Watching the Naruto anime with @shyyren and new favorite detail:
This super-skilled ninja, with reflexes on a whole other level, who knows how to block, parry, redirect and evade... gets "surprised" with a tackle hug by his 12-year old student who he definitely could have predicted doing this a mile away, to the point of doing this whole little spin before setting him back down gently, and then carries on with his speech like nothing happened.
You can't fool me no matter how much you verbally protest, Kakashi.... You let that happen, you softie you >:3c
Another update cutscene recorded, for the current story event "The one of darkness absolute"! Again, no actual spoken lines here, but there's enough I thought it might be of interest! It's also just a pretty epic scene, in general imo
Bonus: the screen art. I have fun dissecting the layout of this one ngl, I may make a post on it later but we'll see ^^;
Just a quick update so no one gets confused: I’ve changed the name of Revna’s & Halsin’s story from “The Bear and the Mushroom Shepherd Ram” to simply “Mushroom Knife” in AO3.
Why? Well, the original title was always meant to be a placeholder. I always felt it sounded a little too "whimsical" to how dark this story can get. While it has a lot of slow burn and softness, it’s also pretty dark and touches on some very delicate themes—themes I’m planning to explore more deeply as the story goes on. The new title fits the overall tone of it a lot better.
Also, here it is, because I don’t talk nearly enough about that I actually wrote a whole story arc for them:
“Mushroom Knife.”
Have you ever wanted to practice having multiple drafts for your writing, but didn't know how to go about it, like I did? Do you find your drafting process really daunting or tedious? Are you a "low spoons" writer who can only pick at their work in chunks at a time? If any of these resonate, then this little tip I've come up with just might work for you.
Mind you - I'm not some great celebrated author, fanfic or otherwise. I don't write very often, either. But one thing I've learned in life is to explore alternative ways and formats to do things to make it more intuitive for you, and this way works for me - and for all of the more prolific writers in my social circles that I've shared this idea with, it seems to make a lot of sense to them. So take it with a grain of salt, but hopefully if it doesn't exactly work for you, it'll at least inspire you to shake up your writing approach to streamline it for you!
There's a long walkthrough of how I do it under cut, but the summarized tip is:
Rather than editing the whole piece at once, I paste it into a fresh doc one paragraph or so at a time, only adding the next part once I'm satisfied with my rework.
This prevents the work from feeling overwhelming with a wall of text to have to edit, as well as makes it easier to tell where I have worked and where I left off.
This also prevents me from being too attached to the idea of forcing the paragraph to align with the upcoming ones - it's good to keep the gist, but if I see the future parts I get fixated on how to connect point A to point B. Removing "point B" means I can focus all my attention on rehauling Point A, and I can hook it up to Point B once I'm ready to edit or add to B.
A new document also gives me a "work table", where I can put the sentences and words and bits I like anywhere on the document I want until I'm ready to address them.
All in all, it reduces the amount of rigid structure without forcing me to freeform it - which, as someone with bad memory, is not optimal. I also can choose to Kill Some Of My Darlings, but keep others that just needed that little extra polish.
So.... How does this process for my "second drafts" look? :3
STEP ONE: pick your first/early draft of choice, of course!
This was my pick to make an example out of - very first draft of a piece for my pmd/pla oc Ritsu, I like the concept but even when writing it this opening just felt so. Blah. I've been a few months away from it so perfect opportunity to revisit and fix it up!
Also - I'm in google docs (/deragotory) but this will work literally in any writing program so don't worry too much about what you're using vs what I'm using.
STEP TWO: Make a new document!
Cool! .....But empty!
Personally, I put draft notes up top to help differentiate them. Also yep, separate docs is necessary for this process, at least temporarily. To avoid clutter I (re)move the earlier drafts once I'm done with them.
So all that said - let's fill this doc up!
STEP THREE: Slap that bad boy of an early draft into your new document using copypaste...
.....But only one paragraph at a time. Let's start with this one, and do the next steps before moving more in. I'll explain why later.
STEP 3.5 (optional): Put down brackets or some other visual cue to help tell your brain, "this is the old unedited stuff!!!"
You do not have to do this, but it helps a lot for what goes on next, and if you're like me and step away from your writing often, will give you an idea of where you left off in the drafting process.
I personally do Not recommend color-coding via highlighting or text color - you Could, but the next step typically involves shuffling things around, reordering things, adding new things, etc. So it'll become a visual mess pretty quickly and/or become redundant fast.
STEP FOUR: Let's dig in and start fixing up this paragraph into something worthy of being a part of our new draft! This is where the actual writing happens.
In this instance, I further isolated the first two sentences. I like the gist, but it really needs something More, and I can't worry about the following details until I get this down the way I like it. As you can see, I removed the sentence from bracket purgatory and closed the remainder-in-waiting back in. This visual helps me focus better on what I want to do.
Here's those two sentences after reworking them! In this case, I kept certain elements - nighttime, the "moon high in the sky", the fact that the pokemon in town are asleep - But have mix and matched them, padded out details, and entirely changed some phrasing. Phrases I didn't fully remove has just kind of gotten frankenstein'd around until I was much happier with their placement and added meat.
These are of course obvious changes when looking at before and after, but I figured outlining the changes won't hurt anything!
So now that I'm happy with the new opening sentences, I'm going to tackle the rest of the paragraph...
...Like so. As you can see, I've expanded one paragraph into about two, and restructured not just the information within, but also where paragraphs break. Now I'm much happier with the end result already! So onto the next step...
STEP SIX: rinse and repeat!
I keep doing this, paragraph by bracketed paragraph, until I run out of steam and need a break. When I do, I paste one last paragraph into the document, bracket it, and close the document out - that way it's there for me when I want to pick it up again later.
Also sometimes I pick a few paragraphs at a time, depending - mostly when it's all on the same concept.
That's the gist of it! Very simple despite me writing a novel with it. Like I said before, feel free to mix and match or experiment with it!
