it'll be my last entry for at least a week... I'd been kinda regular here, but got other plans taking time away... which involves not having a regular Internet connection.
No matter how much time has passed or how good/bad the product is, plagiarism SUCKS...
I was alerted to the fact someone from fictionpress took one of my stories and published it as an eBook on Amazon...
I had since been through a few rewrites so it isn't quite the same story anymore... okay, it IS... but the conversations are slightly different and some new details were added...
I figured it'd be something that polarized people because its an earlier draft than what I spent the past 2 years working on/off with... plus it was an attempt to take fanfiction to my own idea... let's say one person saw right through that on fictionpress...
two people said it was either childish, the writing was horrible or they deleted it cuz they gave up after 25 pages...
Geesh :roll:
I mean, people like Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway get away with a lot of exposition and their stuff are classics... why should it be any different for an up & comer? Why is it frowned upon?
Agents want to be HOOKED within a sentence or two... if not that, they want the ends of chapters to make you want to keep reading... like you just HAVE to read more to see what happens... I totally commend Suzanne Collins for doing that in The Hunger Games... I've heard about this thing about ending chapters where the readers are thirsty for me... therefore, you have a page-turner you can't put down
I mean, that was really amazing that she did that... nobody else I've read into recently was like that... the characters did it for me...
and as much as a Twi-hard as I am, I admit that I wasn't hooked on Twilight until Edward showed up... the writing wasn't tantalizing enough, at least not yet... I became equally as fascinated by him as not only Bella, but Stephenie Meyer, obviously...
the first Harry Potter book... my mom had tried to talk me into the series for years... I forgot one detail... that Harry's parents were killed... I will attest, forevermore, that I was hooked on the Harry Potter series since page 12-13... that was when I read that they were killed and I was BALLING my eyes out...
Suzanne Collins I think is the only person that I haven't heard had struggles with publication...
it took J.K. Rowling YEARS... it took Stephenie Meyer maybe a year or two, thanks in part to Writer's Market... I'd take that route if I felt like giving up my credit card number (and explaining it to my folks who are still footing the bill), and as of now, I had anything good enough to publish... I'm in all kinds of directions with all my work...
Kathryn Stockett ("The Help") was the most inspirational in that she got 40 rejections before her book was published... to be honest, I'm not sure if I'd even been rejected 10 times yet... but it feels like an eternity whenever I get something back
I write pretty lengthy before I get to my bloody point... its my style and nobody quite appreciates that... unless we're friends or family...
and I think almost everything I'd written has a prologue attached... like a lengthy prologue that takes up more than a page....
With Jonas, my latest draft of the prologue took me to maybe 3 pages... it might be more than 3,000 words so I don't know if it'd be within range to submit to a short story contest...
anyway... the other two who read my stolen story loved it... but the 50% that didn't like it wasn't enough for me to throw in the towel and quote "Let her have this one"...
:sigh:
If I ever go back and fully re-edit, you know, I don't want to have to deal with copyright suits when its my own work in the first place
And I think I have another copy hanging around somewhere... I'd deleted half of my work on fictonpress to limit the damage, but I'll keep it up there until I'm sure this has died down...
what has me a little nervous is that they'd try this again and I wouldn't have the evidence anymore... at least not online with a date attached to it
I've got maybe an hour- 90 minutes to kill before shutting down my PC...
I haven't written for Cassandra since Thursday... when I was writing a little everyday... nothing seems to be occurring me looking at what I have so far...
I had a slew of dreams last night all sorta connected...
the first part was that we were watched "Spirited Away"... which will likely become one of my favorite movies of all time (meaning it'll be near the top of my fav movies list on my future movie blog)... with my grandma and we got as far as Chihiro's parents turning into pigs (literally, this is Miyazaki after all, all kinds of crap happens)...
A few elements came together regarding Jonas and that movie was the final piece. After watching it, I launched into my prologue for Jonas...
certain characters just say with you and I was believing that... you know... at the end of the movie, Chihiro and Haku go their separate ways... and they seem to have that long-lasting life-long friendship thing going for them... supposing she moves into her new house and a version of him lives nearby and they rekindle their friendship...
in the very back of my mind, that was probably my intention with the story... because he really was a special character, I felt... full of surprises, obviously...
both of them were in the dream... but then another thought came to mind... from the fact we'd been rewatching Card Captors on YouTube... and either I or someone say something about the "River" card... and it has to do with Haku... for reasons I won't quite give away... even though my audience (however small it is, a couple people) have seen the movie...
then it came a part in the dream where things changed over from one train of thought to another... and whatever character I was embodies was sick with a fever... like a burning up type of fever... and deep down, I felt touched by the other person's concern...
after that, it got even stranger, off-the-grid as it were... I arrive at a table and supposedly someone sitting next to Arthur... not quite King Arthur, but the version from "Merlin"... same actor... the guy sitting next to him had a carrot to his throat, like threatening his life... I defend him and Arthur brushes it off... like they were playing around or something...
I don't let it go cuz even though its not a weapon, it looked like a threat to me...
Arthur is very condensing to Merlin, both of which are in their early 20's... so its a different version of the Arthurian tales (its the Syfy series)...
I don't remember the logistics of some of these things, but its the most vivid dream I've had in a while where I actually remember it when I wake up...
lately its been the case that its vivid when I'm sleeping but when I'm awake, it goes :poof: so there's a remenant left behind that I can't take anything from
I don't think I'd ever been so lucky where my dreams influence an entire story... at least nothing I'd put in the path of publication... ok, only Jonas has been on the path..
but I'd written half a dozen stories that I'd like to edit until they're set to be considered... I'd just like him to be first cuz he's the first original story I'd written
hmm... I'd considered the idea of bringing dragons into Cassandra's "realm"... which I'll call it for the moment... I doubt its anything that exists in this world or even this planet... it'll be a fictional place like Camelot (just to give an example) but it has Asian tinges to it... cuz in part, it'll be influenced by the samurai era... Feudal Japan... and part of it comes from those types of fighting movies
not quite like Crouching Tiger, though... just saw that the other day
hmm.... no wonder it was thrown in with The Matrix with the coming of a new era of fight scenes in movies... same choreographer...
and I figured as much that it was dubbed... the lip flaps didn't completely fit with certain characters and the voices changed in some scenes... therefore it wasnt consistent... I think I would have liked it a lot better in its original format... then I could have said it was my first ever foreign film...
Miyazaki doesn't count because I'd never seen his films in their original form. I watched "Spirited Away" in Japanese for 10 minutes but when Haku came in, I didnt like his Japanese voice so I stopped...
sorry guys, I'd just become too accustomed to/fond of Jason Marsden's voiceover work to substitute if for anything else
even part of my college animé club, I never saw any films in Japanese... I've seen animé in Japanese, entire series, but not movies... not that I remember anyway...
Cassandra will be a toss-up between the girl in "Crouching Tiger" and Katniss from The Hunger Games... and some of Rukia from Bleach
she won't be nearly as hypersensitive to "Ren" as Rukia is to Renji... but she's hesitant to accept his help...
me thinks because she had a hard life that turned her cold and she's spent her life focused on becoming stronger than the girl she used to be... the girl that used to call Ren her best friend...
after her appointment to the princess's personal guard, their relationship changed and she became all business
for all I know, the enemy of the piece, she might have found out that he's the one that killed someone close to her and because she wasnt strong enough to protect them, she wanted to change that so she wouldnt lose anyone else
her biggest flaw might be that she's so wound up about the strength and protection that she doesn't relax... Ren might say to her on multiple occasions that she needs to enjoy the time she has with other people or she'll have more to regret with their loss than the loss itself.
or maybe this comment will come at a crucial moment in the story
I've played around with the idea of using magic... maybe the thing that gives him the edge in this confrontation... which there aren't a lot of details about in the prologue, I want it to be limited to a few sentences... or it could just be a preface...
she thought she had him, but he had some sort of magic up his sleeve that either preserved his life or damaged hers to the state its in now
if I go that route, in which she needs magic to defeat him... there's also the possibility of dragons... cuz they go hand in hand with magic...
I wouldn't say magic is a forbidden discipline... like it is in "Merlin"... I don't even remember if Arthur found out whether Merlin is a wizard or not... but supposedly it was banned by his father and because it failed to save his father's life, he might not welcome it...
I think Cassandra spurns magic for a number of reasons... perhaps in her mind, magic is cheating... her skill lies in her physicality, agility and skills with her sword(s)... so she has refused to learn magic for years... but figures it might be necessary to defeat this enemy...
and there might be different kinds of magic (still kinda gunning for the Avatar version where it lies in a number of elements... although I wouldn't mind calling it "the trinity of elements" it sounds so official... fire, wind & water... subject to change... her ambition is so strong that fire probably comes to her the most easily)...
Ren might already be skilled in one of these, but he'd kept it secret from her cuz he knows how she feels about it
I'm not sure if I'll put too much between where I left off and the next scene I "shoot"... inner monologue and stuff... but I doubt there can be inner monologue if she's in long-term sedation (under the influence of Ren's Nightshade... something he procured from his uncle who runs an apothocrary shop)... unless its like a flashback or something that involves her and the princess...
but I see Ren being led into another scene where he either finds her meditating under a waterfall or doing Tai-Chi (of which I know nothing about, but it feels right, lol)
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