Bedtime Story: "The Story of Oi! and Yai!" (Patreon)

Hello, All 🫶

I've got a Bedtime Story for you! This one's a real folktale, not a reading from The Pillow Book. I sort of miss these and thought you might as well. It's one I've never heard before, and maybe you haven't either.

In other news, The Oracle Yōkai Deck is DONE! I did my last read through and I'm guessing it will go to the printers any day now. I'm really happy with it and can't wait for it to come out. Everyone, let's hold hands🤝🤝🤝, take a deep breath, and concentrate on the whole tariff thing falling through🙏. Don't get me started...

So, I wanted to give myself a small "Gokurōsama deshita*" present. For the deck, for ah~lmost finishing the middle grade for the UK publisher, and for getting through those two interviews. The other day, I happened upon a sign for a newish campsite in the hills near us, came home, and promptly made reservations for two nights. It's a bit of a gamble. I've never been and only going by what I saw on the website. But it looks like we'll have a break in the rain and fresh air, birdsong, and the sound of the river on rocks is surely enough to re-energize these old bones. Both Richard and I are bring Kobos full of books (as well as real books), and I'm bringing journals and sketch pads and recording equipment and cameras. The only work we're going to do is plan what's our next big project to do together. Remember Uncanny Robot? Well, with ever fiber of my body I'm anti generative ai, so that project is dead dead dead. We were lied to at the beginning -- it was very much hinted that it was all "in the public domain" work they were feeding into their ai maws. Anyway. What I'm getting at is we were thinking about doing folktale retellings as little audio dramas. No ai for any of it. I'll draw the thumbnail artwork and write the script. Richard will do the audio and sound design. Julyan will do the music. No idea if there will be any interest in such a thing, but we had so much fun doing the UnRobo stories and learned so much. The ai was never the best part. It was working up the stories, the timing, figuring out how to make the stories funny, acting them out, and putting them all together. I kind of want to do some fun, weird, scary retellings of folklore. That's one of the things on our list to discuss.

The other is the visual novel. Remember that? I just asked Richard to pull up what we had done so far (before oracle deck and book sidelines me) and while it took him awhile to find it, I watched and darnit, I'm stoked to finish that one up as well. Please, please everyone stay safe and well, XOXO,

terrie

*gokurosama deshita is one of those nuanced phrases, something like "thank you for a job well done" or "for all your hard work" or "good job you worked hard I really appreciate it". You'd never use it for yourself like I just did. But I thought it was funny.