News and Life for August 2025

Good evening!  I am tired.

Enough of that though, I wanted to update everyone on my ongoing struggle with the disease called “life”.  It’s been a bit since I talked about life things, so I figured an update was due, especially since I haven’t been posting anything but Hell/Dolls stuff recently.

Health-wise, I’m fluctuating between “healthy” and “dead”, but not as badly as I would’ve expected by this point in my life.  I visit a mental health doctor, family medicine doctor, dentist, and eye doctor regularly compared to how I was the past decade.  Teeth are still in my head, blood pressure and cholesterol could be better, and sleep is what it has been since high school.

My right eye, however, possibly has something called keratoconus, which basically means my eye is distending at a rate that could cause partial blindness if left untreated.  I’m seeing someone in September to confirm I have it, then I get the surgery if I do, hopefully before the end of the year.

I have kept hold of my current job, now making it the longest career I’ve ever held (just passed five years), and I still enjoy the people, coworkers, and the work.  If I end up moving out of my current state, I will definitely look for a similar job.  Unfortunately, a lot of my favorite coworkers (including my direct boss), have either left the company indefinitely or prepared themselves to leave, so there’s a lot of shuffling positions right now, which is a little stressful, especially considering I don’t know who’s going to be filling the holes.  New bosses can always be a hard thing to get used to, more so if they have a different leading style than you’re used to.  Still, I’m holding my breath.

Aside from that, as y’all are (painfully) aware, I’ve been writing a lot more than before in my spare time, mostly Hell/Dolls and supplementary material for it.  I am still greatly enjoying building the world beyond its original design, and redesigning and building new characters and pieces of the world.  I haven’t had this much freedom with my passions in a long time, mostly due to being pressed for time – work, stress, and duties to school and family were always preventing me from committing my thoughts to paper.  Nowadays, I feel like my scheduled interactions with others are more clear, well-placed, and fit with my pace and needs.

I’ve been looking into Fiverr for some high-quality art for my story (mainly for the cover, world map, and possibly a map of the main city), and a couple artists have stood out to me.  If I can at least get a commissioned world map with the details I want, I will be much more likely to release art with the chapters, as I originally wanted.  I may release the first designs I had, but I’m still on the fence.

The last thing I wanted to talk about today was my reviews.  I haven’t really been posting many anime reviews lately, and I haven’t posted a game review since I came back, as much as I want to write them.  I’ve been watching full cours of anime recently, so I’m not lacking review material, but I need to buckle down and think hard to write those reviews in a way that doesn’t sound too repetitive, which I felt was happening with the last few I wrote.

To be honest, I have a few reviews started right now (Metallic Rouge, The Wrong Way TO Use Healing Magic, and a couple of other fun ones), but for me, reviews have to be written after binging the series or while watching episodes.  Otherwise, the details get fuzzy, the episodes blend together, and I forget key points or confuse characters or meanings.  I have never deemed myself a professional reviewer, and I won’t deign to be one now.

That’s all for now, I just wanted to give y’all a quick update on my life.  I hope you all enjoyed my rant today.  I’ll try to get some more content posted.

Thanks for listening!

-Marcosias Isif

Late Night Thoughts

Hello.

How are you tonight?

I had some thoughts about my story Hell/Dolls recently, and since we’re so close to release, I thought I’d talk a little about the history of the story.

This will be a little long-winded and meandering, so ou don’t have to pay too much attention to this post.  This is literally me just rambling before I pass out.

Continue reading

RAPID UPDATE: Hell/Dolls

I know it’s late (here at least), but I just wanted to update y’all as soon as I could.

I have finished Chapter 10, so after a final review of the first two chapters, the Prelude and Chapter 1 will be released.

I hope you are as excited as I am, since this has been in the works for *checks watch* almost a year now, wow.  As I’ve said in previous posts, this story is very dear to me, so I hope those who follow me on various sites will enjoy this story as much as I do.

There is no fixed date for release, but keep an eye out on Wattpad, FictionPress, and here on this site for the release of the prelude and first chapter within the next few weeks.  I promise they will be released before the end of August.

Super excited!

-Marcosias Isif

Update Diary: Hell/Dolls (July 16th, 2025)

THIS IS TAKING LONGER THAN I INTENDED.

Story of my life.  Before I get into details, here’s the stats for this month:

Current Chapter: 10 (Status and Poison)

Pages: 143

Word Count: 65,015

Before you ask, yes, these are the numbers with the ToC and title page taken out.  About a 2000-word difference from the last post; not great, not terrible.  Could be better, but most of the work done this month was corrections and clarifications, so I think it evens out.

So, as I said, the release is taking longer than I intended – my original goal was to be done with Chapter 10 by now, and have the Prelude and Chapter 1 released for you to read.

To my misfortune, life was extremely busy this past month, and I lost some motivation in the past three weeks.  I was running overtime like crazy, alone for the longest amount of time I’ve been in a while, and just generally bogged down and exhausted.

I did, however, keep listening to the story over and over again to catch mistakes and inconsistencies, and to make sure where the next chapter was headed was where I wanted it to be.  Chapter 10 is going slow, but it is about halfway done, so with any luck, I’ll have the first chapters out by the end of the month (though to be honest, it’s looking more like mid-next-month now…)

I’m doing a few more once-overs when I can only listen, and I’m trying to write after work or on my days off.  Here’s hoping that the schedule sticks!

As a final note, I wanted to share something relatively special upon release.  I’m going to be sharing maps and designs as the chapters come out – maybe one every three releases.  If I’m able to, I would love to release one alongside every chapter, but to do that I would need better skill with the tablet I’m using, or (something I’d love to do) hire an artist for scenes and profiles.  Right now, I’m looking at just releasing the world map of Kiria with the Prelude, but please tell me if you’d be interested in this sort of thing.

For now, back to writing.

-Marcosias Isif