The Bog

You ever read a sex scene that's so bad it causes you actual psychological problems?

I'm exaggerating a little, but on the other hand I'm not. I won't name names or titles, but I started working on editing my first webnovel/light novel/etc that has explicit content in it (I've done explicit manga before, this is my first prose project though).

And god, is it ever bad.

I was in the middle of slogging through absolutely the worst sex scene I've ever read -- not just "worst in a published book" but I think worst I've read ever in my whole life -- and I just got like...overwhelmed? By the fact that this sucked SO BAD and multiple parties paid money to publish this in two different languages and now someone was paying ME money to try to make it as readable as possible (a tall order let me fucking tell you). And I think this must have set off some kind of chain reaction in my brain because I spent the next week or so just catastrophically depressed and stewing over my own failure to accomplish...well, much of anything, really.

With a little more perspective I can say that there are actually things I'm EXTREMELY proud of (hell, I was the editor on a manga that won an Eisner for best foreign language adaptation), but there's still... I dunno.

I guess 20 years ago...30 years ago...I thought I'd have done more by now. In particular, I thought I'd have some kind of big artistic project, a book or a comic or video game or I dunno, depends on when you asked me.

Here I was polishing up the most bottom-of-the-barrel shit I'd ever seen and I couldn't stop thinking, man...even the bottom of the barrel is still IN the barrel, you know? What am I missing that the author of this nonsense has? Is it persistence? Dedication? Work ethic? Do I just not CARE as much as he did? Clearly it's not TALENT that's the problem and that honestly makes it worse. Talent is neutral; what I've got is a failure of personality, clearly.

I've been trying to channel this into something a little more productive, maybe try writing something I can throw up on Amazon/Smashwords because if this can make its creator a bit of money then goddammit I can do better, right? But I dunno. It's hard to face up to another goal I might very well fumble yet again.

Guess we'll see how things go.

Anyway, that's the story of how I had an existential breakdown over anime boobs. Thank you, good night.

Went around putting some subscription money into things I actually use and like, which includes this site. Because I've been thinking a lot about, idk. The old internet and wanting to make better stuff.

There was a Twitter post by another manga editor that was like, "I wonder what percentage of my job is typing stuff like "ball sack" or "blow job" into merriam-webster.com" and I think about that like, literally every time I look up anything there now, so I had to make this icon. For work posts, I guess. It was between this or a screenshot of a chart showing JPN to US bra size conversions, an invaluable resource in my line of work.

There is no Merriam-Webster accepted spelling of "ball sack" by the way so feel free to run wild. The playing field is wide open.

I've spent all day trying to fill out a series bible retroactively for something I'm working on, since there's a multivolume gap that predates me starting the project that I can no longer handwave, and also the whole thing has gotten so complicated it needs to be completely reorganized. Honestly, its a nightmare and I don't know how anybody with a series bigger than this keeps everything straight.

Currently it's a regular old Excel spreadsheet and I am honestly considering taking up maintaining the fan wiki, since I genuinely think it would be easier to reference in a pinch. Also this series is actually popular enough to have a fan wiki, which despite having been doing this for some years now I'm still astounded that I'm in charge of something popular enough to have a fan wiki.