Onus

I have been wicked tired lately and darned if I know why, I actually conked out yesterday several hours earlier than planned, which was nice, but not what I wanted. 

I did manage to finish the latest chapter of Where You Belong, Moving onto a change in perspective that I'm still kind of hesitant about, On one hand, Valerie is literally the only cannon character in the work, courtesy of Nickolodian's refusal to give us any named yetis other than Frostbite and my desire to expand the Farfrozen into something properly kingdom-sized, but on the other, I really do think the reader needs to know some of the information I'm putting in here, and I just couldn't think of a naturalistic or timely place to do it while keeping her as the main POV. 

She's the outsider, and what the reader is looking at here, in this chapter, is a glimpse of what's going on inside the clan, why they're keeping her, and the things they stand to gain by letting her hang out, all stuff Valerie doesn't know, and doesn't have a means of accessing.

After this, I think I need to expand the setting a little bit more by having Valerie meet other yetis. I actually have their whole family written out, so I just need to think a bit on who she should meet, in what order, and what mini-adventures they have together before moving forward with the main cast and plot. 

I managed to re-fill my fountain pen with some ink I had lying around my room for no good reason. Back in the day, before I decided I was legally married to sumi-e, I wasn't terribly discriminate with what kinds of inks I used for lining, just so long as they were black. As it happens, some of that ink was fountain pen ink, specifically. I'm not a huge fan of writing in colors, so I was very pleased to discover I could re-fill the cartridges that came with my pen with some stuff I had on hand. 

I do kind of want a different fountain pen, though. my craft store speedball takes proprietary cartridges only, can't fit a converter, and doesn't have room for plus sized cartridges, either. I seem to run through ink at a pretty decent pace, so not having to swap out and refill quite so frequently would be nice.  

Also, a non-stub nib, while I'm at it. I'm trying to purchase carefully this time, so I'm still shopping.

I haven't spoken about it in a bit, but I'm still pacing my way through From Here to Eternity. For a book that goes out of its way to be of its era, there are portions that get pretty modern in very ugly ways. Stuff like "Nobody gives a damn whether you're guilty or not. The court doesn't care." and "The quickest, efficientest, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same with any other animal."  Are both lines I could easily see being used, both in a current-year work, and, more depressingly, real life.

I have said it several times before, but I don't think this book is going anywhere good.

I'm still trying not to get too far into the weeds, though, since I still haven't, properly finished it, and I do try to withhold going full literature-review until after I've read something completely, but it's given me a lot to think about already. Too much, if I'm being frank.  I can't quite grab onto any one point where I would even want to start.

I had labor day off yesterday, which was unexpectedly nice. I ended up checking on my work, just in case, though. I've never been quite able to get over the paranoia of accidentally getting myself in trouble by missing a day, somehow.

I used the free time to hit up my local antique mall, which I quite enjoyed, and almost convinced myself to pick up a couple of books before remembering how many I had at home that I was yet to finish. The Maltese Falcon still needs its last few chapters polished off, and I need to get back into From Here to Eternity on top of that. It took over 400 pages, but Prewitt's finally going to jail. Supposedly some of the stuff that's set to occur there is based off things the author really saw, and I've been doing my best to avoid spoilers, so I'm curious about how it's going to go.

I'm trying something new for my fanfiction writing - getting up about thirty minuets earlier than I otherwise would, and just using that time between getting up and getting ready to sit down at my typewriter and have at it as best I can. I'm not a fan of getting up early, but I can't seem to establish a good routine for writing late at night. I really feel if I can nail down a habit, and do it in a time and place where I won't self-foil from avoidance, I'll finally start really making headway on finishing this arc. 

I'm getting way ahead of myself to even think about it, but I want the next arc to be a large scale portal run, where Valerie and a bunch of yetis dive into another world and raid it for money. Technically, it's more like arc two-and-a-half, but I don't think I'll be able to hold back on posting that long. That 2024 last post date kills me a little harder every month. 

I've also started experimenting with loose-leaf paper, my fountain pen, and playing with bits and pieces of the story in non-linear order, sort of writing down dialogue and  scenes I really want to happen without fussing so much about linearity. I'm an intensely linear person, so this is pretty different for me, but it is fun to play around with my pen. 

I do wish I would stop blowing through my capsules so fast. I need to either grab a syringe to refill them, or knuckle down and purchase a different pen that uses a siphon rather than capsules. My current pen, being a speedball, is too small for a converter, or so the internet tells me.

On a related note of trying to get more done by loosening up, I'm fairly close to finishing my next webpage, which should be dedicated to unfinished and sketchbook-y artwork. The hard part, truly, is just uploading my stuff, which I actually have a fair amount of. Once  I finish its dedicated page, I'll probably need a day just to load up my backlog into the site. 

There's Some Danny Phantom themed sketches in there, too, which need to be stuck in my fandom page, now that I think about it.

I'm back from vacation, having gotten quite a bit less done than planned. I think I grossly underestimated both just how much I had written for chapter eight of Where You Belong, which is looking to turn out to ~4000 words or so in its draft form, and how tedious it was to get it transcribed into my computer. I did get it halfway done, and may try to finish it yet, purely because that 2023 last upload date is making me sad. 

Well, vacation is vacation, and all of this is a hobby, anyhow. It was not as though I spent the whole time as a potato, either. I finished a tiger-man in procreate while I was there using a technique I had never really tried before (working on tones first, then, and only then, adding in colors by stacking overlay and multiply layers on top of one another.) and I must confess I'm pretty proud of it. 



This took about 15 hours, which is pretty fast for me. 

Man, I need to draw more. 

I also finished a short story that, because it was absolutely a first draft and completely unedited, got thrown into the "playground" section of my website, which is a page I made for any original work I write that I don't consider "scraps", but don't view as "finished, either". It's very much intended to get myself writing more by removing the restrictions I tend to place on myself for posting. 

I want something similar for my fanfiction stuff, I think, but that's for later.

I've also finished page ten of chapter eleven for WYB after my return on Saturday, and may finish the chapter out completely before going to work tomorrow, since it's definitely looking like it'll top out at eleven to twelve pages long. As much as I hate to do a POV swap, I'm seriously considering doing exactly that for chapter twelve, there are things going on in the background that I strongly feel would be much more efficient/interesting to deliver through another character's eyes.

In the meantime, I've decided to try out writing my short story/drabble/headcannon type of stuff using my new fountain pen. The typewriter is great, but bouncing between more than one project at the same time is a real pain, since you either need to finish a page, or pull your current one out of the roller, start on something else, then re-roll and re-align your old page once you want to pick your other one back up. This has been a huge blessing for keeping me focused in one fic at a time, but if I want to bounce around, having a notebook with some handwritten garbage I can throw in my royal for a second draft may be the way to go.. 

I'll try to get back to more regular posting here, now that I'm back.

Some short Danny Phantom oneshots works I have thoughts or outlines for, but have not written:

• picture Perfect:

Wes Weston finds a haunted camera, and of course has the bright idea to aim it at local ghost boy, Danny Phantom.

• By the Bell

William Lancer dies and turns into a ghost, but doesn't notice, leaving his class to try and handle the fallout.

•  Flowers on a Stone

Sam and her grandma bond after the death of her grandfather, a look at how Sam first started really getting into gardening. 

• Study Buddy

A Sydney Poindexter and Danny Fenton friendship fic, which is something I desperately want more of. 

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I've also written one oneshot as a break between chapters ten and eleven of Where You Belong that just hasn't been published yet, centering around Tucker and ghost!Tucker from that season one Deserii episode. Everyone seems to like king Tuck from later on in the series so much, they seem to forget that that envy-based ghost version of Tuck was never destroyed, just thrown into the Ghost Zone after Danny separated the two out.  Since cannon never addressed what happened to him, I thought perhaps I would.

It needs a crazy amount of work before I even get close to publishing it, though, at least two more drafts, maybe three before I'd feel good putting it up live.