Category: Updates

Writing – The final part of What’s Beneath the Fan Service got delayed a few days due to an unforeseen technical glitch. It might be consumed by E3 news at this point, but when it’s up, you’ll be able to find it here and on my social media accounts at least. I signed up for the Critters Online Workshop this week, which I’ve wanted to do for a while. Now I won’t just be reviewing movies. I’ll be reviewing writing (privately) as well. Besides that, due to another unforeseen technical glitch, I poured a large amount of time and effort this week into The Twelfth Hour. I realized that one of my characters didn’t take a clear set of steps to solve his major problem throughout the book, so I’ve been backfilling that.

Development – I made some progress displaying a webpage in an iframe and displaying its raw text in another iframe for the That’s not an Argument website, but then, retrieving HTML using YQL stopped working. It seems that Yahoo! has discontinued that service without warning. This means that WikiNatural is also down until I can host it myself. It seems I can’t put off experimenting with transforming my old desktop into a Linux server anymore. I continued stalling by spending the rest of the week on The Twelfth Hour anyway. 😛 Also, I’m in the middle of moving, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get to it until next month when I can find everything that I need again.

Marketing – I updated/reopened my Google+ account this week. I haven’t looked at it since probably 2011, and it took me half and hour to figure out how Google+ works these days. You kids and your Collections and your Communities. I’m also thinking about opening a Twitter and a public Facebook page. One of these days, I also need to make a banner and a profile pic/logo for all of my accounts as well. Graphic design: ARGH!

Advent Children: What’s Beneath the Fan Service – Part 2 of my Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children analysis released on the Extra Life Community website this week. Find it here! The response between Facebook and Minds has been really cool so far. I’m thinking about posting a compilation so I always have an easy-to-access reminder that Advent Children fans exist. You guys are awesome. 🙂

My Eliza – This week, I wanted to try writing short fiction for a writer’s group on Minds. As a bonus challenge to myself, the story had to include two prompts: 1) the main character must get pulled over for speeding and told to get out of the car at gun point and 2) the main character must accidently swap phones during a job interview. I didn’t plan on posting it anywhere else, but it turned out so well that I did. You can find it here.

Other – My family decided to celebrate my niece’s birthday this weekend, I decided to fill out a job application in the middle of the week, and My Eliza took longer to write than I expected (even though fifteen hours is a ridiculously short time for me to write anything with a structure). Revision planning for The Twelfth Hour and building the editor for That’s Not an Argument got delayed consequently. Slow progress will likely continue because preparations for my move to another city are happening earlier than I expected as well, starting now. So we’ll see where I am in a week.

I’m trying something new. We’ll see where it goes. Since I don’t finish things very often and have some large projects in the works, I thought I’d write updates to track and report my progress. Here’s what I did last week:

Advent Children: What’s Beneath the Fan Service – Part 1 of a three-part article series on Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is up on the Extra Life Community website. You can find it here. Part 2 and Part 3 should be up in the next few weeks, depending on when the editor can get to them. In the meantime, I will probably start harassing reviewers on YouTube about how WRONG they are. 😛

That’s not an Argument – I’m working on a website prototype that lets you highlight and comment on text sections on any website and share your thoughts with friends. Originally, I envisioned it for supporting or discrediting news articles. I found another use for it this week, however, when I was trying to figure out how to provide comments to an author in a writer’s group I’m testing out. Anyway, this week I finished roughly coding the backend logic for saving and exporting json files and local data. Now it’s time to actually make the tools for navigating to websites and displaying them for editing!

MisCon – I spent the weekend at MisCon, a science fiction and fantasy convention in Missoula, MT. It’s a good place to listen to people talk about writing. Also, for the first time ever, I participated in the writers’ workshop. I submitted a query letter, synopsis, and novel sample for a paranormal thriller I’m working on called The Twelfth Hour. My synopsis was absolute crap, but the actual novel sample was at least halfway decent. I can’t write a simple overview of a story, but I can write dialog! I guess all the years of writing scripts for silly amateur films and watching plays six to fifteen times each as a theater technician actually paid off. O.o After spending more than a decade writing novels in a closet, it’s nice to hear that I haven’t wasted my time writing terrible, uninteresting garbage. I just get lost in the details. Now I can fix it!