Unbeknownst to dreamwidth, I have been creative these past months, and A and I are trying to encourage each other to blog more, so here I am.

Looks like I've been gone a year. Ya'll were fortunate enough not to have to listen to me 1.) get over a man, 2.) fall for another man, 3.) angst over him. 4.) angst over COVID and the relatively mild changes it made in my life since I'm a hermit anyway. Mostly, it just made work very, very slow. Life, in general, got almost therapeutically quiet and slow-moving, to the point where some very old fascinations sifted to the surface.

I was on the clock, doodling with a blue highlighter when some very ancient boys slid off:

"Ahahahaha. Ahahhahaha. These are my OC's. They're from 2004, so they're 16 years old now. SIXTEEN YEARS OLD, can you believe it??? They're in this story that I never wrote but was OBSESSED with. I know, it doesn't make any sense."

So that was two months ago, and I did decide to write that story. Something about a closeted queer ice prince stuck in a dangerous, deceptive castle with his own emotional constipation really spoke to me during quarantine. A lot of re-acquainting has been happening, re-examining, tearing down and rebuilding. Looking back on why the whole thing has mattered to me and stuck around, as if I'm standing on a mountaintop overlooking a valley.

So yes, I have some posts to make. Such as:
❄️ The urgent dream I had in 2004 in which ice-prince (Akira) introduced himself ( here! )
❄️ The fact that this story was originally a fanfic for an N64 game called Paper Mario (2002). 
❄️ The fact that Akira is the reason I got into The Phantom of the Opera
❄️ The fact that Akira is ostensibly LGBTQ+ long before I had all the words in my vocabulary, and a lot of it was why he so easily became a VERY CLOSE character of mine when I was in high school: my own fictional best friend.
❄️ I never wrote the original story that I'm doing now, but my real life flesh-and-blood best friend growing up, Kate, and I wrote extensive spin-off stories, and I drew an extensive comic... And while all of it was never meant to be taken super seriously and some outrageous stuff happened, I'm finding a need for my character development timeline to still be cohesive. It so far hasn't been a problem, which is pretty amazing.
❄️ How the bloody writing is even turning out. Short version: it's going okay.

On the whole, I can say I'm really, really surprised? In disbelief? But sincerely happy? That this thing has been resurrected? I stowed it away a long time ago because even though it meant a lot to me, and had this really cool aesthetic, and I could feel something awesome buried beneath the bullshit and the dramatic Evanescence playlist I had for it... I didn't have the tools to pull it out, or the motivation. An ice castle isn't usually a young woman's emotional head-space.

So yeah! I will go down the list with those posts.