Guava Continent Outpost

Monalisa approves.

For the whole of last year, I continued writing longer stories (10k words and above) but stopped printing them out for re-reading and editing. I had to get rid of my stash of printouts while moving and thought twice about amassing a new pile at my new home.

Reviewing the posted versions of last year's longer stories allowed me to see the advantages of getting a hard copy of my draft. Reading on paper feels slower since there are more words over a larger surface area, yet it allows me to finish editing faster since I could see from the number of physical pages how much story I have. After only editing with a computer, I spotted months after posting some parts of my story that called for refining, bringing up the total rounds of editing for the same story.

Currently I live further away from a shop where I can get my draft printed cheaply, but it's worth it even with some nervousness over someone else glimpsing at the bits of smut in the print preview 😵 My writing appears formal and official when printed out, which is kind of hilarious when I get to the parts that are smutty and in general of a nature commonly seen only in fanfic.

Yesterday, I finished editing and marking up the printout of my latest draft. It took me a month to write and a lot less time to re-read. That's a very good sign! Also I very much cherish the moments when I paused re-reading to laugh or just sit with delightful thoughts about my OTP 😌

A compilation of updates and reflections about my writing for the week. Some or all have been posted as comments for the posts for writethisfanfic.

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The stories that I can finish the fastest tend to have these common ingredients:

• Focus on 2 characters interacting
• Set in 1 place
• Takes place in-universe under 1 hour

So, to get a story finished sooner I could:

• Cut down or eliminate interactions with other characters, even background nameless figures
• Start at the place right where the story opens
• Minimise the time, and therefore actions taken for character and relationship progression

HOLY MOTHER EXPOSITION

There's good news and bad news regarding the development of my latest Timeranger fic.

Bad news: INFO DUMP FALLING LIKE ROCKS FROM THE SKY. Sometimes I ask myself if this fic needs this much worldbuilding to connect one sex scene to the next. Then again, I'd have a much harder time portraying the development of Naoto and Tatsuya's relationship if they aren't doing anything else important in their lives. Since they're such driven guys, it'd be more believable for them to have the mental space to work on better relating to each other once they've made a dent on growing in other areas.

So, I'd just have to keep working on pasting up my scifi one day at a time =/ All my years of only skimming the sex scenes of Manna's The Administration series and little of the plot are catching up to me. As I muddle through the expository sentences, I'm amazed at how many ideas I've gathered for this verse since coming up with it in the middle of Meidi-ya.

Good news: ONE MORE PAGE TO GO. Until I complete this draft! I continue to turn my restless mind inside out for a way to end this on an intriguing note and get prepared for the slog of editing.

Karaoke video for TimeFire's Theme nearly done!

New video coming up! I've been planning to make a karaoke video using Powerpoint with each slide containing a screencap + three lines - the Japanese lyric, the Japanese lyric in Hiragana for singing along and the English translation.

What's left for this project is to decide what to put for 20-secs the Instrumental bits. I'm thinking of putting more Japanese info on it and my own translation, but I put it off cause it's nerve-wracking ;_;

With this done, that means I'd have one more Timeranger fanwork prepared for next year's 20th anniversary. By then, I'd have moved on to another show and who knows what it'll be...

Re-watched more than half of Kyoryuger

Randomly decided to rewatch my first Sentai. I still haven't made headway on figuring out my problem with finishing Sentai shows -- only 7 more Time Force episodes to go and the entire LuPat endgame to go through. It's not worth stressing over completing shows, so as with my usual pattern, I shall just play what I need for the day to lift my mood.

Finished first buttsex scene of 2019!
( NSFW Talk )
15 more episodes for PR Time Force

I'm reaching the arc where Red's descendant appears in present day, which is not my favourite part of Timeranger :/

The endgame in Sentai shows is hard for me to watch, which is one of the reasons why I tend to leave shows unwatched from Ep 40+ onwards. (For the present LuPat, I'm stuck at Ep 41). It's not that I'm too attached and don't want the show to ever end; maybe it's just that I prefer the sitcom premises of the show to having to watch one episode filled with plot after another.

Working on a Sentai recs blog

It'll be a low-commitment one so I won't feel too much pressure about updating. Since I've gotten better at reccing shows that aren't my personal favourites, I'm thinking of giving this project a shot. Whatever will come of it will probably still have a large emphasis on my personal favourites, for if I feel compelled to self-censor myself, I'd probably give up on creating updates.

Making a Twitter account to spread my entries on social media seems necessary, but I don't want to engage with current, fast-paced social media anymore tbh. Still thinking what to do for self-promotion, or if it's necessary at all if the recs serve a dual purpose of logging what I've watched and liked.

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

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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: In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts.

Being used to small fandoms and creating all the content, my fannish wishlists tend to be more like to-do lists these days. One of my greatest fannish wishes is for tokusatsu fandom to have another active, thriving kink meme - a wish that no individual fan can fulfill alone.

Throughout the years, the fandom has had multiple Kamen Rider/Super Sentai/Ultraman/General tokusatsu kink memes that rarely stayed active for long unlike the long-running franchises of the source materials themselves. Below is my wishlist for the running of a new kink meme that could potentially last for a year or two.

Tokusatsu Kink Meme Wishlist

(01) Hosted on Dreamwidth with detailed tutorials on how kink memes work. Topics for the meta/tutorials can include: Tracking DW threads, writing short vs detailed prompts, writing short & satisfying fills etc. So newer fans can take advantage of the platform's features (that AO3 doesn't have) and be braver about writing prompts/creating fills.

(02) Top level threads with titles of each show. To allow tracking of the shows that you're interested in prompting and filling for.

(03) An associated AO3 Collection and Twitter account for notifications of new fills. For continuous promotion of the kink meme and fics created for it.

(04) Chat post for discussion of kinks and how to write/draw them. A free-for-all space to ask for help on the technical details and share recs of existing fics/art that focuses on niche kinks to learn from them.

(05) Affiliation with fanwork exchanges. I've been thinking that it's a waste that many cool and delicious requests in exchanges have been left unfilled, so why not reuse them as prompts for a kink meme? Plus as the requests for exchanges roll out, the kink meme may be a good avenue for practicing writing/drawing certain characters/ships. This way, the fanwork exchanges and kink meme can work in tandem to create a healthy fanwork ecosystem.

Posted my exchange treat!

I posted my completed treat on 11 Dec, four days before the official deadline. I feel unnecessarily competitive and therefore #onbrand with my ship >:3 Even after posting, my nerves on how the story will be received still have yet to abate. I'm trying to work through it now by starting another fic, one with kinks and a plot that makes it obvious that the story is mainly for me.

A vision for juicedguava 2.0: Version Dreamwidth

Like many who have jumped on to the DW bandwagon due to the recent Tumblr purge, I've been exploring the various communities on the platform. I've rebooted my own fanworks community juicedguava, named after my first fanworks blog on Tumblr.

In 2019, I plan to move my static graphic edits from the Tumblr to juicedguava, that is photo sets and a softer world remixes. I think I'll continue making GIF sets and to make up for the extra step of uploading them on another host for embedding, I can experiment with going beyond Tumblr size limits.

This week, I've made some shippy icons for the first time and learned how to use this handy website for generating the HTML for the icon table. It's been a refreshing experience to just edit pictures for the fun of it with no expectation for the final work to be of use for others. Once or twice I wondered what if I learned how to contribute graphics back when I was active on LJ fandom, but at that age when I didn't really have anything unique to express, it felt all the more awkward when I forced myself to contribute out of anxiety on missing out on all the fun.

Last year, I confronted that anxiety head on through writing and posting fics, and while it feels like a never-ending battle, each breakthrough gives me the confidence and courage to face the next intangible obstacle.

Completed this week's prompt for 100words

Wrote a Naoto/Tatsuya drabble for Prompt #123 - Ghost and posted it on the comm! I've saved the post to my memories for posting on AO3 if/when I've written more drabbles.

I was more excited than I thought I'd be about posting on a DW space that isn't my own. I had to take extra care in formatting my post to look like the post of other members; a practice that I don't think is intuitive for fans of the social media generation. For that reason, I think that if there'd be another attempt to start up fan activity on DW, a lot of detailed handholding would be required to keep up the momentum for a significant (and perhaps finite) amount of time.