esamastation

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Behold the most writing I've done in months.

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I did zinetober this year, which started as me wanting to give myself incentive to do more art and maybe make some comics - and then devolved into me dealing with the death and funeral of the most important person in my life. I'm honestly shocked I both kept at it through this month and actually finished. Good job, me.

Anyway, did not use any prompts, so they're all kinda whatever. Also, learned that having little physical things of art that you made which you can then fiddle with is very good for happy brain chemicals. Which I definitely needed.

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Looks great!

Bookbinding: Sometime Yesterday by Esama

Another day, another project! Sometime Yesterday by Esama/@esamastation was one of my first attempts at bookbinding years ago. Long, long ago, I learned Barnes & Noble will take whatever PDF you upload and give you a paperback book for a fee. I took ages considering doing this to fanfiction but always hit a wall when it came to the cover art. I never went the B&B route, but now that I'm binding my own books, I felt it was time to finally get back to making this book a reality.

Now to chose what to do next - Miles to Go, Solar Maximus, or Life a Life or Die Trying...

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Hello there :) I was skimming your Assassin's Creed fics again and there's one I can't seem to find: the one where Desmond pretends to be a doctor and assassinated a man with an air embolism? Could you point me at the right title? Thanks for the help :^)

I was born for this, chapter 18.

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Are you off Ao3? I can't seem to find you.

I'm still there.

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'Lo! hope you're having a good day/night/timezone! I'm curious, what do you think ab/of fanfics of your fanfics? like, ppl writing fanfic in the universe of your fanfic, iykwim? /genq

I'm cool with it.

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Been doing some wandering :)

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If you see my fics uploaded in any format on YouTube or any other site except AO3 or here on my blog, please know I did not give my permission, I do not approve, and no, I am not going to do anything about it because it's more effort than it's worth.

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Occasionally I get the urge to write some litrpg isekai.

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hi! have you been playing any video games lately?

I just finished the first AC and planning to play the sequels, thank you so much for your fics coz if not for those I wouldn't consider playing them at all

I'm phasing myself though so before jumping to the sequel I got into another game and I wanted to share it with you. Have you ever played Hades? The game was all hyped up back in 2020 and I'm a bit late but the hype is well deserved. If you're looking for a new game to play, please do try it.

Currently trying to finish Witcher 3 again. I have played Hades, yes, though I haven't yet gotten the sequel. I have too many games I haven't even touched as it is 😔

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I would like to suggest a new saying, in the spirit of, "Still a better love story than Twilight":

"Still a better battle than Winterfell."

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Okay, calling off this exercise now.

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What were your plans for mob boss? I just read it for the first time and i absolutely love it but now im stuck thinking on how it’d continue 😭 Much love! ❤️

It didn't have any. That's why it died. It was basically just "what if Reigen was mistaken for a mob boss?" and that's it - once that part was written, it had no further steam to keep it going.

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I have an ending planned, yeah. I even have a middle planned - in my head the fic is still at the first third. But anyway.

Into the Abyss started out as 2 different ideas smashed into one. First was older idea of SY donning on plague doctor getup to fight all the sex pollen, that's basically where the bird mask came from. Other was an idea - or rather a grievance - I had while reading another fic. I won't go into the details, it's not important, but it left me with a hankering for a properly monstrous/demonic SY fic. Specifically one where he became monstrous in reaction to equally monstrous environment. So I decided to write one.

That's basically it for the original plot for Into the Abyss - I just wanted to throw SY into the Endless Abyss and have him come out very much changed by it - bonus points if he got to absolutely abuse his PIDW knowledge. Both the world building and the System's antagonism comes from that - for SY to use his knowledge to his advantage the world has to be complex. And for SY to have a need to make use of it, he needs an impetus, a force driving him forward. Therefore, a world that wants to fuck him and a System that wants to kill him.

I'm not sure now if the idea of Endless Abyss being the result of the realms splitting in svsss is canon or fanon, but I really liked the idea of it as this chaotic in-between dimension that's being constantly ground between heaven, human realm and demonic realms, and probably some others. So that's what I went with - a constantly shifting hell dimension full of corrupt creatures and elements that long ago leaked in from the other realms. Festering, stagnating sewer of the other realms, basically.

Svsss has a lot of mentions of magical flora and fauna and svsss fanon loves it's sex pollen, so, lot of that seems like natural thing. I wanted to make things as uncomfortable for SY as possible, hence stuff like the Leaking Flower Meadow. I wanted SY not just badass - I wanted him to be uncanny, messy and feral. No room for his canon sensibilities and wilting flower act - the Endless Abyss takes his modern sensibilities about sex and puts them into a meat grinder.

For the various biomes in the Endless Abyss I took inspiration from games ice played over the years, can't really pin point what came from where. The shimmering atmosphere of the Leaking Flower Meadow came from the movie Annihilation, though. The Hell Frost is basically hailstorm from hell. And so on. Just picking bits and pieces here and there and smashing them together.

After that's it's basically another "put these guys into a Situation and see what happens" fic. Except it's a Lot of Situations. With a few "wouldn't it be cool if he did this" and "What's the reason he would do this" and "if this happened, how would he get out?" thrown into the mix.

I still got plans for Into the Abyss. Most involve scenes I want to see and stuff I want the characters to figure out. Just gotta figure out how to move all the pieces into place for the scenes to play out.

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Well

Metagaming started with a plan and then veered WAY off course. Also, a little bit of spite was maybe involved.

Might end up lol. But yeah, the Cast Iron thing was plan from the very start. There was also some video I watched on YouTube, can't remember by who, but it had a mention of concept of mana in Polynesian cultures and how it can be gained through sexual acts, etc, not really important. Still, there was some spite and previous random research influencing the planning process.

*going out his way.

Yeah, so the original plan was for Shen Qingqiu to figure out the sex thing out and also have a lot of it probably, and eventually turning it into mastery, etc etc. It was a fun enough plan. There was going to be a lot of smut. Experienced and confident sqq, hell yeah.

.... And then I actually wrote a bit further and the story turned into something else. Arguably what it ended up becoming as it progressed is probably better - but I still have this other story in my head about Sqq with more confident and comfortable attitude towards his own, healthy, sex life. Alas, no plan survives encounter with the enemy and Sqq's various issues won, and then various issues of Qing Jing Peak started cropping up. That's the risk you take when you go in depth - you find the depths.

Still, the rough shape of the harem survived, if not all the educational and casual sex I was planning for sqq to be having. His character just didn't work with it.

Yeaaah this sort of thing happens to me a lot. I start writing one thing and end up writing another. But that's fine, it was fun exploring mental health care and stuff in xianxia setting and it went interesting directions later on in Character Optimisation. I ended up hanging onto the idea of "Sqq as eventual Master of Dual Cultivation" probably to the story's overall detriment, really should've killed my darling there, but I just couldn't. Hindsight is whatever, that's just what happens sometimes when plans go awry.

I haven't abandoned the fic yet. The last part is going to be called Power Levelling and I have like 10% of the start and 20% of the end roughly planned out but I have no idea what happens in the middle and that's why I haven't yet written a word of it. Still, I hold onto hope. I'll write it one day.

In conclusion, plans change, stories go off the rails and overall it's all going to be okay 👍

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Hi! I’ve recently bound Desmond ex machina. I would be delighted to make you an author’s copy, if you want (and if not, I’m just happy to show of :D)

It looks lovely 😊

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It all started with, I kid you not, with a dream

From where we went onto asdfghjking over various aspects of potential Shizuroth, about how lbh would be so into it and Sephiroth having the Wife Beam™ and Harem and When Yuan dealing with Shinra Corporate Bureaucracy, etc etc, and it was hilarious enough that I wrote the first bit, nimadge gave me some helpful feedback

I did some research

That's what most of my research looks like, trying to figure out the right word to use in a situation. I still don't know what those types of corners are called 😔

i got some more feedback from nimadge

It's very helpful having second pair of eyes looking over your stuff, honestly. Nimadge and other people have helped me a lot with polishing my stuff over the years, adding context and stuff into scenes, etc. A good proofreader friend is worth their weight in gold. Some more polish and off it goes.

And that's how the fic begun, lol, with immediate edits and no plans. Shizuroth is very typical "put that character into a Situation™" fic, and it's written very much seat-of-your-pants. At the start it only had two goals, really, 1, lbh's future reaction to seeing Shizuroth, which is the End Goal it's being written towards and 2, seeing Sephiroth one day in full Shen Qingqiu getup playing the guqin 😌 and honestly those are still the goals.

I also wanted to try this stress free writing style i'd seen other people on Tumblr use, writing just small snippets and posting them without much hazzle to Tumblr. It was nice way to get over a writer's block, which I had at the time. Hence why the fic was, at least at the start, written as these short snippets. I was just jamming it, writing wise

But as with all things, the fic got more complicated as things went on.

In conclusion, good brainstorming session is invaluable and the the one who deserves the credit for Shizuroth is probably nimadge, lol.