Happy birthday, Altered Origin! I actually do have a handful of updates this year—most of them are catching up with some stuff I didn't share earlier, but there is even a New Thing, oooh.

The Trainer Generator has finally been updated to include Gen 9 DLC content as well as some general miscellaneous extra items (like new goals and trainer classes) and a few little corrections. I've also added a piece of fanart to the gallery that I made as a gift for a friend and her fanfic.

Speaking of fanfic, there are some updates on that front as well! I did a small handful of pokédex mini drabbles, but not just on their own: I wrote them as part of the PokéPod Project's Gen One anthology, a collection of fanfic and podfic ("podfics" are dramatic readings of fanfiction—think of them like audiobooks for fanfics) for every single Generation 1 Pokémon. I was tapped to write for Kakuna, Bellsprout and Tentacool, and getting to hear those little stories actually narrated (by Rambling_Company and ShakespeareStoleMyURL, many thanks to the both of them!) was fantastic! Definitely make sure to listen to the readings on AO3 after you read them—they're linked underneath their respective drabbles. And check out the rest of the anthology as well! Several of my friends and a ton of other talented pokéfic community members contributed to this, and there's a lot of great stuff to enjoy.

And lastly, there's the actual brand new bit! And it's actually longer than a drabble, gasp, oh my, etc.. (Only about 400 words longer, but shh.) "Word Problems" was written as a contribution to an upcoming community zine for the Thousand Roads forums. The zine isn't quite ready for publication yet as of this writing, but I've gone ahead and published my piece here now as a bit of a sneak peak, and because you endlessly patient people deserve to get to see something here first every once in a while, heh. It's tiny and silly and simple, but it was fun to write nonetheless!

As always, I'm hoping next year will end up being at least slightly more productive on the AO front. Always things I need to fix, stories I'd love to write, tweaks I'd like to make. And there are always things getting in the way, such is life. I can't make any promises, but with a little luck there'll be some more nerdy creative stuff for you folks to enjoy in 2025.

Wishing you all the best for the end of this year, the holiday season and beyond!