Now you know why I said no promises. Almost two weeks later, look at me.

I bet you've been wondering what the READING section is for. Real quick I can tell you what it's not: it's not a seperate blog for book reviews. If I really wanted this thing to go full 2008, I would've but I digress.
Anyway, that section is for something I've been working on (and off) for about a year and a half now. It's part of the reason I made this website in the first place.

I've been a fan of skateboarding for pretty much my entire life. Like any other kid from my generation, I first learned about it through the Tony Hawk video games and started skating for real when I turned 14. I learned the basics, like how to ollie and grind stuff... but slowly and surely, school and life in general caught up to me, and by the time I was 16 I sort of fell out of it. It wasn't until after long after I graduated high school that I started wanting to pick it back up again. I had heard that skating had been introduced to the summer Olympics for Tokyo back in 2020 (or uh, 2021 I guess), and the idea that skateboarding had become an Olympic sport kind of blew my mind.

Another thing I used to do is draw. Draw a lot. Especially in high school. I still have an entire box of paper that I used for doing exactly that, now coffee stained and crinkled almost beyond recognition. As for what I drew specifically, what else would a teenager who so desperately wanted to feel unique draw? ANIME. AND MANGA, I GUESS. My style back then was something of a hodgepodge of shows I saw as a kid; 80s mecha and 2000s battle shonen. Think SDF Macross meets Bakugan. Drawing for sure scratched a creative itch, but what I really wanted to do was make comics out of them. Much like skating though, school and life got in the way, and I eventually fell out of that too. If I had to pin dates on when, I'd say it's been about 9 years since I've drawn anything that I sunk a good amount of time into. 9 years out of practice.

After graduating high school I got really into 3D animation, but there was one problem: I was doing it via Garry's Mod, and that game only has pre-done models from games that already exist. I wanted to make my own characters, but I had (and still have) no idea how to model, or rig, or any of that. I was still content making stuff with video game characters, mind you, but there was always that nagging sense of "boy, I really wish I could do this with my own creations".
And it was around that time that I realized I have a real passion for creative writing. My first exposure to what I'd call influential for my style was reading all the update pages and comics for TF2 back in the day. The dry wittiness and what I'd describe as "150% confidence in complete stupidity"... something about it really just did it for me.
Later down the line, I learned about the magical and explosive world of tokusatsu shows -- Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, what have you -- and there was one prolific screenwriter in that scene who really stuck out to me. Toshiki Inoue, a man who has several head writer credits on a number of mainstay toku shows, is known particularly for his rather unhinged and downright crazy manner of telling stories. He's a guy that does not know the meaning of the word "restraint" and will more often than not have you thinking to yourself "this is completely insane, but I'm hooked". A prime example of this is Avataro Sentai Donbrothers, 2022's Super Sentai season that he was the head writer for. I'm not gonna say much about it, you should 100% open up that can of worms for yourself. But I will tell you that the pink ranger is a 33-year-old office worker who really, REALLY loves his wife.

Surely by now you must be curious about where I'm going with this. I still haven't answered the question I proposed all those 10 minutes ago so if you're not curious, you're gonna wish you were.

I'm writing a story. It's a story about skateboarding, and taking it to a level nobody's ever seen before. As for what format I want it to be in, I've been thinking about writing it like a serialized light novel (or in this case a web novel); having it be something like a webcomic would drain me pretty fast since I'm a hyper-perfectionist, so just getting to draw important bits would provide a healthy balance. That and, it'll provide a feasible challenge to someone like me who hasn't drawn anything in so long. It's a shame, this kind of thing just didn't take off in the States as much as manga did.

"Soulskater" is its name. As the title implies, it's my love letter to everything skateboarding. The culture, the styles, the music, the spirit of never giving up... it makes for an excellent motif. The story's about a girl fresh off the boat from Japan in the east coast of America (Baltimore specifically) looking to see how far she can take skating. There's a huge island just outside the city on the coast called Port Markona, an abandoned port town stemming from the government throwing money at it until it worked... but it never did. Years later, it's been fully reclaimed by skaters and other extreme sports athletes, and is also a pretty hot tourist destination for people visiting Baltimore.
The image you're seeing up at the top of this post is the logo. Or, part of it at least, I still have to make the text. To add some extra context for the setting, I'll be making little videos for YouTube that expand on some things I don't in the story.
It won't be anything crucial, just some worldbuilding about minor places and things in the city. They'll be in the style of those Adult Swim bumps from the early 2000s with the character silhouettes. Think of them like bonus features.

I suppose that's it, then. Over the next few posts I'll talk a bit more about it and the kinds of things surrounding it. It's gonna rule.