in the last few days of november i got real sick, so i didn't feel very much up to making a blog post. but on the upside, before that happened i did actually get a lil bit of website work done. sloooowly but surely changing the CSS into a new theme. it's not finished or final by any means, but it's new and it looks pretty cool. on the blog in particular, i decided to not do the little thumbnails for each individual blog post anymore. they were cool and nice, but i was getting a lil bit annoyed having to draw a new one for each post. again, i kept getting caught up in minute details and getting in my own way.
i haven't done very much besides that, between generally being tired most of the time and this recent bug. but i have come up with a couple of new story ideas!
some weeks ago, i decided to look through one of my sketchbooks from middle school, and i found a character i invented back then called Oya. i don't remember why i called him that, but he was this little wizard fellow who was a fuzzy dragon that could take on a more humanoid shape. i thought the concept was cool, even after all these years, and i came up with a new setting for him to exist in: yet another fantasy world, but this one is a bit different.
art was on the mind, so i decided to go the route of making magic analogous to art and put Oya in magic art college. i came up with a couple of new characters too: Thaddeus, who's a manticore and Oya's roommate, and Daisy, who's a gnoll and one of Thaddeus's classmates. i hesitate to come up with any more characters before i get my expectations for myself way too high again, but it's a fun world rolling around in my head for now.
speaking of expectations, i was watching Do No Harm as the episodes were coming out, which was a very fun time. i always like when funny improv projects take the opportunity to try to say something greater. by the time the last credits rolled, i'd gotten rather attached to this supposed story of a young boy who wanted to be a doctor. the original music that they made for it is also really good. all these things were bouncing around my mind these last couple weeks, and it made me decide i wanted to do something with this inspiration: open a word document and just start writing whatever.
the nature of Do No Harm (and Real-Time Fandub as a whole) is the main thing that inspired me. it reminds me of how i used to write back in middle school and early high school, where i'd have an idea while fooling around in Minecraft and just go for it. i don't think any of those stories i started writing ever broke a few thousand words, but i was writing, and it was fun.
there isn't much to the story yet. the main three characters are called Sorrel, Lark, and Horizon, who are definitely inspired by Do No Harm's versions of Sora, Kairi, and Riku. a more original addition is Prince Kirion, who i came up with earlier this year, but didn't have a story for him to fit in until this. the plot will materialize more as i work on the story, but i like the vague ideas i have for it so far. refusing to write them down means that i have to work my way through the story in order to fully realize these ideas, which is pretty exciting.
i do want to get back to website work proper, but right now i'm distracted by my weird little guys and also still kinda sick. i actually did have a job interview lined up for today, but i had to cancel it when i got sick, which really sucks. i'll give it another go when i'm well again. the next thing i want to do for the website is reformat these blog pages a bit, but i have to do that one by one, so i've been procrastinating. on the other hand, they look pretty nice as they are. i don't know yet. we'll see.