Oh, hey guys. Forgotten me? I guess I sort of slipped away there. The move put more stress on me than I thought and was expecting... It was probably the closest I've come to breaking down from stress in a long time. We've been here for a few weeks now, but it both seems like we just got here and that we've been here forever. And now, just when it seems like I may be settling in, I go back to school in a week. Oh well, at least I know what to expect there. Since I have the same dorm as I did last year, I even know what that's going to be like. And as it's a single room I don't need to worry about a roommate.
Having failed to get chapter 4 of TRINITY out before we moved, you may have seen me post it a few days ago. Lately I've been trying to return to writing again, looking back at my old fics to see why I started writing in the first place. I may not have my oldest fics due to inexperience with moving data between computers back then, but I have enough. The writing is terrible from those old fics, the stories generic and bland, the characters cliched and boring, however beneath all that I think I see what made me a writer in the first place: that overflowing passion and desire to tell a story, one that I thought was pretty good back then. I may not have the same view now, but I still have that same passion. So why am I not writing as much? I can't say that it's a lack of time, not now over the summer when I have so little to do. Perhaps accepting that I will never be the most popular of writers has had a negative effect on me, making me view writing as having lesser priority. I want to tell a story yes, but if I have so few people reading it, what's the rush to get chapters done?
But then, back then when I wrote these terrible stories I had no readers at all. It was just me, the story in my head, and my passion. I never even planned to put those stories online, in part because the computers I wrote them on didn't have internet access and it wasn't until later when I learned how to transfer files offline. Why am I letting my perceived lack of audience affect me now, when I never did before? Back then I was so innocent, pure even. Now that I've seen I'm not alone and will never be able to match the greats, in popularity at least, it's as if it's corrupting me. I have to wonder if perhaps I would write more again if I gave up on the internet, walking away from it and developing the offline life I've never had. But doing so would be silly. Walking away from something because it's causing problems is the weak way out.
So, I want to say this out loud. In public, where everyone can see. From this day forward I vow that for as long as possible, barring any pressing matters, I will write every single day. Be it in TFC, TRINITY, the second part of Haunting at the Old Chateau, or even that personal writing I've always alluded to and which is codenamed VPT, I am taking it upon myself to write something in any of my stories every day from now on. Be it a single paragraph or five pages, I am not going to whittle away my life any longer, wasting time that could be spent on my true passion.
Also, I have to say that reading through the entire first part of the oldest fic of mine that I actually managed to save has given me a new view on the numerous "crapfics" that pop up all over. Perhaps they are crap, but do they really deserve the hate I used to have toward them? I was no better at one point, yet despite that I managed to greatly improve to the point where a reader may not even recognize my old fics as having been written by me. When I go and hate these kids for posting their first fanfics everywhere for us to see, I'm virtually hating my old self from 2002 and before, when I first started writing.
As for the topics at hand, 99.9% of my posts are in the Pokemon fanfiction section. This will apparently be my 56th post in this thread and 129th period, so 43.4% of my posts are in this thread. That leaves me second only to Sparkling Dragon among those who have posted so far, although I have the lowest post count of all of you.
Bay said:
How you guys figured out how many posts you made here in the lounge? O.o *I is dumb*
I ran an advanced thread search (expand the search thread button at the top and click advanced search beneath the text box) using myself as the member name. The way Dagzar said is a lot easier, though.
When did you start writing Fiction? (Not to be confused with when you got serious with writing or when you had to do essays for your English class)
As I pretty much said above, it was at least 2002 or earlier. Either 2002 or 2003 is when I started my earlier saved fanfic, Pokemorphs Evolution v1. Even before that, though, I had a few random, scattered writings that were not saved. While I can't be sure, these could potentially date back to 2000. That means from when I was 10 to 13.
Have you accidentally taken the plot of your fic the wrong way or another way than you originally expected, but kept it like that, because of either reviews, or your liking to it?
In a way, the entire beginning of TRINITY is like this. My original plan was to go from the prologue directly to the second half of chapter 3, continuing on without skipping back to explain what happened to cause the prologue. That likely would have been explained in flashbacks later in the fic. However, since the readers were expecting for it to go back and explain what had happened, I felt compelled to do so to please them. In a way, I feel that this killed the first few chapters as I was not expecting to write that backstory just yet and didn't even have it planned.
When I first started writing TFC it also had a different plot, however partway through writing chapter 3 I began to suddenly change it and make it less of the standard journeyfic it was going to be. This led me to pretty much discard the entire second half of chapter 3, although even in the original version it wasn't that noticeable. Still, this sudden change of plot left a plethora of inaccuracies among the first chapters that haunted me until I began to rewrite them.
What do your fic titles mean? (Spoiler tags may be used for the cautious. Vague hints work too.)
TFC, or The Flamestar Chronicles, is pretty self-explanatory. It's a story about a boy named Shrike Flamestar, chronicling his journey to fight evil and all that!
TRINITY is also somewhat easy, especially since the TRINITY plot-device is mentioned in the prologue. Still, it's not really explained in detail until chapter 2, when it's revealed that:
TRINITY: Waves I chose because of the water symbolism throughout it. I've always given elements to my characters, with Shrike being fire of course, Rayne dark, Aira flying, TFC Zack normal, Tashima electric, and finally TRINITY Zack water. That elemental affinity even extends to his name, Zachary Atwater (following in the tradition of Shrike Flamestar and to a somewhat lesser extent Aira Kaza). Then there's the fact that his companion, Jet, is a Floatzel (although the companion Pokemon aren't always the human's affinity, such as with Tashima, Aira, and TFC Zack). Near the end of the story, space itself is also represented as if it's water, which I'm going to emphasize more in the inevitable rewrite.
Do I even need to explain Haunting at the Old Chateau...? It's a haunting. At the Old Chateau. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
