Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

I had a good idea for a shōrt about ladies sharing their notes in school. I wasn't at the computer, so I noted the word "Notes" in my notes.

Unfortunately, as there is neither such a note in my phone nor a good idea in my brain, it was just a dream. I have way too many ideas for someone who can't publish them, but I always appreciate more to mull over. The ones for which I've typed blurbs are only the very tip of the iceberg.

The dream was obviously brought on by reading 『★Y★R★Y★R★』 here. They finally get to the real yuri, and apparently that's not the part that sticks in my head. Bloody comedy

As noted, I'll be out of town from tomorrow through Monday. I don't know whether or not I'll be checking email or LJ during that time.

In light of the previous announcement, I'll probably keep the blog to more timely things. For instance, I just found that I have so many ideas for shōrts that I can't really remember what one of them is. I really should just type them all up so I don't forget all the specifics. It's too bad it's so inconvenient to use the computer.

As noted before, if ebay allows sellers to ship a week after receiving payment, I would be able to sell my things. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any official reference to the rule. Does anyone know about specifics, or if it's just left up to the buyer and seller?

As opposed to the research described in my previous post, I figured that for "Final Exam," I could find a fair amount of stuff on the Website. As it turns out, there's hardly any background text on the pages. But what really struck me is that you can download any of the current books for free. Although the information won't be as accurate, this would prove an extremely useful resource for someone who doesn't already bootleg them.

Also, I'm amused by the fact that this commercial site is chummy and informal, addressing the customer as "kimi." As he'd most likely be a dude, I don't find this particularly offensive （笑）.

I was doing research for one of my shorts. According to more careful perusal of the wiki, my original premise was completely incorrect, as he's an exception because he was the primogenitor, not because of the specifics of the act. It's too bad they don't actually cite their information, but I guess I shouldn't be too disappointed to lose one that I can't sell anyway. I was thinking about that one because it seemed like an easy one to draw and have people critique my Japanese without publishing something that I'd want to enter in the contest later (and thus would prefer not to have floating around the Web too much). With my illustrations, at least, I can tell whether or not I'm getting better.

I haven't been getting around to posting much about these things, but I got around to it this time because I thought that showing off this part I turned up seemed easy. The glossary didn't help save my story, but I was interested to find an entire essay on Celas×Integra, and the first and third stories use that and its converse, respectively, as a gimmick—but they're comedies, so you shouldn't expect too much. (In each of the two, one of them compares the other's supposed tastes to "a certain MI-6 lieutenant commander." I have no idea who that is.) As there are no pictures, I wouldn't be able to post it on daily_yuri even if I could take the heat. For the same reason, I'm not familiar with the actual discussion communities where it would be more appropriate.

They also repeatedly use the quote in the subject line for some reason. That line used to bother me (why's he talking to someone who isn't there?) until I remembered that the guy who fights only with wire also happens to be the gunsmith. . . .

I also noticed that this and GUN SMITH CATS both claim that it's absurd to think that a ~20-year-old American or English lady would be a virgin.

My orders for the second quarter will be going out pretty soon. Since the middleman didn't seem to understand when I asked him about combining orders, I'm planning on going back to amazon, as long as I can get it before Tsubomi Vol.1 sells out again. (If it consistently sells out faster, I'm considering moving the orders to the month that one comes out in the future. As non-periodical limited editions are by definition unable to be predicted, that may be a more usable criterion.)

I'm also going to be getting rid of some other old comics (none yuri, since I'm keeping those ones). As my job prevents me from being able to consistently ship things within the time limits that would be required for official selling, I'm hoping someone here might want them. Off the top of my head, I've got Jōki Tanteidan (the full eight of the original, plus Vol. 9 of Shin, for which the first eight were essentially just a reordering of the original), EARTHIAN (all five of the original series, which doesn't include the last few chapters or extras because the serialization ended in-between full volumes; I imagine you can get pretty much everything you miss here if you buy the last volume of the complete edition), and X (volumes 1–18, which is as many of the long-on-hiatus series as have been compiled permanently, although there were apparently a few more chapters in a special edition of Gekkan Newtype). I'm going to get rid of Hōshin Engi as well, but I'm keeping them for the foreseeable future since, as noted before, I'm thinking of using a speech pattern for which this is the only reference I recall having in one of my shorts. If you're interested in any of these, I'm sure you can find your own links (and post them here for our reference).

Contrary to my usual tastes, I rather liked the music video that was posted on daily_yuri the other day. However, it brings up the problem with ethics in these communities. Particularly with free media, I don't mind people posting samples to blogs, but they should at least credit the creators. (In this case, the poster doesn't know, but she should at least have posted a link to where she found it so that others could try to figure it out.) If any of my works ended up there, I'd have to go there and fight them. The same goes for scanslation sites where they don't even give the real title of the works, much less the ISBN. If you don't allow people any way to buy them, your mantra about why it's acceptable doesn't work very well.

This time, I've got time before the deadline (as far as I can tell). However, there are a couple of things that concern me:

1. It says to pay by going to the bank and requesting a postal transfer (郵便振替). I imagine I can probably do this even from the States, but it'll be difficult for me.

2. There's a fixed shipping charge of ¥600, regardless of how much you order. Thus, I really would prefer to get more than just one volume. The specials from the other three mags probably contain side stories to other things I've tagged, but my wish list is so backlogged that I haven't gotten around to buying parts of the actual series of any of them. So, alternatively, does anyone else want a copy of SayuriHime Vol*.4 (¥1,000 a pop)?

Anyway, since it's a fixed shipping cost, they'd probably be ticked if I tried to ship it to this side of the (other) pond, so I'm probably using postty. This means that, at least for the journey overseas, it's more economical if I pick the full three packages to be combined. (Of course, since amazon has free shipping to postty anyway, they often split orders into smaller pieces without warning, so it's hard to say how many there will be.) As it's noted to be shipped toward the end of April, it should be close enough to combine with my next standard order (now three quarterlies and counting!).

*It has lower-case Roman letters, unlike the main mook, since it's "sa."

I still haven't gotten around to typing the second part of my thoughts about the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō, but I have posted some blurbs for the shorts. I'd appreciate it if anyone is actually interested in reading any of them. "Diamond in the Rough" is the one of which I almost got all the way through the rough draft (because I thought of it first, not because it's at the bottom of the list), but I haven't gotten around to finishing it or making all the changes I've thought up since then. That's the trouble with momentum, I guess. I also see that I'm really bad at writing prose (since I mostly only read dialogue).

arifyn mentioned that he's not reading much of my stuff in Japanese because it's a pain in the ass with the Chinese characters. That means that I can draw the line above reading English and below looking things up (as it's just cut-and-paste online). I thought that BABEL FISH might be useful to at least give you a general idea of what I'm saying, but it turns out it was even worse than I thought, to the point of ignoring white space and changing the names of the title characters in the draft I posted earlier to "thin D," "beer tris," and "thornback me" (which, though amusing, doesn't get people to read it).

From the entry here, I couldn't throw off my love of memes, even though I'm a dude. I was interested to find that "adult yuri" is also known as "joshi yaoi," but that makes me sound bad, too. . . . Anyway, my results were surprisingly accurate in places:

*博士の貴女は、有言実行を信条とする知的なオタク女子タイプです。メガネが似合います。一度口にしたことは、周りの協力を得ながら、必ず実行しようと努力します。的確な判断力とまれにみるタフネスぶりで周囲の信頼も厚く、リーダーとしての才能が開花すれば大きな組織を築くことができます。会社勤めをするにしても、変化の多い職種やクリエイティブな仕事に才能を発揮します。恋愛にはやや臆病で奥手でかなり鈍感ですが、一度好きになってしまうと激しく燃え上がる傾向があります。その一途さゆえに、相手の女子にだまされたり、貢がされたり、勝手に怪しいプロジェクトメンバーに組み込まれている可能性も秘めています。基本的には、物事の道理を柔軟に考える思索派で、意思が堅く、独立心が旺盛ですが、色事に対しては極度の近視です。

*מיכאל・偉闇・王さんに幸運をもたらすライトは、ちょうちんです！

*そんなあなたの本日の運勢はこちらです！

Speaking of today, it's already arifyn's birthday in Japan. Perhaps it's a good time for him to be reborn as a lady (particularly considering he's already married to one).

Apparently there's another one of a level that I should be downloading it. Sadly, I'm so backlogged that I don't have the disk space for another series. I should just burn or delete a lot of stuff.

(And yes, finding the subject for this post took about as long as typing it.)

You probably haven't noticed that I've added a bunch more ideas to my shorts since the last time I actually announced one (although I have obliquely mentioned ones that I didn't announce in the previous two posts with the tag). I'm considering moving the list to Google Docs so that you don't have to join to look at it. (Wikispaces doesn't seem to have as good a system for editing databases.) Incidentally, with this many ("¿Oro?" being rather long), I could probably even make up an entire graphic novel doohicky (thus meaning that people would actually be able to get copies after the mook sells out), if I could get someone to publish it.

On the topic of publication, I finally got around to examining the latest rules for the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō. An older version can be found here; as it appears to be the same other than the facts that the money amounts have changed and the newer version has added typos, I'll refer directly to the categories there:

受賞者特典 (Prizes): There are two overall prizes (the special one and the regular one), which both include publication of the winning entry and a contract for a serial. That would be damned nifty, but unfortunately, as I've mentioned, I don't currently have one that looks good even for S, much less the one that has a category in the contest. As this section is not specific to category, I imagine the judges' choices would be colored by which magazine/mook would benefit from it (for instance, not likely that they'd give both prizes to one in the same category). Below those two are the top prizes for the four magazine/mooks. Each includes publication of the winning entry and the winner's next story. All of the above are interesting in that they give you a contract to publish stuff that the judges haven't seen (or that you haven't even written) yet; I suppose there has to be a balance between the guarantee and the exit clauses in the contract depending on how good these works are. Also, it appears that they don't have to give away these prizes unless there are worthy entries, as only two of the six had winners this year. There are lower prizes that don't give you contracts, but still give you a patron editor for your continuing work; these ones are apparently not limited in minimum or maximum number of winners, as there were twenty-four winners between four categories and three levels of success, not covering all combinations of the two.

応募資格 (Entry Qualifications): You can't enter if you've previously published something through ID, but I imagine if you have, you have a step up on getting your other stuff published without having to enter a contest. Also, it's interesting that the work you submit is only forbidden from having been published professionally, so in theory, you could submit something you've already sold as a dōjinshi. Of course, I'd probably lose money trying to sell those while living in America, so the more pertinent point to me is that I could, for instance, post the works on the Web first. There is of course the chance that someone else would see my works and steal ideas. My social worker suggests that I look a bit into international copyright law, but for now, I think that I should be pretty safe just pointing out to the authorities (in this case, the judges) and having them take that into account.

応募規定 (Entry Specifications): Some stuff about ink type, paper size, file format, et cetera. I don't think I'd ever heard of MO before, despite all the Japanese stuff I read. Apparently you have to send in the text as a separate piece from the actual laid-out manuscript. One thing I find unusual is that you're free to choose the length of the story, although obviously the judges are going to take whether or not it's worth the space into account (for instance, a greater number of pages than the mook itself would probably be a bad idea).

必要記入事項 (Required Included Information): A bunch of stuff to write on the back of page 1

結果発表 (Announcement of Results): When the winners will be published. I'm not going to make this deadline, so the current one is irrelevant.

原稿返却 (Manuscript Return): As usual, you have to add an SASE if you want your stuff back. Of course, this isn't important if you send a digital copy.

諸権利 (Various Rights): ID gets all rights to publish the work, so if you've published it as an amateur as noted above, you'll probably have to take it down. (I'd also want to give daily_yuri gift illustrations to convince people not to distribute bootlegs. This would be a lot easier if I could get a compilation out quickly at least in Japan, so they actually have a legal way of getting the stuff if they miss the mook.) It's also interesting that they reserve the rights for screening and performance, which means that they have considered the possibility of making adaptations of the works in other media. One point that sticks out is the fact that they get the rights to the entries for all prizes, including the ones that aren't high enough that they get contracts for publication. I haven't seen any of those published so far, so I hope they don't just sit on them. They don't keep the ones that don't win as with RPG Superstar, which puts me in the odd position of hoping I win either one of the top six prizes or nothing at all. I also notice that it only says they get the rights to the work itself. I hope they don't want ownership of specific content, as in particular I'm using overlapping settings with some of my projects. Ms. Eiki has sold a spin-off that she couldn't get published about the same characters as her pro works as a dōjinshi, but she didn't get there through the contest, so she's likely to have different terms.

This is long enough for the moment, so I'll talk more about general concerns for the contest later. I should look over the non-contest submission guidelines, too.