Okay, I have officially learned my lesson about posting unfinished fanfics. I mean, I had already learned it (you’ll notice Guardians is my only incomplete fanfic online, although I have plenty laying around in binders in my room), but working on Guardians has really cemented it. I don’t know how anyone can do it. I find myself wanting to go in certain directions, but I feel boxed in by the things I’ve already written and published online. Now I find myself not sure what to do. All I can think is that I need to just go in the direction that the story is taking me and hope it doesn’t jump the shark too much for the readers.

The thing about a real book is that you write it all in one go. Obviously a series of books is one thing, but at least if it’s a single novel, you can go back and make revisions before the world sees it. But since this one is already out there, there’s nothing I can do. I can go back and redo some of the previous chapters to make them more cohesive once I’m done, but that’s only going to benefit new readers or people who are willing to re-read.

I know it’s just a fanfic, but to me, this is kind of my life’s work. I’ve been working on it since 2004, that’s 8 years of my life that I’ve been working on it pretty consistently. I want it to be perfect, you know? It’s very frustrating.

Part 1 of these rambly notes can be found here. Explanation of the names I use for the Shitennou’s human names is here.

The premise of this story was suggested to me by my sister when we rewatched Act 35 recently. It actually was based on a two-part question:

1. How does Zoisite know that the music box won’t work if your heart is guarded?
2. What does Minako mean by, “I also know how it feels to forget“?*

I realize that this fic is a lot darker and more angsty than most of my other fics. As my sister would say, sorry ’bout it. I’d blame it on the fact that we just marathon-watched Hana Yori Dango, which has a tendency to bring out the melodramatic; but I think the nature of this premise just kind of lends itself to the darker angst anyway. Just… blame it on my sister, either way 

Some things that you might be wondering about in general…

Keep reading…

Tags: melody to forget

This actually got really lengthy, so I’m splitting these notes into two parts. This part kind of meandered into general theorizing about PGSM and its characters. For the second part, which addresses a few specific points from the story, click here.

I wanted to use this story to explore what kind of lives the Shitennou might have led before Beryl possessed them (this is following up on the premise I started with in “First Sight,” which is that all the Shitennou were like Shin—regular humans who were possessed by Beryl and lost their memories). I kind of build here on my own headcanon that the personalities of the Shitennou who served Beryl were a meshing of their past life and their modern personalities. The mileage on this, of course, varies from general to general.

Keep reading…

Tags: melody to forget

Is it normal for it to take hours upon hours for a new chapter of a fanfic to appear on the site? I added a new chapter to “Guardians of the Earth and the Moon” this morning at around 11:00. It is now 7:30 PM and even though it sent out the “new chapter” email to everyone, the chapter still isn’t appearing on any of my browsers, and it still says the fic was last updated on June 23, 2010. Between this and PGSM Fanfiction going down, I’m really full of rage right now. It took me almost two years to write this chapter and now I can’t even get it posted on the internet.

EDIT: I wound up deleting the chapter and re-uploading it, and that seems to have done the trick.  The chapter is now live here.

So, after such a ludicrous amount of time, chapter 7 is finally done and uploaded. Yaay! You can check it out here.

Lots of things change in this chapter. First of all, we finally meet Luna and Artemis! I hope you like them and that the Ethereal concept works for you like it works in my mind. 😉

Also, I know I’ve said it before, but I hope you’re picturing Beryl as Mio right now.  That’s how I picture her in my mind. In fact, it’s been really hard for me writing this because I almost type “Mio” instead of “Beryl” almost every single sentence, lol.

I actually don’t have a lot of notes for this chapter. Everything seems self-explanatory, to me at least. I’ve spent the last two years obsessively thinking it over, though, so maybe that’s just me.  If you have any questions about the chapter, please comment here or on the chapter reviews on FF.net.

In other, depressing news, it seems PGSM-Fanfiction is gone! I went to add the chapter there and it’s just… gone. So is Kirari-PGSM.net. I’m really upset about this. First of all, I loved adding my stories to that site, and having a PGSM-only resource available. I used it frequently, but not as much as I wanted to—now that I have a smart phone and an eReader, I was hoping to read more there and make use of its ePub feature. Also, on a more personal note, I don’t think I backed up all my reviews from the site, and now they’re gone. So I’m really hoping that the site may make a reappearance… :'(

Tags: Guardians Chapter Notes

Barring all major catastrophes, the new chapter of Guardians should be up by the end of this week. I have about 4 more scenes to write, then type, then proof. Then it will be done! 😀

In the meantime, how many years have I been using WordPress? And I just now figured out how to add RSS to the sidebar. People kept saying it was built in to WordPress, but damned if I could find it, lol. So you can now access the feed to this blog and keep up with my updates here to know when to expect chapters (and read the oh-so-exciting author’s notes about them ). I already set up feeds on Dreamwidth (sailorwings_feed) and LiveJournal (sailorwings), so you can add them there if you’re so inclined. 🙂

I know I’ve said this before, but the thing that sucks about fanfiction is that, since you publish as you go, if you think of something you want to change later, you really can’t :-/ I guess if you waited until the whole thing was done to publish it (which is what I originally planned to do with “Guardians”), that would work… but on the other hand, part of what keeps me writing is getting feedback from others and knowing they are waiting to read it. Plus, some reviews have helped me polish my work, remember to include other characters who don’t feature as prominently in the plot, etc. Meh.

P.S. yes, this does mean I’m working on “Guardians.” I’m sorry chapter 7 is taking me longer than I said it would; over the summer I got really sick and then right afterward I started a new job that’s been quite time consuming. I wrote a lot last night and I’m working on more as we speak, though, so hopefully I will post an update soon. 🙂

So, last night I outlined the rest of “Guardians.” At first I was like, “Oh, wow, I guess I’m closer to being done than I thought!” Then I started dividing the outline into chapters and realized that I have about six chapters left (providing nothing changes as I write), meaning that I’m exactly halfway done.

Hopefully, it will take me less time to write the next six chapters than it did for me to write the first six.

The fanfic and these notes were originally posted on Dreamwidth in April.

I got the idea for this story after rewatching Act Zero recently. I’ve always been of the opinion that the Shitennou were reborn as humans like the Senshi, and that Beryl brainwashed them and brought them to the Dark Kingdom. This makes sense, based on what we see of Kunzite in Act 14, not to mention what happens to Nephrite in the second half of the series.

(Maybe this isn’t even up for debate? I haven’t read the manga yet [September!], but I’ve never seen anything really definitive about this in the fandom, so I’m assuming this is just speculation.)

Anyway, so I thought it might be fun to imagine what kind of life Zoisite might have been living before Beryl captured him. I chose not to name him in this one… I thought about using Shiroi Zero like I have in other fics, but then I thought, “If Minako learns his name now, then wouldn’t she recognize it in Reunion?” So I just decided to leave it a mystery.

I also wanted to play with the idea that PGSM gave us about everyone having different personalities in the present than in the past life. Throughout the series, some of these were more obvious (Princess Sailor Moon vs. Usagi comes to mind), but others were more subtle. And then there’s Minako and Zoisite, who both completely surrendered themselves to their past life identities when their memories reawakened. We at least got to see a little bit of Minako’s present-life identity in Act Zero (goofy, ditzy, cutesy), but we don’t know what Zoisite was like before his memories reawakened. The boy we meet in this story believes strongly in pursuing things that make you happy; of course, when he remembers the past life and his mission, he is forced to leave all that behind, just as Minako becomes very grave and serious when her memories return. But I’d like to believe that, once Metallia was destroyed and the ties to the past life were broken, Minako and Zoisite might be able to go back to the lives we see here in this fic. ♥

Like I mentioned in my last entry, I have written a new PGSM fanfic for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth. This one is a modern-day Zoi/Mina story, but it’s different than any of my other stories in that it takes place before the start of PGSM (well, except Act Zero, of course). I hope you will check it out! You can find it here: http://jeweledeyes.dreamwidth.org/527718.html

After three weeks have passed, I will be uploading it to Fanfiction.net and PGSM Fanfiction (I’ll post the story notes here when that time comes), but for the time being this story will only be available at my Dreamwidth. I hope you will head over there and check it out!