Life Sucks…

…and then you find even more crap to junk up your life. Dealing with college again, with more classes than previously. Still doing well in them, but it consumes time. Reminds me, I should do some work for one of my classes after I’m done writing this. At any rate, I’ve also been working on a whole bunch of stuff in my free time and it falls into three main categories:

Trigamyverse

It took me a while to get through the five pieces of Trigamy‘s ‘Goddess of the Dayspring, I Am’ – which was where I was last time I updated this blog, evidently – and then plowed through another two piece chapter named ‘Captiva’ before putting out regular-sized chapters ‘Arafax Deep’ and ‘Asmara’, leaving me working on ‘The Inmates…’, which is the last chapter in Part 2. Part 3 will bring us back to Cleveland and swap out a number of spare Young Avengers in favor of Scoobies. Covering the ‘verse’ part of things as opposed to just Trigamy, Scary Girls Need Love Too will get another chapter or two soon but not much will be done with the story until I get to the Halloween chapters of Trigamy because the two will meet up again then and I need to synchronize events. And the two stories being written by outsiders that will connect with my own world – Wise’s A New World in my View and anotherlostsoul’s Of Silver Coins and Lost Souls – are chugging right along. Go check ’em out. After you read my stuff, of course.

Other Fics

Just to keep myself amused while my beta is working on pieces of Trigamy or Scary Girls Need Love Too, I’ve started a ‘story’ that’s actually just a series of ficlets exploring random YAHF combinations for Cordelia. It is, quite appropriately, entitled Ten Costumes Cordelia Never Wore, and will feature Cordelia trading in her broke ass cat costume in favor of dressing up for Halloween as:

• Burai (Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger) – DONE
• Toph Bei Fong (Avatar: the Last Airbender) – DONE
• Hermione Granger (Harry Potter)
• Seven of Nine (Star Trek: Voyager) – DONE
• Miranda Lawson (Mass Effect 2)
• Aayla Secura (Star Wars)
• Toni Stark (Marvel comics)
• Jean Grey (Marvel comics) – DONE
• Laura Kinney (Marvel comics)
• Selina Kyle (DC comics)

There’s no real update schedule for it apart from ‘when I have time’ but depending on how it goes and how people like it, I may make the time to do a sequel with either ten more costumes or ten costumes for another character.

Art

This requires significantly less effort on my part because I’m merely the thinker and not the one drawing, but I do help Lexi out with the pieces she does for me. So far, she’s completed three pieces for Trigamy and has a bunch more planned.

For those of you interested in Lexi’s work, she can be found on DeviantArt but isn’t available for commissions at this particular moment in time.

Stacking Up

Starting to get more requests for photography/portraiture work these days. Or rather people willing to say yes when I ask if they want to do it. More of Column A than Column B, though. It’s nice to be slipping back into that as a hobby and it’s really going to help those skills improve. I’ve always considered myself as a still life photographer and pictures of people were more ‘still life with a pulse’ moments for me. Hopefully that’ll change, especially as I work with people who have done this before and pass on their experiences and advice so I can apply them when I work with those who are new to it but curious.

College. Bleh.

I’m back in school again. It’s overrated. Messes with my free time because I need to change my sleep patterns and my actual day patterns because I need to go to classes and – in the case of one class that starts during Hartford’s rush hour – I need to get my butt in about two hours before class starts just so I don’t get stuck in traffic and miss the start of class.

I better get a lot of money out of whatever job I get with this ‘higher education’ shit society says I should have…

The State of the Trigamyverse

The State of the Trigamyverse:

• Scary Girls Need Love Too: With the end of Chapter 7, the five chapter back-and-forth between Scary Girls Need Love Too and Trigamy is done and from Chapter 8 till the end will return to chronicling the adventures of the Runaways. Sometimes their adventures will bring them into contact with the Cleveland gang again or the Young Avengers, but those will be covered elsewhere. It’ll probably only reach twelve or thirteen chapters in length, fifteen max, but I don’t want to have to split good ideas between two stories and water both down, and I’d much rather save my A Game for…
• Trigamy: Chapter 12 is currently in progress and pieces of Chapters 13 through 16 are already completed due to the fact that this is a rewrite of an older story. That’ll wrap up Part 2, and then five or six of the eight chapters in Part 3 come with some degree of prewritten content I can adapt. Part 4’s chapters are more of a crapshoot and Part 5 will be all new, but I’m looking forward to surprising you all. Also, speaking of a surprise, my beta Courtney the Magnificent will be taking a step forward into a pseudo-cowriter status for a scene in Chapter 14 and most of Chapter 15. After that, she’ll be working with me intermittently to continue providing the voice for one specific character. I have a handful of other people who do such a thing for/with me, but this is definitely going to be the most prominent occurrence yet. Depending on how it turns out, I might make it a more regular thing. But no pressure, Courtney…
• The Pack: Anyone remember ‘Doppelgangland’ from Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? The spell that brought us the delightfully skanky Vampire Willow is making a repeat appearance in this one-shot or short story, where we’ll end up seeing Laura Kinneys from across the multiverse – including several canon interpretations and at least one from my own work: the top-heavy Laura of Blue Belle – coming face to face. Still in the planning stages, since it will slot in during Part 3 or Part 4 of Trigamy.
• Dark and Terrible Things: Anyone remember ‘Doppelgangland’ from… okay, we already did that. Yeah, the group doesn’t learn after The Pack. This time, the results are even more interesting when the girls decide to get to know Tara Maclay and opt to turn to dimensional fishing instead of necromancy. A crossover with a currently unposted project by Not-Dead-Fred that should be posted by the time Dark and Terrible Things is because… well, it won’t make much sense otherwise.
• Cougars’ Den: Mary Jane Watson-Parker. Jessica Drew. Julia Carpenter. Felicia Hardy. Emma Frost. Janet van Dyne. James Howlett. What do these people have in common? Well, most of them are hot women. Sorry, James, you’re not. But all six women have something else in common, that they also share with James: they have ‘children’ that weren’t created the natural way. See how they cope with their unwanted parenthood in an upcoming serial currently in the planning phase.

In vaguely Trigamy-related news, Wise‘s story A New World in my View is chugging on and has now reached Chapter 7. Which means it’s a few chapters closer to crossing over with Trigamy than it was last time I mentioned it. Still not sure when exactly it will crossover, but it is coming.

Oh, and if you never hear from me again? Hurricane Irene did dark and terrible things to me. Maybe blew a tree branch through my apartment’s wall or something. Sorry about that.

A Day With the Heather, Part Deux

As promised, here are more photos from the series I did with Heather while we were transferring her files from her dying MacBook to her new-to-her one. Well… there aren’t really enough to call it a series. And given the subject of the photos… perhaps calling it a miniseries is more appropriate?

I have a feeling she’s going to kick my ass for that when she reads it…

A Day With the Heather

I got together with my friend Heather to transfer my old laptop into her clutches to replace a near-identical model that was starting to get a little too beaten up to run properly. While the files were transferring from her old MacBook to her nused one, we took a few pictures of her for my gallery and her Facebook. Figured I’d toss them up on here; those of you who actually read this and track me in various places around the web might recognize her as the Trill my sister drew a while back.

In other news, still working on Trigamy and Scary Girls Need Love Too. The two stories have reached the point where they’re individuating again with Chapters 8 through 10 of Scary Girls Need Love Too covering solely the Runaways – although the last chapter does lead back towards another encounter with Xander and his girls – while Chapters 12 through 25 of Trigamy will be Runaways-free save for a tiny blip of Kit.

An update… finally!

Holy crap, that took forever. Well, it took a bit of time to write and then my beta needed to get poked a few times in order to get her moving on reading the chapters I sent her. But she read and now… I post! Chapter 6 of Scary Girls Need Love Too is now up, and Chapter 11 of Trigamy is undergoing final clearing as we speak. After that, Chapter 7 of Scary Girls Need Love Too will wrap up the ‘Goddess of the Dayspring, Am I’ arc and that story will go on hiatus for a bit since the remaining chapters I have to convert to bigger and better versions – Chapters 8 through 10 – won’t connect back in to Trigamy until the mid-20s. That means I have a bit of time to work on those, since I’m… well, on Chapter 11 of Trigamy at present.

Also, if you have any taste, you’ve been reading A New World in my View by Wise over on Twisting the Hellmouth. What the hell does it have to do with anything? Yeah, it’s going to cross over with Trigamy at some point in the new future. As we begin getting closer and more details become available, you’ll be the first to know. And why am I excited? Well, it’s because of who the protagonist of his story is.

Power Girl

In the words of Quagmire… giggity giggity. Giggity goo. Alright.

Goddess of the Dayspring, Am I

Holy hell this new chapter is starting to get away from me. Chapter 10 of Trigamy started as a pair of roughly two thousand word sequences: one covering Xander and Kate’s date while the other was going to cover Rebekah and Cassie’s day out. Could not for the life of me decide on an activity for Rebekah and Cassie, though. Then it hit me. Cassie was thinking of being a Runaway. Through Xander – or rather through Dawn through Xander – Rebekah has access to Kit, who joined the Runaways in Scary Girls Need Love Too. Why not let the two stories intersect? So I wrote a lead-in at the end of Chapter 5 of Scary Girls Need Love Too that would have them in Las Vegas for Chapter 10 of Trigamy. Then it all went to hell. Now I have that second half of Chapter 10 (2,115 words) done and ‘Goddess of the Dayspring, Am I’ has been split into four parts: Chapter 10b of Trigamy, Chapter 6 of Scary Girls Need Love Too (≈2,000 words), Chapter 11 of Trigamy (≈4,000 words), and Chapter 7 of Scary Girls Need Love Too (≈2,000 words).

Yeah. What should have been roughly 2,000 words will now likely clock in at close to ten thousand.

I hope people like it because I am putting way too much effort into this.

Although some good did come of this, I suppose. I learned how to make the ≈ sign in HTML while writing this post: ≈.

Purrfect Form of Relaxation

Yeah. Cat jokes for Felicia Hardy. Not at all original, I know. Did it anyways. Staring at this, coming up with a few ideas for Trigamy illustrations…

Felicialicious

Well That’ll Learn Me

For future reference, if you’re going to have two stories that are connected, it’s a good idea to work out everything you need for both of them before you get started. Otherwise, you’ll inevitably hit some point where you have to make the awkward stall to do shit you should have done before you even got started. In my case, catching up Scary Girls Need Love Too, which takes place before and during Trigamy, so I can do the chapter of the latter that includes characters from both stories.

D’ohh.