To-do list! UPDATED WHENEVER. (03/24/11)

Most (but NOT all) of these will be posted publically; if you're curious about seeing what isn't (mostly the not-worksafe stuff), please check out this post and ask to be added to the appropriate filter(s). :) Please also be sure to actually comment, because, uh, I don't honestly check this post that often. If a week goes by and I don't reply, FEEL FREE TO HARASS ME IF YOU STILL WANT IN. I-I am notoriously forgetful and absentminded, sob.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

ON-GOING

* Royal Archivist

* [livejournal.com profile] lovesexgrave (a joint quasi-harem/BL/etc project with [livejournal.com profile] harukami)

+++++++++++++++++++++++

IN CONSIDERATION

* fic fairytales (once upon a time there was a boy who loved the stars)

* EPIC DRAGONSSSSSS

* currently looking for a Big Bang and/or challenge set to catch my attention :|a
nekokoban: (Default)
( Jul. 31st, 2013 06:35 pm)
So after two months of a roughly-outlined Real Adult Schedule, I have come to a few conclusions:

1.  I really genuinely do feel much better when I have one, even if the lazy kid in me chafes at keeping tabs on my free fun times;

2.  I am intensely more productive with one, even if it's really just kind of the bare-bones of one;

3.  Sometimes, it makes me sad, in the same way a lot of things about settling into adulthood makes me sad.

Points one and two are things that I have always sort of known about myself, even if I really rebelled against it for a long time (and, as per point three, I do still complain about in my heart), even if the "schedule," as it is, is barely a real thing.  "Assuming I get home around 6, I will have about an hour to unwind/get dinner prep started, then dinner, then eating, then a couple of hours of free time, then an hour or so of writing*, then a shower, then unwinding, then bed."

* It's not a straight hour of writing, even.  I usually do two or three 15-minute sessions, using focusbooster, depending on how long it takes me to hit the first 1000 words.  Some nights it happens faster than others.

It's not something I have sat down and meticulously planned out (I have still not mastered dayplanners; I don't quite understand how one can meticulously plan out one's day without losing precious time in the process), and of course it's pretty flexible (sometimes we go out to eat or order out; sometimes I linger with my timewaster games longer than I probably should), but just by having one I've seen a huge improvement in my actual productivity.  At the beginning of the year, I had a bit of a boost in terms of writing fic, but even then, I was sometimes barely hitting even the baseline minimum of 750 words a day -- now I'm averaging about 2000 words, and it's not something I'm straining that hard to manage.  (Again, some days are easier than others.)  It's only about forty-five minutes extra in a given day, but I've been impressing myself, at least!

At the same time, though, it does mean I have to compromise on some of the other things I would like to do.  A friend of mine started up a new game that looks interesting and fun, and I would like to join!  ... But I've already sort of hit my limit in what I can reasonably juggle, between the game I am already in, recharging time (the joys of being an introvert even with regards to online interactions), offline things, and writing time.  I don't want to go back to skimping on the writing, especially when I feel like I've finally hit a point in my own personal discipline that I can keep up with things!  It was a choice I made deliberately and willingly, and intellectually I know it's definitely going to be better for me in the long run.*

It doesn't mean I don't feel a whole lot of wistfulness when a large number of my friends are having fun with a new shiny thing.  It's a lot like the metaphorical kid outside of the candyshop, with my hands and face mushed against the glass, wishing there was a way I could go inside and afford everything I want.  Only instead of candy, it's a new thing to do, and instead of money, it's time and energy.

* A friend of mine linked me to an article the other day that mentioned that the "sweet spot" for self-published authors is to put out a new book every 2-4 months.  Yikes.  While I have the confidence I could write 50k words regularly every 2-4 months at this point, whether or not this would be a completed story that I can hand over to my betas is another thing entirely.  That's something I'm working on.  One thing at a time, I guess.

Part of me is seriously considering seeing if I can juggle things, though the other thing I know about myself is that a more forgiving system -- one that says, "no, it's all right, you don't need to push your activity levels, it's meant to be relaxing" means that it will, in fact, be the thing I put off, which in and of itself is not very fair, either to the thing itself, or the people that I would be interacting with within that system.  I don't have such a demanding daily schedule that it's another unpleasant stressor on everything else; I have enough freedom that I do need the restrictions or else I just end up flopping out.  Even in fun things, apparently, I need something to essentially keep me honest.

When I was a kid, I thought that adulthood meant there would be just some switch that went off in my awareness and suddenly I'd be all right with being responsible even in my free time (because even that far back, I had some inkling about the sort of lazy personality I have).  Now that I'm actually of an ostensibly adult age, I've found that the only thing that's switched is that instead of my parents nagging me to do things and be good and get stuff done, it's my own internal sense of responsibility and reaction.  Maybe in the end, instead of just playing an adult in my dayjob, I have actually truly become one.

How distressing.  (´Д`)
From the writeworld prompt: All you’ll ever be is a poor little rich boy.

But why is that?

The East Wing Ghost )
HELLO FRIENDS ... or cobwebs, whichever the case might be!

After some thought (and about a month of basically puttering around, trying to get myself into some sort of regular schedule), I decided I do actually want to try using my journal(s) here on Dreamwidth and Livejournal again. We'll see how successful I actually am, but by god I am going to try.

At this point, I am mostly going to be crossposting from my domain blog, so I really apologize if there's actually someone who's getting multiple copies of these posts. *g* At least for these, I will do cuts for the text -- but let's be honest, I really really miss the sort of social interaction that happened on journal sites, and while I hardly expect it to be a Thing again (for me, at least, given how extremely bad I am at keeping up with stuff), I want to at least try. I will be tagging these "in other words," which is how they show up on the main blog.

Please be patient with me. (シ_ _)シ

Imposter Syndrome )
I think ultimately one of my biggest faults is that it's very easy for me to fall out of touch with things -- people, the world, my immediate surroundings.  (I am not actually being facetious when I talk about running into walls.  On one memorable occasion it was a telephone pole.  Ow, by the way.)  It's really easy for me to get distracted with small things and suddenly weeks later I realize I've left something I meant to do fall by the wayside, and there's no one to blame but myself.  The internet is both really good and really bad for me in that sense; it's a lot easier to get in touch with people again, but it's also a lot easier to just get flat-out distracted.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that I think about five or six things at a time, but frankly, it only takes two or three before I'm confused, haha.

As I get older (and though I'm in the middle-older range compared to my friends, I actually very rarely feel old; it's nice) I want to get better at that.  So I'm putting an effort into that, just like I have been with this new attempt at a More Responsible Schedule (today is day five and I've done pretty good on all points so far!  I'm proud of me).  I've picked up twitter again and will be cross-posting stuff on this blog to tumblr.  I'm undecided about LJ/DW because that just starts to sound like spamming, but I have to admit, I will miss my icons. (sadface) I'd like to at least keep posting links to new stuff here, but we'll have to see how things go.

With that in mind, I am @nekokoban on Twitter, and my tumblr is tumblr incognita. Please feel free to add me or not as you wish!  ♥
HELLO FRIENDS

I know I have sort of dropped off the map in a lot of ways for journaling; some of those reasons were legit, and others were not. One of the legit reasons, though (I hope!) is that I have decided to give the wonderful world of self-publishing a whirl. My pen name is Lotus Oakes, and I have authorpages at Amazon and Smashwords.

TO DATE I have nine stories up there, that range from 3K to 37K words in length; I am writing primarily romantic erotica (or, at least least, lots of feelings erotica), both m/f and m/m. As time goes on I am hoping to just keep writing wherever the whim takes me, which means that the variety of will increase with time.

My latest story is In His Proper Place (Amazon | Smashwords), which is a m/m romance novella about a lord and his butler. There are some sexy parts, but mostly it's a love story, in its quiet way. If you're interested, please check it out! If you're not, but know anyone who might be, I would appreciate a head's up in my direction.

If you're interested in keeping up with me and my processes, I've been trying to use my domain blog more often; with luck it will be my "writer's blog" and general thought depository.

Thank you for your time and consideration! ♥
The [Shape] Of The Mind
D.Gray-Man, Nea/Allen
Porn, but not exactly sexy. :|a With this I fulfill my part of the agreement with [personal profile] box and [personal profile] harukami. Set early in the three-month timeskip between 205 and 212.

The [Shape] Of The Mind )
Five Countries
D.Gray-Man, Allen+Cross
2943 words

Five Countries )
I COMPLETED THEM ALL :B thank you to everyone who requested, I hope these will suffice. o(><)o
(OH MY GOD IT WAS TOO LONG FOR ONE POST!!)

[livejournal.com profile] inarticulate, Baku!Len and Ammy (夢食い白黒バク)

Can't sleep again tonight? )

[livejournal.com profile] tatsuta_hime, Original, just desserts

All the things you're made of )

[livejournal.com profile] theboxization, Gil/Vince (in that order)

The way things are shaped )

[livejournal.com profile] sigrunic, Shuri/Teito - grieving

Even absent he remains )

[livejournal.com profile] herongale, Original, palindromes, or not quite.

Fun anecdote: my last two apartments have had mirrors like described in the story and I have refused to take either of those two bedrooms )

[livejournal.com profile] vulchu, Jack/Oz in that order plus recent spoilers, "swallowed up by darkness I lost myself"

Jack's too obsessed with things )

[livejournal.com profile] ningen_demonai, Allen x Rinali, the Order - Fixing up something Komui's robots broke?

At some happier time )
H...hello everyone... '-'

Ssssso my birthday is in exactly two weeks from today! AS PER MY USUAL TRADITION, I would like to do birthday mathoms for folks! Which means that if you comment with characters/a pairing + some kind of prompt I will write a short thing (I am aiming for 500 - 1000 words) and post them all on my birthday, October 12th. 'x'

ANY FANDOM IN MY TAGS (or that you know I am following/have followed) OR WHATEVER IS FAIR GAME. I will even try to write porn. '-'

Max 28 because guess what my age is.

'-'!!!!!!!11111
SOUNDBITE: a reunion, of sorts
2102 words
07-Ghost

Actually I wrote this last year and just forgot to post it. :|a Written wayyyy before we got any of the recent chapters and their related spoilers, y...yeay...

a reunion of sorts )
nekokoban: (I know him as a prince)
( Apr. 27th, 2011 10:35 pm)
I am pimping a thing, because I love it so. :(

Once upon a time, there was a man named Revo, who started his own doujin band and called it Sound Horizon. It started relatively small, releasing self-produced CDs at conventions that were primarily instrumentals that told stories, but didn't have vocals. Along the way, though, it picked up actual singers, and Revo himself started singing parts (usually the main male lead of a given story). Sound Horizon (nicknamed SanHora) eventually grew in popularity and star power, to the point where actual seiyuu that the casual anime fan would recognize (Midorikawa Hikaru, Ohtsuka Akio, etc) began to have speaking(/singing) roles. They do lives and they have concerts where they have costumes and sets and act out the stories of individual albums. To date, they have seven full albums, the most recent being Märchen. I have been a fan forever, but the seventh album is the one I want to talk about, SO I AM GOING TO. :(

First: イドへ至る森へ至るイド
Then: Märchen

At its core, these two albums tell the story of a murdered boy who, through the power of his mother's love (for him) and hate (for the world) conducts revenge plays for those who die unjustly, which in turn gives birth to the scenarios of several well-known fairytales (specifically Hansel and Gretel, The Hanged Man From The Gallows, Snow White, Mother Hulda, Sleeping Beauty, and Bluebeard). As the seventh full album, Märchen follows the seven deadly sins, the stories of seven unjustly-killed women, progressing from twilight to dawn.

There are translations for IdoIdo and Märchen on Anime Lyrics as well as a different translator for videos on YouTube (this is the first song; the rest are in the sidebar).

NOW I WILL BE LONG-WINDED )

Anyway the albums are kind of fantasy-rock in style, with random bits of jazz, pop, snippets of Vocaloid (Miku sings Elise's parts, though an actress does the speaking role), and also Ode to Joy and In The Hall Of The Mountain King.

:(b
nekokoban: (Games you've never believed)
( Apr. 1st, 2011 04:15 pm)
It is the start of a new quarter, the year is a third over, and while I am not beating myself up over failures, I am not extraordinarily happy with here I have flubbed and could have done better and etc etc. THERE ARE THINGS I COULD AND SHOULD DO TO IMPROVE MY LIFE AND MYSELF! So I am going to make this list and hope it works out for me. :|a

But first, things I did accomplish in the past three months:

* I have a regular column now over at Royal Archivist! It is pretty neat to be over there, and I would recommend folks giving things a look-over if/when they can. I will have an actual guidebook thingy coming from them in a couple of months, kyaa kyaa.
* [livejournal.com profile] lovesexgrave isssssss officially started. :D
* [livejournal.com profile] bb_shousetsu -- Shadow Stranger [Ladies' Night]
* [livejournal.com profile] imaginarybeasts -- The Dream's End [Dreams]

I ALSO COMPLETED SPRINGKINK, ugh, I meant to post them to my journal proper last month. I guess it will just have to happen in April, or else not at all. 8|a

But now: goals!

- Seriously try to be in bed by midnight/midnight-thirty during the week. I can definitely tell how letting myself slip to a 1 am bedtime has affected my general mood/creativity/etc. EVEN IF I AM HAVING FUN OR WHATEVER, I really need to start enforcing this. It'll let me get up earlier in the morning too, and be less hateful of the wooooorld by the time I get home from work.

- On the flipside: Get up no later than 10:30 on the weekends. If possible I would like to go for 9:30, but who knows how late I will stay up when I allow myself a late bedtime on Friday/Saturday. :|a

- Be better about frivolous money things. It is super-easy to want to just not cook and go out, but I want to be better about things--I want to stick to the budget I have drawn up, and in this way be more responsible about my spendings and thus feasibly shore up my emergency savings till I hit my goal. If/when I hit that, then I can reevaluate how silly I want to be about stuff. Until then, I should make my emergency savings a priority.

- Start walking home from work. At least on Fridays, when I am less :V BUT MY PRECIOUS FREETIME! and as the weather starts getting nicer. Once it stops raining pretty much every Friday, that would be nice.

- Write daily. I let this slide also more than I should, which is terrible, because writing brings me a lot more joy than prrrrretty much any of my other hobbies, though I am missing having an active fandom that I could and would participate in the ficwriting culture of. Debating some of my older fandoms, because I still love those, but they're either deadish or terrifying to me, so again: hotly debating. I should just go back to randomly posting fic here and maybe someday people will find me and be happy. :B Original and fanfic both, though I haven't decided if I want to do like, a WORDCOUNT GOAL or a TIME SPENT GOAL just yet.

-- wrt the above point, the theme list for [livejournal.com profile] 500themes. I don't think I will officially sign up, because I am balls at crossposting (as the springkink stuff has proven), but I do want to try doing this. Maybe a theme a day. :|a Current plans are to just go back and forth between D.Gray-Man, di[e]ce, Pandora Hearts, and 07-Ghost for these themes. Idk if I should actually post them, though, because an update a day might get gratuitous when it's every day for over a year. :|a If people have a strong opinion they should yell at me.
I FELT LIKE WRITING so I made faces at Plurk to give me short ideas. D.Gray-Man, Pandora Hearts, 07-Ghost, beware all spoilers up to the most current.

Link/Allen )

Oz/Elliot )

Road/Tyki/Allen )

Castor and Razette )

Sharon and her mother )
Legacy
1733 words
xxxHOLIC Rou spoilers (the whole thing); implied sex
There is a story that a Doumeki son is told on his fifteenth birthday.

Legacy )
nekokoban: (Good job sir!)
( Mar. 3rd, 2011 04:18 pm)
Hello everyone on this LJ, I apologize for being basically AWOL for like ... monthssssss ... :|a Part of it is certainly because of Plurk, because micro-blogging is a lot easier and feels a lot more interactive than journals. ON THE OTHER HAND, journals are super-handy for when I have longer thought-out rants and not just the I AM HAVING OPINIONS AND I WILL TELL THEM!!

That is not to say I haven't been productive, though, oh no. I have been busy. I have been all over the place. I have done MANY THINGS. I make it sound like I am talking myself up, but man it sure hella felt like a lot of things.

BASICALLY IT WAS A LOT OF WRITING. To whit:

- I participated in [livejournal.com profile] springkink this time around (with eighteen fics, none of them late hell yeah \o/)

- I wrote a story for the next [livejournal.com profile] imaginarybeasts, which I have sent off

- I have written (together with [livejournal.com profile] harukami) the first two chapters of a supernatural harem series, [livejournal.com profile] lovesexgrave which won't see the main story posting until April, but we'll be posting RELATED STUFF every day this month. We're really excited about this, guys, these are characters we've had kicking around for at least three years, and they are FINALLY GOING SOMEWHERE. DOING SOMEONETHING. IT'S PRETTY COOL.

- I started (AND FINISHED) a project for Royal Archivist which by the way guys I am also still kind of ridic excited for. With luck THINGS AND STUFF will happen and it will be grand. I am hoping for grand. I will believe in the best!

All I have left is my [livejournal.com profile] bb_shousetsu piece, for which I generally know what I am doing, I just need to get started. If worst comes to it, I figure I will be able to just write on the plane when I fly back to Seattle tomorrow. The main reason I got the RA thing done is because I'm visiting my parents in Austin for the week. hrr hrr.

So basically this is fair warning that over the next couple of weeks my lj is going to be FLOODED WITH CONTENT. FANFIC CONTENT. I think the majority of you who friended me did so for my fic, though I admit that a lot of it is also for pairings/series/etc that I've never written before. FEEL FREE TO IGNORE ME.

HELLO FRIENDS, PLEASE READ THIS POST.
(You don't have to contribute of course, but I would appreciate it if you read! ♥)


Today I am going to tell you about this Thing that is happening! It is Royal Archivist, which in their own words:

Royal Archivist publishes speculative fiction in various mediums set in a shared universe that explicitly invites and is impacted by fan contributions. We see ourselves not so much as a publishing company, but as a storytelling company, producing fiction, setting-expanding guidebooks, sequential art, roleplaying scenarios, regular columns, audio works and more, all tied together by our setting and the contributions of our fans.

We believe that by creating in a wide variety of media, we open the door to both a greater number and greater diversity of contributors. From the beginning, it has been our goal to see our shared universe populated by characters traditionally underrepresented in fiction, speculative or otherwise. Expect to see protagonists who are also people of color. Expect non-traditional gender roles, and non-traditional genders. Expect us to be a place that your story can be told. Join us, and expect more from our world.


IT IS PRETTY COOL STUFF. WE'RE ALL PRETTY EXCITED FOR IT. (I am not actually one of the founders or anything, but I am in fact friends with 95% of the people working on this project, and am in fact making contributions as a writer and content provider. FAIR CAVEAT.) Watching stuff is kind of like watching something growing up straight from a tiny little seed and it's really cool okay!!

At this point in time they have a Kickstarter Project ongoing, to basically get the monetary push they need to start hiring artists. They're about two-thirds of the way there and have a deadline of March 1st, so there's still time! It's still exciting! And once it gets off the ground, they'll be looking for submissions that fit their interests, which you can see in this here handy FAQ.

Basically this is a really cool project by some really amazing people, and I am excited for this beyond even the tiny bits that I am contributing. So if you guys have the inclination, please give them a look, read up on their current literature, and see if you think it's something you'd like to contribute to.

THANKS GUYS ♥
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