's good" and no one knew anything about the show so we were like "what's that? who's that? why's he doing that?"

Camper Challenge

8/13/2024

Todays challenge: writing things for the log without mentioning Pokémon whatsoever to get back to the point of this page which is on writing processes.

I’ve moved Pokémon thoughts to their own seperate containment zone as if this site doesn’t already now have 50% of it dedicated to Pokémon and various containment zones that keep getting bigger instead of smaller

Writing original stories instead of established franchises is a difficulty onto itself based on what you decide to take as your influence. This is kinda like the lesson log thing from week 8 where you consider that the reader will be familiar with some terms based on the franchise which is why they clicked on the story to begin with. But if it’s OCs and OC Lore and an entirely original setting within a franchise, you have to write basically an entirely original story. The level of OG writing and fanfiction is that franchises already have everything set up for the writer to use like characters and the world and setting and timeline and most importantly. The plot, or lack thereof if you’re doing something like a rewrite or AU or fixit or Isekai fixit or OC/SI or something. The rules of the world or franchise, in order to ensure the readers willing suspension of disbelief or just go full Gurren Lagann and go beyond the limits. Note: this may have the effect of making yourself go “this is so stupid.” (I write my stories for myself first, readers second so most of my stories hit the stupid thing from the get go.)

I’d say there are franchises with stories that have lore but its never brought up too much to make entryway impossible in terms of all ages media: stuff like , sonic, Kirby, and RWBY. I say RWBY because it has lore (it sure does) but there’s a chance you can plop your character pre season/volume 3 and they can do whatever they want because the maiden relic stuff only came later. As long as they’re related to a fairy tale, got a color name, and some cool semblance you can do whatever!

Same for Madoka, there’s a mobile game with lore, but you can just make your OC live in an area outside of the main city and things can still work out. (I realize this can apply to many anime and comics that have power level systems and will no longer have examples.) Sonic has so many different branching franchise points with their own various canons and casts and even then you can throw out all preestablished characterization for the sake of parody or crossover, which was the case for many sprite comics I saw on smackjeeves. Megaman also has this because bob and George pretty much was the setup for this but it's also pretty easy because you can just go with "this is my new robot master OC GUN MAN". I guess MHA can be considered with quirks but really you can apply that to any already established world with an easy breakdown of how powers work and the structure of the world. Consider how many historical figures can be used for a franchise like Fate (but then Fate lore as I mentioned is all over the place.)

Mario is so minimal in plot you can do whatever you want, even with the RPGs you can plop Mario in something like fire emblem or undertale but as long as you play it completely straight with your characterization it’ll work. Kingdom hearts would’ve been considered for being a Disney/FF crossover with its own universe and rule set as long as you ignore the main plot and just make up your own disney worlds to visit but it’s got a hit for the whole “lore important stuff is in a gacha game spinoff that shut down and then it's done again.”

Kirby is there because there is lore but two different paths and one is the anime and the other is the games and do not conflate anime lore and game lore because you will be poked with pitchforks. Like he’s not a star warrior or whatever, nowadays he is like a being of infinite power (like Shadow.) Kirby could beat shadow.

There is one franchise I could use as a far better example of “everyone knows it and the readers would get whatever the writer is saying” because of its popularity but the author completely sucks as a human being so I’ll just use the next best example and say “a Percy Jackson AU where you write about him having a sister or something and she dates an OC from the Hermes Cabin.” Harmless, easy to parse. “A Percy Jackson AU about a person from another camp that is the Norse gods and they’re trying to stop Ragnarok.” Slow down, pal. I haven’t read any Rick riordan book since the one about the Egyptian gods. I hope that one’s not real or I’m gonna look silly.

I feel like most of my original stories branched off from whatever I was into at the time which I mentioned before as an effect of “writing fanfiction but with the names changed.” I guess in that way my heart was on my sleeve… Maybe I’d make a lot more stuff if I went into making sprite comics instead… thing is I’d make a few and then immediately drop it after getting bored. Cucumber quest is a comic I used to read online but that got wrapped up in a Google doc… that doesn't have to do with my work though. I'd probably never make a comic because I look at my art and go "auuugh, I want to draw more!" But whenever I do draw nothing comes to mind. I stare at a blank sheet going "DRAW" and nothing happens.

Dragalia Lost

8/16/24

The dragalia shaped hole in my heart will never be filled, that game introduced me to DAOKO and also was one of the story inspirations for a later iteration of one of my OC stories. I really wish the entire soundtrack got uploaded aside from the earlier songs but it makes sense a lot of them didn't get to streaming services. (Like the one by Ano that was used for a summer event.) I still remember when they had wyrmprints in the 5 star pool, that was PAINFUL. The game really did have incredible QOL updates and a lot of gifts, which I guess might've been a contributing factor to it's death because whaling wasn't necessary because the gacha rates were incredibly kind in comparison to other games which will wring blood out of you before spitting out a 4 star. Like the game had a lot of stuff going for it, like the fire emblem collabs and megaman and persona stuff and a world where anything could happen since it was built on top of a dead civilization where they went backwards in progress because there were robot people at one point and one of the major plot things was the rediscovery of GUN and one of the MC’s sisters got a machine gun and I’m here like “yeah, go girl!”

The plot was kind of barebones for a while with the whole “your princess is in another castle (she’s your sister BTW) and you have to collect the dragon pacts to do something and everyone in your royal family is kind of weird” but then it picks up with a lot of stuff about the drama of the royal family and the MC secretly being a homunculus of one of the dead sons but it turns out he was alive and pissed off he got replaced and then there was like, an evil anti dragon that then also possessed the sister and there was also a time traveling version of that sister . By the way, the church knew about the anti dragon the whole time and there was an entire conspiracy about if they should reveal if the anti dragon came from their equivalent of Mary (from Bible) This was one of the games where I really did start paying attention to story in a gacha game, the ones before that either were barebones (Brave frontier) or shut down (chain chronicle, BF did too) and Fire Emblem Heroes was only on like Book 1 or 2 and they didn't really have stories centric on 1 character and their story like Dragalia did with every unit (CC also did this) and also, it's a gacha game where the story was completed before the servers went. (I think SinoAlice did this too or it tried to, idk, I did not pay attention to it.) Food Fantasy does not have a well presented plot, I'm surprised that game is still going. Magia Record died uncermoniously, Priconne died too even though Pipple was meant to be there for the collab, and I haven't touched any of the final fantasy mobile games. (FGO is in this weird spot where you basically have to go through a lot of it before you start hitting the better stuff is what I've been told so it's a long hal. I had downloaded a lot of mobile idle games at some point... quite frankly it's been super weird seeing phone games go from stuff like doodle jump and office jerk to the way they are now. I'm sure some of them have great plots and memes but I don't really have the time to dedicate my time to gambling simulators. I miss sonic runners.

But for a while they really did make me think “okay well what if the main character did have an evil counterpart outfit and his evil dragon creature since they keep foreshadowing that’s a thing , can I see that, can I see the evil villain outfit he's gonna get when he fuses with the big bad” and the answer was “no.” There were a lot of events, I'm glad they didn't lock them all behind reruns and instead had an event compedium where you could replay them, a lot of games could do really good with doing stuff like that instead of relying on FOMO (staring heavily at Genshin)

There was a lot of stuff that happened with the plot later on but I kinda stopped paying attention last time I really was into it was when the gang fought a different satan Like real Satan Then they used the power of friendship to defeat super Satan (this game has 3 Satans) And the dragalia was lost, because that’s what dragalia was Friendship

The main character sacrificed his life so his friends could live on in a world without him (because they forgot him) but the power of friendship brought him back I wish I had any screenshots but they were all on my old and dead phone. Why is this in the writing log? Idk.

Music, Maplestory

8/5/24

I've finally properly linked this page to the writing directory. It's called fanfics but I'm considering renaming it even though I know a ton of links will end up broken by that... Oh well, I did that already when I decided to rename the site to not be FF14 related anymore, right? Music is pretty nice, right? I mostly just ended up listening to artists I usually used for studying back on campus. Stuff like re:plus, DJ okawari, July, Yiruma, Blazo, Raujika, Nujabes (RIP), Kondor. So maybe just a mix of jazz and lofi beats…?
I learned about them from this playlist on Spotify called “Maplestory.” I feel like the significance that game had on my life can’t be ignored, but honestly, I could do without the gambling aspect, and the daily grinding and boss leveling and legions where the more characters you had the bigger stats so it was a big timesink. At that point I went “this is a JOB, not a game!” and I ended up switching to FF14 a bit after. That and despite the name “Maplestory” there were only a significant amount of places and quests that actually had good stories and half the time they ended up removed from the game or “revamped” in a way that made them worse. Ellinia, Ludibrium, El Nath, and Orbis were probably my favorite spots aesthetic wise. It's a game that also inspired me to write because of watching sprite battles and whatnot and going "I want to do that too!"

The more they tried going out to different planets and dimensions and shit I started mentally checking out. Friendstory was a little spinoff that never got expanded outside of one character, which made me think maybe that would be significant, but it was not. I thought Shade/Eunwol’s story was pretty sad because no one would ever remember him. They kept retconning a bunch of things and adding in revamped stories to old class stories which makes stuff pretty jarring when old NPCs still have their quests from years ago still in the game with the same exp pool.
No one actually plays Maplestory for the story so it’s just an aspect of the games age from 20+ years. Once I realized that they weren’t gonna stop after the black mage and kept increasing level caps to 300 I kinda thought “eh? I thought we’d downsize, not just introduce a new villain as being the real mastermind behind everything…” and them pushing this new direction of the player being the super chosen one instead of a select few classes being the significant game changers also took me out.

I miss old explorer because they were free to wander with only a smidgeon of story with the RED revamp that introduced the more important characters but I’ve heard the newer one has to do like an hour long story tutorial which is a supercut of that revamp where everything revolves around a bunch of text dumps and barely any gameplay. If I played something like that when I was my age playing Maplestory I’d probably never play again. (When did I start playing again…? Tempest was 2012, but I played a bit before that I think? Maybe at 10? …so I really did play this now 20 year old game for almost 12 years on and off again? Sheesh.)

I guess I like some stories more when you aren’t the center of existence where everyone is constantly praising you just for breathing. These are my personal gripes though. The real gripe was the gambling where if you fucked up a piece of equipment it would explode and you’d have to go refight a boss and hope it had the right stats. GAMBLING WITH REAL MONEY BY THE WAY. Nexon also got under fire for rigging the stats on the gambling cubes. The only thing you should buy with money in an MMO for me should’ve been cosmetics.
I do use Maplestory ost for writing and creativity sometimes, but it gets me fuming like above because buried under that thing are the vestiges of a game I used to enjoy and now thinking back on it it was just a huge chore and a waste of time.

Lesson Log

7/23/24

I apparently downloaded a bunch of lessons from a writing class so I'm gonna try breaking them down for a better reading since chances are I'm never gonna actually use these otherwise... never said my writing was good though, I just like writing. Let's see how well I can write notes and condense the weeks!

Week 1

Simile, Metaphor, and Symbol Simile: comparing two unrelated words with like, as, than, appears, seems Metaphor: same thing but doesn't use those words. Symbol: comparing two things but not having the abstract object be named Writer mention: T. S. Eliot

Week 2

Image and character: Assign an image for the character based on diction (word choice) and dialect (language variations) to nail a person to place, time, gender, economic class, or social state. Depends on the author's ear. Pyhsical detail for an intro can be for definition and plot device. Writer mention: Alice Walker, Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Colderidge

Week 3

Framing Time There is Real time--explicit or implicit There is narrative time to tell past events, fragments of history, or sections of plot info Mythic time frame represents the real cause for the narrative truth.

Week 4

Setting has several functions: the concrete location, but also painting a scene in a self contained world. Not every detail has to be there. Writer mention: Katherine Mansfield

Week 5

Writing is a process of sorting priorities. How does style work? I guess it's like fashion, you can be fancy or minimalist. Authors are normally recognized by their style. Writing outside of a comfort zone isn't really a thing I do. (but I don't even know what my style IS.) Writer mention: Matthew Arnold, Ambrose Bierce, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

Week 6

The Theme: Don't let default themes overtake our thinking, it should be more abtract. Write instead of the greater truth, the thing the character learns as a whole. What is the greater truth and when do I need to know it? Any created world holds within itself the "greater truth." Writer mention: William Wordsorth

Week 7



POVs: I is first person, you is 2nd person, he or they or she is third person. third person is shifting characters. Sometimes they aren't concrete defined, like there will be "I' coming from a third person narrative. Writer mention: Stephen Crane, Franz Kafka

Week 8

It helps to visualize the Author sitting in a chair, writing or typing the story.  Clearly, that individual, both in time and in space, is not really the Narrator, since, first, writing the story or the book takes days, weeks, whatever, and the Narrator's time frame is always different.  We first want to note that the Author and the Narrator will have a different experience of Time.  If your First Person writing seems like it is coming from the Author in the chair, you have, in an important sense, not really created a Narrator. There are many different types of Narrators, so they aren't omniscient and all knowing of the narrative. Unless you make it so... You can also make multiple narrators appear for the story. Writer mention: Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gillman

Week 9

Writer Mentions stop after this point. Some weeks have less info.

Week 11

Reading Theory advances the notion that every piece of writing depends 20% on what the writer has written down and 80% on what the reader brings to the exchange.  The theory maintains that, for any reader to get new information from a piece of writing, the reader has to be able to supply this 80%. So info is split into two ways: familiar, which readers should know, and unfamiliar, which writers should teach. The most reliable way to set up a situation where the default assumptions are going to seem confirmed by the Reader is to 1. start with images that the Reader does have and 2. use descriptive language that includes sensory experiences the Reader is likely to have experienced. 

Week 12

Plotting Character and plot summarized in the process is a bit much... You need to have an idea of the direction of the plot. What the audience finds out is more important than the discovery. "The whole trick of Plotting is not knowing the plot, per se, nor inventing one, it is in figuring out when to tell the reader who knows what." The plot is the revelations that are given. Writer Mentions: Alice Munroe, Annie Dillard, Arundhati Roy, Richard Ford, VS Naipaul, John Irving, Joan Didion Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Week 13

Beginnings and Endings First/last  lines that are truly excellent do more than present a stylish flourist - they often characterize the scope, setting, direction, and even "greater truth" of a piece of writing.  so they're really important to establish the EVERYTHING of the plot. There is no Week 14.

Week 15

Dialog should move the plot.  (Note: this means it is not primarily a tool to illustrate character - if what your character is saying is not moving the story ahead, you don't need it.) Dialect is when the writer uses a non-standard version of language to distinguish a character. There are more sensory things than just seeing-- what about hear, feel, smell, and thinking...

Camper Challenge

5/28/2022

Alright campers, today's challenge is to find a reason to keep going.

New Year’s Journal Entry

2024

Grabbed from tumblr during my move but never properly posted.

rather than try to write things that aren’t getting me interested to write, i’d like to go back to trying out daily writing again. Like drabbles, I guess. but I’ll always be introducing new ideas instead of old ones… I don’t think my system of just working on old ideas is working though. I also filled out a q and a. I copy pasted the questions but I forgot to grab the source so now I just have a list of answers with no author to the original.

Do you have a word-count goal for the upcoming year? No. Will you participate in any fandom exchanges or fic challenges, etc? Not exactly, no. I’m not social enough to do that and I kinda let my ask blog die because I lost interest. Do you anticipate writing for a new fandom this year? Which one? It’s not new, but it’s more or less new fics for an old fandom, Kirby. Do you think you’ll stop writing for a fandom this year? Which one? Probably FFXIV once I finish the vampire story. My brain has been Pokemon fixated for a while.

If I finish that though, I’ll write a new fic with my XIV inspired stuff. Which WIP is first on your list to complete this year? Will you post a snippet? It’s finishing up Chio Hall. I have like, a rudimentary plan for chapter 2 but not much. I liked the chat room I had in the previous chapter interlude so I want to continue that. Which yet-to-be-started fic is first on your list? Kirby’s Back to Basics. It’s a fic covering dreamland 1 but with a twist to introducing characters. Will you change anything about the way you interact with other writers? No. Well, I’ve been considering exiting this discord for fandom writers since I’m losing interest in the fandom but I don’t really have anyone else to talk to so I just stay and lurk. Is there a story idea in your mental vault that you’ve never been brave enough to try writing? Is this the year? Can you tell us about it? The XIV 8 man MSQ, mostly because no one has finished the MSQ yet. And also, juggling 8 characters seems difficult when one of them continues to be flat as a board. (I just can’t get Lily to be interesting to me no matter how much I try.) Short term goals… what do you hope to complete this week or in January? I want to get back into writing 500 word drabbles every week or so.

Will you keep a record of all the fics you write and/or post this year? Probably on Notion, it’s where I transferred all of my notes and stuff. I do have a desktop backup when I post them onto tumblr but so far everything is still just HTML. Note: It is no longer notion.

Would you like to try any new fanfic genres or tropes this year? Not really.

Will you change anything about the way you edit or rewrite this year? Try to come up with something more consistent with my posting/writing. I just write down whatever and only when I’m struck by inspiration do I make something and then post it. Aside from fanfic, are there any other fan works you’d like to try creating? Fanart, or fanvids, gifsets, or podfic?

I like drawing but I don’t draw specific fanart. If I had the patience I’d draw for my own stories, but I’m kinda mediocre, so I rely on Piccrew and memes for context. Have you ever lost large chunks of your work in the past, due to not backing up your work? Will you change your methods this year? The only chunks of work I’ve lost are the original works I purposefully wiped from my hard drive out of embarrassment that I’d never become a published author and because of family pressure of always wanting to read my works. I did have them physically printed out, which thinking about it now seems worse. Now I just write whatever and post it on my tumblr. Do you foresee any personal or professional obstacles this year, that would keep you from creating fanworks? Familial pressure and my inattentiveness.

Do you have that one fanfic that you wrote a ton for, ages ago, but never posted? Will this be the year, come hell or high water, that it WILL get finished and posted? I guess it would again be my XIV works but they’ve been scattered notes for years. Not very readable. I don’t think it’ll be this year because my interest has kinda dwindled for the game and fandom, I still love my characters I made for it though. Do you typically post multi-chapters as you write, or finish it all and then start posting? Would you like to change your posting method? I post multi chapters as I finish them. The only thing I’d like to change about my posting method is the frequency. Would you consider non-fandom writing events, like NaNoWriMo or writing contests? No. Last time I tried NaNo I got burnt out. Its better for me to not be competitive. There’s a 7 day writing game I’ve been wanting to try out but I’m unsure of when I’d get the free time to do so. Any plans to work on original fiction this year? Possibly denizens of dreams, which is just a Kirby story with the names changed and the lore is made up. Otherwise maybe I’ll go find my original works and go make them readable instead of just bullets. Will you try writing software, like Scrivener or those programs that won’t let you stop writing? I should, but iPad notes have served me well enough as something that’s easy to access when I want to write something down. I did use a dungeon fighting game one time but my issue is that I get brain farts about the word count versus the content.

Do you plan to take writing classes this year? I could always use one on courseera. Would you like to go on a writing retreat? No. By the end of this year, you want your fandom to think of you as “that author who _______.” Uhh, no fandom engagement. I’m mostly just here to post stuff. If you answered questions from this list last year, find your answers and compare your goals to your results. How’d you do? I didn’t do this last year. January 4th, 2024 3:14pm
New Edit: Apparently NaNo got some kind of AI integration thing. Damn, can't have anything these days. I was considering actually signing up too... Look, I'll admit I am a mediocre writer. I'm mostly all talk and no productivitiy. But I'd rather post absolutely nothing than just getting a generator to do it for me. Remember when AI dungeon was all the rage? I think that's as far as this thing should've gone because it's really discouraging to want to write and then people around me go "well, just get an AI to do it for you!" No thanks.

2023?

OG Posts

Writing Log: Things I've collected and my own anecdotes... A few of these will definitely be pulled from my no longer used writing tumblr.



The pomodoro timer: I'm really bad at getting time to write anything so I'm making this roadmaps project to sort through all my notes like how I did it for stuff I printed out years ago Note to self: I will probably regret this

My notes personally shuffle between obsidian, standard notes, and LibreOffice. I downloaded FocusWriter but not much there yet.

(embarrassingly literally the best thing I type on the most is notepad (not even PLUS), wordpad, or my actual phone notes... get it together.) (not even PLUS)

Motivation wise: Written, Kitten! There was this one where there was like, RPG battles but Idk the name.

Art Wise: I normally make characters through either doll divine dress up games, Picrew (minus black characters because Whooooo it's whack there), and Maplestory.Design (when the site decides to work), maybe I'll also draw them (HAHA)

I make a music playlist of like themes that I can imagine fight scenes to

What is prose lmao. No pen or paper yet. Instead of trying to rewrite my tumblr HTML I'm just gonna take the fics from there and repost them to Neocities as is...? It's already code.

  • Have a brainstorming session and an idea log for ideas that distract you from your plot
  • make an outline/map of plot points beforehand instead of free writing, define parts you want to happen
  • A lot of people have a daily word count but most of the time I just ended up writing nonsense to fill out a quota like I did with NaNo...


Old Posts: 2022 and 2023 Era of an Old now deleted tumblr blog (It's either memes about not writing or piccrews of my FF14 chars.)

Maybe flash fiction would work out for me to write because longer things are still something I need to build up. Here I am talking about it as if it’s a skill tree or something… I really am more of a “cool concept” person versus a full on writer… maybe writing out scripts again would help. Or drawing it out. I used to try drawing a lot but honestly that just feels like excuses for me to distract myself to not write stuff. Unfortunately I’ve discovered that I don’t have any dedication to having designated writing time, only that I’m struck randomly by inspiration and if I don’t write everything down at that instant I’ll just sit on concepts for months. Then once I’m done doing that I just post them to tumblr without checking for anything else. That’s why I’m the one shot wonder, I guess…

But, because of this, I’m still nowhere near with the part timers story or reopening their blog because my interest in 14 wanes and waxes. I haven’t even finished the fall guys event yet, that’s how much my interest has flatlined. I might write for Decembhyur but that’ll be kinda funny if Pepper is the character I’ve written the most months for consistently. Updates are still the most relevant way of figuring out what I’m working on WIP wise, but ever since I queued up the entirety of what was the initial plan for prog rock its sort of opened up a floodgate where I realize i can just post whatever i want even if it’s not finished or readable because I have a problem where I just hoard concepts and ideas and do nothing with them. Also…. I wonder how these posts end up being found. I don’t tag them, so does tumblr just lump them in with keywords anyways?

In my newest Pokémon fic I will describe Pokémon as both a sports anime and dog competition anime Not the Chio one. The one after it. Musing. If i had a fic planned out for a franchise I’m no longer paying attention to, and said fic has been a radical departure from what the rest of the franchise wants, do I even consider it a fandom fic? I could always just label it as an original work, I suppose. The franchise in question was cookie run, specifically oven break, before Kingdom came and basically invalidated all of the plot along with oven break not having a plot, that’s why I started making it to begin with…

August

Break’s over! Sadly, I gotta get back to work too, but I got a great new idea that I basically made as a daydream to entertain me on a flight.

Halloween centric storyline! …which I’m pretty sure was based on an idea I had for last year I never finished.

It was a pretty large daydream, like, I had put down Rene as a vampire living in the haukke manor, M’ari /Ira as some sort of wizard with the kids as his familiars in their own stories, Lily was still a researcher though, lol. She had zero fear of all the crazy supernatural stuff around her. I don’t really have an ending for it since the daydream ended on a cliffhanger with the manor burning. Much to my dismay, I completely forgot where I found these images of a fan made encyclopedia Eorzea entry. I can say though that I found the font of FFXIV through google and one was located through Locke Rinnanis’s blog whereas the readable font is just Cambria.

Nano 2022 Research Guide Volume 1 (New Edition) (Working backwards from September?) Or not. Maybe I should work on separating textbooks from real books and wikipedia articles from whatever else. Okay so then the entire thing is a bit of a mess. Isn't that what writing is?

Writer's Log: October 2nd Edition 400 words is the count for Nano, I think? 500 words is the amount that's needed for a flash fiction, which might be my style.

To Do then! (New Edition.)

I've got this stimluwrite thing I downloaded that I've been typing with and it seems to be working so far. Wish I could change the resolutiion but whatever.

To do then! (For Real.)

Continue Neocities descriptions for the FFXIV Gang Which involves learning CSS and HTML for real... wow, that was really 2 years ago. Get back into drawing Read more after the sorting of books vs research Oh my god, the flash drives.

NaNo in 2023... Why am I not doing XIVwrite?

because I’ll only do like 4 days straight of it and then forget to finish it up/ stay consistent.

Will I do NaNo?

last time I did NaNo I did it through an XIV related discord but all I did was write the equivalent of hot air. I don’t know how people sort through their notes to make anything written and at this rate the only way I’ll ever post is if I launch it into the stratosphere without ever looking back and then I’ll reread it and somehow wipe it off the face of the earth. I try not to do that these days but if I ever feel that I’ll likely just stop posting on one of these many blogs.

©repth