emerald_embers

M, Boycritter, and I went down to the nearest Hobbytown (about an hour away) for Bandai Builders Day yesterday. This Hobbytown just became the only Bandai Builders certified shop in the state, so I definitely wanted to support them and their events. (Hobbytowns are franchise shops and each individual one is locally owned.)

This event had a free 30 Minute Fantasy kit, unique to this event! We got there a smidge early, did our check-in (and skewed their demographics, ha!), and got our kits. It was a pretty simplified kit, so I think it only took about 15-20 minutes to build. We chatted with other folks who turned up and posed for some photos while working, lol. By the time we were done, other people were arriving and waiting for our seats. Yay for a good turnout! By the time we'd finished shopping, maybe 2/3 of their stock of the event kit was gone.

(I picked up a 30MF accessory set, HG Abyss, HG 0 Gundam ACD, and HG Murasame Kai as well. M got a ton of paint for his tanks - though he did like the event kit and might pick up some 30MF stuff. Boycritter got a RG RX-78-2 Gramps and HG Sazabi.)

From there we went up to the conveyor sushi place and ate ourselves broke. So tasty! I tried to be a little more adventurous and found a few things I really liked. Next time I want to try more. ^_^

Details aren't entirely available yet, but there's some sort of 30 Minute Label competition in March and I'm interested, but that's also not a lot of time to come up with something, get a kit, and build. So I guess we'll see. But then again, I'd really like to enter for the fun of entering. Hmm.

Happy Anniversary, Lemonade Cafe! I certainly did not think, 23 years ago, that I was creating anything enduring. But it is still here, and I am still here. Go figure.

I have, in fact, chosen a notebook to tackle, though it's going to share with writing a bunch of stuff (hopefully) for the small_fandoms Drabblethon. It has some blank pages, so I can also write drabbles in it. (Ha!) So far I've been able to tear out and pitch some pages of things already long written and posted, which feels good. Some of what's left includes notes for projects that are downright ancient. And, like, to be honest I can probably just write whatever to finish some of these up? It's been so long that I feel like any actual expectations have vanished.

I am free.

Whew, that's a lot of swords though it doesn't feel like I've done much? Basically the cold is destroying my energy levels. So what I've been doing is going through old notes. I told myself I was 'sorting' them but there has been no actual sorting. Shortly, I'm just going to have to find a box to toss them all in because they're literally taking up the whole sofa. I can't even explain what I'm looking for, aside from one particular list I've mostly found but I just... IDEK how I'd sort them. I should probably give up on organization and just pick things up and work on them, lol. My plans for a drabble six years ago are not terribly important at this point; if the idea or the drabble come back around independently and I do something different that's fine. (It's not like I've never written different things for the same idea anyway. Whatever!)

I did get a tiny bit more done with the Best Moves/NaNo 2003 re-write. At the moment I'm trying to deal with a patch of exposition to make it feel a little more natural. (And then overall figure out how to balance out the plot and subplot and just make everyone feel a little more rounded.)

I've also figured out what to do with friend's cameo character. He can basically be slid entirely out of the narrative and replaced with a character who can impact things a bit more. I feel pretty good about this.

I bought a runner of Super Corgi Butts (by DSPIAE) and they're hilariously larger than expected.



They're for paint color testing, to see how a color will look on contours, etc. Plastic spoons are the most popular thing to use for this, but I had a chance for discounted butts and uh, yeah. LOL.

Wrote 600 words of the 2003 NaNo re-write. This means I have started and that is possibly the most important part? It's a complete overhaul so far but I suspect as I go along, I'll be able to keep full chunks and quite a bit of dialogue. I also see other fine lines to walk as I go; hopefully I won't fuck them up too badly.

Posted to inspiredby, posted the event info for the small_fandoms Drabblethon coming in February, posted the no_true_pair annual schedule...

Got the email inbox down to 240 messages, got the DW inbox down to 47 pages. (On a fuzzy goal of 240/54. I'll take it!)

While I was looking for the 2003 NaNo on the Wayback Machine, I kind of died a little at some of my old website front pages. So sparse, so simple! The one with like four! fandoms, original fic, and a links page was definitely my favorite, lol.

Back to archiving. I'm not going to 'catch up' this weekend, but if I can get down to ~a week behind, I'll be really happy.

As usual, if there's a section you'd like me to wake up, let me know and I'll do it.

A bit of archiving, a lot of something. I realized that despite it being two and a half years since I started the new site, I hadn't moved any of my FFVII fic. Not a bit. I have now moved my two Crisis Core fics and will work on the rest sooner than later. But then again, I also had no Kingdom Hearts until I was nudged. (I think some of it is the sheer size of those categories? And knowing this is still a multi-year effort. Even if I manage five fics (or chapters thereof) a day for an entire year, that's only 1825 items, which is nothing compared to the ~2500-not-counting-chaptered-stuff on AO3 + all the original fic I couldn't post there because AO3 sucks and everything I've written since mid-2023. So, like, catching up is a task for the bastard child of Hercules and Sisyphus.)

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned some of the everything about my 2003 NaNo novel, too. How I went to archive it, realized I'd always meant to finish editing and expanding it a bit, but actually re-write it - meant to do it last year and, uh, last year happened. Anyway, dead set on doing it this year! Except the main copy was on the website that's gone. Oh, well, surely it's on my journal! Nope! Okay, to the Wayback Machine! Nope! I dug out the old php files and dumped it into some private entries for my future use.

Main things to do with it:
- less padding smut
- remove friend's cameo character
- words we don't use anymore
- remove some of the real-world canons and substitute some fictional ones*
- tighten up the expies a bit
- yeah idek it just needs a lot and that's okay

*the main reason for this aside from unlimited plot potential with the fictional fandoms is the story is set in 2003 and had plenty of commentary on things like Guilty Gear which made sense in 2003 but are a little jarring in the Year of Our Dude 202X.

I don't know if it'll end up being 50k words still, or shorter or longer. My original thoughts on the story were that it was too short for NaNo, and it possibly was hence a lot of weird padding and things just being... weird.

I also have one KH fic and one FFVII fic that I didn't archive on AO3 for Reasons and I'll have to eventually make decisions with those, too...