Development Update - Yumi-chan and poetry

NaNoReNo

Oh yeah, that first.

Two days left. Everyone scrambles. But it'll all be okay. :)

Yumi-chan's Wonderful Cake Shop

Once my obligations to NaNoReNo are finished, I plan to redouble my focus on coding Yumi-chan's Wonderful Cake Shop until it's complete. I've already learned the lesson of no firm dates unless I'm positive, sooooo no firm date.

Poetry

The more rambly bit. I recently got a new used laptop, pulling all my files from my old crusty dead laptop from a couple years ago. And on there was a whole mountain of bad fanfiction, bad poetry, venting documents about how shitty my life was, video game walkthroughs, and a bunch of other stuff accumulated throughout high school/my early young adult years. Most of it was pretty embarassing to read. But there are, surprisingly, some good bits still in there, and so in the near future I will face the task of wading through all of that to find the jewels.

I was most struck by my poetry portfolio. How I keep mine is, only the works that I feel are good enough to be published. Well...Let's just say that some of the stuff I used to think was good enough to be published...I may have been mistaken.

Will that poetry ever see the light of day? Who knows...?

Circus Rambles - On conventions

Let's talk about cons!

Past

I've been to A-Kon twice, once in 2011 and once in 2015. The first time kind of ended up sucking towards the end due to personal reasons, but the con itself was fun, and this last year...also ended up sucking towards the end due to personal reasons, but the con itself was fun. Funny how that works out.

I know an anime dealer in town, though, and she says that A-Kon isn't very nice to the dealers, so I'm wondering if I'm gonna go back in the future.

Present

I'm doing two cons this year, Arkansas Anime Festival and GenCon.

I didn't plan on going to A2F (as folks call it), but the other big con I wanted to go to, AnimeFest, is the weekend immediately after GenCon, which was locked in first plan-wise, and I probably can't get that much time off work at once. Plus I live really close to A2F's hosting site and it's much less costly to travel there. It'll be okaaaaay? Truthfully it isn't the con I wanted to go to, but I have to think about money, you know...Anyway, I will be attending Saturday and maybe Sunday if I feel like it, decked out in traditional Circus garb.

GenCon I am mostly attending in order to see my nieces, since I don't get to see them enough. I have not confirmed what day/days I'm attending yet. I've never been to a gaming con before, so we'll see how it goes. I see next year it's scheduled the same weekend as Anime Fest, so that'll have to be a competition of sorts...

Future

Cons I really want to go to one day:

- AnimeFest
- Anime Expo
- Anime North (even though passports are expensive for some reason)

So we'll see what all happens.

Circus Rambles - On Happy Binder/Junk Journal crafting

When I was a kid, I had a huge love for crafting. I made bugs out of pom-poms and pipe cleaners, or those pre-made crafting kits, mostly. 'Twas fun!

Recently, I started getting back into crafting a good bit. One crafter I found online and started following was Janette Lane, inventor of the Pocket Letter. She does really cute crafting videos; you should go look her up on Youtube! Anyway, one of these videos was on the Happy Binder, more commonly known as a junk journal. I'd been thinking about how to store all my mini-prints and artist goodies, and today I decided that this would be the way!

The mini binder is an adorable thing. I found mine at Target, along with mini binder paper and mini binder sheet protectors and about seven other cute things that weren't related to this project but were cute. After getting home and discovering that I did not own a hole puncher, I went out and got a mini one of those too (Walmart was out of big ones) and got to work.

The contents are mini prints, stickers, bookmarks, sketches or postcards from artists' shops, things like that. Basically, I just punched holes in them and arranged them in a pretty random method. The sheet protectors are in the very back for fragile things like pencil sketches.

And this is the finished (for now) project. In the pocket are two sticker sheets from Chiikaboom that I haven't decided what to do with yet. The cover is just a white sheet of cardstock since I haven't decided how to decorate that either. But yay, a project started! Yay, another reason to go to lots of cons and get more stuff to fill this with!

And now I need to get back to work badly, but at least procrastination looks pretty!

Chiikaboom interview announcement + Retooling

Announcements!

Yumi-chan's Wonderful Cake Shop

On Patreon, I will be posting a little mini interview with the game's artist, Chiikaboom! If you haven't heard of her, you should go Google her. The interview will also be included in a guidebook that will release alongside the game. If you want to see that early, you can do so by pledging any amount to me on Patreon! It's also full of previews of stuff I'm working on, mostly Yumi-chan previews at the moment, but other stuff in the future, too.

Retooling

I recently discovered the works of Porpentine, author of With Those We Love Alive and the new novella Psycho Nymph Exile. I don't feel like I understand half of what I've read, but I enjoy it a lot anyway. And it inspired me. It made me realize that I don't have to put my other creative writing endeavors on hold, necessarily. I still write poetry and I still want to share that with the world too.

Some Strange Circus will now include all of my writing endeavors, poetry and possible eventual future novel as well as visual novels and interactive fiction. The website will be a bit messy for a few days as I change things around, but it should be done pretty soon.

This does not mean that I will be paying any less attention to game development. This simply means that I plan to share other kinds of writing in addition to making interactive fiction games.

...I hope that's okay? I just kind of lost my train of thought.

Anyway. Thanks for your support, and hope to have some all-new material at you guys soon!