Very full of Seki

My wife and I finished up our long collaborative Office AU Ignoct fic, Hot Under The Collar, after a year-and-a-half hiatus. I'm pleased we got it completed! It was fun having these two sweethearts fall in love over coffee machines and pizza croissants and office parties.

I also finished an old Passportout/Fogg fic for 80 Days, Only The Bold Deserve Favour. 80 Days is an imaginative and clever reworking of Around The World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, which can be found on Steam or as a phone app, and which I highly recommend playing a few times through to see exactly how far off-course you can go from the book text. I was struck with the desire to write this when I first played it on my phone, and then I took five years to come up with an acceptable way of expressing the final few paragraphs.

(It's a fic I doubt many people will read. But I'm glad I wrote it.)

As we've been told it's fine to do so, I posted up my Sagefire piece (Blood) to AO3. It's not shippy, so it won't get much attention, but I liked writing Regency-style awful family dynamics for it.

I also received my copy of Sagefire! It's gorgeous.



Since my last post, I've written one of my outstanding two pieces and handed it in. The last one I need to crack on with; it's half-done and needs to be finished by next weekend.

Fic album meme! Assemble your tracklist according to the descriptions.

1. The popular, catchy one: I'm gonna go with Blind Faith, an FFXV Ignoct onshot fic that felt ridiculously obvious as an idea when I wrote it. It's fun, popular and I'm fond of it.

2. The obscure early one no one bought at the time: Of the several options, I’m gonna choose Across Two Halves Of The World, which I love, which I think has some of my best writing in, and which is my least popular fic ever, because it’s fic for Last Remnant and it’s David/Qubine and really only my wife and I are here for that particular combination.

3. The "experimental" one, written when you were possibly on some substance: Probably An Expansion of Horizons, which is for Valvrave, and for an obscure pairing (H-neun/X-eins), and which I think wasn’t really a successful experiment -- but, enh, still fun to write.

4. The slushy one: I guess slushy means... soppy? saccharinely romantic? In which case, I’ll go with The Sweetest Blend, which is FFXV, Ignoct, and is very fluffy and soft.

5. The brash, loud one, mid album: So many candidates, but I'm going with Euphonious, which has no shame and which is FFXV, Ignoct and Promptio -- and hey, the story is sort of about volume anyway.

6. The one born of your depressive introspection: Cold Comfort, an unhappy David/Rush (The Last Remnant) fic where I -- unusually for me in TLR fandom -- did not give these boys a happy ending.

7. The bitter one about your ex/former manager/cat: That’d be Into The Sun, which was immensely cathartic in many ways. It’s Yagyuu/Niou, Prince of Tennis, and it’s not quite bitter but it is heavily based on events in my past.

8. The one only you like, you insular weirdo: Perfect, or nearly as good as, which is fic for A League Of Their Own (the baseball movie), focused on Mae and a poly relationship with her two biggest fans. I think it’s cute.

9. The genre-hopping crossover hit: Hit is a strong word, but the popularity of Connect was far higher than I expected for Persona 4/Prince of Tennis crossover fic. But it just made sense in my head, so.

10. The one where you tried to be "modern": maybe the first fic I published, actually, which is Cages. Prince of Tennis, Yagyuu/Niou, makes absolutely no sense if you don’t know the canon, and I never wrote anything quite like it again.

11. The anthemic final track: It really has to be The Stars, Reflected, which is my most popular one by a long margin, and which I continue to accrue kudos and comments on. FFXV and Ignoct again. It really seems to have resonated a lot with people. I had fun writing it.

I'm suffused with a concept for one of the two last zines I'm in, and I have a solid idea of what I want to do for the other one too. :D Huzzah!

In other news I'm spending a lot of time churning over Ignoct ideas with my wife. <3

I was accepted for one of the two remaining zines I applied for! I'm excited; it only requires quite a short piece, but the topic is awesome. The other zine hasn't closed applications yet, and since interest seemed low it's possible the zine might not even run.

(I was also tempted to apply for the art history zine, but I've cut myself firmly off on zines for now. Enough.)

Sagefire's pick-up has been gratifying! It's going to be so beautiful and the merch looks great too; I don't think anyone will be disappointed if they buy it.

I finished my regency dress and coat; I read more books; I have finished another playthrough of Heaven's Vault. Currently we're in a DIY blitz; changing our curtains, putting up shelves, reorganising drawers. And I'm trying to get a bullet journal started again. :D

Accepted into a fourth zine! My plan is to spend most of Saturday writing my various pieces -- my wife can do her sewing, and I can try and progress through at least some of the many fics I am now obligated to write. And just in case that sounds sour, it isn't -- having this many zines to write for is a good problem, not a bad one. I like the concepts I'm writing, and I am pretty sure I can do them justice. :D

Managed to write ~1600 words for zines tonight, mostly on my Regalia Mixtape piece. I'm feeling good about it so far! I've also started up my Cosmogony piece. Need to consider how pessimistic I want to be with it, because at the moment it's very dark. We'll see.

Current FFXV zine statuses: I got my concept signed off for Cosmogony -- after some negotiation with another author who wanted to tackle similar themes for that era -- so I can start on that! I've also signed up for Sagefire (Ignis-themed), Ever At Your Side (friendship-themed), the as-yet-untitled Music zine, Lucian Nights (Noir-themed). Which is a lot, but I don't expect to make it into all of them, and if I do the pieces can be quite short for most of them. I am also tempted by the Tarot-themed zine that just got announced, but since signups don't open for that for a couple of weeks, I'll see what my acceptance status is for some of the others first. :D

I need to finish my White Day exchange fic before anything else, though!

I've been accepted for the Cosmogony zine, which is a FFXV zine that is designed to ape a history text, covering a range of 'eras' around the FFXV verse (from the distant past to the just-post-game). I'm excited to see what I get assigned!

(My Valentine's Day was great; my wife and I talked about Ignoct for much of it. :D)

Got my Ignoct White Day gift assignment! My assignee gave me good prompts and told me to go wherever I wanted with them. :D

I just hit Wanikani level 5! I know this level is a killer, very slow-going, but it's still a good progress market.

I also just downloaded Torii to my phone. It's a project by a WK user, for Japanese vocab learning via SRS, and it's customisable to, for instance, just the JLPT level 5 vocab, or JLPT levels without WK-covered items. I've not started it up yet; I wanna get further into WK first, but at first glance it seems pretty cool.