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.