Category: Status Update

If I’ven’t been around a while or just want to say “hey, stuff’s going on” those posts end up over here. The older ones are probably irrelevant to the present now.

Heads up on site design

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

I may switch the theme for this website soon (as in, maybe tonight to get it over with). Apparently the one I’m using now isn’t supported anymore, and while I don’t think I really care, there is one thing that is being annoying and which the switch might fix, which is that I’m not able to set a featured image for pages–even going into the current editor doesn’t have the option anymore. I don’t know why it might’ve changed but I might as well I guess.

Took me a bit to find a theme that wasn’t bad. Hopefully it works out because I probably won’t be able to revert it.

Year since Wandering Fortunes

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Man it’s been a year since I posted the last Wandering Fortunes chapter huh?

That’s all. I’m still working on behind the scenes stuff but it’s going to still be a long while before I get going on that again. Just wanted to mention that.

Another Pokemon comic is incoming.

2020 Retrospective

~ Duth Olec ~ 2 Comments

Well! That was a year, wasn’t it?  Let me start as usual by looking at what I said I’d do this year in my 2019 retrospective:

  • Got Wandering Fortunes all up, but most the rest was “probably won’t do this”. I did say I was doing one page a week for my wikified novel notes but that’s become one or fewer a month. Odemon, the Pokecomic, all that is still a glacial pace.
  • My new focus, the romance/erotica, has done very well! I started SUB FIFTY FOLLOWERS?!? I started this year with under 50?????????? I… Okay, I guess… No, I started the new Twitter in August of last year, apparently it took about six months to hit 50, and then 10 months later I’m past 500! Like, I’m mostly surprised because I was saying I had traction a year ago but I didn’t even have 50 at that point I guess? And now it’s like, oh! It’s. It’s weird. More on this in a bit.
  • I did not succeed in my new year’s resolution to hold a snake.

So all in all I pretty much hit all my goals for this year, with the exception of the one that required me to interact with people to get access to a snake, because, oh yeah, THE PANDEMIC. 2020 was one big mess of a year and

and

also my best year ever.

I mean, flatly firstways, I have readers now. I have people reading what I write, and it’s enjoyable writing! I wrote like… 2 or 3 solo stories, 3 or 4 chapters of a longer story, plus numerous sections for a split-timeline series, and a bunch of microstories. This alone makes 2020 my best year ever, and everyone’s been great and supportive!

Add to it I started commissioning art of my characters related to those, some beautiful, cool, wonderful, and gourd what i’m horny for artwork! Six characters, 20 pieces of art, plus six more either fan art or gifts or raffle such. More to come, and people love the characters and I’m so happy they do.

Honestly, I’ve loved getting the art so much I’m making plans to start getting official art drawn up for the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos characters.

So anyway 2020 is also a good year for me because the job I started late last year moved to remote at home, so I’ve been working almost all year and getting to nap on a bed on my breaks. It’s weird because this is due to the pandemic, which is horrible and awful and I’d trade it for there to not be that… but, hopefully when that’s over the company I work for won’t drag us all back to the office? We’ll see.

I haven’t actually done much CCC work this year at all, but I do plan in 2021 to get going on that again. I actually have a short story I wrote and tried to get accepted in a publication, but that never went anywhere, so I might go over it with my perspective from this year and then post it. It involves an issue that doesn’t really effect me anymore, so it’s a bit weird. I’d also like to actually finish at least one CCC short story this year, it’s a bit of a weird one but it’s a story style I’d like to experiment with.

As noted, I’d like to start getting “official art” (by which I just mean, I get a piece of art of just the character I use to show them to others) of CCC characters, but I’ll probably try to finish my wiki notes before I commission those.

As for the romance/erotica, I really want to get final work started on an audio adaptation of something I wrote this month. I want to keep working on writing, though I wanna take a month off (I overworked myself the last several months of last year), and get more art. Generally I don’t have too many specific plans since I leave the next story up to votes–keep getting audio adaptations made as more proof of concepts leading to an audio-visual novel eventually.

And yes, I will get the hypno hotel story written. That should be in February.

And lastly, should the pandemic lift away, I’ll go hold a snake.

Odemon Haitus

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Odemon is going on haitus; it’s not that I don’t want to continue it, but so many other projects I have going on are more important uses of my limited time and the original idea of writing the piece the day of is really difficult when I only do it once a week.

I might change how I do it and work on some privately here and there when inspiration hits. I’m not sure.

And yes, this means I’ll be posting here even less. I’m doing a lot of work, it’s just, it’s all going into my much more successful projects, which are *checks* romance and erotica.

i might add a section on here for that someday

2019 Restrospective

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Man, it’s been a long time. It feels like… 3 years since I did one of these. As usual, I divide this into 3 parts: what I said I’d do last year, what I actually did, and what I hope to do this year.

  • Continue work on Wandering Fortunes, which I did. I finished the primary edits. I did not finish editing it in full though, nor did I get started on novel 4. More on that either in a bit or a looong while.
  • Continue Odemon: Yeah. After I started a new job though it reduced to one a week. Given the amount of new Pokemon per gen these years I should, in theory, be able to finish this someday. SOMEDAY. I also did continue the Pokecomic; I only got about 10 comics done but that’s what I expected so whatever. I’ll finish it when gen 12 is out.
  • I very much did not get all my novel notes transferred to wiki format, but I didn’t really expect to it seems. I’m going pretty slow at it these days but I’m slowly chipping away at it.
  • There’s not gonna be a Darmenzi audiobook.
  • I did get a freelance job but not much came of it, and then the website I went through changed how it works to stupid pay-for-play basically so I started looking for a regular job, went crazy, and then out of nowhere succeeded in September.
  • I legitimately can’t remember how many short stories I wrote, or even edited, and I certainly didn’t get any published.

The anaconda in the room is I started writing erotica. Have I mentioned that explicitly yet? In early summer I started thinking about stuff, about my gender and sexuality, and somehow that led to me thinking about writing “hypnosisnakerotica”. In… June, I think? I wrote a long Mastodon/Twitter thread about how I can barely be said to have a gender or sexuality, and how I don’t think about it much, and ended by concluding the internet is full of weirdos so there’s no reason to be afraid, and I shouted that snakes and hypnosis are sexy, my brain married a fictional character (the cool kids call this having a “waifu”), and I started writing erotica. (By the way, it’s made me have to think more about exactly what my sexuality is, exactly. Unfortunately it’s not meant for this Earth…)

This has gone. Confusingly well? I honestly had more traction in a few months than I did in half a decade of the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos. I mean, I guess it makes sense. A lot of people are horny. It’s also more niche, which means more people will go looking for what they can find, and if it turns out a writer who is basically trained in writing novels starts writing about it… woo. If it turns out you like that stuff or are just curious it’s all here, it’s all SFW, non-lewd, it’s honestly just erotica because it’s steeped in kink/fetish, it’s really more romance, which is actually stranger for me to think about me writing than erotica for some reason!

My new day job has been going well enough, I’m evaluating book manuscripts to see if there are legal issues (libel, copyright issues, etc.) I’m still slow at it after 3 months and I make mistakes but um. I can hope things go well.

I also released Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmail 1! The idea besides this being fun was that visual media might get me more noticed but by the time this got finished I was already getting into writing erotica and having more success there, so I still haven’t actually made a section on this website for comics. Ah well. It’s still a good comic and I love it.

Now then… what do I plan to do in 2020?

Not a lot for the CCC, actually.

  • Wandering Fortunes should be all up mid-year. No estimation on final book release, though.
  • Right now for the CCC I’m focusing on organizing my notes. I only have time to do one page a week now and there’s honestly more than 50 left I think so this is going to take a while. Probably more time than I should bother with to be honest but… oh well. OCD.
  • I don’t intend to start more editing on Wandering Fortunes or write the fourth book until I finish those notes, so that’s on hold.
  • I will have another new story in a few months, definitely not something I’ve done two years in a row now…
  • Odemon and the Pokecomic will continue at their glacial pace.
  • If not obvious yet, I’m going to spend 2020 more focused on what I’ve actually gotten some traction with. It’s fun and people like it and wow! I’m going to have a post about that at the DeviantArt I post that stuff at, so if you want to know about that check it there.
  • Also my New Year’s Resolution is to hold a snake. For obvious reasons, I think.

That’s about it. Things are weird now. It’s fine.

Schedule Change–New Job

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Small update, I’m starting a new day job next week and that’s going to reduce the time I have to work on stuff. That’s mostly behind-the-scenes stuff and my posting schedule won’t be affected much… right now.

I’m some 9 months ahead on Wandering Fortunes so that won’t be an issue and my primary focus will always be to keep up on that monthly posting.

Odemon is going to be reduced to once a week, on Saturday. It doesn’t seem like it takes much time but every bit is going to count, and sometimes I can spend quite a bit of time just coming up with an idea.

That’s about it that I’m doing publicly right now I guess? There’s the Pokemon Moon Comic and I’d like to keep my promise of returning to once a month and really I can probably do that until the end of the year but we’ll just have to see after that. (Once a month is figgin awful honestly it’ll take me like 8 years to finish it at that rate.)

New! Wandering Fortunes Chapter 26: Sea Spectrum

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

The newest Wandering Fortunes chapter is up! We’re all on a boat! Boat adventures! We’re going fishing, and it’s going to be great, and we’re definitely not going to get eaten by a sea monster!

Also, Ropak struggles with guilt.

This month has been weird. There hasn’t been a new Odemon (and this chapter is a day late) because my laptop has been sent for repairs. I hope to have it this week but Best Buy actually has it repaired right now and it’s just apparently taking them a whole week to run diagnostics and sheesh.

Also I’d mentioned a comic for June but that’s late too, but it’s going to release this weekend.

Princess Serani profile is up, and an announcement about old chapters

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

The princess of the Salenth Kingdom, Serani, gets her own profile page! She’s headstrong and not going to take anything from anyone and the gossip corner has all sorts of rumors about her and also the protagonist of Wandering Fortunes maybe wants to give her a smooch

ANYWAY, I’ve taken down old in-progress chapters for Slubes and Darmenzi. They’re old and I dunno that I want them public. They’re each *one dollar* as an ebook so it’s not a big deal. The previews of the final book are still up, though. It’s just that I’ve improved so much since these in-progress chapters I want to look forward. I don’t know if I’ll do this regularly, like every book’s serial release will eventually be made unavailable, maybe at some point they’ll be so good that I won’t even mind them being up. And at some point maybe Slubes and Darmenzi will just become free ebooks all the time. Who knows what the future holds!

However if I do hide unfinished Wandering Fortunes chapters they’ll still be available for patrons on Patreon. Slubes and Darmenzi would be too but I wasn’t posting chapters directly into Patreon back then it seems so those are just links to pages that don’t exist now. Anyway, speaking of Patreon, I’m gonna post another new profile on there today if you’re interested, and of course the next chapter is already available for patrons, so check it out if you have an interest in reading things and then reading more things!

2018 Retrospective

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

A little late, but what do you want, it feels like it’s still a week ago. Let me start by looking at the 2017 retrospective, specifically what I’d hoped to complete this year:

  • Released Darmenzi, as I’d planned. It’s available as an ebook on Smashwords and, as I’d wanted to, I looked into a different physical copy publishing site than Createspace because I wanted to leave Amazon entirely, which I have, I haven’t gone to Amazon at all probably all year! So I made the paperback of Darmenzi through Lulu.com, and I think it worked out well. I’ll probably use it for Wandering Fortunes in about 47 years when I finish it.
  • I started Odemon, as I’d planned, and though it was daily the first half of the year, for certain reasons I gave up on that and made it three times weekly–usually. Still, I’ve kept up on it, and did a look back at the Odemon of this year on social media recently.
  • I’ve kept up on my Mastodon account and basically have written stuff on Mastodon then copied and pasted it over on Twitter. I actually abandoned the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos Twitter account because I wanted to leave Twitter, but the way Mastodon works with sharing kind of made it harder to do it there and I eventually abandoned the Mastodon Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos account. Maybe someday if I’m popular enough for people to pay attention, but probably not.
  • I got a Ko-fi. I pay attention to it less than Patreon but I try to keep both updated. This lets me use Ko-fi for rewards that would be a one-time thing instead of a monthly thing, like mailing copies of books.
  • Posted stories, wrote stories, didn’t really submit stories too much to publications because I didn’t have any for it but near the end of the year I did and I’ve started doing that again.
  • I did continue Wandering Fortunes! Things are moving along at a steady pace with it. The Pokecomic… not so much. Apparently in 2017 I did about 50 comics, 2018… barely over ten. That doesn’t mean it’s abandoned, in fact I have a comic I’ve held onto for several months now and just have been waiting until I get back into it, but the problem is I have several projects and it’s more or less the least-important one. That said replaying Pokemon Moon made me want to get back to the comic so we’ll see how it goes this year.
  • Wait what? Recording on the Darmenzi audiobook had been done before 2018 even started??? That’s depressing because NO recording has been done since. Various reasons have resulted in it being hard to get it started on, but things are clearing up so hopefully something can be ready to show off before the year anniversary of the book’s release.
  • I got a freelance job! I was doing some organizing of levels for a mobile word game which I started around May, did that for a couple months and when it was done they had a new job for me to do. That lasted all the way until December; since then things changed and I’m no longer doing it, so I’m back to looking for a new job. Now that I’ve done something maybe I won’t feel so panicky about it.

Other accomplishments include the yb_ebooks project, which has consisted of me dumping a huge amount of text from the half-decade or so of writing my friends and I did in the old Yoshi Bodyguards fan universe we accidentally created. The bot was set up by my friend, while I’ve been going through all the text and stuff and putting it in place for the bot to access. It’s ranged from fun to mind-numbing, especially when I go through stuff I wrote over ten years ago. It’s weird to call it an accomplishment though because it’s kinda pointless. That said, I also started planning a secret project with some old friends. Will it go anywhere? We’ll find out!

So what do I want to accomplish in 2019?

  • Continue work on Wandering Fortunes. In terms of posting it online I should get to around the three-quarters part of the story, so 2020 should see the completion of it. I actually hope to finish editing it before the year’s end, though, and if I can do that, begin writing the fourth novel. Considering I wrote Wandering Fortunes like 5 or 6 years ago, I’m kind of excited to start a new novel.
  • Continue Odemon; at the rate of 3 a week I should get through about 150 more. As Pokemon gen 8 may release next year I may find a lot more to go through before I’m done. I also do want to continue the Pokecomic, though ten comics might be about what I finish.
  • It would be really nice to get all my novel notes transferred to wiki format this year! I don’t know if that’s likely but I’ll keep chipping away until it’s all in there, at which point I can finally start writing new notes again.
  • I mentioned the audiobook, right? I really hope work on it can get started for real, before it’s been so long since Darmenzi released that it feels weird to release an audiobook version. Experience on that should help for if an audiobook of Wandering Fortunes is created.
  • Get another freelance job so I don’t go broke halfway through the year!
  • Finish a few more short stories that I’d be willing to submit to a publication, and maybe get one of these actually accepted! That’d be awesome! There’s also at least one short story I’ll be posting on this website in 2019, but that’s for later.

I think that’s about it. Let’s all make 2019 the most adequate year on record!

EDIT: OH FIG I FORGOT ONE MORE GOAL FOR 2019! I actually want to start writing articles on this website. I know, I know, it’s something I’ve said a lot before. But what I’m thinking is just, each week I’ll think about the writing-related stuff I’ve done and come up with some little article to talk about it. I kind of did that without meaning to a little while ago–I have an article idea from when I was working on some novel notes. I’m a bit behind on work right now so it might be a bit before I get to that but that at least will come; the rest, well, we’ll see. No promises.

Update

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

I’ve gone back and undone the Corbel font recently. It makes more sense to just remove the formatting when I post chapters, I guess. Someday if I upgrade my WordPress plan I might CSS up the site to be all in Corbel but not today.

This also means sometimes chapters might have weird formatting issues. Whaddya gonna do, it’s WordPress, I guess.

Also I’ve changed a bit of stuff, removed the quotes section of the menu (I might bring it back under the About heading someday) and changed the Blaargablog to just an Update section, since all I really use this for is updates on stuff like Odemon or novels. I rarely have premedicated non-fiction posts; the last one was some sort of essay-like thing on Waluigi back in July. I only ever come up with stuff on the fly and post it on Mastodon or Twitter, and on occasion that ends up being long enough that it would have worked as a blog post but I’d already put it all up on social media instead. I mean, I guess I could go ahead and embed all the posts in here, but I’d rather just let this website focus on the CCC instead of my inane ramblings. So that’s all you’ll really see here now, Odemon, new chapters or other updates, and maybe even that Pokemon comic I started doing a couple years ago and slowed down tremendously. Just been too busy for it, really.

Oh, and updates about the website itself, like this.