Yet again, I had neglected to audit my time, so I only vaguely recall what it was I did this past week. The vague recollection might also be a result of my mind completely swimming this week. Roughly around the time I posted my last blog update, I was starting to get sick. It was a nasty tickle in my throat and a violent, dry cough. I was light-headed and ended up with a few intense headaches from coughing so much. I tried a whole assortment of over-the-counter meds to try to stop the cough. Eventually, I landed on a Dayquil knock-off. Worked like a charm... sorta.
I don't know if the drug actually solved the coughing symptoms, or if it was a coincidental switch to a new med at the same time my symptoms “evolved.” The cough stopped, but the nose started going. And going. And going. I was a human faucet for the better part of two days. My routine was sneeze, blow nose, Purell my hands, sigh from exhaustion, spray down my work space with Lysol, and repeat. I went through an entire box of tissues within an 8-hr work day. I nearly went through a full 1-fl-oz travel-size bottle of Purell over the course of two work days. I'm not entirely sure how much of my 15oz can of Lysol I went through....
Between the coughing fits, and then the non-stop nose running and sneezing – which was borderline giving me whiplash with how violent my sneezes are as well – AND the need to still go out car shopping.... It's been an exhausting week. At least twice, I shut myself away in my bedroom to try to quarantine myself and get some rest. I also witnessed the creepy Big Brother powers of the internet. When I mentioned on Facebook how I always seem to want to watch Osmosis Jones when I have a particularly nasty head cold, I turned around to find a Real Doctor Reacts to Osmosis Jones video in my suggestion bar on YouTube. Yaaaaaaay....
Not nearly as bad as my co-worker who simply mentioned, verbally, about an item, only for said item to show up as a Facebook targeted ad. Whooo, cell phones listening in for internet companies!
Let's move away from the creepy uber-monitoring of our day-to-day lives though. But not TOO far away, because it nicely ties in with “Armada.”
With my head floating away all week, it was hard to really focus enough to write anything. I did add some words to “Prescription for Love” but I didn't quite hit my goal of having the story COMPLETED before the month was out. My updating once every three days – something I'll come back to – does seem to give me enough of a head-start, though. With my cold easing up quite a bit, I SHOULD be able to finish the story without disrupting or delaying my update schedule.
Back to “Armada” though. Since I couldn't really concentrate enough to write, I figured I'd try to read instead. It's now March, and I have yet to complete a professionally-written story. I've read fanfiction – which I'll comment on a little further down – but nothing professional. I completely slacked off in January because I was focused on “WovenHeartstrings” and February was much of the same between trying to get back on track with “One and the Same” and then derailing myself again with “Prescription for Love.”
I was sick. I was locking myself away in my room, or hiding from customers if I wasn't needed to help them. Why not use this time to finally catch up on my reading?
Guys. I'm trying, but I'm still kind of whatever about “Armada.” I still have little emotional investment in Zack, and even routinely forget that's the main character's name. Thankfully, he's addressed frequently enough that I'm reminded. Alternatively, I JUST got introduced to a character named Lex, and, frankly, I'm much more interested in her story. She seems so out-of-place even though she's supposed to be with her peers. I want to know why. Why is she getting drunk? Why is she a misfit among "her people"?
Since I've read “Ender's Game” before, and the book is even referenced a couple of times in the opening chapters of "Armada," a lot of the “big surprise” moments really.... weren't. I was expecting them, and was actually wondering what kept so long to get to them. The basic concept of the Armada game – and other such alien invasion games, movies, and TV shows – wasn't quite as sinister as I had expected, given the close ties to “Ender's Game,” so that was a nice switch-up, but still. It felt very predictable thus far. The biggest surprise to me, which, probably shouldn't have been, was who Zack's handler was. I knew they were involved in some form, I just didn't realize to what extent.
But now we're coming up on the actual alien invasion. Zack has a few internal questions about it, and these mysteries are setting me on edge. Because, if I'm right in what it all means, it kind of annoys me that all of these gamer characters aren't seeing the pattern just as quickly.
Now, this next part is going to be heavy on early Act II spoilers, but I'm only 190 pages within a 481-page novel. So, I don't know how “spoilery” this really is going to be for the story as a whole. Still, if you haven't read “Armada” yet, wish to, and don't want spoilers, feel free to scroll ahead a little bit.
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So, for the history of “Armada,” in the 1960s, a NASA satellite passed Jupiter's moon Europa, and discovered the surface of this icy moon covered in a giant swastika. Unsure what it all meant, they sent a probe to examine it further. As the probe penetrated the ice surface of the moon to better examine what could have caused the anomaly, it disappeared, only to later send off a signal stating that Earthlings had desecrated sacred land, and must be destroyed. The swastika then vanished from the surface of Europa. For the next forty years, the alien life on Europa – Europans – built up an armada to attack Earth. However, some of this build to total Earthling annihilation bugged Zack.
First, why wait 40 years? Why not take out the planet with a much smaller attack group, back when we were too technologically stunted to successfully fight back? Two, why build the armada above the surface of Europa, and in plain sight of our satellites, instead of under the frozen surface, which is where the Europans clearly lived? Third, why attack with spaceships instead of sending a few scout ships with a biological weapon or the like? Fourth: Humans are only now prepared to fight back, and that's because we were able to finally figure out how to reverse engineer technology taken off of scout ships sent to Earth decades ago. Why did the clearly technologically superior Europans even allow Humanity to have their tech, let alone leave us enough time to figure it out? The Europans didn't even start their armada's trek to Earth until after humans attempted an attack on Europa. It was almost like the Europans were waiting for proof that our technology was on par with theirs, at least, to some extent. Five: after 40 years of observing Europa and experimenting on the tech landed on Earth, humans know about their technology, and the drones they send to fight us, but we still have no clue the biology of the alien invaders. Finally, the Europan armada is coming in three, increasingly more difficult waves. The first wave has the basic forces and one “mothership,” as it were, and then, about three hours later, the second wave has slightly more advanced forces and two “motherships”, followed by the third wave with the most advanced forces and three “motherships.”
So now I'm sitting here going “Holy crow! It's a Tower Defense game! The knowledge of an invading force – along with a rough estimate of how large the force is - the allotted time to set up defenses and offenses, the invaders coming in waves of increasing difficulty, the “boss battles”: the Motherships. It all feels like a Tower Defense game.” I then wondered if the “twist” of the story will be that the Europans think THEY are playing a game the whole time. They have seen Earth's peace offerings of media, and somehow a tower defense-like game was included, so the Europans decide to “play.” They set up a false threat of total annihilation, since that's what happens in that style of game, and then they make sure we are prepared for the invasion by letting us know how many players are involved, and even send us some tech to use so it's a more even playing field. The Europans use drones instead of their actual populous, so it's not like they're endangering their own people by “playing.”
I swear, if it turns out that the Europans are playing offense on a Tower Defense game and NOT. A. SINGLE. CHARACTER. NOTICES. THIS? I'll probably literally throw the book across the room.
Come on, Ernest Cline, surprise me, here.
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OKAY! SPOILERS OVER NOW! YOU CAN START READING AGAIN IF YOU SKIPPED THE LAST PART!
Long story short? “Armada” just doesn't have the same magic to it – for me, at least – as “Ready Player One” did, and that might be why I'm not flipping through the pages quite as quickly. Same thing happened when I went through the Kane Chronicles books by Rick Riordan, and when I attempted to read “Atlas Shrugged” a couple of years back.Part of me gets why so many people are turning from professionally published stories, and turning towards fanfiction for most of their reading entertainment. I find myself unintentionally doing the same thing. First of all, you know the world and/or the characters already. You know you enjoy them. Secondly, the episodic nature of chapters being publicly posted one-by-one makes them less daunting to read, and adds excitement when you see a story you follow updated. I can only think of three real downsides: (1) it's not professionally edited, so you do have to weed through stories that could have been improved with a nice polish, (2) episodic chapter updates may disengage the reader, depending on how long it takes to update the story, because the reader may forget what happened in the chapter(s) before the update, and (3) the author may abandon the project.
I've lucked out, and only stumbled upon one or two “Hey, Arnold!” stories that were abandoned, and the only “abandoned” Miraculous story I read was TaurusPixie's “Immortal Bond,” but that was because the plot wasn't working as-is, so she's starting it over from scratch. I'll read the completed story eventually.
Speaking of reading fanfiction, a story I follow updated this week, so I did sneak that in along with my “Armada” readings.
The story started off as a one-shot, but then she enjoyed the story she created, and she got enough love for her one-shot, that she decided to continue. It's an “Enemy AU,” which usually translates to an Alternate Universe where Cat Noir is on Hawk Moth's side and battles against Ladybug. One of the first ML fanfics I read – "Curiosity andSatisfaction" by imthepunchlord – was an Enemy AU. If you find the right author, the Enemy AU is very intriguing; seeing how Adrien and Marinette interact when they're enemies instead of allies.
Anyway, Discordant Sonata is up to 4 chapters. There was a content warning in the latest chapter, however. So if you are triggered by claustrophobia and/or a character dealing with a panic attack, maybe you should skip this chapter....
Otherwise, go read it. I am really enjoying this story, and cannot wait for more. Fair warning before any new readers get into Eden's work, though. She's a busy mother who focuses on her artwork, so there could be a month or two wait between updates. Please do not harass her if you don't think she's updating regularly enough.
Oh, and speaking of "Enemy AU" fanfics, while it's not QUIIIIIIITE the same, HariWrites has that Con-man/Thief AU story I talked about last year: "Mr. Lucky and the Cat." It was a really good read. I highly suggest you check it out. However, you only have until March 31st, 2019 to do so. She just posted, as a tag-on chapter, that she's planning on reworking and publishing the story. So she is going to take it off of AO3 by the end of the month. Luckily, AO3 allows for downloads. So go snag it now while you can!
As for my own story, well, I have three chapters of “Prescription for Love” up. The chapters are short, so the whole story thus far is only 3700+ words long. I had chapters of “Peeping Tomcat” longer than that. Much longer than that. About three times longer....
I write long chapters...
This time, though! This time I have little bite-sized ones. Chapter 1 was only about 1000 words, chapter 2 was about 1100, and chapter 3 just passed 1500.
AAAAACTUALLY.... Funny thing about the latest chapter. I had been writing down how many words each section was after I wrote it. By the time I finished the sixth chapter, which should be the last one told from Kagami's perspective, the word count was Adrien: 4929, Kagami: 4982. So, without even meaning to, I had both characters have almost identical amount of page-time. Adrien was then going to blow Kagami out of the water as he finished up the story, adding roughly another 1000 words to his count, but the story was originally going to be his, so it seemed fitting.
Then, Sunday evening, as I hid away to polish up the third chapter to post, I realized it didn't really work.
As a transitional scene, it wasn't all that bad. As a chapter, though? Nothing happened. There was no action, no agency. Adrien returned from the akuma attack, noted how strange it was that his father was in a bathroom for over an hour, realized that it appeared he was in the bathroom for just as long, attempted and failed to have an engaging conversation with Kagami, and listened to music.
I needed more. This would have been the only chapter that didn't focus on the “love letter” Adrien got from Marinette, so that needed to be fixed at the very least. Another 500 words - and an hour - later, and I was satisfied with the chapter finally. So much for Kagami having almost even page-time with Adrien, though. Buuuut, I haven't edited the next chapters yet, so who knows?
In the meantime, here are the next two chapters.
"Chapter 2"
"Chapter 3"
Chapter 4 of PfL will be live sometime tomorrow evening.
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| Not my best work, I know. This is why I'm not a cover artist. I need to find the magic I had for PT when I create the cover for OatS.... |
On FFN, I've had 7 reviews from 4 different readers. On AO3, I've had one reviewer, but they've reviewed all three chapters so far. The posting on FFN has had 14 faves and 15 follows, whereas on AO3, it has had 46 kudos and 5 bookmarks.
Like I said: moderate success.
To be honest, considering how far past the episode my story is dragging, and how it is directly tied to an episode, I'm surprised I'm getting even that much love. So, if you're one of those readers, thank you.
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| Hacker Girl Facebook sticker by Birdman, Inc |
I really need to remember to sample some of the work though..... I keep forgetting that bit.
Oh! Another cool thing about Tumblr, which kind of relates to those likes and views? I garnered another 7 new followers this week. Which means I'm now at over 100 followers! Barely a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things, but it's an exciting milestone to me.
Remember, I mostly reblog stuff. I rarely post anything original. I even started up a tag - LycoRogue Original - to help filter out the few bits I actually ADD to the site. It's mostly promos for my stories and this blog.
Point being, having 100 people follow me, and only have about six of them be IRL friends? That's super cool to me. So, if you're a follower, thanks. Makes me feel special.
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| Hacker Girl Facebook sticker by Birdman, Inc. |
That's just my personal philosophy though.
My point being, that reading through these files meant reading through what I have so far for OatS. And it restarted my drive to really get this story done. It's been delayed so many times, and it looks like my derailment in both January and February has pushed back the release once more. Probably looking at a June/July release now, unless I can make magic happen during April's Camp NaNoWriMo. Still, if you have been waiting for this story, know that I haven't abandoned the idea. I still absolutely want to write it. I just need to stop working on other plot-bunnies in the meantime....
Speaking of, I still need to finish PfL and edit the next chapter for tomorrow. So I should jet. Catch you next week!
Oh, and happy Donut Day/Fat Tuesday/Faschnaut Day/Shrove Tuesday/etc....
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| Homer Simpson from "The Simpsons" created by Matt Groening |
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