Onus

Having several days off and gotten back the energy I normally put into work, I succeeded in toting a small nightstand up two flights of stairs, wiping down some desks, and re-arranging my room. I also finished the second draft of the second chapter for Insomnia, got started on the first few pages of Orion for my next read, and put together a fanpage section for Devil May Cry, Which I've enjoyed enough that I decided to properly dedicate some of my website to it. 

I'm slow to produce, so there's probably won't be much in the way of content on it for a while, but I'm hoping to add some stuff eventually. I've got one fan theory written out already, and hope to do a react/review type thing for the 2007 anime, which is much easier to access than the Danny Phantom series ATM (though I want to do the same with that show, too.)

Everything looks like ass on mobile, but it's awesome on a full-sized screen, I swear. 



I'm really pleased with all the diamonds. 

For what it's worth, here's the page for Danny Phantom, which as you can see, is much more complete!



As you can probably guess, I'm a big fan of box shadows and gradients.  Gotta love the glow.

Making these a CSS carousal rather than their own, separate pages is almost certainly dumb, but I like it that way, so I plan to keep it, at least for now. 

I need, or rather, want, to make a section just for outlines and story ideas, too, which shouldn't be hard, but has some how ended up being put off for no particular reason. 

I still need to re-upload all my original artwork, too.  

I put up the tweaked version of my fandom homepage, today, as well as a new version of the page I keep my main fanfic, Where You Belong on. I'd copy the format and make that my new short-stories page, too, but I want a couple of days to think about whether I should mess with the colors to make it more distinct, or just leave it as-is. 

Thinking of Where you Belong, I more or less put it to the side for the last week or so, in favor of drafting out a couple of short stories,( which is why a new short stories page for my website was on my mind in the first place). I'm in that spot where I know what I want to do with the chapter, but can't quite work up the gumption to sit down and do it for any length of time. 

Rather than torture myself for not being fast enough, I've decided putting it to the side for at least a little while is not the worst. 

Overall, I'm happier with the new versions of my web pages - They both look a lot more cohesive with how I've designed the rest of my Danny Phantom themed stuff, though they probably could still use some tweaking. Purple and green together are natural eye-burners, but the bright yellow-lime I have on my Danny Phantom homepage in particular could probably stand to be slightly less noxious than it currently is.

I want to make sure my font is readily visible against whatever background I'm using, but dimming that color down is going on my list of planned alterations once I get in the mood to play with gradients and sliders once again. 

I'm probably going to finish up that second short story tonight, and then after that, I don't know. I'm sort of caught between reading, drawing, and just fooling around with one of my browser games with what free time I have left. 

It's tentative, but I'm thinking about devoting my time between work and sleep next week to finally finishing that one Jack and Vlad essay I've been bellyaching about. The darn thing has given me a bit of a case of creative constipation, and if I finally get that done, perhaps it will be a little easier to pursued myself to move on to something else. 

I had one of those powerfully surreal dreams that involved a burning house at the edge of a long road running across a landscape that was both incredibly flat, yet massive in scale. I wanted to use the road to get somewhere, but had to turn back because the fire had gotten that section of road shut down. Somehow, this was happening after I had investigated a cabin where a child had died and I had to hold a water  bottle that was drugged so powerfully, just touching it caused you to hallucinate. My father was getting a massage at the same time. This cabin was located at one end of the road I ended up driving down, I think I wanted to tell someone about it?

I had a different dream a few nights ago that involved fishing live power cords out of a swimming pool, also enormously big - I remember I couldn't see the far edge when I tried to look across it, it just vanished somewhere off into the sunny horizon. Not the worst pair of dreams I've had by a long shot, but the monumentality of the spaces, paired with the need to handle things I knew were dangerous seem to present a theme.

Maybe I feel nervous about my inability to predict the future. I'm not sure.  

It's finally a day where the weather isn't oddly warm and I have free time, which would have practically guaranteed I'd have spent at least a little time outside, except for the fact that it's damp.

Not raining, just damp. The ground is sodden and we're all still stuck in the drizzly aftermath of last night's storms. 

Maybe if I give it a few hours, it'll clear up enough to be pleasant again. 

One of the nice things about where I live is there are a lot of very large parks - some 5-10 acres, some much larger, all within an easy drive of my house. They're all free, and very few people seem to make much use of them - you'll get a small crowd of locals in the front seating area, sometimes, but that's it. If you want a nice spot to sit down and not be bothered, but don't want to be indoors, these places are perfect. 

There's a part of me that's half-tempted to grab a foldable chair  and have a nice sit, anyway, damp or no. I don't get out much, but I've had a jonesing for some nice outdoor time lately, and want to do it before winter comes around the corner and starts setting in. 

In terms of other plans, I have a fair amount of things I want to do with my website - the fandom sketches are still not loaded in, though that's almost certainly going to happen sometime today, I have a new page ready for launch, and some written stuff I want to upload, too. 

I've been trying to write short-story and headcannon-y stuff lately, alongside my main fic, of course, partly to continue practicing my writing, and partly just to get my many ideas down in a format that doesn't take months or years to complete. 

Thinking of, I still need finish editing that write up on Jack and Vlad as childhood friends, but I confess to not particularly pressuring myself about it, either. 

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.

Today:

1. ~1hr of study:

   Odin project, making my way through command line basics, hoping cheat sheet/quick reference I found will help long term.

2. ~50min writing:

   cut between all odds outline and TD ff oneshot.

3. 30min art:

   same as before, shading still slow going. 

I did basically the same thing yesterday, but since I forgot to write it down, I’m going to say it doesn’t count.
putting an effort to get up slightly earlier, so I can get a bit more done before going in to work.

staying up late just is as unproductive as it is hard to stop.

Today:

1. 30 minuets of art:

   Project still a long way from completed. I'm not very experienced with compelling light and shadows, and it shows.

2. 30 minuets writing:

   fanfiction, oneshot WK, a couple sentences worth.

3. 1 hour study:

   No real progress, still stuck on the absolute basics of basic JS, mostly pointless.

Total: 2 hours