Ladies and gentlemen, the legendary Genesis.
Hello again everyone. I know it's been an eternity since I posted anything in this world. I have been a little more active here during the last couple of months though. A few of you at least probably noticed all the posts I've been doing in my Puzzle Room world, particularly the deck video posts. Of course I realize that those posts aren't all that interesting to those who don't play the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game.
Anyway, the reason I'm doing this post is because I've been rather depressed since this morning, and I thought it might help a bit to vent about what's got me down. Some of it is personal stuff involving my dad that I don't feel at all comfortable getting into here. A big part of today's depression though has to do with my fan fiction writing. Right now I'm pretty stuck on a lot of the story projects I've been working on recently, and I've found that when I have some really bad writer's block, it tends to trigger my depression.
One of the projects I'm grappling with right now is an odd little series of Sailor Moon fanfics I've started that has the Sailor Guardians pitted against deities of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. One of the deities I have slated as a villain in one of these stories is a toad-like creature known as Tsathoggua. Below is an artist rendering of the deity in question, curtesy of Wikipedia.
Tsathoggua was not originally created by H.P. Lovecraft, but a friend and fellow writer of his named Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft liked Tsathoggua so much that he incorporated the toad deity into some of his own stories. It should be noted though that Tsathoggua never actually appeared in any of Lovecraft's stories, merely mentioned during the course of the narration. Another interesting thing to note is that Lovecraft and Smith sort of disagreed on how Tsathoggua should be depicted. The differences are so extreme that there are essentially two entirely different versions of Tsathoggua. There's the Lovecraft Tsathoggua, which fits perfectly for the type of horror stories Lovecraft specialized in. And then there's the Smith Tsathoggua, which works well as the monster for dark fantasy or "Sword and Sorcery" stories like Conan the Barbarian, for instance.
Anyway, in Clark Ashton Smith's stories, Tsathoggua comes from the plant Saturn (which Smith gave a hard-to-pronounce alien name to in his stories), so he'd make an interesting villain for a Sailor Moon fanfic focusing on Sailor Saturn. Of course I'd be using the Lovecraft Tsathoggua for that story. The thing that's kind of interfering with my progress though is that I was also thinking of using Tsathoggua in a Sword Art Online fanfic I came up with last year during a trip to Colorado. I even ended up drafting a scene for this SAO story that I felt turned out rather well. Unfortunately, I pretty much decided to abandon the idea for this SAO story for various reasons.
One of those reasons is that in an SAO fanfic, Tsathoggua would only be a game character, and I kind of want him to be a real threat to the world somehow. The thing is though that I still really want to use that scene I drafted during that trip. I'm not going to say just what the scene I'm talking about is. All I'll say is that it's a bit... risqué. I've been trying to figure out if there's some other SAO story I could use the scene in. I've also thought about changing the scene for that Sailor Moon fanfic I mentioned earlier and putting in different characters, but that's turning out to be a dead end as well. Basically, all I've been doing is banging my head into walls.
Well, I do feel a little better now after having vented about this difficulty I've been having with my writing. My depression has been lessening as the day's been going on. One thing that helped me was reading this new yuri manga I got my hands on today called, Now Loading...! It's a cute little love story with only a very microscopic amount of drama, with a small side of cynical workplace humor. Just the kind of manga I needed to read today, I think.
I think that just about covers it for this post. For those who actually read this whole thing, thanks for listening.
