Lost in Lualand

Life has been A Lot for me this entire month, but, that's a topic for a different post. Only good things in this post, my friends.

1) Today I made an extremely tasty chili and now I get to eat it all week, all praise be to this boilermaker chili recipe

2) This weekend I learned that “hiring a falconer” is a thing you can do for your wedding, and immediately proceeded to do so, because hell yeah.

3) I published two new fics!

Shrike, No Chaser: Ace Attorney, Klavier/Apollo fluff, ~2.5k words. Basically, some people enabled me one time by being like "hey what if Ace Attorney but they're all birdwatchers" and this is the result. "Wow, Lua, it sounds like you've been thinking about this a lot—" my headcanon doc for this AU is extensive. Expect many more fics where this came from, lol.

and

Mountains Made of Steam: Fire Emblem 9/10, Reyson being a weird tetchy avoidant mope, also there's Rafiel and Nailah, ~7.5k words. This was my Nagamas exchange gift for lavendre, hi lavendre :P It includes an AWFUL DINNER PARTY so my writing goals were basically accomplished.

Hope I can be more chatty on here shortly. In the meantime, if anyone's having as rough of a January as I've had: remember, the Chinese New Year is coming up! you can just treat January as a free space! you get a fresh start in a mere one week, it's fine—

During the march toward the Tower of Guidance, Micaiah contemplates the future: her own, Sothe's, and Daein's.

Naesala isn't helping.

~14k words.

Here at AO3.

( very spoiler-y making-of notes here )

Hey my exchange fic got done; let's see if I'll hate myself for it in the morning.

But before that time comes, here, have some random notebook scans from when I was writing the fic.

These notes are from pretty early on, when I knew I wanted to write Rafiel and Naesala and a swamp but I didn't know much else. I was just kicking around ideas, but I was surprised how many of these made it into the fic after I'd finished going down some dead ends first.

( Page one. )

( Page two. )

It should probably bother me that I end up drawing Lost comparisons as often as I do when I'm outlining fic, both of the fan and original varieties. That show was excellent excellent at characterization and god-awful at plot. Whups.

Also I'm almost at the end of this notebook and I don't know of a Japanese bookstore near me that sells more these particular notebooks D: I tried ordering some online at the beginning of last semester, but turns out navigating Japanese retail websites is pretty damn complicated even if you do have a semi-fluent Japanese speaker sitting beside you while you do it. I should've bought more of them while I was in Seattle ugh.

I love looking at artists' sketchbooks and works-in-progress — there's just something so fun about seeing the lines and shapes in a rough sketch, or watching how a project progresses and changes as it gets closer to completion.

I really love looking at the writers' equivalent, too — drafts, outlines, notes, and so on — but for whatever reason, writers don't really share such things nearly as readily as artists do.

Anyway, I thought I'd share some bits from my notebook, written while I was planning "Dog in the Vineyard," for anyone who's similarly interested in such things.

( Spoilers for aforementioned fic, obviously. Also, images ahoy! )

Click here to read!

Thought this would be a short chapter when I started writing... clearly I was wrong >__>

But hey!  There's lots of Zihark-ly goodness in this chapter =D