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.

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.

So I’ve come to a sort of random realization: I can’t write “Guardians” unless my sister is here.

You may have noticed that I’ve only ever updated it during the summer, and I finally realized it’s because that’s the only time we are both living in the same town for an extended period of time, i.e. the only time I have time to write while she is also here. I’ve written several scattered scenes for chapter 7 over the past few weeks, but I keep hitting a road block in the form of, “Oh, I don’t know if this makes sense, I need to ask Lizzie,” or, “Do you think this is dumb? I wish Lizzie was here to help me.”

But she’ll be home in two weeks so I figured I’ll just hold off until she gets here and can help me figure out how to tie everything together in chapter 7.

In the meantime, I’ve had an idea floating around in my head for another short PGSM story recently, and with Three Weeks for Dreamwidth coming up in a few days, I thought this might be a good way to get involved. I’ll be sure to post here if I decide to go forward with it 🙂

Yes, yes, I know, I suck. Almost six months since I updated here, let alone updating my fanfics. And the thing that really gets me is that I legitimately thought this time I was going to get a chapter of “Guardians” out in a reasonable amount of time! I totally freaking outlined chapter 7 AND chapter 8, I had story notes coming out the wazoo, and I was super excited about writing it, I couldn’t wait to buckle down and get to it.

But you see, in late August/early September this little thing called Monster High happened. If you don’t know, MH is a new doll line put out by Mattel that has an accompanying cartoon as well as some novels… and they hooked me HARD. For like 3 or 4 months, all I could think of was Monster High. This wasn’t really a writing fandom, but those dolls… you don’t understand. I was spending like every hour of the day posing them and taking pictures. You don’t understand how cute these dolls are. Anyway, I tried to write, but all I could think of was MONSTER HIGH OMG GOTTA CATCH COLLECT ‘EM ALL, and I thought, “You know what? To heck with it. I have fandom commitment issues like no one would believe. In a few months, I’ll be sick of MH and I can go back to PGSM.”

And guess what? A few months have passed and I’m sick of Monster High. Do I know myself or what?

Anyway, so this means that barring any major catastrophes (which seem to happen frequently in my household, unfortunately), I should be able to get back to writing next week or so, after the season finale for House of Anubis has aired and that fandom takes a break from consuming my every waking thought (see what I mean about commitment issues? As an aside, have you SEEN that show? It’s like crack!! I know of no one who has seen it who has not devoured it like potato chips and then demanded moar).

Thank you all, as always, for being patient with me. I hope that the new chapter of “Guardians” will be worth the wait. 🙂

I always re-read my previous chapters before I start a new one, so I’m not really sure how this happened…

In chapter 5 of GotE&M, I had Nephrite tell Ami not to tell anyone that they were looking for the stuff about the feud. This is because originally, they were going to find all that stuff on their own. Why? Because I started writing this thing in 2004 when I was 18-19 and what do you mean there are other characters in this series who should be included?? Back in those days, I wrote romance and if it didn’t have to do with the romance, then why even bother with it? That’s why Rei and Makoto were like… barely in it. That’s also why, in the original outline of the story, Luna and Artemis were not going to be in the story. At all. I couldn’t figure out how to include them, and as far as I was concerned, they weren’t necessary.

Fast-forward to 2010, I’m still working on this thing and I’ve reached the point where I’m out of the material from 2004. I had written like 5 pages of chapter 6 back in 2004 and I stopped because I was really stumped and didn’t like where it was going. There’s a good reason for this: it was crap. It just took 6 years of maturing as a writer and as a person for me to figure that out. I’d been stuck at a road block on that chapter, and when I finally got past that, the chapter went in a really different direction than what I would have written in 2004.

Nowadays, I still like romance, but in moderation–I’m not going to be writing a story that’s just like “I LUFF U, LET’S MAKE OUT” anymore (I’ll leave that to Stephenie Meyer). Thus, GotE&M isn’t just the story of Nephrite and Ami’s twu twu wuv (and later down the line, Zoisite and Minako’s… spoiler? XD) anymore… I want it to be the full story of what happened in the Silver Millennium, one that can explain how everything that happened in PGSM came to be. Yes, Ami’s relationship with Nephrite (and Kunzite) has a lot to do with it, and I hope that when you see more of Zoisite and Minako’s relationship, you might understand why they act the way they do in PGSM. But there’s a lot more to it than that. I think it’s important to see how Serenity transformed from the sweet girl we see in the PGSM flashbacks (and the one we’ve seen in GotE&M so far) into the tough bitch Princess Sailor Moon was. We need to understand how Luna and Artemis figure into this, and how they become who they were in PGSM. And we need to understand the relationship between the Silver Crystal, Metallia, and Serenity/Usagi. These are all things that I want to cover in GotE&M. So the story has evolved, and this is just part of the reason chapter 6 had to change.

I also realized that it just didn’t make sense for Ami to be the only character driving the story just because “I liked her best” back in 2004 (P.S. funnily enough, she’s not my favorite character anymore, so now I look back on my old stuff and think, “Why did I use her so much?!”). And there are other things that matter in Ami’s life besides her ~luv~ for Nephrite, other people who are just as important. After getting older, having real relationships and seeing other girls doing so as well made me realize that your boyfriend is not, and shouldn’t be, your life. Ami has a great group of friends in the Senshi, and that needs to be a factor in stories about her. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense for Ami to want to include Makoto, her closest friend after Usagi, in the search. So that’s what I did.

I’m personally very happy with the way it went, but it does create a plot hole between chapters 5 and 6. This really is the downside of fanfiction as opposed to writing, for example, a novel that no one but your editor sees until it’s finished– with fanfiction, it’s “publish as you go.” This is why on most of my newer fanfics, I have been waiting to upload until it’s completely finished, so if I have to make revisions, I can without creating problems. But in GotE&M’s case, it’s too late for that.

So the question now is, “Just leave it? Or revise chapter 5?” I’m planning on going for the revision (I have typos I want to fix, anyway). But for those of you who have already read it… sorry for the plot holes. XD

Finally, chapter 6 of “Guardians of the Earth and the Moon” has been published.  This chapter went through a lot of evolution, which is a large part of the reason it took so long to write/publish (that, and the fact that I’m easily distracted XD). You see, I started writing this fic back in 2004, but it was all on binder paper… so I had to type it, which is why it took me so long to get even this far. Chapter 5 was the last chapter I’d written back then. From Chapter 6 on, all content is brand-spanking new.

Because of the amount of time that’s passed since I wrote the first five chapters, you might see a slight difference in style between chapter 5 and chapter 6. I’m hoping it’s not too bad (my sister betas for me and she didn’t think it was a drastic departure from the previous chapters; it could be that I’m being overly critical XD).

This chapter also went through a lot of revision as I came up with new ideas to tie in more aspects of the PGSM timeline, as well as ways to give the characters more depth and backstory. Hopefully you will enjoy these additions. Here are some notes I had regarding this chapter that I hope will answer any questions you might have (here there be spoilers):

• This chapter goes into Princess Serenity’s backstory much more. I wanted to find a way to explain why Serenity is still a princess (not queen) if her mother is not present. The most logical explanation for this something that has occurred throughout history: a regency. Serenity is ruling with the help of advisors such as Egeria and others until she comes of age. In this story, Serenity is 18 and will become queen when she’s 20… that may seem old, but there’s a reason for it which will soon be explained, and it has to do with the Crystal.
• Speaking of Serenity, we see a harsher side to the Princess in this chapter. This ties into what we see in PGSM: she looks so sweet in the flashbacks, and yet she’s so cold as Princess Sailor Moon. Serenity’s under a lot of strain right now because her heart is telling her one thing, but everyone else is telling her something else; but there’s more to it than that. We’ll be seeing more of this evolution of her character, as well as the reasons behind it, in chapters to come.
• The Ethereals are probably my favorite addition in this chapter, so I hope they’re not too “WTF” for everyone else. 😛 I had been trying to think of a way to include Luna and Artemis, but was having trouble  figuring out how to incorporate talking cat plushies. My solution to this six years ago was to just ignore them. XD But then I recently came up with the idea to make them shape-shifters… I won’t give you more details than that and what Serenity explains about them within the chapter, since I don’t want to spoil you. But I’m looking forward to introducing Luna and Artemis and revealing more about the Ethereals, who will be playing an important role in the story in the future.
• I reference a lot of Greek and Roman mythology in this chapter, although I use the names loosely (a lot like Naoko Takeuchi’s borrowing of Selene and Endymion for her own story, heh heh). For example, Egeria’s name (and character) is based on Roman mythology. According to legend, a nymph by that name was the wife of the second king of Rome, and she was also his chief political advisor. Many of the laws and traditions in ancient Rome were begun by Egeria. It’s only fitting that Serenity should such a strong political leader as her advisor! I had a fun time coming up with this character, although I don’t think she’ll be playing a very big role in the story.Other mythological names in this chapter: Deukalion is actually the name of one of Endymion’s ancestors. The names of the months are based on the Athenian lunar calendar. Hestia is the Greek goddess of the hearth (tying in with how “Mariel” means of the sea [although that’s a Dutch name], I thought the princess of Mars should have a name that tied to her powers as well).

I think that’s it… if you have any questions about the chapter you’d like me to answer, feel free to post them here! ♥

Tags: Guardians Chapter Notes