#revision of the discord post to keep them separated

[mgsr-sing-to-me]

Sing to Me Reboot Announcement

(Cross-posted from Discord and Telegram)

Hey so — What's the current status on Sing to Me? When will the fanfiction continue?

Well… soon.

2024 was a pretty shitty year for me to be honest; after I finished the revision of Chapter 4 sometime around November 2023 and posted it on AO3, I kept getting more and more frustrated with the fic progress I made. The revisions were made because I wrote the first 6 1/2 Chapters of the fanfiction between late December 2022 and the beginning of February 2023 under an extreme amount of sleep deprivation but a lot of insomnia fuelled creativity and while that made me work super fast, it created a bunch of issues for the fanfiction. Then I wanted to get the last 2 Chapters revised in early 2024 — only for quite personal things to go bad. To keep it short without too many details; I had 2 deaths in my immediate family just 5 days apart from each other in January last year and it fucked with my mental health quite badly. The added chronic pain issues I have on top of that made me go through a lot of shit and the insomnia got only worse as a result. I've now finally medicated properly so sleep is no issue for me any longer, but that took nearly all of the last year to figure out.

Now you can imagine, while my creativity was on an all-time high — on so little amount of sleep, and all the other issues, it was difficult for me to write anything that is something worth posting. Other than lots of note-taking and a lot of work on my Obsidian vault for the fanfic project, I was unable to do anything for the story aside from that.

The good news though is that I got back into writing in general by now; I wrote some short scenes already for Sing to Me and its surrounding 'multiverse' as I call it. I have ADHD, so sometimes it works better for me to write stuff completely out of order and then stitch things together later to make a proper fic chapter out of those loose scenes.

Anyway: After lots of contemplation, I have decided that Sing to Me will get a complete reboot.

For a fanfiction that will span probably over 100 Chapters, throwing the first 6 Chapters that are already on AO3 into the bin isn't that much of a big deal, but I am not completely abandoning them either. There are some things that I actually love about those early Chapters, and I will definitely reuse stuff from Chapters 1-4 that have already been revised, and the Prague Chapters 5 and 6 will also be part of the reboot, but they might be pushed further back within the first arc of the fanfiction.

That being said, I decided that each of the arcs of the story (there is a total of 7 arcs, but they are labelled 0, 1, 2, 3, 3.5, 4 and 5) will be posted as a separate fanfiction on AO3, but will be part of the same series. That means you won't be missing anything if you stay subscribed to the series instead of just Sing to Me itself.

The titles are as follows:

Sing to Me ARC 0: I Come with Knives

Sing to Me ARC 1: Dissociate

Sing to Me ARC 2: Parasite Eve

Sing to Me ARC 3: Dark Matter

Sing to Me ARC 3.5: The War in Heaven

Sing to Me ARC 4: Origem

Sing to Me ARC 5: deNiAL//wE FouND LoVe

(Yes, the strikethrough of ARC 5 has a reason and no, I won't elaborate on that.)

Sing to Me ARC 1: Dissociate is the current fanfiction posted on AO3. I will not delete it — when the time is ready and I will update the fanfiction, the title will change, and the Chapters will be posted when I wrote them. However, I will not stress myself about writing either and do things as my muse allows it as well as my health. There is also still some planning to do and I want to be smarter about writing than last time and have everything set out before I publish anything. How long that takes… depends really on life.

However, this doesn't mean that there will be complete radio silence from me. The nature of Sing to Me's 'multiverse' (or rather, the ideas and characterisations of Sam and Raiden) have already created smaller, shorter stories in my WIP folders and I will be posting smaller things from time to time. I already have a folder named 'the eroticism of the machine' for erotica focused on Raiden and Sam.

Regarding the project however, I am thinking of sharing things that will perhaps not make it into the final fanfic project, because I think of my story as a video game rather than a novel (series), so I am aware that there are some ideas that will be cut. In that case, I might drop them here and there as snippets or separate, short fics, who knows.

Lastly, The first 5 arcs of Sing to Me have teasers that I want to share with you all. They will tell you a little bit what this story will be about, but not enough to reveal too much.

So… Enjoy the teasers and feel free to leave me something in my ask box (here or on my main @hatredmadeofgold) about your thoughts! I am willing to answer questions about anything about my writing, Sing to Me and Samuraiden!

[jazzy-art-time]

I know you have plant lore but I need to know if you have animal lore too. I've known for a while that the Hend ranch is...well, it's a ranch. Ranches have animals.

The mainline Pokemon series loves to continue to dance around where any animal products other than milk and honey come from, and while I know Pokemon is moreso a species choice for Jarble rather than anything more concrete, it still does make me curious.

Are animals in the Jarble setting just normal real world animals? Are they *feral* Pokemon since all the Jarbled guys are anthomons? Are they Pokemon adjacent but in an evolutionary (irl definition of evolutionart) sense i.e. ask-scrafty?

Does Tucker see cows and oxen on the ranch and just nod his head? Is this a Goofy and Pluto situation?

*shoves a microphone in your face*

Your thoughts please I'm so normal about animals in Pokemon/Pokemon-adjacent settings and seeing how different people explain them.

SURE I'LL GIVE A LITTLE YAP 4 YOU I already did in discord but this is now the Public Version this version revised for the General Public

SO... For JarbleAU.... I wasn't sure what to do for a long time! Because I've done the animals VS Pokemon... Sentient VS feral... I've done pretty much every version of it for all of my blogs/stories. I had almost contemplated just "lol lab grown meat" and such because I didn't want to try and brace the subject again Cuz whenever I do I always get someone questioning it and whatnot When most of the time it is just a Goofy/Pluto situation and I have to use that one image from Gumball of "Don't think about it too much"

BUT for Jarble, I added the Imps. The Imps changed things. Because the Imps are considered "feral" creatures. Am I just going to have a universe with only 3 non sentient creatures?? That wouldn't make any sense. That would be like a HUGE deal then. I can't have Eden casually show SUPER RARE FERAL BEING THERE ARE ONLY 3 IN THE WORLD on a livestream. That would be like a huge in universe deal. SO... I had to make a decision. I had considered doing the "Sentient VS Feral" pokemon thing again. Much like how I do for Ask-Scrafty.... BUT.... Again I just am always iffy with too many connections to pokemon to Jarble. Despite everything. I know it's a pointless thing to stress over but what can I say, I be stressin. I can't have InternetStranger45 point at me again and go "UMMMM???" I cant do it man I CANT!!!

BUT ALSO ON THE OTHER END.... I did not want to add normal animals. Like I make this fantasy setting complete with ancient gods that literally alter your personality and core as a person... and then I'm just gonna have a like. Dog? I'm just gonna have a normal dog there?? No that's boring I don't enjoy it. SO.... I decided to make the wildlife fantasy creatures! NOT pokemon, but just... general fantasy creatures that resemble their animal species. Sometimes I might make them resemble pokemon species (Like how The Imps resemble The 3 Lake Guardians) but otherwise I wanted to make them separate creatures! "But jazzy... why keep the pokemon species but design all new fantasy creatures?" consider: I don't wanna. SO All Jarble wildlife will be fantasy based creatures! WILL there still be some awkward staring at a creature that is similar to you? Probably! BUT at least they will be a entire different species. That way it is... more akin to a Human viewing a Gorilla. Tucker can live in peace on a ranch knowing that he isn't entirely related to the cattle gkjadhgkjsd

THESE WILL BE GIVEN THEIR OWN POSTS BUT HERE A cow and a lizard!

[fabbyf1]

Hello renowned writer, first let me express my appreciation for your writing. The characterization, the dialogue, the smut which is world-class and never ceases to amaze me. You made me smile and you made me cry, and my world is better for having your fics in it 💛 🤗

If you don't mind, could you please shed some light onto your writing and planning process? It is totally okey if not of course.

How do you plot out your ideas and fics? Especially the long ones? Do you have everything planned out before sitting down to the first chapter? Do you have just general milestones? Or do you have detailed notes for all the scenes? 😅

Is there anything from the notes you would be willing to share? 🙏

Right now I struggle with the level of details I hit in my outlines. I tend to have a general idea about the big building blocks but the concrete shapes of it get to me when I'm close enough to writing them. This means I can't post as I go because everything needs so many revisions to be consistent and paced right.

hi bestie!!

i don't have one consistent answer across the board. it definitely depends on the kind of fic i’m writing, and how long i’ve been thinking about it. 

i’ve found that over planning fics really fucks me up. i get too caught up in trying to follow my plans to a T, that i stunt my own creativity and my scenes don’t have a natural flow. i ran into this problem a lot with my dando fic that was supposed to be 100k+ and only ended up being 30k lmfao. the plan and headcanons are fucking incredible (still even reading them back now im like wow this is the best thing i never actually wrote) but because they were so good and so thought out, it was impossible to write them. because i felt like i had already written them, but in discord conversations with bailee lmfao. in my head, that fic was already complete. even though there was only 30k actual words in a google doc. 

so i’ve found it much easier for me (personally) to just... sit down and write. 

sometimes when i don’t overthink things and just go into a fic blind, i come up with really amazing things on the fly. 

my fic Vapor, for instance, had a vague “ideas” document that was MUCH different than what i actually produced. it was going to be a slow burn enemies to lovers fic. but when i started writing it, and i got to the first club scene (which was only supposed to be them running into each other) i thought “lmfao what if i had them hook up here?” and suddenly the fic went a completely different route. and i’m glad i listened to myself and not my Ideas doc, or i don’t think it would have been as good as it ended up being. 

but that’s not always the case. 

for fics like Long Live that required a complex timeline, i had a separate doc that i put all my research and ideas in. it was a google doc with bullet points, pictures, and ages. sometimes the bullet points were simple, like “charles wins in monza, he gets drunk in a club and they fuck” (lmfao) and sometimes they were line after line after line of conversational dialogue that i would think about while walking my dog and the whole conversation ended up in the actual finished work, word for word. 

so, really, it depends on what i’m writing. 

i’ve found that when i write a long fic, i’ll usually have 1 or 2 scenes that i KNOW i want to write that happen later on in the fic, and everything else before that is like “okay how do i get to that scene????” and the fic kinda builds itself that way. 

when i write a short fic, it’s more like... “okay, what’s the plot? lets go.” and the story writes itself. 

i’m not sure how helpful this was, but i’d be glad to keep rambling about my writing process if you’d like! 

[monstersinthecosmos]

Kacy! 29, 30, and 48 for the fic writer asks please and thank you ❤️

(writing asks!)

29. What’s your revision or editing process like? !!!!!! I try not to ever edit as I go because I used to be really bad about tinkering and not moving forward, so I kinda like CHARGE AHEAD and get the story done, and if I think of something I want to go back and add, I write it down for an editing note. It also helps to give me fresh eyes when it's time to edit, because if I haven't reread the WIP it kinda helps if my memory is fuzzy and I can be a little more objective.

I also don't do heavy editing because I do the big moves inside my plot outlines. It's very rare that I change my mind on something huge that I have to go back and revise. I'm just constantly using the outline to sketch the story out so when I'm actually writing, all the structural stuff basically is done right the first time. I edit for like typos and flow and stuff. So the process is something like this

Copy editing notes into my notes app on my phone so that I can full screen the story but have the notes available on the littler screen

Change the font! So that your eyes are ON ALERT and the text doesn't look the same as it's looked for weeks while you were writing!

Pick the correct MUSIC TO EDIT TO because I always have songs that are integral to the emotional core of everything I write, so I need to play them while I read/edit as a vibe check to make sure the tone is correct. I always want the reader to feel the way the music makes me feel! So editing music is really important to keep the tone!!!!!!!

JUST START REREADING AND LOOKING FOR STUFF. I am a sloppy typer so I always have a million typos. I look for typos and like, if I reuse the same word/phrase too close to each other.

I do a separate read through for smut scenes to just double check that everyone's limbs are accounted for and no positions got flipped.

I do a ctrl+f for phrases like "a little" and "for a moment" because I know I overuse them lol.

I double check my editing notes in case I forgot something in the moment.

THEN I copy it into Google Docs (I write in Scriv lol) and run the gdocs grammar check because it helps catching sloppy lil mistakes. It will overcorrect you on stylistic choices so don't let it correct everything, but it catches a lot of typos for me.

AND THEN!!!!!! I copy it into https://hemingwayapp.com/ which wiLL READ YOU FOR FILTH AND TELL YOU YOURE STUPID so do not use this tool too seriously. I also often use passive voice ON PURPOSE sometimes so SUCK IT HEMINGWAY but I like to use it to check for dense sentences and just basically skim over and see if anything looks super sloppy.

THEN I POST IT ON AO3 and read it again because I always find more typos after it's posted because the pressure of it being public gives me better vision.

AND FINALLY once it's on AO3 I also have the screen reader read it to me out loud because that lady finds some more typos LOL. Hearing it out loud catches what my eyes don't.

30. Do you share rough drafts or do you wait until it’s all polished?

I very rarely share rough drafts! I usually make my WIPs available to Discord friends to get some cheerleading but I don't publish them. Occasionally I'll share like a WIP Wednesday passage or something if I get tagged or asked but otherwise I keep it TO MYSELF! 48. What do you look for in a beta?

bro I don't use betas lol. My mom Anne Rice told me not to let people edit my work.

Occasionally I use a beta because I need to like for a zine (like you beta'd me once for the horror Sheith zine!) but that's the only times I use one. I just want people to like, be constructive, and I want to be communicated with beforehand so that I know what they're looking for and I can tell them what type of criticism I'm willing to listen to vs. what's off limits.

I don't want to sound dramatic LOL but I had a really traumatizing experience in my first zine where I got beta'd without warning/permission, when they said they'd just be checking for typos, and I got absolutely fucking shredded. Like not a single paragraph in my whole fic was left alone, and the beta had like, rewritten sentences, rearranged sentences in the paragraph, erased stylistic choices, added exposition that I didn't write, and removed a bunch of references I had laid down throughout the story as a motif. It was genuinely like so demotivating and made me feel so fucking terrible about my writing and really fucked me up. I still haven't shared that fic on AO3 because I can't look at it without thinking I'm an incoherent fuckup. AND ALL THAT, AND LIKE ONE SINGLE COMPLIMENT LOL. Like one single thing in the whole fic that the person thought was nice. ashdkjglasdg . Lord I almost packed it in after that lol.

So anyway I don't look for betas, on principle, but if I do ask someone to beta I try to be clear like "Find typos and tell me if something didn't make sense." I don't need someone to like shave down everything that makes the story sound like me or add extra fucking sentences, like. Bro no. lol. And give me lots of compliments so I don't feel like I did a bad job because I don't want to feel like I'm being graded on my homework :(

[shepard-ram]

📺 Hello Shep its been awhile!!!!! My writing brain died lmao BUT I went into the discord archives and found some headcanons that I wrote but never sent here! I wrote these either at the very end of season 7 or the very start of season 8, and since then some of them have been proven canon or debunked lmao. I also revised them and added onto a few ^^

-Bdubs, Tango, and Impulse all have tinnitus from being the boomers. Bdubs has it the worst and has some permanent hearing loss from being blown up constantly. It’s why he’s always yelling.

-Keralis still gets nervous going through nether portals bc of area 77 and a nether portal is what separated him from hermitcraft way back when

-all ex-members of the nHo have/had a group picture of them. Etho keeps it in one of his vest pockets, Beef has it framed on his desk, Doc keeps his in his wallet, and Bdubs burned his due to bad memories of the jungle.

-Bdubs claims to not know what the nHo is (this is semi-canon btw, he said this during one of his first livestreams back during season 6)

- Doc is the only member of the nHo who misses it and wants to regroup, but understands that the other members have their own reason for wanting to stay separate and gave up trying to get back together

-during the nHo days Doc and Bdubs got really drunk together and married each other. They didn’t realize it was a real document so they were officially married for a few weeks before they decided it was better to get a divorce. There’s no hard feelings and they still joke/tease each other about it

- during season 6 when Stress and Iskall were neighbors, Iskall would let Stress grow flowers in his lab because she couldn’t grow them in her base due to it being on a glacier

-Joe is afraid of heights (this was proved canon I think?)

-the only people who have seen X with his helmet off is Keralis, Joe, and Hypno

-Doc is fuzzy like a creeper

-Tangos eyes are red due to a really bad redstone accident. His vision now has a slight red “filter” and he can see better in the dark than before. They also admit light like redstone ore.

-Doc lost his eye in his early 20s trying to impress his friends. He doesn’t like to talk about it, he finds it embarrassing.

-Impulse is like 1/6 demon. It only allows him to be summoned however.

-the reason we haven’t seen worm man since season 5 is bc Zed lost the uniform.

-X and EX aren’t human but extremely similar to humans. Their race is called “Slayers”

-“Xisuma” is a surname. X’s first name is actually “Void” It’s common in Slayer culture to have your name be a noun or adjective. It’s also common to have your surname go first, but Evil X puts his first name first as a form of rebellion.

-Evil X thinks X is a “stuck up snob” and a “stickler for the rules”

-Evil X is 100% the younger brother and is just bitter at X because X was the golden child while EX was the problem child

-The only reason EX followed X when he left home is because even though he hated him, X was the only person who gave EX even a sliver of respect and didn’t just see him as “the problem child”

Damn I need to write again👀

AYYYYYYY It's great to have ya over here again Tele!! Since this is a longer post I honestly don't have much to say, but I thoroughly enjoy all of these. I have eaten the headcanons, they are mine now.

[fondnesses]

roscoe’s notebook post

A while back I said I was going to write a post about the way I use notebooks for writing projects. This is the first of several posts about Writing Process I’ve been tossing around in my drafts for a little while as a result of conversations with friends, so bear with me.

I. Love. Notebooks. I genuinely would have to deeply overhaul my whole Process of writing anything on the longer side if I were to go paperless; I find physical paper pretty invaluable when I’m outlining, brainstorming, and researching, and I still probably write ¼-⅓ of all my actual content on paper first. (That proportion used to be a lot higher, but I’ve gotten better at being productive on a computer in recent years, which is great.) I’m a very visual person, so notebooks really help me visualize my ideas, story structure, etc. It’s very helpful to be able to use arrows and diagrams and physically strike things through, and the tactility is really soothing to me. If I show people my notebooks or talk about them, I often get a response like “this is so organized”, which is sort of true, but I have to stress that it’s “organization for a disorganized mind”; I can’t misplace ideas or notes if it all goes into the same physical object, vs. electronic notes, which are much more, like “Did I say that in a voice memo? PM it to myself on Discord? Leave it in a desktop sticky note? Write it directly into the Google Doc? Who knows! It’s lost to time!”. It’s very much an ADHD management strategy.

It helps that I’m a very neophyte stationery hobbyist and appreciate any excuse I have to use my pens, but I also will go off at any opportunity about how helpful I find them for writing projects, which is why I decided to just make a post about it. Right now I mostly use them for (fan and original) fiction projects, but I used a notebook for a very similar purpose when I was working on my undergrad thesis, and I have a slightly different but equally necessary-to-me approach to notebooks I use at work.

My typical structure for a notebook that’s devoted to one project only looks like this:

I always leave the first couple pages blank so I can go back and retroactively index bujo-style. I don’t always actually do the index, because sometimes I get too lazy, but I like having those blank pages there to give me the option. I also usually put epigraphs/inspo quotes on the first page.

After that, there’s often (but not always, I’ll talk about it) a couple pages at the start where I’m frantically jotting down loose brainstorming ideas before they've coagulated into a story structure. Just, like, vomiting into the void.

Stemming out of that, I usually write out about like 5-10 pages of outline-style notes in chronological order, laying out all the main story beats and charting out the story trajectory. This will inevitably get revised and rewritten many times, but I find the process of writing these wide-angle synopses really useful for dislodging ideas, making connections re: thematic threads, etc. from my brain.

I’ll devote a couple pages after that to specific things like "sex scene brainstorming", "random scene ideas/minor details that don't have a clear place in the outline right now but I'll turn to for inspo later" [this is what I refer to as “bits” in one of the later photos], "page where I just outline the Motifs And Themes", "research notes", "to-do list", "stuff to check on a second pass", "things to put in the a/n and AO3 tags", etc.--the specifics vary with the story.

Then, I skip ahead to approx. halfway through the notebook and cordon off the rest of the pages to be “free writing” space, AKA writing of actual content rather than planning, with the expectation there will be no internal organization and I’ll transcribe to laptop as I go. Writing on paper feels less binding than typing something on a computer; it’s like a little secret kept with myself, and it doesn’t need to go anywhere or be seen by anyone if I decide I don’t like it. Setting aside pages in the back half of the notebook means that, as more things come up re: planning, I can go back and add those in the rest of the pages that were intentionally left blank. This is how I avoid (for the most part) having the whole thing be a jumbled mess where there’s no separation between the notes and the actual story writing; I learned this the hard way via the first notebook I’ll show you in a second. I’ve recently gotten really into using Muji sticky note tabs to label any pages/sections of particular import that don't want to have to refer back to in the index and would rather just flip to instantly.

I do use notebooks that aren’t specific to any one project, but those are much less organized and less worth sharing.

Before I look at more recent stuff, here are some selections from my notebook for the project that got me into writing longfic, my Golden Kamuy canon divergence AU (with apologies for the bad photos, my phone’s camera is trash). I worked on this from Sept 2018-July 2019. It was a learning experience in a lot of ways, and notebook utilization was one of those. I’ve always used notebooks for keeping track of writing projects, as I said earlier, but before this it was largely without much organization or structure; just total chaos. Having a physical notebook became really important for this project because it was a sprawling multichapter story with rotating POVs and a lot of historical research. I also learned a lot about what not to do with a notebook, personally, or at least things that don’t work so well (for me). This was a college ruled spiral-bound Decomposition Book, for the record.

By the time I bought a notebook for it I already had a (very basic) plot outline in mind, so I wasn’t doing that very initial ground-zero brainstorming in here; I was copying out of my phone’s notes app, basically, and then going from there. 

This is one of the first pages in this notebook; I wanted to visualize the relationship web between the four central characters in the story in terms of how they feel about one another. The two colours correspond to the POV characters (Sugimoto in orange, Ogata in pink), and I used this colour-coding throughout the notebook with highlighters, etc. to keep track of information that was more relevant to one character than the other. Tsurumi and Yuusaku aren’t POV characters, but they’re prominent in the story and their presence impacts the central relationship between Sugimoto and Ogata, and it was helpful to me to map out the emotional ecosystem, as it were.

(There are coffee stains all over this, because I wrote the vast majority of the story in coffee shops because I didn’t want to be around my roommates, lol. This is part of why I never do fiction writing in notebooks that are too nice, I get neurotic about needing to keep them tidy. I can’t use ones that are too shit though, either, so it’s a bit of a narrow window. I’ll talk more about brands and paper quality etc. later.)

As you can see, this is the first page of many I set aside specifically for jotting down different pieces of historical information relevant to my story. It’s about fictional characters who are members of an army division that existed in real life, and both the canon and my fic involve a high level of attention to detail with regards to which divisions were present for which battles, etc., as well as general historical details specific to the Russo-Japanese War setting--what did people eat in the trenches? What did they do to fill time? How did they get through the winter? What did third party observers have to say about the conditions? What were the specs of their weaponry (particularly important because one of the POV characters is a sniper and gun nut)? I did a lot of reading (and watching of antique gun collector Youtube videos... the things I do for love, eh), and it came in handy so many times, because it turns out it’s much easier to write trench warfare slice of life if you have factual details to pull from when you don’t know what to do with a scene! Imagine that!

This is the first of three “grid outlines” I made; this is a way I sometimes like to visualize a story outline all on one page, with the columns representing chapters and the squares within the columns representing sections/scenes within the chapters. As you can see, early on I was hoping to get this done in five or even FOUR chapters (whatmakesyouhaha.mp3), with POV switches happening internally within the chapters. This proved to be unwieldy for many reasons, so I revised the outline:

Here I’d come to terms with the fact this story was going to have a lot more chapters than I’d planned, and I rearranged things so that it would happen in ten, with each chapter belonging to only one POV character. This also needed revising later, and in the end the story looked a bit more like this (though it did in fact end up being twelve chapters, but only because Chapter Ten was like, 12k, and needed to be split in two chunks):

I must have remembered to bring my fineliners to the coffee shop this time, lol, because as you can see it’s properly colour-coded this time. This outline was made when I was already four posted chapters into the fic, which hopefully gives you a sense of the way in which I am sort of a planner and a pantser; I can’t get into a longer project without an outline, but the outline inevitably changes many times throughout writing and I often end up with a finished product that looks pretty different from what I was intending. My creative M.O. as always is Do The Maximum! Amount! Of! Work! Possible!

This is what a “free writing” page looks like, for me. In this notebook I didn’t set aside any specific spaces for free writing so it’s strewn throughout the notebook in a really disorganized way and I was constantly flipping through looking for bits I’d written and forgotten to transcribe, and I decided to be more organized in future as a result of that. If something’s crossed through, that means I transcribed it. As you can see, they’re often small sections, sometimes just a coupled decontextualized sentences. About 3/4 of what I write in a notebook makes it into the story, I’d say; some of it never goes anywhere, and that’s OK. I have less of an issue killing my darlings if they never make it off the paper page.

A very brief, top-down chapter outline, where the goal was not to get too bogged down in details and just to visualize the beats and pin down what they’re trying to accomplish. Chapters for this fic typically ran about 6k, and five or six scenes per chapter was pretty common, so the average scene length was about 1-1.25k words/scene. IDK why I called it storyboarding when I didn’t make drawings. (Margin numbers are to keep track of word count, since I was using a daily word count tracker while writing this.)

This page was, as titled, for keeping track of the various balls in the air when I was about 2/3-3/4 of the way through the story and really feeling the pressure with regards to tying up the various loose ends. This was... a struggle. I hadn’t ever written anything longish (this fic ended up just under 70k) that had an action plot before, let alone a canon divergence scenario where I had to engage with and explain away various canon plot elements so I could maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Now, I mentioned earlier that I learned various “things not to do” with my notebooks while working on that project. One of those lessons I learned is to be more realistic when assessing how big a project is likely to get, not least because I RAN OUT OF PAGES around the chapter 9-10 mark. In my defense though, that’s because I’d never written anything even half this long! But I know better now, and try not to be in denial. Finishing the notebook early was a way bigger problem than I’d anticipated, and was part of the reason the last few chapters took several grueling months to finish. The issue was that I needed to be able to use a notebook to maintain my workflow--attempting to do it only on a computer was dismal--but it seemed silly to start a notebook of a similar size to the one I’d finished (80pg, approximately B5 dimensions) when there was no way it would need that much space, especially since the reference pages, like the historical notes, didn’t need to be transcribed over. I was also pretty broke at the time and didn’t want to spend money unnecessarily, lol. I tried to get by using a Moleskine Cahier for a month or so because I had one lying around, but it was horrid; it was too small to be used comfortably, it wasn’t spiral-bound so it wouldn’t lay flat, the ghosting is terrible and I hate the way Moleskine paper feels, etc. Eventually I caved and went to Muji and bought a 30ish page A5 with closer to lay-flat binding, and I finished the story in there. I would take a comparative pic for you of the relative notebook sizes and include some of the scene staging diagrams, etc. I put in there, but I can’t find it :(

So I learned that specs really do matter, and it’s okay to be picky if the pickiness is going to make the difference between actually using a notebook or not. Things that are important to me in my notebooks:

Ruling (gotta have ruling, I can suffer through grid but blank or dot is a no-go)

Size (I can’t use anything smaller than at least a medium-large notebook, I find it claustrophobic and get miserly about page space)

Binding (twin ring is my preference because it looks and feels better than a classic spiral but has the same comfort of use with regards to bending the pages back to suit workspace size and laying flat with ease)

Paper quality and colour (I don’t like anything too slippery/smooth or with too much visible ghosting, and I strongly prefer an off-white paper to bleached paper--part of why I don’t use Decomposition Books anymore, the paper is scratchy and it’s too damn bleached!)

Pagecount relative to size of project

Portability (in non-COVID times; anything bigger than a B5 wouldn’t fit in the satchel I used to bring to work at my old job), etc.

But everyone’s taste is different in this respect, and the only way to figure out what works for you is through trial and error, I’m afraid. I also suspect I’m more neurotic and particular about the sensory experience of using a notebook than most people are, but I yam what I yam.

Now to talk about the notebooks for my current projects, where I’ve refined my approach somewhat. I’ve included less photos for these because they’re ongoing WIPs I don’t want to spoil completely, but I’ve tried to include some outline-type stuff to give you an idea.

My big bang fic is in the very ugly twin ring notebook on the right; I got it at a dollar store by my house because I needed something to work in and didn’t want to wait for an online order, but it’s been very serviceable for my needs. The paper isn’t even bad. The bigger notebook (B5) is my Sangcheng fic.

I wanted something with a lot of pages for this, because I knew it was going to be a long story, and for some reason the fact it’s smaller than my usual preference doesn’t bug me (I think it’s an A5?); it just fits this story, somehow. I’m not sure exactly how many sheets are in here but I’d guess about 150.

Because this notebook has upwards of 100 sheets, I made a lot of use of sticky-note tabs to label high-priority pages. The colour coding of these doesn’t mean anything, it was just whichever ones I had at hand at any given moment. These are those tabs from Muji I mentioned, I’m really obsessed with them--the shape makes them so much less obtrusive and more practical than conventional squares/rectangles OR flag shapes, IME.

My big bang story is nonlinear, so, similarly to what I did with colour coding for the two POVs for my GK fic, this story has two main colours corresponding to whether a given section takes place in the “before” or the “after” portions of the timeline, with blue as “after”, yellow as “before”. This is what the most current version of the outline looks like in there:

If you squint, you can see the alphanumeric notes in the top right of each section entry; I gave them each a code like “A3″ or “B5″ corresponding to their position in the story sequence (so, it goes A1, B1, A2, B2, etc., through to B9 and then the epilogue). [Unintentional that this schema overlaps with notebook size labeling and so is kind of confusing in the context of this post.] At first I was just keeping track of the sections via the highlighted titles, but it got confusing because I’d write down “Wedding” or “Yiling” in my notes and then refer to the notes later like “but there are multiple marriages?? and multiple scenes in Yiling??”. Stuff gets struck through with a straight line if it’s been written in a more-or-less complete form and crossed out with a squiggly line if it’s been cut from the outline or made redundant.

As I said earlier, I started out all the initial brainstorming for my Sangcheng fic in its notebook, instead of brainstorming it in someone’s DMs/my notes app/a voice memo/etc. and then transcribing it into the notebook in a somewhat more organized fashion, which is how my stories usually start out. Because of this, the first five-ish pages are basically just stream of consciousness rambling where I was trying to jot down every disconnected thought I had about the story concept. I don’t have photos for that because it’s too spoilerific for later developments in the fic, but I can show you some of the stages the outlines went through, once I was able to corral those initial notes into a story structure:

All the chapters in this fic have their own highlighter colour, so when I started trying to make sense of my initial brainstorm notes I just went through and highlighted stuff in the colour of the chapter it would make the most sense for, and then transcribed things more-or-less in chronological order into the relevant chapter outline. I later ended up rewriting all the chapter outlines AGAIN to refine them and divide them internally by the individual scenes, which makes them a lot more legible and less wall-of-text-y. They look like this now, with about four sheets per chapter:

Because this fic is on the longer side, I have some pages that are just for keeping track of other story elements, like this, where I refer back to whatever the fuck the “themes” are supposed to be whenever I forget what this fic is about:

It’s all about the visionboarding... Anyway, that’s most of what I have to offer, since most of these two notebooks is Forbidden Content.

With regards to brands/supplies, I really like this Kokuyo Campus Wide notebook that I’m writing Sangcheng in, it’s pretty perfect for me. I also like the B5 Muji twin rings, but those only come in 30 sheets, so I wouldn’t use it for anything above a ~20k project. The B5 Maruman Spiral Note 6.5mm ruled/80 sheet is another good one, though I wish it was twin ring instead of spiral. As you can tell, I like Japanese stationery brands because it’s easier to find decent paper quality and minimalist design without shelling out $$ than it is with American/European brands, at least IME. I like Rollbahns too. But honestly, I can usually find pretty serviceable random notebooks that aren’t brand-name from Asian dollar stores; it’s really not something where you need to shell out tons of money.

[newmayhem]

Character analysis: Aubrey (Part 1)

Because this post heavily refers to direct quotations from the author and the OG text, I’ll stick calling everyone by their original names throughout (as I usually do when I’m talking specifically about the original iteration and in quotations). But elsewhere on the site, I typically refer to everyone by different names in all other situations.

Aubrey is both easier and harder to pin down than either Risika or Alexander. He gets a decent amount of screentime in ITFOTN both DIMV. Whereas in ITFOTN we’re seeing him exclusively through Risika’s pov, DIMV is narrated in the 3rd person so we also get to see him more objectively, and because he’s more of a hero in that book, we get to see a different side of him.

Still, what’s going to make him slightly harder to articulate is that his motives in ITFOTN have never been explicitly spelled out in the text, and we also never got to see his pre-vampire history so we don’t really know what shaped him.

I’m going to split his character analysis into three sections- Aubrey’s motives re: Risika/ITFOTN, Aubrey’s personality/worldview according to the og text,  and a (re)imagining/reverse engineering of Aubrey’s’ personal history.

Motives

It seems a little backwards to start with looking at his motivations, but this being Risika’s story, it makes the most sense to examine Aubrey in relation to Risika. For me, the most interesting part is trying to figure out exactly why he keeps popping up in Risika’s narrative. It’s never covered in the og text, and that makes sense because this is being told from Risika’s pov and she doesn’t care about Aubrey’s motivations, only about the disastrous results of them. Which is more than fair, tbh.

Like I said, we don’t get any explanation of Aubrey’s motives in ITFOTN, but we do get clues in DIMV as well as some Word of God statements from ahar, and the excerpts from Black Flame (an unpublished TDOS story from Aubrey’s POV).

Quotes From Chapter 10 of Demon in My View:

More than her physical appearance, Jessica had a rare aura of strength about her. Aubrey remembered Ash Night's describing him as having the same kind of aura while he had been human, but he had seen it in very few others. Risika had been one of the exceptions; that strength had drawn Aubrey to her before she had ever caught Ather's eye.

And you can read these two excerpts from Black Flame on the Nyeusigrube-haven blog, which archives quotes, fanart, clips, and words of god about The Den of Shadows series. I’ll reblog them later just so I have a copy on hand.

From a blog post of ahar’s entitled Perspectives from 9/3/15:

“When it comes to Aubrey's and Risika's complex relationship, In the Forests of the Night is only half the story. Someday, I would love to release a revised and extended version that includes Aubrey's point of view in addition to Risika's. Here are a few details it might include:

Pandora had claimed Alexander as a student; he had attacked Ather, and she had decided to retaliate by killing Alexander's sister Rachel. Why didn't she? Who do you think convinced her it would be better to change Rachel into a vampire instead of killing her?

After her change, when Risika was weak due to her refusal to feed, who convinced her that she needed to hunt?

Who finally baited her into fighting him, proving her strength and taking her rightful place as a force to be reckoned with among her own kind?

Aubrey has been around a couple thousand years. Do you think it's more likely he's stupid, or more likely that he's manipulative? Rachel never wanted to be a vampire, and maybe would have preferred death at Ather's hands back in 1704 (Did I get that date right? I don't have the text in front of me) but long-story-short: Aubrey saw her first, had his options limited by Ather's bloodclaim... and didn't want Rachel dead.

Try rereading In the Forests of the Night sometime with this point of view.”

And most recently (3/2/20, to be exact), ahar posted some more details in the Nyeusigrube discord server (in the Den Of Shadows channel) under the username Nesrerai (Note that I made some formatting edits to make it more readable. No edits to the content have been made).:

“Someday I'd love to rewrite an "extended edition" of In the Forests of the Night showing more of the back-story. I wrote some of it out in an Aubrey background/POV book that was TERRIBLE and shall never see the light of day but was good for author-knowledge.

Key event relevant to this conversation was that Alexander attacked Ather. Ather couldn't kill him because he was Pandora's, but that didn't protect Rachel, so she planned to go after Rachel in retaliation. Aubrey encouraged her to change her instead, as a more effective form of punishment for Alexander, because he didn't want Rachel killed. Aubrey is more powerful than Ather, but she had blood claim on the family so he had to go manipulative instead of direct.

He was tracking Rachel before Ather got involved. He has a sorcery background, and has an interest in the powerful but untrained. Also, she's Jager's lover's daughter, so he was keeping an eye out. If I recall my notes/drafts right, he was more or less at the "I wonder whether it's more trouble with Jager and Lila than it's worth if I mess with this family" stage. Keeping the kids safe was kiiiiiiind of part of the deal that kept Lila in line ... which is why Mayhem burned down shortly after Rachel was first there... which in turn put Mayhem/Silver's line in a vulnerable position while they were trying to gain power, so they hired a spoiler to knock Midnight down a peg.”

Findings To avoid redundancies, I’ll list out all of the findings and then cite the specific sources in brackets:

Aubrey has a very different version of how ITFOTN went down (i.e., he did not see himself as Risika’s antagonist). [BF; blog]

Aubrey was a sorcerer when he was a human, so he’s always had an interest in those who were very powerful but untrained -> he was drawn to Risika because he saw a rare aura of strength around her, one that he himself had as a human. [DIMV; discord]

Risika had initially caught Aubrey’s attention and he had been tracking her well before Ather ever got involved. [DIMV; BF; blog; discord]

Ather initially wanted to kill Rachel, but Aubrey was the one who convinced Ather to change her into a vampire instead. [BF; blog; discord]

Aubrey was trying to help Risika all along [blog]

Aubrey manipulated Risika into drinking from her stepmother in order to show her that she needs to hunt/feed regularly.[blog]

He got frustrated when he pushed her down and she didn’t get up right away. [ITFOTN]

Aubrey purposefully provoked Risika into fighting him (in public) with the intention of getting her to prove her strength and take her rightful place as a force to be reckoned with among their kind. [blog]

Aubrey was considering changing Risika himself (among other options that didn’t involve her dying) [BF; blog (implied)]

Aubrey didn’t want Risika dead [BF; blog; discord]

Aubrey saw it as a plus that Ather would take the blame for changing Risika. [BF]

Aubrey knew that Alexander was still alive and actively conspired with Pandora to keep the twins apart so that Alexander wouldn’t interfere. [BF]

Aubrey argued with Alexander when he came looking for Risika, meaning that up to present day, he was still trying to keep them apart. [ITFOTN]

*It’s also worth noting that in a facebook video, ahar confirms that Aubrey has a lot of respect for Risika

There are also some other findings in the discord post re:Lila Light, but that’s tangential and I’ll be covering those in a separate post.

Questions Basically, Aubrey was drawn to Risika for reasons unrelated to the situation with Ather (namely, her strength). He’s heavily invested in Risika’s survival to the point where he was actively manipulating the situation both in the initial stage of having Ather change her instead of kill her, and then later on in trying to help her. Not only did he want Risika to survive, he also wanted her to ‘take her rightful place as a force to be reckoned with among her own kind’.

But we’re left with the overall question- what was Aubrey’s endgame? This effort was clearly very calculated, time consuming, and required a lot of effort and attention (I mean, how did he seem to always know where to find her? And how did he know she hadn’t been feeding regularly?). So how did Aubrey see any of this benefiting him?

So we know that Aubrey was drawn to Risika’s strength/power/potential, but to what end? Based on the blog post, Aubrey was considering a few different options for Risika before Ather’s bloodclaim forced his hand. What were those options? We know he was considering changing her himself, but again, to what end? Was she meant to be part of some larger plan he had? Clearly, she was important enough for him to go out of his way to manipulate Ather into not killing her.

Possible Explanations The least exciting explanation, I think, would be that Aubrey wanted to sire a strong fledgeling...for the clout? I mean, it happens! Ather does it, but she does it out of necessity- Aubrey doesn’t need strong fledgelings to protect him or scare off his enemies. And the fact that he saw having Ather change Risika as a preferable result implies that he just wanted Risika to be changed regardless of whether it was by him or not. Which is also interesting.

Another explanation could be that Aubrey planned to use Risika’s powers (or her potential powers) for his own personal gain. This seems very unlikely. I can’t picture a plausible scenario for this and even if this were the case, it doesn’t make sense that he would keep treating Risika the way that he does, knowing that it alienates her. I also find it hard to believe that he’d wait three centuries for her to come around rather than move on to other targets.

Additionally, Aubrey was setting Risika up to ‘take her rightful place as a force to be reckoned with among her own kind’...and that would effectively set her up as his competition, which is the exact opposite of his goal if we were to go with this possibility.

A similar but slightly more plausible explanation is that Aubrey was ‘recruiting’ on behalf of Silver’s line. We know that Mayhem at the time was in an intense rivalry with Midnight, so they’d probably be in need of strong fledgelings. Word of God has also mentioned that Silver’s line is one of the least prolific because they are serious about only siring the strongest. It tracks that Aubrey came across Risika and her unusual strength/power, and saw that she was the perfect candidate. That could be why he was not only ok with Ather changing her (rather than him doing it himself), but he also took responsibility for Risika survival and ‘education’ after she was changed. Maybe he wanted Risika changed no matter the cost because they couldn’t afford any lines loyal to Midnight getting to her first.

But if this were the case, why was Aubrey the only one looking out for Risika? Why would he still try to convince her to prove herself centuries after? And if siring and training new powerful fledgelings who would fight for Silver’s line was a priority at the time, why were there no other fledglings during this time period? Generally, this just seems like a very flawed and inefficient plan. Training fledgelings takes time and energy that could be better used to fight Midnight directly and, as we see in Risika’s case, their loyalty isn’t even guaranteed.

Conclusion This may seem like a cop out...but I feel like in this case, we’ll have to go Occam's razor. The answer that seems the least complicated- so uncomplicated that I haven’t even mentioned it until now- is that Aubrey feels some type of affection for Risika.

This might not necessarily be romantic or anything like that (though that’s definitely a possibility). It could just be that he recognizes some of himself in her and feels a sense of kinship, but it’s obvious that Aubrey cares a lot about what happens to Risika. He wants her to succeed and repeatedly goes out of his way to keep tabs on her and help her even if it inconveniences him, even if it puts his own status at risk (I don’t think he planned on losing the fight, but he must’ve known that in order for her to come out of it looking good, he would’ve to win by a much smaller margin than normal for him). He didn’t care if she hated him and never realized that this was all to help her, it was more important to him that she survived and thrived. And he was willing to do all this over the span of centuries.

The big counter-argument for this is that in ITFOTN, Aubrey does say “Remember this, Risika—I have no love for you. I think you are weak, and I don't care about your morals. If you challenge me again, you will lose.” But for me, his actions speak louder than words, and it makes sense that because he’s trying to get her to be tougher and to fight back so that she could survive, he’s not going to be gentle with her or let her expect help from him. And, I mean, he could’ve killed her right then and there if he wanted to, but he actually let her get away with a lot (she called him a lap dog, slapped him, spat on him, broke his knee cap, and lived to tell the tale).

Anyway, the beauty of this explanation is that it would be really interesting to explore, but won’t get too convoluted. I think it would be really interesting to go deeper into:

Possible parallels between Aubrey and Risika.

The dramatic irony of Aubrey’s well-intentioned efforts contrasted with Risika’s perception of them.

Aubrey as a foil for Alexander and a rival for influence over Risika (and how Risika breaks free from both of them in the end).

Aubrey’s feelings regarding how terribly received his ‘help’ has been and why he keeps choosing to help her regardless.

How it’s also kind of messed up that Aubrey decided that he knew what was best for her and mercilessly imposed that on her despite her clear lack of consent (or knowledge).

The nature of Aubrey’s affection for Risika, how it compares to Alexander’s, and if/how it has evolved.

This is probably beyond the scope of this rewrite, but I’d also be interested in some sort of ‘deleted scene’ type epilogue where Aubrey and Risika (post-fight) have a real conversation/confrontation about all this.

[benevolentgodloki]

Loki pokes - January 

Happy New Year! My Partners page has been updated for January so should now include anyone I picked up over December. 

I have sent out reminders for anything I’m super keen on that’s over a month old. If I haven’t reminded you about something but you’d like to keep it, please come poke me about it. It may be that you were inactive/away for a particular reason, I lost it somehow or I’m more enthused about it knowing you are.

My oldest unanswered thread that is not currently in queue is from Nov 25th but my current turnaround for each partner getting at least one reply to a thread is around 10 days. This will likely have been due to Christmas threads and social events slowing things down.

To-do list

Update Partner list

Check through Rules page

Edit headcanon posts/revise them

Edit About page

Edit Verses page (though this may need a proper revamp since most of my things go under the ‘second chance’ verse which doesn’t help separate plot-lines

Make Discord server for interested mutuals

Make post about Christmas threads going forward

Make post about a visitor to the Marvel universe

[quietdaysco]

Primrose Path - Devlog #007

We’re flipping the script... in more ways than one! We’re proud to show our month’s raw stats—first this time:

Main Game Progress

Common Route:

Rough Outline: 100%  ✔

Revised Outline: 100%  ✔

Draft Script: 21k words

This month we wrote the common route draft script and ended up hitting a cozy word count of 21,000 or so. We’ve taken a fourth week off to review, address side projects, and manage miscellaneous company tasks among other things. The next few months will follow this routine and progress will be listed as a word count. We expect to hit the same word count goals at minimum.

So far we’ve written scenes from The Party, wanting to get into the head space of our men and how they’d interact with the different playable tones of our main character, Lynn Austen.

We've also started implementing some of the interactive elements in Lynn’s apartment. Want to watch TV? Channel surf and pick up on world lore—and maybe some crucial clues for characters. It pays to know what's going on in Primrose Path!

Here’s a couple of our favorite unrevised draft snips from this month:

My eyes dart to the Prince so I can apologize for the misunderstanding, but his gaze pierces through me as he laughs.

PRINCE: Oh, don’t be such a tease. PRINCE: Are you getting coy over what you shared about Priya? PRINCE: (smiling) Because that would be silly… and unadvised.

EZRA: Old royal buildings. It used to belong to a runaway Prussian heiress—a distant cousin of the Romanovs.

He freezes as the panel clicks open and slowly reveals a small stairwell.

EZRA: Allegedly.

Pique your interest? You don’t have to wait for one every month: we share more unrevised draft snippets in our Discord server. Join if you’d like to peep longer excerpts and chat with us over them!

Behind The Scenes

CGs in VNs Survey

We had questions about CGs and wanted to know what fans of the visual novel community thought about them, the role they play, examples they enjoyed, and more. We received over 200 responses from folks across different platforms—all this is in addition to our previous survey which received over 100! There's only two of us, so it'll be a while to get through all the data, but we’re excited to interpret and release them in separate posts coming soon!

Writing GitScrum Board

We’ve had this feature in our Discord server for much longer, but now that we’re writing our script draft for the common route, we’ve decided to open up our writing GitScrum board publicly. Now you lot passing by can peek into our progress on scenes at any point. Please, feel free to hold us accountable for how much we get done weekly. Your watchful eyes spur us on.

Code Blog

We're keeping up a mini-blog on side projects and developments! Elm will be talking about developing with Unity, starting with basic knowledge and things to consider during the early stages of production. If you're interested in hearing about 2D narrative development in Unity via our projects from start to finish, you can stop by Elm's coding blog!

Real Life

Coda’s back in college this semester, and she’s decided to pick up a 3D Game Graphics class to learn some asset creation basics. The class will teach her how to make a low-poly asset pack for creating environments, interiors, and props in Maya 2019 to explore in the Unity game engine. Quiet Days’ method for creating backgrounds in Primrose Path uses 3D modeling as a base for our environments, which is later rendered and post-processed in 2D. This is the main reason Primrose can exist at it's current scale! Elm is the one with the BA (Hons) for 3D, but Coda wanted to take some of the weight off of Elm for efficiency. Wish her the best; so far she’s had a great first day!

Lore Snippets

BŌGLŌ

BŌGLŌ is a trendy meal replacement drink in the universe of Primrose Path. Although many consumers are skeptical about its appearance, the bioluminescent algae smoothie has become a popular drink among its eccentric audience. Creator and CEO of BŌGLŌ, Chouette Lars is a contentious figure in the natural holism movement. Many prominent holists denounce her for appropriating the ideology in her pseudoscientific and capitalist ventures. Lars’ health claims for the drink have been found inconclusive by food scientists and nutritionists. BŌGLŌ glows brighter when agitated, is allergen-free, may stain teeth, and comes in such flavors as “Pasta La Vista” and “Cake or Death”.

Love this snippet? We’ll be posting more on our Twitter under the hashtag #PrimrosePathVN, but come back here to get detailed insight beyond Twitter’s character limit. 

We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:

Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!

Thanks for reading! Remember to take it easy on your Quiet Days. ♥

Socials

- Micro-updates on Twitter!    ♦ Factoids with Greyson! - Task tracking on GitScrum!  - Live art development on Twitch! - Art logging on Instagram! - Ask us anything here! - Continue the discussion on Discord! - Master thread on Lemma Soft!

[ana-motion-nua-ba2a]

08/02/2019

My individual tutorial with Lynsey was on Monday, for which I did actually have a completed draft of my script. Most of the discussion centred on the character of Gwen - Lynsey felt that she was discordant, compared to the tone/ideas of the rest of the story, being a very literal element in a story where I’d been using magical realism. I agree in a purely critical sense, but I do worry about how easy it will be to edit her out. I think I might struggle to come up with any alternative ideas in the timeframe, since I have so much of my stop motion puppet still to do - and Lynsey did agree that it’d be acceptable to hand my script in pretty much as-is. 

Moreover, Gwen is tied to two important aspects of my story, and I put her in there in the first place so that I could represent parts of my own struggle with mental illness, as I’ve outlined in a separate post. On top of the taboo homosexuality angle, Florence’s reaction to Gwen is also a depiction of my reluctance to let anyone else find out about the intrusive thoughts I was experiencing while I dealt with my OCD. So, on a personal level, I think Gwen might be harder to get rid of than if I was looking at this from a more objective standpoint. I know authors are supposed to get used to killing their darlings, but this project is supposed to be a response to Jekyll and Hyde, and if I left out these elements of my response to reading the book then I wouldn’t actually be truthful about how I interpreted it. 

Most of the rest of the week has been taken up by model making - realistically, I don’t think I’ll have my puppet finished by Tuesday’s filming slot, so my aim now is to at least get it to a decently mobile state and run some motion tests, as I’ve booked another session the following Monday to be my final filming. 

On Friday, we had our final lip sync workshop. The feedback from my tutors overall now seems to be that the subtle, semi-realistic approach is working, and that I should focus on deriving humour from it by keeping to that style of animation. I’d originally intended to have my reacting character be annoyed at the speaker, as everyone else in my acting reference group had narratives where the listener was fascinated - but Kris told me that actually, most people are doing irritated reactions, and that something in the way I’d set up my listener’s face made them look intrigued already. We then discussed how to make the piece seem funny by keeping it genuine, rather than pushing poses all over the place for exaggerated comedy. After that discussion, I’m now revising the way I planned to animate my second character - I won’t have time to sketch out concrete plans, but I’ll be keeping it in mind when I’m next in the media lab. 

[timesorceror]

!! COMMISSION INFO !!

Hey, TimeSorceror here. I decided to revise my commissions stuff a little bit, because it’s needed revising for a while now. Some structural elements for this info post come from Laskull’s post, because I really liked the flow of it and thought it would help my own revision efforts.

Currently, as of the status of this posting, I am open for commissions, though that may change given life circumstances, etc.

Now, now that that’s done, do read on. More under the cut.

SKETCHES

Sketches are hand-drawn pencil drawings that are scanned and directly uploaded without any editing except for some small touches to clean up the scan.

Prices are fairly cheap compared to the other categories.

Single-character sketches (small/large) cost $8 / $16  And each character added will cost an additional $6 / $12.

BUSTS/WAIST-UP

Bust or waist-up commissions are slightly more expensive than sketches because color + detail = a little more elbow grease than pencil drawings. Also, they’re digital, and that takes some time and planning. 

Less detailed/chibi characters cost around $18, more detailed/fully fleshed characters cost about $32 (Backgrounds are again, optional, and will cost an additional $1-10 depending on desire for color/complexity).

FULL BODY

Full body commissions are forward facing or three-quarter views of a desired character. And here’s where it starts getting pricey. Fandoms/material I am more familiar with tend to shave off some time, but the plans for Rome weren’t likely drawn in a day and neither are these commissions.

Smaller/chibi characters cost $40 Larger/fully fleshed characters cost $75

As with busts/waist-up commissions, backgrounds are totally optional. But because these are so much cooler in color, they’re going to cost an additional $2-12 depending on desire for color/complexity.

COMPLEX PIECES

Complex pieces, or detailed commissions, are pretty much full body commissions with special stuff added to them. This is more of a package deal, like when you buy a laptop with so many gigabytes of RAM and then decide to double that amount on checkout instead of putting it together piece by piece. These can feature just about anything I’m willing to draw.

Chibi/cute character compositions (left) will cost $50 minimum While fully fleshed character compositions (right) will cost $80 minimum

Compositions with 2+ characters cost $8/16 per character, and backgrounds will cost an additional $2-12 depending on desire for color/complexity.

WEBCOMICS

These are completely separate from my webcomic series featured on my original Tumblr, timesorcerorwebcomics. They’re also probably the most expensive, but if you think you want one, go for it. Just be prepared to wait, as these can take anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks depending on real life circumstances.

If I fail to deliver a month from the day the comic is commissioned (the day I send you the invoice), I’ll tack off a quarter of the price.

Prices are (up to 9 panels - Tumblr friendly format): - $8 per panel w/o color - $16 per panel w/ color - Title panel is free, but contains all my contact information.

The comics can be simple or complex (within reason), with or without dialogue, and have a variety of characters. It isn’t necessary to provide a per panel script (but if you want to, go for it), but at least a general idea of what you’d like it to be about would be nice. (Ex. Your avatar and -insert game character here- discussing the benefits of underwear) and if you’d like to keep tabs on its progress, I’m cool with exchanging e-mails or talking via Skype chat or Discord.

Keep in mind that all of the will draw/won’t draw rules also apply here unless discussed via note/e-mail/etc.

If you want to commission me, feel free to reach out to me here on tumblr or at timesorceror@gmail.com. (I’m pretty sure I’ve rigged it right so it forwards to my main email, so I should get them. Probably.)

I take Paypal and Ko-fi, so do let me know which payment method you prefer upon request. Thanks so much! Have a lovely day. :)

[subtletyislost]

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1. Tell us about your WIP!Currently I’m working on a lesbian romance novel about two girls in college,one is a double majoring in business and english education, the other doublemajors in computer science and astrophysics (the college she goes to doesn’t do“rocket science” or aeronautical engineering, so this is probably as close asshe’s going to get for programing rockets and theoretical space flightpaths/devices). The other major part of the story is that the MC (the rocketscientist) is searching for her missing brother at the same time.

3. What is your favorite/least favorite part aboutwriting?My favorite part about writing is that moment hen someone tells me eitherthat they like my writing or gives me some kind of critique/encouragement (yes,I actually like receiving constructive criticism). My least favorite part aboutwriting is trying find people to give that critique/trying to stay focusedenough to actually finish a story.

5. Top five formative books?I don’t know what this means but the books I read as a child that made mewant to write were: 1. The Magic Treehouse Series 2. Molly Moon’s IncredibleBook of Hypnotism 3. Bloody Jack 4. The Tale-Tell Heart (and other Edgar AllenPoe things) 5. The Little Princebooks that shaped my writing style/preferences though were 1. Molly Moon’sIncredible Book of Hypnotism 2. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witchof the West 3. Welcome to Night Vale: The Novel 4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide tothe Galaxy 5. Martin the Warrior

6. Favorite character you’ve written?Fandom: Sera, Leliana, Josephine, Cole (Dragon Age), Jack, Liara, Peebee (MassEffect), Pharah (overwatch), Raven (Teen Titans), Lara Croft (Tomb Raider)Original: Cassandra Tesla (the MC of the wip from question 1), Scion, Xia,Sage, Ruka, and Nvros

8. Do you have anywriting buddies or critique partners? yes! @wardenpharah @snowstorm-thirteen @uswhovianswillholdasiton and acouple others who I mostly talk to on discord

9. Favorite/leastfavorite tropes? Favorite: I don’t know trope names, but there’s trope that I didn’t know was atrope until I came across it in a few fics and a podcast where basicallysomeone is separated from their spouse and when they meet back up with themthey’re like “I missed you so much! Btw I kind of accidentally adopted thiskid/[wayward character]”; that trope “remove your weapons” *pulls a ridiculousamount of weapons out of nowhere* “ALL of them” *reluctantly hands over one ortwo more*; “will this work?” “I have no idea” *thing explodes* “was it supposedto do that?” “I don’t know but it was awesome!”Least favorite: that trope where they destroy the MCs hometown/house/familyjust so the MC has nothing tying them back to where they began and then proceedto do absolutely nothing with that plotwise and it affects nothing but gettingthe MC to actually leave their town

10. Pick an author(or writing friend) to co-write a book with@snowstorm-thirteen or @wardenpharah or one of my new friends from discordwhose tumblr I’ve forgotten

12. Which story ofyours do you like best? why? Original Works: either Light in the Dark or The Forgotten Realm of Dreams orThe Invisibles, because they’re all really really gay and really really nerdyFanfic: Is This Home Yet is without a doubt my best work ever. I’m consideringrewriting it as a novel. Wouldn’t be hard because the only thing making it afanfic and not an original work is that I used the two mcs to basically justget more attention.

13. Describe yourwriting processIt tends to be: sit down, open a notebook/grab paper/open scrivener/word/googledocs, stare at the page, start writing, erase things, write different things,listen to music, check tumblr, write more, somehow things get done or they don’tget done.

15. How do you dealwith self-doubt when writing? look at paper, say “I hate this”, cry, complain to anyone who will listen,stop writing for however long that takes, go back to writing, say “this is bad”,complain more, talk shit out, then it branches: if feel better, keep writing! Ifnot, stop writing and play video games then come back to writing two or threedays later!

16. Cover love/dreamcovers? I love me some good book covers, but professional ones are expensive orrequire talent that I do not have. Light in the Dark would be good with eithera mysterious cover, cover with a bunch of letters and envelopes, a soft gaycover with two girls that fit Cass and Ruka’s descriptions, or a cover that’s likethe soft gay cover but with space and video games/a computer incorporated intoit.

17. What things(scenes/topics/character types) are you most comfortable writing? scenes: anything not smut or fightingtopics: I’m comfortable writing about anything except incest/ddlg|mmlb/anythingthat falls in the realm of ‘not my thing to talk about’ (ie. I will write transcharacters, but not specifically about trans issues—nonbinary/agender issuesthough I will; I’ll write mlm characters but not specifically about theirissues; I’ll write poc or religious characters but I won’t write specificallyabout the issues that they face-without a lot of research and talking to peopleand such—because it’s just not my place. To explain a bit, I mean that I’llwrite characters that are not like me, and will do research to make sure I don’taccidentally do that in an offensive manner, but I won’t tell their stories forthem because I am not them. I hope this makes sense.)character types: women or nonbinary individuals, rebels, nerds, autistics,abuse victims/survivors, lesbians, ace people, the secretly nerdy femme, thesecretly nerdy butch, the secretly nerdy anyone,the tough girl who likes soft things, the soft girl who will kick your ass, thereptile person (person who likes reptiles), pirate, scientist, explorer, ectthere’s a lot of character types I love to write

25. What’s yourworldbuilding process like? this deserves its own post

21. What aspect ofyour writing are you most proud of? characterization

22. Tell us about thebooks on your “to write” listmost of them are in some way all part of the same series, but not necessarilyconnected, and not necessarily linearly or direct successors. Some/most can be stand-alonethat just happen to take place in the same universe as the others

27. Every writer’sleast favorite question - where does your inspiration come from? Do you docertain things to make yourself more inspired? Is it easy for you to come upwith story ideas?Dreams. Most if not all my story inspiration and ideas come from dreams, therest come from songs or random thoughts that just get stuck in my head. To getmore inspired I play games, bounce ideas off my friends, listen to music, orsleep. It’s fairly easy for me to come up with ideas, almost as easy as comingup with characters *shoves my like 300 ocs into the closet*

28. How do you stayfocused on your own work and how do you deal with comparison?I don’t focus, that’s the problem that’s why there’s so much unfinished shit onmy ao3. Tbh I’m usually the one doing the comparing and I deal with it bylearning from the work I’m comparing mine to and improving.

30. Do you like toread books similar to your project while you’re drafting or do you stick tonon-fiction/un-similar works?I don’t read. I can’t focus long enough to read. Instead I play video games inthe same genre or daydream or occasionally relisten to the Welcome To NightVale novel audiobook. I’m starting to branch out and try to find otheraudiobooks to listen to, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a pretty goodone on Audio.

33. What’s yourrevision/rewriting process like?draft one on one side of the screen, draft two on the other side of thescreen and literally rewriting draft one in draft 2. Sometimes I’ll rewrite onthe same document using markups like strikethrough instead of deleting thingsand other colors for the new additions, also lots and lots of sleeping andcrying, and soda (I don’t drink coffee).

34. Unpopular writingthoughts/opinions? Ernest Hemmingway sucks. He’s a terrible writer and you should not aspire towrite like him nor should you look up to him. Said is a perfectly valid word.The Oxford Comma is required not optional. Adverbs are not bad, use them if youwant. First person is a valid form to write in. Parenthetical asides (likethis) are just as valid as hyphenated asides—like this—and should be used if itfits the story/narration style. If your pov character doesn’t understand theforeign language the other character is speaking, putting the words in theother language in the text with a footnote translation is just as valid as “hesaid something in [language] but MC didn’t understand it.” Stalking is notromantic. Unhappy endings do not belong in the romance genre. Your charactercan be gay without complaining about it or it making their life hard. You canhave more than one minority character! You characters never going to thebathroom is unrealistic. Mosquitoes are a thing and if your character isoutside in the summer they had better damn well be protecting themselvesagainst them or slapping at at least one. A romance story with a character whowon’t take no for an answer, who isn’tthe antagonist/big (or little) bad, is not romantic. A romance story where thecharacters kiss or have sex when one of them clearly doesn’t want to, is notromantic. BOTH characters in your romance story need to change by the end ofthe story, that’s just good characterization. You can have polyamorouscharacters, but we are not a kink/fetish, if you don’t actually support actualpolyamorous people in real life don’t write about us in your fiction it’sdisrespectful and you’re probably going to do it wrong. Cheating is notromantic. Asexuals exist, Aromantics exist, Bisexuals exist. Romance doesn’tneed sex. … I’ll stop now, I have a lot of things I could say here.

35. Post the lastsentence you wroteShe blinked them back, willing herself not to cry.

36. Post a snippetCassandra had never been one for plans, if she had she might have actuallytalked with her roommate before move-inday. Even so, despite not planning things much, she did have goals. Her goal onmove-in day was simple: move in, preferably alone. She’d been under theimpression that she was the first one to arrive and that her roommate wouldn’tbe coming until later in the day. So, it was a shock to her when she arrived ather dorm room and found it was already open. She tapped her foot against the doorto get the attention of whoever was inside the room. She couldn’t quite see whomight be in there through the boxes that she was carrying.

“I hope you don’t mind,” a soft voice from inside the roomsaid, “it’s just that it was easier to leave the door open than to have to keepunlocking it.”

Cassandra tilted her head as she walked into the room,lowering the boxes just enough to see over them as she did so. “It’s notrouble,” she replied. “Who are you?”

The girl she was addressing, that she assumed was herroommate, was probably the most delicate looking girl she’d ever seen—wearing alight blue sundress with a ribbon around her waist and matching Mary Janes. Inher mind, the girl gave the impression of the enchanted rose from Beauty and the Beast; almost more likean idea than a person. She had long dark blonde—or was it light brown—hair withfaint, but still visible, red and dark brown streaks running through it, asthough it contained a fire within its French braid. Her smile was soft, barelyeven visible, and she looked like she might have played a sport in highschool—probably archery or fencing. Her brown eyes sparkled in the light fromthe window, like a stone of topaz against a blanket of snow. Never in her life,had Cassandra ever seen a girl that made her wonder if she was staring, but shehad now.

37. Do you ever writelong handed or do you prefer to type everything?100% depends on the story, and the day, and whether or not my eyes hurt.Sometimes ideas flow better on paper, sometimes typed, sometimes they flowbetter when I talk them out those days are bad for writing but good for gettingideas.

42. How many draftsdo you usually write before you feel satisfied? 100% depends on if it’s original work or fanfiction. Original works I’m usuallynot satisfied even after 6, 7, or even 10 drafts. Fanfiction, sometimes I justpost up the first draft without caring, sometimes I’m more satisfied with a seconddraft. It usually doesn’t go beyond that.

48. Do you prefer towrite skimpy drafts and flesh them out later, or write too much and cut itback?I just write. Usually my second draft is longer and more detailed than thefirst, and by the 5th or 6th everything has changedbecause of added or removed details.

51. Are you asecretive writer or do you talk with your friends about your books?I don’t shut up about my writing, not with my friends.

52. Who do you writefor? Myself., or anyone who pays me.

54. Favorite firstline/opening you’ve written? Absolutely nothing could go wrong, she thought just exactly as everythingwent wrong.

50. Do you share yourrough drafts or do you wait until everything is all polished?I share them, if I waited until they were polished no one would ever get toread them

55. How do you manageyour time/make time for writing? (do you set aside time to write every day ordo you only write when you have a lot of free time?) I have no job and no life. 0/10 do not recommend my method of having writingtime

[quietdaysco]

Primrose Path - Devlog #006

Hey, it’s us again—two indie devs with fresh dirt on our visual novel progress. Ready? 

Behind the Scenes

Playtesting Feedback

Last month we closed the pre-alpha Ink build of Primrose Path’s common route outline. It met its purpose of proving the basic concepts of our game were viable and that it interested players in our target demographic. In fact, playtesters gave us overwhelmingly positive feedback in our post-test form about the characters and story. Here are a few quotes from their responses:

“The number of elements of the MC's [main character’s] life added in to the story in increments helped me not only relate to the MC but also stay interested.”

“There's a good variety of calmer moments and more outlandish/exciting/otherwise more high tension moment [sic], no issues for me.”

“[T]he clients are a rainbow of people with a few that [sic] very much stand out [to me]”

“By the end, I was definitely considering who I was going to chose as my client and was sad the pre-alpha ended even though I knew it was going to.”

“I 100% would dance [in a mini-game similar to] DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]”

As you can see, the beginnings of Primrose Path went over well and players definitely had a lot of interesting things to say about our mischievous clients! We can’t spoil them here, but you may be able to see for yourself when alpha testing comes to our server in the future! 

Now, for all the good we received, it’s not to say the pre-alpha went without its criticisms:

“This might be silly, but I wish there were an option that weren't a dress for her outfit to the party.”

It’s not silly at all, playtester! It had us thinking about the different ways our protagonist, Lynn Austen, could express herself. This concern lead to one outfit redesign and introduced a number of new ones!

“The beginning was a little slow, but I love Priya, so all of her scenes brought my attention back instantly.”

We love co-worker and bestie, Priya, too, but she can’t be an exception for pacing. We’ve since reevaluated and tweaked Part 1: Work Day. Plenty of visual changes and cutting scenes entirely were discussed in order to tighten up the overall pacing.

“Harper seems harsh but has pressure on her to make her harsh, but then you see her and shes [sic] just straight up scary.”

While all playtesters understood Harper’s role as Lynn’s no-slack boss, a few found her consequentially unapproachable. We have a lot in store for her in later routes, but acknowledge she was sparse during the common route. We’ve since taken this concern and made her more available in new scenes, adjusted her tone in some of the older ones, and had other characters—who have a very different relationship with her than Lynn does—reflect more openly on her. We think this humanizes Harper much more.

“Unfortunately [Bellarmino] feels like a snobbier, more irritating Matt. [...] I personally don't find him very likable but I'm looking forward to being proven wrong.”

In our feedback form, we asked about character impressions. We also polled if players didn’t have to play all routes at least once, which clients they’d pick. While character impression responses expressed a willingness to give our model and fashion designer, Bellarmino LaFauci, a chance, he was our least popular choice in the poll. We figured it may have been that his personality wasn’t differentiated enough against the company with whom Lynn encounters him, so we’ve made adjustments to contrast him more against his judgmental cabal.

So as we went through and addressed feedback, we had some ideas of our own to implement, which leads us to...

Updated Revised Outline

Double the wordcount! Yep, we’re just shy of 32,000 words for the revised common route outline. How could this be? Look: don’t mistake Primrose Path for a linear narrative. Your choices affect the world from day one.

Beyond changes from playtester feedback, other new content includes:

New Characters! We work to make sure our side characters leave an impression. We’ve added a few more with the means to salvage or devastate Lynn’s career. Until you yourself can meet them, look out for future Lore snippets on our Twitter!

New Events! Lynn has more opportunities than before, and under different states of mind, to navigate and impact the world around her. Depending on what Lynn did, where, and when can completely change an encounter within that same space and time. 

New Key Items! There are a couple of items Lynn can collect if she meets the right people and takes certain actions. These items can reveal some important information in client routes later on—and some hints for others, too!

New Areas! A few more places have been added to the common route, including whole new scenes. What could possibly lie behind these doors?

So how’s that sound? If you said “Damn, that’s hella rad,” well you just took the words right out of our mouths. But we’re not done yet; we take feedback seriously. When we can’t decide on what our audience may want, we leave no room for speculation. There’s really only one way to settle that.

VN Protagonist Sprite Survey 

We run a survey! We wanted to know how visual novel fans preferred to see a customizable MC represented as a sprite, if at all. It’s tough for us because as much as we want to make Lynn as visually present as her sense of self, we also acknowledge that “immersion” for many players also means different levels of “intrusion” from MC’s sprite—down to none at all, for folks wanting to self-insert despite taking on another character’s existing backstory. While we think we’ve come to a happy medium that serves our purposes and would appeal to a good number of players, we’ll be sharing with you all in a separate post our findings.

Two things are for certain: 

Visual novel players are an incredibly dedicated base, having turned out over 100 responses to our form! Thank you so much for helping us see your side on the matter! 

The communities we frequent overwhelmingly take issue with one specific manner of MC representation—one that seems to plague the industry. If you’re not an avid consumer of visual novels, this begrudged answer may surprise you!

But hey, we haven’t closed it yet: you can contribute your opinion too until August 5th, 11:59 PM EDT. Stay tuned for our detailed write-up on the results, next time. We’ve got another survey in the works too (sounds like we’ve got a few hard decisions, huh?) so keep tabs on our Twitter when we release that form.

Greyson’s Twitter 

Greyson’s been taking a break from Twitter for a minute. Working Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday overheated him, and in that vulnerable time, he caught a virus! So now he’s on sick leave and we’ve promised him an easier schedule of one day a week when he gets better. His posting schedule will be announced soon. You can still send him some love on his Twitter account. He’ll be sure to respond when he’s feeling up to it. He’s always there for you. Will you return the favor?

Main Game Progress

Common Route:

Rough Outline: 100%  ✔

Revised Outline: 100%  ✔

Draft Script: --%

The Artist: Matthias Barousse

Rough Outline: 100%  ✔

Revised Outline: --%

Progress on the main game has primarily been on the common route outline. Some interesting things to note are that last time we reported our revision to be at 90%. After implementing feedback, our clean outline doubled in word count and we’ve reviewed it entirely since then. So now we’re thoroughly at 100%! 

The breakdown of that is:

We finished up the common route’s Part 3: The Interviews, in which Lynn meets all her clients whom she may or may not have stumbled upon at a legendary bash. 

We elaborated on Part 2: The Party encounters and added more variations which subsequently trickle over into alternate interactions in The Interviews. 

We added an interactive, portent dream sequence the night of The Interviews, right when Lynn hits the bed after evaluating all potential clients at work. 

... and a few other additions. Also among other things, we’ve actually started work on the draft script already, but we’ve not had time to properly calculate the percentage. It’ll be updated accordingly in our next log.

What’s Next For Us

We’re going to finish up our script draft and start focusing our efforts into creating a playable, visual alpha build of Primrose Path. Yes, we want to play our game as much as you do and that’s motivation enough!

We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:

Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!

Thanks for reading! Keep up and remember to enjoy your Quiet Days. ♥

Socials

- Micro-updates on Twitter!

  ♦ Factoids with Greyson!

- Live art development on Twitch!

- Art logging on Instagram!

- Ask us anything here!

- Continue the discussion on Discord!

- Master thread on Lemma Soft!