October 2019 Doings!

Hello, everyone! So, October. It's been a crazy month, let me tell you. I mean, that is the whole point of this Doings! post, but yeah.

(Also, I just got back from a Halloween party about an hour before I finished this post, and I'm still so hyped. Tired, but hyped. It was amazing. But more on that later!)

Writing!

• So, there's good news and there's bad news.
• And the bad news is that Blood in the Earth/Soil is most likely going to be delayed because I've barely had time and energy to work on it at all this month.
• I'm keeping up with creative nonfic all right . . .
• And I'm keeping up with D&D all right . . .
• But once I get through the week-to-week deadlines and my schoolwork and my various social commitments, there's not much energy left over for Eun-Ji, Azuma, Baili, Gan, Chouko, Xiang, and company. And I wish there was, and I hate that this is the spot I'm in, but I'm not sure what to do about it.
• (And I just added one more thing to my workload . . . but more on that later.)
• The good news, at least for me, is that my D&D campaign is still going well. Everyone seems to be having fun, and I think I've found a good balance between the plot of the week and the overarching storyline. And I've been able to introduce several NPCs who I really like (including one who's showing up tonight), so that's fun.
• (I also learned the importance of testing NPC names for possibly unfavorable mispronunciations — case in point, one of the NPCs last session was named Morin, and some of the players insisted on mispronouncing his name as "Moron." Oops.)
• The other good news is that next semester should be much less stressful, and hopefully, I'll be able to dedicate a lot more time to writing, which could mean extra stuff releasing to make up for the delay? But we'll see how that works out . . .

Reading!

• This was another light reading month, unsurprisingly.
• I did finish Northanger Abbey at last . . . and was not really impressed. The more I interact with Austen's books, the more I think that I'm not really an Austen fan; I'm a Pride and Prejudice fan. That said, there are a couple Austen books I haven't tried yet, so maybe I just don't jive with what I've read so far.
• I also reread Masque because I needed something to read and couldn't get at Prince of Stars, Son of Fate, plus you can't really go wrong with a Beauty and the Beast murder mystery. I have exactly 0 regrets, and it was honestly an excellent destresser.
• The last complete book I read this month was Ghostlight, another sort of magical mystery. It was interesting, but not my favorite thing I've ever read. I may read the sequel, but it's hard to say for sure.
• Finally, I'm currently reading the Thing Explainer, another Randall Munroe book. I feel a little weird whenever I'm reading it because it sometimes kind of feels like a kids' book, even though it's not a kids' book, and I can't help feeling guilty that I'm not reading something more sophisticated. On the other hand, I am enjoying it and I'm learning things, so I'm not about to stop reading it.

Watching!

• My roommate and I finished Season 1 of Avatar: The Last Airbender, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago. You can check out my season thoughts post if you missed it and are interested in reading my overall reactions as someone who knows a ton of spoilers and basically loved the show before she started watching it.
• We intended to watch a bunch of stuff (mostly Disney movies) over Fall Break, but that . . . didn't happen. I'm ok with that, except for the fact that we were going to watch Aladdin (the original, which I've never actually seen) and I was going to knit a bunch and I was kind of disappointed by the lack of both those things. But we played a ton of board games instead, so . . . worth it.
• And my roommate and I are endeavoring to pick Sword Art Online back up. We kind of skimmed past the Gun Gale Online arc because my roommate doesn't like most of it that much and I was . . . not super enthusiastic about the idea of watching it. As I mentioned to a friend of mine, Sword Art Online is kind of like the DC Dark Knight trilogy, in that it's deep and intellectual and thoughtful and people tell me it's really good and I should definitely watch it, and I want to take their advice . . . but it's also heavy and dark and doesn't have a ton of joy or humor to balance that out, and so even though I theoretically want to watch it, in practice, I avoid every opportunity I get to do so.
• But, as I said, we're past the GGO arc; we picked the episodes that my roommate liked best and watched those; I got a recap of the rest of the arc from her, and now we can move on to the remaining mini-arcs! Which I'm excited about!

Life!

I painted a pumpkin for a contest hosted by my campus bookstore. (It didn't win.)

• So, there are four main highlights of this past October: Parents' Weekend, fall break, academic decision crisis, and Halloween.
• We will start with the chronological first of those items: Parents' Weekend. This is also the easiest one to tell: the first weekend in October was Homecoming/Parents' Weekend, and my parents came up because it's my last year and my sister's first year and both of those are significant. Also, my sister was part of one of the Cardboard Canoe Race teams, so they wanted to support her in that, even though she wasn't actually in the boat. (Her boat did not win, but they did make it across without sinking, so all is well.) Getting to see them was super fun, and we got to go out to eat at Cheddar's, which is always a win.
• That weekend, I also went to Cedarville's production of A Comedy of Errors, which I enjoyed (though not as much as some of the other plays I've seen). The actors all did a very good job, and of course, Shakespeare is always great. Some of the mistaken identity humor did get old after a while, but overall it was good.
• After that, it was a fairly quiet-but-busy two weeks until . . .
• The academic decision crisis . . . which wasn't really much of a crisis, more of an opportunity that I had to decide whether or not to take. See, between the classes I've taken and the classes I plan to take, I'm only one class away from a web design minor, and it was bugging me . . . but I didn't think I could do anything about it because the class I needed was only offered in the fall semester, aka now, and I'm not sticking around an extra semester just to take one class. But my advisor encouraged me to email the professor in charge of the design department and ask if I could switch out the class for something else, so I did, expecting the answer to be no.
  • The answer was not no.
  • The answer was "I've talked to the professor who runs the class, and he remembers you from Web Design 1 and because he remembers you doing well in that class and really enjoying that class, he's willing to let you take this class as an independent study. But you have to start this semester, not next semester when you currently have a lighter workload."
  • So. That sparked a lot of debate and reassessing my plans and calling my parents and trying to figure out if the independent study is doable -- which I've decided it is, but only if I cut down on some non-class activities.
  • Thus why Blood in the Earth/Soil is being delayed.
• In the middle of all that was fall break, which was, honestly, delightful. Once again, I went to my roommate's house . . . but this year, we had my sister and her roommate along for the ride. That turned out to be really fun, as it meant we played a ton of board games.
  • A few of the board game highlights: multiple games of "Sentinels of the Multiverse" (in which I confirmed that my ideal playstyle is not support), two rounds of "Escape the Temple" (fun, but easily the most stressful game I've ever played, and not the best thing for when you're trying not to have a cold), and two games of "Mysterium" (including one in which I played as the ghost and learned that I like that much more than playing as a normal player -- it's a great game, but I get frustrated when I'm trying to work through the clues I'm given and everyone else is talking around me and telling me what I should think).

• • My sister and I also went to the Columbus Zoo with our aunt, which was really fun. We got to ride a camel (I can definitely tell why they're called ships of the desert) and we saw absolutely adorable arctic foxes!!! They were so white and pretty and fluffy and were basically my favorite part. The cheetahs were pretty cool as well, though.
• Then we got back, I had a super stressful week in which I had to do aaaaalllllllll the graphic design, and then reached this week. Which, of course, is Halloween!
  • To make it clear, I am excited about Halloween solely because it's an opportunity to dress up, not for any other reason. I have no interest in the spooky side of the holiday.
  • But, yeah. I basically managed to have Halloween events every night of Halloween week except Monday, which meant I got to wear all the costumes!

 

• • Tuesday: PWID Halloween party. I dressed up as a dragon keeper from the DragonKeeper Chronicles. As usual, no one knew what I was. As usual, I did not win. But I got to walk around with a sword on my hip and a dragon on my shoulder, and I got to eat cinnamon pretzels and caramels, and I got to meet my professor's baby, so I call the evening a success.
  • Wednesday: Inklings creative writing org, with costumes welcome. I thought about trying to be a Jedi this evening, but stuff didn't work out, so I went back to the classic assassin look. (Specifically, I was a Shadowwalker assassin from one of my to-be-eventually-published books, but I didn't advertise the specifics.)

• • Thursday, daytime: So I didn't exactly dress up, but I went with a sort of low-key Jedi-ish look and carried my lightsaber around in my backpack pocket, so I count that. Speaking of which, I have a lightsaber now. Like my sword, it's 3D printed. I still need to paint details on the hilt, but that's only going to be a little bit of work, and it wasn't significant enough that I felt the need to get it done before Halloween.

• • Thursday evening: Orion Halloween Hogwarts party! My roommate and I went to this together, and it was SO MUCH FUN. I did a whole post about the event over on Facebook and Instagram (pick the one you like better), so I'm not going to recap all the details here. That said, it was so much fun, I ate a ton of good food (including Orion's version of fever fudge, which is DELICIOUS and AMAZING), and I got to dress up AGAIN. This time, I was a Hogwarts alum who works with dragons. It was probably my most comfortable costume of the week (with the exception of my low-key Jedi one), but also had the most small fun details. And I got a Hogwarts letter! Which was awesome!

• • Friday evening: AKA tonight, AKA a time that has not occurred as of the writing and publishing of this post. But I've invited people in my D&D group to dress up, and I'm planning on wearing my capelet at least and having my dragon on my shoulder, so it will be a good time.
• Outside of those three things, most of October has been occupied by schoolwork, mostly graphic design. I'm currently in a group project in one of those classes, and it is not my favorite thing, but it's the only group project of the semester, so I'll deal with it.

November Plans!

• So, you may be asking "Sarah, if you're delaying your WIP and taking this independent study, will you still have time for NaNoWriMo?" And the answer is . . . not really. But I'm doing it anyway with a rebel goal of one creative nonfic piece and one D&D episode written and edited per week. Aka, I'm doing the stuff I need to do anyway, but at a slightly faster rate. And then if I have time around those things, I'll work on my WIP as well.
• On a side note, if you have been able to find the NaNoWriMo banners and profile things, please point me in their direction, 'cause I'm kind of lost on the new site.
• The other part of the main November plan is "do all the graphic and web design."
• Seriously, though, basically every weekend in November is going to be occupied primarily with my independent study. It's going to be great (I say only slightly sarcastically; I am really excited for this class).
• In my spare time (such as it is), I hope that my roommate and I will be able to keep watching either Avatar or Sword Art Online; I'd like to finish a season of something by the end of the semester. We'll see how that works out.
• I am planning to go home for Thanksgiving break, which I look forward to. I miss being home. This will also be my and my sister's first drive of that length when we're not following our parents, so that's going to be exciting and mildly nerve-wracking. I'm hoping that we can leave super early Wednesday morning so I don't have to drive most of the way in the dark. We'll see how that works out.
• Also, there's a chance that the TDK Christmas party will end up being before Thanksgiving, and I am not happy about that. I have strong feelings about when Christmas is meant to be (AKA, only after Thanksgiving) and I hold to those feelings with a significant enough conviction that I will have an actual crisis of conscience if the party is before then. I'm an officer, so I have to go, but . . . yeah.

How was your October? What plans do you have for November? Are you doing NaNoWriMo? When do you think the proper time for Christmas celebrations and decorations is? And did you dress up for Halloween this year? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

October 2017 Doings!

Oh, look! It's November, the best month of the year! (Well, one of the best months, anyway. April and September are pretty nice too.) October, though? October can be great, but sometimes— this past October, for instance— it can be a pretty mixed bag. Don't get the wrong idea; it wasn't a bad month . . . but it was a pretty tiring one.

Writing!

• The thing about college . . . if I don't have either a deadline or a challenge to meet, I don't write. I want to write. I carry my notebook around in hopes that I will write. But things that don't have deadlines, or that have very distant deadlines, tend to get pushed to the side in favor of everything that's due this week. And I apparently have a knack for taking on projects that end up more complicated or time-consuming than they're supposed to be, which doesn't help matters at all.
• That said, I managed to edit the first two and a half chapters of Blood in the Snow during the first half of October. 4K words down; probably-25K words to go . . . (Well, actually a little less at the time I write this, but that's November news.)

Reading!

• My reading for October has been mostly dominated by C.S. Lewis's books— which is a good thing! I started the month by rereading The Silver Chair so I could give a presentation for it in one of my classes. Then I also reread Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra for the same reason. I haven't read the Space Trilogy in years— not since I was in my fairly early teens and mildly obsessed with Dekker's Circle Trilogy. As you might expect, I didn't really get it the first time, although I did enjoy it. I liked it even more this time around, and I actually look forward to reading That Hideous Strength as soon as I have time. I actually think I prefer Out of the Silent Planet to Perelandra, although most people seem to like Perelandra better. I can understand why; Perelandra is an amazing book; it's theologically rich, with a fascinating concept, deep themes, and a surprisingly high-stakes conflict. I know and appreciate all that, and I do genuinely love the book; it's become one of my favorites. However, I also like stories and exploring new worlds and new peoples, and Out of the Silent Planet gives me a little more of that and a little less theological argument, and so I suppose it's just easier for me to enjoy. And I feel quite uncultured and unspiritual for saying so, but it's the truth all the same.
• I also took my first step into Lewis's nonfiction this month with Mere Christianity and quite enjoyed that as well. Lewis covers a surprisingly broad range of topics, he explains them well, and he presents his message in a friendly, familiar style that makes even complex concepts understandable and enjoyable to read about. At times while reading the book, I felt as if I were sitting with Lewis and a few friends beside the fire on an autumn evening, each of us with a cup of tea and Lewis with his pipe, listening to Lewis talk. Other times, mostly when Lewis made a particularly dry and sarcastic comment, or when he covered an especially difficult concept, I felt like I was sitting in a really good lecture by my favorite philosophy-and-Bible professor. Both are good things. The content of the book, of course, was top-notch. I could probably write a whole post, or a whole series of posts, just going over different insights that stood out to me.
• My only non-Lewis book this month was Before She Ignites, which I read and reviewed for my college newspaper. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the book! A lot of really hyped mainline fantasy and sci-fi ends up disappointing me because of content or overwhelming romance or annoying characters. But Before She Ignites had surprisingly little romance and plenty of intrigue, diversity, mystery, drama, and worldbuilding, along with great characters and excellent handling of real issues. There weren't as many dragons as I expected, but I'm ok with that. And, ok, yes, the main character could be a touch naive and helpless at times, but she made sense and grew past those things, so it was all good, and I would definitely recommend the book.

Watching!

• Still watching Fairy Tale. My opinions on the show haven't really changed much, although I enjoy it more and more as I watch it, become increasingly attached to the characters, and get used to how the episodes generally play out. And apparently we're about a fifth of the way through, according to my roommate, so we might finish by the end of the school year. We'll see.
• However, I have rather mixed feelings about the last two arcs. The first one was Erza's backstory, which is good- Erza is one of my favorite characters, she has an interesting past, and it was an exciting storyline- but at the same time, it was kind of depressing in parts and featured altogether too much of the "No! I must do this alone! I must sacrifice myself to save you!" variety of dramatics. Then the second arc involved one of my least favorite characters getting a his well-deserved punishment, plus lots of cool magic, a super fun teamup on the part of Loke and Lucy (who I ship very hard, by the way), and a focus on one of my favorite minor characters whose name I don't know how to spell. On the other hand, it also involved betrayal and characters turning other characters against each other, so . . . yeah. That happened.
• As for the arc we're currently in, I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I met Wendy (one of my roommate's favorite characters) and quite like her. All things considered, she's one of the more accurate depictions of a 12-year-old that I've encountered in fiction.
• So, yeah. I haven't really watched anything besides Fairy Tale, but I haven't had much time to. We'll see whether or not that changes next month.

Life!

• Basically, October has mostly consisted of running around, trying to do all the things, because right around Fall Break is generally when professors decide to throw everything at you. In the course of four weeks, I've presented on two C.S. Lewis books, written two book responses and one report, edited a group essay, taken my first English exam, created, perfected, and presented my professional portfolio, and created various and sundry design projects for Visual Rhetoric. On the upside, that's roughly half, possibly two thirds, of my big projects for the year out of the way. On the downside, I don't feel any less busy now.
• Oh, and on top of all that, I also wrote my first book review for my college newspaper and took my first photo assignment! I covered the Women's Ultimate Frisbee team practice, which I figured would be pretty fun. While I have no interest in sports, I have friends on the team, and I've had success with action photography in the past. Then my dad pointed out that the lens I had on campus wasn't exactly ideal . . . but I got the shots I needed and had a good time doing it, so it's fine.
• Fun or not, though, I was more than ready for Fall Break when it came around. I went home with my roommaate again, and we spent the first two days of break crafting our costumes, which I posted about on Tuesday, and eating yummy homemade food (like sausage potato chowder and legit homemade donuts). Then, on Saturday, we went to her grandparents' house to celebrate her grandmother's birthday, which was fun and involved fireworks and more delicious food (namely apple and pecan pie- I've been craving pecan pie for literally a year now and I finally got some and it made me happy). And if I seem a little food-obsessed . . . well, my college's cafeteria is in the country's top ten for a reason, but it still gets old after a while, especially when they keep serving my least favorite things and never seem to have my favorites. Plus, as I mentioned, pie. And donuts. Both homemade. Those deserve as many mentions as I can give them, arguably.
• On the other side of the spectrum: I'm still doing Martial Arts and very much enjoying it. It's actually a really great stress reliever, which I didn't expect. I mean, it's hard and tiring and sometimes I wonder if I'm doing anything right and if I'm ever going to actually improve, and I never can get my stance quite right for my forms. But at the same time, martial arts force me to slow down a little, to think a little more about what I'm doing, and it makes me feel like I've accomplished something (which is invaluable when I spend so much time working on long projects). So, yeah. No matter how busy I get in the next few months, I'm not quitting this.
• Speaking of stress relievers: my church's Bible Study has finally started up again! We're going through 1, 2, and 3 John, and I think it'll be interesting. We have an actual book this year, as opposed to just talking through a chapter or two a week, so we'll see how that works out. I'm excited to be back, though. Even though we lost a few people from last year, it's a great group and we also have good (if sometimes weird) discussions.

November Plans!

• It's NaNoWriMo! I'm going Rebel this year and not starting a new novel. Instead, I'm rewriting Blood in the Snow so I can submit it to Rooglewood Press in December. Not only do I think this will be a more achievable goal for this year, it's more practical. I need to get this done soon; I don't need to start another novel, especially since I have so many already that need edited. For maximum effectiveness, minimal stress, and easy conversion to NaNo-winner-dom, I'm actually tracking and recording my time spent rewriting, rather than my words. (Well, I'm still tracking my words, but I'm not recording them on the NaNo site.) My official goal is to spend 25 hours rewriting this month. My hope is that a time-based goal will help me keep writing even when I would normally allow myself to stop on days when the words flow well, but will also keep me from getting too stressed when I'm stuck and can't accomplish as much as I want. Also, I don't actually know how long Blood in the Snow is, so I don't want to set a word-based goal and then have it not be enough.
• Of course, besides big writing projects, I also have final projects in most of my classes. Most of those aren't due until December, of course, but I need to start them sooner rather than later. The exception is my final project for my portfolio class, which is basically a series of mock interviews, and which is happening this week and next week. I've finished my phone interviews— huzzah!— and those actually went fairly well. Now all I have to do is survive the face-to-face ones . . .
• Because of NaNoWriMo and the start of final projects, regular blog posts may or may not go on hiatus during this month. That said, I also may or may not post occasional NaNoWriMo updates, potentially featuring snippets, so . . . yeah. I'm not sure you're really missing out.
• I'm also starting work on Christmas presents already. I'm a firm believer in keeping holidays separate, even if certain people who I know occasionally try to start Christmas music in September. However, Christmas presents I'll start thinking about as early as I please. There's no reason to restrict giving to one season, and when you handmake gifts, you can't always wait until after Thanksgiving to begin. That's just a recipe for stress, even if you can make a hat in about a week.
• Of course, Thanksgiving is only three weeks away, which means the certain people don't have long to wait before I'll gladly join in on the Christmas music . . . and which means I get to go home! I don't want to say I can hardly wait, because that implies a conscious eagerness, and often I'm too busy to think about how much I want to be home— which is a good thing, don't get me wrong. If I spent all my time thinking about how I'm not home, I'd be miserable. Besides, I like being at Cedarville and spending time with friends and going to class and all that. But at the same time . . . I miss home, and I miss my family, and I want to be back.
• Other than that, I don't have any real plans for November . . . but I don't exactly need other plans either; I have plenty to keep me busy.

How was your October? Do you have any plans for November? Are you doing NaNoWriMo, and if so, what's your project? When do you think you can start the Christmas season? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
 -Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)
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Captain Elizabeth Britworth

So, you may or may not have figured this out by now, but I love cosplay. I love seeing pictures of it, I love hearing people's stories and seeing how they put their outfits together, and I love coming up with my own cosplays. So, while I don't exactly care one way or the other about Halloween in and of itself, I'm super excited for an excuse to put my ideas into practice. Last year, I stalked the night as a Mistborn and then wandered the wilds of my residence hall as an elven adventurer. And this year, I stepped out for adventure as an original character from one of my favorite genres . . .

Introducing Elizabeth Britworth: inventor, captain of the skyship Windrunner, and one of the first people to travel in time, along with her friend and colleague, Dr. M!

I've been planning this cosplay for a while now-- a very long while. However, I didn't quite know how it would come together until Fall Break, when my roommate (aka Dr. M) and I had a shopping-and-crafting weekend to create our costumes. The end result is a little different from what I originally envisioned, but I like how it turned out overall.

The base of the outfit- shirt, skirt, boots- are all items I either had already or, in the case of the shirt, needed to acquire anyway. I originally planned to wear a second satin-y skirt under the tan one, but decided, on the advice of a friend, that it detracted from the overall look. So, I switched for a different skirt that wouldn't show but would give the tan one a little more texture and volume.

The vest I created from a men's shirt that I picked up at Goodwill. Semi-following a Pinterest tutorial, I cut off the neck, arms, and extra length and took in the side seams to make the vest a little more fitted. It was a little trickier than I expected, but didn't take terribly long overall. I spent much more time on my accessories, namely the goggles:

I don't have a proper tutorial or in-progress pics, because I didn't exactly come up with these on my own but rather combined ideas and elements from various tutorials. The base of the goggles is a pair of mason jar rings, connected by a copper pipe strap for a nose bridge, and some brown vinyl for the eye cups. Then my roomie and I raided the hardware aisle at Home Depot to acquire wingnuts, bolts, little gear-looking things, and other miscellany for decoration. We aged the mason jar rings and the coupler using watered-down black paint (paint it on, wait a moment, rub it off; repeat to satisfaction), then created lenses using some scraps of excess laminating from my sentence patterns poster. (Hey, if the library is going to charge me for the extra six inches at the top— for which I don't blame them— I might as well get some use out of it!) We tried making the lenses out of clear report covers, but that turned out too thick and obscured our vision too much. Then we used hot glue to attach the lenses and the decorative elements. I went for a more low-key look: two wingnuts on each goggle, a line of tiny gear-things, and three bolts on underside of the left-hand ring. My roommate, on the other hand, went all-out:

After that came the eye cups, which was absolutely the most frustrating part of the whole process. Because the jar rings are so large— much larger than the couplings used in the Epbot tutorial I based the cups off of— finding the right shape for the cups took a lot of trial and error. My first effort put the goggles out too far from my face, and even after I trimmed it down, they didn't flare enough at the temples to actually stay in place. So I tried again and eventually found a shape and position that worked well enough, though not perfectly. I attached those with more hot glue— honestly, the whole assemblage is basically held together by the stuff— and added a vinyl-and-elastic strap.

Overall, I think the goggles turned out pretty well . . . except for the fact that one of the rings kept coming off the nosepiece no matter how much I hot glued it. Eventually I had the thought to lengthen the strap by re-sewing the elastic slightly closer to the end of the vinyl, and I think that solved it, but my goggles still spent most of last night held together by desk tape (which kept them in one piece as long as they weren't on my face). At one point I tried wearing them around my neck:

Lousy lighting + cell phone camera = not a great picture. On the upside, you get to see my trench coat.

However, with both the goggles and the necklace . . . it was too much. So I perched them atop my head for a while, then attached them to my belt, then finally just carried them. Depending on how well my modification this morning works out, I may or may not look for something stronger than hot glue to attach them with.

My other accessories were a lot simpler to create, thankfully.

The necklace was my first experience using chain and jump rings, but I'm actually super happy with how it turned out. I put the clasp low for visual interest and so that if I wanted to loop it over my belt or something, I could do that more easily, and the key is attached a couple inches above the clasp. Conveniently, when I actually wear it, my collar hides the ring attaching the chain for the key to the main part of the necklace. The pocketwatch does open properly, but there's currently no face in it, so . . . yeah. I'm hoping to fix that eventually. Then I made the little vial thing- which is actually just a chain with a gear on one end and a key on the other. The chain is pulled through the gear to form a loop, which holds the vial in place when I loop it over my belt. (See the first picture.) The pistol is part of a Western playset; I spraypainted the whole thing bronze, aged it with the same black-paint-and-water method that I used on the goggles, and painted the handle brown. It's not super steampunky— I originally wanted to acquire, modify, and repaint a clearance watergun or even some kind of Nerf knockoff that would look a little more unusual— but apparently I looked too late in the season for that. Oh well.

Reactions to my cosplay were pretty interesting. I wore it first to my major's Halloween party, which was fine, but didn't work quite as well as I hoped. Part of the problem was that I didn't associate my cosplay with any particular character, original or otherwise, very well, though unexpected goggle issues didn't help either. Then I returned to my dorm, made another go at emergency repairs, and headed out again, roommate in tow, for the dorm-wide trick-or-treating-style event. This went much better, partially because I'd given up on actually wearing the goggles and partially because I could get "in character" to a degree, asking for the date and the year and then getting excited over the answer before introducing myself and my roommate, still in character. Some people seemed a bit confused; others played along quite well. However, there was one interaction in particular, with an RA dressed as an Arabian lady (equally in-character) and another girl costumed as Ms. Frizzle (who may or may not have been in-character), that particularly stood out:

(Note: dialogue has been slightly dramatized. The roomie is referred to here as Dr. M.)

Arabian RA: *as Dr. M and I approach* I am afraid I am out of candy.

Me: *in a very bad British accent* That's all right, but could you perhaps tell us the date?

Arabian RA: Of course; it is October 30, 3017.

Me: 20— 2017?

Dr. M: You're certain?

Me: You're not playing a joke on us, are you?

Ms. Frizzle: *walks up behind us* No, actually it's 1927.

Me: No! No, we missed it!

Dr. M: *dramatically sinks against the doorframe* Alas, we have failed!

Me: But— but we still traveled! We still got somewhere!

Dr. M: True! Our calculations must have been off . . .

Ms. Frizzle: When did you come from?

Me: Why, 1917.

Ms. Frizzle: Well, that's still ten years. I'm here from the future, actually.

Me: Truly? When?

Ms. Frizzle: 2011.

Me: Indeed? Please, tell me— what is your time like?

Ms. Frizzle: It's boring, really. Too much technology. Well, good luck! *walks off*

Arabian RA: Alas, I am afraid that although you have come such a great . . . distance? I have nothing to offer you.

Dr. M: It's fine. Discovery is reward enough on its own.

Arabian RA: True. Would that you could leave your attitude here when you return to your own time.

Me: We shall do our best. Good evening to you!

Arabian RA: *doing a little bow thing* Good night, and may you be blessed in your travels.

So, yes. I had a few other interesting encounters, but that was the absolute best bit. I'm very grateful to have such an amazing hall and an amazing roommate who actually got just as into this as I did.
Did you, or are you going to, dress up for Halloween at all this year? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
 -Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)


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