Sunday, March 31, 2013

An Easter Miracle! (But not really)

Image by Celesse
Well, don't I totally rock at this weekly update thing, huh?




Do I get forgiveness if I say I missed last week's update because I've been writing almost non-stop for the past two weeks?


Probably not much consolation when you guys realize that you can't read anything I've been working on... not for a while at least.


But, let's backtrack and see what I'm talking about.

First off, I've gotten off the doll-making kick; at least, for a little while.

I had the 20th, 21st, and the 22nd off.... and I spent them WRITING!

Yeah, that's right...

writing!

I was able to hand write the opening of the next What Is Truly Meant To Be chapter on the front and back of a legal-pad page. Not too much once it's condensed down in typed form, but it's something, right?

But that little bit was done during breaks at work. The rest of the time I've been getting mad inspired by the X-Men RPG. We've had a couple of days two weeks ago where we actually had nice little role-play groups going. Most of them consisted of me mainly running my character Willow. She's a flirt and a prankster who gets her kicks out of getting a rise out of her fellow classmates - one in particular being the stick-in-the-mud William. She's just becoming so much more fun to run as a character and she's quickly surpassing Lia as my main character.

A LOOOOT happened that week in Willow's world and it just developed and expanded her character. I love it! I'm getting super connected to this character - a lot more than poor Lia - and I'm starting to finally hear Willow's voice in my head.

She's also a major case of "The Character Tells The Author How Stuff Is Gonna Go Down."

In other words.... this:
"So, You're a Cartoonist? - Following the Leader" by Tom Preston
It has inspired me to translate Willow's story in to prose so that all of you fine readers could also partake in her tale. I also still want to eventually try turning the entire forum game in to a series of webcomics, but I'll need an artist for that.

Anyway, on Thrusday, March 21, a cataclysmic event happened on the forum that turned it in to a massive bundle of heart-wrenching, edge of your seat, "For some reason I completely care about these characters" emotions. If you're keen to Tumblr's own little sub-genre language, the emotions would be simply summed up as "The Feels!"

I'll try not to be too specific with details so that when I DO translate everything over in to prose I wouldn't have let spoilers slip too much, but a player didn't want to run his character anymore and decided to start up a second one instead. However, he didn't want to bring in the new one until he got rid of the old one. This was the catalyst.

He killed off his character, and now mine are not only trying to come to terms with the loss of a friend, but a lot of other unresolved emotions that are building up to a head. The death of the character resulted in Willow completely breaking down. To the point in which I was weeping like a baby all of that Thursday night. Like.... legitimately, "Hand me a damn box of tissues, I can't see over here" crying. To this day, over a week later, I can't read any of that stuff without choking up. She had a very touching memorial that even got the killed-off-character's player crying, welled up Hubby's eyes with tears, and got Devon's player to choke up a little.

Mad skills!

One of the many reasons I want you guys to be able to read this stuff! I want to know if this stuff is just emotional because we're running these characters and feel connected to them, or if this stuff truly is that emotional.

Since I have no clue how many of you are X-Men fans, and because we created our own universe canon for this role play, I wanted to write up the main events of the world these characters live in. This way, everyone sort of gets what's going on. So last week I started writing down the key plot points of the X-Men: Evolution TV series, since this is the basis of our world.

I didn't get very far before the forum continued to blow up. So much emotion going on, so many characters reacting to the character's death, and reacting to the repercussions of the event.... it's taken us about a week of nearly non-stop role playing to finally finish off everything that happened that day!




It's been mad crazy! That's why I missed last week's post. Between bringing Hubby home from work and going in to work myself I spent the rest of the time working on the role play instead of my blog post. I had every intention of going back and writing the post after work was done, or on Monday, or even Tuesday. Yet, the forum always seemed to take over every waking moment.

And there were a LOT of waking moments. Even with me having to get up at about five or six in the morning nearly every day during The Week Of Feels Hubby and I still stayed up until midnight, 1am, and even 2am.

I am certainly not a college student any longer. I cannot survive on minimal sleep.... and my body sure as hell reminded me of that this past Tuesday. After I was done with work I got hit hard with a nasty head cold. I've gone through two tissue boxes easily. I frequently sit with my nose clogged with tissue and wonder if people would buy a product that is essentially tampons for your nose. I mean, doctors already use tampons to help with nose bleeds after a head trauma or nasal surgery...

I'm going off topic.

Anyway, Wednesday was miserable. My head was swimming, my eyes wouldn't focus, I was constantly either sneezing or blowing my nose, my throat was scratchy, and I couldn't seem to medicate the symptoms away no matter what. Dayquil? Doesn't help with runny nose. Herbal Tea Cold Remedy? It usually works, but this time, no dice. AlkaSeltzer? Didn't touch the cold at all. Dieting Tea with a hint of caffeine to keep you energized enough to exercise? Well, this one was mainly for the steam and to attempt to combat the drowsiness the meds were giving me. Still.... down went another tissue box.

I'm still getting over the nasty cold. I hate being sick like this now that my netbook died on me. If I am able to lay in bed, snuggled up in my covers, being on "bed rest" while sick is the best thing for my writing. I just go off like a beast. When I feel craptastic, but I'm forced to sit in a computer chair? I start to slowly slouch, my neck, shoulders, and back begin to ache, my eyes strain to see the monitor two feet away, and I'm just a grouch. Blah.

Hubby helped a little by offering up his laptop while he used the desktop. But that was mainly so I could continue role-playing in an insane attempt to finally close out the day so the rest of the players didn't have to sit and twiddle their thumbs for much longer. The player who killed off his character had to wait about a week before he could bring in the new one, since we wanted his new one to literally start where the last one stopped. It was a cool scene, but his grand entrance couldn't be on the same day as the other's demise.

I sure hope all of this massive role-playing will eventually result in the two prose sagas I'm hoping for - one for Lia and one for Willow - and when that happens I hope you all will let me know whether or not it was worth this blog and my Hey Arnold fanfic being put on hold.

I think it is helping me out as a writer at least. First off, it blasted through my writer's block. I'm now writing daily, and I'm writing a lot. I'm getting emotional and personable with my characters. I'm finally "hearing" them speak to me the way that DarkAngel1326 and Delaroux tell me their characters speak to them. Which is exciting.

OH! Quick sidenote about Delaroux! I just got a message from her that she has a new story idea and wants me to beta again. I have no clue what the story is about. I don't know if it's going to be another Hey Arnold fanfic, if it's going to be solely about her Flite11 group, if it's going to be about other demons and supernatural beings based on the universe she created for Flite11, or if it's going to be something completely different. I also don't know how long it will be before I start getting stuff from her, let alone my turn-around time. If it's anything like Something To Return To then I'll be getting something soon, and frequently!

Now, back to me.



I'm super excited about hearing these characters in my head! It's weird though. Because I don't legitimately "hear" them in my head per se. You know how when you think to yourself you hear your own voice in your head? Or when you read a piece of fiction - especially if there is a visual representation of it - and you "hear" the character's reciting their lines? Oooor, maybe not. Maybe I'm odd.

Anyway, that was how I was picturing the characters "chatting" to DA and Delaroux. Maybe that IS how it works for those girls. But for me, it's more of a series of Freudian Slips while I'm typing. Kind of like how Arnold and Helga just sort of take over while I'm writing WITMTB. I have every intention of writing one thing, but when I look at what I actually wrote, it's something completely different. Yet, if I try to change it back to what I intended, I get this weird feeling inside like the character is telling me that what I wrote was wrong, and what I originally had was what was "natural". Most times I comply, and this leads to the above comic strip.

My only thing is that Willow is a lot smarter than I gave her credit for, and Hubby's character Chayse is a lot more honest and straight forward. This resulted in a MAJOR plot twist/story arc device to be figured out WAY too soon. It would have been a lot more fun playing around with a certain element that was brought in, but noooooo Chayse had to confess something and Willow had to put the pieces together. Stupid characters.




This whole "The characters take over" thing is why Lia and Chayse ended up hooking up so shortly after the game started, instead of having Chayse take his time woo-ing her. Anyway, during The Week of Feels, the majority of the time Lia stayed "quiet" and just did whatever it was I deemed "natural" to do. Sadly, since Willow exploded as a much more developed and dynamic character, most of the time I had no clue what to do with Lia - so she sort of sat in the background.

Then Hubby started "hearing" Chayse in his head the same way I heard Willow. Soon our apartment was filled with a chorus of us verbally asking Willow and Chase "What are you doing!?" just before posting. We knew that the characters shouldn't say this, or act like that, but they had other plans.

As the Week of Feels came to a close and I realized that Lia never really did anything to say goodbye to her fallen classmate, I created a touching series of scenes for her. Nothing as emotional as Willow's farewell because Lia hadn't yet blossomed, but still moving - hopefully. What really surprised me though, was finding out that Lia is like a Mama Bear protecting her cubs and she gets SCARY when provoked!

A few days later she finally started to grow as well, and I "hear" her along side Willow now - although Willow is still the more dominant talker.

Hubby has also had a few of his secondary characters start "talking" to him too. This game has really gotten him in touch with his own writing side. This is big considering the fact that he has HATED any sort of transferring what's in his head down on paper since about high school due to his Aspergers. So the fact that he's writing just as frequently as I am, with such compelling stuff, and loving doing so is FANTASTIC to me. YAY, Characters Talking!




The biggest concern for him is that one character in particular, who he WANTS to get more involved in the game is NOT talking to him, at least, not for a while. Yesterday Ripley FINALLY opened up and we got some real good stuff from him. Completely surprised both of us. Mr. California Surfer Dude is actually quite the gentleman and apparently wants to become a therapist. Neither of us saw that coming.

Now, when either Hubby or I are on our lunches or breaks at work we always make sure to have paper and a pen on hand so we can jot things down as it comes to us. Hubby was shocked as the stream of consciousness for two of his main characters came out majorly different than what he was expecting of them - given the situation he left them in. He's also developed more backstory to fill in the two year time skip we just participated in, as well as the over-all driving force story arc for the universe.

I played one campaign of D&D with him as the Dungeon Master, and yet I forgot how epic his stories can get! I'm so super excited!

One last thing before I rap up with all this role-play talk. A new character just came on the scene and he's "scaring" his player by doing the same thing of "talking" to the player. The player was joking around that it's like the character is just channeling himself through the player. This just adds to my love of this new character.

His name is Lincoln, and when I get back to building avatars he's the next one I'm working on... even though I was in the middle of building Lincoln's player's main character when I stopped. XD

Anyway, Lincoln started off as just this shy, awkward kid who was raised in a different world/dimension. He's not the only one, another character Sasha was also raised like that. Lincoln was socially awkward and unsure as to how to carry himself on Earth.

This awkwardness developed a stream of consciousness where his thoughts would contradict his actions. Sort of like these new line of Speed Stick commercials:
    
If that wasn't adorable enough, this "my thoughts contradict my actions" back and forth quickly developed in to full-on multiple-personality-like conversations with himself. He is just too friggen adorable!

For those who watched the anime Soul Eater.... Lincoln is kind of like my obsession a few months back when I watched the show.... You might remember a loveably glompable character named Crona:
Crona being the kid.
Ragnarok - Crona's weapon and secondary personality - is the X-Faced thing messing with Crona.
We don't have a name for Lincoln's head-friend, but he picks on, messes with, and delights in Lincoln's pain just as much as Ragnarok does for Crona. Lincoln and Crona are just as equally socially awkward and may find their first friend in the maternal character of the group. Bonus: Crona and Lincoln are both raised and taken care of by a woman named Medusa!!!! How trippy is that!? Especially since Lincoln's player doesn't really watch anime and has never even heard of Soul Eater or Crona! I'm telling you, give Crona a set of green butterfly wings and an acknowledged gender and you have Lincoln! It's fantastic! My instant fave character! <3

Alright, enough ramblings about the forum for today. Hopefully this makes up for the two week delay. I'll try to work on converting stuff over in to prose, but no promises that I'll have anything concrete.

Aside from the forum itself possibly taking up more time, tomorrow also marks the start of my unofficial continuation of Script Frenzy! One Month. 100pgs script! Can I do it!? I haven't in the past, and I'm saddened that I will now never officially have a "winner" badge, but that doesn't mean I can't still participate in Script Frenzy - at least in my heart.

Normally, the script would be started completely from scratch, but since it's no longer official, I'm just going to use the month to get as much done in a script written format as possible before May hits. I'm supposed to be re-starting my The Jungle Movie fanscript with ChibiSunnie this month. I just need to sit down and take the time to go back over all the notes and what we have so far.... I've been slacking on that....

Depending on how adventurous I feel, I may start converting the forum posts over in to webcomic scripts. We'll see how that goes.

Since it isn't an official Script Frenzy I'm debating if I will be purposely skipping weekly updates in favor of my end-of-the-month diary recaps that I've done the past two years. Considering I've been doing bi-weekly updates this year so far, it's not like you'd really be waiting all that long. However, I do fully expect to just go ahead and continue with the weekly updates. I guess we'll have to see how work-heavy April turns out to be.

So, I may or may not catch you folks next week.... sorry about being so vague.
You can follow my blog or me directly if you haven't already. This will guarantee that you won't miss an update. Over along the right side of the page you'll see a spot where you can either add my blog to your RSS feed, or you can input your email address. I don't spam you and you'll get my blog neatly wrapped up in email form. If you have a blogger account you can also follow me by logging in to your account, scrolling down your Dashboard page until you reach "Reading List" click on the "Add" button, and drop in my URL: www.TheRoguesScribe.blogspot.com! Super simple! You can also follow me directly by checking out my Facebook Account, or following me on Twitter: @LycoRogue.

OH! Another quick sidenote, speaking of following blogs. Cyhyr just started up her own blog about writing! You should go check out her stuff here:

The Writer Cyhyr

And while you're at it, go hop over to DA's blog and poke at her until she remembers to post something.

Random Creativity Blog

In the meantime, please wish me and Chibi luck on our Script Frenzy, and wish me, Hubby, and the other X-Men Forum players luck with all the voices in our heads.

I'd like to close out by again wishing everyone a Happy Easter!


Image by MoogleGurl 

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Making more dolls

Another really rough week of not wanting to write a darn thing. To be completely honest, I didn't even want to write this week's update and I seriously debated just throwing up that "Temporary Post" yet again.

I'm really not sure at all what's wrong with me. My brain is just totally fried. I'm pretty much set for the next chapter of What Is Truly Meant To Be, and yet I have NO DESIRE to start writing. I have no clue why.

I even read a fairly good HelgaxBrainyxArnold love-triangle story this morning. It really made me THINK about my story, but still no desire to actually WRITE anything. Oh well, read the story anyway!

It needs some polishing here and there, but it's still a nice, quick read:
Life With Brian

I also completely missed the first bi-weekly writing challenge of "Someone confronting a moral dilemma" that was "due" on the 15th. I had a possible story picked out from my list of Plot Bunnies, but I just never had the urge to type anything up. I honestly don't know if I'm going to attempt the prompt for the next two weeks either:
"Your least-favorite character lets slip the secret of your favorite character"
I honestly don't even know who I'd pick as my least-favorite character....

DarkAngel1326 and ChibiSunnie have been amazing this past week. Nearly every day one of these two ladies would send me a Facebook message with something along the lines of "I heard this song and it made me think of your story" or "I saw this show/movie scene and it made me think of your story" or even "I found this article online and I thought it could help you with the latest chapter".

So, thank you ladies for both your continued effort to jumpstart my muse as well as showing me how much my story affected you on the day-to-day basis. Love you both so much!

I did start doing more on the X-Men forum though... so I guess I did do SOME writing this week. It was mostly boring stuff like having the girls chill at the pool or in the living room, but it's something. I also seem to focus mostly on Willow. Poor Lia hasn't had much game-play as of late, but Hubby hasn't really been inspired to RP either so Cajun just sort of stands around more often than not. Lia doesn't really do much more than interact with him, so that sidelines her too most of the time. Plus, Lia is more reserved and a bit of a goody-two-shoes.

Willow is much more fun to play. She's wild and flirty. She loves teasing and pulling pranks and I'm having a world of fun of having her flirt with EVERYONE. Yes, that means the two new male players as well as the one new female member and the new female NPC. She doesn't care where she gets the love, she just enjoys making EVERYONE blush!

I could have even more fun with my newest character, but Hubby still isn't sure if he'd allow me to bring her in - at least, not anytime soon. I'm still waiting for Devon's player to finish up his recap of what Devon had been doing over the past two years, so my newest character won't see the light of day for a WHILE it seems - and that's still assuming she'll EVER be used in this game.

As with last week, this week was mostly spent creating avatars of all the characters. Sadly, my computer had a major issue last Sunday and everything I had done previously was somehow lost. So I got to start from scratch and it kept me nearly all week to get back to where I was LAST week, so I sadly don't have too many new characters for you guys to meet - as if you care anyway.
Again, it isn't definite yet because I have a few more things I want to tweak and I don't have approval from his player, but first up is the newest member/character: Tyler Cassidy.
Tyler
Yes, that IS a picture of himself on his shirt...

The interesting thing with Tyler is his parentage. I explained this back when the board was first created, but as a reminder the way we set up our characters is mostly random.

The game is played exclusively with characters that are the "next generation" of X-Men - as in, the children of former X-Men or Brotherhood members. When a member joins the boards he or she gets a list of approved mutants that are available for parentage. The player chooses ONE, this way the character isn't COMPLETELY random. The other parent is then decided through dice rolls. The options are as follows:
  • The other parent is also selected off of the list - obviously being the opposite sex of the mutant the player picks
  • The other parent is a random un-named mutant - there are a lot of mutants out there and not all of them join "the fight"
  • The other parent is a human
  • SINISTER SHENANIGANS! Mr. Sinister did what he does best - steal DNA from famous mutants and conjure up an artificial being. In this case, since the character is just genetically spliced together the parents don't need to be of opposite sex. The last time I talked about this option I stated that Hubby's character Chayse "Cajun" LeBeau almost ended up as a Sinister splicing of Gambit and Bishop.
There are also rare occasions - if Hubby feels the player is capable enough - where a player can select a mutant that isn't on the "approved" list.

The random-creation continues with Hubby rolling to figure out what the character's starter powers are and the like, but I want to get back to Tyler.

The player picked Siryn for his mother. Then Hubby rolled that Multiple Man was Tyler's father! This is a huge OMG moment for two reasons.

ONE: For those who don't know/remember, my character Lia is the daughter of Amara "Magma" Aquilla.... and..... Multiple Man..... And, on top of that, he was set up as this loving husband and father, and yet Tyler was supposedly born a year after Lia..... Hmmmmm, me thinks foul things are afoot.
TWO: Although our game doesn't use the main comic book timeline - therefore rendering what I'm about to say completely moot - it seems that Multiple Man and Siryn DID hook up in-canon. And Siryn DID have his son... only to find out that it was actually the son of one of his duplicates and when Multiple Man first held his baby boy his body accidentally absorbed it thinking it was a Dupe ready to re-merge with him.

So, needless to say that the creation of Tyler has proven a bit..... interesting. First, Hubby had to figure out a backstory to explain away the shared parentage between Tyler and Lia while maintaining Multiple Man's "loving husband and father" persona. It's a good story that I'll get to in a moment. Secondly, I had to figure out if Lia had a half-brother or a "cousin" as well as how she'd react to knowing of Tyler's existence after 17yrs in the dark. She hasn't met him yet, so I still have a little bit of time to figure it out.... Finally, Hubby had to try to figure out if Tyler was in as much danger of being absorbed by Multiple Man as his canon equivalent.

Personally, I think Hubby's solution was brilliant! I won't give away all the details in case some of my readers are also players, but I will give the highlights. Namely, that Jamie "Multiple Man" Madrox isn't TECHNICALLY Tyler's father. In comic book canon there have been occasions in which one of Jamie's doubles forms a completely different personality than Jamie Prime and creates his own life. These "rogue Dupes" refuse to be reabsorbed by Jamie and live their own life away from him. Eventually he loses track of them. Tyler's father is actually one of these "rogue Dupes" - therefore giving him the proper parentage without messing with the backstory I already created for Lia. Also, Tyler's father feared one day encountering Jamie and be forced to re-merge with Prime, and so he took precautions preventing such an occurrence; a side-effect being that Tyler is equally safe of never being absorbed by Jamie - either accidentally or forcefully. We're still trying to figure out the half-brother versus cousin thing.... but we're leaning more towards cousin I think.....

Anyway, enough of that! I doubt you guys really care since this all means I wasn't working on any writing. So, to make it up to you I will finish up by talking about story writing again.

Namely, about the Valentine's Day contest the Hey Arnold group held last month. As predicted - assumingly because I didn't have a fluffy, gushing romance story - I didn't even place. I honestly don't know how well or how poorly I did since I don't have the score sheets yet; I'll keep you posted.

But guess who got second place in the writing category again!?

Did you say ChibiSunnie? Well, you should have! So let's all congratulate Chibi for another fantastic job well done!

The winner of the fanart portion is UrielManX7

I'm not entirely sure, but I THIIIIIINK this is the runner up's picture submission

And now a reminder of Chibi's entry


But anyway, you wanted to know about STORIES, right? Well, the winner of the contest was PinkRose34 with her entry The Photo Album.

Personally, I was a little put-off by the story at first because it felt SOOOO much like my very first fanfic The Moral of Gertie. It was a story about Arnold and Grandpa Phil sitting around a photo album and talking about Phil's childhood bully Gertie and the parallels between her and Arnold's personal bully Helga. It was set shortly after the events of the Hey Arnold movie - as was mine - and it even described the aftermath of all the explosions that occurred at the climax of the movie. As far as I knew, prior to PinkRose34 writing her story, mine was just about the only one that did that.

Now, by NO WAY am I claiming that she stole my story. The similarities more-or-less end at the above list. Plus, the coincidental similarities in PR34's story parallels those of DA's Valentine's story she posted last month. The one that was scary similar to my V'day story I Caught You a Star. Great minds just think alike, I guess. Regardless, although I hold firm to my belief that Chibi deserved the win, PR34's story WAS adorable. It was a fun take on Grandpa Phil's past and how Gertie went from bully to friend to lover. Give it a read.

Done with "The Photo Album" yet? Great! Now you can go and read Chibi's runner-up story My Oh So Special Someone.

Might as well finish off the trifecta by including my entry one more time:
The Adventures of Brainy

Until next week - when I'll hopefully have SOMETHING more productive to showcase....

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Creativity flows and halts at the same time

Well, I'm once again full of fail.... I didn't attend the "temp post" to be a permanent one, but for the third week in as many months I seem to have failed at going back and posting the delayed update.

FAIL!

To be fair, the reason I missed last week's post wasn't because I was busy or lazy. It was because the week before consisted of little to no writing. I am completely stuck behind a Writer's Block.

Since I had talked about writing an inspirational postthree weeks ago I thought last week would have been the perfect time to go ahead and write it. One, I promised that if I didn't have much of an update - which I didn't - I'd work on that post. Two, it seemed fitting since my lack of update meant I'm in the same boat as some of you.

And then the post just took over and became this massive beast! Instead of at least attempting to go to sleep while Hubby was at work last week, I spent the seven hours he was at work writing last week's post. SEVEN. STRAIGHT. HOURS. Seven hours of collecting all of the "I can't do it" issues that my writers have come to me with. Seven hours of me gathering up my "yes you can" responses. Seven hours of finding articles online that could help motivate and inspire. Seven hours of me organizing and categorizing. Seven hours, and I still wasn't done when I had to leave to pick up Hubby.

When we got back home I tried to get back to work, but I was dead tired and napped before work. Throughout the rest of the week I kept going back and slowly worked on the post, but this thing is a beast! It's LOOOOOONG. Plus, I want to have the time to also update my Handy Links page to make sure all of the links I have in the post are also there. It's a bit of a task!

So I might break that post down in to two or three smaller posts, work on them off and on throughout the rest of March, and then drop them as a series during April while I'm on my Script Frenzy Hiatus. So keep an eye out for that.

Now, as for my writing. As I said, I still haven't written a word for the latest chapter of What Is Truly Meant To Be. So there goes two of my resolutions: Post a new chapter of WITMTB each month, and finish the full story by the end of 2013. That doesn't mean I won't still try throughout the rest of the year.

Anyway, I think I MIIIIIIGHT have the issue that's been holding me up figured out. I did end up sending inquiries out to DarkAngel1326, ChibiSunnie, and AngelBlood666. All three of them have been helpful with their advice. In fact, every time I log on to Facebook I seem to have a new message from DA with yet another article she found somewhere in hopes of helping me out. Now for me to return the favor and finish beta reading something she sent to me late yesterday. Poor thing is just as stuck as I am, so let's see if I can help her as much as she helped me.

In the meantime, I must struggle against a weird lack of desire to write. I'd much rather play video games.
I dunno. I guess I just feel tired and uninspired lately. I'm hoping to break myself out of the funk soon - even if by force.

One way I'm trying to "force" myself back in to writing - aside from keeping up with this blog - is to participate in a new writing challenge the Hey Arnold group is holding. Once every two weeks we'll be given a writing prompt; we have until the next prompt to complete the story. The prompt that started this challenge was given out on March 1st, and we have until the 15th to write our story. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with "Struggling with a moral dilemma".

Another creative outlet has once again become the X-Men Forum RPG that Hubby started up in June. We recently had a few new players sign up, which also resparked interest for the game for some old players. So now Hubby and I have been trying to figure out how to restart the story after the 2yr time skip he created when everyone slowed down posting.

He decided to use the same tactic as when we started officially role playing last year - jump-start everything with a real-time "mixer". He set a time on the first for everyone to try to be on the forum and we all enjoyed a little party role playing. It was fun and mildly eventful. It was a great way to meet the new players and have them interact with our old characters.

Unfortunately, there's been little activity on the forums since the mixer ended. It seems that no one really knows what to do with their characters when they're the only ones on the boards, and since we have so few players - only about nine people - it's rare to have two people on at the same time unless an (like the mixer Hubby hosted)online get-together is pre-arranged. Sadly, I'm one of those people. I still don't really know what I want to do with Lia and Willow now that there has been a 2yr time skip. I'm still figuring out how they changed over those years I guess.

However, the one character Devon is active again. The combination of reading his posts and obsessively listening to "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)" by Fall Out Boy resulted in mini-inspiration. I have Willow, a wild-child prankster who can create illusions, and I have Lia, a magma-controller who can also be sort of considered a pyrokinetic. However, the angry passion of the Fall Out Boy song just calls to my inner pyromaniac. I wanted a character that was a pyrokinetic, but not as reserved as Lia. Essentially, I wanted a character who was crazy-impulsive like Willow, but with Lia's powers. Thus, a new character was born.

Whereas I had a mildly healthy chunk of backstory for Lia, and Willow's backstory is as bare-minimum as it gets, this new character's backstory is massive. I started writing and just didn't stop. It's almost a page long on its own. She is the first character that really took over and spoke to me in a while, so "YAY" for that. She feels like she'd be a lot of fun to play.

However, I'm also a bit fearful that I'll never get the chance to play her, for multiple reasons.
  1. There are already easily 100 pyrokinetics in the normal Marvel universe. Add in Devon - who has his father's powers - and Lia, and my newest character may be one pyrokinetic too many.
  2. I created the new character as someone to interact with Devon while he's considered a betrayer by the X-Men, but Devon's player already has three of his own original characters that he was going to throw in while Devon was on the run. Does he really need my character if he has so many of his own to interact with? Would my new character just complicate things too much?
  3. With my character's personality and power combo, she may be too unstable and uncontrollable. Yes, I'm very good at not going overboard with my characters; being able to hold them back. Both Willow and Lia could probably be a lot more powerful than I'm allowing them to be. However, my newest character may be too volatile regardless.
  4. I have two characters already that I'm not entirely sure I know what to do with. Do I really want a third character to run? Especially since it will be a little while before Devon would be ready to meet her? Also, considering that I'd pretty much exclusively use her to interact with Devon and his player has very limited internet access, so I could go days or weeks before I could do anything else with the character.
I'm still proud that I managed to write SOMETHING this week, even if she never joins the fray of the forum. Maybe if I don't end up using her for the X-men game I could find some way to rework her for one of my high fantasy stories. She'll most likely fight her way to the surface somehow. I won't be able to keep her confined in my head for too long, I'm sure.

Another bout of creativity hit me this week by way of avatar-making once more. Back when the X-Men forum game was first started up I was having difficulties visualizing what Lia and Willow looked like - as well as the other characters. I am a majorly visual person and have to have some sort of reference for nearly everything. So I started building a floor plan of the Xavier Institute so I knew where my characters were and where they needed to go to get to different rooms and such. I also found this pixel-doll making site.

Taking elements from multiple doll-makers and combining them in Photoshop, I started creating avatars of the different characters. Over the summer when I started this project I only managed to create Willow and Lia - along with an extensive "closet" so I could switch out their outfits whenever I needed to describe them in something other than their "every day" clothes. I have fun playing "dress-up" with them.

The process was long and tedious the way I was doing it originally, and so I stopped with my characters even though I wanted to do the full "cast" that we had at the time.

Well, something about the new characters got me obsessed with avatar making again. I even found a way to make them that was MUCH easier than how I was originally doing it. I'm breezing through the guys easily. The girls will be a bit trickier since there is easily seven-times more outfits I would have to sift through. Again, it will be fun to play dress-up.

Even with the easier set up, however, it is a bit time consuming. I've easily spent about 14hrs this week just messing with this stuff.


So, before I leave to maybe be productive elsewhere, I'd like to introduce you to a few members of our RPG:
Lia as her 14yr old self
15yr old Willow in her X-Uniform
Hubby's character Chayse "Cajun" LeBeau 
Devon - Kinda looks like The Terminator here
William, son of Nightcrawler and Dazzler
Most of these guys need some tweaking still, but it's a nice start.