I hope to get through this post and finish it before I completely blow this off...
during part one, I took the reader through the first number of original stories I wrote... most of which fit the bill of this blog... a couple did not...
although if I really get down to it and make the idea as good as I saw it in my head... heck, I don't think I had any pure intentions about that. I wanted to rewrite my life with that story and when it proved to be too close to the real thing, it got to be too much... but taking all that into account, if I did this story right... it could bridge romance/science fiction... but the phenomenon of multiple-personality disorder isn't entirely science fiction... its just that a few soaps including "One life to live" used characters who had two personalities in one body... later on, Jess & Tess gained another personality called Bess (which I still believe to be one of the stupidest names I'd ever heard in my life... who names their kid 'Bess' anyway? and don't give me that whole 'it's short for Elizabeth' BS... how in the name of god is that possible?)
Soaps tend to take a lot of things to extremes and I did that with Jamie... to the point I really do regret making things so horrible, building up all that drama. I actually read a book review in the paper about a kid after he attempts to commit suicide, how his life changed and all that... it'd be interesting to read that just to see how they approached that oh-so-sensitive subject
It's called "Trying not to breathe" by Jennifer R. Hubbard
It's a story I certainly don't want to fade to obscurity where I can't find a good way to write it without it being too depressing and without it making me sound suicidal...
the closest I came to that, ever... was me thinking during the darkest and loneliest of times... between the time I was 15 to now... the past 10 years... I thought that "I really wish I wasn't here anymore, I can't take much more"... maybe somewhere between 4-6 times... but never so much where I elaborately planned anything out... just the mere desire to not be facing what I was facing at the time. But when I was in high school, the two times I was really in a dark places... 9th and 11th grade, it was my grades... I was so afraid to disappoint anyone that... well, at the time, the alternative was an easier idea... but it never came to that
I'd go into more detail about it, but to save myself trouble, I'll end the conversation there and pick up where I left off
I started writing my short story "The Ghost of Leo" August of 2005 and probably only got to the first 10 pages before I had to go away to college...
between this and that and other things, I guess the fact I kept missing out on watching Danny Phantom really took its toll on my pool of inspiration... I started writing the story cuz I loved that show... was kinda crazy about him too... trust me, not the first of my cartoon crushes :-P
for a number of months, my personal life got in the way... or rather, you know how they say "life happened"... it was kinda like that... trying to find my way around campus, getting around, making friends... I only had a couple... one lived in the bottom floor of our dormitory, he was a big nerd like me and we went to a couple anime club meetings together... but after the first couple, he either found interest in other places or just stopped coming... I guess in part cuz they didn't do the kind of anime he wanted to watch...
and of course my other good friend was my roommate... lol... omg, I'm thinking about the way I felt about her, it's almost something out of "Mean Girls" when Regina was explaining to Cady the time she and Janis Ian were best friends.
a little while later, "I started seeing my first boyfriend... who was totally gorgeous... and Janis was weirdly jealous of him... I'd be out with him and she'd be like 'why didn't you call me back' and I said 'why are you so obsessed with me'..." then she said that she couldn't invite her to her pool party because she thought she was a lesbian... after being outcasted by that rumor, Janis came back the following year with that goth look going for her
there were times where I literally felt obsessed... I would make excuses to spend time with her just because it was a helluva lot easier since we roomed together than for me to go out and find my own friends... then a couple of her friends kinda became my friends, which was kinda nice. Both happened to be gay men who were real theater types... espeically one of them... oh now I remember, and through him, I met another group of people... three other people... Nikki was one of their girlfriends and omg, she was so cool... had this 'take no prisoners' attitude about her
but yeah, with my roommate, I just loved spending time with her... then it got to the point sometimes where I felt I wanted her all to myself... but its not like it was a new phenomenon... I feel oddly possessive of my girl friends. All of them seem to be extremely popular and I'd fall between the cracks because I wasn't the most outgoing in the bunch... I lost one or two of my girl friends because they had so many other friends... what was I to them? the sort of thing
also it got to the point where I'd always be in the room and girls would stop by looking for her and I'd say that she wasn't around... she was busy between class and ballet and stuff like that... but seriously, almost never would anyone come to the room to see me... I put more of the blame on them than her... I shouldn't have been too surprised how popular she was because she just had this loving, gregarious personality
I could go on that forever... she's one of a couple people I'd love to write about in length right out of my real life... in fact I started to... it was meant to be a sequel to that multiple personality storyline, where I find out that the guy I spent the whole story wanting to be with was gay... a total buzz-kill too... I guess at the time, he was still figuring things out (well, in the story, not in real life, we never became more than casual acquaintances)...
I've so gone off the handle with this... I took it the point where I wrote about this encounter I had with this guy who asked me out through Facebook and he wanted to jump right into making out and all that when we hadn't spent any physical time together before... it left me so sick and not liking anything in romance for a couple months... I guess that helped open the door to fanfiction too cuz I couldn't do much of anything else... after that, I started to wonder if whether I have grown to distrust men because of that one incident...
the story ended where I come out to her and say that I might have feelings for her beyond friendship... didn't find any way to reinvigorate that story after that... what else could I say?
Anyway, take all that aside and so sorry it took me this long to get here:
White Tiger Demon, Princess Chihiro
genre: YA, romantasy
fantast"ical" qualities: another world, beasts with magical powers and anthropomorophic attributes
this started out, originally, as an InuYasha fanfiction... I started writing it in March of 2006... right after I discovered YouTube and was really getting into the show (I was it a few times on Adult Swim but at the time I couldn't physically stay up super late... my night owl habits didn't start until a couple months later, lol... Facebook and a Prince messageboard took it to extremes)...
and after I fell head over heels for my character, I wanted to make changes so I could one day see her story published... it is still in midst of heavy duty edits :-P I started by starting the prologue in greater detail....
I'm someone who loves prologues, apparently :-P
here's kinda how the story goes...
there's this big issue in InuYasha that helps booster the plot every now and then: the fact that he's half-demon who's father was this great powerful demon, he had a human mother and his older brother Sesshomaru (who is the handsome beast I've been using as my blogging profile picture for years) is pure demon and wants to become as powerful as his father...
I took that and ran with it... would it be like if Inuyasha came across another half-demon and developed a friendship with them? there were a couple of other half-demons in the series, but they were only there for a storyline and more or less disappeared for the rest of the series...
Chihiro ( three guesses where I got the name from, lol) had a human father, born into a clan of tigers and her mother was the leader... war breaks out and her family is destroyed... she gets away, not wanting to live anymore because she has nothing now, she comes across Lucas (my Inuyasha-esque character) who was near fatally injured... apparently she has this power of healing because she knows how to heal his wounds. Because of that, she gets the courage to keep going in life and he's able to live to fight another day.
they meet again several years later. She's almost ready to take over for her new clan and he helps teach her how to fight. throughout the story, she starts to fall in love with him and (SPOILER ALERT) it gets to the point where she would give her life for him... and makes that noble sarcifice... just so encumbered by love that nothing else seems to matter
I usually go out of my way (well, not really, its a lot easier than that) to not kill off my characters... but I didn't see it go any other way... it was inevitable, based on who she is, how selfless she is, that she would give her life to save his in a heartbeat...
let's see if I have this right... when I was in high school, I was uber prolific with my writing where I'd have multiple stories going at once... I started slowly, but I think I finished them a lot quicker than I do now (for a number of reasons... strangely I wrote in greater length back then than I do now)...
Jamie's story- started in Oct 2002 and finished... umm.... I dunno, 2006 could be when I finished this rehash rather than the first draft... I'm sure it was in a shorter amount of time just before I got the next idea
Jonas's story- March 2003 through... I'm sure the first draft I finished in maybe June or July
Orion's story- October 2003 through June 2005 (sounds about right)
a bunch of stories in between, I think I stared writing sequels and all this other stuff... most of them are gone because I didn't like how they turned out and/or I couldn't do much else with them...
I think my sequel to Jonas's story and Orion were going on around the same time... or I was in edits for Orion while starting the sequel
I've been meaning to write a sequel to Orion that includes my knowledge on sea life, my idea of Atlantis and more good versus evil... my favorite clichéd conflict for sure
but in most cases I'd be writing one story at a time, but I'd usually start another halfway through when I got bored or just had writer's block... or just an emergency brainstorm session I had to take care of
8-)
usually, though, and its more the case in college than anywhere else... I average a story a year... either takes me that long to finish or otherwise I spend an entire semester working on it.
my 2nd semester (spring 2006) belonged to my white tiger... between the fanfiction and the conversion to otherwise... that took me beyond that semester... and I'd been tweaking it and going very experimental with another type of storyline specifically revolving around her. I can't really explain it any better than saying it's very pro-life heavy, even though under most circumstances, I lean more towards pro-choice... it depends on the person and the situation... rape/incest/danger of life, absolutely... but the exact opposite... in the words of one of my friends "it's ridiculous when some girls talk about going in for their 10th abortion"... that is utterly ridiculous and when I start to think that the pro-life people are right in pushing their beliefs
this has me primed to go on another rant on those branch of things... I do that elsewhere and I'd already been sidetracking enough as it is
I usually start writing heavily about my latest interest... that interest became Prince as of February 2007... so this year, it'll be 5 years...
I not only started visiting messageboards to discuss his music and build my collection, but I started my first blog to discuss his music... and before I even saw Purple Rain in its entirity, I started writing based on whatever perceptions I had of Prince at that time... being an up & coming musician who loved his music to the point it was all he lived for... and in case you're wondering, there's nothing relating to suicide in this story, thankfully...
It more or less is a story about an artist and who becomes his greatest admirer/supporter/muse...
this might be actually be the first thing I wrote in the style of The Great Gatsby and Sherlock Holmes... you see how the main protagonist and the admirer get along from both sides of the equation in my case, but the other party is heralded as being an eccentric genius, paid all these compliments and written as to hoist the protagonist to almost god-like status... well, that's the case in Sherlock Holmes more than Gatsby, lol...
I had only read Sherlock Holmes recently so that wasn't at all my intention 4 years ago
the only downside to "Joshua Isaiah Prince" was that the ending was kinda... anti-climatic... just ended... I wrote an epilogue and everything, so it isn't quite like the end of The Sopranos... but anyone else aside from me might not buy into it... that I just ran out of ideas and let it go :shrug:
maybe an epilogue wasn't even necessary, there was no prologue
I went down that rabbit hole and listened to Prince almost exclusively for a little more than a year.
focused my writing mostly on him and my blog... a lot of which was pretty insightful and yet reaching at points... I was trying to explain his eccentricity in layman's terms... though I'm not sure if anyone got more out of my blog than I did... I find that I understand things a lot easier after writing them down...
I wrote that story in a span of 2-3 months, starting it in Feb/March and ending it May... roughly...
perhaps much all of 2007 was dominated by this phenomenon... much the way 2011 was dominated about my favorite actor
my last novel-length, romantasy story, I wrote between January and December of 2008
"Hope in Alaska"
genre: YA, romance with a tough of fantasy
I don't know how long "White Tiger" is because of all the rewrites I'd put it through, but aside from that, I think this story is my longest... okay, not really... "Joshua Isaiah Prince" caps off at 199 pages with the epilogue
I've had an affinity for wolves for more years than I can count. What inspired me to finally write something about that... well, that's also not entirely true, I started writing a story about wolves, but it ended up getting deleted off my computer cuz I didn't know where to take it, continue it... etc, etc. the story wasn't entirely about that either.
when watching "Ratatouille" on DVD, there was a trailer that looked like it was going to be another sled dog movie... instead it was "Snow Buddies" about golden retreiver puppies pulling a sled... I called for blasphemy... haven't gotten over it since...
I think at the time I had just finished reading "Twilight" and just fell in love with the series... so the beginning kinda takes on the same tone, Bella going to Forks, which she loathes but does so to spend time with her dad and give her mom more alone time with her new husband...
I think since the Parent Trap remake, I've loved the name Hallie. so I used that for my heroine... I find its harder to write a female lead because they're a little too much like me or take on too many of my negative attributes...
she's kinda like my own incarnation of Holden Caulfield, but without the foul language or fragmented grammar... but definitely a cynic...
the story kinda begins in tragedy... she and her dad were in a car accident, she survived and he didn't. She now has to move up to Alaska to live with her free-spirited mom who was such a free spirit that she abandoned her family... she lives in a different place every 2-3 years, but Alaska will be her home at least until Hallie graduates high school.
In the beginning, Hallie is still grieving for her dad, has harbored a grudge against her mom for years. In the outdoor shopping village of Nanook (it's an Alaskan name, but I doubt that's the name of an actual place), Hallie meets Joey Stevens, the son of one of her mom's closest friends... it's kinda the same thing that happens in Forks... it's such a small area that everyone knows everyone and hears about Hallie coming.
She hangs out with him and his friends. I guess at the time and I make allusion to this, I was still hyper aware of Edward Cullen, just being taken in by him as much as Bella (its hard not to when she's narrating her story)... and some of those things made their way into this character. Joey is of Inuit descent, chestnut brown hair and eyes to match and he's more old-fashioned than his friends. He opposes commercialism and wants to keep the art/sport of dog sledding alive because those were the old ways.
Anyway, the wolf aspect. Well, first of all, Hallie has a boyfriend named Andrew that she leaves behind with all of her friends, but they want to make the long distance relationship work. She hasn't told her mom about him at all so when she finds out about him, Hallie blows a fit and gives her a piece of her mind... actually letting her know how she feels about her, that her leaving left her dad with a broken heart that he'd harbored ever since she left....
fueled by anger, therefore clouding her judgement, she runs off... their house is maybe 20 minutes away from Nanook village, but it's almost in the middle of nowhere. She gets lost in the wilderness, wakes up the next morning and discovers that a wolf had saved her.
She sees this wolf a number of other times and they have this interesting relationship. He's a cautious individual, but neither seem to be afraid of one another. More or less, I got this idea that the spirit of her dad is living on in the wolf, who is looking out for her under mysterious pretenses.
After that, she and Joey start to get close and she more or less forgets about Andrew up until the most crucial point of the story. A lot of the plot builds up to the fictional Alpine Ridge dog sled race, both of them enter because they want to use the prize money to save an outdoorsman shop from being bought out and replaced by a snowboarding boutique (an idea being supported by Joey's cousin Nathaniel, who's the exact opposite of him in almost every way and is at least 10-15 years older than him)
I started writing the first chapter in a computer lab one day, but only had a short amount of time before my next class. I started carrying a notepad with me so when inspiration struck, I would be writing in between classes and during class break... eventually, the institution stuck... I just couldn't get in a rhythm on the computer like I had been able to for years.
I actually had this notepad with me at the SuperBowl party they had for the Giants/Patriots game... I wrote maybe some of the 5th chapter at the time, just before that fight breaks out and Hallie runs off... even more funny, I had this with me everywhere so my friends saw me writing it. One of them was talking about reading it when it got published so he could say he knew me when, lol
if only... this story is still being looked through. I started doing track changes a couple years ago to fix some of the odd language I put in my narration, stuff that more or less didn't make sense... haven't gone through a lot of it because of everything else that started going on
but with "The Grey" being out in theaters and me being totally opposed to, if not offended by, wolves being used as villians... I might start working through this again, if not reading it
No comments:
Post a Comment