selenicseas

It's been a success!

Every day this week (except today, because I'm posting this before I go to work), I've been able to set aside time to read after I get home from work. There are two "chapters" left for me to read of Lost Places, one of which I'll read today and one I'll get to on Monday – if I don't decide to finish the book tomorrow.

I'm super pleased that this experience has been a success! Maybe it's too early to say that since it's only been four days, but I haven't made this much progress on a book in weeks, if not months. If I can keep this pace up, I should be able to get through another book this month.

Yes, I've already started working on a new conlang. In fact, I started on Friday. I haven't been able to get very far, but I do have a phonology and a little bit of grammar.

One of the first decisions I made was to have the phonology be sonorant-heavy. From there, I decided that there would be a full "set" of palatal consonants. That led to all consonants being able to be palatalized, which then led to all back vowels having corresponding front versions.

Here is the current consonant inventory. Consonants in parentheses are exclusively palatalized versions of other consonants: [c], [ç], and [ʎ] are the palatal versions of /k/, /h/, and /l/.

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Nasal	m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Stop	p	t	(c)	k
Affricate		ts	tɕ
Fricative		s	ɕ (ç)	x
Approximant	w	l ɹ	j (ʎ)

There are no voiced stops solely because it didn't fit the aesthetic I had in mind for the conlang. As for the orthography, the only consonants that don't match their IPA values are /ɲ/, /ŋ/, /ɕ/, /x/, and /j/, which are written <ñ>, <ng>, <sh>, <h>, and <y>, respectively.

For vowels, I didn't really know what I wanted except for /i/, /e/, and /a/. I then expanded that to include /o/ and /u/, but still didn't know how to make the vowel inventory unique. It didn't necessarily need to be unique, but I didn't exactly want to go with the "standard" vowel phonology. That seemed a bit boring.

I decided that back vowels would front when the following syllable contained a front vowel. Now there were five front vowels and three back vowels. Then, because that wasn't enough, I decided to add vowel length. The current vowel inventory is shown below.

	Front	Back
Close	i iː y yː	u uː
Mid	e eː ø øː	o oː
Open	a aː	ɑ ɑː

The vowels /y/, /ø/, and /a/ are written <ü>, <ö>, and <ä>. Long vowels are indicated with an acute accent. For the "regular" vowels, this produces <á>, <é>, <í>, <ó>, and <ú>. I was a little confused as to what to do with <ü>, <ö>, and <ä>, until I did some research and found out that double acute accents exist – Hungarian uses them, among other languages. So the long versions of <ü>, <ö>, and <ä> are <ű>, <ő> and <a̋>.

That's about it for the phonology at the moment. I haven't really decided on the stress system or if I want any diphthongs to exist.

For grammar, I've just started working on nouns. I knew from the beginning that I wanted at least two unique noun classes – I decided on animate and inanimate – but not much else. What would nouns be declined for? Are those declensions suffixes or postpositions? What kind of agreement do they have with other parts of speech?

I decided that this language wouldn't be agglutinative. Most of my conlangs are, because it makes things nice, orderly, and easy to remember. But I wanted this conlang to look like a language with a long literary history – my initial inspirations were Tocharian and Sanskrit – so I decided it would be fusional in morphology.

This isn't a very big deal at the moment, since nouns are only declined for case (nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and vocative) and number (singular and plural). Animacy isn't distinguished on nouns; it will be instead shown on some other part of speech – I haven't yet decided if it will be articles, prepositions, adjectives, or something else.

Since words can end in either vowels or certain consonants, I made different declensions for vowel-final nouns and consonant-final nouns. There are two examples below.

Declension of süriññe "temple" (vowel-final declension):

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	süriññe	süriññel
Genitive	süriññes	süriññem
Accusative	süriññele	süriññen
Dative	süriññeha	süriññer
Vocative	süriñña̋	süriññő

Declension of pekweñ "book" (consonant-final declension):

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	pekweñ	pekweññe
Genitive	pekweñña	pekweñaru
Accusative	pekweññé	pekweñelu
Dative	pekweññi	pekweñäye
Vocative	pekweñám	pekweñámu

Süriññe and pekweñ are actually the only two words I've created. I don't even have a name for this conlang yet!

I may or may not make more update posts on this conlang. If I do, I doubt it'll be on any sort of regular schedule.

Movie Thoughts is a semi-infrequent series where I briefly write up my thoughts on movies I've watched recently.

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I guess I'm going to be reviewing every movie I watch this year! Not what I expected when I started clearing out my watch list, but I've got lots of movie thoughts this year, I guess.

Solo: A Star Wars Story – I actually tried to watch this one a couple of years ago and couldn't get past the first ten minutes. Something about it just wasn't clicking with me back then. I wasn't too thrilled about a Han Solo origin movie to begin with (I'm not particularly a fan of origin stories), so my thoughts back then (and now) were, basically, "why does this even need to exist?"

I can't say it clicked with me in 2025. This may sound strange, but I don't think it felt like a Star Wars movie. It wasn't because of the lack of Jedi or anything like that, but something about the movie just didn't feel right.

Ringu (1998) – After hearing memes about this movie and the American remake since grade school ("seven days" was a popular thing to say at my school when I was eight years old), it was pretty interesting to finally watch it. I had all these thoughts in my head of what this movie was and basically none of them were right. I thought it was going to be a typical horror movie with jumpscares, I guess, when most of the movie is about investigating where the videotape came from and who's in it. I didn't realize that the whole "Sadako coming out of the TV" scene only happened once, and it was the end of the movie.

Fiction

The Hanging Tower of Babel by Wang Zhenzhen, translated by Carmen Yiling Yang (Clarkesworld)

The In-Between Sister by Monte Lin (Translunar Travelers Lounge)

The Wheat of Good Works by Matt Hornsby (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

I’m sure most creatives have this problem: they’re constantly coming up with ideas and stories, but the vast majority of them have to go on the backburner because it’s only possible to work on so many things at one time. This definitely happens to me, but I’ve realized recently that it only seems to happen when I’m working on a creative project. Furthermore, it really likes to happen when I’m seriously busy with a project and can’t spare any extra time on other things.

In the past two weeks, I decided to ramp up work on the Selegesine’s Shadow outline and get it done in a timely manner. In that time, I’ve come up with a brand-new idea for a story and thought about multiple backburner stories. I’ve written down what I’ve thought of since I definitely know I won’t remember any of it later, but I don’t have the time to actually work on any of these stories.

Something I just realized when writing this blog post is that it also applies to…blog posts. I’ve been blogging a lot this month. This will be the seventh blog post I’ve written in March. Meanwhile, I struggled to write four posts a month in both January and February.

Do I like that I’m blogging more? Of course! I wanted to get back into blogging anyway, and the renewed inspiration has made it incredibly easy. But the sudden story inspiration is really something I could do without at the moment.

I’ve come up with a plan to get back on track for my word count goal for the year. As of tonight, March 17th, I should be at 21,401 words. I’m actually at 13,336, mostly because I wrote less than 5000 words in January and February both.

I don’t typically have the time to write more than my daily minimum on the weekdays, but I definitely have that kind of time on the weekends. I’m going to attempt to write 1000 words each weekend until I get caught up again. I tried it this weekend and was successful, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.

I sat down this weekend with the intention to write, and write I did. I wrote 873 words on Saturday and 521 on Sunday.

I decided in the past two weeks to shift the focus of the story slightly, which has resulted in outlining new events and creating new locations and characters. The plot of the story has largely stayed the same, but now I can put in more of the things I originally envisioned – namely, more of the dark fantasy and horror elements that disappeared as I started writing things down.

The first two acts (out of five) are now fully outlined and broken into chapters. Act 1 has 10 chapters and Act 2 has 9, so I’m going to try and keep the other acts around 10 chapter as well.

I’m still behind on my word count for the month – and the year – but I’m making very good progress and I’m happy with what I’ve written.

February was a fairly busy month for being so short, but I don’t have much to show for it. I made some progress on the Selegesine’s Shadow outline, especially in regards to organizing it. I also did some plotting for a series of stories I haven’t worked on in years.

I watched 3 movies (American Psycho and both Kill Bills) and wrote up my thoughts on them in February 2025’s edition of Movie Thoughts. I read 20 short stories and started reading Sarah Pinsker’s Lost Places, which is an anthology of short stories. I remember reading a few of them when they were published in magazines, but most of them are new to me. I also played over 30 hours of Horizon Forbidden West, mostly doing sidequests instead of progressing the plot in any meaningful way.

I did a few doodles of my Dragon Age characters from the first three games in December and January. Thought I might as well post them here.

Emrys Mahariel, the character I made for my first playthrough of Dragon Age Origins. He was a warrior in-game, but I used a bow the entire time, so I now think of him as a rogue - thus the rogue Warden armor.

I'm also really amused that the rogue Warden armor in Veilguard includes a hoodie. I just had to draw it.

My Hawke from Dragon Age 2. I tried out a different brush for lineart on this one, and I like it a lot more than what I've been using for the past few years. The problem is that I'm not entirely sure how to color it.

Pose reference is from AdorkaStock.

Emrys Mahariel, again, in the same style as Hawke. There's no actual lineart here, just a sketch that I didn't fully clean up.



My Inquisitor, Rhiannon Lavellan. This is the outfit she was in for most of the game.

Every Friday, I take screenshots of all posts I've made on Pillowfort in the past week, as well as any comments those posts received. These screenshots are subdivided by year. I actually joined Pillowfort back in 2018, but I've purged my account multiple times and didn't save any of those posts before I did so.



If an older post receives comments later on, I add those comments to the existing image. Saving these posts as image was, in the beginning, intended to be temporary until I found a better solution, but I haven't found one yet – so images it is.

These are original posts only; I do not save reblogs of other users as the purpose of this is to keep track of my own work.

There are three posts I keep as documents rather than images: Pillowfort bio, tags used, and creative work. I update these posts periodically, and it's easier to update a document than an image. They live in the main "Pillowfort" folder.