since her p3 outfits are all skirts, i figured i would try some cute summer dresses for her p4 summer casual outfit, but... even as sketches they just really didn’t look right. p3!saika would probably have worn them, but p4!saika chooses comfort and practicality over cuteness, i think. (i don’t think i like these leggings, though i’m sure she would be wearing some, if not these exactly.)
i wanted to do a “saika and ryoji” thing, but fuck if i know what ryoji’s summer casual would be. dude’s only got one canon outfit, and it’s his school uniform! imagining him in casual clothes is just... weird.
(i used her winter uniform on the right for reference, shh)
working on life in technicolor, specifically the chapter where saika and ryoji join the investigation team, and i’m trying really hard to not call the tv world the shadow realm
found my waymoor files hiding in my google docs (which... isn’t actually surprising, because that was The Semester I Didn’t Have A Computer) and ported them into scrivener
i feel like i’m missing a lot of notes which i just found, though they don’t actually help me all that much because i was hoping for something, anything involving worldbuilding. all my original subplots are sketched out, though, which is at least vaguely helpful (even though i was actually able to remember them all).
waymoor’s next big step is all of the worldbuilding in the entire universe, because if i’m going to continue it (and spoilers: i might, and for the same class, even) i’m going to need to know all that stuff. i’m probably going to try and hammer out a real outline, too, but that’s slightly less important.
sometimes i think i should have stuck with the dragons. this plot made way more sense with dragon riders instead of magic bullshit.
and since i was just complaining about how i hadn’t drawn anything… bam! drew some character busts. the main characters of psd… and princess riessa. i’m actually super not sure why i even drew riessa, except maybe because i did have to draw seryn (he’s the main viewpoint character) and she’s the only one of the two evelleas siblings i can actually stand. seryn turned out less like archer than i expected… except, of course, for the part where i draw waaaaaay more animu than archer, so i probably should have expected it, really. (and riessa’s hair is bugging me. again. too bad, princess; i’m not fixing it again.)
reithe and tolreis i drew because i fucking love reithe and tolreis, of course. i wasn’t actually sure at first if i was drawing them pre- or post-conflict, but then i realised reithe’s hair looks too nice to be pre-conflict, so it has to be post-conflict. (which also explains tolreis’s scraggly bangs… and probably also his eerie resemblance to cole. pay attention to your hair, lune!) reithe looks a lot less like cassandra than the sketch did, for which i am eternally grateful. (the fact that i gave her cullen’s lip scar… might have something to do with that. oops.)
i knew switching from notebook to computer was a bad idea.
#the other option was to smash universes together#in such a way that alexiel would take seryn's place in psd#but then i decided that was too many pretentious assholes in one group#besides it's not like the veil fits into psd's magic system AT ALL so it would be au!alexiel at best#though tbh i'm not really sure how psd's magic system even works anymore
actually the REAL other option i guess was switching the siblings’ roles around: seryn would be crown prince and riessa would be king’s champion. (because i actually like riessa, you see.) but then, riessa is pretty observant, and a big plot point is that nobody notices the thing going on with reithe and tolreis, and i’m not so sure that riessa would, you know, not start to figure it out.
(reithe’s mom does, of course, but reithe is actually quite close to her parents, even if it is the first time they’ve seen her in nearly three years.)
tolreis is, of course, pretentious asshole no.1. reithe has her moments, too.
psd’s magic system used to work on colours (specifically, on wavelengths of light within the visible spectrum), but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense with the six magi of vagrant story, which psd now shares a universe with, or with any of the magic shit in pompeii rising, which psd now also shares a universe with, so... i need to work out something else for it, particularly since tolreis’s whole thing is magic, but i’m not quite sure what yet.
...come to think of it, i never really came up with specific magic for diantha, either, did i? maybe tolreis ended up rediscovering some of the stuff she used.
i actually just seriously put in my notes that, instead of working on psd for camp nano, i could do duchess of waymoor instead, just to avoid writing seryn
fortunately for everyone involved, i don’t actually know where the files for that are! so i don’t actually have to do that.
also, btw, i guess i’m at least half-seriously doing camp nano!
i remembered why i stopped working on psd! it’s because i fucking hate my viewpoint character. i can’t even work up enough enthusiasm about him to try and coax anything non-generic or likeable out of him - even his character arc is depressingly predictable.
i mean, reithe and tolreis aren’t really all that more original than seryn is, but i find them significantly more compelling. i can only hope that seryn gets better once he’s stuck in their company for a while, or writing this is really going to suck.
actually this merge thing is probably the best thing that could have happened to the plot of psd, since it gives me a much better idea of what caused the Conflict
i have way too many original worlds and am very bad at fleshing them out
so like i just sat down to work on one and thought, “hmm maybe i should merge this one with that other one” and then as soon as i wrote that down in my notes i was like “wait wasn’t i going to merge that other one with a different one? …fuck it they’re all the same world now”
i’m pretty sure that, in the writing world, this is called “progress”. i’m also pretty sure that i feel way too pleased by this decision.
I kind of forgot I had this blog. Oops. Anyway, everyone should write OC sailor senshi fic right?
"There I was, just walking to the library after school," says Asuka.
"This doesn't look like a library. Why didn't we go to the library?"
"Because I got attacked by a talking cat!" Her voice shakes a little bit, a sign of her distress.
"I wasn't attacking anyone, okay, I was just jumping out of a tree," the cat says defensively, ears back. "It's not my fault that you happened to be right where I was going to land."
"And then said talking cat was perfectly happy to chatter on like an idiot, totally heedless of the fact that it should not be talking, and then something about how it was apparently looking for me, which is just - I did not sign up for this, okay? This is not my division. And home was closer than the library, with the added bonus of having nobody else there to witness the talking cat."
"You are really hung up on that, aren't you?" the cat asks dryly.
"You know what awaits things that do things they biologically aren't supposed to? Science experiments. And you know what happens to people that happen to be even tangentially involved with those biologically questionable things? Interrogations. So excuse me for not wanting to get hauled off in a windowless white van!"
those would be the stats for moonlight renaissance ch1. i'm actually kind of surprised at how not-coloured the text body is; with waymoor chapters it seemed like every other sentence was red or yellow.
this also illustrates why i don't like the app very much. (for the record, 'hard to read' sentences seem to be any sentence with a semicolon or more than one comma, and 'very hard to read' sentences involve one or more of the above, or a dash, from what i can tell.) i use complex sentences a lot - i could probably write an ode to semicolons - so usually i have a ton of those. also, i love adverbs. like, a lot. so i think it's kind of ridiculous to say i'm allowed to use passive voice - something else i don't really follow the hate for - 71 times in 3200 words but can't use any adverbs whatsoever.
but then, i'm writing fiction, so. if i were writing like an essay or an article or something like that, i would totally use the hell out of this app - some teachers/professors have hate-ons for the things it calls out, so this can be really useful for pruning those out, since it highlights them for you. (i'm thinking in particular of my junior high english teacher, who gave us the most inane vocabulary lists and absolutely hated passive voice and even vaguely wordy writing.)
as far as fiction is concerned, though, i think that probably this stuff is a lot more guideline-like than rule-like. i mean, obviously you don't want your action-y stuff to be written in passive voice, and you don't want to attach an adverb to every single verb and adjective, and you should vary your sentence structures, but. none of that is going to stop me from using adverbs when i feel like it, or from writing the occasional hideously long sentence, or from describing something as 'very x' (one of the purple ones that pinged; the other two in this chapter were to change 'all of' to 'all', which would be fine except that both times it was in the phrase 'all of us').
i guess what i'm trying to say is that for fiction-writing this app is ok if you're just using it to make sure that something didn't go wildly wrong with your prose, but that you shouldn't treat it like gospel or whatever.
(i felt differently when i was running waymoor chapters through it, but that's probably because i was purposely writing things more complexly and obtusely, because i was writing in alexiel's voice and alexiel is kind of a pretentious douchebag when it comes to diction. i'm using more of my normal voice for moonlight, so comparatively the prose is a lot simpler. ...then again, i use my normal voice (sort of) for mass effect ficlets, and those routinely pop reading level 17 or so, so i don't even know.)
with the end of the semester i'm switching gears from waymoor to my one true love: fanfiction.
between the viz announcement and the new series starting up for real this time in july, i don't think i could have picked a more perfect time to focus on a sailor moon au (｡･ω･｡)
the meat of it takes place between the dark kingdom arc and the black moon arc, although i'm kind of simultaneously working on both it and the dk arc because i am making changes to stuff and i don't want things suddenly coming out of nowhere when/if i post the main arc, so it's easier to rewrite dk and establish where all these things are coming from. (it also helps me to keep track of everything!)
and the main reason i've said all that is so that i can cackle to myself about calling endymion's current incarnation basil derosier
I've only just started chapter three; I discarded one idea for another, which seems to be progressing more smoothly. If I can wring at least five pages out of this, I'll be content. (Unfortunately I have to do that in the next ~three and half hours, because my read date is kind of tomorrow. Oops.)
Creating character traits on the fly is weird. I feel way more like I'm NaNoing this fic than I am anything else - although, in a way, I am, since I wouldn't be writing this if I weren't under deadline and as it is I've put it off for way too long. This is kind of fun, though; it's like spontaneous character evolution. Five minutes ago I didn't know that spirit familiars were considered kind of second-class amongst veilans, but now I do! Five minutes ago I didn't know Ithyn was kind of a stickler for social class, but now I do! Five minutes ago I didn't know Alexiel was fiercely defensive of Almandine, but - Okay, actually, I think I knew that one already.
Now, if only I can teach my writing prof and several of my classmates how to read my bloody character names, I'll consider this semester a success. (It's probably a good thing I'm writing from the viewpoint I am, because I don't think they would survive multiple uses of "Vakarias".)
So lately I've been working on this "book" called The Duchess of Waymoor (my last post on this blog... two months ago, oops, was about it vaguely) and
Well, I kind of hate it. A lot. Part of this is probably because I'm working on it for a class and therefore basically every time I sit down to write it's because I have a deadline looming - and let me tell you, pulling fiction out of your ass is significantly harder than pulling essays out - and so I naturally hate every second of it all. Some of it is probably because this story needed to simmer for a bit longer before I started to work on it in earnest, and now I have to figure out how to turn a plot out from this mess of idea-pile from two months ago.
I was pretty okay with my first chapter. I didn't like it very much - I thought it was boring, actually - but it was all set-up and it all needed to happen, so I was okay with it. The class in general seemed to hate it, though: the pacing was off, there wasn't much interesting going on, my dialogue was unnatural, my characters weren't likeable, etc. I lied about making edits (read: gutting the chapter), then sent the chapter to my friends and took their feedback into account before actually making edits, which were much lighter than the class had wanted, though I was happier with them.
I hated chapter two. It was entirely transition and every single word was like pulling teeth to get out, which is most of the reason why it was half the length of chapter one - I just literally could not stare at it any longer without wanting to murder someone. (Also, it had been due the week before and I really needed to turn it in.) I was fully ready for the class to rip it to shreds - I already was, after all.
So, naturally, they loved it. Thought it a great improvement on chapter one, even! There still wasn't anything happening but this time they didn't care, for some reason. (My prof pointed out that I wrote around all the potential conflict; to be fair, she wasn't wrong, although I mostly did it to make it easier on myself - read: to get the fucking chapter done sooner.) "Good job, you took into account our criticisms!"
I don't even. I have to turn in another chapter in about a week - two weeks? idk - and I just literally don't even know. Possibly it'll be another long one that I like and the class hates, or maybe I'll hit that magic sweet spot where we both like it?
I have no idea, but what I do know is that I've got a ton of worldbuilding in my future, because chapter three involves an exploration of the town and an explanation of the Veil. Fuck.
what a horrible night to have a curse @writteninstarlight - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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