Good morning and Happy π Day,

It feels good to be able to get back into writing, though at a somewhat limited capacity. I still need to balance work, recreation, my new diet, and family time, but all around it's manageable.

Besides Ascension, I'm working on two other projects that I'm rotating chapter-by-chapter.

Chapter 10 of Ascension Part 1 was completed after a months-long hiatus, which I'm glad to get out of the way to kickstart the tournament part of the story. And that's also when I hit a snag in my writing. Before, writing Dragonball fights was a lot easier, but from a writer/novelist's perspective, it looked pretty sloppy. The reason was because I was writing it in the way you'd see it drawn out in a manga, which is vastly different than reading a fight written in a book. Pick any classic sword fight or martial arts fight you probably read somewhere in the past. I have to consider whose point of view I'm writing from rather than make the "head hopping" mistake I used to make writing fanfiction. I want to take my writing seriously and implementing techniques used by novelists to shift the reader's focus more clearly is a lot harder, because now I have to re-train my brain to imagine how the fights play out, but using one person's perspective and playing off the opponent. I can't simply go from one person's thought process to the other in single-person view. There's also the issue of more concise sentences that don't come off as too wordy of fluffed to no end. I want to be able to write narratively something that my reader can enjoy.

That being said, the other two projects are being done on a rotation basis. A Stone by Any Other Name, my Krillin and 18 fic was initially a one-shot, but there's so much left open to fill in the gaps of Dragonball Z's 7-year time skip after the end of the Cell Games to the Saiyaman arc, which focuses primarily on Krillin and 18's growing friendship into marriage and family. I want to showcase a little of my headcannon that I'd like the reader to feel as if it could've actually happened in the main story. My goal with this series is to be as faithful to the characters as I possibly can knowing what we've seen of them in the main story.

The third project, After the Fall/Prelude to Hope, is a Final Fantasy VI project I put aside some time ago back in 2021. I had started it, hoping to complete it within a few months, but my personal experience with going through a lot of crap during August leaves me unmotivated to write for months on end until I start getting the mood back to continue writing, but at the time I did, I was working on Ascension and put the FFVI fic on the backburner. I'm currently working on the second story of the series, focusing on Shadow and Interceptor and I intend to complete it before I get back to working on Chapter 11 of Ascension Part 1. I did start Chapter 11, but the idea of my Kx18 fic and then the FFVI project made me think that I could feasibly make this work and provide content for other fandoms.

I don't know how long the Kx18 fic will last, I haven't set an end goal, but I am exploring ideas for the next couple chapters.

So that's my current status as far as writing projects go. Stay tuned.

Cheers,

EM79,
March 14, 2023