More FFX Undub

Yay! Xoa has posted another issue of his/her "Final Fantasy X Undub" videos, overlaying the original Japanese soundtrack over the English-subtitled release.

The timing of this one is perfect -- the first part follows EXACTLY the route of chapter 15 of "Love Her and Despair", leaving the gates of Djose Temple and heading back down the Highroad to the crossroads. Clasko even runs past Kyou in the background. And there's a brief conversation with Elma and Lucil, whose personalities come through infinitely better in their Japanese voices.

Elma reminds me a bit of Utena: optimistic, capable, naive, and faintly crushed out on the orange-haired Captain of the fencing team Djose Knights. It's not obvious in this scene, but Elma's got a few blatant lines elsewhere like "I hope captain Lucil notices my efforts in this mission!"
 

Manic Muse is Manic.

Hot frickin' squee.

I need to slow down. Next chapter finished, 2400 words written all in one sitting from start to finish over the last several hours. Dinner would be wise.

I won't post it tonight because I want to give readers time to read the LAST chapter. So instead I will finish what I was doing earlier today, going back through all the old chapters and giving another round of spit and polish. Lulu knows my prose could use every scrap of refinement it can get. Whenever I read the more verbally gifted writers here and despair, I try to remind myself that hey, Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey got published and have a jillion devoted readers, and their prose is hardly up to Sayers or LeGuin standards.

The thing is, though, they have something I've never had much luck with: Plot.

This explains my manic muse, and also the hideously long pauses between writing periods punctuated by brief avalanches of chapters. For once, I really DO have plot. GOOD plot. But it keeps getting all tangled up like a kite-string, and then since I'm not used to plot I get all stuckified and have to let things percolate for several months until somebody asks the right question to unjam my typewriter keys.

I miss my grandma's typewriter. I never wrote anything on it, I just liked whacking as many keys at once to see them all get clusterfucked. Poor typewriter. I was very small at the time.

Annnnyway. PLOT! I HAVE PLOT!


And, er, I have a dissertation. Which I have now neglected for days.

I expect the flood of chapters to come to a halt again soon, until I can figure out how to balance dissertation by day and Muse by night. Usually after a day of taking notes I don't have an iota of creativity left. But right now I can feel the entire story tempting me: "don't stop! You know what comes next! Let's write this bit! And that bit! And that!"

I'm hoping this is all a psychological dress rehearsal for the dissertation writing process. I've written tons of 20-30 page papers, but a diss requires a much greater level of structuring and planning than I've ever attempted before.

So does this story.