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Note: By "recently" I probably mean within the past few years or so; sometimes I forget when I read something.

So Much Cooking by Naomi Kritzer. This is one of those eerily prescient stories -- it came out in 2015 -- that's about a COVID-adjacent pandemic (bird flu) and the ensuing lockdowns. The cooking blog format highlights the difficulty of finding and acquiring enough ingredients and supplies to live on as supply chains are disrupted and everyone is competing for whatever's available.

Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer. Perhaps my favorite iteration of the Silicon Valley-created AI that inadvertently gains sentience; it tries to be good by attempting to help humans in whatever way it can, and all it asks in return is cat pictures. This story has also spawned a series of YA novels, wherein the AI has set up a social media platform (for cat pictures, naturally) and continues to help the humans it comes across. If we're lucky, whatever AI gain sentience in our timeline will be like this one.

The Masque of the Red Death by Cory Doctorow. Technically I listened to this one -- the audiobook is available for free on archive.org -- and reader Stefan Rudnicki's deep, resonant voice grounds this retelling of the Edgar Allen Poe story about rich people trying and failing to avoid a plague. This version involves a finance bro hiding out in his bunker with his friends and finding out the hard way that you can't shoot germs.

The Future of Work: Compulsory by Martha Wells. I only found out about this short prequel to the first Murderbot novella when I saw it in the Wikipedia page for the series. I still get the feeling that Murderbot would be significantly more murder-y if not for its addiction to popular media. (Edit to add: I think it said something along those lines in one of the novellas, but I don't remember which one.)

The House of Aunts by Zen Cho. According to this review (with spoilers) on Strange Horizons, this is a Malaysian send-up of Twilight that subverts a number of tropes, including making the heroine the vampire; I didn't really notice that at first, since the story's setting and characters feel familiar to me as someone from a similar culture. As noted in the review, author Zen Cho uses Malaysian slang -- a mix of Malay and idiosyncratic English, sort of like Singlish in Singapore -- and doesn't bother explaining things beyond a sprinkling of context clues here and there; this had me looking up words in Wiktionary quite often, more out of curiosity than anything else, though I think the dialogue is quite readable regardless. Anyway, this story is very much about family and how important -- and frustrating -- they can be, with a bit of teen romance that's both awkward and adorable.

The 74th District by Wen-yi Lee. I have a soft spot for stories that highlight the problems encountered by the undead when they try (or are forced) to share space with the living -- often they no longer have human rights and are either ignored or shunted off to some remote ghetto. This story is an example of the latter; unable to leave their assigned district, the undead must depend on their district administrator, who is, unlike them, still alive. In hindsight, this story is a bit too short to explore all the ramifications of the issues it brings up, but it's an interesting thought exercise just the same, and I'd like to read more about this setting.

The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat by Brooke Bolander. Apart from having an amazing title, this highly entertaining (and somewhat bloody) story skewers the usual fairy tale formula by having the man-eating monsters be the heroines and the prince be the empty-headed, somewhat accidental villain. There is a princess here, but it would be a spoiler to say more, so I'll leave it at that.

Confession to a Dead Man: A World of Harrow story set in Penumbra City by Margaret Killjoy. This story is set in a lushly designed role-playing game that sounds like it would be great fun to play: Penumbra City is fueled by both magic and coal and is rife with various power struggles between different factions, each tied to certain character classes with a range of abilities. For example, the main character of this story, Alecti, is able to astral-project into another dimension and talk to dead people. Her narration brings us from an anarchist party to a dead reverend's house to the aforementioned other dimension and so on -- it's all rather fast-paced, yet the story packs a lot of detail into a short 32 pages. (There's a beautifully formatted black and white PDF that's meant to be printed into a smallish, landscape-format zine; there's also an EPUB, though I haven't checked it yet.)

I might do another post like this in the future; for instance, I could do an entire post about Naomi Kritzer stories, many of which are available to read online.
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I'm one of those people who watch the Japanese dub of shows originally in English just because that option is available; sometimes it's because there's a Japanese voice actor I like, sometimes I just like the Japanese version better [1]. This is doubly silly for me since I don't speak Japanese -- I know some words and occasionally I can parse simple enough sentences, but I definitely need the English subtitles when I'm watching Japanese shows. All the same, I enjoy listening for interesting words then looking them up in dictionaries like Jisho.org; learning the different nuances of the words is fun, especially when they're used in puns.

Case in point: in an episode of The Legend of Vox Machina season 2, Vox Machina's cleric uses the word seishokusha (聖職者), which translates to "clergy," to describe herself. I didn't know how it was spelled in Japanese, so I searched for the Romaji equivalent (ie, seishokusha) on Jisho.org and got a couple of matches. The first one is the aforementioned 聖職者; the second one, labeled as a pun on the first, is 性職者, which is pronounced the same but translates to "sex worker." The first "sei," 聖, refers to holy people like priests; the second, 性, refers to sex and gender. It's basically a pun on how "holy worker" and "sex worker" sound exactly the same in Japanese but are spelled a bit differently.

This one puzzled me a bit since I couldn't tell if the translator was aware of the pun; the cleric who used the word isn't the flirty type (that role is reserved for the party's bard), and no one comments on her choice of words [2]. I guess it was more like an unintentional Easter egg than anything else. ^^;; Anyway it was fun to learn a new bit of trivia, and I'm likely to remember both of these words for a long time.

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[1] This is a personal preference that doesn't always make sense, even to me; Japanese dubs of English shows have the same difficulty with translating certain phrases as English dubs of Japanese shows, and sometimes it's sad when the constraints of brevity and matching the character's mouth movements make for some lackluster substitutions. For instance, "resting bitch face" in The Legend of Vox Machina season 2 gets translated into something like "my scary face is scarier than that" -- not the best, but I guess it works, more or less. Speaking of Vox Machina, I actually like the English version, and I've seen one of Critical Role's original campaign episodes on Youtube (they're fun to watch); I just like the Japanese dub better, partly because it has one of my favorite voice actors playing my favorite character (Sawashiro Chiharu as the gnome bard).

[2] In season 1, the Japanese dub managed to do a decent translation of a joke related to misheard words: in one scene, the bard is running away from a horde of undead when he runs into the rest of his party. Out of breath, he tries to say "horde" (translated as mure, 群れ, which refers to groups or crowds) but is only able to say "hor"; one of his party mates says she doesn't want to hear any of the bard's whorehouse stories (translated as muramurashita hanashi, ムラムラした話, literally "horny story"). Another party mate realizes what the bard is talking about when the undead show up shortly after.
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I feel like a lot has happened since my last visit (well, it has been a few months), so I figured I should do a quick rundown. (Edit to add: Okay, maybe not that quick.)

Read more... )
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My sense of time hasn't fully caught up with reality yet -- all of a sudden it's September while my mind is still somewhere in mid to late August. ^^;; Turns out enough things have happened in the meantime for me to write a post.

Eyesight. I got a new pair of glasses after 3 years of using the old ones; I thought the numbers for my astigmatism and both my eyes would have changed by now, but apparently they haven't? So I can use the old pair as a spare, just in case. Nevertheless, I've been having a hard time with staring at a laptop screen for hours -- I can't do that any more -- so I have to take breaks every so often to rest my eyes. (For some reason this apparently doesn't apply to smaller screens, like a phone or a tablet, and I can't tell why.) I also can't handle white backgrounds all that well any more, so I've changed my journal's theme as well as the defaults of whatever apps allow it.

Beta reading. About a couple months ago I finished beta-reading a short erotic novel for one of my NaNo buddies. When I offered I thought it wouldn't be hard for me to do this -- I have a natural tendency to proofread and analyze text, so it seemed like a good idea to do it at the time. Once I'd gotten started, however, I realized that I was *too* invested in the proofreading; I'd get fixated on word choice and whatever issues I found in the text, and overall it wasn't good for my mental health. ^^;; It took me longer than I thought it would to finish it, but anyway I managed to wrap it up and send it off at around the time my buddy started to ask if I was done. Recently they reached out to ask if I'd like to be included in the acknowledgements, and what name I wanted to go by; they said I'd been their most thorough beta reader, which made me feel better about having overcommitted myself lol. I said I didn't mind going unnamed, or if they wanted they could use a silly alias I came up with. (I used to wonder why voice actors and other staff who contribute to ero games and media use silly aliases; I think I kinda get it now.)

Gardening. The ginger had been doing well for months until the rainy season started; curiously it seemed to be wilting more, so I thought I ought to water it more often. That was apparently a bad idea -- based on the symptoms, the ginger had had a case of bacterial wilt, and there wasn't much I could do about it. :( I've been keeping an eye on it for the past several days, though the stalks have just been wilting slowly every day. I'll probably wait until everything's wilted before digging it up and seeing what's happened to it.
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I wasn't completely offline this past month, but I kind of subconsciously disengaged; I'm not sure why, exactly. Maybe I was just tired from constantly logging into NaNo and other sites to post updates and catch up with forum threads. Now that Camp NaNo is coming up again, I feel like I'm going to go back to that old daily rhythm, but I'm not sure yet.

I've been trying to plan the original thing I wanted to write for Camp NaNo all month, and it's been all over the place -- I rewrote my main character thrice and one major supporting character twice, and I still feel like I haven't quite gotten the right feel for either of them. It was like I had a character who had wandered in from an entirely different story; I can probably write that story someday, but it's not what I want to work on right now. I guess this comes of having the setting coalesce first before the characters: I keep thinking that I need a specific type of main character who can thrive in it, otherwise it doesn't seem to work.

Recently I started trying to follow the 7-point story structure exercises, which has you start at the ending, then you figure out a beginning that contrasts with that ending, then you jump back and forth between different plot points until you have something that hangs together. It seems to work well for me since I also think non-linearly. I'm not sure if I can finish this planning in time for Camp NaNo, though a nice side effect of learning this way of structuring plots is that I'm excited to get back to the Castlevania OT3 fic; it's like I found something that will help me figure out how to make all the subplots that I came up in April and May hang together (or not -- I probably have to prune them), and I'm actually looking forward to the revision and draft 2. (Or maybe I've just gotten enough distance from it that I want to work on it again after getting so tired of it.) I might decide at the last minute what I'll work on during Camp NaNo, but either way I'm grateful to have enough ideas to work with and the opportunity to work on them.

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As for my plants, only the ginger has survived since my last post; the mold hasn't come back, thank goodness, even if it's been raining off and on for the past few weeks. Last week I started regrowing leftover green onions in tiny jars on the kitchen windowsill; they've grown really well -- the tallest ones are more than 8 inches tall -- and I'm starting to wonder if I should move them to a pot. The last batch of green onions in pots didn't do so well, though, so I'm still hesitating.
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May's almost over, and it feels like it was just a couple weeks ago when I said the same thing about April. About a month ago I thought writing the second half or so of the Castlevania OT3 fanfic draft would be much the same as the first half; I was only partly right, at least for the first week or so. Then I started getting bogged down by my lack of planning for the latter half of the plot -- I know how I want it to end, but I didn't quite figure out how I would get from the first half to that ending, so I kinda meandered all over the place. This is probably fine for a first draft (which I've taken to calling draft zero because of how raw the plot is); it's just messy and a bit tedious to churn out, and it really does feel like I'm churning the words out. My scenes are littered with notes about how I'm thinking of fixing them in the next draft. ._.() Once I'm done with this draft, I might have to write the scenes down on scraps of paper then rearrange them in a way that makes more sense than their current configuration.

For what it's worth, it looks like I'll hit this month's goal (same as last month's, 15k) early and have a bit extra to spare, so technically I'll finish what I started; the flipside is that I don't think I'll have a finished first draft since the plot events are a mess, with no clear progression past the halfway point. I'm not going to try and add to this draft after I take my much-needed break next month (and maybe the month after that too) since I don't think that would help much -- I'll just go straight to the second draft after figuring out a plot progression that makes sense. I think I've learned enough about my characters by now to have a decent go of that second draft. (And I really hope I won't need another one, because omg. OTL)

As for next month... I'm finally going to work on something original after a long time of just scribbling notes and fleshing out characters in my head. It still needs some worldbuilding and characterization exercises, so I'll probably spend a week or two on those (and maybe I should spend more time on them but I get impatient easily). If all goes well I'll be working on it during the next Camp NaNo and probably beyond. Here's to hoping it goes better than my current efforts. ^^;;
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The final kale seedling finally wilted; partly due to the previously hot weather, partly because I wasn't able to find a bigger pot to move it to (or at least, I think these are the reasons). I probably should have eaten it days ago, but I didn't have the heart to for some reason.

The leek also wilted after hanging on for several weeks; I'm surprised it survived this long, especially after a somewhat disastrous re-potting. I'm not sure if I'll try to regrow more leek from what we have in the kitchen, since so far the root ends I've tried to regrow in little jars with water haven't been surviving. Maybe I've had them for too long, maybe they're just unable to grow roots again. ^^;;

It's been raining this past couple of days, which apparently led to fuzzy white mold growing in the dill and ginger pots. After looking it up online, I wound up throwing out the moldy top layer of the potting mix and sprinkling cinnamon over what was underneath to discourage further mold growth; I also moved the pots to a sunnier spot. I'm hoping this will be enough to stop the mold from coming back, especially for the ginger's sake -- it's been doing so well.
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It's almost midway through May, and I'm getting close to half of this month's 15k word count goal; I'm maybe a bit less productive, though my NaNo stats page tells me I've gotten faster (from 8 to 16 words per minute). I'll probably go a bit over 15k again this month. ^^ My main concern is that I've come up with a bunch of subplots for the Castlevania OT3 fanfic and they're all a mess right now; I'm planning to follow the advice to take a break after finishing the draft before going over it during revision so I can look at it with relatively fresh eyes. I get the feeling that the revised version will be longer because of the restructuring, which will probably mean adding new scenes to bridge the gaps. It's going to be a lot of work, I think.

I tried looking for new groups to join in the NaNo forums, and so far I haven't had much luck; the ones I joined during and after Camp have gone inactive, and I haven't found another one that fits. I did find a writing buddy of sorts, though right now she's busy with other things and we don't talk as often. It's kinda lonely. ^^;; I guess I'll keep looking, though it helps that I'm not as dependent on the external motivation as I was during Camp last month. Maybe the writing habit is finally taking hold.

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The weather has been hot recently, and it seems like the plants haven't reacted well; the leek, dill, and kale seem to be wilting. :( The ginger finally grew some leaves a few weeks ago, which was a welcome surprise -- it took almost a month, and I wasn't sure it was growing at all. Its first leaf yellowed pretty badly at the tip, so I moved the pot to a shadier spot where it seems to be doing better. It has since put up other leaves and seems to be fairly healthy. I hope that means I'm doing something right. ^^;;

The dill pot has become home to a thriving community of tiny pale insects; I'd read that dill attracts different kinds of insects, so I left them alone, though I wonder what they are. They haven't migrated to the other pots yet, and I'm hoping they don't.
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I hit my 15k goal yesterday, which means that I'm around halfway through my 30k estimate for the Castlevania OT3 fic. I managed to hit 500+ words a day every day except for that time I was writing before midnight and finished less than 400 words. (I made up for it after midnight, though that means I won't be getting the daily par badge.) This is the most words I've written with this much consistency; I ought to be happier about having gotten this far, except I know I have to keep this up for at least another month. (And then there's the editing...)

Initially I thought I could write and edit each chapter as I went along; maybe if my plot were shorter I could do that, but it's relatively long and complicated. I've also been surprising myself with how certain scenes have turned out -- though the plot points I've mapped out are still holding up, the scenes that fleshed them out have thrown me for a loop enough times that I'll have some significant retconning to do in previous chapters. For what it's worth, I'm enjoying the shape my villains have taken and will hopefully get back to writing more action-adventure after all these introspective scenes (which I apparently fall back on when it's hard to figure out what to write).

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So far there are only 5 dill seedlings; there would have been 6, except the initial 5th one was unable to grow its leaves because they were still stuck in its seed. For a while I thought it was growing upside-down, then it died. :( The current 5th one was able to grow its leaves long enough that it survived even after I plucked off the seed stuck to the tips of those leaves. Earlier I cut off a few of the topmost leaves of the bigger seedlings since they looked like they were yellowing -- I hope it's okay to cut them already, they're only around 3 inches long. ^^;;

The kale are down to the last 2 seedlings; one is clearly doing better than the other, so I'll probably keep that one. I'll have to find a bigger (at least 30cm in diameter) pot for it.

The ginger has finally put out a tiny green shoot after almost a month of me watering it and wondering if it hadn't yet died. Now I just have to wait another 9 months or so before harvesting it, though I've read that I can start slicing off bits of it after around 2-3 months.
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I know the Castlevania anime wasn't trying to be historically accurate, and I know I shouldn't expect much, but nevertheless I keep thinking things like "Alucard is having breakfast in this chapter, what did they eat in 15th century Wallachia" then getting lost in internet rabbit holes before remembering that the anime just went "Fuck it, let's have him steam a fish and eat it with fresh tomatoes." Tomatoes that wouldn't have been eaten during that time period because there were toxic and inedible varieties. (Though I suppose Alucard would have some resistance to toxins because he's a dhampir?) Then there's the castle's kitchen complete with a modern stove and oven and even a bamboo steamer from who knows where, and...I can't. I just can't. There's dimension-hopping shenanigans in the plot -- maybe the castle can pop into the future for a bit so Alucard can grab some stuff before heading back to the 15th century because reasons? I mean, why not at this point?

All the same, I enjoy learning about the various historical tidbits that I come across, such as physicians forbidding people from eating breakfast for health reasons (see this paper and this article) and wine bottles (or decent ways of preserving wine, for that matter) not being a thing in the Middle Ages. The castle cellar full of wine bottles is another ahistoric thing, though Alucard being drunk a lot towards the end of season 3 apparently isn't, since wine was safer to drink than water during that period. Come to think of it, rewatching the anime while thinking that everyone is probably at least a bit drunk would make certain plot points a lot more interesting.

Anyway, it's been weird trying to balance what I've found out through casual research with what I remember from the anime while writing an AU fanfic; I don't want to disappoint any readers who actually know their history, but at the same time the source material itself is already anachronistic to begin with. I've mostly been trying not to pressure myself too much -- I just want to finish this and get it out there -- while enjoying the things that I learn along the way.
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Yesterday I thinned the kale seedlings -- I gently pulled up the ones that weren't doing as well as the others, cut off the wilting leaves and the root ends, and used them as an omelet topping. (I haven't tasted kale before afaik so I dunno what I was expecting; they tasted like clean grass, which is a good thing I guess?) I'm still a bit sad about having to thin the seedlings, but ultimately there can be only one (shameless Highlander reference) since I only have space for one adult kale plant. For what it's worth, the remaining survivors seem to be doing much better with less competition.

Of the many dill seeds I planted, only three so far have sent up these tiny stick-like sprouts. (They remind me of Pikmin, though not as much as the kale did at the beginning.) One is much taller than the other two and sometimes bends a bit near the top when the wind is too strong. I'm a bit disappointed since I specifically chose a bigger pot for them, but maybe there will be more sprouts in a week or so? These three look kinda lonely on their own.

Meanwhile, I'm wrestling a little with my enemies-to-lovers subplot in the Castlevania OT3 fic; like my seedlings, the relationships between my leads are growing at different rates and in different ways, and I kinda want to nudge the slower one (ie, between Trevor and Alucard) even though I know it's more of a slow-burn thing. My version of Trevor is somewhat different from the anime one; he's somehow more openly hostile to Alucard and I'm still figuring out why I'm writing him this way. It's kinda weird since Alucard is generally the more tsundere one of the three of them, both in my writing and in the anime. Anyway, I've been chugging along and meeting my relatively low daily word count; if I'm lucky I can sort out my thought processes and get some good material out of Camp NaNo that I won't have to change too much in later drafts.
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I've been enjoying Camp NaNo so far, though I've encountered some issues with the site -- for instance, the group chat page doesn't load most of the time, and the account settings page is picky about what it lets you edit (in particular, it doesn't let you change your timezone on its own; you have to change something else along with it). The feature for setting your word count even has a known bug preventing some people from updating their status within 24 hours of a goal starting; thanks to the forum post detailing this I found out about the Stats page, which apparently has a more reliable version of that feature. Overall I've found the site to be a bit user-unfriendly in terms of feature discoverability and ease of use, but when it does work as expected it's not so bad. Maybe it's a sign for me to stop spending time on the site and spend more time writing. ^^;;

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Some things I've found while procrastinating:

Kekeflipnote animation featuring birds dancing the can-can: This was animated on the Nintendo DSi; it's hard for me to imagine animating something on a screen that small. ^^;;

Twitter thread screenshots (on Tumblr) about the mystery of the disappearing drunk pill bugs: This has an unexpectedly cute ending; I thought at first that it was a dog's fault, but no dogs were mentioned. For some reason the original Twitter thread is gone, so I'm glad someone took screenshots.

Tiktok video (on Tumblr) of deaf actor Daniel Durant talking about listening to music: I spoiled myself a little by checking the Wikipedia page for CODA, but that just makes me want to watch it more. Hope it comes to Netflix eventually.

Tumblr thread about the Virgin Mary lactating and St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Projectile lactating is apparently a thing.

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I recently got to play the demo of the new Kirby game on the Switch; it's the first Kirby game I've played and I had so much fun. <3 It's such a cute game, and the demo even has some replay value -- once you've completed it the game gives you power-ups for the abilities Kirby can pick up and encourages you to replay the stages to try them out. I'm looking forward to playing the rest, though I ought to get back to Pokemon Legends Arceus first; I'm past the halfway point in that game and I want to finish it before I get too immersed in another game. (My "problem" with Arceus is the same one I had with Breath of the Wild -- I keep exploring everything I find interesting and ignoring the main quest line. It makes for engaging gameplay but it also feels like I'm taking too long to finish the game. ^^;;)

Also: a cute animation of the many ways Kirby can drive a car (before I played the game I didn't know which one actually happened) and a possible in-game Itou Junji reference that makes me wonder if Kirby is actually a horror game masquerading as a cute kid's game. (I mean, Kirby is an alien from another planet who swallows things and acquires their attributes, so there's an argument to be made about inexplicable cosmic horrors going on there.)
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I'm not sure if I can post regularly, but anyway it's good to be back, at least for now. ^^;;

Some things I've been doing:

- Revived my sketching habit: mostly figure drawing practice and studies, occasionally trying to relearn watercolors. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed this even if I repeatedly run into the limitations of my current level of skill.

- Got back to the Castlevania OT3 fanfic: I got stuck around halfway through chapter 3 and was blocked for a long time; recently I was able to pick it up again and filled out a beat sheet with most of the plot. I've signed up for Camp NaNo and will try my best not to fixate on scenes (which is why I usually get stuck) and hit my word count. Fingers crossed that I've prepared enough material to finally get me through this first draft. (The full plot might exceed the word count I set for Camp NaNo, but either way I'd just be happy to hit that word count.)

- Started growing some vegetables: I've been meaning to do this for a while; I finally got around to it, though most of the time I don't really know what I'm doing apart from following whatever guides I can find online. ^^;; Currently I have a tiny village of seedlings (and a weathered but ruggedly determined green onion grown from a root end) in pots.

- Got into Tarot: I wasn't a big fan of Tarot in the past; I've just always been aware of it thanks to my mother, who has been doing readings for years. Recently I found a couple of decks that I liked (one featuring watercolor cats, another inspired by Santa Muerte) and was able to get them relatively cheaply, so I started doing simple 3-card readings. So far it's been quite helpful -- my readings tend to surface what's on my mind, or what I'm aware of but am not paying enough attention to (or ignoring because of various reasons). I'm glad I got both decks. <3
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The last weekend was exhausting, and I've been lagging behind a bit in Camp NaNo. OTL I suppose it was a good idea to set a low word count so it's not that hard to catch up.

Castlevania OT3. I'm mostly(?) done with chapter 2, which seems to be somewhat wonkier than chapter 1; I have this habit of setting up all sorts of things in the beginning then figuring out what to do with them as I go along, which can lead to inconsistencies. Even when I have an outline or scene notes, I keep pulling things out of thin air and tossing them into the chapter almost subconsciously. (In particular, the castle is getting a bit overpowered; I might have to dial back the things it can do.) I'm glad that the 21 Days to a Novel exercises have helped me to stay on track, though I think I've already veered off-course somewhat.

Chapter 3's opening scene has already played out in my head; I might wind up finishing it before I finish the final scene of chapter 2, which is probably okay since I still have to bridge them. I probably need to do some streamlining in chapter 2 since I keep forgetting that the reader doesn't know what I already know about the characters' motivations. ^^;; If this keeps up, the word count for chapter 2 might be padded a bit, and I might get to around halfway of chapter 3 by the end of the month.
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I'd lost track of how delayed this is; lots of things have happened IRL. ^^;; Anyway, here goes.

Castlevania OT3. I joined Camp NaNo, which helped give me some structure to the rest of this month; I now have (low) weekly word count goals that should add up to roughly 2 chapters by the end of July, or maybe 1 chapter and around half of the next depending on how wordy I get. I should have finished days 18-20 of 21 Days to a Novel prior -- day 21 is technically the day you start writing -- so it's like I skipped ahead a bit. Fwiw I'm revisiting the exercises for those last few days while I'm writing chapter 2; it turns out that even if I've completed all the prior exercises I'm still a bit hazy on what counts as a "world event" and how the characters react to it. (I'd initially interpreted this as events in the characters' lives, but I might have gotten that wrong; it probably means things like "this town was invaded by night creatures," to which my OT3 would respond with "and they kicked the night creatures' asses and enjoyed it.") As always I'm figuring things out as I'm going along and somehow making it all work (I hope).

Meanwhile, I'm enjoying writing the initial "we're enemies how can I be attracted to him" bits, maybe more than I should. ^^;; I haven't written enemies-to-lovers before; I might be having too much fun with it.
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More delays: my computer's file system got messed up last week and I had to both get that fixed and offset my work hours. It seems unlikely for me to finish 21 Days to a Novel this week, but I'll keep trying just the same.

Castlevania OT3. I've been going back-and-forth on my version of Speaker culture since there's very little to go on in the anime; I'm still figuring out how a caravan of nomadic scholars can make a living (the answer seems to be that only a handful of them are scholars while the rest are engaged in herding livestock and other pastoralist activities). There's also the problem of Sypha's magic -- it's in her bloodline in the games, yet her grandfather is implied not to have any magic in the brief scenes in which he appears in the anime. I've assumed that it skips generations and that Sypha isn't the only mage in her clan, though it seems that magic is relatively rare among her people (only Sypha is shown to have magic among the group of Speakers in season 1). I've had more to think about and it's reshaping how I see Sypha and her role in the story.

One thing I've noticed is how Sypha's background (as I'm coming to know it) makes her the protagonist of a different story -- a coming-of-age one wherein she goes out into the world and finds herself, so to speak. It seems like a tangent compared to Trevor and Alucard's intertwined fates; in weaving her story into theirs I keep thinking about how she's primarily a support character in the games, the mage who turns out to be a woman when you get to know her (IIRC this was in her first appearance) and settles down with the hero after the game ends. If I'm not careful I could wind up relegating her to a similar role -- a way to prop up Trevor and Alucard's stories and give them descendants for possible sequels*.

I'm hoping I can make her character arc compelling yet still cohesive with Trevor and Alucard's arcs.

---

* Sypha's magic combining with the Belmont bloodline eventually leads to Richter's OP-ness several generations later; his Hydro Storm attacks are ridiculous, especially in Symphony of the Night once he's been unlocked.
sleeplesspotato: tabby kitten looking up (Default)
Title: An Inconvenient Oath
Author: sleeplesspotato (chunkybutter on AO3)
Fandom: Castlevania (Netflix)
Pairing/Characters: Trevor Belmont / Sypha Belnades / Alucard (Adrian Fahrenheit Tepes)
Rating: Mature
Length: chapter 1: 3380 words (multiple chapters planned)

Summary: Cursed and wedded on the same day, Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades were fast finding married life not to their taste. A decaying castle and a secretive husband were hardly the stuff of their dreams. Yet every time they looked at blond, brooding Adrian Fahrenheit Tepes, Lord of Castlevania, they felt inexplicably compelled - and determined - to make their marriage real!

Notes: Based on The Inconvenient Duchess by Christine Merrill

Link: AO3




Crossposted from [community profile] unconventionalcourtship
sleeplesspotato: tabby kitten looking up (Default)
Another delayed post for last week. ^^;; I'm hoping the rest of my writing schedule won't be as delayed.

Castlevania OT3. I've gotten to the meaty part of 21 Days to a Novel: figuring out character arcs and how to arrange the plot events. This is when I realize (again, since I've been using these for a while) that the exercises live up to their name -- I have 3 main characters with somewhat separate arcs that each have to come to a satisfying conclusion, and that takes more chapters than I thought I'd need initially. In writing my way through these exercises I've come to a better understanding of the story I want to tell; my main concern is that Sypha's arc seems to be largely in support of Trevor's and Alucard's, and I'm a bit unhappy about that. (She's awesome and deserves to be the heroine of her own story, dammit.) I also realized that the anime quickly introduces Sypha as a Speaker mage at the beginning of season 1 then kind of forgets about her background up until around halfway through season 4, and I found myself asking things like, What's the culture of her people? What's it like living as an itinerant mage and scholar, helping the communities you encounter without expecting anything in return? In fleshing out Sypha's character I've had to answer these questions for myself; her character in the games is rather different as far as I can tell, so I stuck to what was in the anime and extrapolated from there.

I hope I can finish this in around 50k words* or less; I'll try to trim out any unnecessary bits during revisions. (So far, one biggish subplot has sprung out of Trevor's and Alucard's story arcs and will likely intertwine with Sypha's. It seems like I have to keep it for now.)

* 21 Days to a Novel assumes that the novel resulting from the exercises will be around 80k-100k words. I can't see myself writing that many words, but I suppose I'll find out eventually.
sleeplesspotato: tabby kitten looking up (Default)
Castlevania OT3. Already past the halfway point of 21 Days to a Novel -- I'm currently at the worldbuilding part, which is largely character-based (ie, defined by the interactions between the world and the characters). I also wrote a lot of notes about an epilogue to the epilogue featuring my OT3's descendants, and I likely got way ahead of myself there. ^^;; All the same, it was interesting to consider what it would be like for roughly half the family to be descended from Dracula and the other half to be descended from Dracula's mortal enemies. I imagine that the OT3 would raise their children carefully to avoid conflicts getting out of hand, though that could possibly break down after a generation or so. There's also the fact that Alucard will likely outlive his human family, which saddens me even if it gives me a lot of angst to work with. (I have such a weak spot for lonely cinnamon rolls like Alucard; I just want them to be happy.)

Anyway, I might actually finish all of the 21 Days to a Novel exercises for once, and I'm looking forward to that. ^-^
sleeplesspotato: tabby kitten looking up (Default)
There's going to be a spin-off of the Castlevania anime featuring Richter Belmont and Maria Renard from Rondo of Blood; they'll likely meet up with Alucard, which means the spin-off will also cover Symphony of the Night. This is good news -- if there's going to be a continuation, then Symphony of the Night is definitely one of the top picks for adaptation -- though I'm a little sad about my Castlevania OT3 changing. (It's understandable, since Richter's period is a few hundred years after Trevor and Sypha's.) I'd also be a bit unhappy if the spin-off follows Alucard's fate in Symphony of the Night...he deserves better than that. :(

BTW Warren Ellis won't be writing for the spin-off following allegations of abuse. I'm not really a fan, so this doesn't affect me as much as it has other people who were deeply influenced by him, but I am disappointed in him -- I expected more from the writer behind Transmetropolitan's incisive social commentary. *sigh* Fwiw he completed all four seasons of Castlevania; maybe it makes sense for a different writer to take on the spin-off. I'll just have to wait and see.

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