Welcome to Special Announcements Sunday here on Okazu. A happy Tanabata to you.

When I stepped away from events and publishing in March, the most popular question I received at the time was, “What will you do with your free time?” I have an answer for that now. I am spending my time and money on getting things done that have been left languishing for years. So. Today we have two announcements:

The final chapters of Saiyuu no Ryouko: The Continuing Adventure of Yuriko are (at last!) available on Yuricon.

Shoujoai ni Bouken and Saiyuu no Ryouko, the stories about our beloved Yuricon mascot, out lesbian pop idol Yuriko and her lover, novelist Midori, are completed and up for your reading pleasure.

The first book took a mere 7 months to write, but I had no other obligations and I spent a lot of my days and nights writing.  The sequel took several years to write, but it’s been complete, probably, since 2008 or so. Time just got away from me, with other, more critical tasks.  Looking back over the chapters, I’m still very happy with the stories.  Yuriko and Midori are characters I like to think about, even now.  Maybe one day I’ll even write more about them. In any case, I hope you enjoy reading their stories as much as I enjoyed writing it. ^_^ Please feel free to write fanfic for them. We put SnB/SnR fanfic up on Yuricon. Fanart is also welcome – it will go up on our Yuriko and Friends Gallery. If you are motivated to write or draw about Yuriko and her friends, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. ^_^

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And, even further down the list of “stuff to get to eventually” was my poor little fan/fiction site, “Worldshaking” Fanfic. I originally built an archive in 1997 when I first started to write Xena fanfic. Like so many other people at the time, I had a free site (not Angelfire ^_^;)  and in 1998, I added my first Sailor Moon stories. It was about then I moved to my own site, “Worldshaking” Fanfic, although the Wayback Machine only has an image from 2001. I remember the first site I built. I was so proud of myself. ^_^  The image here is from my first site renewal. I spent *hours* on that tiled clouds background. /grin/

The site remained substantially the same from 1998-2006, when I ran a contest here on Okazu to get a new design. Kyanite developed a spiffy new site design for me – one that was not terribly different from what most people would be doing shortly thereafter on WordPress. I was writing more Maria-sama ga Miteru stories by then and a lot of Miscellaneous Fanfic from random, obscure series like Amakusa 1637, Transistor ni Venus, Hana no Asuka-gumi, and the like. ^_^

Also around then I started putting together more original fiction, aside from Yuriko and Midori. Fanfic is a great way to learn the basics of writing, with training wheels. With a fanfic, you don’t have to create the world, the situations or the relationships.  (Although I often do anyway. I tend to create original characters and situations, even while using the ones already established by the series. ) The new site allowed me to focus on whatever I was doing at the time, without losing access to the rest.

I haven’t written a lot of fanfic in the past few years. In 2008, I lost a job, got another one, lost that, got a *terrible* job, left that, had a series of awful jobs until 2010 when I got the job I have now, which I love. Those years were not easy on me – my health and creativity crashed and burned. Duh. And here we are, years later and I am *finally* back to a place where my creativity has returned to close to previous levels. I’m ready to write again. And now I have the time, too.

So, here is my second announcement.  “Worldshaking” Fanfic is back, with a new look  – and a new, original story! And I find myself mentally gearing up to finish a bunch of unfinished stories, (including a cyberpunk novella I have had in my head for probably close to a decade now, which is about 2/3rds done.)

Before I wrap up here, I want to mention two things. One – you may have noticed that all the iterations of the site have that dorky little animated gif of Sailor Uranus doing “World Shaking!” I love it, do not grief me over it.  As long as there is a WSF, that gif will be there.  ^_^ (Does anyone else remember those?  They were from some game or other, I think I probably have them all on an unreadable backup disk somewhere.)

Secondly and most importantly, the recent Yuricon, Okazu and WSF site renewals have been worked on by the incomparable Lissa Pattillo. Lissa’s design skills, patience and WordPress wizardry cannot be praised enough. I recommend her with all my recommends for your website needs.

Thank you for reading Okazu and for reading my stories over the years. I hope to bring you many more. ^_^