requiems

See title... Estelline fic is requiring a lot more work than I believed it would as I continue to trim on every pass, and whilst I do of course still love it, I desperately want to be done with it so I can go back to writing about ouihaw... this is what happens when you finish Heavensward and vaguely start Stormblood and that's no longer the vibe you're looking for. I've also just been struggling with words and worth in general - I probably need a break, but I feel like I'm constantly having a break when there's days I can't write and I have to write so I don't go crazy!! It's tough. The first five chapters/27k is up, though. C6 and C7 are finalised, C8 is next.

In my "I miss my girls" state, I opened up the sims 4 after not doing so since last December and spent thirteen hours over last weekend moving my ouihaw yeehaw ranch save from a 30x20 lot to a 64x64 lot and instead of building from scratch, used the pre-existing blueprint to make each room ever so slightly bigger, so it keeps the cozy country vibes but it's not as pokey and the daughters have actual individual rooms now. And the horsies have a paddock and space to roam 🥹 I do not recommend building like this it was a nightmare, although it was worth it. I'll take some screenshots of the new and improved house next time I play.

And in the trifecta of "I MISS ASHE TAILS I MISS HER A LOT" let's talk about my Ashe stadium build.

( For a girl who was so against stadium pre-launch I sure do talk about it a lot... )

Finished my first pass at Estelline's fic! This is particularly good, since I wasn't able to write for seven days and it was driving me a bit stir crazy. I cut about 5k words, so now it's 55k in total. I need to go through it again for final checks but it's in a state where it can soon be posted, which is deliberately timed with me finishing Heavensward; I've been getting Sorbet through the initial push of levelling a first DOW job through 80/90, plus her DOH/DOL and it's going reasonably well, she got lucky with some GC handins so one DOH is at dwarves already, WHM is 77, she should get picto over the weekend which opens up the arksadora dailies and hunts sprint - but back to Estelline, the focus on Sorbet was a result of not having the capability, physically or mentally, to really focus on MSQ, so I took a small break (and played Caravan SandWitch on the side. I liked it! Not sure if I'll ramble about it yet, I might). I'm hoping to do 3.4 and 3.5 over the weekend and have her set up for Stormblood.

Stormblood will be a mixture... I left off with Ai following the liberation of Doma, so I'm going to do the initial Ala Mhigo part with Estelline, get her to Kugane with doing Sirensong, and then swap over to Ai to play out the other half. As I have the opportunity to see the plot hooks back to back without several weeks of Doma in the middle and time for my brain to forget, this feels like a good chance to take it.

This week has been very noisy. My upstairs neighbours are having work done on their bathroom, which I found out at 8:15am on Monday when the hammering and drilling and buzzsawing started. Sometimes over my head, because the connecting wall is the wall I sleep against. The workmen have been here every day since through about 2-3pm - except for yesterday, when they were here until 6pm. :') this was Bad as my desire for No Noise Time had to take precedence over sleeping so I got like. An hour and a half of actual sleep before the morning chorus. I did drown it out a bit with a fan today to try to get a little more, but unfortunately that means I have to listen to the fan, which as we already know, is not a real solution... being housebound is awful sometimes.

Thing is I know the size of their bathroom. It's the same as mine. It's miniscule. I'm hoping it's a week and done, I don't want to imagine this next week with groceries PEM, it's bad enough as is. My weekly things, aside from noise, are done after next Tuesday, so I can have a bit of a break and go back to trying to tackle the folate problem and also the GP-do-your-job problem, and maybe, just maybe, have the energy to look at a several thousand page catalogue of what I want for my bathroom renovation, lmao. rip.

Current Mood: sleepy

me, I am taking a break from working on undercoverfic, a longfic, where I have spent six weeks rewriting and editing approximately the first 18k words, and the first six chapters of twenty eight.

the break in question:

don't worry about it.

that said... it mostly just needs touch-ups and a bit of readjustment here and there; this is what picking out a little of it for the riversmeet reunion taught me. 60-80k words are usually all quality. 100k is when it gets a bit dicey. tmyk.

i have been doing gpose during estelline's heavensward playthrough to pair with this - i need some more for patches, but i might wait until i'm actually in patches to do it. i also need to rehn gpose (not many, perhaps 2-3) and prih gpose (lots! i need to get certain armour and a drk sword for her and also cut her hair to its original, she's gonna be so baby it's gonna be emotional), and lastly amélie doing weird creepy shit for the mandatory echo scene. she is causing problems on purpose.

Current Mood: tired

( in the waxing gloom, did wane the lover's moon )

Accused. Accused and just this morning he had gazed upon his mother's engagement ring in his father's study and thought that, in a few days, he might be returning to ask for it.

Imagine if she had returned a few days hence—

It sickens him. How he has to feel about it. Disdain. Disgust. That he feels that way about her at all. Her father never showed a single sign. It cannot be true, but if the Heavens Ward has pursued it and he has fled is it not admission? It means the system fails them if it is wrong and it cannot, it shall not, they will outlast. It would have been a blight upon the Foretemps name, and he—

He is trying, shrewdlessly, to make it better. Systematically unmaking himself and his preferences until he is moulded into the perfect son of Ishgard, who will sacrifice to uphold her eternally as She is.

For NaNoWriMo last year, I wrote about Estelline, and a retelling of Heavensward from her perspective. Estelline was a member of The Order of the Knight's Dragoon who, whilst engaging the Horde alongside the Azure Dragoon and their fellows, on the return home via Falcon's Nest discovers her father has been accused of heresy. With her father fled and her mother taking her own life, it falls on Estelline, the sole surviving member of House Maylis, to answer for his crimes; and knowing she would win a trial by combat at the Tribunal, the overseeing inquisitor espies an opportunity, and suggests she might not have survived the engagement with the Horde after all. Estelline is cast out into the wastes, where she finds her way to the Convictory.

I've written about significant moments in several of my wol's lives prior to this for Ai and Khlip, but Estelline's was by far the longest and most extensive. First and foremost it is a love story, about falling apart and falling back together and falling, falling, falling, in love with other things and ideals and that love itself endures in unpredictable, unexpected ways. I should free more of it, eventually. It's got good vibes and good Artoirel character study moments and Prih is having a whole time missing Minfilia and Rehn is there and I love Estelline dearly.

This is not the entirety of my 2024 Nano (far from it!) but as I reached this particular quest, of Artoirel and the WoL travelling to Riversmeet in the pursuit of heretics, in my playthrough of MSQ with her, I've been thinking about it. And seeing as what I'd written required little to no edits or changes at all, here it is.

( The heretics are dead. Two people stand. One as a knight and the other a mystery. )

Current Mood: tired

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i miss my girls, tails. i miss them a lot.

i crave silence...

(worry a little)

echoes of truths that one rang clear