The time has come

…That didn’t sound quite so ominous when I first thought of it.

I really enjoy looking back at my fics. They’re a little dusty now, older work – fics that I wrote with less experience, in all genres. That doesn’t make them bad, oh no. I like them for their quaintness, their charm. It’s like peering back at a seventeen and eighteen year old me and saying hello.

Outside my bedroom window, the siding’s come off the house from a hurricane and blizzard. The siding hasn’t been updated in closing in on thirty years. It’s old, it’s tired, it’s worn. It needs to be changed and updated. Replaced, so that the house not only looks nicer, it’s decorated and protected better.

Perhaps my fics don’t need to be protected better – and they certainly don’t need replacing – but they are due, I think, for an update. A rewrite. At the very least, Missing needs a rewrite. I need to sit down and plan out where I want to go, what clues I’ll leave in chapters to point to the conclusion. When I wrote it, I knew point A and point B , but none of the points inbetween. And as I’ve learned in my schooling, there are an infinite number of points inbetween, waiting to be explored. It’s come time to take a peek in at them, while I’m off and looking for workterms. No studying means free time, and free time means writing!

Often times, I know I come off as extremely critical and dismissive of my own work. I know I am – I like seeing it as perfect as it can be, and I struggle with knowing it’ll never be exactly perfect. However, I am better than I used to be. Engineering has taught me that there is value in inperfection, each mistake leads us closer to the solution. And so too does editing and being critical of my work.

I have calmed down, though.

How the time flies

And not necessarily when you’re having fun, hm?
It’s been – wow, over a year since I’ve posted anything on here. And MBTB has been similarly quiet for the same stretch of time. I miss it, in a way. You guys were my first real group of online friends, something I still cherish. Even though I feel like a totally different person than I was then, you can’t forget something so precious.

At least, not at my age. Give it seventy years or so, I might have forgotten things in my old age.

I might as well give an update on my life, since I haven’t spoken to you guys in a while, right? Okay! In chronological(…ish) order, here we are.

• My family went to Disney World August 2011, a week after that last post, actually. It was my first time in the States, lovely country. Apart from the gun control. And the blatant sexism and racism in Hollywood. And the lack of gun control. But hey, Obama! Canada was proud of that.
• I turned nineteen, which means legally able to drink here. Not that I did much.
• I tried Doctor Who, and became hooked.
• I registered at my university as a Bachelor of Science, enabling me to do engineering courses.
• I joined tumblr, which is – sort of like WordPress, but infinitely more casual. It’s quite nice, actually, fandoms are huge, the meta flows freely, and social justices are discussed heavily. I post a lot on my blog.
• People are also… lazy there, and even I’ve stopped typing properly in casual reblogged (You can reblog posts from others, allowing easy conversation!) posts.
• i tend to type more like this which i swore i’d never do
  and yet
  i do
• Blargh, that feels unnatural outside tumblr, so back to grammar!~
• I started roleplaying on tumblr, and met many of my friends there – including Lyssie, my best friend. Unfortunaly she lives 4500 kilometers away in St. Louis, but she is so precious to me.
• I roleplay there as the tenth Doctor, independantly. Though I’m on hiatus for school right now, I’ve somehow managed to become… popular? For my Doctor. Over seven hundred people follow him, something I can’t believe. Here is a link to him!
• I applied for, and was accepted into, my unversity’s Engineering Major in the Process discipline. I love it.
• I turned twenty! That still feels weird to say, even almost two months later. To think that I’ll be thirty in a decade is sort of… wow.
• One of my friends got me to try the webcomic Homestuck, which, despite its terrible reputation… is actually amazing? No, really.
• My Thermodynamics course is kicking my ass.

I haven’t made much (Read: any) progress in my fics for The Lost Boys in a long time, now. I wish I could work on them more, but with MBTB being so silent, I feel like there’s just no audience for it. Nor do I even have the time to write them, though I’d love to again, one day. I write the occasional fic for Doctor Who, and I’m thinking about one or two for Homestuck, but nothing major. Something I do try to do a bit of work on is a dystopian scifi novel I’m calling Model 4419 – even though it won’t be written in its entirety for another… four years, or so, I’m still very pleased with it. There are a lot of ideas and social criticisms about society that I’m putting into it.

One thing I have done, since roleplaying on tumblr, is discover an unknown latent talent (Did anyone else ever notice how they are an anagram of one another, or is that just me?) for writing angst. And smut. Which I always swore I’d never write, but! There we are, hm?

I’m not entirely sure why I’m still talking, at this point. I’ve gone all dreamy-eyed for the past, reminisced about who I’ve become, and admitted that I still adore all of you. You really are my darlings – the people I talk to now are my bbs, but you! All of you are my darlings, and always will be.

And if any of you have skype, or want to talk again, I’d love it.

:3

While I update…

I’m going to pull down the pages for Origins. Not because I’m giving up on the story, not a chance. I’m still stuck in the same place for months, buuuut I’ll get to that later. No, I’m going to pull it down because the pages, particularly the Character page, is just badly written, awful, and makes me cringe. It’s not even that the characters are bad, because I don’t feel like Emily and Isabelle are bad characters.

The way I wrote and described them (Especially Isabelle) is just awful.

And I know part of the problem. They were both created when I was a writing noob, trying so hard to analyze personality traits and create well-thought out, developed characters. I looked at the scenes of the movies, thinking things such as “OMG Marko just put his hand on his chaps he must have a secret injury possibly healed there let’s put that in.”

Two notes: One, I never actually thought THAT particular sentence, and two, yes, really, that’s the sort of stuff I came up with. I can remember watching the scene between Max, Lucy and the Boys in the video store, studying Dwayne like I was some sort of behavioural specialist when I was writing Signs of Change. One of the actual things I thought, and I cringe to admit this: “He keeps looking all over the place like it’s something he’s never seen before he’s studying it really closely WHAT IF HE WAS TEMPORARILY BLINDED BEFORE HE GOT TURNED” as well as “He’s so quiet I wonder why WHAT IF HE COMMUNICATES WITH HIS PACK MENTALLY BECAUSE HE GOT INJURED BEFORE HE TURNED AND COULDN’T SPEAK SO THAT WAS HOW HE COMMUNICATED AND HE JUST GOT USED TO IT.”

Please forgive the capsrape and complete mary-stuish thoughts. I lose all former writer cred, I know.

That’s why I need to take down those pages, and why I need to completely overhaul Unknown Blood and Signs of Change. Back then, I thought that analyzing every minute detail would make my writing better. Yes and no: The way I showed above, that’s the wrong way. Peoples’ eyes naturally wander, they never remain fixed. And some people are quiet. Marko and Paul don’t speak either, but that doesn’t mean they were temporarily rendered mute. It means that they recognized that it wasn’t the right moment to speak and they probably had a good laugh over Max’s immediate infatuation for Lucy when they returned to the cave.

Codes

In chapter four of Missing, Alan finds some odd combinations of letter in Linny Marshall’s old calendar. It’s a code, though what for or what it says or even why Linny wrote it in code is a mystery still. What people don’t know is that it is the third code I originally made up for the chapter. That’s right, I went through two other codes until I decided on the one used in the story.

I’m not going to reveal the translations or the key for any of the codes, all three are an assignment of a pair of letters in different orders. None are complicated. Just be glad I didn’t use arrows or dots for the code – In highschool I must have made up ten different codes with arrows and dots and I-don’t-know-what-else-anymore out of boredom…but that’s another story. I picked the third code for a simple reason. Saying it aloud, it was the prettiest and was the only one that could be really said aloud. Heh heh.

Because I can, I’m going to show the same three phrases in the story, in all three codes. BECAUSE I CAN. >:3

CODE ONE:
Phrase one: Orvat gheaq. Yrniat Ubzr.
Phrase two: Qenax oybbq. Guerr Qnlf.
Phrase three: Gurl ner inzcverf.

CODE TWO
Phrase one: Yvrmt gfimw. Ovzrmt slnv.
Phrase two: Wizmp yollw. Gsivv vyag.
Phrase three: Gsvb ziv eznkrivh.

CODE THREE
Phrase one: Xuqls fehluv. Nuydqls rkzu.
Phrase two: Vhylo xnkkv. Fruu vyag.
Phrase three: Frua yhu dyzjqhug.

So there they are, and if any eager beavers decide to try and decode them…muahaha.

Little Sister

Chatper  four of Missing is up!

It’s UP. ;AIGJSAE;LGUHIAGUAHLGJA.

It’s also the first chapter where we meet Eleanor, whom I love. She’s nice enough to her friends, if short fused. She likes to call those who irritate her names…usually referring to ‘ass’ in some way. I love this girl so much and it fills me with joy to FINALLY introduce part of Abel’s family. S’cuse me while I squee in joy to introduce her.

Honestly, I’m not 100% pleased with the chapter, though I was with the third chapter. I was really happy with that one, but considering that chapter 3 wasn’t rated too highly, maybe I’m completely wrong about chapter 4. We’ll wait and see, though. I can always revise it later if I need to; if I do, it will be silently. (Yeah, me, silent. Perish the thought.)

So yay. We meet Eleanor, we find out WHO Alan’s informant is (Figuring it out is pretty easy), we meet Eleanor, and we’re that much closer to getting to the good stuff. I’m so excited to introduce the rest of Abel’s pack next chapter, I love them so so much and they keep me mindlessly entertained. Plus…more Stella! Ty! And an Emerson (!!!!!) makes an appearance in Chapter five.

I’m excited. Now to actually, you know, WRITE it.

Catching up

Ooooooh, it has been way too long since I’ve updated.

I think we’ve all gotten a little lazy, though I am by far the worst. iI haven’t updated Missing since last September, and that just isn’t right. So I apologize for that, and I promise I’m editing and finishing off the next chapter now. I promise. REALLY.

I think I’ll delete All the Damn Vampires and Fanfiction Nation, since I have enough trouble keeping one blog updated. All the posts from those two I’ll move here. Thoughts?

Right. I’ll go back to editing now.

Naming

Be it characters, stories, chapters, places or what-have-you, I am horribly ANAL when it comes to naming things in my works.

I’m a firm believer that the perfect name exists, it’s just a matter of finding out what it is. It can take me weeks, sometimes, to discover the perfect name, yet other times it comes almost right away. It all depends-and there are names and titles I use currently that really piss me off, but I gave up. To put it simply. Like the name of Edgar and Alan’s first stoy-Missing just doesn’t feel one hundred percent right to the story. Yes, it fits, and yes, it reflects the BASIC subject matter of the story, but there’s much more to it than “OH HAI FROGZ FIND MAI SISTER PLZ.” It’s more than looking for a missing person, the Frogs have to deal with betrayal, mixed feelings, confusing boundaries and more. And “Missing” doesn’t reflect all of that. Just the basics.

Some names come quickly and easily. Ty, Abel and Linny’s name-Almost instant. Same for the rest of Abel’s pack. (Speaking of which, I’ll tell you their names now-Jackie, Mickey, Izzy and Eleanor. What? A theme, you say? Buttocks.) Almost as soon as the character was conceived, the name was there. Why this doesn’t happen more, I don’t know, though I wish it would.

Names, I think, are something so personal, so closely linked to a person’s identity that there is only one possible name that they can ever take. And unless that one, single name can be found, the character cannot truly be realized into complete fruition.

A little mind-trippy, perhaps, but true to me.

Getting back into the flow.

Exam. Week. Is. OVEEEEERRRRRRRRRRR!

Will I admit to having some alcohol in celebration… at noon? Just a small glass.

It’s odd, but now that exams are over, I can get back into writing. Um, yeah, it didn’t take long-halfway through my exams I started brainstorming and it’s been lovely. It’s been more so for an original work and for a fic in another fandom, but the ideas for Missing are beginning to come now. So between sleep (Which I’ve been seriously deprived of), and work (…My boss scheduled me for 1PM to 7PM. Christmas Eve. YEAH.), and Christmas fun, I’ll be writing.

I’ve honestly missed writing Missing – Not just because it’s fun to write the Frogs being the Frogs, but also because I wanna get to the other stories in the series. Between plotting this one out, I’ve been developing plans for stories two through seven. Yes, I said SEVEN. We’ve got werewolves, we’ve got aliens, ancient Egyptians, mermen, and pretty much everything in between. Hell, I’ll even dive into a derived version of the Navajo yee naaldlooshii.

I can’t wait.

Turning

Mmmm…the past month has been a very stressful one. Between letting go of best friends that weren’t real friends during university orientation and my first ever midterm week…it’s been crazy. Man – Wednesday I actually broke down, freaked that I had to do so much for school and it wasn’t going to get done.

But the week is over and have a long weekend-Bless, Thanksgiving is so wonderful. Screw calories, I am going to stuff my face on Sunday and love it.

Enough whining. I bought a laptop for school and it’s really inspiring me, which is sad. If I could marry my laptop I probably would. So having a nice computer with lots and lots of memory and hard drive, combined with one of my birthday gifts is really inspiring me. For both Origins AND Missing! Le gasp! What gift was this? Season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s the only season I’ve seen, so no spoiling! I’ve only finished the first seven or eight episodes! Meep!

I’ve been studying the way vampires act on the show, and the way they change when sired is staggering. They’re clearly more evil and malicious and love it. Seeing it done so well, and the First Evil-whooooooa babe. Now THAT is truly inspiring. It’s going to really imporve the way my vampires act and behave, especially in Origins when I have to actually show that shift from average Joe human to bloodthirtsy, soulles and evil vampire.

Turning actually seems to magnify their innermost thoughts and worst traits, twisting them until only the barest shadow of the original person remains. Their mortal morals are gone, replaced by the hunger and love for sadism and killing.

*Shivers* I now understand why Buffy is so damn awesome. And screw team Edward or Jacob…can you imagine if Grandpa and Spike teamed up? A lean, mean, vampire killing team!

By ‘Chance’

Some of you probably know this already, but Victoria and Theresa over at Marked By the Boys went to the Indianapolis Famous Monsters Con and got to speak with the Boys themselves. While they were there, Chance Michael Corbitt told Victoria that he was almost in the Thirst.

Note ‘almost’.

In the end, so the story goes, Warner was cheap and wouldn’t fly Chance to South Africa for filming. And they considered hiring another actor to play Laddie!

Now say it with me: Those scheisskopf bastards.

Jamison Newlander (Also known as Alan) seconded the story. I’m trusting them, because if the Warner thought The Tribe was a good idea, then this is more than believable.

Victoria has started an online petition, so please, sign it. We want Chance. Not another actor, CHANCE.

Click me to sign!

(And on another note there’s now another blog added to the two I already have. Link on the side. And yes, I have a blog-making problem.)