Minty

Sooooo against all reason and better judgement, I started writing a thing.  Not as a NaNo project but I did start it at the end of November. I haven't decided whether to post it on DeviantArt (allows images and artist's notes, bad for chaptered fics), ffn (I don't think it allows images, but I haven't been back there in years so I'm not sure, and around the time that I left author's notes were no longer allowed), or A03 (I've never been there and don't know anything about it) so I am starting off here.  But if anyone can recommend one of those as a more official home I will listen.

This came about as a mash-together of some unused plot arcs I wanted to but couldn't fit into Guardian, of which it is kind of a doom spinoff but you don't need to have read it, and an AU that occurred to me while I was doing the writeup for my Let's Play.  What would have happened to Yuna -- and everyone else -- if Braska had failed to defeat Sin?  What if she had grown up not as the beloved daughter of the High Summoner but known only as the child of the heretic summoner and an Al Bhed?

((Spoilers for the thing you are about to read that looked stupid stuck at the bottom of the page so scroll ahead and come back afterwards if you want: The design for the Lulubeast, Yuna's Final Aeon, was the very first piece of FFX fanart I ever drew way back in like 2008 after or near the end of the first time I played it.  When Lulu volunteered to become Yuna's aeon I got SUPER EXCITED, and, in the space that it takes anyone to respond during that scene, my mind had raced ahead envisioning an outcome where these two women go off, leaving the rest of the party behind, save the world, and die together after one of them becomes a giant monster.  I had a feeling that that wasn't going to happen, but I got really excited about it in the approximately three seconds I had before the scene continued.  I've never posted that picture anywhere but it is still my favorite thing I've ever drawn, for anything.  When I started writing Guardian I decided I should probably come up with a less monstery design, went through a few more humanlike concepts, and then decided fluff that, Lulubeast it is. You still can't quite see her clearly, and she probably won't be coming around again needing a full description until late in the story, but in the end I had to decide between not wanting to reveal it until its proper place in Guardian and wanting a dramatic opening here.))

Anyway, here's the beginning of a thing.

The Heretic’s Daughter


 

Prologue

The execution was not scheduled to take place until midmorning, but a crowd had been gathering on the steps of the Palace of St. Bevelle since dawn. It was composed of a diverse assortment of clergy, off-duty warrior monks, and ordinary civilians, from the bent elderly with joints aching from the long wait to fidgety children perched on the shoulders of their parents to get a better look. Most of them were citizens of Bevelle, but some had come from as far away from Besaid. Everyone was eager to see Yevon’s most hated enemy, apart from Sin itself – of course – brought to justice.

 

( Read more... )

 

Last night I went into my yearly 10:00 on October 31st pre-NaNo panic, outlined a fic I've been planning for a few weeks . . . and then decided in the end not to write it. I have a lifelong bad habit of pitching story ideas to someone and then getting discouraged by their lack of interest/understanding. I know I shouldn't measure the entire worth of an unstarted project by an early lackluster response, but I do and I have abandoned so many of them because of it. It isn't the other person's fault. I just have very little confidence in my own work.

I think part of the reason I've managed to stick with Guardian for so long, despite it being a completely unreasonable thing unmarketable even to its home fandom, was that I didn't tell anyone about it or try to get anyone's opinion before I started it. There was no starry-eyed planning period of announcing "I'm going to do a thing!" I just did the thing, plunked it down in my deviantart gallery, and never looked back to see if anyone cared about the thing. It was the least discouraged I've ever been by a lackluster response, which there certainly was for the first few pages. (I was still disappointed, but I had gone in accepting that that might be the case, since I had just turned up one day like, hello, deviantwatchers! Here's a story for a fandom I've only barely alluded to in my past artwork so all of you are almost certainly watching me because of something else. Oh but it won't be returning to the plot hook introduced on the first page until the last chapter. First it's going to cover the life story of a generally-overlooked character beginning with her childhood. Some of this will be unfamiliar unless you have played the game very thoroughly. None of the really popular characters will be introduced for several weeks. Oh and it's in graphic novel format. I have never written one before and I am also fairly new to digital art.)

And then Auronlu found it, and suddenly I had an audience who was actually paying attention. I probably would have continued trudging stoically along with it otherwise, but knowing that someone is reading it who likes it and is invested in the story really gave me a renewed sense of purpose. There are now a handful of someones following it, but she's still my most diligent reader. :)

So this month my NaNo goal is to finish the first chapter, which has a few more pages to go. (I think this is the point I was trying to make when I started this entry.) There really isn't a NaNo for sequential art, probably because it's hard to quantify and also not something you can go back and easily edit if you've rushed through it. I can't really keep a word count or anything because the pagely process goes like script - panels - sketch - lines - text - color - post - repeat!

I haven't written prose in a really long time and I miss it, and I love/hate the joyous/hair-pulling frenzy of NaNo, I love the camaraderie of writing alongside everyone else, and I wanted to write a fic because I have this increasingly crowded hutch of plotbunnies for them, but I don't want to stop working on Guardian especially since I've finally managed to drag it onto a regular update schedule. And I really don't think I'll be able to keep up with both.

Sooo yes. I don't know if I can still count it as a NaNo project, since I'm still going to be boxed off in panels while everyone else is working with words, but that's my goal for the end of the month.

On the way back to the docks I had Tidus attempt to take down a killer bee that had only 1 hp left and be nagged by Lulu when he missed. Then I pressed the wrong key and had her attack it with her mog rather than casting a spell and she missed it too. And nagged herself.

( On we go. )

Next time: Sketchy guys! Horrifying monsters! Prodigious badassery! And blitzball.

Or why I was super suspicious of Lulu at first. With bonus feminist theory analysis.

( I mentioned earlier that this needed some extra backstory )

This is not even the first time I have sat down at my computer intending to do something else and ended up writing an essay about Lulu.

I got some bigger pictures of that wall hanging I was puzzling over. It's a bit more legible now, but its meaning isn't any clearer.





Trying to read this is like trying to read an eye chart and needing glasses, and unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it doesn't translate into anything. The big letters are A and Z, which show up paired at the top and bottom of things in several places throughout Spira to represent Yevon and Sin, respectively. I thought it might be the Hymn of the Fayth, given the way the characters are spaced like words if you read them vertically, but when translated it just came out as gibberish. :(

I deciphered (to the best of my ability) the top line going horizontally and then a few lines vertically and didn't get much out of it:

A

E M B D O U U H G I
N H N
? ? V
- I ?
H G K
F L
Z - Y

Z

Here's the Yevon alphabet, if anyone else wants to try translating this.

Hopefully we'll get a clearer look at it in the HD version. Until then I'm going to assume it was meant to be a prayer or the Hymn and they developers just didn't bother putting in accurate characters because they didn't count on it actually being read.

Hello again! Welcome. Here’s Part One if you missed it.

( Seagull, I've a feeling we're not in Zanarkand anymore. )

Next stop: Besaid!

The top of my quilt is finished!



I still need to do the backing, quilting, and binding but I guess this was the hard part? This is my first one so I don't know how difficult the rest of the steps are going to be.

In the whirlwind of quilting this weekend and the days leading up to it, though, my sisters' birthday kind of got overlooked and I felt bad about that. Well, we celebrated it, but I was sewing and my mom and granddad were busy making dinner and we forgot to hang the birthday flag by the mailbox. I forgot to text them a happy birthday on their actual birthday. And Katy was sad that there was no birthday cake because Laura requested birthday pie because she didn't want a store-bought cake; she said she only likes the cakes that I make, and she didn't want to ask me to bake one because she knew I wouldn't have time. :( So yesterday when I knew they were coming over for dinner I made emergency remedial cupcakes.

Of course all of this means I have gotten NO work done on Guardian in more than a week, which is really making me itchy. I don't know why I feel this project is so important, because it probably really isn't, but whenever I have to put it aside to work on something else I get anxious about it. I feel like I'm running headlong towards some invisible deadline. And I get stressed out about how long I've planned it to be and afraid of running out of time.

In my very first vague ideas I only envisioned it to be about ten pages long (a milestone I just passed), covering Lulu's first pilgrimage and ending with her arrival on Besaid, and only take me a few weeks to do. And then I was like NO ALL THE WAY TO ZANARKAND FINAL AEON GO!!!

A year later I haven't gotten nearly as far as I had hoped I would be but it is coming along. Not as quickly as I had hoped, because I discovered that drawing sequential full-page, full-colour comics is HARD. I really don't know why that was the format I decided to go with. I never really considered for it to be anything other than a graphic novel, even though I'd never drawn one before and had very little experience with comics at all. I mean, I could have written a novel-length fanfiction with chapter header illustrations as was my usual medium. That would have been a lot easier and made a lot more sense. But I literally woke up one day and started writing out the script for this thing that I had not planned to do and now here it is and I can't let it go.

Well I got three blocks done, and then I ran out of thread. :/ Apparently I am terrible at gauging how much thread there is on a spool and I keep thinking "There's plenty here!" until the spool itself is visible. So my options now are order new thread and wait for it to arrive, or use lavender thread, which I don't really want to do in case it shows through, but it is the only other colour I have that is close to matching and cotton. (I have been instructed never to use polyester thread for quilting.) I'm annoyed that I didn't think to pick up more thread at the quilt shop.



The first one came out fine; it was actually on the second one that I started screwing things up in every possible way. I had a feeling that the star points would be the fiddliest bits, but you would be surprised at how many different ways I could manage to fumble over such simple directions as "Mark diagonal lines on the small squares. Sew them to the small rectangles. Cut off the corners." Made more embarrassing by the fact that the reason I messed it up was because I was distracted thinking about Pokemon.

However, despite my comprehensive list of mistakes, I never made the same one twice. Which is actually the same thing my driver's ed teacher said to me in high school in an effort to be encouraging. (Incidentally, I still don't have a driver's license.)

I must say though that I am really enjoying working with small pieces and straight lines, even though fitting them together is a precise process and takes some concentration. (Meaning you cannot be at the time thinking about Pokemon, or which Pokemon certain Final Fantasy characters would be if they were Pokemon, btw Auron is totally Arcanine.) It's a nice change from the big irregular pieces I'm used to from making clothes or the tiny curves from making dolls and doll clothes. I was intimidated by quilting at first but I am finding it to be a LOT easier than dollmaking.

But I suppose I'm not going to get as much of a head start as I had hoped before the Great Quilt Weekend (of Doom) descends upon us. It took me several days to get as far as I did, counting the time it took to press, measure, and cut the fabric and lay out the squares. I don't know how in the world my mother is expecting that we'll have three individual finished quilts by the end of the weekend.