Happy Birthday To Me… Anya In Review, The Novel, And A Wish

Happy Birthday to me…… I’m alone like that picture. Minus the pretty dress and the cake. I WANT CAKE. Maybe I’ll celebrate by going to get a decent dinner, though I’ll probably stay holed up in my room and order pizza as usual.

What does a birthday mean? A day where a bunch of people on Facebook that haven’t talked to me in years start saying Happy Birthday. (With Twitter it’s people I actually talk to quite often.) Celebrating getting older and closer to what some call the Christmas Cake Age (25 and unwanted)… well I’m still young (just turned 20) so I don’t mind stuff like that. Age doesn’t matter as much anymore anyways, the Christmas Cake is nothing more than a joke now. Besides it’s nice to have a day where you can feel special, even if it’s like the above picture.

Oh well, might as well review what’s been going on with my life lately. And a little birthday request at the end. 

Social Life: Nonexistent, there’s only once a month when I’m NOT sitting alone eating by myself. There are only a few people in my college I can sort of call a friend, though I rarely ever get to see them and conversations last 2 sentences. That’s probably gonna drop to zero next year when the few people that talk to me all graduate/go on study abroad. If I didn’t have twitter I doubt even antidepressants can keep me from falling to complete insanity. Okaaaaaaaaay moving on.

Academics: Somehow I ended up majoring in Political Science. Now I don’t know what the hell I want to do with my life, I keep changing goals/interests around. I used to be all PHYSICS4LIFE, then I switched to Computer Science, then over to Political Science, and now writing? What do I do with my life? And I’m having another case of lethargy this spring quarter again, and ragequitted one of my classes that I’ll have to retake later. Not doing so well in my other classes either. I’m just so tired of school, I need a break. Seriously, one week spring break between quarters in a quarter-system college is NOT enough.

Blogging: Yeah…. I ended up dropping Smile Precure because blogging it didn’t feel fun, and I have a bunch of other post ideas that I’m supposed to write about that I procrastinated forever too. Need to really continue to do those Gunpla posts too, though I haven’t built a Gundam ever since I picked up drawing and increased the writing on my novel.

Oh and I got addicted to Mahjong over the past week, so play with me! RIICHI!

Sweets & Steel 

(It’s a temporary name for now, might change later.)

The novel and things relating to it are pretty much all I focus on nowadays, to the expense of schoolwork. If you follow me on twitter (or anywhere), you probably have a few weird ideas of what it’s about with all my talk about trap fapping and a teahouse full of lesbians.

Sweets&Steel is about some mecha pilots of a Private Military Company, a lesbian teahouse owner and her partner, and a transgendered high school girl. They have their own problems, some dealing with unconventional sexualities, while the gears of the world keep turning. Violent protests in various nations, nuclear sales to a rival state, and a hostile international arena threaten to creep into their lives. Flan becomes intertwined in two worlds between their everyday lives and her duties as the pilot of a mechanical exoskeleton, and has to deal with the increasingly dangerous threats. Threats to their country, their well-being, and the ideals that brought them all together.

At the time of writing this post the novel is at approximately 34k words, with some more written down that I haven’t transcribed onto the computer yet. It’s moving along rather nicely, though I still get stuck at some parts and I’m not able to write as much as I’d like due to classes and stuff. It’s rather hard since I’m usually alone and don’t understand how people interact with each other that well. Due to the nature of some of the issues involved, I have to write about things I have absolutely zero experience with (e.g. the female body, war). I think I’ll have a finished first draft manuscript sometime this summer, though it’ll take a long time to edit. I doubt such a niche and weird novel would be accepted by a publisher, so I’ll likely self publish when the time comes. Need to find a good editor somehow. And I use too many fucking commas.

I also started drawing, with my first chicken scratch picture in my sketchbook exactly 2 months ago on 27/3/2012. I tried to draw everyday, which was an easy goal at first when I was just practicing with small pictures and just faces but over time when I moved to more complex pictures I end up having several days in between pictures. A month after I started drawing, on 26/4/2012 I drew one of my favorite pictures of Aoi (the teahouse owner). Two months after I started drawing, yesterday I drew my latest picture of Flan in her formal military dress uniform.

I still have a long way to go, but I’m pleasantly surprised by how far I got. I mean, before this I couldn’t draw JACKSHIT. I was the absolute worst at art stuff, I barely took any art classes and although I love pictures I kept myself from drawing for almost 20 years because each time I tried the result would make me want to grab an electric drill and pierce my brain.

It’ll probably take me a long time to reach the level of the good stuff we see on the internet, but hey at least I have something to show people if I want make a collaborative artbook (a goal for if my novel gains some traction in the anime community). Drawing the characters made their appearances clearer to me, and the process also made me think of various ideas that probably would’ve never came to me otherwise.

I thought about making a page either on this blog or create a new blog to explain and introduce the novel, but I should focus on actually writing it first. I need some way to build up interest on the story but since there’s no preceding work there’s nothing to draw people in yet. Any ideas?

A Wish/Request

It is my birthday after all! I want a hug in real life. But obviously that’s not gonna happen, so please listen to this request.

The note of the current compilation of the story is at

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s38/sh/2ec8070a-033a-4e51-996d-8ee36c43731d/dc119f1b169be8fda0aff9cfb2f27aa0

and I’d like some thoughts on how it’s going. It’s a first draft so there’ll be typos and grammatical errors, but those are fixed in the last stage of editing. I’d like to know what you think about stuff like realism/believability, character depth, story progression, and the balance between the everyday and the macro world. I want honest opinions with the bad stuff pointed out to me about why you didn’t like it, and what parts felt wrong to you.

Or if you really like it then also tell me that so I know it’s not a lost cause ^^” and spread some hype about it if possible :3

Please leave a comment here, tell me about it on twitter, or email me at anya.fennec at gmail. Anything is fine!

Maybe if you’re an artist you can make me a picture of one of my characters ^^” apart from the aforementioned Flan (usually her hair’s down like this) and Aoi there’s Claribel, Megumi (with eyes open), and Alice (her pictures come out worse than the others for some reason). My Twitter and WordPress avatar is cropped from a picture of Aoi that @MoldyKeyk made for me and I really like ^^.

Wow this post came out longer than expected. I think I said everything I wanted to say? How many of you actually read this far? Anyways I’ll see you on twitter or next time I feel like blogging on a whim!