...dammit.

I don't have any excuses, aside from that if it's any consolation the Big Project is tantalizingly close to being done. Actually keeping up with any writing or any progress on anything else at all has been like pulling teeth, although I did at least write six more 649 mini stories in February: Ariados, Pineco, Swellow, Sealeo, Shelmet and Genesect. (Man that is a lot of bugs. Huh.) I was hoping to post them in the usual batch of ~ten, but since it's been well over a month since I wrote those and the other four are nowhere to be found... yeah.

Also, as a sidenote, there still appear to be some issues, mostly on my end, with the fanart gallery (+ the other stuff that uses the same interface like the sparkly lists and the free renders page). It's gotten to the point where I think I might need to change how I'm handling it entirely; I hope not because that's a lot of rearranging and reuploading and rewriting descriptions to do, but it may end up that way. I really need to focus on the final stretch of the Big Project for now, but once I can finally put all this grand opening nonsense behind me I'll hopefully have more time to troubleshoot (and to write, of course). Once the troubleshooting is done I have at least two more pictures to upload to the gallery, too.

In the meantime, if you are continually frustrated by the lack of new things to read, my old affiliate 6th Floor is back under a new name—Lavender Town—and is going strong again, so you can drop by there and check out some creepypastas while you wait for me to not be totally inadequate.

Fourteen new 649 mini drabbles today, almost all actually done something resembling on time, haha. There're some updates to previous posts for Charmeleon, Caterpie, Pikachu, Kadabra and Liepard, and then new posts containing Hitmonlee, Hitmonchan, Furret, Wobbuffet, Skarmory, Tyrogue, Hitmontop, Sableye and Meditite. Whew! Hopefully this is only the first of many decent-sized updates to the thing. The new posts are currently missing tags because something seems to be wrong with the site's backend, so I'll have to fix that as soon as I know what's going on there. (EDIT: Tag problem resolved now, though I did notice a separate problem with the fanart gallery in that its lightbox effect has stopped working. I've switched to a different lightbox temporarily so that the image captions are still visible.)

While I'm here, I'll also say that I'm working on a full-size one-shot for 649 proper. The general idea is that it'll be done by my birthday, partially so it can serve as my gift to myself and partially because I'd like it out of the way so I can start something else a little bigger on that day. I am doing a bit of work now and I do still have to hustle on the Big Project, but it shouldn't be a terribly long story and I'm hoping I can pull it off. (Ideally with enough time left over to actually sit on it for a few days and proofread it properly so that the illogical shenaniganry that was My Oshawott Never Smiles doesn't happen again.)

...guess I'm gonna have to rename these projects soonish, aren't I? Damn you, Gen VI, damn you and the excruciating extra renaming effort you have heaped upon me. :P Hurry up and leak the full pokédex size so I can get that over and done with already.

I finally finished the fanfiction rec list I mentioned a few updates ago; I meant to have it ready earlier in the month, but at least I posted it before November really got going. I feel like the two people who commented saying they were interested in rec lists will already have seen most of these, at least within the fandoms they're interested in, but hopefully the rest of you will find something new to read! For future reference, you can find this and any other rec lists on the Misc. Writings page, though I'll probably make a quick note of it in the updates anyway if I add more to it.

(I am a little bummed about not being able to include one of my other favorite Pokémon fics on the list since the author appears to have taken it down from FFN and I haven't attempted to see if it still exists on any forums yet. If you happen to come across Mentor by Dagzar anywhere, though, and don't mind that it apparently won't be finished, give it a look!)

The webcomic rec list honestly should've been done well before that one, especially since I had most of my comments written down and just needed to clean them up, but apparently it's harder to do that than I'd thought it would be. It should hopefully show up soon.

That "soon" should be read as "sometime in early December", by the way, because after taking a break last year I'm going to be participating in NaNoWriMo again. Updates will be scarce to non-existent, yadda yadda yadda that doesn't mean a whole lot seeing as they've been scarce all year. :/ But since I'm writing a fanfic (again sob sob why are my original ideas never ready), it is something that can be posted to AO when it's a bit more polished... and as my primary NaNo plan is to write a bunch of mostly-standalone short stories that still add up to one larger story, I feel as though I'm more likely to have stuff that's ready to post instead of a monolithic thing full of monolithic plot holes that collects dust on my hard drive like At Liberty, Incarnadine Harvest and Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen. The caveat is that, like the aforementioned Incarnadine Harvest, this year's story is not a Pokémon fic (unless I do in fact change my mind over the next few days, which is ill-advised but not entirely implausible) and so will likely not be of interest to the majority of my usual visitors. Still, I know there are at least some people who might enjoy it if I post it here in addition to the more general fic venues, and dammit I need to be doing something on the actually-write-crap-and-actually-post-it front. (In more Pokémony news, though, I do have other plans for some writing that is a bit more relevant to most of your interests. More on that in another update, though.)

For now, anyway, I am definitely working with this Golden Sun fanfic. I'm already 800+ words in as of 12:30 AM (after which I stopped to finish up the rec list and this update), and will get to the other half of my day's wordcount after some sleep and some work. I just hope that leaves me enough time to either feel more confident about what I want to do with the GS fic or else make just enough headway on one of my other ideas to start that instead and not fall too far behind.

Oh! One other thing before I go: I finally updated My Oshawott Never Smiles and fixed the issues that had been pointed out to me. (Hopefully fixed, anyway.) Negrek I am so sorry and I swear that next time you leave concrit on a fic I will not take almost two years to act on it :(