It’s not. Green, red, and black are all colors with significant presence in this story, and the site reflects that. But the Christian holiday does not have some exclusive claim to the use of red and green (regardless of what people in the U.S. seem to think when I wear them together). If you think of it as fresh blood on spring grass, you probably have a better sense of the imagery here for than if you were to think of holly and holidays.
Simply put, yes, and the response is going to depend on what you mean by publication. At the most basic level, this is me publishing them. The story is available to the public; you can read it, share it, and discuss it. Usually, though, what people actually mean by publishing is either “monetize” or “release through a publishing agency,” and in both cases, the answer is that I’ve considered it and it is unlikely to happen.

There are a number of reasons for this. The first is simple practicality. It is highly unlikely that I would be able to make a living wage from these books, by any avenue. And as things currently stand, I’m supported by governmental disability programs because I have some serious physical and mental health problems. Self-employment isn’t worth the headache it causes with bureaucracy.

The second reason is that I am pretty severely disabled, and attempting to get a publishing company to accept something is a huge amount of work. I don’t have the energy for that, nor the time. Even just monetizing this site would take a lot of energy and work; you have to set up payment arrangements, you have to provide people with an incentive to pay you, and you have to do things like advertising and outreach. That, too, is going to be more headache than it’s worth.

And then finally, it simply would not be what I want from this project. One of the things that makes this worth doing for me is that I have a great deal of creative freedom. I’m happy to accept feedback and input from people; things like requests for interludes or suggestions for ways I can improve my work are quite welcome. But if someone is paying me to do something, I feel like I’m beholden to them, and that isn’t what I want here. Doing it this way also means that I don’t have to worry too much about whether my work is popular or suitable for general audiences, and so I can write the themes and ideas I want to.

So, taken as a whole: Yes, I’ve evaluated this, and no, I’m not pursuing it. It’s really not something I am interested in, and I don’t see a reason why that would be likely to change.

Unfortunately, no. I just do not have the skill with any other language to confidently translate them. I am endlessly fascinated by the ways that languages differ and the nature of translation, and I am slightly conversant with a couple other languages. But I would not consider myself fluent in any but English, certainly not enough to do other-language versions of a book.
No. I just don’t have the time, energy, and skill to make audiobooks.
I have a fascination with language and its variations, and it shows through a lot in this story. There are a lot of words that are not drawn from standard English, and in many cases I try to preserve the original form of the word. Sometimes, this might involve non-Latin characters, diacritical marks, unusual transliterations, and unusual grammatical rules. I try to preserve these things for a few reasons. One is that I feel it’s respectful to the cultural material I draw on, and that’s important to me. Another is that many times either there is no direct translation in English, or there is one, but there are many distinct ideas that would all translate to the same word. In these cases I am very likely to retain the original form, simply because having (as an easy example) ten different pieces of various folklore all translated to “elf” would be very confusing. I try to explain these variations in the comment section of each chapter.

Additionally, translation (both literal and metaphorical) is a concept that’s important in this story. It’s something I want to invite the reader to think about. Maintaining this pattern, because there are ideas that can’t readily be translated in their entirety, is one way that I evoke this concept. For the same reason, when I’m using a word that’s directly adopted from another language, I try to follow that language’s conventions to the extent possible. For example, Japanese does not have plural nouns; as such, direct borrowings like “samurai” do not have separate pluralized forms. I also use many diacritical marks that are left out in standard English writing but are part of the word in the original or source language.

And as a final note, I just use language in odd ways sometimes. There are contractions that routinely show up in speech, but aren’t usually present in writing. I use them because I want to make the dialogue feel more real, and I also use them in the narration, to help maintain the tone and perspective of the story. Similarly, there is profanity because some people use profanity, and Kyoko is one of them. There might be regionalisms, either intentionally or because I use them habitually. Spelling is not consistently either American or Commonwealth in its patterns, in part because that’s my habit, in part because Kyoko did not grow up in the U.S. I might use archaic or obscure words, just because that’s how I write. If something like this is unclear, feel free to ask for clarification.

It’s possible. Certainly there are books and other kinds of media that are influential on me as a person and as an author, and these influences show through in places. I’m also prone to work in allusions or references to them. This is particularly likely to be the case if the story element in question is a minor one, a trivial character or throwaway line.

With respect to more important elements of the story or setting, though, it’s more likely to be a matter of convergent evolution. The premise of this setting is that it is mostly like contemporary Earth, with the exception that the supernatural is in some way a real part of the world. That’s not exactly an unusual concept. I draw very extensively on the history, culture, and folklore of various real-world cultures as part of this, and that’s also not an unusual approach.

I prefer to use primary sources for this whenever possible. Because of the ways historical records work and the history of the culture, in many cases this isn’t possible; the documents were lost, or the stories were always an oral tradition rather than a written one. In these cases, I usually have to use a mixture of secondary sources and extension of existing setting elements.

But because the primary sources I’m drawing on are limited in volume, they will often be (directly or indirectly) what other people are using as well. If you want to have Norse mythology and folklore be grounded in the real world, you will inevitably have to make use of the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and some of the sagas from the period. Any discussion of Japanese mythology would be very incomplete if it didn’t incorporate material from the Kojiki. Because these sources are going to be shared by a lot of the authors who are working in this genre, there will be a lot of similar setting elements. But for significant parts of the story, I’m usually going to be going to the source material more than to modern interpretations for my inspiration. I try to include relevant notes about the sources I’m using in the comments section under each chapter.

Relatedly, if you’re ever curious what source I’m drawing on for a specific element, feel free to ask. I try to keep pretty good notes for that and can most likely provide at least a general answer.

There are a lot of factors that go into this. I’ll leave foreign language words aside here, since that’s been addressed elsewhere, and focus on different variations of English in this discussion.

To start, there are certain things that are consistent within my writing. I will, for example, write it as grey rather than gray without exception. This is because I prefer the former on a personal or aesthetic level, so when I decided many years ago that I should pick one to use exclusively and thus avoid confusing myself, I went with grey. My understanding is this split is largely one of British/Commonwealth English and American English. Which, really, leads well into an important part of this.

I did not have a normal education. In pretty much any way, but the relevant detail is that I spent more time reading than talking to people, and my reading ranged widely. I was seeing both Commonwealth and American spelling routinely, and with no real distinction. There are also a lot of obscure words that happen to show up more often in specific contexts—a single author’s work, a specific academic field, archaic use, there are a lot of possibilities. Because of that broad range of reading, I use these words and phrases routinely.

I am also fascinated with language, endlessly so, and I think this shows through. I collect odd or very specific words, words that are hard to translate, interesting idioms and unusual expletives, creative profanity, unusual names. These show up often in my writing, and in my speech, because that’s just…how I communicate. Similarly, I sometimes use constructions of language in ways that are unusual, or not in keeping with what is considered proper form in grammar classes. This is typically for the sake of style and clarity.

Finally, although related to all of the above points, the narration is from Kyoko’s perspective. Exclusively so, and in her voice. As a result, it’s written in ways that relate to that. Why does the narration call it petrol rather than gasoline? Because while she lives in the U.S., she didn’t grow up there, and the version of English she learned was not entirely American. Some words she uses differently than contemporary American use as a result, places where years in the U.S. have not fully removed that older habit or pattern. In this case, it also shows through that she’s a scientist by education. “Gas” means something different in a chemistry context, and she feels that shortening gasoline to gas produces needless confusion between the two. And petrol is quicker and more convenient to say than fully pronouncing gasoline every time. So, that’s what she sticks with.

So, as the tl;dr here: My own language use is unusual, I am more interested in clarity and accurate representation than formalized rules, and Kyoko has unusual language patterns as well that show through in the narration.