babygray

This... isn't a blog I often use.

Instead, you should find me on:

~~Livejournal~~*
Tumblr (This is where I am currently the most active.)
Twitter
FF.net as babygray and (not babygray)
AO3
Deviantart

Or drop me a line here. That's cool too :)

*Considering how things have been shaping up on LJ...

I'm not exactly looking forward to the end of another year. All it means is dealing with regrets and making a whole new list of things to fail at.

I went a little... nuts last week. I usually spend my weekends watching MST3K, and one day, I ended up watching Master Ninja 1, an episode I avoid because, eww, crap TV series mascarading as a movie? Pass.

Watching it, though, gave me an idea for a fan video: splicing clips of Supernatural into the opening host segment, in which they talk about American muscle cars.

I spent most of this past week trying to make it, and most of my waking hours obsessing over it. It's always a bad idea when I want to make a fanvid, and doubly so when it distracts me from work and life. My computer hated it; it kept complaining that it was too old to deal with video editing. My SuperDrive hated it, refusing to read any of the DVDs I got specifically for this video.

On the other hand, it definitely reinforced my admiration for AMV and fanvid makers. All movie makers, really. I didn't really get how hard it was before trying to stitch together a movie for the first time.

I made it mostly to post on Tumblr, but a friend suggested I put it on Youtube as well.

Watch on YouTube

... At least that's one less thing on my "shit to do eventually" list.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Rifftrax clips

Happy Halloween!

I love/hate this time of year. Finances are low due to lack of full time summer work, and work has been... really draining lately, but the delicious fall food and the fact that it'll soon be FREAKING HALLOWEEN has kept my spirits up.

God, I love Halloween. I get to dress up and watch cool movies and toss candy at random strangers. (I really can't do much of the last one around here; trick-or-treating isn't really a thing in Japan. ... So I'll just throw the candy at myself?) AND I have a legit reason listen to Halloween music and people won't look at me like I'M the weirdo for doing the Monster Mash.

Next week is the start of NaNoWriMo, and I think I'll be participating properly this time. Spent a bit of time today cleaning off my work desk in preparation, in fact. (Though... I should have spent that time warming up my atrophied writing muscles by writing something for the Snarry Mini Games or finishing off an old fanfic.)

Today's doodle: I finished it up in the middle of the night... and it kind of shows? Bigger version posted on dA.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation

This week has been busy. I have forgotten how to deal with work, and I might have hit an energy upswing. It's the only thing I can think of to explain the current need to do something everyday.

(The only other reason I have is freaking Tumblr.)

I went insane and drew up a comic based on a Supernatural episode. Insane because I... think I wasn't so much doodling as painting, and I don't even know how to paint. (I am still ridiculously proud of myself.)

Today's doodle is based on "The Prince and the Merman". I've been thinking of writing out another version of the first draft for chapter 2. (That sounds more complicated than it should.) But I'm a coward, so I drew a picture of Snape as a merman instead of, you know, actually writing.

... I think I'm improving...

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: BBC Radio 4 repeats

I kind of wish there was still time. Or maybe I'm write one more post this week, just so that I can title it "Hot Times/Summer in the City".

This summer... It had been years before I actually had a good summer. I worked a few hours a week, which meant I didn't end up staying inside my little house for days on end, sweating my way into depression and boredom. I spent too much money, but all for the good cause of visiting Harry Potter Land and getting my grasping hands on a Sailor Uranus and a Sailor Neptune mini-figurine... because you CANNOT have one without the other.

I do regret not working hard on my WIP-pile. There had been days where I floundered with nothing/too much to do. On the other hand, my output during vacation time is about the same as my output during work time. And I got some things done (even if those things happen to be related to Bioshock Infinite's trophies) and had fun doing it. So... win/win?

Sketch is based on Supernatural 9.02 ("Devil May Care"). I've kind of decided to sketch something for each episode of season 9 over on Tumblr. I wish I thought of it back in April, when I started watching the series, but... meh. That's just something to look forward to when I watch it all a second time.

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: SF Debris reviews

Gosh... I wonder. What game have I been playing lately?*

The heat has been almost unbearable lately, but this summer hasn't been bad. I work for an hour or two every other day, which isn't a lot, but it keeps me from staying at home for weeks, going stir-crazy and depressed.

I have to get back to writing. I've been lazy, and reading/playing video games is easier. Hell, drawing is easier. Which means I'll have to spend the next two, three days writing, lest I start to feel really guilty.

But... that'll have to wait until I finish this, which I'm hoping will be the first "completed" drawing I've done since.... January?

Trip to Harry Potter Land is next week. A co-worker who had been to USJ recently said there was a 3-hour waiting time for the HP rides.

And here I am, planning to go at the peak of summer vacation. It's gonna be awful, isn't it...

*I love Bioshock Infinite's Lutece Twins, particularly Rosalind. ...I might have a weakness for "quirky" redheads in masculine wear. Honestly, I want her clothes, complicated underthings and all. (Does it look like she's holding that plate, or am I just being lazy again...)

Current Mood: guilty
Current Music: BBC Radio 4 shows

The next chapter of "A Series of Events" went up on Friday. It should not have taken as long as it did, but, stuff got in the way. (Mostly my own insecurities, I think). That said, considering my track record, posting anything at all is worth celebrating.

Today's sketch, of course, has Nothing To Do with the story. I stayed up all night trying to draw something, only for this pose and this image to finally come to me this morning. I'm still having trouble drawing Snape for some reason, but what little you see of Harry came out not that bad, right?

Frankly, I just think Naked!Harry glomping Snape from behind is a cute/funny idea. Nearly based a story on that, before it turned all angsty and serious on me.

Completely unrelated except it totally is, as I was trying to draw anything last night, I caught an episode of Momo Kyun Sword. Just my luck, it was the beach episode?, and... I did not like it. (I have nothing against blushing boobs and butts; it's the interminable parade of boobs and butts and practically naked girls and women of all shapes and sizes and heroines with NO BRAS running and having their boobs bouncing painfully up into their faces with each step packed into 20-ish minutes that I kind of have a problem with.)

That said, <insert hypocritical joke here>.

Current Mood: uncomfortable
Current Music: Sublime

When it comes to gettin' shit done during summer vacation, I have a terrible track record. This summer doesn't seem to be any different, but it's only been five days. Can't give up hope yet.

The first draft of the next chapter of "A Series of Events" was finished two weeks ago. I had planned to post the revised/edited draft by now, but I got distracted. (Oops.)

Harry Potter Land* over at Universal Studios Japan opened last week, which pretty much decided for me where I'm going this summer. The hotel's booked for mid-August/O-bon; I'm already dreading the peak season crowds and the timed entry tickets I'll probably have to buy.

*The official name's too much of a mouthful.

Doodle: I was trying something, and I failed/gave up at the last minute. It was very nearly some Snarry fanart, but I can't see Snape and Harry lying around like that. (I have a crappy imagination.) So they're expies of Snape and Harry? Totally different. ... I should have at least given them hands, huh.

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: podcasts and BBC Radio 4

It's been a rough couple of months. May was just awful, but June went pretty well, despite lack of money and near-constant rain. Hell, I wrote 4 whole pages this past month. That calls for a celebratory drink! (Chocolate milk and vodka.)

Worked on "A Series of Events" today, but my heart still isn't all that into it. My mind kept wandering to:

- The Half-Blood Prince movie, the first Potions class, and how more and more flustered the makeup people made Hermione look every time they cut to her. I get that it's to show how hard it is to brew the Draught of Living Death, and how easy of a time Harry was having with it, but it was so ridiculous that Hermione's flustered hair is all that I remember.

- What story had Severus berate Neville for nearly killing Harry in class? And by "berate", I mean verbally flay poor Neville alive for his exploding potion. I hate it when I forget the name of a story I really liked (or was at least memorable). (But I refuse to actually try to find it right now. I have enough distractions as it is without adding "needle in haystack search" to the list.)

... Guessing from my stray thoughts alone, it's not that hard to guess just what the next update of this too-long, too-old story is going to involve. I wish I had finished this story years ago.

... I should get back to working on it instead of complaining about it here, huh.

Sketch is a quickie of Castiel from Supernatural. I've been watching a lot of Supernatural lately.

Current Mood: good
Current Music: Bleak Expectations

My spring vacation was long and, aside from the knitting and my new interest in Supernatural, utterly forgettable.

April has been so completely jacked for me. Work started up on the 14th, but two weeks in, I still hadn't been able to re-find my footing. Hell, I had trouble just remembering the date, and that the month was nearly 2/3s over.

What's more, just as I got used to the 5-to-7 again, BAM, a super-extended Golden Week: 5 days off, plus 5 more because I'm so amazing. Because what I need the most right now is More Free Time.

Today's sketch is pretty much the first bit of semi-serious doodling I've done since ~~January~~ March. I don't know if I should finish it, or leave it, or color it, or go all sexy monochrome on it. I'm trying not to think of why I haven't really doodled anything in months.

Or, for that matter, why I haven't been able to sit down and write something lately. The fact that writing stresses me out and I'd rather do ANYTHING ELSE than try to put words to paper shouldn't be an excuse, but I can't overcome this fear of filling the blank page with bad writing or, worse than that, editing the blocks of really bad writing into something remotely good enough for consumption.

Can I even call myself a "writer" when I refuse to write at all?

Hell, I started sketching tonight to put off writing for a little bit longer. Although, it was nice channeling what meager creative juices I have into something. I kind of missed that.

... I really like her hair that shade of blue. Maybe a limited palette sort of thing? Blue, black, and a bit of red? Though I should clean and line it first, huh...

Current Mood: uncomfortable
Current Music: a lot of mashups on random

I've been on vacation for over a week now, and it's been good. I've gotten around to working on a few of the many half-finished projects lying around the house. Writing, sewing projects, stacks of books to read and closets to clean out... I have a lot to do.

... Which is why I've spent most of my time on my ass, knitting a vest.

When I think about how much time I've spent on it this week, I feel terribly guilty (though not as guilty as when I spend several hours playing video games). Knitting is easier than making sewing patterns or sketching. It's something I can do while listening to the radio or my stupid telenovela. If the repetition didn't make my hands, shoulders, and eyes hurt so much, I could literally do it for hours on end.

Considering how much knitting I've done so far, I can safely say I have been doing just that.

I know that I'm using knitting as a way to avoid doing everything else. Writing demands too much, cleaning is boring and allergy-triggering, and that stack of books is downright formidable. There's just too much to do, and if I didn't focus on this one thing, I'll probably spend my time either flittering from one task to the next or staring off into space, too indecisive to do anything else.

...

That said, I made some progress with "A Series of Events" (Yay!), only to get sidetracked by, well, everything (Boo!). I am having trouble with the scene,, specifically the moment Snape and Potter face each other, each waiting for the other to speak, before they're interrupted, romcom-style, by a wild Weasley.

My doodling just gets better and better!

Considering the trouble I'm having with this precise moment, I wonder if I shouldn't just scrap the scene and try again. Cleaning the slate has helped my writing a lot more times than I can say. However, I don't think the whole scene is completely awful. It just needs work.

And I have to stop knitting to give it the attention it needs.

Current Mood: good

For the past three days, I kept running into homosexual and homoerotic undertones... and not even from the usual, expected sources.

( Very long bit about Tom Ripley, The Celluloid Closet, La Mujer del Vendaval, and the Mysterious Death of Jane Austen )

Sigh.

As for the expected sources, I wrote a sex scene (which I will never post) for the sake of getting it out of my head. I was working on the next bit of "A Series of Events" when I had what I thought was a great idea: perving up the detention scene in Half-Blood Prince, the one after the bathroom scene and before Harry's kiss with Ginny. But the more I wrote it out, the more I was skeeved by the whole scenario: Snape sneakily masturbating with Harry still in the room. I know I'm not the first to think of it, and I hope I can find someone else's version of it, if only to get my version out of my head for good.

Current Mood: blah

I worked on A Series of Events this week! Calloo callay!

I would have written more this week (and maybe finish the next chapter by now), but I was doing other things, such as:
- watching over 50 episodes of La Mujer del Vendaval (A telenovela I don't immediately hate? Yay!)
- trying to speak Japanese with a bad Mexican accent
- celebrating my birthday with way too much pizza (so much pizza that I was in actual physical pain)

Speaking of my birthday, years ago, I decided to celebrate it with a bit of fanfic/fanart crossdressing. Maybe, back then, I thought the idea of men in dresses was funny as-is. (Though Banana Yoshimoto's Moonlight Shadow and the teen boy wearing his dead girlfriend's school uniform in-story probably played a part...) I don't do it every year, but sometimes I do, which is my excuse for tonight's doodle.

Well... not the only excuse. Hina Matsuri is on Monday, hence the Heian period dress. I also like putting Snape in female clothing. If I do it one more time, I get a free cauldron cake!

... I wonder what they're saying...

After wondering where the hell she went off to for the past month, my muse showed up, drunk on Snarry-a-Thon prompts and more than a little fighty. "OMG, I finally figured out how to do that police procedural, and I have the best idea for prompt --, yadda yadda yadda."

I, on the other hand, got so sick of waiting for her (and I've become so afraid of being a disappointment) that I've only been writing a lot of notes based on her ramblings. She mostly talks about location scouting for some photography, but she's insistent that I write, too. I, on the other hand, am still afraid of my writing and can't seem to put these ideas into actual prose.

Doodle tonight is me procrastinating. Will force myself to get at least a thousand words on "paper" before going to bed. I should get right on top of that if I want to go to bed before dawn...

Current Music: MST3K - Hamlet

At the moment, there is about 2 feet of snow outside pretty much trapping me inside my house, my main computer's power cord is utterly broken, and... balls. Basically balls. I'm basically stuck here.

There are only two things I want to do right now (get food and a new power cord) (three if I included "shoveling the crap out of here get food/power cord"), and I can't really see past that and do the stuff I can do while stuck here. The fact that the stores are just as closed up for the day is not all that reassuring. So I'm watching Olympic curling instead. Balls.

I've been trying to write every day this month, mostly because of Month of Letters, which I decided to not do because of the postage costs, among other things. I thought at one point to try for a drabble a day, or maybe a third round of ABC fanfics, but everyday life things (and freakish snowfalls) kept distracting me. Meh. The month isn't over yet. I might get something done yet.

Yeah.

Current Mood: bored

Crossposted on LJ for reasons.

Title: Spider Rhythm
Author:

babygray
Pairing: None
Warnings: Typos. No beta.
Disclaimer: This is just fanfiction, non-profit and just for fun.
Notes: This takes place pre-Hogwarts. The Tiger handheld for After Burner was released in 1988, if you need a specific-ish date for this. I was half-thinking of making this pre-slash, with Snape showing up as a tarantula. However, the research I did on spiders, and poisonous ones in particular, skeeved me out. So... enjoy a snippet of Harry's pre-Hogwarts life?
Word Count: 328
Summary: Harry and a spider share a moment under the stairs.

( Read more... )

Crossposted on IJ for reasons.

Title: Spider Rhythm
Author:

babygray_dam
Pairing: None
Warnings: Typos. No beta.
Disclaimer: This is just fanfiction, non-profit and just for fun.
Notes: This takes place pre-Hogwarts. The Tiger handheld for After Burner was released in 1988, if you need a specific-ish date for this. I was half-thinking of making this pre-slash, with Snape showing up as a tarantula. However, the research I did on spiders, and poisonous ones in particular, skeeved me out. So... enjoy a snippet of Harry's pre-Hogwarts life?
Word Count: 328
Summary: Harry and a spider share a moment under the stairs.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Journey OST

Crossposted on LJ for reasons.

Title: Starfruit
Author:

babygray
Pairing: Snape/Harry
Warnings: Typos. No beta.
Disclaimer: This is just fanfiction, non-profit and just for fun.
Notes: This was inspired by the

fanfic100 prompt board, specifically prompt #57: Lunch. It's not a full story, just a drabble, really. And it's very much a 30-minute, barely-thought-out something/practice. Like a sketch. With words. And I'm not sure if Severus Snape even knows what a sweet tooth is...
Word Count: 426
Summary:Severus, busy at work, gets a package.

( Read more... )

Crossposted on IJ for reasons.

Title: Starfruit
Author:

babygray_dam
Pairing: Snape/Harry
Warnings: Typos. No beta.
Disclaimer: This is just fanfiction, non-profit and just for fun.
Notes: This was inspired by the

Current Location: MST3K - Monster A Go Go

"Past performance does not guarantee future results."

Comic City was last Sunday, and it was... okay.

I sold nothing. However, I did finally start reading Casket of Souls, so that's something.

Have you ever read any of Lynn Flewelling's Nightrunner books? They are fantastic, yo. Heroic fantasy, all sorts of magic, fun characters, and political intrigue. Plus, all the Bi the Way and UST. Casket's writing was a bit weird in the first couple of chapters, but by the time I got to the climax, I was crying and pumping my fist and cooing over love blooming, though not at the same time.

... Did you notice how I sidetracked from Comic City? It's almost like I don't want to talk about it.

It took me a bit to get over my disappointment. I put myself out there, and left feeling very sad. It's obvious that my skin isn't thick enough, not if I felt like I (and not my work) had been rejected. I try to take solace that it was my first time, the venue was very small, the people across from my table had about as many customers as I had, and people did look. They didn't buy, but they looked. Not what I hoped for, but I can take that.

I have to. It's all I have.

Aside from the lack of sales, it wasn't too bad. I sat for three hours, read nearly half of my book, and tried not to stare at people walking past lest I scared them. I've wasted my time in worse ways.

I have until mid-February to decide on whether to try the bigger, appropriately-named Super Comic City. I'll see I can handle more protracted sleep deprivation and ego-bruising by then.

Writing this week. I thought of joining in on Month of Letters, but postage is nearly $1 a letter around here. Screw that noise. I came up with a better plan.

Current Music: MST3K - The Girl in Lover's Lane

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babygray

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Recent Entries

Things, Man

Last Chance Power Driiiiiiivvveeee.....

(UN)Happy Halloween!

I Think I Need Rest

(Not So) Cruel Summer

How is it ONE in the Morning!?!

Summertime/Doin' Time (and the Livin's Easy)

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Blankity Blank Blank

Self-Trippage

Knitting

Finding without Even Looking

Hinamatsuri/Doll Festival Snarry

The Fighty Muses

Buried Alive

[ficlet] Spider Rhythm

Spider Rhythm (drabble, MoF)

[ficlet] Starfruit

Starfruit (drabble, MoF)

Past Performance ≠ Future Results