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.
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| 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.
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....
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