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After years of hearing about Fate/Stay Night I plunked down to watch this latest anime rendition– wow. Animation by ufotable was pretty awesome and the music was great too. I really want the soundtrack.
I just read all I could of Oresama Teacher– the manga by the creator of Monthly Shoujo Nozaki-kun. there are a lot of similar characters but the basic premise is really catchy. Former Yankee/bancho leader ends up in a new school, has to hide her nature from others, falls in with other people who like to fight, gets involved in a weird school conspiracy — all good stuff.
And well, there are the drawings…. SMEXY drawings…
In all seriousness, it’s obvious the mangaka has a thing for bad buys and Nozaki-types as well as cross-dressing :)
Can’t remember if I already mentioned this to lianne but have you guys reached out to the American Library Association? They have a yearly conference and invite small press/comics down to their exhibit hall. I believe the ALA is in June this year and in San Fran (so you have a Westie out there, IIRC).
Last year’s info.
http://ala14.ala.org/node/14030Not sure if you have to apply and explain sort of the relevance but I think the light novel/manga discussion would be interesting to push forward. It would be good to hear why you thought it would work with an audience here (less-inclined to read) and what you’ve learned via digitalization.
Plus you have books and a number of published authors already working with you…
Not part of team either, but I have gotten a table at Momocon in ATL from May 28-31st.
http://www.momocon.com/I am probably going fairly art-lite this time around ( just so busy) and can focus more on books. If you have postcards you can spare, happy to set them up alongside books/other free bookmarks.
Whatever excess is left, I can give to the folks at Oxford Comics (they put them by the register). Let me know if this interests you– no need to say anyhthing now until you know your full schedule for the first part of 2015!
@courtneylunn Thanks! This is the fourth I’ve done and they get increasingly more complicated :). I’ve done a few custom beanies too but I like unicorns better. Munnies… haven’t done them yet but I’ve given blank ones away to coworkers to play with.
@corinthian : This is a blank Tokidoki sold in boxes. These are bigger than the regular ones you buy blind. They give you three or four sharpies to play with but in my case, I went out and bought other sharpies from the office supply store and then used them in combination with other pens (or pencils). The rest of the stuff are random flowers or beads that I buy at a craft store and glue on.
I don’t have anything in mind save “I want her to be sassy, or French” or something odd like that. In this case, she was a mate to a really crabby silver guy (who has been trying to break up another unicorn pair this past year) and I needed her to be different than the other three. So I made her flirty :D
Started another picture too but making slow progress. Mostly features my OC making a derpy face as he fondles his pregnant wife’s belly. Ha! I amuse myself.
It’s been pretty busy as of late so there hasn’t been much time to do creative things although I try to prioritize time for writing since I want to line up multiple books before I retire.
Art is like a very neglected hobby as of late as much of work is digital and I’ve not had energy to sit at the computer and paint.
I also like photography (http://red-bird.org/photos/) and frankly update my photos a lot more on my site or on tumblr than I do with doodles.
I also like putting together random legos and figures. Sometimes I’ll do custom toys for specific people but they’re kind of a once in a while thing since I take so long to plan them :)
Ha! After the last story this is certainly a surprise. Also rather amused by the ending of this installment. For some reason it made me think of One Punch Man…which means I hope this is going to be one ironically funny series :)
I hate finishing games with troll endings which is why I gave up on XIII-2 and XIII-3. :/
Unlike with anime with trollish tendences, you put way more hours into most console games so the endings that aren’t all that resolved feel worse for some reason.
Speaking of which Nobuhiro the Fool had a typical Kawamori troll ending that bordered on stupid. Yone’s designs though are quite pretty, I’ll give her that.
Mushishi’s episode last week was beautiful. It was really probably one of the most beautifully structured eps I’ve seen in a long time.
Also been checking out random stuff for no particularly good reason such as
* (the new) Fate Stay Night (because someone commissioned art for Archer once and told me I had to see it)
* Sailor Moon Crystal (because)
* Yowapeda
* Log Horizon (always more interesting than SAO for me)
* Shirobako (because it’s about an anime studio and is done by PA Works who generally does good character drama but sometimes can go off the rails, cough, Glasslip)
* Denki-Gai (mostly just like picking out Akihabara scenery while they talk about manga stores)
* I Can’t Understand What my Husband is saying (5 minute comedy shorts on a woman who marries an otaku)
* Bonjour Sweet Love Patisseries: Another five minute short series that’s prefacing an otome mobile game out sometime in the near future. (DESIGNS ARE PRETTY.)In all seriousness, most of these are fluffy anime or adaptations of light novel material so I’m not really sweating to keep up with any.
Missing Nozaki and “Irregular at Magic High school though”… nothing I’ve seen so far in the comedy lane or the “light novel” lane this season matches the intensity…
SAO: Bored by it. Maybe I’ll binge watch later.
I think Glasslip is losing me. I think the problem I’m having is that unless it’s Anohana (The Flower we saw that Day), most of these weird friend/group animes just can’t hold my interest. I’m not too fond of the trope whereby we throw a random group of friends up on screen and then romantic entanglements/unexpressed feelings surface and the subsequent angst is supposed to carry you along. That only works if it’s got a compelling setup. Dead ghost girl (Anohana) works as did Honey and Clover (mostly because Morita was just so off the wall).
Glasslip is just reminding too much of another PA Works entry last season about people who are essential modern water dwellers (merpeople) . It had beautiful imagery but just felt cranky watching the junior high drama.
Nozaki-kun is just fun. I worry every week it’s going to jump the shark… but this past week in that second arc when Nozaki is pushing that cart and it goes flying off that staircase… man, that was a visual punchline worth waiting for.
Sword Art Online 2 is starting off better than that last arc in season 1. But… I’m wary of where it’ll head. After seeing Log Horizon, I realized that SAO was really lazy about its payoff in books 1/2. LH as an anime is a far better , more disciplined experience.
I really was hoping Samurai Jam-Bakumatsu Rock would be better than it is but I want to burn it with fire. I love Bakumatsu era stuff. But this one is trying too hard and I really hate the character designs for Sakamoto, Takasugi, and Katsura. The Shinsengumi boy band ones are very tame and not very inventive. Sadly Hijikata looks like historical Hijikata and Okita is “vicious pretty.”
I feel obligated to watch it though. But I would rather have the Urakata versions as done by the folks who did Hakuoki Shinsengumi.
I pretty much loved the last bit whereby (spoileryspoileryspoilery) …walked off… Did not expect that development.
Been flipping back and forth between pages. Is that last page character the same as page 2 character?
I’m not sure what to make of Paypal and recurring payments. Guess I should have cancelled the first before instating the second!
Solution worked out so it’s all good now and I’m downloading the updates. Yay for compiled works!
I think I also lost access to content with the switch. Not sure what’s up but it looks like while Paypal recognizes me with a recurring sub the website doesn’t. let me know if I need to do anything. thanks!
Not sure if this is a bug but while logged in and trying to change membership levels a few odd things happened:
* The confirmation of the switch seemed to go through but the resulting page showed me at the 5.00 level for recurring (monthly).
* I went into paypal to look at what was going on and had both the monthly and the vip showing up.So manually cancelled the 5 dollar recurring membership and doublechecked that the VIP one is still there. It shows up and seems to have the recurring stuff set up correctly but don’t know the net effect on your side in terms of what you’ll end up seeing in terms of numbers?
Payment type Amount due each cycle Total cycles Remaining cycles Cycle frequency Amount sent Initial Payment $0.00 USD -- -- -- $0.00 USD Trial Period $15.00 USD 1 0 Monthly $15.00 USD Regular Recurring Payment $10.00 USD Indefinite Indefinite Monthly $0.00 USD Total $15.00 USD
thought I’d flag that in case others make that switchover from monthly to “other level.”
Some early thoughts (recognizing more discussion might happen once the podcast is out from behind the firewall):
* Would you consider running member-only polls to help shape the next project to come to print — whether an artbook for Off*Beat or one of the finished prose stories? MEmbers who pay the monthly are already slightly invested in the larger concept of “Sparkler Monthly” and if they can /are willing to pay a sub, more likely to kick in for smaller tiers of the various campaigns. [Would you also consider building a more permanent form behind the paywall to catch membership thoughts, such as “What was your favorite story/comic this month? Why?” –> Basically go with the Shonen Jump method.]
* I think an artbook actually might be a good project candidate for Kickstarter. However, I think limiting it to one creator-property is too preemptive and risky. FOr the most part, the artbook projects I’ve seen fund well on Kickstarter are often anthologies. IN this case, featuring art for characters from Sparkler Monthly stories could work — you could draw from your main artists and additional “guest artists” in order to leverage their collective social media power and support the “cause” of Sparkler.
* IN response to some reader requests — would you consider POD for the prose books? Those are a little easier to set up with Createspace and not as cost-prohibitive to get into. (If you have a very good Word source file to start with that makes clean use of headings and styles, your conversion from digital to print for Createspace is not terrible.) It does mean someone who processes files needs to set a few days aside to work on it but once you get the hang of it, it’s not too bad!
You’re welcome!
There is a small possibility that your story (if original characters but borrowing/inspired from a fandom setting) could be suitable for AO3 (Archive of our own). I had a conversation once with one of the board (I guess) who said original work wasn’t discouraged although it seemed like it would be hard to find an audience unless it tickled the right “fandom niche.”I never went back to follow up/try it although I have thought about it.
BTW – I was a Gargoyles fan too, although I admit that I was not always liked because I refused to ship Elisa/Goliath. (I’m a sucker for redemption plotlines so I wanted Demona and Goliath to be endgame >_<. I always seem to ship dark-horse pairings though and don’t mind it — it seems to be the one thing I do consistently and annoyingly well :DDD)
If you’re going to write romance or fantasy, I do recommend Wattpad. I think that’s pretty safe in those genres. Sci-fi less so there but not for a lack of trying. There’s a lot of good authors coming in now (Wattpad has impressive numbers) so I hope it means the audience there will mature!
If you’re looking to connect with other serial authors, I would poke around the Webfiction Guide Forums and possibly starterserials forums (which just opened). I’ve had kind of mixed feelings about Goodreads and the Web SErial group there because a lot of people who show up there throw down a link and run away without ever paying attention to the fact that the web serial group there is all authors, many of whom don’t read other authors.
Jukepop (formerly Jukepop Serials) is another place where you find lots of stories . They only recently changed their whole dynamic to be more “social” so not quite sure if it’s got a good community. (I haven’t been able to stomach their forced log-in to read chapters and the constant Facebook popups… Facebook is really intrusive and tracks you all over the web, so I end up no wanting to engage with Jukepop very much because I don’t trust any site that forces facebook upon you :/ ).
Can’t think of many places you’ll see folks who serialize interfacing well and openly ,though. IT’s all so scattered and niche . That said — you find a lot of authors on twitter. If you haven’t joined — maybe it’s worth lurking?
Phoenixfire:
I’ve run into a lot of wordpress.com blogs featuring writing but to be honest, I don’t bother with them much. Save the people who I have a relationship with (i.e., long-time fandom connection or other writing connection), I don’t follow authors but stories. Maybe once I have a strong rapport with that writer after finishing a few of their works I’ll start to “follow the author” but that’s still fairly rare for me.
As a reader, my preference is to not have to pick through various blog entries to read a story. If possible, I think a separate wordpress.com blog or blogspot.com should be used for long epics. That said, if you have to keep to one site and want to mix it up with other things, make sure you have a clear tagging system and an index so I can jump straight to whatever chapter I left off. Whatever you do make sure you have a proper index page and navigation system or you won’t be eligible to list in many directories.
Regarding Project Wonderful — I don’t recommend it much for “a writing blog.” The PW network tends to be full of webcomics and gaming folks.. it’s already an uphill battle to advertise serial fiction via PW … but at least some folks advertise on other fiction sites but usually they advertise a specific story.
…
You also should participate in communities for readers such as Wattpad, Figment, and all those lookalikes.
I would cross-post chapters in those places. That said, I would focus on finishing stories one at a time. (Some folks update randomly in fanfiction.net skipping from fic to fic and that doesn’t work well in these other environments. It actually can aggravate your readers if they are anxiously waiting for an update to their favorite story. People are more impatient on these sites than on ff.net!) Be aware though that you won’t necessarily see a major bump to your author site off the bat. Those places are designed to “keep you in” to maximize their readership and influence. However, you can put in details like websites and other social medial accounts in profiles. THe people who *really* like your writing and aren’t so lazy will click on over, although in very small percentages.
If you’d like to post your URL for your current blog, I’d be willing to look and see if there’s something more I can advise.
