Finally free. Sort of.
Friday, 14 August 2009 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yatiSo.
Fic for FFEX is done. It is posted! It is here: On the Precipice of the World, a FFX fic. (Pretentious title, check.) I'll have it reposted here sometime soon.
Dear recipient, I hope it is satisfactory.
Though how the heck did it get so long. Seriously guys. 6,400 words. That's a lot of words for me, let me tell you. 6,400 words of people not doing anything. And by people I mean the whole cast of playable characters of Final Fantasy X and occasional strays, so there's always someone standing around doing nothing and looking odd in the scene. (Person who helped read through and didn't know the fandom: "Hey, this guy is just standing here. Make him say something." Me: "I can't. He doesn't talk." Poor Kimahri.) I started this the moment I got the prompt but I managed bits and pieces of one scene and had trouble connecting things. I killed a whole sequence of things in Bevelle because I didn't want to write a freaking novella. Otherwise it would've been much longer. And July was also a very busy month for work -- I was spending around twelve hours at the office for most of the month and coming home too tired to do anything but sleep.
I thought, oh well, I can work on this on weekends! And one weekend I fell really really sick and couldn't do anything (the laundry, sigh, I had a lot of that) and another weekend people kept coming over and I couldn't work much on the fic either.
I was doomed. But not, because I was also persistent, and I wasn't going to default the first fic exchange thing I participated in, dammit.
And then there was the extension! I blame the length partly on the extension as well -- otherwise I would've cut off the whole part set in the Calm Lands. I still dislike how I couldn't quite manage to write the ending and how I still cannot connect the scenes more gracefully and how I can't give decent titles to anything, but I'll live.
But for whatever it's worth, a lot of research went into this: scripts were read, YouTube videos were watched, the dictionary was abused.
Something I've noticed: the original script of the game is very well edited, and very consistent. I wish fic writers would pick up certain cues from it, like how "fayth" is with a lowercase f and titles are always in lowercase unless they are attached to names (eg "Grand Maester Mika" but "the grand maester" otherwise), and "aeons" don't get any special treatment but it's always "the Final Aeon". (I shall, however, remain firmly a believer that "alright" is not a word.)
Also listening to the dialogue is really different from just reading it.
Now I shall ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist and go on doing other stuff.
--
Right now I'm on leave! Vacation! Holidays! No work until Tuesday! And no plans either, so it's just me lazing around and catching up with stuff.
I've also realised that I have a lot of things to learn. One of them is how I should not feel guilty about setting time aside for myself! This includes weekends and off-days that don't involve celebration with family! Doing things that don't matter like staying in and reading books and programming stuff and chortling over fanfiction and sewing and fretting over bookshelves!
I applied for four days leave and the first things I think of are, "Oh, mother would like to have me home. Oh, auntie would like to see me. Oh, I haven't visited grandma in a while." While those are nice thoughts, they aren't really things I want to do. I wouldn't know what to do with an extra long weekend with my parents. The longest I could stand my grandma's company is half a day, and I can't even think of the three-hour drive to her house without groaning. Yet I feel like I have to do these things.
I don't! I don't.
Sometimes I feel guilty that I don't even try to plan a proper vacation somewhere.
But! I can stay at home and read if I want to. I can stay up and read Yuffie/Vincent fics or Roy/Ed fics (there seems to be a pattern here), or fics featuring Kakashi and Iruka if I want to, despite being having away from the fandom for ages! I can write 6,400-word fics if I want to (I'm pretty certain I don't).
So guys, be nice and stop hassling me about what I did last weekend every Monday we have lunch, yeah? Don't you ever notice I never ask that question?
--
I've also lost touch with my books, thanks to work and FFEX. Also forgotten about some DW dev stuff I wanted to try, but that's OK, I'll get the hang of things soon.
Fic for FFEX is done. It is posted! It is here: On the Precipice of the World, a FFX fic. (Pretentious title, check.) I'll have it reposted here sometime soon.
Dear recipient, I hope it is satisfactory.
Though how the heck did it get so long. Seriously guys. 6,400 words. That's a lot of words for me, let me tell you. 6,400 words of people not doing anything. And by people I mean the whole cast of playable characters of Final Fantasy X and occasional strays, so there's always someone standing around doing nothing and looking odd in the scene. (Person who helped read through and didn't know the fandom: "Hey, this guy is just standing here. Make him say something." Me: "I can't. He doesn't talk." Poor Kimahri.) I started this the moment I got the prompt but I managed bits and pieces of one scene and had trouble connecting things. I killed a whole sequence of things in Bevelle because I didn't want to write a freaking novella. Otherwise it would've been much longer. And July was also a very busy month for work -- I was spending around twelve hours at the office for most of the month and coming home too tired to do anything but sleep.
I thought, oh well, I can work on this on weekends! And one weekend I fell really really sick and couldn't do anything (the laundry, sigh, I had a lot of that) and another weekend people kept coming over and I couldn't work much on the fic either.
I was doomed. But not, because I was also persistent, and I wasn't going to default the first fic exchange thing I participated in, dammit.
And then there was the extension! I blame the length partly on the extension as well -- otherwise I would've cut off the whole part set in the Calm Lands. I still dislike how I couldn't quite manage to write the ending and how I still cannot connect the scenes more gracefully and how I can't give decent titles to anything, but I'll live.
But for whatever it's worth, a lot of research went into this: scripts were read, YouTube videos were watched, the dictionary was abused.
Something I've noticed: the original script of the game is very well edited, and very consistent. I wish fic writers would pick up certain cues from it, like how "fayth" is with a lowercase f and titles are always in lowercase unless they are attached to names (eg "Grand Maester Mika" but "the grand maester" otherwise), and "aeons" don't get any special treatment but it's always "the Final Aeon". (I shall, however, remain firmly a believer that "alright" is not a word.)
Also listening to the dialogue is really different from just reading it.
Now I shall ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist and go on doing other stuff.
--
Right now I'm on leave! Vacation! Holidays! No work until Tuesday! And no plans either, so it's just me lazing around and catching up with stuff.
I've also realised that I have a lot of things to learn. One of them is how I should not feel guilty about setting time aside for myself! This includes weekends and off-days that don't involve celebration with family! Doing things that don't matter like staying in and reading books and programming stuff and chortling over fanfiction and sewing and fretting over bookshelves!
I applied for four days leave and the first things I think of are, "Oh, mother would like to have me home. Oh, auntie would like to see me. Oh, I haven't visited grandma in a while." While those are nice thoughts, they aren't really things I want to do. I wouldn't know what to do with an extra long weekend with my parents. The longest I could stand my grandma's company is half a day, and I can't even think of the three-hour drive to her house without groaning. Yet I feel like I have to do these things.
I don't! I don't.
Sometimes I feel guilty that I don't even try to plan a proper vacation somewhere.
But! I can stay at home and read if I want to. I can stay up and read Yuffie/Vincent fics or Roy/Ed fics (there seems to be a pattern here), or fics featuring Kakashi and Iruka if I want to, despite being having away from the fandom for ages! I can write 6,400-word fics if I want to (I'm pretty certain I don't).
So guys, be nice and stop hassling me about what I did last weekend every Monday we have lunch, yeah? Don't you ever notice I never ask that question?
--
I've also lost touch with my books, thanks to work and FFEX. Also forgotten about some DW dev stuff I wanted to try, but that's OK, I'll get the hang of things soon.
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no subject
Date: 14 August 2009 05:48 pm (UTC)That was one of many reasons I had to make my own FFX script (besides the glaring gaps in the most complete script out there). I finally noticed that fayth, guardian, aeon weren't capitalized. Shotgunnova's script sometimes deviates from the game in capitalization, punctuation. I've never gotten finished; I've done several passes, but every time I play through with my transcript booted up, I'll find another wee punctuation mistake, and 90% of the time it's my fault, not Squeenix's. I'm really impressed by their proofreading. I've caught exactly two typos after all this time, not counting a very few bad habits like "alright".
I still can't remember titles without reviewing a bit of dialog to check. "Your Grace" or "your grace"?
Random obscure note: in FFX-2, Lucil is promoted from Captain to Commander. Assuming the Youth League didn't rearrange their ranking system, the Crusaders' ranking system is based on but not in the same order as the US Navy. Whoops.
no subject
Date: 15 August 2009 02:47 am (UTC)"Alright" just makes my eye twitch.
I'm pretty sure it's "Your Grace" -- they seem to be following the style manual I use at work, and that's how we'd go with it! (I work with a publisher. That's where most of the OCD comes from.)
I am hopeless with ranks, be it in games or real life, but I shall remember that, for the off chance I need to promote someone in the Youth League. ;)