Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

On the topic of possible entries for the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō (YuriHime Bumon):

I forgot in the last paragraph that there's also one in S that has a drag queen (thus, the subject clipped from the same quote as before) as pretty much the most important character after the protagonist and heroine. I guess these guys are more palatable than big, hairy gits like the ones in "Spaghetti Western." There have been various men who've appeared in the numerous sad one-shots throughout the years, but those are the only two major ones whom I remember in serials.

Meanwhile, there may be another problem if I have to give up my ownership of the intellectual property as with the contest for my other half, which would mean that it would have to be thrown out if I couldn't get it published. If so, I'd want to make sure that I have the best chance I'll ever have of winning before I risk it. It would be better, of course, if I could instead become an established author/illustrator and thus be considered for publishing without having to take that risk in the first place. I'll have to take a closer look at the rules when I get back to those issues as part of my other stuff I'm supposedly doing. (I can also use that opportunity to look over the previous winning entry and the judges' comments for that and the runners-up to get a better idea of what they want.)

Another consideration is the problem of graphic novels. I've seen that Japanese author/illustrators often have problems getting one-shots that have been published in periodicals printed in more permanent form as they're not enough to make up a full compilation. A common solution is to put them in as extras in volumes of series by the same person, but that wouldn't work very well in my case, because these ones would read right-to-left, while my projects are left-to-right. YuriHime Comics dealt with that through Yuri-Hime Selection, but I don't know whether they'll do that again or how long it'll be in print. Authors sometimes publish sequels/spinoffs/side stories of their own works as dōjinshi, as you may have noticed (also mentioned here), but I don't imagine they're allowed to do that with the stuff that's been licensed by professional publishers.

Speaking of which, I hear that Zettai×Roman actually has quite a lot of stuff that wasn't published in the mooks, including a short from a long-out-of-print anthology, two from another magazine, and further explanation on the one from YuriHime whose details I found quite incomprehensible (also, incidentally, the only one I remember where one of the main characters is anywhere near as promiscuous as in mine). I haven't been bothering to buy the graphic novels as I already have all of the serials, but I suppose I should be checking their introductions to see whether the extras are worth it.

By the by, as I was grabbing links for this post, I found there was a tachi-yomi (reading without buying) page in case you want to try any of the publications.

As was the case with Spanish back when I thought I knew it, I'm planning also to publish official Japanese versions of my projects. (Of course, as I've noted here, my first one might be a bit heavy on the English even in the Japanese version.) I'm far from fluent, of course, but this way I can provide translations that are much truer to the author's intent than most. The expanded exposure this should provide would also give me a chance to come into contact with people who are fluent, which means I could have a chance to actually learn the language, and perhaps impose on someone to correct my work. (I think I'd have more trouble bothering to make the rest of the appropriate site bilingual to cater to these people.)

Another thing that I've pondered at times is that, since I'm going to have to learn to draw anyway, it would be really nifty if someday I could get one of my works published in my belovèd YuriHime S (not the main Comic YuriHime, as I don't imagine I'll ever manage to write works appropriately feminine or comedic for there—with Ms.? Natsuneko's work there, I might have hope, but it's nothing compared to Picard's, as I'll note later). If I did manage to achieve widespread popularity as noted above, they might let me do it cold turkey, but the more likely way is through the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō （「大正」ではなくて「大賞」） or other yomi-kiri (the comic equivalent of a pilot episode). The problem with that is that, as I've no doubt mentioned before, I don't think of many good one-shot ideas lately, as I'm so absorbed in crafting intricate webs of full-sized projects. (Even Project Cow Level, which was pre-planned to be a short, simple "practice" project, is expected to run to about one graphic novel's worth.)

And yet, oddly enough, I happened to think of an interesting one-shot idea yesterday. Although it relies on a lot of tropes, it has a major setting element that I haven't seen used for this before, and unlike some, the premise is distinctly yuri, not just a romance that happens to be between two ladies. (Oddly enough, the unusual setting for a yuri story may have caused me to have a dream last night about sleeping with a man (don't remember for sure). If so, at least I was the seme. . . .) Of course, as a short story, it doesn't have much to reveal without actually writing it, and I'd rather keep the good parts to myself just to avoid anyone else stealing them. (Yes, that's my delusions of grandeur talking again.)

If this somehow did come to pass, there's the problem that the format only allows 400 characters of commentary, much less than I'd normally use. I'd probably put most of it (and the official English translation) on the Web as a supplement to the published part, as Ms. Miyahara does. For the actual printed version, I'm thinking the essentials are along the lines of 「男で申し訳御座いません。いつか必ずレディーにもよろこんで頂けるまんがを描ける様になりますから、今は違った味でがまんして下さいませな。」 (although I haven't bothered to boot up Word to get a character count).

The "chigatta aji" bit overlaps with the question of how predisposed these Japanese folks will be to publishing stuff by some American git. I can't do much about that, but I might consider working in a more Japanese style than my own. For some reason, it seems to be coming out with a larger-than-usual proportion of pseudo-comical elements despite the fact that I don't have a sense of humor (perhaps to make up for the fact that romance is an alien concept to me), so it'll be an outlier in my portfolio in more ways than one (hey, more dovetailing with the post subject).

By the way, in the excessively megalomaniacal mōsō situation that I actually got to do a serial, Project AnthraXX seems at this point as if it would actually be palatable. Of course, it would be helluva Webcomic time in a quarterly mook. . . .

Who wins?

Notes: These were the most adversarial-looking images I found in appropriate resolutions. I chose to flip the former (forgetting that I'd left some text in) so they'd look a little more like they were facing off, in case the latter had asymmetrical tattoos. As with its predecessor, I hope the image itself doesn't take up much in the way of bandwidth.

For some time, I'd been planning on making a helluva tough fancomic (a one-shot along the lines of Darths & Droids) to hone my layout skillz, but it turned out that my image-editing skillz weren't up to the task (as you can see by the crudely pasted-in text in this one). The chief problems were appropriate panel spacing and word bubbles. I imagine both of these will be solved in comics I draw myself, the former because I'm planning on using graph paper, and the latter because I can draw them myself.

I've mentioned before how on HGTV, they avoid talking about the relationships of two people of the same sex who aren't family but live together. Well, it's not much, but on an episode of CA$H CAB, they showed two ladies kissing on the mouth twice. (The episode synopsis is not helpful.)

By the way, I have no idea why DEADLIEST CATCH is supposedly "the most popular nonfiction show on cable." I already think no one's going to recognize the references to shows I actually do watch in my projects.

I've decided to start my experiment with characters for Project AnthraXX, since I removed them earlier. (I took down a page from Homuncupunk as well, but as it stands at the moment, AnthraXX has actually become slightly more publishable, since it has something vaguely resembling a story and themes to go with the sex and weirdness.) This may be a bit of a waste of time if I manage to later get other people to do it for me, but it's pretty easy to edit, so this is a reasonably good way to keep notes for my own use as well. It would be even peachier if I could figure out how to make a template for a little info box like they use on other wikis.

As if I weren't busy enough with my application and more equipment training, apparently the stress caused my mind to wander, because I suddenly stumbled upon another really stupid coincidence (or Freudian slip?) that I should have noticed long ago. As you know, I have two projects that are set in a setting closely based upon the real world. You may not notice because of the omissions, but there are exactly three native Japanese characters among the many dozens of characters I'm currently developing for those two projects. And all three are lesbians.

「今さら何ほざいてんだてめえ」とは言われそうだから言っておくが・・・*

As noted in the first paragraph of the previous link, I don't write lesbian stories. I write yuri. Judging by the notes I'm keeping in my head, of those many dozens of characters, those are the only three lesbian-identified individuals I have planned. So how the hell did this happen? To tell the truth, in all three cases, I just made them Japanese because of the names I thought up for them. (It's not as much of a coincidence as it might have been, as the two from Project AnthraXX are connected in terms of their background.) As noted in the disclaimers, I don't have any intentions of perpetuating stupid stereotypes (even ones I accidentally made up myself), and I certainly didn't do this on purpose. It just goes to show that I don't pay much of any attention to how my projects end up looking, which means I'm just going to get even more flak as I release any of this stuff. I really need to look more carefully at these things before they are (hypothetically) published.

Meanwhile, as with the other night, I'm putting myself on a slippery slope trying to bring up half-remembered lines off the top of my head and using them as post subtitles. I've read both of those at least half a dozen times, but they're really dipping into the archives; I'm not sure if I've even opened either volume in several months, much less read those chapters. At least one of them I plan to check at some point to corroborate something else I vaguely remembered, so hopefully I'll use that opportunity to correct myself. Being obsessive-compulsive is rather dumb sometimes.

*Yeah, another line that I'm too lazy to try and figure out how to say in English. It's not terribly important to the so-called flow of my blabbing, so those of you who can't read it don't need to feel left out.

Edit (2008.05.03): Fixed vowel length and punctuation in the quote

Unusually enough for me, Project Cow Level has no sex in it, as I didn't have any interest in having such content in a story about tauren and dwarves. While I'm at it, I'm considering keeping the violence to (MPAA) PG as well. That may be difficult for one of my adventure-based (type B) projects, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, as I've mentioned before, Projects Umbra and Homuncupunk are coming to have more and more sex, while Project AnthraXX is coming to have more and more story, thus blurring the gap between A and B. Consequently, AnthraXX is probably the most ready of my original projects, owing primarily to the fact that its setting is heavily based on the real world, thus preventing me from needing to create mecha designs from scratch. Of course, it's still quite controversial, but at least there's plot to thin out the sex and I don't portray YHWH in quite such a bad light. I also think that the witches' and demons' subplot doesn't overpower the main story about the protagonist and heroine, but it's still tangential enough that I haven't completely thrown out the idea of making it a separate project.

In other previews, I've thought about vague subtitles for the three story arcs of Project Homuncupunk:

Part One: The Bounty Hunter
Part Two: The Prodigal Son
Part Three: The Emissary

I chopped the first two down to one word each for better parallelism. The subtitles reflect Jūzaburō's role in the story. ("So, what's with the second one if he turns coat at the beginning?" you might ask. Now that would be telling, wouldn't it?) Riku's backstory relates mostly to the first story arc, but the second half of it has a spoiler for something in the middle of "The Hunter," so where I include that will depend on how long each volume runs. I'm also not quite sure about the wording for the third part (and can't explain without spoiling it), but there's plenty of time to think about that.

I'm thinking of also making Project AnthraXX in three parts, corresponding with the three trimesters of Ms. Brown's freshman year. These would likely be short enough that one volume of the hard copies could be devoted to each, with one extra story as an extra for each. I don't have subtitles for the trimesters, as I don't know quite where the breaks will be, but the first two extras are currently known as "Time-Gilded Paradise Lost" and "The Dark of Gomorrah"; I'm not so sure about the third, as it doesn't really seem to add anything to the series.

As you may remember, I've always tried to posit that my intention with my projects is not to make anything realistic, but to create total fiction. I've tried to express this in recent drafts of the disclaimers. (I had them on the main page, but they quickly outgrew the 2-kB limit. I should probably put them somewhere else so you could access them without joining, but then I'd have to reword the second-to-last sentence. . . .) Of course, I have no knowledge of legal issues, so I just cobbled the document together arbitrarily. If you have any ideas on improving it, I'd be interested in hearing them.

I've also removed a couple of documents from the Project AnthraXX and Homuncupunk sections because they contained the most glaring misogyny on the site. Sadly, those pages were the main sources of information for those two. Hopefully, I'll get around to updating and re-uploading them sometime in the near future.

Wikipedia is an important source of encyclopedic information for me, as I know no other reasonable resource for information on Japanese topics in general. Sources in English are very unreliable, particularly in the case of popular media, where information is generally based on one to three crude translations, all with parts deliberately changed from the original meaning for various reasons. There are two main problems with it as compared to Wikipedia: that the contributor base appears much smaller, resulting in less information and much less discussion; and that they have very few images, possibly due to more strict enforcement of licensing.

However, I just found something very useful on a page I where I was doing a bit of research: a spoiler hide box. I have always found that part of the fun of series is the thrill of wondering what's going to happen next. That's why I've always been irritated by the fact that, in most cases, almost the entire English article was under the "spoiler warning" tag. The argument has been made that if you haven't already seen/read it, there's no reason to read the article, but that isn't true for me. The fact is, I usually have no idea whether there is any other place for information on a series other than reviews, fan material, and publication data. If people are kind enough to tag the spoiler parts individually, the reader has the option of whether or not he wants to spoil any particular part, and this system just makes it even more convenient.

So, I dropped by the English site to see if they had a tag like this, and I found that they've changed the policy: although there is still a tag, the discussion claims that you are now not even supposed to tell people if there's a spoiler. I find this even more disappointing, not just from a user's point of view, but as a contributor as well. I thought that if my projects reached the status of notability, I'd just rely on the Wikipedia article for the list of background information, as there'd be one anyway, so I could wait for other people to write what they felt was necessary, and I could personally oversee it to correct any mistakes. But if they feel that all spoilers are required to be included without notice, it doesn't fill that need, so there'd have to be one somewhere else with a different policy. That would be a pain in the ass, because I've seen that small wikis have little exposure and less people to edit them, and each one has to write its own set of policies (although cut-and-paste would work for the basis) and get the contributors to learn it in addition to those from other wikis for which they contribute, which may be very similar but differ in a few key points. I suppose we could say, "The rules are the same as Wikipedia, except ____," or something.

Edit (2008.05.03): I forgot that Comic Genesis has its own wiki, and upon closer inspection, it doesn't have that problem, so I don't have to worry about it as long as I use them and they don't change that policy. It also has a built-in rating system.

My readership appears to be at an all-time high (apparently at least two regulars!), but I've accumulated quite a lot of stuff during its absence, to say nothing of my sloth and the fact that I've built up a lot of new things due to year's-end-and-beginning splurging. So, I'd like to see if you have any requests or suggestions. What I've got in the works is as follows:

( Ridiculously long notes )