Wow it's been a while since I updated this page! I'm officially settled into my new home in Chicago. I still don't know a lot of people, or have a lot of in-person friends, so that's what I'm going to be working on next. First step: start leaving the house regularly. Scary.

As for writing, I have plans for later this year! I want to do NaNo this year, but with a bit of a twist. My anthologies have been on my mind, I've been world-building for them a lot lately (and I really should post some of it here, note to self), and I've been thinking about how well Kinktober 2023 worked for me regarding writing regularly. Having arbitrary deadlines that have to be completed in a day seemed to really motivate me to finish short fiction, so I want to do something like that for NaNo instead of the standard "50k words in a month" goal. Tracking wordcount has always made me feel worse, not better, but "finish this thing in ONE DAY, GO!!" feels a lot better!

I don't think I'll do "one a day" like Kinktober works, maybe one a week? Maybe if I finish one that's really short and I still have time in a week, I'll try to finish a second one. We'll see! I'm really excited about these anthologies, I've posted some prompts here already. I don't know if I want to risk posting all of the short things I write for NaNo, because I do want to publish them and make money off them eventually.

I've also been thinking about Pride & Justice all the time, forever, every hour of the day, which is most evident on my Tumblr. I've been toying with a sci-fi story recently as well, about a space cruise gone wrong. I'm also thinking about organizing my poetry into collections to be published. My writing plans are beefy this year! I hope I get some stuff more concretely hammered out.

I finished Kinktober2023 at last! In December! But in my defense, I'm still getting used to the winters here in Chicago, and wow are they different from the ones I'm used to. It's not even as cold as it gets and I'm dreaing that.

But anyway! Yay! I finished Kinktober, and I'm glad I did finally do it, even if it was very late. I enjoyed every prompt, even the ones that didn't turn out like I expected. I think I'm a much better erotica writer now than I was before, so that's cool to think about. Since the actual Pride & Justice book is going to have sex in it, I'm excited to apply what I've learned during this exercise to future works!

Speaking of the future, I guess I'll have to start thinking about what to do in the new year, regarding my writing projects. I have a lot I want to do, a lot I know I need to stop doing, and things that I'd like to do more of if I have the time. I want to start moving the paid-only Ko-Fi posts over here, eventually, as well as on Tumblr, because I'm proud of them. I want to start doing Magnet Mondays again. I know I need to pace myself, and I'm going to be slowing down on Ko-Fi in the new year in general because of how much it's sucked out of me this year. What I don't have is a plan for any of this. I guess I can think about it when I fly back to Texas to see my family for the holidays.

I'm excited about all my projects though! And about how I can use this site to share them! I think I'm going to retool how I do my WIP pages, having huge lists doesn't seem like the best way to do it. Having dozens of nested links doesn't seem great either though? Oh well, another thing to think about.

Here's to 2024, the year of Me, Writing! I hope!

I'm FINALLY moved into my new apartment! Getting all my stuff halfway across the country was an experience, but now that I'm finally settled in (mostly), I can start writing regularly again! Woo! Rejoice!

First order of busniess is to finish Kinktober2023. I'm proud of myself for getting all the way to day 24 before I had to stop, because I was packing and preparing to move in that time. I also managed to write a few in the U-Haul on the way to my new place! But now that October is gone, I don't have a "schedule" of how to post them anymore. I guess I'll just be uploading them whenever they get finished. I don't think I'll try to finish them all inside a day anymore - no use in holding to that challenege now that it's technically over. I will finish my prompt list though! I'm enthusastic about these last few unfinished prompts, and I refuse to leave it incomplete, even if that means finishing late.

I'll also have to figure out what I'm doing when Kinktober ends. I've been meaning to make some paid-only content on my Ko-Fi available for free for a while now, so maybe that's next!

Whew, it's been a while! But since my last entry, I've signed a lease for a new apartment this week, and started Kinktober2023 this month! I'm excited to move, but there's still a lot to figure out and stuff to pack up. I'm also very excited for Kinktober, but I'm definitely worried about being able to keep up with it, especially since I'm also moving this month to be at my new apartment on November 1st.

I think if I finish a prompt super early, I'll try to at least start the next one to help myself get ahead. I think there's a chance I won't be able to write at all near the end of the month, so writing multiple prompts a day would definitely help later. In any case, if I can't write them all in time, I definitely want to post them later. I've had this prompt list for months, including an outline for each one so I know what I'm doing.

In any case, I hope you're all enjoying Kinktober as much as I am! Also, if anyone reading this knows anyone else who's doing an original/OC-centric Kinktober, I would love a link to their prompts. I'm having a hard time finding any on Tumblr, and I'd love to share the love.

I got back from my vacation this week, though honestly, it was kind of a working vacation. I'm trying to move to Chicago (from Orlando, FL) and man is it difficult to find a nice apartment that sticks around. Literally my favorite apartment got snapped up 4 days after I toured it, before I could even submit an application. Sigh. Hopefully I'll find somethin soon. I just have to be more aggressive about sending applications, I guess.

I'm not sure what else to do on the website right now, other than upload more snippets and share world-building. I guess updates will slow down until I can think of something else to add. I'm still thinking about how to do Kinktober: should I upload them daily, or do a drop a whole bunch at the end of the week? I think doing them daily might be an annoying amount of extra work, but not too bad? I mean, I have wordhtml.com to help me out with the formatting, and posting it daily would keep with the spirit of (K)Inktober. Maybe I can host a poll about it. I wonder if enough people would vote on it?

That can all be done in September though. I think for now, I'll just focus on adding more cool stuff to my site whenever I feel like it!

I finally got a guestbook and Cbox up and running! Had some trouble with Cbox the other day because their servers were having some kind of issue, but today I was successful! I'm getting an error when I paste the Cbox code though? "Named entity expected." I don't know what that means, but it isn't breaking my site or the box, so I'll just ignore it until something does break.

I had a friend help me out with something yesterday, too. My badges box kept overflowing into the footer, so we figured out (i.e. she taught me) how to stretch the main body of the site however much I wanted. It looks a little awkward on the homepage, but I don't care much! as long as I get to show off all my cool badges :3

What I really want to do is implement a "freeze" toggle for my blinkies and other graphics if I add any some day. I want my site to be accessable, and too many flashing blinkies can make it hard for some people to be on my site. Hell, I don't even like flashing lights very much. I'm not really sure how to do that, though, and looking around online has not helped. Maybe I should ask some of my code-y friends for advice.

All-in-all, excited about my website! I'm going on vacation next week, so I won't be able to mess with it for a little while. But when I get back, I'm totally adding all my prose excerpts and stuff!

Got all the ShortStorySlam2019 stuff up! I did the weird and probably wrong way of making a multiple pages I talked about in the last entry, but it's working for now, so I'm going to leave it until I learn of a better way. Eventually this is going to get insane and I'll probably have no choice but to make a folder or something. That's Future Annnika's problem though.

Next thing to work on: my prose WIPs and excerpts and whatnot. I still want to make seperate pages for all of them, but I've been thinking about adding a drop-down menu to the "Prose" section of the navbar. I'm not sure how to do that, but I'll definitely be looking into it. Because then people wouldn't have to click the "Prose" button if they already know what story they want to read, they can just go there.

I think I am definitely going to make folders for all my prose WIPs though. It'll be easier for organization. I've got so many of them, and so many things I want to share, doing it the way I did it for ShortStorySlam and poetry. I think I'll make a folder for Kinktober2023, too, since there's going to be 31 entries.

Onward and upward into the website adventure though! I'm excited about everything :3

On my journey to figure out this website, I've run into a few problems. I don't really know what I'm doing.

My original plan with posting prose excerpts was to put them all on on page with a "scroll to top" arrow to save people some time, but now I'm thinking that's probably not ideal. I could do more than one page like a "/poetry/page/2" sort of deal, but I don't... know how to do that. Well, I don't know how to do it efficently. My immediate idea is to literally just make another .html page with a number on the end of it, but I feel like that's way too obvious to be how you're actually supposed to do it. I just figured out how folders work the other night because I wanted to put all my badges there. Maybe I should make a folder? Ugh, but then I'd have to re-link everything in the navbar.

There has to be a better way to do that, too. The real way can't be to just copy and past the navbar into every single page on the site, right? It seems so... tedious. Especially if you have a shitton of pages, how are you even supposed to manage all that? What if you forget one? I guess my current solution of keeping a notepad of a blank page to copy and paste whenever I make a new one helps to a certain extent. But now I have to remember to update the notepad file whenever I want to make a new page.

Making a website is hard. I'm sure it's better if you know things about it.

I've also been considering different ways to put comments on here. My first thought was to literally get a comment box like from this site here but I've also seen how cool chatboxes are and might pick one of those instead? Or a guestbook? There are a lot of options for comments. I guess it just depends on how much moderation I want. It also seems like I'd have to make yet another link in the navbar for a guestbook, whereas with a comment box or chat bot I can put them individually on each page. But again, that means copy-pasting all the code into each page. Sigh. Logistics.

With Tumblr adding more and more features that suspiciously mimmic Twitter and Reddit, the weird "bug" that only flags trans women's posts as mature, and the general fuckery of social media right now, I'm glad I decided to get this website started. For now, I'm using a template from EggRamen that I plan on tweaking as I learn about HTML and CSS (starting from a base knowledge of 0). It'll be cool to have a non-professional place to share my writing. My portfolio is nice, but I wouldn't be comfortable throwing a whole bunch of random and/or unfinished stuff on it, obviously, so a casual place to share my work without worrying about it getting taken down, flagged, my account getting deleted, etc. will be nice. Thanks for being so cool, Neocities!

I'm especially excited about the fact that there are no bans on explicit sexual content here, because I've been so worried about how I was going to share my prompts for Kinktober this year. Like, Tumblr technically doesn't allow depictions of sex acts, even if it's marked as mature, and Ko-Fi doesn't allow anything even remotely suggestive, even if you flag your page as NSFW. So yay, I can just put them here! I also found out how to make a little HTML pop-up so I can send out alerts for stuff like that, which I'm going to do. But it's nice that I'm not required to. I can post my smut and not have to worry about getting my entire profile nuked from orbit because obviously two fake people having queer sex is the most abhorrent thing on the face of the Earth.

I guess Ao3 is an option, but nobody goes to Ao3 to read about original characters from original works. They go to read fanfiction, which is nice! I love fanfic. But it's always been rough finding a (non-exploitative) place for original writers to share their stuff. Oh well, that's why I'm carving out my own little space. Just for me to play with my OCs like dolls and let people watch.