Welcome to the final progress update of 2023! To be quite honest, this one is going to be short and sweet since, well, I haven’t really done much of anything, haha. I did do SOME stuff, though so let’s break things down a little bit.
From Ashe Vol. 9
In the last progress update, I had written two chapters of the book. Naturally, if you’ve paid attention to my Progress page, then you’d see that it is “completed.” (by that I mean it’s in first draft.) I am still debating what to write for the bonus story, though as I have quite a few different ideas that I want to test out. It’s just a matter of picking one and going with it.
This means that editing the book is next but I will be quite honest with you… that probably won’t happen until January. With it being the holiday season, I have decided to take the remainder of 2023 off and hit the ground running in 2024. After all, I did release From Ashe Vols. 7 and 8, My Girlfriend Was Delivered by 2-Day Shipping, I re-released Final Hope as a web novel, wrote and submitted My Regularly Scheduled Life to the J-Novel Club contest, launched Meteora Press, re-branded my website to reflect that, and began work on creating merchandise for an online store.
That’s a lot to accomplish in one year… especially when you have to keep in mind that I also work two jobs, my regular Monday-Friday 8-5 as a graphic designer and my nights and weekends job doing anime/manga news and reviews. It’s taxing and, to be quite honest, I need a bit of a break so I am selfishly taking the rest of December to do just that. But… there are a couple of things I have been picking at here and there.
The Store
Obviously, a store needs products so I have begun designing some t-shirts. The first collection is going to be the Blaze Auras Collection from A.R. Dragonfly. These will feature characters from the game within the book series. I also plan on doing shirts for the five main characters: Amber, Kaito, Lynn, Takumi, and Sebastian as well. This will be the initial A.R. Dragonfly launch collection. Before I continue, here is a sneak peek at a couple of the shirt designs:
I still have to create one for the Arcanist as well as Koroshi, Amber’s character from Shadow Wing Online (although that, technically, wouldn’t be a “Blaze Auras Collection” shirt). There are a couple of other shirts that I mocked up as well, which are simple logo shirts. You can check those out below:
Before you worry, no… the A.R. Dragonfly logo is not getting revamped, and I am not redoing the covers! You can relax! The “new” logo is simply for the t-shirt!
That’s all that I have so far. I still have to create shirts for From Ashe and MyGF, and Final Hope. I figure that I will do some basic character t-shirts first and then release new ones later as part of new “collections.” Just something to get things off the ground.
Of course, t-shirts are not the only products I’ll have. I still have to find a print-on-demand store that integrates with WooCommerce before I can finalize what else I will be offering.
Which brings me to my next point… if you have a preference as to what you would like to see merchandise-wise, drop me a line!
A Video Review!
One of the things that popped up right when I was about to do this update is a new video review of My Girlfriend Was Delivered by 2-Day Shipping! Carrie Cheung (ALightNovelist) took the time to, not only, do a written review on Amazon and her website, but she also posted a video review of the book on her YouTube channel! If reading words isn’t your thing, check out what she had to say about the book!
Until Next Time
I told you it would be short and sweet. That’s all that I’ve been up to. I did enjoy a nice 11-day vacation from work. I used that to get caught up on some anime and some video games I have been neglecting. With this break that I’m on, I became hopelessly addicted to another swarm survival game… Army of Ruin. That’s been eating a lot of time and, honestly, I’m just enjoying having fun again. Don’t worry, the passion for writing is FAR from gone but a little recharge now and then can’t hurt. Besides, I already loosely plotted out From Ashe Vols. 10-13 and I’m really excited about where the story is heading!
I might pick at the shirts some more this month, although, over the next couple of weeks I will be hard at work preparing for a work event at my 8-5 job and that is going to drain me creatively for sure. Not sure how much I will get done with all of that stress but we’ll see.
January’s update will probably be just as thin as this one but we’ll see how it goes.
Until next time,
Ja ne!