#because this is probably the roughest week ive had all year at work and i just want to bury myself and hide in a hole somewhere

[betweenbreaths]

It’s been a rough week, to say the least.

The door opens with a violent swing, knocking against the wall and bouncing close with a loud slam.

The sound catches the attention of the green-haired man who was just lounging on the couch, and he looks up just in time to see you plop down next to him. There’s a disapproving click of his tongue when you grab the blanket and pull it over to you instead, leaving his feet uncovered and vulnerable to the cold air.

“You’re late today.”

You nod, pulling your knees to your chest wordlessly. There’s a beat of silence as you swallow the thick lump in your throat, and you take two deep breaths to steady your voice, before you speak.

“Could… Could you hold me? Just for a while.”

There’s no movement. Just silence.

You begin to berate yourself in your mind for asking something so stupid. Zoro isn’t exactly the soft, romantic type after all.

But then a split second later you feel the couch dip beneath his weight as he inches closer, and you feel his warm arms wrap around you, picking you up effortlessly to sit you in his lap.

He pulls you in, letting your head rest against his strong chest. You feel his heartbeat against your temple, and your eyes begin to water.

“Better?” he asks gruffly, but you recognise it as the tone he uses when he’s feeling unsure and doesn’t want to show it.

When you don’t answer, Zoro’s arms tighten around you, pressing you closer to him and you feel his lips in your hair.

A smile cracks your lips just a little.

“Better,” you murmur against his shirt, as your eyes slip close.

“Let’s just stay like this for a while.”

#one piece #roronoa zoro #one piece fanfiction #zoro fanfiction #zoro x reader #my writing #a little comfort drabble for myself #because this is probably the roughest week ive had all year at work and i just want to bury myself and hide in a hole somewhere #not at all ready to face monday and the horrors of demanding bosses clients and deadlines #even my parents are now worried that this job is taking a toll on my mental health #sigh

[random-storykeeper]

My OHC compilation video is here! This time, I showcase all 29 entries I’ve submitted for One Hour Compos in 2018. The cover art in the centre of the thumbnail is done by my friend catnippackets and I still can’t get over how amazing it is that she took the time to make it for me. :)

Last time I did one of these compilation videos, I made it so that the blurbs I wrote about the individual pieces was on its own, private post. I forgot you could do read mores on video posts, so this time I figured, why not just make this all public? That’s in the full post below:

OHC 482 "Connect the Dots" - When the first OHC of 2018 kicked off, I had a lot of trouble thinking of ideas on how to approach this theme. Eventually, I just settled for keeping things simple, using chiptune with a little bit of guitar to create a more pleasant little nighttime piece.

OHC 483 "Patternwork" - When I first saw the images, I wanted to be direct as possible in terms of my theme approach musically. I would use guitars as my choice of string instruments to convey the “threads” and have them repeat simple patterns with triplets going against eighth notes, taking away and adding layers as the piece went along. I exhausted almost every guitar I had in my soundfont collection and ended up having to use an electric guitar. Surprisingly, it worked out pretty well.

OHC 484 "Going Your Own Way" - I usually approach underwater themes in the same matter - sine waves with lots of release. This time, I wanted to do something a little different, but still chiptune. So I decided to focus more on having a direct melody and using square waves instead. I actually quite like the carefree melody I came up with here - sadly, I didn’t really know how to develop it any further so I ended up just repeating it a lot throughout the piece, haha.

OHC 485 "Rays and Rain" - This theme was difficult to work with. I wasn’t really sure what to interpret the pictures as. I ended up just thinking of “rain with some light coming through” and kind of went off with that in a more laidback fashion. It was this compo that I discovered that slowing down the tempo while using delay that is synchronized to the current tempo creates a cool kind of pulsating effect, which is heard at the end.

OHC 486 "Distant Hearts" - This piece was one of the few vocal entries that felt like it kind of fell into place as I went along. I actually am using an excerpt of the post compo version I did for Chips Compo, the full version which I’ll be posting to my channel some time later this year. 

OHC 487 "Drivin' 'Round the Galaxy" - Space in a car = chiptune blues? Sure...and don’t forget the high whistle with plenty of vibrato. :P

OHC 488 "Glass Curiosity" - I’m really not good at doing “rave” or dance pieces, so I decided to just focus on making something that would kind of try to capture the feeling of “losing yourself” via drinking. I mean, it’s a really basic interpretation, but towards the end, I play around a ton with the tempo as well as the filters. 

OHC 491 "From the Earth" - Whenever we get nature or plant themes, I feel like I’ve always tried to make them happy and joyous. This time, I wanted to go for a more tranquil, calmer approach. With acoustic guitar, flute, piano and violin, everything started to fall into place from there.

OHC 492 "Cybernetic Rush Hour" - At this point, I realized that my own sounds were severely limiting me, particularly in the electric department. Chiptune sounds weren’t quite cutting it for me, so I ended up booting up Harmless and taking a couple presets from there. I only barely know how to use it, unfortunately. Maybe someday, I’ll learn. The piece only started working for me when I hit those running notes at the end, but by then, time was already running out. 

OHC 493 "Routine" - One of the first things I think of when I see a bunch of machines is “conformity” and sticking closely to regular tasks. So I tried to keep the notes as even as possible and then put in some vocals. Ironically, the “just don’t come out of the blue” line really does sound like it came out of the blue lol

OHC 494 "Iris Chase" - I remember playing this one Ludum Dare game that had a red eye similar to these pictures. You would play as a person trying not to die while trapped in a room with several other people. I think the eye would kill people based on a vote and if not it would just kill people randomly. Anyways, I wanted to go with this sort of idea - a sinister eye constantly searching for the kill. I tried to play it really weird with slow pitch LFO, maybe some distortion, tritones, a gradually faster tempo. This was a lot of fun to make, and felt a bit different from what I normally was used to making, which in my opinion, was good. 

OHC 495 "Palace 9" - So I pretty much had my instrument set in mind once I saw the images - harps, violins, pizzicato strings, y’know, things that would be light and heavenly. Then I realized, I didn’t really have a good lead. Turns out, the oboe makes a great lead. Although now that I think of it, pitch bending it doesn’t sound that good haha.

OHC 496 "Paws on the Sidewalk" - Seeing fur made me automatically think of white fluffy dogs, so I decided I wanted to make a piece about taking a dog out for a walk on a pleasant sunny day. And yeah...started out with the first few notes you hear on the guitar, and just sort of went at it from there.

OHC 497 "But Only For a Moment" - I really wanted to do a ballroom dance piece for this one. Not only that, but the experience of sort of “having that first dance”, heart pumping in your chest, the pause of anticipation. Of course, it didn’t exactly turn out that way, but the idea was to set a “beautiful” scene cut short by time. How appropriate, given that this is OHC. Surprisingly, this did well in the compo. 

OHC 501 "IV Dream" - This was a weird OHC to come back to. I had never worked with a text theme before, so I was a bit taken aback here. There were so many interpretations I could go for. The one I felt the most comfortable with doing was an ocean/underwater track, but I wanted to go for something different but still water related. Then I remembered: just the week before, I was in the hospital (I burst my appendix, it infected my lower abdomen and I had to stay there for a week) and they put an IV in my hand for the antibiotics and hydration. As I was falling asleep there, I would recall the dripping sounds as the fluids made their way into my hand. I dunno, I guess that was kind of a weird approach to the theme: “I’m dreaming of flying through the sky but I’m actually just stuck here in the hospital”. Plus my voice got all messed up from the operation, so the vocals probably sound a lot worse than they normally do. :P

OHC 502 "Chipititis" - I missed making straight-up chiptune, so I made straight-up chiptune. That’s all, lol.

OHC 503 "Open Up" - I chose to go with the theme of “solitude” being a more positive theme, maybe focusing more on the calmness/meditative side of being alone and allowing yourself to be open and free in isolation. The pads in my soundfont set, as I discovered in this compo, actually work really nicely to set a fuller atmosphere. 

OHC 504 "Long Lost Reconnections" - In this compo, I tried to make a song based on a dream I had that felt real to me. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I could fully develop the lyrics and the theme didn’t come across as well as I had hoped. 

OHC 505 "Confrontation" - Falling. How on earth are you supposed to portray this musically? I decided I would have to go with the basics: fast, descending chords. Then I hit a bass groove and decided it really needed a sax melody, so I put in that sax. By then, I decided that this piece would be about constantly falling with no end in sight, and having to come to those terms that eventually, you’ve got to land on something...right?

OHC 506 "Being Bold" - When I made this piece, I put in a definite end, and regretted it soon after hearing it in the listening party. Personally, it sounds so much better when the notes at the end don’t resolve, like in the “where does the hope go from here?” sort of way. 

OHC 509 "Forgetful Traveller" - Another one of those “hard to convey” themes. The chords had to be just right, conveying someone moving forward, but also kind of thinking that “maybe I should have gone back because I forgot something”. Well, I tried my best.

OHC 510 "Conflicting Voices in My Head" - imo this is easily one of the roughest of the vocal entries I’ve ever done. In the original compo version, I had a lot of trouble getting the vocals to be loud enough for people to actually hear them. Third time’s the charm, I hope. 

OHC 511 "Porcelain and Plastic" - I wanted to do a spooky, unsettling piece for this one, so I tried to make a piece about “feeling strange because you’re being watched by a bunch of old dolls in a dimly lit room and also, you might be turning into one of them”. 

OHC 512 "Rest in Victory" - Before I started the compo, I wanted to make a piece that would keep building up until it got to a sort of “grand finale”. So for this one, I tried to keep it simple, with the same set of chords repeating and just adding different layers as I went along. I had this crazy idea of putting in electric guitars and wasn’t really sure how these were going to work, but I think there’s some ideas in there that I kind of like. 

OHC 513 "Lullaby For a Needlessly Productive AllNighter" - I submitted this with a weird title because it was almost too long to be submitted properly (there’s a weird glitch on OHC where if you submit a title that is too long, it just glitches your piece out entirely). As for the piece itself, I wanted to make a lullaby that was kind of related to my own problems of wanting to stay up to constantly get stuff done. 

OHC 530 "Giants" - I missed out of OHC for several months due to one of my classes last term directly conflicting with the time that OHC ran. So I was pretty excited to return. Live entries are always more nervewracking, but they’re a little easier to set up, in a sense - plus, you get more control over the tempo and stuff. That being said, since they are done in one take, there’s a lot that can go wrong. I almost got this one down until I messed up on the last few notes, oops. 

OHC 531 "So Just (Let Me Be)" - The theme page originally showed “sjsj” as the theme, so most people started basing their pieces off this. It wasn’t until a few minutes in that the official theme was actually posted. Rather than starting a new piece entirely, I decided to just combine the two themes together. I tried to make several lines of the lyrics start with “S” and “J” then I ran out of time. 

OHC 532 "Melting Point" - When I saw the hot springs, it immediately made me think of the hot springs I went to in Japan last summer. It was one of my favourite experiences there. But yeah, I tried to grab a combination of instruments that would sort of capture the contrast between the hot and cold. Vibraphone for a bell-like sound, pizzicato strings for the forest setting, marimba for a warmer sound. Marimba worked surprisingly well for this theme, and I wasn’t the only one in the compo who thought this. 

OHC 533 "Hibernal Regret" - Didn’t really want to do a vocal entry, but I couldn’t help myself - this piece needed words, so I put them in. I tried to keep them short and simple rather than spending a huge chunk of the hour just trying to come up with meaningful lyrics. This allowed me time to process them properly and polish things up a little more. Never really thought I’d be combining winter and space, but hey, it was an interesting combination.

#ohc #compositions #music