It's finally done. My Mai-HiME fanfic, One Wonderful April, is finally complete after four-and-a-half months. I'm very satisfied with how it came out, so I'm going to start posting chapters here on deviantArt, one per day. Now that I've figured out how to create preview images, I think this might work out. I just hope they don't get pulled or shuffled around for any reason.

Anyone in the mood for reading Mai/Natsuki fiction (kinda hard to find given the way some search engines work) can go here until I get all of the chapters up. Hope your week is lots of fun!

Chapters available here so far will be updated every Saturday as they're posted:
1: Close Your Eyes
2: Guess Who?
3: Sweet Thing
4: Flying High
5: A Blossoming Friendship
6: Sing Your Hearts Out
7: Answers
8: Lockdown
9: Rude Awakening
10: A Dime A Dozen
11: The Winning Team
12: Sitting in a Tree
13: Subliminality
14: Taking Over

So, yeah...short and freakin' sweet update today. I now own a Nintendo Wii...can't believe it took me so much effort to actually get a hold of one. At least the Wireless set-up was easy. Now that I have one, I fear I'm gonna be stuck on Super Smash Bros. Brawl for all of eternity, 'cause there's so much hidden content to unlock. For those about to Brawl, or who've already started brawling, I salute you.

Outside of that, I have a couple of Miis posted on the "Check Mii Out!" channel, if anybody wants to pick 'em up. I wanted to flex my creative muscles even further, but you can only design faces with this thing, and not body parts.

So, short story even shorter:

If anybody wants to join me in Brawl, my friend code is 1676-3568-0586.

And finally, here are the first two Miis I posted to the "Check Mii Out!" channel (no more lame puns from me today, I promise):
Mai Tokiha (Mai-HiME): 9229-6510-6733
Shizuru Fujino (Mai-HiME): 1197-7784-0793

Well, looks like I missed out on the big Wii rush for Super Smash Bros. Brawl last week...and wouldn't you know...my tax refund came in the day after that, so I'm kinda behind on all the cool stuff.

That's not to say I haven't been busy, though. The Mai/Natsuki fic I've been working on (LJ link) is just seven chapters away from completion, and I'm two chapters into the one for Sakura/Karin (FF.net link). If I can get these done in a 30-day period between sessions of Guild Wars, watching old Darkwing Duck episodes and other assorted books, this might be my most productive time of year...ever.

I simultaneously thank (and blame) Mai-HiME for luring me into the world of shoujo-ai ("girls love"/femslash/whatever-you-want-to-call-it) fan-fiction. Loads of pretty girls + magical powers + subtext + one dirty-minded 27-year-old = Hilarity Ensuing. It helps that there's an actual lesbian character in canon (Shizuru, though at the point I am in the series, she isn't quite as open about it as Bleach's Chizuru). Surprisingly, she's not the one character who's the focus of my "pairing du jour", but according to FanFiction.net, she's practically the focus of everyone else's. That honor would go to Mai and Natsuki, two of the main characters. What can I say? I like a challenge. Plus, they both have pretty good chemistry when they're on screen, so...why the heck not?

Sadly, it's very hard to find good fiction on these two at FF.net, since the search engine doesn't recognize the slash ("/"), leading me to find completely unrelated pairings (and I really don't like using "cutesy" portmanteau couple names, which this fandom and Avatar are completely nuts about). I find this little omission completely absurd, since most of fanfiction is "all about the slash" (bad pun very much intended). As I've already written 19 chapters of a planned 30 in a story for this pairing, I've been inspired to do even more in this category.

Next up: Sakura and Karin from Street Fighter, inspired partially after reading this story written a long time ago by someone named Kaiser Ryouga II. Say what? Rivalshipping? Happens all the time in Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! I'm a sucker for these two...rivals on the battlefield, and friends off it.

That's not to say that I don't have other non-femslashy projects waiting in the wings. I have this little Dark Cloud 2 Max/Monica friendship fic that I sat aside once I started working on my Mai/Natsuki story, and I might later do a little something revolving around Read or Die's Yomiko/Donnie relationship, which is pretty much central to her character. I plan to get all of these projects off the backburner before the end of the year.

That's all I have today. Oh, wait...a link to the Mai/Natsuki story:
Table of Contents on my LJ

Cheers!

How weird...Super Smash Bros. Brawl is due out in the United States on March 9, the same day as the anniversary of the death of the Notorious B.I.G. Argh...I hope I get time to get my tax return done before then, so I can stash away my Wii funds...because I am ready to BRAWL, foo'!