<–The State of the Writer: 10/7/18          The State of the Writer: 12/2/18–>

A post updated every other Sunday discussing my current writing projects and any completed the prior two weeks.

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Finished Projects: 3

• Blogger Tags: The Three Things Tag – 10/9/18
• Book Review: Saga, Volume 8 by Brian K. Vaughn & Fiona Staples – 10/13/18
• Book Review: Krim Du Shaw by Talia Haven – 10/15/18

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Project: Story
Title: The Broken Rose
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Type: Fanfiction (FFVII) Novel
Current Word Count: 255,753
Prior Word Count: 256,723
Word Difference: -970
Status: Editing
Progress: Second edit of Chapter 12

If all goes well, I might be able to post Chapter 12 before I go on my November NaNoWriMo hiatus.  I’ve added everything I needed to the chapter and am currently doing the second edit, looking for any proofreading or flow issues.  So far things look pretty good.  I’ll probably do a third edit since I did make some changes, and I like to go over those with fresh eyes.

It hasn’t escaped my attention that the sword is in the “wrong” hand above, but I’m going to give the artist a pass since the Great General would be able to wield it right-handed if he so wished.

“He was a monster despite all the years of trying to prove the inverse.  The thought of the shrieks of those who’d hurt her brought the pale of satisfaction.  He would not be content until tongues of torture filled his ears with their screams.  It would still not suffice for he could never make them endure even a tenth of what they deserved.  *The can never suffer enough to pay for even an instant of pain from this innocent flower.*  Closing his eyes, he only saw blood through palest lids.”

Project: Story Audio Recording
Title: Northern Lights
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Type: Fanfiction (FFVII) Novel
Status: Video Editing
Progress: Working on image timing

I’m really, really happy with my progress on this even though there have been some setbacks and things I still need to figure out.  The images have been put to the audio and for the most part I really like it.  I’m a bit iffy on the end, so I’ve been playing around with that, and I had to redo the final panel that showed the title because it wasn’t wide enough.  I added a transitional animation to each image so it looked more cinematic, but since those add about a second and a half, I need to go back through and re-time everything.  Then I get to figure it out all over again when I do the license music version.  I’m happy that you can download it without having to pay for it first, but I’m going to purchase the yearly subscription before I post anything.  It’s $15 a month for YouTube creators with small viewership, but I could pay $144 a year all at once and save $36.  I might wind up doing that.  The music Epidemic has is excellent, and there’s quite a variety to choose from.

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In Progress

• Game Review: Final Fantasy V – I’m working on wedging in my play/watch notes to the story summary.  It’s actually been pretty fun.
• Final Fantasy Character Assessment: Kain Highwind – I did the setup, but I haven’t even chosen Kain’s Major Arcana yet, though I’m like 99% sure it’s going to be The Hanged Man.
• Book Review: The Diamond of Darkhold by Jeanne DuPrau – I just did the setup for this, too.  A lot of times I’ll do that for posts since I have a general way I set book reviews up and it can be time consuming, so I’ll do it when I’m too tired to actually write but can still do things by rote.  I’m hoping to bang the review out some time this week and be done with the series.

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I went to a Halloween party last night (yep, this early.  There were scheduling issues with people, so it happened earlier than usual), and I…am…dead.  I was a kitty cat.

I figured I should get some use out of my $110 a pop Sephiroth contact lenses, so I decided what the hell and wore them.  As you can see by this photo, I’m back in glasses because omfg I was in pain most of the night.  Between allergies, the contact lenses being bigger than most and old, they irritated my right eye to the point that my vision was blurry and veiled in it after I finally removed them.  Their coloring had leached away, too, so it looked more like I had huge dilated pupils instead of slits, which I’m a little annoyed about, but contacts don’t last forever, and I think these have run their course.  You can probably see how red my eyes are in the picture, and I’d wiped away my makeup between that and my nose running so much (awful allergies).  I was also dealing with fibromyalgia issues, so yeah TSN was a mess, and I’m super sore and tired today.  I really do like that wig though.  I tried to model my makeup after Cid.

Because he really has the best eyeliner.  It was pretty fun, though now I’m also socially tired lol.  I had some good conversations, which were worth the energy spent.

I’ve been thinking about setting up a Patreon in the near future, but I want to have certain things out there before I do so that anyone who pledges knows what I’m offering.  I’m also really keen on transparency so that supporters will know exactly what their money is going to.  I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing it now because it takes me a long time to put any videos up, and I’d like to have some before I start anything like that.  There are a few things I need to figure out and add to my list.  I try not to do anything before I research and figure out all of the contingencies.

As you may have noticed, the next SOTW isn’t until December.  I’m going to do the same thing I did last year and take a hiatus in November to do NaNoWriMo, attempting to write the same novel I worked on last year.  Unlike then I’m not going to hand-write it because ow, arthritis.  I hate an empty Word doc, but I’ve written two stories exclusively on it before; I constantly email myself to combat my fear of losing my work; and I have enough notes for it that I’m not going in with nothing.  I know where I”m going to start writing even if that’s not the beginning of the story, and I feel better prepared this year (we’ll see if I actually am).  I’ll probably put up a hiatus post the day before so if any of you are worriers (aw!) you don’t have to think I dropped dead.  I’ll also still be active on Twitter so I’m not going to disappear entirely…unless aliens show up and offer me a way off of this hellscape :p

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<–The State of the Writer: 10/7/18          The State of the Writer: 12/2/18–>