A summary of my week:

* Unf, it feels so good to have a proper OC again. ♥ Sumiya Miho @ All My Sees doesn't really count, since she's basically an original character apped into a canon game. I ended up joining The Wild Edge as Kaz, my brand new mildly crazy Japanese dude. AJ was great and put up with me babbling about her re: all the crazy shit I wanted to do with his backstory. I now have a character who blew up a town when he was sixteen! Awesome.

Anyway, the game looks like it'll be a lot of fun, so I hope it takes off quickly. I'm mostly just excited to be doing anything resembling original writing again. Jon and I are gonna do a small writing exchange too -- one week he writes something and I critique, the next I write something and he critiques. ... that is, after we actually get our outlines done. I got completely distracted by Kaz's app and didn't do anything. Oops!

* I had to give a twenty-minute speech to the local Rotary Club this week. All in Japanese. Without being informed about the fact that it would all be in Japanese until I got in the car to go to the meeting place. Hello heart attack! ... but I survived anyway, somehow, so I guess it went all right.

* Saw the new Goemon movie in Japanese. It was pretty, but terribly confusing. I can't wait to see Star Trek next week.

* Went hiking with adorable little kindergarteners! We rode plastic sleds down the side of the mountain, despite the fact that there obviously wasn't any snow. They asked me all sorts of fun questions, like "What's 'dragonfly' in English? What's 'leaf'? What's 'flower'? What's 'pee'?" o my students.

* Reapped Shin at CFUD. Yaaaaay my football retard. The best part? He and Sakuraba are now splitting Souji's Hanged Man s.link. :|d

* I have two DW codes. Anybody want 'em?

Got a brace for my ankle; wrapping it up whenever it starts to ache helps keep it from hurting, and it's usually stopped pinging me by the time I start losing circulation, so. It's working out so far.

I had a gradeschool visit today. The kids were adorable, as always, and the older ones were pretty impressed by my stash of American money and (my coup de grace) the English Shounen Jump. One of my teachers even asked to copy one of the One Piece chapters to give to her son. Spreadin' American culture by ... giving Japanese people English versions of their own manga, whoo! Getting out to the school, however, was absolute hell. Riding a bike in a long skirt = hard. Riding against the crazy wind we get out here = harder. Riding a bike in a long skirt against the crazy wind we get out here? Nigh on fucking impossible. I had to get off the bike several times and start walking because I just could not keep pedaling.

And I lost the hair tie I'd been using to keep my skirt hiked up. The wind snagged sent it flying into a rice paddy when I stopped to readjust my skirt. ... one day, some poor rice farmer is gonna find a random hair tie in his field and not know how the hell it got there.

In other news, I ... kind of want to do some original writing again. I've been meaning to rewrite my serial novel project for a while; there were a lot of flaws with the first version, I think, and I have some different ideas for the direction I want to take it in this time. (It doesn't help that the character I killed off at the beginning of the first draft has insisted on resurrecting himself. And informing me that he has a family, thank you very much.) DW seems a good spot for it; I don't want to go back to Blogger if I can help it, and I'm not quite comfortable with spamming it up on LJ. ... but I don't know much I want to do with it. Full chapters would be too much work; tiny snippets probably won't end up being "real" enough for me to feel like I'm actually writing. Smaller pieces with a looser, overarching plot or theme? idk.