Featured image: title and artist unknown.
Editing the twenty-first chapter of Jake and the Dynamo took me longer than I expected, so it doesn’t look like I’ll get another post up today …
… but I’m gonna go ahead and post the chapter early. Expect it in thirty minutes!
Featured Image: “Magical Girl Marisa (Miss America)” by PencilTales.
Crazy week for me. Sorry for the absence.
Chapter 21 of Jake and the Dynamo is almost ready to go. Dana and Chelsea finally square off in Magical Girl Rumble, and the winner in the contest will get a kiss from T.B., the effete yet rakish idol of Juban High!
If Dana wins, will her short-lived magical girl career end in unrelieved pining? After all, they say a lot of girls are wasting away because of T.B. And what of Chelsea? Will this destroy her relationship with Jake? They say once you’ve had T.B., you never really get over it.
Y’know, I don’t think I realized when I started writing this that Dana was going to pick a fight with everyone she met. Jake really can’t take her anywhere.
Featured image: “Thailand Magical Girl Malai” by shijyu.
I’m afraid I’ve nothing new to report. I’m running short of time tonight.
Artwork from the official Sugar Sugar Rune website, by Moyoco Anno.
I wanted to get up another review today, but I have to spend what time is left editing both my own work and another guy’s. I have chapter 21 of Jake and the Dynamo drafted, but it’s not yet ready to go.
I’m starting my new job tomorrow, which is good, but there’s no telling at the moment what that will mean for the schedule around here. Come January, my schedule will definitely get a lot tighter.
There’s a few shows I’d like to discuss this season, but I don’t think I’ll be doing episode-by-episode reviews, as I’m already doing that for two.
I also managed to track down a few volumes of Sugar Sugar Rune
The manga is out of print; what I’ve read of it so far lives up to the hype, and it must continue to be good, since people selling it have figured out that they can charge reasonable prices for most of the series and then charge sixty dollars or more for the final volume. The penultimate volume must have one heck of a cliffhanger if they can get anyone to pay that.
“That’s outrageous! … Ah, but I’ll never sleep again if I don’t find out what happens to the broody ten-year-old goth girl with the magic powers! Fine, here’s eighty bucks, you bastard, and to hell with you!”
Also, the series is being loaded, legally, to the interwebs in full color! But only in Japanese. This series came out in English from Del Rey Manga, and though I never bothered to learn what the story was behind them changing their name to Kodansha Comics, I did notice that they reprinted some of their catalog afterwards. Maybe there’s a chance they’ll reprint this one. I would say, from what I’ve seen, it deserves it.
But anyway, all of this is why the Moon Princess made interlibrary loan. We’ll see if I can manage to get them to loan me the whole series. The bad part of reading it this way is that, even if I can get the whole series, I likely won’t get it in order. I probably should have ordered one volume at a time, but instead I requested the first four … and I got volumes one and three. Volume three, of course, is the one that’s due back first.
Damn you, public library.
Featured image: “Magical Girl Tessa” by Primantis.
Just as a reminder, November is National Novel Writing Month. If you’ve ever wanted to write a whole novel in a single month, now is the time. There is an official website, linked above, where you can get pep talks, track your progress, and so forth.
I am reliably informed that if you hit writer’s block during a NaNoWriMo marathon, “just add ninjas” is a good way to get out of it. This is known as Chandler’s Law, formulated by pulp writer Raymond Chandler, who once said, When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”
This technique has worked for me in the past. Jake and the Dynamo is a story very amenable to Chandler’s Law: I am unashamed to admit that I “just added robot dinosaurs from space” because I didn’t know how else to save Jake’s bacon.
ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that, after the next two chapters are up, I believe Jake and the Dynamo will have hit the 100,000-word mark. Depending on who you ask, 40,000 is your basic novel length.
Magical Girl Raising Project, episode 4, “Add More Friends!” Directed by Hiroyuki Hashimoto. Studio Lerche. Produced by Genco (2016). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated PG-13. Available on Crunchyroll.
This episode continues where we left off in episode 3, with magical girls Snow White and La Pucelle getting bum-rushed by Ruler and her minions, who hope to swipe Snow White’s Magical Candies in order to avoid death at the hands of Fav’s sadistic elimination game.
Continue reading “‘Magical Girl Raising Project,’ Episode 4”
Featured image: “Magical Girl Art” by Chrysolith.
I recently stumbled upon this, a quiz designed, supposedly, to see if you have any clue how to write a novel. It was designed by the writers of How Not to Write a Novel
I got a perfect score, I guess. If I may say so, the score doesn’t surprise me: I have no pretensions of being the next Shakespeare, but I can at least turn out a workmanlike product when I’m halfway sober. However, I think a few of the questions are unfair.
For example, when asking what is a good sentence, it first gives the final line from The Great Gatsby
Ever back, to the chthonic quagmire of yesterdays that ate yesterdays in monarchic succession, like crocodiles held vassal to a Pharaoh of loss.
That’s purple, but not horrific. I would accept it, depending on the context. It would be at home in a story by Lovecraft. After all, not everything is The Great Gatsby, nor should it be.
Yesterday’s post featured art for which I could not find the source because it had already been traded around like a cheap whore.
But reader Tom Geraci, whose Google-fu surpasses mine, discovered that it was the product of one CKYM, an apparently Korean artist. CKYM has a cover image for his site so good, I stole it, too.
In other news, although I typically refrain from talking about personal matters with strangers on the internet, I have a job. It’s not quite the job I wanted, but it’s a real job that pays real money. I’ve also been accepted in the university program I’m entering for retraining. When I got out of college, I entered a field that was volatile, but where I could easily pick up a new job within two weeks whenever I lost one. But the last time I went job-hunting, it took me two years to find a position. Now the market’s even worse, and I’m not going to go through that again. So I’m changing careers.
I’d tell you who did the featured image, but I can’t find the original source. But I can tell you that it’s Sugar Sugar Rune
Sorry for the slow week here. Things are moving along on Jake and the Dynamo. I have a draft of chapter 22, but chapter 21 is still incomplete. Funny, huh?
Pretty soon, I’m going to rearrange the blog. The menu at the top is getting so long, so I’ll be creating a separate page for the Jake and the Dynamo table of contents.
I’ve got various non-blog things going on as well. I should have a new review up tomorrow after I get my act together.
Featured Image: “Magical ‘Witch’ Girl Neil” by Layer Industries. Sources for the rest of the art in the post are unknown.
Life is crazy, and I find myself behind on both reviews and story chapters, but so it goes.
Today, however, we must all pause in our labors to celebrate that second-most important of all magical girl holidays, Halloween, the one night in the year when cute witches can fly on their broomsticks without worrying about being observed, because they are simply mistaken for trick-or-treaters.
This is also an excellent night for magical girl warriors to use their transformative powers to acquire free candy, usually while being scolded comically by their familiars.
The first-most important magical girl holiday, incidentally, is Walpurgisnacht, which I believe you’re supposed to celebrate by destroying Tokyo or something. But that’s not until April 30th.
In any case, happy Halloween to one and all. To all cute witches who will be seeking candy tonight, stay safe and don’t stay out too late.
Um … so, candy corn. Does anyone really eat that stuff? It tastes like wax. It’s like something that nobody likes, but that they keep bringing out year after year anyway because it’s become inextricably linked to the holiday. Like Peeps at Easter.
Myself, I hand out toothbrushes and toothpaste samples at Halloween. That keeps the little scamps away. That way, I can watch the Halloween episode of Ouran High School Host Club in peace.
