I'm now on ko-fi! If you want to support me, go to ko-fi!com/vjkendall

Hey, I'm Val! I'm a stickler for spelling, punctuation, and all those other hoity-toity things. I like the smell of honeysuckle and jack-fruit; the squishy feel of sinking into sand; blowing bubbles; the smell of burning paper; and hedgehog-shaped pencil-sharpeners.

If I review your story, it will to praise you or give constructive criticism, because I don't believe in writing negative reviews. I will tell you if you need to separate your paragraphs better, but I will NOT tell you if I think your plot points suck, because that is a personal opinion, not a fact; I will keep my personal opinions where they belong: in my own work. If you want an opinion from me about something you've written, PM me.

I'm the sort of person that loves a thing and ends up trying to make it better; this is why I do fanfiction, I love the original story so much, I'll sit and think of all the ways it could be made even more interesting to me. I do this for fanfics by other authors as well, though I keep those mostly to myself. I don't appreciate being accused of plagiarism, especially when I have it clearly stated that my stories are based off other fics and WILL contain recognizable content. It's stated clearly in the summaries and the disclaimers as well; it is NOT my fault if you are apparently too illiterate to even understand a story blurb.

Considering none of the authors of the stories I've fic'ed have come screaming at me, I don't know why anyone else would do so. I've messaged them for permission, but it seems neither of them have anything to do with anymore, and they haven't told me no. Neither have been active in years. If they ever come back and tell me to take down what I have up, I will, but none of YOU have the right to make any demands of me.

"Why do you make Harry a girl if you won't put her in a relationship?"

It's all about practical experience. I'm a girl -- I know how a girl might think and behave. The beauty of Rowling's characterization of Harry Potter is that he could easily be turned into a girl with only a few small changes, changes that don't interfere with his intrinsic quintessence. The only parts where Harry's distinctly male is when he's dealing with crushes on girls, and even then it's like he's just going through the motions -- he could easily homosexual or bisexual and just unknowing. (Being oblivious is one of those things that make Harry Harry.) Because I prefer writing from a female point of view, Harry changes into a girl for the sake of my convenience.

Unless my story starts out with him initially being a boy, Harry (or any other MC) being a girl is not a plot device. I don't want to get any more comments telling me that unless I stick Harry with a guy or have her do something exclusively female, my making Harry a girl is pointless. How many stories are out there with Harry having his name changed to something like Hadrian, or more lordships than he has fingers and toes to count on and the story has nothing to do with those things? Don't give me any crap just because I don't cling to gender-identity.

MARCH 9 2016 NOTICE

So, I figured out what the hell was wrong with my computer that it refused to save any document files. It turned out that on top of a virus, my flash-drive was on the blink. My expensive new 62 GB flash-drive with my entire library of ebooks, sheet music, and other important files on it.

I cried. I cried damn hard and had to watch Youtube videos well through the night and into the next morning to calm down properly. Several thousands of dollars of books accumulated over four years, months of effort put into arranging sheet music, countless weeks of work put into creating lesson plans, worksheets, and Powerpoints, all just gone. Unfinished chapters, ideas, research, and outlines for fanfics as well.

My current fics; my future fics; all that time I spent on researching and brainstorming: Gone . . .

I'm back on my feet now, so to speak, but I contemplated just throwing in the towel on it all for a while. Thankfully, I write more for my own pleasure than I do for others, so that line of thought was soon abandoned. Several days on and off of playing melodramatic music on my viola got the depression out of my system. I now have backup drives, cloud storages, and external hard-drives coming out of my ass, so I feel rather confident in saying that this will never happen again.

As of right now, all my fics aside from Godling Ascending are on official hiatus. I currently don't have the time and energy to devote to more than one story at a time.

SEPTEMBER 27 2017 NOTICE

Just returned from Taiwan and I'm on my way to Vietnam instead.

I feel like I somehow have gotten even busier since the last time I've updated my profile announcements. My writing speed is definitely dragging and I feel like my discouragement at being so slow is making it worse as well. Also, my attention is wavering again.

God, I wish I was better at multi-focusing, but I've recently been re-drawn into divination and music by some friends and now time I should be researching and writing is spent on tarot cards and ukulele. God help us all if I slide back into manga as well 'cause I once abandoned my favorite MMORPG for 4 years because I had been introduced to shounen-ai/yaoi/BL, and I didn't resurface until aforementioned MMORPG had long been taken down by its administrators.

I don't want that to happen to my fics -- they deserve better than that and so do my readers. Maybe I should write a book -- with income from a book, I wouldn't have to work as many jobs . . .

If I write a book, would any of you buy it? A book of short stories and poetry and stuff, maybe with riddles, uncommon nursery rhymes, and teaching verses too . . . I dunno, my abilities are eclectic and don't really mesh well together. Shall I make a general children's anthology with ESL potential? Should I make kiddy books about gardening and being eco-friendly? Should I put together a collection of epic poetry for all ages? Should I re-edit one of my fics into an independent story a la the way of Fifty Shades of Gray?

Sigh

I guess whatever will happen will happen.

The next chapter of Godling Ascending is coming, it's just got to be squeezed out between my work and other distractions.

MAY 6 2018 NOTICE

By the time I post this, I’ll have moved again, this time back to my family’s property, where I’ll be living in my fourth maternal aunt’s unused house until I can get my shit together. The moving (something I seem to be always in the middle of doing) is one of the RL things that keep my update-pace so sluggish. I genuinely do feel bad for being so crappy at this updating thing (especially when I follow some writers that consistently update, like, once a week), but I just can’t see it improving any time soon. I should have known better than to start a long-term, multi-chaptered fic like this, but here we are.

If you’re reading this, then you’re either irritated enough with my inconsistency to demand a full explanation or you’re nosy and just want to know what’s happening in my life. Or maybe you just like reading what I write even when it’s just me rambling and ranting.

Anyway, I began writing Godling Ascending in . . . February of 2015. (Frick-frack, I’ve really been dragging my feet, haven’t I?) I started it when I was still keeping house for my mum and doing her lesson plans and teaching material for her English classes, so I had plenty of time to devote to writing. But then I got enlisted into teaching as well when a family friend who worked at a hotel said they needed instructors to improve their staff’s English, and then most of my focus went into keeping up with that. And then I ended up doing weekend tutoring elsewhere too. And then I took up another student that needed to be proficient in reading, writing, and conversation within a year’s time starting from the ground-up.

My contracts with those groups eventually ended (and thank all the gods), but then a friend hired me on to get her a visa to America. Okay, no big deal, I’m familiar with the visa system and know how to make it happen, no problem. But then she flopped her initial interview (ei. She went dressed like what you’d expect when you hear ‘Thai massage therapist’ and acted like her usual abrasive self despite me telling her to put on a respectable front) and she got the brush-off with the polite excuse that she was missing something in her paperwork, so then I had to stay up in Chiang Mai for another month so I could restart the process. That was a month filled with paperwork and more paperwork, no time to stop for lunch some days, never mind writing fanfiction.

After that fiasco was dealt with, I had to move to a new area because when I was living before was too far away from the place I’d be working. Where’s that, you ask? An eco-education park, where I’d be some strange amalgamation of eco-instructor, event-coordinator, head techie, and English teacher again. The job wasn’t labor-intensive most of the time (outside of the occasions where I had to supervise over soon-to-be-released convicts and teach them how to subsist off the land) but there was just a lot going on at all times. I was eventually sent out to some other countries to see if we could open a market for the eco-friendly products produced by local farmers in our organization, but I’m an introverted person and I really don’t like working with people no matter how good the cause is, so I’d had enough after that, and I moved yet again after finding work elsewhere.

So finally we’ve reached the last quarter of 2017. I was teaching English again, but this time as an actual school teacher, and I don’t know what the Hell I was thinking when I agreed to it but I taught three year-levels and a total of nine specific . . . sub-categories? Well, whatever.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the school’s new and they still didn’t have all the textbooks they needed, so yet again I had to come up with material to teach on my own, and I don’t think you can fully understand how soul-rending and panic-inducing teaching can be until you’ve show up on your first day on the job only to find out that nobody knows what the Hartford-Hereford-and-Hampshire they’re doing, that no one gives a Frigg that they’re filing system belongs in a horror film, that you have to create the entire curriculum yourself, and that you have ten minutes until your first class starts.

Long story short, I was over-qualified for that travesty of a position, they tried to force me to resign after the principal’s new side-dish wanted the job, and now I’m suing them for violation of contract, withholding my pay, and then docking my pay by 3,000 baht (approx. 100 dollars) on the grounds that I missed six days of work with no notice after New Year when it was them that told me to stop coming in after December.

As you can figure out for yourselves, I haven’t had much time for writing in the in-between.

I really want to be optimistic though. Apart from my fanfic writing that will be picking up, I’m hoping to get some books published, books for the ESL demographic, some children books that I’ve written myself or will be illustrating, and some poetry anthologies. Believe it or not, I’d consider myself more of a poet than an author — I’m better with short and descriptive slices of thought and fancies than proper book-writing. I’ll never give up writing fanfiction (it’s a guilty pleasure) but I think I’ll be spreading out my reach soon.

So, if you’re interested, I hope to have at least two or three poetry anthologies available for sale soon. They won’t be expensive — five dollars at most — and you could think about it like supporting me on Pa!treon something.

Speaking of Pa!treon, I now have a ko-fi account:ko-fi!com(/)vjkendall (with standard web-address of course). It doesn’t have a reward system like other funding sites, but I like the thought of doing exclusive one-shots for supporters or something similar. IDK. If you have ideas or suggestions for this, hit me up.