And writing. WIPs will go up in Discord. I'm so insanely tired from getting back into the rhythm of my life that I can't bring myself to write a more elaborate update post today; I'll try to make up for that on Monday.

Ao3 got my ass. I received a warning and an imperative to remove all self-promotion from my profile and the works. That includes "(Commission)" at the end of titles, etc. I had no idea Ao3 has a strict non-commercial policy, but it's one of those things that immediately makes sense—Ao3 is too big and too legit not to have a policy like that, or else they'd eat a ton of regulation that they probably can't afford (or don't want to put up with).

No harm done and no hurt feelings from me (assuming what I did was good enough and got the restriction lifted). Might hurt outreach a bit, but that's the kinda thing I try not to worry too much about. And there's a silver lining!

Instead of links to substar posts, the Ao3 stories now link to MEGA folders with the stories. Naturally, there's one bigger folder that holds the story folders, and that can be a new subscriber perk! Substar was a good file storage upgrade, but having files live on individual posts just isn't ideal, so moving to MEGA is an important step up in terms of having a browsable archive of files.

I'll make a discord channel that the MEGA archive can live in—for now it only has the public posts (so, everything but WSB 2 as of time of writing) but I'll eventually make two archives, one public, and one private, so that subscribers can have everything all in one place, and non-subscribers everything else in another place.

I fly out to Japan on the 16, Thursday afternoon, and yeah, I didn't get any of that HWNL writing done. Hey, I'm on vacation.

Edit: took me like 3 minutes to clone the archive and add the WSB chapter that's still sub-only. There are now two archives, and I'll do my best to keep them both updated appropriately

White Stained Black Ch2 released over the weekend—that one ended up being a heavy hitter, and I'm really proud of how it ended up developing. Still, it took a lot out of me and took longer than anticipated to finish—kind of a recurring theme. I'd rather get more accurate with my time estimates than work faster—I like my pace and I think it allows me to create good, meaningful work, so it'd be great if I could ballpark release timing better than I do now. Something to work on, and not the end of the world.

Ten days until my trip. I may or may not start on the Heroine Will Not Lose recap—writing WSB 2 while getting affairs in order for the trip was stressful, and I'm enjoying my reduced obligations right now. But I've trained myself to get nervous after X days spent not writing, so I'll probably start on the recap if nothing else—I have frankly no idea how large or small it'll be, just that I want to summarize the HWNL chapters, editorialize them a bit, and include character primers so that new readers can get a general understanding of the thing before Season 2™ starts up.

I'll probably start work on it on Thursday, but no guarantees. If you're in the Discord, WIPs will go up there, though they probably won't be all that impressive since, again, this is supposed to just be a brief synopsis of HWNL (can you hear me talking myself down from making it into a Big Thing?).

Anyway, ten days until I skedaddle, I'll do my best in that time, I'm already on soft-vacation, thank you so much, take care of yourself.

I'm already looking forward to being back, because then I won't be living in anticipation of having to go somewhere, do something, and I'm just the kind of person who frets in the face of pending obligations.

Goal to get WSB2 finished before the end of the month: Not happening. At 25k words, I have another two or so days of writing to finish out the chapter, followed by the edit. That should have the chapter done by the end of the week.

I think I have vacation mode already set up for Substar but I'll check after posting to make sure it goes into effect on Oct. 1. I'll start on the Heroine Will Not Lose story so far + character bios primer, and hopefully I can finish it before I leave on the 17th, but who knows. I'll try to write as many days in October as I can while I can, so that when I take a few additional days off at the start of November when I get back, I'll still only have been "not writing" for roughly a month (which is a frightening thing to type but hey).

Plans post-vacation are to go right into my next commission (Mass Effect), and possibly the next commission right after that (Dragon Tamer Neeko), both to power through my queue a little bit and to get some extra liquidity around the holidays. Such plans are subject to mood and endurance, and very well can change. I might slip in that self-indulgent OC fantasy thing I've been wanting to write somewhere; we don't know.

As always, thank you and take care of yourselves—in the runup to this big trip I've been battling pretty severe exhaustion, so many things to manage, so many jobs to get done. It's like running a marathon, and at the end of the marathon instead of a finish line there's going to be a ramp onto a plane, and then I'll be somewhere else entirely doing so much in so little time (just a little over two weeks!) and I'm exhausted just looking at my itinerary.

That's how exhausting it is to go on vacation—so don't neglect yourself. Take what time you can where you can, take breaks, and take care of yourself in what ways you're able. 

Getting everything in order before my big trip is unsurprisingly a stress bomb. Current goals are to get White Stained Black Ch2 finished by the end of the month. October will likely prove to be a soft-vacation all the way through—I've decided to write the Heroine Will Not Lose recap during the days leading up to my trip, which will hopefully be very doable. 

I'm exhausted from everything but I'll keep trying my best. Thank you for reading, for supporting, and for taking care of yourself.

As title. I should post these on Sunday instead of Monday, because on Monday I barely have the life force necessary to do anything.

Anyway: White Stained Black Ch2 is at 12k words out of a target ???. Will probably edge close to 20k because I can't help myself (another 14k target going sailing by).

Thank you and take good care of yourselves, yeah?