LitTechGirl

Hey guys, sorry I haven't updated in a while!

I have various drawings from my manga practice still to scan; I hope to put those up ASAP.

I would like to do more drawings of Sailor Grimm and Sailor Buttercream Sparkle, possibly even using this Sai tool everybody talks about, or Sta.sh. Or Illustrator, since I should probably learn Illustrator anyway.

Also I want to finish the drawing ideas in my "Brimming with ideas" posts (one and two).

Music Land Maestress is on the back burner right now because I had a really bad time with it for JaNoWriMo. I hope to return to it soon.

I may start doing Doctor Who fanart, including art of Alyson "Alys" Reed, a Companion character I created for a roleplay I'm going to start soon on Instagram and Tumblr. Look for that!

See ya!

Sorry I've been kinda scarce here everybody. Been kinda busy with NaNoWriMo and all.

But all my hard work paid off. I WON!!

30 days and 52,917 words (53,084 according to the NaNo validator, which is always off of the word count Microsoft Word gives). I am in utter shock, still, days later. I mean this was my first time doing NaNo, and I went into it wanting to win, but I honestly doubted I would, considering how I fell very behind three times.

Anyway just wanted to share the news with you all!

So it's currently Day 5 of NaNoWriMo. I am on chapter 3 of my novel and have written over 7,000 words so far (as of this morning). What?!

You can follow my progress at NaNo's website or at my writing blog, To Walden and Beyond!.

The project is going pretty well, though I admit yesterday and today, days that I didn't have to work, I don't think I felt as motivated. But I'm chugging along.

I have a lot of prep stuff to do still, stuff I didn't finish before NaNo started. Hoping to catch up on that today, since I spent most of my day yesterday organizing my writing-related internet bookmarks in Firefox and Chrome (not really using IE that much anymore) into something I can peruse more efficiently. Yes, I am actually neurotic enough that I would do this in my spare time. The only real prep I got done was a "plot checkpoints" list and some Google searching for inspiration pictures for my characters. Oh and I finally thought up names for all the Aquarian 5's civilian identities and assigned them their magical hero identities (previously only Ranvois was assigned).

What prep do I need to do...? Hmm. Well, I need to do character work for the guys in my story - i.e., the Guardians and Knights of this lovely magical girl drama. I've already done character profile overkill on the Maestresses, so no more work needs to be done there for now. As I said, the Knights now all have names. They are:

     -Kristoph Bauer/Ranvois
          An Austrian who works as David Adagio's assistant.
     -Raul Martinez/Lucas
          An obnoxious Spaniard who likes partying and picking up girls.
     -Mark Walker/Simon
          An American whose father is stationed at a military base in Germany. A little full of himself.
     -Andrei Valentinovich Orlov/Bernard
          A young Russian man. (The middle name is what's called a "patronymic," a typical feature of Russian names).
     -Hans Neumann/Vincent
          A timid young German man.

The magical hero names are from Old French, since I intend for Aquarius to have an Old French vibe. All of them except Ranvois I found on actual lists of Old French names. Ranvois was a name I came up with on my own out of thin air; I think it's a reworking of "Lanval," the name of an Anglo-Norman (a sort of mix of Old English and Old French used in England during the early Middle Ages) poem I read in an English class. For Andrei and Hans's names I consulted lists of Russian and German names respectively; Raul and Mark were names I'd decided on a while back. The name "Orlov" stuck out to me for Andrei because my great-grandmother's maiden name was Orloff. As for the nationalities, I wanted them to be varied. Raul is perhaps a bit stereotypical, but I wanted there to be one not-so-serious guy in the bunch to offset the rather serious Kristoph. Mark came about because I thought there should be an American in the mix, and also probably because my uncle was once stationed in Germany, so I am aware that we have military bases there. His attitude is kind of inspired by America from Hetalia.

Besides character work, I need to do some work with setting and maybe a little on plot too, I'm not sure. I also need to figure out what research I need to do and do said research.

Well, better get back to it.

Oh one other note: Popular book publishing blog GalleyCat recently posted an interesting article on how writers and publishers can use DeviantArt: www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/…. Check it out!

Ok, so I made a decision which might end up being potentially risky. Well, maybe risky isn't the right word.

Ok, I'll just say it...I decided to work on my Music Land Maestress story for NaNoWriMo.

For those of you who have no idea what that is, let me explain. NaNoWriMo stands for "National Novel Writing Month." It is an annual event which is run by the non-profit organization The Office of Letters and Light. They also run the Young Writers' Program (a kids' and teens' version of NaNoWriMo), ScriptFrenzy (a script version of NaNoWriMo that happens in April), and its newest program, a summer version of NaNoWriMo called Camp NaNoWriMo that runs in June and August and is structured like a summer camp. The point of the regular NaNoWriMo event is to write 50,000 words (generally agreed to be the length of an average adult novel - though accepted word counts differ by genre; fantasy can be much longer, for instance) during the 30 days of the month of November. And if that sounds impossible, don't worry - there's no penalty if you don't reach that goal, and there is a vast community online to help you out, whether it be cheering you on, giving advice, or whatever (through the official forums, their LJ community, etc - there are even NaNo groups here on dA!).

Now the reason I consider this risky is that, since I started seriously promoting myself online as an author in 2009, I have striven to keep my writing and non-writing lives as separate as possible. Heck, I even created a separate Facebook account so I could promote myself as a writer on Facebook (after an unsuccessful attempt doing so on MySpace) without anything from my "real life" creeping in. What I was afraid of was that, if anything from my "real life" intersected with my writing persona, any attempts I had made to appear "professional" would be dashed. Because, well, as mature as I may appear, at times I think I come across as childish. And I am definitely interested in some TV shows, books, etc that are intended for people younger than myself (let's face it, ANYTHING on Nickelodeon is not intended for someone in their late twenties). Frankly being a geek, detail-obsessed, and a person with Asperger's, though, I can't help but get really into certain subjects. I mean, I have had jobs so I do know how to act professional. I just wonder whether my geekiness will help or hurt me in the professional, post-college workforce. Especially with clients (for my web design), editors, or other people I may have to work with. Will I be able to act my age? I mean, I'm going to be 28 next Sunday (woot!). I need to act like it, right?

But I have more or less come to the conclusion that there is probably no use to completely cutting off one persona from the other. They are going to bleed into each other no matter how much I try to keep them apart. A line I read once in an essay by George Orwell is appropriate here: "So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself." My geeky self will leak into my writing no matter what, and vice versa. After all, writing - well, storytelling really - has been a passion of mine my whole life. And writers are influenced by lots of things. As are web designers.

So I am going to do Music Land Maestress as my NaNoWriMo project. I may never publish it, at least not in the usual sense (though if I "win" NaNoWriMo - that is, make the 50k goal - I may get the chance to get 5 "published" copies of it via CreateSpace). I intend to publish it online, likely through a website devoted to the story. Though I suppose I could "publish" it the way I did my chapbook for my Creative Writing Workshop class - just a small, POD-style run. (You can see that chapbook here). After all, it's more fanfic-y than anything else, even though it has all original characters and I am owning it as an original work. But then Fifty Shades of Grey showed that a story like that could get noticed and published in book form and become famous and stuff (Fifty Shades started out as an Alternate Universe Twilight fanfic and then later became an original story). Not that Music Land Maestress is anything like Fifty Shades in content. If anything, it would be more like a typical mahou shoujo anime or like Winx Club or W.I.T.C.H. (Fifty Shades is erotica, btw). I have imagined the series getting "optioned" (as they call it in the publishing industry) for an animated series and then adapted into a separate anime and manga in Japan, and I would totally be cool with any of those sorts of adaptations. Heck, even a LA film or series would be cool if they could make it look right.

NaNo doesn't start for about 10 days, but I am working on preparation now so I don't have to worry about that so much once November starts. Following a tutorial on the NaNo LJ, I am making a "NaNo Binder." Part of making said binder is collecting inspiring things about the characters, plot, etc. Since Music Land Maestress has music as a main theme/motif, I had the idea of making CDs for each Maestress plus one for Allegron and one for David (the two main Lyran characters) with songs that fit their characters, sort of like their own personal mixes/playlists. I have a pack of printable CD labels I bought for my Portfolio Development presentation but never used. I just need CD-Rs and maybe some jewel cases. It'll be fun (I hope)! Not sure what else I'll use for inspiration yet.

Actually, since I will ultimately be putting this online, I may experiment with the idea of hypertext fiction. For the web version at least, probably not the original draft I'm doing for NaNo. Hypertext fiction is something I first heard about at a literary reading a while back. (I don't usually go to literary readings, but I was in a class that semester that required me to go to at least two readings). It basically is a type of fiction that uses web links to add to the story, mostly to jump to different parts of a story in a non-linear fashion. In that case, it is inspired by "interactive fiction" like the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series, where you read a scene and then were given choices at the end that, if followed, would lead you down different plot paths. I don't think I would do that sort of hypertext thing (it would be too confusing), but instead probably something more like what they do in enhanced e-books - add enhancements to the text like video, audio, etc. I don't think it would be that hard to do - HTML5 has been shown to be great at adding interactivity to websites that wasn't possible before without Flash, thanks mostly to features like the CANVAS tag, which allows you to basically create a canvas you can draw on (though I doubt I could do a canvas - I've seen what kind of code it requires, and it was WAY over my head). I was thinking I could use it for music and video mostly, since HTML5 has native audio and video tags, making it easier than ever to embed media into a webpage without worrying about codecs and stuff. An example: Why describe a transformation sequence when you could show it? (Now, this will require me to actually make an animation for said sequence, but that's neither here nor there). There could be some paragraph about the transformation and some hyperlink to the video, or maybe the video would be embedded in the text. I'm not sure which would work better; I'd have to play around with it. Besides music and video, I could probably use links for any words/phrases said in Lyran or Aquarian, which could then link to a glossary (the way you can put your cursor by a word on the Kindle and it brings up the definition via the dictionary that comes as one of the default books with all Kindle devices) or some other form of translation. Anyway...that would all be for later.

So just wanted to share the news with you all. Just writing about it makes me feel excited. But I'm also nervous, because I've never done NaNoWriMo before. Please keep me in your prayers, wish me luck, whatever it is you feel comfortable doing. And please, dA followers and admins, be patient with me if I'm scarce on DeviantArt next month...I'm going to be spending a lot of time writing!

Well, my mission is accomplished. I have watched both Mugen Gakuen myus and taken down notes about the Grimmseijin from them.

Today I re-watched the Kaiteiban (revision) of Mugen Gakuen, which I hadn't watched in a little over two years. As I thought, it's not much different plot-wise than the original, though some songs were added and several parts were recast. After having watched the awesome Takagi Nao and Asami Yuuka play Uranus and Neptune in the original, the Uranus and Neptune in this myu (Uchida Asako and Inami Tomoko) just can't compare. I mean, they're good, but Nao and Yuuka just cannot be topped. Their chemistry is amazing, and Nao has this coolness factor that even makes me, a completely heterosexual girl, squee when I see her appear on stage. On the other hand, Shirota Yuu, the new Tuxedo Kamen as of this musical, actually manages to top his predecessor Kenji Urai. He sings really well (a rarity for SeraMyu Tuxedo Kamen actors imo) and acts really well too. I also noticed during "Tuxedo Versus" that his English is actually really good; he sings the English lines in that song with hardly any accent. I hadn't noticed that before. He's half Spanish and can speak Spanish and Catalan fluently, so maybe he has a knack for foreign languages. Either that or he's been taking English lessons from Kuroki Marina (Sailor Moon in this myu), who has shown her knack for near-flawless English since her very first fankan in 2001.

Anyway...this is about the Grimmseijin DANGIT. Focus.

This being merely a revision of the previous myu, not much changed plot-wise for the Grimmseijin here. One change was that in this myu only Damask got brainwashed by the Death Busters, whereas in the original all the Grimmseijin got brainwashed. The scenes before "Chinmoku no Hameln" and before their part of "Triangle Secret" were also changed slightly. The biggest change was the extent of their involvement in the final battle; it seems like it was expanded somewhat (I'd have to go back and compare). Also there was a scene where Moon, Mercury, and Tuxedo Kamen meet up with the Grimmseijin in the Mugen Gakuen labyrinth and the Grimmseijin lead them to the Death Busters' base which was new to the Kaiteiban. As far as canon goes though, not much new there.

My research done, I have some thinking to do. Quite a bit. For one, I need to consolidate my notes from the two myus into one document and see what I can use. To be frank, I am more likely to trust info from the original because I know the translators at Miss Dream are all fluent in Japanese and thus I trust their subtitling/translating more than I trust Innocentami's translation, since even at her site she admits her knowledge of Asian languages is "rough." Not to bash her or anything - I'm thankful the myus that weren't available subbed before (like the Mugen Gakuen myus) are getting subbed at all, because I wouldn't be able to watch them any other way since I am very not fluent in Japanese (I can speak some, but can't read or write it). The essential stuff seems to be the same in both myus, which is good for continuity.

One thing that worries me is that, in both myus, Grimm is called "the windy planet Grimm." The Grimmseijin also release an attack that appears to be wind-related (based on the sound effect accompanying the action) and in the Kaiteiban Centi calls herself a "wind wizard" (I tried to listen to the original audio to determine if this translation was accurate, but I couldn't tell what words were said in that line). However, this whole time I have been writing the Sailor Grimm story with the idea that she would be a Senshi of nature, to play up the rose pun with the canon Grimmseijin's names (Gallica, Centi, Damask, Moss, and Alba are all types of roses). Her "Guardian" character, the Rose of Hameln, was also created with this idea in mind. So now am I going to have to change her to a senshi of wind? I was already worried about her being too much like Sailor Jupiter (down to her senshi colors, green and pink, though I chose different shades than Jupiter's), but if I change her to be a senshi of wind she might be too much like Sailor Uranus. Doushiyou?

There are also certain things I'll have to explain, like the missing children, the Magus Gun, etc. Not sure how I'll explain those yet. The story about the flute player is also a bit confusing, differing slightly between the original and the Kaiteiban (I think the Kaiteiban's subtitles, which refer to a Prince rather than a King like the original myu's story, could possibly be incorrect. Not sure). I think the story is supposed to be based on the Brothers Grimm's story "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." I have never read that story before so maybe I should. (Thankfully, I just ordered a nice hardcover volume of the Grimms' tales that was on my wall at Wishwall.me and had dropped down significantly in price - I think I saved close to 80% off the original price - and by some miracle it is coming tomorrow rather than Saturday, even though I had two-day shipping).

Ok gonna go to bed now. Just wanted to get that off my chest.