#astl

The story is at just under 100,000 words of posted material so far, and it's just gotten to be too much to go back and reread every time I work on something new for it - and I felt like too many details/small plots were going to accidentally be forgotten.

Now I have all my characters organized in order of appearance (Canon characters on the left, OCs on the right)

AND I've been working on doing character portraits (particularly for the OCs) as well as chapter-specific notes on each character when an important event/plot happens with them.

Example of the character portraits:

I also have all the chapters broken down scene-by-scene, and any extra art I want to make upon editing gets it's own reference/planning sub-board as well >:3

I've been doing the thumbnails mostly in my sketchbook and finishing them off digitally which has been a really gratifying experience tbh, I really love doing my sketches tiny and in mechanical pencil bc it gives me the looseness and texture I love while stopping me from going to detail-heavy (bc small) & redrawing 40-billion times (bc tradtional).

Below is an example of the thumbnail sketches vs. the base lines :D

I just moved into a new place, and I don't have a monitor that displays color well, so I've been firmly in the b&w/lineart space with digital work right now, but I'm actually grateful for it bc it's forcing me to slow down and not hyper-focus on any one particular piece.

Idk how many chapters will have art, but I'm having fun with it for now hehe

Sometimes I get kind of down on myself for how slow I can be at updating, but something (I can't even remember what atm it's 3 a.m. rn lmao) resparked the feeling of happy fandom warm-fuzzies I had for years and years, and I just - this is fun. I'm so grateful this is like... a thing, you know?? Ik the internet can be A Lot esp. with the large influx of ppl into the community who haven't learned the culture yet but... idk I'm just feeling... happy about making things again in a very familiar way I had been chasing the last couple months.