Project from my character design class back in college.

For a portion of the course, we focused on designing a cast of characters for a hypothetical TV show. Students were individually given the option to either develop their own original cast and story pitch, or work from a premade concept that the teacher came up with. 

At that point I was not feeling particularly confident in my own story ideas*, so I opted for the latter. The plot revolved around a suburban American kid and his Leave-It-to-Beaver family who get mixed up with the owner of a shop that sells monsters. It wasn't really the sort of thing that appealed to me, but I soldiered through because 90% of working in the animation industry is just doing the job that's handed to you regardless of how much you personally like the project, because money.**

Probably because of this, most of my design work for the project turned out pretty lackluster, but I did enjoy designing the old monster shop owner. Sketchy, eccentric, grotesque old men with mismatched argyle socks are fun to draw.

*Honestly I think this lack of confidence was somewhat justified, as up to that point I had no training in story development and my story ideas were half-baked at best. For example, the story involving Toko that I mentioned a few posts ago had all the sophistication of a really forgettable manga, and the plot outline was essentially "the good guys defeat the bad guys, and then justice or something". It wasn't until I started taking my writing seriously after college that I started to really learn how stories work and what makes them work well. I guess the entire point of this rambly footnote is that I promise I'm better at writing now.

**Frankly, this was a large part of the reason why, after college, I opted to go freelance (and started to focus on novel writing) instead of trying to fit myself into the industry; I just couldn't bring myself to care more about money than about artistic integrity, and I was also very tired of being forced to work on other people's ideas that I didn't particularly care for, and work and associate with groups of people not of my choosing. I may not be making tons of money with my writing, but I'm definitely way less stressed.

 I'm really enjoying the (long-awaited) finale of the dragon storyline in Cookie Run: OvenBreak, and I just had to draw Lychee Dragon and Rambutan Cookie hanging out together, because their friendship is adorable. I feel like Lychee Dragon has the most compelling character arc in the entire game up to this point, going from a twisted manipulator to a sympathetically lonely figure whose betrayal of Longan Dragon to ally with the Cookies felt really satisfying to watch. Nicely done, writers!

Remember how a few weeks ago I mentioned I'd like to get my niece into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? Well, in a twist of irony (I've learned God likes those), I was able to spend some time with her and her sister this summer, and now they're fans of the show. So of course I had to draw them as ponies (along with their cat Fred, whom I have previously depicted as a dromaeosaur because why not).

I imagine their pony names are Cosmic Swirl (she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up) and Milky Puff (do not run out of chocolate milk when this toddler is around, or there will be terrifying consequences).

Another animation assignment that I think turned out nicely; this time, we had to animate a jump cycle. I can't remember if there was a frame count limit or not, but these are obviously just keyframes. (It loops, if you're bored enough to click through the thumbnails over and over.)

 

For this assignment, and a few others in the class, I used Toko, a character I made up in high school for a not-very-well-thought-out story idea* involving heroes fighting for justice on a lawless desert planet. Toko was a young hacker who used his skills to take down criminal computer networks and obtain valuable intel. The story was super corny and uninteresting and I eventually scrapped it, but who knows, maybe someday I'll find another story to fit Toko into.

*Does anybody ever actually have any well-thought-out ideas in high school, though?

Another animation from college; we were practicing the good old bouncing ball subject that most animation courses start with. If I recall correctly, there was nothing in the assignment about anthropomorphizing the balls and making it into a fight scene, but I overachieved again.

The rest of the frames are after the jump because there are quite a few frames in this one and I didn't want it to stretch out the main blog page.

I saved a few projects from my animation classes; I did a program in animation production, which covered not just actual animating, but just about everything else involved in producing animation for film and television, including storyboarding, character design, and screenplays. The only other animation-related degrees at the school had more to do with animating for video games and general 3D animation, which mainly just involved learning how to use 3D animation software. The animation production program gave a much more well-rounded education, and I also really loved that it included a couple of courses on good old-fashioned drawn animation (which I like better than 3D animation, but that's a rant for another time).

This assignment was to animate a dance in 10 frames; typically for me, I got carried away. The end is a bit truncated because of the 10-frame limit. Anyway, because of the way Blogger displays images, if you click on any of these thumbnails, you should be able to click through the other pictures sequentially and get a good feel for what it looks like "animated". (This character is just a random character design from back when I used to make up random character designs.)

 Before I get anyone asking me if I can animate such-and-such for them: I'm actually a really bad animator, so you're better off asking someone else. Also, I don't have any animation software on my computer right now.

Now for some real blasts from the past--I was rooting around my hard drive and found the folder with all my old projects from my animation classes in college! I thought I'd share the good ones here. 

I'm particularly fond of this assignment from my storyboarding class; we had to storyboard a commercial for a fictional breakfast cereal. (The technology in the first panel really dates me.) I got to make up my own cereal, and, well, it's not a kids' breakfast cereal* without an over-the-top mascot and questionable nutritional value.

*I'm pretty sure breakfast cereals "for kids" are primarily consumed by 18-24-year-olds no longer under their parents' thumbs.

 Back in college, I had an extravagant idea for a tactical video game set in a fantasy version of historical Asia, where various cultures and communities were represented by humans with animal features (Shaolin monk rabbits, samurai dogs, etc.). The idea never really got off the ground (I'm an artist, not a programmer), but I like this piece of concept art that I did for it. The qilin in the game were supposed to be very rare, demigodly creatures who would be difficult, but worthwhile to recruit. I know the proportions are a little off, but, I dunno. I just like things with deer faces I guess.

More old art, namely a character design for a Digimon roleplay I did with a friend back in college. My character was a scrappy swordswoman who chose to stay behind in the Digital World when it was disconnected from the real world because she disliked her "real" life. She trained as a warrior under Leomon and Ogremon, and continued to wear this getup even when she returned to the real world years later, not caring how many heads it turned.

(Yes, she does greatly resemble Terra from my Neopets fics. I did a lot of character recycling in college, before I started taking my writing seriously.)

 Another wildly reinterpreted player character outfit from Kingdom Hearts Union χ (which I really hope they someday re-release in some capacity). I feel like she looks like a character from some 80's cartoon that never existed, but should have.

 Another doodle from back when Pokémon GO first came out and I was like "finally I can romp around with monsters in real life sorta". I'd be a pretty terrifying Pokémon trainer actually.

 I doodled this back in the day when Neopets was still good, because there were a few editions of the Neopian Times editorial where the editor decided to have some fun and let site characters King Jazan and Hanso answer player-submitted questions... much to their consternation. It was hilarious.

I've actually written multiple Neopian Times short stories about the misadventures of the long-suffering Jazan and the Ixi thieves who keep him on his toes (i.e. both Hanso and his wife Queen Nabile). I haven't been putting them on this site because I wanted to keep focused on my main Neopian Times cast, but maybe I'll add them to the collection someday.

I also wrote an NT short story that's a series of correspondences between a desperately penitent Jazan and a very vindictive Princess Amira, in which she makes his life miserable as politely as possible and he tries very hard to be diplomatic about it. It's got a Jane Austen-esque vibe to it and I had a lot of fun writing it, so I'll have to post it here eventually.

(To be clear, I like Jazan; I thought he had a really interesting character arc in the Lost Desert plot and I loved further developments of his character in subsequent plotlines. His high-strung personality and complicated relationships with other characters just make him really amusing to write situational comedy about.)

I doodled this to commemorate the end of the Cassini-Huygens mission back in 2017.* Cassini-Huygens was one of the big planetary exploration missions going on when I started following space stuff more closely in college**, and I really enjoyed keeping up with the plucky probe's adventures around the Saturn system over the years, until it was finally time to say goodbye (and did it ever go out in grand fashion).

Here's hoping we get missions like this for the ice giants one day!

*If you take a look at the sidebar, you'll notice that I started this blog in 2017. But I didn't put this illustration up then, because Cassini-Huygens ended in September of that year, and I didn't start this blog until October. It narrowly missed out on being one of my first posts, I guess.

*I have been a space geek since I could read, but the proliferation of social media around the time I was in college made space news more accessible, so that's when I really started paying attention to things that were going on in space as they were happening, not just reading about them years after the fact. Plus, as a teenager, I was unfortunately distracted from science by stuff like too many video games, bad friendships, and just trying to survive high school.

Something sort of abstract that I painted in college, purely out of the relief of getting through a really intensive month-long summer mathematics course that left me with no time for art.

 This isn't really supposed to represent anything in particular or have a story behind it; my being a paleontology geek has just left me with an unusual fascination with skulls (but less in a goth way and more in a nature-is-amazing way).

Incidentally, I suffered a major health breakdown a couple of months after that class, and I don't think those two things were unrelated. Take care of yourself, folks--there's no use earning a fancy college degree if you die in the process.

I've been rooting around my hard drive and I found more old artwork that wasn't terrible, so I thought I'd go ahead and share it here.

First up, some rare Digimon fanart. I didn't care much for Davis when 02 was first airing, but as an adult he's grown on me because he's just so ridiculous. Veemon is an absolute cinnamon roll and I'd love to have him as my Digimon partner (I could really use his upbeat enthusiasm and unconditional friendliness on days when I'm an anxious mess).

This picture in particular was inspired by the third Digimon movie (i.e. the last part of the amalgamated Digimon: The Movie that was released in the West), which had a definite vibe to it. It was surreal and weird and the animation was totally different to the TV series, and I just loved the evocative setting of the characters traveling through the American West, the plot culminating in the rolling fields of southern Colorado in the summer. Also, although the film didn't really try to be all that deep, it had some good messages about the value of friendship and that yes, letting people into your life and letting them help you can be terrifying, but true friends are worth taking a chance on.

It was like a road film if you replaced the cars with Digimon, and I feel like it took the franchise and its storytelling in a new and unique direction. I also have nostalgic memories of watching Digimon: The Movie during a sleepover at a friend's house in junior high (that was back in ye olden times when you rented VHS cassettes from Blockbuster). 

I've been on a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic kick lately, so of course I had to draw myself as a pony.

 I swear Twilight Sparkle is my actual spirit animal, and one of the reasons why I enjoy MLP:FiM so much is because fiction needed more egghead heroines who save the day through research, overthink everything, and have friends who help them get out of their own head and live a more balanced life.

I'd love to get my 7-year-old niece into FiM, but right now she's too busy obsessing over The Nightmare Before Christmas, zombies, and mummies. She's every bit as terrifying as her cousin in her own unique way.

 This didn't actually happen while we were playing, but in my headcanon this is how these two met. I thought this would be a fitting sendoff for this comic series. For now, I've got other projects to work on... until my niece decides she wants to play through Tears of the Kingdom. 

 Well, we finally finished the game*. It took us nearly a year (silly school getting in the way of video games), but it was a fun ride and I'm glad I got to come along. These comics also gave me a fun project to work on, so I'm grateful for that. It was nice to flex my cartooning muscles(?) a bit.

Ironically, my niece had been badgering my sister for weeks to just go fight Ganon already. And then this happened. (My sister said, "Do you want me to wait for you?" "No. (leaves the room)")

My sister and niece have started (re)playing Ocarina of Time and I've been watching, but I'm not sure I'm going to draw any comics about that, because a big part of what inspired these BotW comics was the sheer spontaneity of my sister and niece experiencing that game for the first time, my sister having no idea what she was doing (I coached her when she needed it, don't worry), and my niece being totally ridiculous the whole time. When we play OoT, it's more my niece eating snacks while my sister and I reminisce about when we thought N64 graphics were the most amazing thing we'd ever seen. Still fun, but it just doesn't quite fire my creativity the way BotW with them did.

That said, I think we're going to have a lot of fun with Tears of the Kingdom when they get around to playing that.

*Sort of. We freed all the Divine Beasts, beat Ganon, and completed a lot of the Ancient Shrines and some of the side quests. I wanted to take them through all the Shrines and side quests, but my niece's attention span only goes so far and I think they were ready to move on.

Waterhole

Time for more nerdy space poetry!

I find SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) a really fascinating subject, not only because it seeks to answer a very poignant question, but because I think the search may ultimately tell humanity more about themselves than about the beings they're trying to find out there. It's an interesting philosophical exercise.

I've read a lot of literature that runs the speculation spectrum about what ETI might be like and why, after decades of having the technological capability to theoretically detect them, we haven't found any trace of them. One line of thought that I'm not a fan of is the idea that ETI are malevolent, and we should not try to alert them to our presence or else we risk dooming our planet. Stephen Hawking was a proponent of this idea and was against sending intentional messages to ETI (hence the poem's subtitle).

But I really don't think humanity should let pessimism or fear limit us and control our actions. Collectively and individually, we do great things by dreaming big and daring big. I don't see any reason why we should stop reaching for the stars.

(At any rate, I have my serious doubts about the existence of malevolent ETI that could pose a threat to Earth on purely logical grounds. Any civilization advanced enough to be dangerous, with the ability to reach Earth worryingly quickly, would definitely possess the ability to discern that Earth has an industrial civilization on it, with or without us broadcasting our presence. If that sort of ETI existed, we should have been invaded by now.)

 She keeps forgetting the name of Dubious Food and calls it something different every time.

(Yes, I know meat and berries don't make Dubious Food. That's the other part of the joke. No matter how many times I try to explain the cooking system to her, she still doesn't quite get it. I think she's too busy looking for horses.)

 My niece wanted to go ride bikes with her friend (I guess she's allowed to hang out with people her own age sometimes), so my sister and I decided to keep playing with my sister's cat in tow.

It wasn't quite the same.

 

I'm very pleased to announce that the audiobook edition of Between the Salt Water and the Sea Strand is now available on Audible! David Ault worked so hard on this audiobook and I think it turned out spectacularly. If audiobooks are your thing, please give it a listen!

 Sometimes it's like she doesn't even want Link to save Hyrule. (I guarantee you that if someone were to say something like 'my headcanon is that she's secretly evil', my niece will absolutely take that and run with it.)

This really happened, and this is why you can't leave her with the controller unattended.

retrograde

 On occasion I write poetry!

I'm fascinated by the fact that just because our Solar System looks a certain way right now, doesn't mean things were the same all throughout its history. It's also amazing how in the past few decades of space science, researchers have noticed peculiar little incongruities about our planetary neighborhood, and from them have begun to tease out pieces of an incredible story--tales of wild planetary migrations, moon systems built from the rubble of an earlier satellite catastrophe, and episodes of intense bolide bombardment. It makes our present-day Solar System seem completely tame in comparison. I'm excited to see what other stories we can uncover as we learn more about our little spot of space.

Neptune's moon Triton is a definite oddball in its system. It's the largest Neptunian moon by far, looks completely unlike the others, and has a really unusual retrograde orbit. From this and other bits of evidence, most scientists have reached the consensus that Triton is probably a Kuiper Belt object that was gravitationally captured by Neptune when that planet moved outward during aforementioned planetary migration episode. However, in order for this to work, Triton would have had to have originally been part of a binary system, and the capturing interaction would have to involve its companion being flung away to who-knows-where. 

It's a rather poignant story when you think about it--somewhere out there is a missing twin, wandering the void alone after an unfortunate encounter with a big blue bully. Is there any way to figure out if a given object is Triton's missing companion? Makes you wonder if we'll ever happen upon it someday.

If we do, we should tell Triton.

 I wasn't feeling all that great today and decided to phone it in as far as art stuff.

I'm not really good at phoning it in.

This maybe isn't something you want constantly in your ear while trying to navigate a puzzle full of live currents and killer robots. But she persisted nevertheless.

 The last of the traditional media pieces (that I feel are worth sharing, anyway). I sort of randomly made up this character design for the Star Wars universe, but never did anything with her.

All this old art has given me a hankering for doing stuff with marker again. I'd love to get some Copics and go camp out at my local museum and just doodle colorful dinos all day. Sounds like a dream.

 Random creature design; the idea was that these blind beings float on the wind and absorb airborne nutrients through the gill-tendrils on the underside of their heads. I like its little rodent paws. Purple and red brush pen with colored pencil.

 She's at it again! Link's sassy little companion has been pretty busy with school (and playing through Echoes of Wisdom), but we finally managed to get some play time in. We might go challenge Ganon soon... but rest assured she'll be back to join Link on his Tears of the Kingdom adventures at some point.

This actually happened. It was great.

 More watercolor! I really love working with watercolor, but it does require a certain amount of work space that I just don't have right now. Maybe someday I'll get a dedicated art desk and then I can do more with traditional media. For now, though, I'm really uneasy with the idea of trying to fit open water on the same desk as all my electronics.

This character design was inspired by the cat-people in Escaflowne, a fantasy anime that I remember aired for a brief period on Fox Kids once upon a time (this really dates me). Later I learned that it was really a heavily-edited version of the series Vision of Escaflowne, which was decidedly not a kids' show. Lesson to dubbing company producers: if you're bringing an anime over to the English market with the intention to present it to kids, it would help if the title in question was aimed at children to begin with.

I also based this design after one of my previous cats, a lovely tortoiseshell. She was a sweet girl.

(Looking at this piece now, it's nice and all, but I seem to have had no concept of the idea of line weight. Those thin lines are really getting lost beneath the bold watercolor. I'd love to do something with brush pen and watercolor one of these days.)

 Sometimes I dabble in watercolor!

This was a design I concocted in college for a tabletop roleplaying campaign where my character was an eccentric mechanist in a world with Renaissance-level technology--kind of like Leonardo da Vinci, but female and questionably sane. It's always a great day when your character's skillset allows them to build their own combat vehicles with a few good dice rolls. (She ultimately ended up building her own airship, so that was fun.)

As an aside, I like the idea of tabletop roleplaying, but I haven't participated in any of it for a while because I had some bad experiences with groups who were unpleasant and unfriendly. I think if I were to do any more roleplaying, it would have to be with family and/or close, trusted friends.*

*I actually wrote a Neopets fanfic about this issue that I never bothered submitting to the Neopian Times. I'll get around to posting it on this blog eventually and ranting more about the importance of being a decent human being during highly social games that have to do a great deal with both group synergy and treating every player with respect and kindness.

Video game ramblings: cancellations, consoles, and how to make a bad mobile RPG

 Is this blog turning into less of an original artistic content blog and more of a ranty gaming blog? Perhaps the question I should really be asking myself is, does anybody actually care either way?

With some recent occurrences in video gamery, and just overall thinking about things in my spare time, I've come up with another batch of items to discuss and no better place to put them. Read on if you're bored enough.

 Another old piece. This was a panther martial artist character I semi-randomly made up and never did anything with. Back in junior high/high school/college, I often used to make up characters and vague storylines behind them, but not really do anything with them besides draw them a lot. I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do with characters; I guess it's just struck me looking back, how many characters I used to make up who never went anywhere, when nowadays I generally only create characters that are going in a written piece.

At any rate, I still like her design.

 More old art. I love working with markers. Brush pen and marker is seriously one of my favorite media combinations.

This creature design stemmed from a frankly bizarre story idea I concocted in high school, about a motley group of humans and aliens living on a derelict deep-space station. The main character was a preteen boy whose ancestor on the station had stumbled upon a sinister entity from another dimension who had emerged in the depths of the station, but no one believed him and his family became regarded as a joke through the generations. There was also a mysterious and brooding young man who was secretly the lost prince of a planet that had experienced a civil war some years past, and a moody teenage girl with an alien stepdad whose biomech she regularly "borrowed" for space escapades. 

(It's okay, you can laugh.)

The biomechs in the story were very odd creatures that were organically grown in laboratories and had armor plating and control systems implanted into their bodies. They were sapient and capable of communicating with their pilots.

I never really went anywhere with the story; I think I was trying to be cool and come up with some conceptually super deep sci-fi, but, well, I was 14. 

(I executed this piece much later. My art definitely did not look like that in high school.)

The other day I was feeling bored enough to do some vanity Googling, and to my surprise, Google's AI actually came up with an overview for my Neopian Times work. I'm a little shocked because nobody actually seems to care that much about it, but perhaps it has more to do with the fact that I was fairly prolific back in the day, and my username showed up frequently across many issues of the NT in a certain time frame.

(Although, this is the first I've heard of being "well-known" within the community. One of the reasons why I stopped writing for the Times was because my work was getting ignored, and I honestly haven't interacted with the player community in ages. Apparently AI thinks that prolificity = renown, so it needs a reality check.)

 As much as I eternally loathe generative AI, I concede that sometimes it is good for a laugh. I have no idea why the AI picked those four particular pieces to detail, instead of, say, one of my epically long series. The bottom two are super old and janky contributions from when I was in high school, and every time I see them I just sort of wince. 

Okay, actually that "Fifty Reasons" article is pretty decently funny by high-school-me standards. It was basically me poking fun at how, for two consecutive plots, players could choose to fight on the side of the good guys (Isca, Hannah, et al) or the bad guys (gangs of pirates and thieves, respectively), and so many people inexplicably went the "evil is cool" route instead of seeing the logic in trying to keep Neopia safe. This article was trying to point out, in a tongue-in-cheek passive-aggressive manner, that both thieves and pirates are pretty gross when you stop to think about it.

"The Ensorcellator" is a tepid little short story from when I was going through a writerly phase where I had just plain run out of ideas, and decided my inspiration process would basically be "pick random stuff and make stuff up about it". Yeah. I'm glad I grew out of that phase and moved on to "let's wait until I actually get an idea for a story".

The AI summaries are also a little off. "On Developing Your Neopet's Character" is actually an op-ed that discusses various ways one might go about giving one's Neopet a personality and biography, with examples of how I formulated my own Neopets' characters. And that's a pretty generic description of "Ylana Skyfire: Protector of Spring", which is actually more about Ylana and a clingy fanfic-writing geek (who is totally me making fun of myself) searching for a missing Illusen. (I actually do recommend this one, as it's more recent and I had great fun writing it. Maybe I'll put it on this blog at some point.)

As an opinionated aside, I'm still not a fan of the directions Neopets is heading under its current management and I have no desire to start playing the website again. I much preferred the Adam-and-Donna and Viacom days, when Neopets was more "we're marketing this franchise to kids but we know plenty of adults play too" and not "Hey Gen-Z's! Let's make your childhood on-trend!". Way to alienate everybody else, guys. Thanks.

 Another old piece; I was just playing around with character design. I'm aware the proportions are really funky; I actually went in and tried to fix them a bit in Corel but they still look off. Still, I'm fond of this illustration because I think it nicely evokes the feel of adventuring through a fantasy world.

 Another old traditional piece. This is a life reconstruction of an ammonoid (possibly Parapuzosia seppenradensis) looking very hypothetically like a modern nautilus. Usually ammonoids are reconstructed with more octopus-like soft tissue, but from what I understand, so little ammonoid soft tissue has been found, it's still really up in the air what they looked like aside from their shells. I just like the idea of a 2-meter nautilus cruising along the oceans of the Cretaceous. I imagine you could probably hitch a ride on its shell and it wouldn't even notice.

Executed in brush pen and Prismacolor marker, with some white acrylic paint for accents. I love the look and feel of Prisma markers, but their two major downsides are that a) they are expensive and b) they're noxiously smelly so you have to use them in a well-ventilated area. That's why I haven't done much with them lately. If I had the budget, I would invest in some Copic markers, which last time I checked are hands-down the best art marker in the universe (and don't smell), but they're also on the pricey side. I guess that's probably why I do more digital work these days; traditional art is fun but the materials are so costly. /artist rant

 Recently I remembered that I actually have a bunch of old traditional (i.e. non-digital) artwork lying around (i.e. neatly tucked away in a portfolio), and I thought it would be fun to post it here.

Here's a little standee of Blynn that I crafted for a Neopets contest some years ago. It didn't win (apparently most people don't share my cauliflower obsession), but I had fun regardless.

 Remember that announcement I teased a while back? Well, it's ready to be announced: Between the Salt Water and the Sea Strand is getting an audiobook adaptation!

Not only that, but the narrator is none other than David Ault, co-creator of the Jodcast, professional voice actor, and all-around awesome guy! We got to chatting on a comment thread on a Jodcast X post, I asked him if he'd be interested in the project since the character of the faerie king was actually partly inspired by him, and now an audiobook has happened, and it turns out social media can be useful after all!

David has been an absolute joy to work with, and he did an amazing job drawing the listener into the story and bringing the characters to life, and even singing which he gets a jillion gold stars for. (And, being English, he can do a much better British accent than I can.) 

He also did me the huge service of going through the text and making sure everything was in proper British English. Because as much as I love the UK, I have never been there (yet), and although I grew up reading a lot of British children's literature, enjoy following British astronomy, have written way too much Neopets fanfic that was required to use British English to be accepted for publication in the Neopian Times, and I think nowadays I actually listen to Brits more than Americans*, there are some definite gaps in my knowledge (usually about items that are not related to astronomy or food or medieval combat). (Did you know they call crosswalks "pedestrian crossings" there? Wild!) 

So I am indebted to David for giving me a crash course on British English (and a fascinating side trip into British geographical nomenclature!), as well as correcting things that I promise I actually already knew, but that I missed when I was converting the manuscript from American to British English. To make a short story long (which I can do because this is my blog and there are no word count limits that I have yet found), I originally wrote the manuscript in American English despite the story taking place in England, simply because I am American, I live in America, and aside from aforementioned fanfic with specific publication requirements, I feel it's dishonest of me to pretend to be British when I write. But when David signed on for the audiobook, I figured that sort of gave me the green light to just go ahead and make it British. It's an international production, much like the James Webb Space Telescope and Fraggle Rock! (But I still missed some odd things in the transition, like calling trousers "pants" which is British English 101, and not spelling "armour" the Commonwealth way, despite my Neopets fics involving quite a bit of armour and I am perfectly aware how it's supposed to be spelled and I am still kicking myself about it. I think I need more sleep. David was so patient with me and he deserves a medal.)

Anyway, that's neither here nor there; the point of these ramblings is that the audiobook is coming to Audible very soon, so keep an eye out for it (or keep an eye on this blog, or my social media, I guess)!

*Speaking of listening to a lot of British people, I think I've begun to pick up a little bit of an English accent, which is going to be very awkward if I ever have a real spoken conversation with a British person. I guess I could try hard to sound more American? Would they even notice? Am I just overthinking everything again?????

Video game ramblings: the unecessary sequel

 Again, it's time for more random rants about stuff that's been on my mind and I can't find a real excuse to write it up, so I'm just going to collect it all into this blog post and hope no one notices.

Below the jump you'll find more stuff about Pokémon (although surprisingly not about Scarlet and Violet this time), Digimon, Zelda, Super Mario Bros., filmmaking, and web design just because.

 

Carrie and Saturos enjoying a little arcane study date. They get married at the end of the book, and that's major spoilers, but I'm not sure when I'm actually going to get around to publishing the manuscript, so probably by then everyone will have forgotten about it.

While constructing the plot, I went back and forth for a bit about whether or not they were going to end up together, but at one point in the book, Carrie builds up enough self-esteem to break up with her horrible boyfriend back on Earth, and I realized the ultimate resolution to that wasn't just that she was out of a bad relationship, but that she needed the best relationship possible to make up for it.

I'm not a fan of unconvincingly putting two characters together just for the sake of an arbitrary romance, but in the case of these two it just seemed to work. Saturos really appreciates Carrie's kindness and friendship toward him and his subjects, despite Castle Ravenscrag giving off the whole dark lord vibe (it's touched upon in the book that that sort of thing is the usual aesthetic for Saturos's people), and loves having someone he can finally talk quantum-mechanics-magic shop with and who is interested in his travels to other worlds. And Carrie appreciates everything Saturos does for her to make her stay at Ravenscrag as pleasant and enjoyable as possible, his gentlemanly demeanor, and his selfless and sincere interest in letting her be herself that is the polar opposite of how people back on Earth treated her. I think there's someone out there for everybody, and when you've found the right person, you've found the right person. Even if that person is a dimension-hopping demigod who likes to pretend to be a D&D end boss.

Also, in this novel I wanted to address another fantasy fiction pet peeve of mine, which is where at the end of the adventure, the protagonist returns to Earth and leaves a super cool world behind for the sake of keeping up the status quo, except maybe with a few life lessons learned. Like, why would you ditch magic powers and/or an enchanted weapon and/or the friends who helped you through the journey and/or dragons!!!! so you can go back to stuff like laundry and homework?! 

It's just as bad when the author really forces a lame excuse as to why the hero can never ever go back to the fantasy world ever, and they're destined to be completely ordinary for the rest of their days. I almost feel like it kind of sends the message that in the end, you don't get what you really want out of life, which I don't think is true in the slightest as long as you don't give up and follow your inner voice. So I went ahead and gave Carrie what she truly wanted and needed, and a big part of her character arc is her learning to accept and enjoy her life being so much more awesome than she ever thought it could be.

(Saturos also teaches her how to open dimensional portals, so she can go back and forth between Arthabasca and Earth whenever she wants, as well as let Tam visit. Saturos and Carrie are going to need to go back to Earth at some point anyway so Saturos can meet his new in-laws. That's going to be awkward at best, especially since Saturos is not at all pleased with Carrie's parents trying to mold her into a performing STEM monkey.)

I had so much fun writing the cast of this novel that when I finished, it left me wanting to do more with them. However, unlike Disney I don't believe in sequels for the sake of sequels, so we'll see if I get any concrete ideas for another adventure with these guys. Until then, though, I have a lot of other novel ideas I'd like to get around to.

Also, there are tiny wyverns flitting about Arthabasca. <3