2026 Writing Log, Part Nine

[rynling]

- After being a fan of the ship for more than a decade, I finally wrote my first Setzer/Celes story for this year’s Final Fantasy Kiss Battle! It’s on AO3 (here), and it’s about Setzer doing postapocalyptic airship housekeeping so that Celes will have a place to come home.

- I’m working on another Kiss Battle story, but I’m being slow. “Slow” is better than “not being able to write at all,” though! Here’s hoping that this horrible winter will end soon.

- In a bolt out of the blue, I was invited to include an old comic (this one) in an upcoming anthology. I’m not a huge fan of the art, which from 2021, but I said okay. Because why not? Just to be on the safe side, I also wrote a somewhat lengthy artist’s statement. I’m 99% certain this won’t accompany the comic itself, but hopefully it will give the editor some context about pandemic-era Tumblr culture. It makes me feel like the worst sort of far-right creep to say that “even progressive people can sometimes be huge assholes online,” so I did my best to add context without coming off as accusatory.

- I got back the peer review comments on an article about indie comics publishing (that has been upgraded to a book chapter!), and the reviewers were basically like “looks good, but add two paragraphs about [something marginally relevant] to the conclusion.” So I did that, while also performing some additional gymnastics to make it fit. Hopefully the additions aren’t too awkward.

- This week’s post on my book review blog (here) is about a Yoko Ogawa novel from 2004 called Burafuman no maisō (Brahman’s Funeral). The “Brahman” of the title is the name of a forest creature of indeterminate species that the narrator cares for over the course of a summer. There’s a lot of wholesome goodness in the story, but also a lot of gothic weirdness. Like what if you casually lived side-by-side with death in a beautiful but isolated village in the woods, but also you had an intelligent animal companion who loved you very much? Clearly the author wrote this book for me specifically lmao.

- Speaking of forest creatures, I drew a baby boar hunting for acorns at the edge of an overgrown road, and I posted the drawing (here) on Tumblr. I unfortunately don’t have the skill to make this look like the scene in my head, and the shade of green I used for the background is a little too saturated, but I still had fun painting the textures. Also did you know that boars have long and beautiful eyelashes? Because they do!!

- I also made a page of rough sketches of tanuki, which are round and fat and lazy and happy and truly this planet’s own chosen creatures. Maybe I’ll clean this up later, but the sketches are (here) if you need them.

Not much to report this week. At the moment I’m doing my best to look at the news only in small increments, and only according to a schedule I set for myself. To help keep myself sane, I’m thinking of picking up Final Fantasy XVI, maybe?

ETA: Because I was paying attention to other world events yesterday, I missed the big Pokémon announcement, which is that there's an upcoming new game called Winds and Waves whose fire-type starter pokémon is a Pomeranian named Pombon, and oh!!!!!!!! I am so in love ❤️