Oh hey I'm alive big surprise to some of you maybe not so much to the others but yeah whatever let's just answer some questions and **** already!
What's the longest or shortest your chapters have ever been? What makes them shorter or longer and how do you make it work?
Longest has been around 23 or so pages. Can't remember the exact number and can't be bothered to look for it either. Shortest, at least among my modern selection of fics, is around 7. Average now is about 14 or 15, having shortened from 20 from back near the end of TFCv1.
I've noticed that my chapters tend to be quite a bit longer than most other people's and I can't really say why. One reason may be that it's partially inflated to an extent due to properly spaced out dialogue, or that I put more detail in than some others. Most likely though is that in those longer, 20+ page chapters I just put lots of stuff in, enough that other people would probably have split it into two chapters. We'll see how those same chapters turn out when I get to them this time around with my improved pacing...
What fandoms do you want to/have write/written on besides Pokémon?
By far all that I've done has been Pokemon-related except for this one time years ago when I attempted an Animorphs fic. It failed of course.
I would like to write fics based on other series if I could think up good plots, though. One that I would like would be EVE Online, which I actually have wrote a single unpublished one-shot for (I didn't include it above as it was just something I did one day when I was bored, has no plot, and has never seen the light of day anywhere). Another that I've become interested in lately is Mass Effect, unfortunately I have even less of an idea for that than I do for EVE. The problem there is the world is so large and open. The only part of it the games deal with is Shepard's exploits mostly, with just a tiny window into the everyday workings of things. The books help add to that though, but it's still not enough to really have much to build off of other than raw background concepts.
Perhaps the single strongest other series I want to write for and have attempted in the past is a little series known as Myst and its spin-off, Uru. Namely, I don't want to write a fic around those games so much as I do the entire D'ni lore that surrounds it (and which admittedly is what Uru is built on). Myst will always have a special place in my heart no matter what others may say about it; it's simply affected my life too much so naysayers be damned.
A Uru/Pokemon crossover was one of the three fics I toyed with back in the dawn of 2006, the other two being The Flamestar Chronicles and IMPULSE (which later became TRINITY). As such, it is my only "Golden Age" fic that hasn't either survived past that time or been revived. I've made several attempts at it, however each died due to a lack of focus in the story. My most recent attempts have shed the crossover idea and so are pure Uru fics, though, which has helped some in focusing it but not enough.
Scraped concepts include the original, where the Pokemon world is linked to our own world through a D'ni linking book. The plot never got far past that although I think it was going to go into the hero becoming a trainer only to encounter an evil time of people from his world and all. Pretty much, it would have ended up being too focused on the Pokemon side. Then there was one where the explorers in the D'ni cavern ended up dividing themselves into two sides, those who believed the D'ni remains should be untouched and those who thought they should be used for power. Guess which side was good. Anyway the concept was that a war would start between them complete with, well, weapons.
Once I realized that bringing guns into an Uru fic and having actual gunfights break out amid the D'ni ruins was practically sacrilege, that one died.
Then I tried a new concept with some evil force sweeping over the ages. This one was a bit disjointed. It started with an abandoned computer (with a satellite uplink!) sending a text message out to several people with the coordinates for the cavern. When those people got they they would then begin exploring like normal alongside those people already there, only to eventually run into said evil that I never worked out the specifics of. A girl named Hikari (hahaha yeah I think that just a temporary name that I never changed seeing as the concept died and al) that the main character finds in one of the ages would end up being the key to defeating the evil and all! Yeah, how generic! And disjointed. It died an honorable but ultimately humiliating death.
Since then my thoughts have shifted more to simply making, well, a no-plot fic. It would simply be about the main character going about exploring the cavern and ages, perhaps with mini-stories that would be encountered and solved within a single chapter. Perhaps the best equivalent to what I'm thinking of would be the manga/anime Mushishi, but with a bit more cohesion between parts and a set timeline. One nice feature about this is that I wouldn't feel pressured to get a chapter out.
Hmm, as I've been writing this some ideas have come to my mind. The whole comparison with Mushishi, I hadn't actually thought of that before. Now that I think about it though, it may be just the kind of structure I've always been looking for in how to make this work. Well, I'll get back to thinking about it more and see what comes of it.
Oh, and if this does come to fruition don't worry, I'll explain pretty thoroughly all the concept of D'ni in it, seeing as it would star a guy new to all this stuff himself. So, no previous knowledge of Myst/Uru/D'ni required!
Oh hey a long post who would've thought.
