Guava Continent Outpost

Prompt: Talk about why you participated in Snowflake &/or what you got out of it.

At last, the final day of this year's Snowflake Challenge has come. I was resolved to complete all the prompts yet I didn't think I'd actually do it and even stayed up late to finalize my posts. It's a good time to reflect on what I've achieved through the past two weeks of daily posting and sharing.

More content for my long neglected DW. Like many other DW users, I've created my DW years ago to participate in a fandom event and never bothered to fill it up with entries. Now, I've got my thoughts and a few fanworks up, and even hosted some discussion in the comments of my original posts.

Picked up new skills. I thought I'd just practice writing casual entries for an audience. I'd never have expected to have picked up vidding - an activity I tried once and thought I'd never do again due to its time intensive nature. Yet here at the finish line, I've managed to complete a couple of video edits, a shippy one and a non-shippy one which I've shared on Youtube. In looking up and tinkering with the code to share my vids on DW, I managed to practice some coding as well!

Connected with fans from my small fandom. A big shoutout to evilinsanemonkey and silveradept! I really enjoyed our conversations on tokusatsu. Us meeting made it worth it for me to just pile on the squee and thinky thoughts for tokusatsu (and the 2000 Sentai that's my current obsession) despite being unsure how many people out there would know the fandom.

Before today, I found myself redoing a couple of Snowflake prompts. I guess you can find me doing that at one point or another in 2019 to show my love for my fandom no matter who's watching. Until next time, everyone!

Prompt: In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

Writing a traditional 'to-do' list makes me feel like I'm forcing myself into doing things I actually want to do, which doesn't make sense. So instead of listing 'to-dos' for the year, I'll write a note to self of the habits and practices that I know has helped me apply my skills and create what I want since I've been an active contributor in fandom.

My ultimate goal is to keep up as best as I can the following habits and practices:

(01) Binge watch less than 15 episodes a day.

Despite the strong temptation to finish a series, especially a 50 eps show, as soon as possible, I need time over days to pick up the little details to enjoy both the worldbuilding and characterization.

(02) Write 10k words of fic for a ship before declaring said ship to be my OTP.

Shipping is srs business for me as it's the central pillar of my fanwork creation activities. Before comitting to one ship, I'd best make sure that I can think a lot and have enough to say about it for a significant amount of time.

(03) Never 'vanity google'.

Peering into social media (mainly Twitter) to see what non-commenters are talking about my work is like looking back at the ruins of the city and turning into a pillar of salt. I'd get salty from reading comments on my writing and creative choices that weren't left on my fics themselves, and so aren't meant for my eyes in the first place. I used to be able to know how to find those hurtful tweets through Twitter's advanced search, going back in time to the painful moments even if the critics have long moved on.

I've taken care to avoid vanity googling even in moments where I crave more concrete feedback for my work. Anyone who cares about my writing and my ship--my intended audience--will have left actual comments for me to read and reply to, and there's no reason for me to seek more validation from strangers who don't really care.

(04) When starting a new web account, create text/written content first before graphics.

Otherwise, it's too easy to endlessly avoid the hard work of writing in favour of tinkering with Photoshop/Canva.

(05) Write smut regardless of whether there's an audience for it.

Same with shipping, writing smut is integral to my fannish identity and mental well-being. As long as I can be left alone in my own space, I shall allow myself to write as much smut and kinks as I want as an act of self-care.

Prompt: In your own space, talk about your creative process(es) — anything from the initial inspiration to how you feel after something’s done.

The end and beginning of my creative process for writing fic is updating my fic tracker. At the start of each month, I set aside a page in my Moleskine to tracking my growth as a fic writer.

I've started making a fic tracker each month in December 2017 and kept up the practice since then. Putting the completed tracker of December 2017 and December 2018 side by side, I can see how I've developed as a writer in how I've developed my system.



I've decided to only track the factors in my writing that lead to more inspiration, motivation and happiness. At the start, my goal was to hit 10k words/month and so I tracked the total number of words written at the bottom of the page.

The first time I hit my 10k words/month goal in March 2018, I was happy. Every month, I would reset the number of words written to 0 and write my way to 10k. I started getting stressed on whether I'd meet my monthly goal each month, though I always did for a while.

So I stopped tracking my overall progress in terms of word count. I experimented with mood trackers for a while to track whether my mood was up/down on a certain day in which I've written.

I've took this further by starting a mood tracking journal. It's a small notebook for my private thoughts and grievances about writing and publishing in fandom, also including my interpretations of characters and OTPs that I'm still developing for a fic project. I colour code my entries to correspond with my mood for the day - hot pink for pleased and emerald green for troubled. Each entry is numbered and I'll record the number of the entry in my Moleskine fic tracker at the end of the day.

Lately, here's what I'm tracking to make myself happier through writing:

• Meeting my 500words/day daily quota


• My mood tracking entries


• When I've published a fic on AO3/DW


• No. of days taken to complete a fic


• How far I'm along in a fic


• Fics posted/worked on each month (on the right page)

I've found that posting entries on DW makes me more mindful about my processes and my mood when engaging with fandom. Once Snowflake Challenge is over, I may start tracking my DW activities to stay on track with this new journaling habit.

Prompt: Commit an Act of Kindness. In your own space, share what you’ve done, talk about what you’ve done, or simply leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

When I first joined tokusatsu fandom, I acted like fanfiction grew on trees. Now that I've written about 100k+ words of fic for the fandom spanning across three different shows/ships, I know that's not the case. Though I feel like I'm planting a forest whenever I start writing all the fic for a new show and ship.

Today, I've decided to thank the excellent moderators of the Toku Holidays exchange for motivating fans to get out of their comfort zone and write great stories for their fellow fans. I've done so by creating promotional material for their next run - fic teasers for all the fics posted in the 2018 collection for sharing on tumblr and Twitter.

In an email to the mods, I've sent an attachment of:
-Fic teasers for tumblr & Twitter sized to the current optimum dimensions for the respective platforms
-Fic teaser templates
-A Word Document with the accompanying caption & links to the fics for copy+pasting on tumblr & Twitter
-Two screenshots as samples of how the fic teaser + caption would look like on tumblr & Twitter

Fic Teaser Templates

( Read more... )
I've told the mods that I haven't shared any of the fic teasers so I won't repost the ones I made for other writers here. I'll just share the teaser I made for my fic - to best represent my writing style and the ship, I only took a screenshot of the 6.9MB (way too large for tumblr) GIF that I've embedded in the fic instead of a fic excerpt.



(Phew, I sure feel like I went through a Sentai mecha upgrade episode.)

Prompt: Stretch yourself a little and try something new. Go play in a new fandom or with a new pairing. Try working in a new medium. Or check out some fanworks that are new to you.

New things I tried for today's challenge:
-Created a fanvideo for my otp
-Using free online tools that I don't need to DL on my PC (Adobe Spark, sites for cutting videos/trimming mp3s/removing sound from video clips)
-Set to the rap+bridge of a K-Pop song (Shinhwa's "Perfect Man")

Timeranger Fanvideo: Perfect Rival

Why K-pop? For this ship it's justified cause one of them is an actual chaebol heir.

And like Chekhov's gun, the code for embedding video that I've uncovered for Day 3 came in handy. Yay!

Prompt: In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.

When the creative juices aren't flowing, there's one thing fans of non-English canons can do to stay involved with the community--translation. For those who're just starting to learn the language of their canon recs, here's three platform recs that budding translators can use as study material.

3 Platform Recs for Translator Superheroes

(01) Wikipedia in your canon's language

You may be surprised to find out that the non-English Wikipedia page for your canon can be five times longer than its English page. There's often more references to cast and crew interviews and extra material that English-speaking fans aren't able to access.

For instance, I've found the exact birthdates and family background of the main heroes of Showa era Kamen Rider series (filmed in the 70s) on their Japanese Wiki page. A closer look at the Plot and Characters sections may lead to more discoveries of tidbits that aren't explicitly referred to in the canon itself.

(02) Twitter fan accounts

For Japanese fandoms, Twitter is THE social platform for fannish activity. Aside from accounts of individual fans, you may find challenge accounts with unique hashtags for challengers to share their fanworks. Tokusatsu fandom has tokusatsu1draw2, a challenge to draw a fanart using a prompt from at least one of the three categories--Work (Shows), Word (Character, Organization etc.) and Free Prompt--within an hour.

If you're looking to encourage activity in your side of fandom, challenge accounts can be a useful starting point for generating inspiring prompts and creating a structured challenge.

(03) Official cast blog/social media account

Commentary from cast members is often a treasure trove for extending the pleasure of canon.

Right after an episode of Lupinranger VS Patranger has aired, I look forward to reading the official cast blog in which the cast members take turns to address the show's fans and talk about what it's like to work on the show. Also, there would often be pics of the actors for my otp being gay (Exhibit A,Exhibit B) like their characters in-universe :P

Prompt: In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

One of my favourite moments in Timeranger is Naoto's first transformation as TimeFire, especially the part where he's able to understand the English tutorial recorded on his transformation device. This scene is the reason for my headcanon of Naoto being good in English, or at least in understanding spoken English. 彼の英語レベルは超ヤバいぞ!





Unfortunately, this little detail wasn't copied over to the American adaptation of the same scene in Power Rangers Time Force. We don't see Eric Myers, Naoto's PR counterpart, squinting at 'runes' and recognizing them as kanji, heh.

TIMEFIRE!!

Prompt: In your own space, talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calms you or keeps you sane.

After all these years, my fanworks blog (juicedguava) will always be my happy place. I first created the sideblog to carve out my own little corner and focus on my ships/favs that make me happy.

juicedguava is where I got to improve my skills in graphic design. There's the first GIFset I made for Mari/Takumi from Kamen Rider Faiz, my first OTP from Kamen Rider. Some time ago, I wondered what I'd think now when I look back on this first GIFset, after making and posting about 200 more GIFsets in the following years. I expected myself to be critical about not using the optimal image dimensions, using X number of frames, looping my GIFs for X amount of seconds, writing my caption in a different way etc.

What I thought as I returned to my starting point was actually, 'Not bad.'

If I were to re-do this GIFset, I'd have made different decisions regarding its image dimensions/frames/time etc. Yet the application of my skill and experience matters less than the warm memory of creating something new that practically erases the fanwork's minor imperfections for me.

From consistent creating and posting on juicedguava, I've learned a lot about myself as a creator. I've accepted that for most of my time, I'd rather only create for my OTPs and cater to myself and my fellow shippers first. I've moved on from worrying about the quality of my fanworks for the value of practicing my skills in public and sharing the love.

For the past two years, I've been more invested in working on my writing over creating graphics. When I embark on new graphics projects from now on, I can always look through my tumblr archive and draw from fond memories of juicedguava to build another happy place for myself.