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I’ve missed the March 21st Update by 26 minutes, but that only makes us more in need of an update. Despite what I would like to be able to convince myself, a lack of progress doesn’t absolve me of my responsibility to keep you all informed.

In this case, keeping you informed is just letting you know I slept until noon, went to work for a meeting, ended up covering an interview for my boss, took care of things in the office for a bit, and dropped off a package on my way home.

Oh, and I wrote a bit after I got home.

We’re at a whopping 30%.

I probably would have been closer to 70% if I had managed to resist the temptation of my first mistress- I haven’t received any suggestions for her name, so maybe something like Natalee [Which is what I started calling my Flame Atronach in Skyrim]- but she managed to drag me away to play Darksouls for a couple hours before I became weary of running past the same enemies just to die again.

After that I realized both that I needed to get to bed and that I hadn’t posted this earlier like I was planning. So, here we are. I could tell you about today’s Darksouls session, or ramble on about my history with Darksouls- actually, that would only take a few paragraphs- but I’ve almost finished my wine [Blackberry Merlot, currently my favorite] and it’s taken me a good twenty minutes to write this because I started going through the notes of my Skyrim playthough looking for a better name to refer to my first mistress by.

I use “First Mistress” quite a bit, actually- one of the reason’s she needs a name- but I don’t think I’ve mentioned the others. Don’t think I will just yet, either. My second mistress already has a name, though, and my first is more than a little jealous.

Once again I’ve managed to rambled on about nothing and, having realized this the other day while driving home from work- or was it to work?- I’ve decided you deserve something with a bit more substance.

Actually, you probably don’t. Not in an Update, anyway. I need to start posting things that aren’t updates again- supplemental material, personal things, maybe some strange ideas that have popped into my head, and the like- but that’s for another day.

Huh, probably say that more often than I should too, probably why I don’t get nearly enough done.

Regardless, I’m going to add something more to this update than a disappointing amount of progress on chapters and the fact that I have trouble resisting the call of Natalee.

Hmm, not sure if I like it. Think it’s missing something.

Anyway, to add substance to this late night- early morning- post I present you;

Pictures of my Bonsai!

Well, the box said they were Bonsai. I got them off Amazon for like $20 when I was doing Christmas Shopping back in November of 2018, so there’s a rather large likelihood I’m just growing trees in tiny-ass pots I keep in a windowsill.

Either way, this post now has pictures and you’ve learned something completely random about me. Congratulations.

Oh, and if anyone is familiar with Delonix Regia or Jacaranda Mimosifolia can you please let me know if I’ve managed to get them backwards? I’m 90% certain that the bottom picture- my favorite of the two- is actually the Delonix Regia but as it’s not a bright red- and the top one isn’t purple- I can’t know for sure that I’ve fucked up.

Actually, I can. I just won’t admit it until I absolutely have to.

It’s now been forty minutes for me to write all this- I don’t think it takes as long to make this much progress in Sealkeeper, but maybe I just don’t notice- so I’ll end it here.

If there’s anything specific you’d like me to talk about or random pictures you’d like to see please feel free to let me know. I have to fill these updates with something when I haven’t been getting enough writing done.

I’m kidding.

Partially.

But seriously, let me know if there’s something about me, my gaming, or my writing you’d be interested in. I’ve noticed recently- though it’s been this way for years- that people seem somewhat hesitant when they reach out to me, like I’m going to be upset with being disturbed.

I won’t be.

If I didn’t want people to be able to reach out to me I wouldn’t have posted the story- and would have missed out on the fantastic ego boost that is having people tell you how much they enjoy it- or I’d disable private messaging.

I’m more than happy to answer questions or discuss an idea you have.

And if those questions are about me, well, you’ve come to the right place. I like to consider myself an expert.

We’ll end this here before I start rambling again.

Well, rambling more.

Until I next have your attention,

–Eyazahrid

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While the chapter isn’t finished yet, I’m sure many of those patiently waiting for chapter 67 will be happy to know I’m about halfway done with it. A lot of people- ncpfan included- are concerned with the speed of the story so I’m trying to fit all the ‘current’ events into this one and start on some very minor timeskips [Couple days to a few weeks] so that we’re back on track and making progress again.

That should mean this chapter ends up being longer but we’ll see. Current goal is to have this finished in the next day or so because I’d like to post by the end of the month. That would mean two posts in one month, which is definitely an improvement to my recent abominable update rate.

Remember back when I could crank out a chapter a week? I do. Gods above I miss having so few responsibilities.

Well, that’s pretty much all I wanted to say here for updates. We’ll just have to see if I can finish this quick enough for ncpfan to look it over. Considering I started writing this at 11:55 PM on 1/25 and wont’ even have this posted until 1/26, well, it’s a damn good thing I have tomorrow off, isn’t it?

Hopefully I can make good use of that day and stay focused enough to finish the chapter, or at least a majority of it.

I do want to try making updates like this more frequent so you know what’s going on in the long period of silence between my updates but I’m sure you’d all appreciate more frequent updates a whole lot more.

I’ll try to balance them.

Also, right before I go into this next section I’ll share a quick idea I had for this blog of mine. Originally I was just going to use it for Sealkeeper [hence the name] but FanFiction is a large part of my life that probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Because of that, I was considering having a FanFiction blog to cover all my work and thoughts including Sealkeeper.

If it’s not too much trouble, I would like to hear from you [Feel free to tack it to the end of a review of chapter 67] whether you’d prefer I change this blog to cover all my Fanfiction [Which would involve me changing the name and may result in more frequent posts] or if you’d rather I just make a new one [I think I’ve got it down at this point, only have like four of the damn things sitting around collecting internet dust.].

Now, that’s the end of the update, so if that’s all you came for you’re good to go. What follows is a rant I typed up in response to a review on chapter 66 because it was really bugging me. Technically I got it off my chest then and I was just going to add it to the next chapter so everyone could see it but I’ve since thought better of it. People read the story for the story and while people have agreed with some of my other rants and opinions in my ANs this feels like a more appropriate place for them.

It’s kind of why this page exists after all, isn’t it?

So, after this segment is the rant I typed up right before going to bed which I haven’t touched since. There are probably points I could better make or ways I could improve the word choice but not only does spending time on it detract from time I could be working on chapter 67 but it goes from being a rant to a valid argument and I don’t care enough to refine it. Still, I did take the time to write it- which did make me feel a lot better, actually- so I might as well post it, yeah?

—The Rant—

To “blight23”, I must thank you for such a witty remark. Truly, to make comments about not using elements of other languages when writing in English was a superb show of humor. The delectable irony was not lost to me, I assure you.

Assuming, that is, it was intended.

I have a feeling it was not.

Better yet, you have disabled Private Messaging. I had a good laugh at that. It’s like you already know people will call you out on your comments. Oh, this is written in English, you can’t use Japanese terms.

I can, I did, I will continue to do so as I please with my story. What a strange concept. And the fact that I expect at least some of my readers to possibly have an iota of familiarity with the language the series I’m writing about is originally in? I don’t find it that far fetched.

Perhaps you enjoy things dubbed, but I do not. Add to that the fact that I’m more of a Manga man myself, where they do, in fact, mix the English translation with Japanese terms to preserve the feeling of the medium and you’ll find that I really don’t care that you dislike the fact that I use a small smattering of Japanese within my fanfic about fucking ninjas.

Next you’ll tell me to use knife for Kunai, dagger for Tanto, and sword for Katana. You may have noticed I am on chapter 66 when you commented this on chapter one. The chances of the rest of it being similar is high, the chances of it changing at this point is absolutely nill.

The fact that you apparently “Copy and Paste” this exact same message onto every story that does this (There’s a reason the amount of stories that do this is “surprisingly high” boyo, it’s because that’s the style a lot of people have decided made sense for the story they wanted to tell.) and have blocked PMs is a pretty good indicator that you know your comments are useless.

I’ve mentioned anonymous reviews in the AN of one of my other stories- which may be down at this point, actually- but this is rather similar so I’ll reword it to also include those who will put their name on the review but are still too cowardly to do anything productive with it.

“If you are unable to discuss your opinion then that opinion holds no value and to share it is worthless. Keep it to yourself and spare us of your filth.”

And that’s my rant on a stupid fucking review. Don’t think I dislike the review because it was negative- I don’t even care that Darck Master / Kiraxen decided that one review wasn’t sufficient and decided to post the exact same comment about the fact that they won’t be reading anymore- I dislike it because of how absolutely useless it was.

Everyone doing the same thing doesn’t make it right, but to be of the opinion that you must be right about them all being wrong with how they choose to write stories in their free time and post to the internet for others to enjoy is just pathetic.

There is no correct way to do fanfics- if there was I wouldn’t have to look at the pairings before the title of a story to make sure it’s not Yaoi- so let authors write how they want to write.

Thank you.

—End Rant—

And now, with that out of the way, I’m going to grab a bite to eat and get back to chapter 67.

Until I next have your attention,

–Eyazahrid

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I’ve found myself referring to this quite a lot as I write chapter 66 -though to be perfectly honest I haven’t made all that much progress- so I figured it may be helpful if my readers had access to it as well.

Pretty sure I mentioned that I was starting to use an actual map in an AN forever ago, well here it is. No idea who the creator is [It’s probably somewhere on the damn picture, I’m just blind] but it surely isn’t me. My mental image of the elemental countries was way different and didn’t make any sense at all when I really think about it.

Ah, turns out it was right there in the file name. xshadowrebirthx gets the credit for this masterpiece. I have a feeling I’m going to be using it a lot more in the future.

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I did say I’d be posting this next, so here’s the Flowcharts I came up with to help you keep track. The First two are complete and the third is my first attempt provided here so you can laugh at it.

As a quick note, these focus on Naruto’s relationships otherwise it would be way too complicated. Generally, Person 1 is [X] to Person 2, with Person 2 being the one the arrow is pointing to and [X] being whatever I wrote next to the line.

I’m pretty sure that was obvious enough.

PLI and MLI stand for Potential/possible Love Interest and Major Love Interest respectively.

These charts are by no means all encompassing and there will be relationships I left out, forgot about, or messed up on. This is also subject to change, so don’t try to use this to make any predictions. [It won’t help, I don’t know what I’m doing] .

Also, you may have already noted that these pictures are not small. It doesn’t look all that good in my previews of the page so for that I apologize. Were I to make the images smaller you wouldn’t be able to read it at all and if I’m making it big I may as well keep it at the original size, yeah?

With all that said, enjoy.

Not a small picture at all. This next one’s a bit better, mostly because it’s far more simple, but creating it did bring some rather odd thoughts about Naruto’s relation to Sasuke and Itachi. I’d explain, but I think you’ll get the idea well enough from the image below. I had never even considered that before but I kind of like how strange it is.

Definitely keeping it.

Not sure what the line in the left corner is from, but I’m having trouble getting the flowcharts up so I’m not going to try removing something that’s actually functional.

I’m not dumb enough to give Fate such a tempting target, thank you.

The picture below was my first attempt but was getting too complicated as I tried to show involvement with the Wolves/ Loyalty to Naruto within the same chart as the relationships. I think I did much better in the chart at the top of the page, but that might just be me.

Feel free to chuckle at my miserable first attempt. I spent way too much time on it.

I have one more I’ll be posting separately, but in case you were wondering how I made these it was with Draw.Io . It was free, which was good, and it linked to my Google Drive to allow autosaving, which was very good. I should probably play around with it a bit more so that I can use it better, but I really don’t have the time at the moment.

I suppose as I type this it is- where I am, at least- Christmas day, so merry Christmas to all of you who probably won’t be here until at least mid January.

The last chart will be posted momentarily and I’ll call it quits for the day.

Until I next have your attention,

Eyazahrid