#i am 'looking forward to dawntrail' but 'i am not caught up with the last few patches and that is my homework this weekend'

[nhura]

🧍‍♂️............................................................................................... alright man I'm just going to say it. I'm so hsrpilled that it's making me act out and draw fanart again. look forward to it or else ヾ(￣▽￣)

^ that's a wip

[anneapocalypse]

Writing Wrap-up and 2024 Goals

It's a weird year to be doing a wrap-up, because I did not post a whole lot this year and I'm not sure I even set any goals last January thanks to having covid and being sick and exhausted for weeks, which still kind of feels like it threw off my whole year even though that sounds dramatic. Whatever. I've moped enough about it being a bad year for writing; now, I want to look forward.

2023 Wrap-Up

In case you'd like to read the one fic I did post this year, it's "Before You Go", a Loghain/Maric fic for Dragon Age (3022 words, rated E), which I am still quite happy with! And though it's not writing, I also made a podfic of RosellaWrites' gorgeous fic "let them not make me a stone (and let them not spill me)" (and if you're not interested in podfic you should still go read Rosella's fic, seriously, it's great).

While November 2022 was the last time I made substantial progress on A Hero Sleeps in Gwaren (my Briala/F!Tabris longfic for Dragon Age), I did make a few attempts to chip away at the draft this year. I didn't keep any records of what progress I made, but lucky for me Scrivener has a writing history feature that can at least give me a ballpark, and... it says I added 17,326 words to the draft this year (all in the first half of the year), which, not gonna lie, seems unreal to me. The first half of this year is mud in my head, so the fact that I did in fact get some writing done is really encouraging.

Over the summer, FFXIV started to really consume me as I had finished ARR by that point and my investment in the story was growing, and I also started taking a more active leadership role in my tiny free company, and so for the back half of the year I've mostly been writing little snippets about my Warrior of Light Ariane and her adventures and relationships, some of which may become part of actual fics later. This totals out to about 19,500 words at the moment.

So I only posted about 3000 words, but in total I wrote almost 40K this year. Is that a fantastic year, no... but honestly, it's a lot better than what my brain has been telling me I've accomplished this year, which is nothing. :P So I'm glad that I sat down to actually find the numbers!

Onward and upward.

So what's next?

2024 Goals

Fandom:

Finish one longfic.

Write and post a one-shot.

Do one exchange.

Original:

Outline an original novel.

Write a poem.

Send out one piece.

Tentatively my immediate plans are to get started outlining and then writing my Ariane/Haurchefant fic. I'm on the fence about February. On the one hand, it would be great to come back to my Briala/F!Tabris longfic for Femslash February, but on the other hand there's a high probability I'm going to be playing Endwalker by that point and I have no hope of keeping my head in Dragon Age during that time, so it's probably best not to commit to it. Dragon Age fic might be best saved for after I've caught up on MSQ when there are (hopefully) a few months still left to wait for Dawntrail and I can take a little break to let it marinate while I work on something else. My enthusiasm for the Briala/Tabris fic has not waned despite the long hiatus, and just yesterday I was reading bits of the draft and getting excited again, so I do hope to finish that this year and get to share it with you.

The alternate candidate for February is either keep working on the Haurchefant fic or in the case of a miracle in which I actually finish it this month (hah!), move forward with the next one I have planned, an Urianger/Moenbryda. That's unlikely but we'll see. I know I still have things to learn about Urianger in Endwalker, which I'm very excited for.

As for what exchange(s) I might do this year, I'm not sure yet! I haven't seen any announcements yet that Chocolate Box is running this year. Black Emporium and FemslashEx are both strong candidates for me. We'll see where I am when those roll around, or maybe something else will catch my eye!

Edited to add: Oh, yeah, also at some point we're supposed to get that final season of Red vs. Blue. I have a few outstanding projects in RvB but the main one that really matters to me is Radio Silence, my Carolina lost years fic. I'd love to use the series' send-off as a kick in the pants to finally finish that one, whenever that happens. We'll see!

Finally, I am making a conscious effort to reclaim my writing time, which traditionally has been the morning between 9 and noon because that's when my mind is the sharpest, but over the past I basically let that slip entirely and be taken over by either housework or gaming, just writing on the fly when something came to me. I'm not morning gaming anymore unless it's for a good reason (timed event I need to catch, etc, which is rare, and finishing yesterday's roulettes is not a good enough reason because the queues are slower in the morning and it just ends up eating more time than it needs to, they happen every day, it's fine).

On to 2024. Looking forward to it.

[theradicalscrivener]

Hopefully I am not wrong about this, but so far you mostly write about transformation, right? I ask because I often read body swap stories, and I probably got recommended your blog by Tumblr due to the proximity in themes. And also because of cock shrinking, but that's beside the point.

Truthfully, what I'm curious about. Have you ever thought about writing a body swap story? I could understand if you didn't see the point. Since you often write stories that involve stealing a specific feature (muscles, height, cock size, etc), making body swapping kind of redundant. I guess. I also could understand if it doesn't appeal to you as trope.

But it would be interesting to see how you'd handle it.

Also, I'm both excited and sad because of Acorn. Excited because the story it's reaching its conclusion, and I really want to know what you have plan. But sad because it's probably one of my favorite stories of yours (alongside No dick December, Alpha Omega, Gifted Exchange among others... I really have a very obvious taste, don't I?). I would love to be able to become an Acorn boy someday, since they seem to all be hot as well as lacking endowment.

Hopefully you are having a nice day. Have you had any problems with your new ears, or have you adapted well? I hope it's the latter.

Well body swapping is interesting because there's a lot of potential. A lot of what I have fun with is how a character reacts to the things happening and not just the actual transformation. Body swapping would be interesting because I would assume that both characters swap bodies so maybe one person gets a really good deal and the other maybe gets a really bad one, but I also kind of balk at that trope because the more I think on it, the more it kinda spirals since like, it's very rarely you just end up in their body and everyone around you accepts it as fact. You start to quickly get into Freaky Friday territory where it's like. Do you try to keep the act up around friends/family? Do you have to take on their life? That's where I start to spiral a bit, and I get so far from the plot that it kinda collapses around me.

I hope to not take too long in wrapping up Acorn, but I have a lot of boxes I want to check off in the finale, and I kind of keep going back and forth on the pacing, etc. I've kind of been bouncing around between the epilogue and the finale and sort of doing those in tandem, but I don't have a whole lot physically on the page right now, because it's mostly snippets, thoughts, notes, etc that are a bit of a mess rn.

I've actually had a few people mention that they'd love to sign up to be Acorn boys. I guess the whole Greek ideal of being incredibly fit but incredibly small between the legs, strikes a chord with a lot of people. I get it though. It's a good look, hehe.

Things are going... well? Classes just started back up, so I'm a little bit more limited on free time than I had been. I spent most of the last month binging Dawntrail, but I am pretty much current in that game which frees me up to focus on other games in my very limited free time.

As for the ears... It's great, but I'm dealing with a lot of technical difficulties, especially on the left side. Volume keeps spiking at random, and sometimes I just get loud, long, extended bursts of noise. Like getting caught in a wind tunnel. It's unclear if the left ear is defective in some way, or if my phone is just so old that the bluetooth is not 100% compatible. Although, I am not sure how much difference the phone makes, since it shouldn't need to be paired with the phone all the time. The phone just has an app that gives me the option to change the settings on the ears whenever I need to. (I'd tried experimenting with them because some of the options turn off specific mics to focus the angle and direction that I pick sound up in. there's a setting for restuarants that turns off all the mics except the forward facing ones which is supposed to help listen to the person across from you. I've had mixed success with it.) Aside from when I am loading a new profile, the link to the phone shouldn't make a difference.

Although, aside from the technical difficulties, it's nice being able to understand things. Like, I saw a clip of Fairy Oddparents the other day, and it was kind of jarring being able to understand what they were saying. A lot of the reason I never super got into a lot of cartoons as a kid was because a lot of the over the top, cartoony voices were completely incomprehensible to me. I'm kind of feeling like I should try and binge spongebob, since that's one that always looked fun but I could never get into due to not being able to parse the speach.