Sunday, July 28, 2013

Week 1 Challenge Complete: The Epic Prologue

Wanted to start off with a belated Happy First to Duchess.
Sorry Hubby and I missed your party. 
Another reason to celebrate this week? I've surpassed 10,000 views of my blog! I have absolutely NO clue how many of those views were people actually READING my blog, but still. A fine achievement.

Want one more cause for elation? How about me kinda-sorta achieving my week 1 goal for the Writer’s Huddle Summer Challenge run by Ali Luke.

OH! And before I forget, did you guys catch that last week's Sunday update got delayed until my birthday on Tuesday? If you missed out, go back and check in on that. Also, be sure to find your favorite way to follow me - through Blogger, emails, RSS feed, Twitter, or Facebook - so you don't miss out on non-Sunday blog updates!

Ok, now back to the Summer Challenge.

My weekly goal for the challenge is to create recaps of at least two major events that occurred in X-Future. Even though enough has happened on the board for me to be able to create twelve recaps based on just the game alone, I felt the need to start off with a prologue.

I had been meaning to create a prologue to set up the universe continuity for my individual stories about Willow, Lia, and Trish. However, it always seemed such a huge undertaking that I never got started on it. Using the challenge as motivation, I finally started!

Yes, you read that right: Started. As in, I'm not done yet! I was right, it WAS a huge undertaking! I have the happenings of a dozen or so characters over the course of 30yrs to recap! I'm maybe a little over half-way through and I'm already at 8pgs and over 5000 words! Dear lord, I didn't realize our game had so much history!

It works out well though. For people who aren't part of the game, but are reading my stories about it over on Fanfiction, this long prologue helps set up the world so the reader better understands how everyone interacts and the skeletons in everyone's closets. For the new players, it's a handy way to figure out what has and hasn't happened in our continuity versus the main X-Men comic book storyline. It also helps them figure out their own backstories based on what else happened around them. Finally, it's a helpful refresher for the current players as to how our continuity differs from the Marvel canon, as well as how our characters' histories intertwine.

I just wish I could find a way to cut back on some of it so it isn't so insanely long! Also, there's a lot of time jumping. I'll start with this character, follow them for about three years, and then jump back those three years for that character. Then a third character's history directly follows that character's backstory and so I'm now backtracking seven years to start up the fourth character.

I use main points in time as hubs to help distinguish where I am in the overall timeline, and so I hope I'm not going to be terribly too confusing for anyone. Once I do have the prologue done and posted - and I'll of course let you fine folks know where you can read it - I'd be so grateful if someone would let me know whether or not all the time jumping is indeed confusing.

I also debated a whole bunch of mini-posts where I just follow Character A throughout the 30 yrs, and then start over with Character B for the 30yrs, and then backtrack for Character C, etc. The problem there would be the interlacing of the characters' histories. Still, if that ends up making things less confusing I might go back and rework the prologue like that. As of right now it's more of "Here's what Character A did for five years, and what Character B did, and then what Character C did. Now, let's go back to Character A and see what they did the NEXT five years, etc."

Excuse the tangent, what I mean to say is that I technically didn't hit my challenge goal this week. I wanted to do two recaps and I have yet to finish one. However, I did start off with the prologue instead of the intended first recap of the Student Mixer that kicked off the game. So I took on something extra to begin with. Also, I planned on each recap being maybe a thousand or two words long at most; not 5000 words!

Which leads me to why I believe I actually DID reach my first week's goal. I've written what would be deemed about a dozen mini-recaps under my normal standard; one for each character that had a major impact on the current game's history. Also, I've written FIVE-FREAKING-THOUSAND WORDS for this recap. That's probably going to be the same amount, if not more, that I'm going to write for my two recaps combined during the remaining weeks. On top of all that, it's already a success simply by me actually writing! I've been meaning to work on this prologue and these recaps for a few months now, but it kept the Summer Challenge for me to actually sit down and work on it! Challenges: My Motivators.

And thus my page views jump simply because of people
searching for this meme picture...
Anyway, I do foresee myself finishing up the prologue soonish, but I want Hubby to look it over and correct anything that doesn't quite fit the universe history he had in mind. He most likely will be too exhausted from working the overnight to go through this epic tale today, but perhaps tomorrow or Tuesday I'll be able to post it.
Just enough time to get to work on the next week's challenge.

Meanwhile, the story in X-Future marches on. I forget if I mentioned this in a previous post, but we FINALLY finished off prom, the after party, and the attack on the after party. We're now going through the next day where a whole bunch of new crap went down.

  • Crystal and Tyler are having interesting conversations in her high-security recovery room. Hooray for their miscommunication problems still going on.
  • Trish being interrogated by Deadpool - which is pretty funny.
  • Lincoln meeting his new roommate: new board member and character Alister. The two already have a great chemistry going that is hilarious. Both players already commented on how awesome the other was.
  • Colette's decent in to madness has already started. It may have been a month or two since her character was created, but in-game she's only been at the institute for a week! Oh nos!
  • Liam becomes a squad leader and goes on his own information hunt to try to better prepare all the students in case another raid like the after party attack occurs.
  • Finally, Willow has to deal with finding out who Screw Driver truly is while also being dragged in to a secret meeting. What's the meeting about?
  • Lucas has returned from the future with one of the two displaced students, but he also brought along another time traveler. Poor Willow is commenting on how hot this guy is and hoping Chayse ends up just as hot.... only to find out that said time traveler is one of Willow's relatives! Awkward! Thus leaving Lucas' player in hysterics as he read Willow's thoughts on the traveler.
So all of that will be fun to recap about a month from now....

The new time traveling character also makes me wonder if maybe these characters ARE real in some alternate universe and we're truly just channeling them to our world via the Forum. Why? Well, when Hubby created the new character he thought about maybe having him and the displaced student hooking up. He only told me about this and I didn't say anything to anyone.

And yet, Lucas' player took control of the new character when they arrived from the future. He then had Sebastian and Brianne embrace and give each other a kiss before parting ways! He had NO WAY of knowing that Hubby has shipping those two together. At no time when he relayed over Sebastian's backstory, nor when he corrected Lucas' thoughts on how the future would be, did Hubby ever mention any sort of romance for Sebastian. For all Lucas' player knew, Sebastian could have been gay. But there he was, writing Sebastian and Brianne as a couple! Almost as if the characters themselves were telling us that they wanted to be together.

Ya know, kind of like how Nys and Devon clearly want to hook up even though Ronoxym swears up and down that they have a platonic relationship.

OH! Speaking of Ron! I meant to comment on this last week, but he's gotten in to the habit of shanghaiing my Facebook statuses by speaking as if he IS Devon messing with Trish.

Out of nowhere I'd get a comment that would keep me a minute to figure out that it's not Ron talking to me, but Devon trying to instigate Trish! Although he hasn't done so this past week, the week before it was nearly a daily occurrence. It's fantastic that these characters are completely leaving the boards and becoming more and more involved in our daily lives.

In fact, I have clothes all set up for me to dress up as either Trish or Willow for Halloween this year! I even splurged $8 on myself as a birthday gift and bought a white wig that matches Willow's hairstyle. Now, to get clip-on nose and eyebrow piercings to finish off my Trish costume, or to get clip-on blue hair streaks to add to the Willow Wig!

We all may be losing our grip on reality....

One last thing that I noticed this week. Remember how I commented on Tuesday about how the update would have been Monday except I couldn't figure out what to call Hot Hands or Chimera? The main reason because the two of them claimed they didn't have on-line personas....

Well, due to car troubles, Hot Hands spent a great deal of time hanging out at our house after work, and throughout these visits we eventually began talking about the Naruto fanfics that he and his wife write. He then had me go to Fanfiction.net and lo and behold.... both he and Chimera have accounts with FF.
Which means they DO have online personas.

Which means I didn't have to spend almost 48hrs racking my brain over what nicknames I'd give them for this blog.
So, officially, Hot Hands is actually MadDog24 and his wife Chimera is actually 2-Feathers-And-A-Stone.

I think I prefer Chimera for it's simpleness, but I might switch over to MadDog24 because Hot Hands just makes him sound like a retired porn star...

Any thoughts, guys?

HH? Chimera? If either of you are reading this and have a preference, just let me know.

In the meantime, I'm off to work on my epic prologue some more.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

First Official Week of the Challenge

Yup, late again. I have a semi-good reason though. This past weekend Hubby wasn't scheduled for his normal overnight shift. In fact, he had Sunday completely off! Since we don't normally have a weekend free like this we decided to live it up! Besides, it ended up as a psuedo-birthday party for me! YAY!

I had my tiny apartment filled with pretty much the entire X-Future gang!
Ronoxym, Omnibladestrike, celestialTyrant, The Bard, along with Joyce's player NovaNight.

We also had three special guests:
Hot Hands who plays Liam and Tyler, his wife Chimera who plays Sasha, and their baby daughter Duchess.

Now, this is a HUGE thing for me. Today I turned 29 and I have NEVER been able to transition work friends in to out-of-work friends before. NEVER. I've had a ton of super close friends at work, but we never broke that awkward border of hanging outside of work.

Normally I can't stand these "Keep Calm and Carry On" memes,
but I really am 29 today so I caved!

Anyway, Hubby and I met Hot Hands at work and we started talking about the X-Men role play. He and his wife joined and we became closer friends at work with the forum as a way to hang out "after work". Soon we were chatting literally outside our work and at one point decided to take the conversation to a Chinese restaurant a few doors down. This Saturday was the first scheduled "hang out" though, which is awesome!

Problem being that there is NO WAY our apartment is baby-proof. I spent all of Friday just sprinting around my house cleaning and organizing to try to make it safe for Duchess as best as I could. I somehow forgot about the cutlery in the kitchen...

I didn't think she'd get to that.

Duchess is MAD advanced, man! Like... she's not even one yet and she's walking with no problem! I spent the entire time chasing after her so Chimera didn't have to worry, and could get a day break. I love Duchess though, and she seems to love me back, so it works out. I just didn't anticipate her picking up the bottles of Sunny D that are like half her weight, and then trying to hide some of my notebooks in with my knives!

And Chimera is pregnant! Two little girls this smart running around her house!? I do NOT envy her!

Girl, if you're reading this, STOP TAKING THE OMEGA-3 VITAMINS! GIVE YOURSELF A CHANCE!

Especially since Duchess didn't take a nap the entire time they were visiting - which was from about noon to nine at night - and yet she STILL woke up at about five the next morning!

Anyway, enough side-tracking.
Why is it that I'm two days late with my post?

Well, as mentioned, I had a full house on Saturday, and most of the people stayed for a WHILE. Hubby and I didn't fall asleep until 3am! That, plus work, plus cleaning my house all Friday meant no writing before Sunday. Then Sunday came and went without me posting since CT spent the night and he more-or-less had control of my computer all day.

So blame him.

I was then going to post yesterday - in fact, this whole post was WRITTEN yesterday - but I got snagged again. I like to keep people's anonymity in regards to my blog. That's why everyone I talk about - aside from Ali Luke who purposely promotes herself online, as well as other professionals who do the same - are mentioned through online personas alone:
This is why for the longest time Ronoxym was listed as "Devon's Player" until he let me know what his online persona was. Problem being that neither Liam/Tyler's player nor Sasha's player HAVE online personas. It kept me a day to figure out what to call them and their daughter when I reference them here. And you guys should all know by now how awesome I am at naming things...

It works though. Because now I can show off the birthday presents that DA and Chibi made for me!

First up is Chibi's card to me. She wanted to write me something, but since I told her that I've been slacking on my online reading since it's sorta hard for me to do so with my desktop she decided to go for the card instead. Regardless, I love it! So friggen cool!

Me in the world of Legend of Zelda. Thanks, Chibi!
I love the Steampunk Hyrulian me!
Next up is the picture that DA drew of me. She used the cartooned versions of me that I post on my main Facebook page as reference, and I love it!

I look so cool Anime-d up like that! Love it, DA!
Apparently DA is also working on something in conjunction with AngelBlood666. I'm excited to see what that is!

On top of everything else, DA, Chibi, and Chopfe have each written such sweet things about their fond memories of being friends with me! All three of them made me cry today! Not cool, guys!

Another benefit about being a few days late is that I can also talk about the first week of Ali's Summer Challenge over at Writer’s Huddle. As I mentioned last week, there are two parts to the challenge. Part one is to reach your weekly goal. For me it is to write two recap posts for the events that happened over in X-Future. This way people have an easier way to keeping track of everything plot wise. Part two is to participate in the simple challenge that Ali comes up with.

This week's extra challenge? To incorporate the word "baby" in our writing this week. It was inspired by all the buzz going on about the British royal pregnancy.

I guess I sort of succeeded since I mentioned that Duchess was a "baby girl" and that I wasn't able to "baby-proof" my apartment at the beginning of this post. How convenient, right? I'm gonna also see if anything for the recaps needs the word baby as well.

How about you guys? I know that DA has been feeling guilty about not doing much writing lately, even though she's been out of school. So she's unofficially joining in with the challenge. She's attempting a mind-boggling 8000 words per week - in comparison, Ali is attempting 3000 words a week for her sequel to Lycopolis. Although, 8000 words is still less than the rough 1666 words per day of NaNo.

I wish DA luck in her journey and I'm curious as to how she's fitting "Baby" in to her work this week. As I am with you guys as well. Any other writers in the crowd? Did you guys want to unofficially join as well? If you do and end up successfully completing the challenges feel free to drop a link in the comments so we can check them out too!

Now, I'm off to re-read the forum so I can get started on my recaps for this week.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Setting Up Another Writing Challenge!

I had intended to write this update on Monday to make up for not having ANY time to really do anything last week. Alas, Hubby and I were so zoned out from our weekend that we stayed in bed until like 10am, and then vegged around the house watching shows and messing around with the WWE video game some more. We finished up the day desperately attempting to FINALLY conclude the prom and after party scenes in X-Future.

Yesterday I was just lazy..... Hubby and I were both home from work as of 1pm and yet we still have no clue where our day went....

Anyway, as I stated in Sunday's post, I had no time to really do anything this past week.

Over on X-Future we started up a Prom thread on June 14th to celebrate the game being a year old. It was supposed to be a live-session like the other dances that the institute had hosted. We're all supposed to be online between such and such hours and it's just a fun interaction. No major drama was supposed to go down.

Well, then everyone ended up being busy or whatever on the 14th, and again on the 15th, and the next thing you know the "live session" turned in to a normal thread: people post and update whenever they have time. The downside is that nothing was really happening.

We left the prom thread open for about a week and figured everyone did whatever it was they wanted to do at Prom by the end of the week. If not, too bad, the scene was active for long enough.

Then it was the After Party. Again, we didn't anticipate too much drama here either. We were gonna do another week-long to make sure everyone did what they wanted to before closing the thread.

Then Hubby got inspired. Next thing I know, the Brotherhood is invading the after party and the battle lasted like two weeks of slow off-and-on role playing. We FINALLY concluded the battle on Monday. Now, on to the aftermath!

Also... we almost got our "Crystal needs to die to really propel this story" during the fight scenes!

But you guys might FINALLY find out what I mean. It may not be in the way I originally intended, but still....

Ali Luke started up her own six-week-long summer challenge over at Writer’s Huddle. The concept is simple.
  1. Do the 10min exercises that Ali comes up with every week. Participate in at least five out of the six exercises and she'll put you in to a drawing for an Amazon gift card! Nice!
  2. Set up a weekly goal that you can repeat every week throughout the challenge. For instance, we have one gentleman who is writing two blog posts every week. Another member is writing 1000 words every week.
And that's it! Easy enough, so I decided to try to participate as well. The trick was figuring out what I could repeat for 6 weeks. I thought about using it as an excuse to get back to What Is Truly Meant To Be. I decided against it for two reasons: I'm not inspired really, and I doubt I could routinely work on chapters for it week after week.

Sorry to my loyal fans. I SWEAR I will get back to the story. I refuse to abandon the tale with so many people wanting to know how it ends. I'm just not feeling it right now.

So then I remembered the laundry list of things I wanted to work on for converting X-Future over to prose. I landed on writing those recap posts to help out those who are just starting as well as those who are returning after long hiatuses. I sectioned off the main events of the game in to about 12 different recaps. I'll then spend my weeks reading the forum again and writing at least two recap posts each week. I'll even thread them together as a mini-anthology so that you, my non-member readers, can follow along with our tale.

In theory, I guess I could post them on FanFiction as X-Men: Evolution fanfics since our universe is a continuation of that one. However, since most of the stuff is just generic "X-Men Universe" stuff - Xavier Institute, the Brotherhood, the canon characters as faculty members, etc - and the rest is entirely original I'm debating if I'd be better off just doing X-Men as the fanfic category. I probably will.

Anyway, for some strange reason Hubby wasn't scheduled for his normal overnight shift this Saturday-in-to-Sunday. So we're having a HUGE get together on Saturday. We'll see if I get to writing a blog post on time... Perhaps I should add that to my weekly goals...

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Mini-Post

Pardon this update. I'm currently at a brunch to celebrate my niece's baptism!


Crazy work week. Got called in for extra hours since we have people dropping like flies and shifts needed to be covered....

Now add in that this weekend consisted of....
Friday: Longer hours due to the shift covering, followed by Ronoxym visiting until like 1am while we attempted to work on advancing the X-Future plot a touch more.
Saturday: Loooooong day at work after only about 4hrs of sleep. A wee bit of a nap before dropping Hubby off at work at midnight.
Sunday: A little over two hours updating in X-Future. This quick little blip of a blog update. Crashing for another couple of hours. Getting up to shower/shave/groom/etc before picking Hubby up at 6am. Get him home in time for HIM to shower and us to munch on SOMETHING before the in-laws swing by at about 7am. We then drive to the church, pray we don't pass out, and then drive up to the sis-in-law's for a celebratory brunch/party/thing. Oh, and BTW... didn't have time to work on the blanket all that much, so there goes THAT idea of a gift... although, to be fair, it'd be extra cheep since it's a delayed baby shower gift already.

Anyway, my Sunday concludes with dropping Hubby off at home and have enough time to change in to my work uniform before running off for a glorious 6hr shift - which will HOPEFULLY just be six hours. The girl I'm closing with fell down the stairs earlier this week so it's hit or miss if she can even move enough to work, and then when she CAN work she's hobbling everywhere. I'm going to be exhausted and I fear for my shift to take closer to 8hrs to complete every task needed.

After barely any sleep the past 48hrs...

It's gonna be a looooooooooong day.

Also, because of this person injuring themselves, that person injuring themselves, this person quitting, that person getting fired, and our manager on vacation.... Our schedule for this upcoming week is definitely not the same one that was posted on Friday, although I haven't had a chance to see how much my schedule got shifted around.

In THEORY I have Monday off, which would be FANTASTIC after this weekend. Although I will probably just sleep through all of it instead of doing productive things like cleaning, or writing, or working on that blasted blanket....

If I DO have Monday off still - and if I'm not sleeping through all of it - I will attempt a more adequate blog update for this week. No promises though.

Although, I do admit I have a few things I'd like to discuss.

Monday, July 8, 2013

Focusing on Organizing and Completing Projects

independence day

Happy belated Independence Day to all my fellow Americans!

Sorry for the delay on this post. This time it was Blogger technical difficulties that I just could not figure out how to solve.

Anyway, this week, as with the majority of the summer so far, consisted of me having a full work week. This resulted in me having little to no time to read or write. I STILL have three stories of ChibiSunnie's chilling in my inbox for me to beta read. I haven't attempted to work on any prose writing in MONTHS. I just get so worn and tired and uninspired. If nothing else, I've discovered that unless it's hidden away in my bedroom - like before I got married - I just cannot write or read stories on my desktop.

One of the things that Ali Luke frequently comments about is realizing the best times and atmospheres for your writing. Although I don't know what the BEST is for my writing, I do now know one of the worse places: My desktop.

Man, I miss my netbook.

I did manage to accomplish two things this week. One being cracking open The Red Pyramid yet again. It kept me a moment to recall where I was in the story since I haven't had any free time to read it in about a month, but then I enjoyed a few chapters before passing out. The second is that I completed at least the base of the baby blanket I've been crocheting for my niece since she was born in April! Her baptism is this upcoming Sunday - so there may not be an on-time post YET AGAIN - so I'm gonna try to finish it up before then. I don't have high hopes though. I'm working on crocheting all the details, plus I wanted to get a soft piece of fabric to use as a backing. We'll see how it goes.

As for the limited writing I was able to do this week, it was of course for X-Future. We started up a prom for the characters back on June 14th in order to celebrate the first anniversary of the game. That scene lasted a week until we felt we played it out the best we could with everyone. Then Tyler's player had him start up an after party complete with a concert. We all lazily played within that scene for twelve days without anything really happening. Finally, Hubby decided he needed to throw in a catalyst to really get us role playing again. So on the third he decided to have The Brotherhood - a villainous group of mutants who oppose the X-Men - crash the after party. They're after Crystal again, but Screw Driver is also out for revenge on Chayse after he thwarted the original plans of capturing her. It's been slow role playing again since we have all been super busy with the holiday; nearly every active player being employees of the local grocery store.

Still, there has been a lot going on, and a lot of it consists of important conversations going on at the same time. This results in an interesting dilemma in which I need to actually visualize who is saying what when and what part of which conversation my characters are paying attention to. After a little while of fighting with this hiccup I finally decided to just write everything out in pseudo-script format for characters talking over each other. In other words, I wrote all the dialogue out side by side, then timed myself reading it all off to make sure things lined up timing wise.

After doing so and actually accomplishing my task of updating with the girls I looked at my "diagram" and remembered an article I found over on Writer’s Huddle. The article showcases how famous authors outlined their stories in order to help keep things organized. It's really cool to see how people organize their thoughts. Then I thought maybe you guys would like to see the same of my work.

So, without further ado, here are some of my many diagrams and outlines.

Figuring Timing
This is the timing organization I just described. I edited out the parts that would be spoilers if I ever converted the game in to prose like I intend.

Naming Things
An example of my horrible, HORRIBLE ability to name things. These are places in the country of Kerizmar within the world of Gyateara. Kerizmar is mostly the country Amara's stories would take place in.
It also beautifully showcases my math skills... -_-

Amara Thought Web
One of my early thought webs while I was building Amara.

Amara Timeline
My early timeline of Amara's life leading up to the start of the D&D campaign she'd be involved in. It's since changed.

I wish I could have found the long timeline I wrote out for my NaNo story.... That was intense.

Anyway, to any other writers among my readership, how do you organize your tales?

Who knows when I'll be able to write again, but here's hoping a blog post on time next week; highly unlikely given the crazy weekend schedule with the Baptism and all.

'Merica
Anyway, one last "Happy Independence Day" to my American readers.
(And a bit of a "Nanner-Nanner!" to my British readers )