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.

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....

Beta Reading and World Building

If you didn't see my post this past Wednesday, go ahead and scroll down to read it. As you scroll you can check out a few links in the sidebar. First up is the "Followers" section. If you have any form of Google account you can click on the handy button there and become a follower of my blog! Or you can continue to scroll down to my post and keep an eye out for that "Subscribe to" section. There you can add me to your RSS feed, or drop in your email address for my posts to go directly to your inbox - no spam included.

If none of those options are your cup of tea you can keep scrolling down, read that blog post, and then hop on over to twitter to follow me. I made it super simple: @LycoRogue. Still don't like your options? How about friending me on Facebook? Lyco Rogue. I usually only go on that account to announce blog updates, so even if you place me as a close friend you'll only get an occasional notification.

There, wasn't that easy? And now you don't have to worry about ever missing another update.
YAY!

Anyway, getting back on track. Since my last post I FINALLY got around to reading both ChibiSunnie's Valentine's day entry "My Oh So Special Someone" and DarkAngel1326's two stories that she sent me back in like January!

Chibi's story was ADORABLE and I'm thinking it's yet again a strong competitor. Everyone is in character, the story is sweet, and it's a pairing not too many people write about. So make sure to check it out and let her know what you think. Here's the link again:

"My Oh So Special Someone"

DA sent me a revised version of her Soldier Story and I sent back a few more notes. I'm not sure where she is on polishing the story up, but I feel like we'll all be able to read the story soon.

I've actually been debating sending the story to my mom. It's that Nicholas Sparks-esque story that she LOOOOOOVES. However, it's a bit of a tear jerker - which, let's face it, she also loves, but she'll still yell at me for - plus it might remind her of my dad a touch too much.

For those of you who don't know, my father lost his battle with cancer when I was 13. It's still weird to know that I've had a single parent longer than both. Anyway, the last family trip we all took a little more than a month before he passed was to Disney World. In DA's story a young boy's last trip with his father before the man shipped off to Vietnam was to Disneyland. Also, the name of the soldier just so happens to be my father's name. All the more reason why this story is extra powerful to me and all the more reason I both want my mom to read it, and fear the backlash of her weeping over it.

DA's other story that was waiting patiently in my inbox was a drabble she wrote about her Of Blood and Honor main character 33. A simple little tale about 33's reaction to his missions to burn down whole villages. I can't wait to see more progress on the character and world building of this tale - which seems to be growing in to a full book series at this rate!

Sidenote about DA... she snuck in a Valentine's Day story as well. She didn't make it in time for the contest, but she did manage to post the first chapter last night. I really enjoy it and recommend the read for some fluffy goodness.

"Stories from the Winds of Hillwood"

When I finished my extensive beta reading I also made sure to spend some face time with Omnibladestrike. Haven't heard THAT name in a while, right!? Well, the poor guy has been in a massive writing funk, one that made him want to scrap his story and start from scratch YET AGAIN, as well as made him seriously wonder if he even had any writing talent.

I helped him out the best I could, but deciding if writing is really what you want to do in life is purely a soul-searching experience. No one can tell you if you can or can't. Only you can figure that out. I feel like I should write a full blog post dedicated to that, but I'll wait for a week where I don't have so many updates to talk about. That is, of course, unless you, Dear Readers, would greatly appreciate said post ASAP. If you guys are questioning yourself and need an inspirational/insightful post about the subject feel free to let me know and I'll get cracking on that.

In the meantime, check out my Handy Links For Fellow Aspiring Writers page. I just updated it on Friday, complete with a whole new category for fantastic blogs about writing that I've found.

Anyway, back to Omni. Poor guy has been dying to talk to me about his story for a while now, but every time he visited he either spent the whole time playing Magic: The Gathering with Hubby, or I had my own writing to work on, or he was helping us move. I'm not entirely sure why he didn't just call me or visit with the sole purpose to talk to me about his story, but regardless the poor kid waited months before we finally had our little heart-to-heart this week.

There still needs to be a bit more tweaking in my opinion. Things still don't exactly mesh with each other, but I think he's getting a much better handle on what he wants to do with his story. I think his biggest roadblock is that he's been working on this tale since like middle school and he wants to hold on to a lot of that original story - even the parts that don't quite work anymore. It's a noble effort, but his creativity and abilities have matured so much since then. He knows what works and what doesn't. I feel like he should just drop what doesn't work instead of constantly trying to rework it until it does work. I had to do that with Amara and a lot of the background I did with her way back in 2004. It's hard to do, but the pruning process really does need to be done. Once he manages to do that, I think he too has a nice book series on his hands.

Speaking of Amara, after discussing fantasy world building with both DA and Omni - as well as trying to help DA out with creating a village name - I became reinspired to work on world building Gyateara. So I broke out my 3-ring binder filled with different D&D campaigns as well as notes on the world I was building for Amara. I had two countries named: Kerizmar - the country that most of Amara's adventures would take place - and Gancrock - the country where Amara was born. The majority of my world building thus far was in Kerizmar. To help DA figure out the best way for her to come up with names for her villages and such, I composited a listing of all the cities I came up with and how I came up with the names. I called it "The World of Gyateara and how it was named.... OOOOOOR.... a lesson in how bad I am at naming things".

A large chunk of the city names I couldn't remember how I came up with them, and my notes on how I came up with the names was missing from my binder. However, there was still a vast majority where my name-creation notes were still available. Most of the names were simply me trying to describe the location of the place and then tweaking the name so it didn't sound like that was what I was doing.

For example, here is an exact note that I had on a Gnome village:
Gnome -> David the Gnome -> Forests -> Animals -> Forest Thief -> Forthee -> Forthy

It's mostly just a train-of-thought freewrite. In the end I liked the description of that particular location of gnomes being the "corrupted gnomes" territory. I then took elements of the words "Forest" and "Thief" and merged them in to "Forthee". I then worked the word in my mouth a little until I spat out "Forthy". Thus the village name was born.

As I worked on my extensive list of locations, and compared notes with the map that I created - in an attempt to remind myself how I came up with some of the names - Hubby saw my little pet project. We got to talking about all the work I had put in to Kerizmar back in 2008/2009. He was shocked at the number of locations I had and the vast population I was trying to distribute between all the communities. I had made Kerizmar a bit bigger than Pennsylvania but was still trying to squeeze in roughly 30 cities and a population of  8-million. Since there's over 8-million people in New York City alone, I thought these numbers were about right for a medieval country about the size of PA. Hubby thinks otherwise.

This is a perfect example of what I was saying about Omni's need to let some things that don't work go. Even though I put extensive hours in to researching general D&D population break-down, the rough population of medieval Britain, and made sure to measure out the distances between towns to make sure they weren't too close or too far from each other.... well, Hubby still thinks it was a bit overboard. I was so afraid of UNDER populating my country that I went a bit too far in the opposite direction. So now I must also practice pruning. Drop some of the villages with crappy names - such as Forthy - shift some other towns in to a different country, rework the populous, and rename all of my natural landmarks. Since I was originally building Kerizmar as a D&D campaign setting I had all of the major mountains, deserts, lakes, seas, and rivers named after D&D deities. Now that I'm trying to switch Kerizmar and the whole of Gyateara in to my own original world I need to drop any and all references to the D&D-specific deities.

It's a long trial for sure, but Hubby should be helping me out this time. In the meantime, I can still use my limited world building knowledge to help DA name locations, and use my trial of pruning to help encourage Omni to do the same.