No, I’m not dead.
Yes, I am still writing “Guardians.”
No, I don’t know when the next chapter will be ready. Dear God, I hope it’s soon. 
The good news is that I finally fixed the font on here so it’s not permanently italic anymore. It’s been driving me nuts for years.
No, that has nothing to do with my fanfics. I suck.
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. 
ORIONSpeaking of Orion, the ten-year anniversary of the release of Atlantis is this Friday. FOR REAL. My first fandom/fansite/fanfiction! There are a variety of activities tying into the anniversary that you can learn more about here. I would like to do some more stuff with my A:TLE fanfiction universe…
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!
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 🙂
Okay, so I made the name changes for the story, and then I thought I might go through and make some revisions and… no. No, no, no, no. That fic is just too stupid. It is too stupid to exist. I mean, aside from everything else, my absolutely clueless approach to life in the early 20th century… the way I clearly assumed that schooling in 1902 was the same as it is now (4 years of high school, 4 years of college), not to mention the commonplace presence of phones in rural New York?! (It didn’t help matters that in the movie itself, there was Mrs. Packard jabbering on the phone to her friend Marge… from the submarine… in 1918. I’m so sure.)
I couldn’t bear to read it. It’s so embarrassing. I just used auto-replace to fix the names and shoved it up. I really kind of want to take it down, but there are actually people on Fanfiction.net that like it (how??!?!) and so I’d feel bad doing that… I’ll just shove it under the carpet and try to pretend it doesn’t exist. ;_;
When I think about myself and the kind of person I was and the kind of writing I produced in high school… it kind of makes me sick. Can I get a do-over?
Let me tell you a tale of one of my REALLY old fanfics.
So, today I was on DeviantART and I stumbled across a fanart of Milo Thatch and Lisa McGrath from Atlantis. You may not know that in the A:TLE canon, although this was not mentioned in the movie itself (but it is brought up in several of the tie-in books and on the DVD), Milo was apparently involved with some girl named Lisa McGrath back in the day.
IKR? Milo had a girlfriend (besides Kida, that is). I can’t wrap my brain around it.
Anyway, waaaaaay back ten years ago, I was writing a fanfic called “Tales From Atlantis” that was about Milo and Kida before the movie, like the Tales From Agrabah book about Aladdin and Jasmine. I did actually write a Milo-got-his-heart-broken-in-college chapter, completely clueless that apparently that was also the case in canon (thus, the girl had a different name). Then a friend told me about the canon girl, and what her name was.
And I promptly went batshit crazy, because my name is Lisa. This was very distressing to me. How could I write about “Lisa” breaking Milo’s heart, that’s like writing about myself! I would never break Milo’s heart! I’d also never date him in the first place, but that’s not the point. I couldn’t do it.
Well, now ten years have passed, and I’m looking back thinking, “Geez, Lisa, you can’t screw with canon like that! Just get in there and change her freaking name!”
So that’s what I’m doing right now. But can I just say, writing a story where a character has your name but is not you is totally freaking bizarre?! I have never done it before. I don’t know how Jane Austen managed it. Every time I see it I’m like, “Wait, what? Me? What?”
It doesn’t help matters that my name is fairly uncommon. I’ve only met maybe two or three girls with the same name as me in my entire life. I was only actually friends with one of them. Likewise, I very rarely come across my name in fiction, either. So whenever I hear my name or see it in print, I’m like,
Nevertheless, I shall press on.
I just had the immense pleasure of reading an absolutely fantastic fanfic. It was called The Secret Key to the Meidou-seki, for the Inuyasha fandom. You may or may not know that for many years I’ve been an enormous fan of the Sesshomaru and Kagura pairing (I’m even the maintainer of the Livejournal community, which is how I came across this fic in the first place), a semi-canon (think Neph/Ami) pairing that ends pretty tragically in the series; but, being Inuyasha, a series where death doesn’t really spell the end very often, there’s always a lot of room to plausibly resurrect characters in fanon. This fic does just that in an exemplary fashion, because it was completely believable– it didn’t read like a work of fanfiction. It read like Rumiko Takahashi (artist/writer of Inuyasha) said, “I think I will draw a short epilogue story for Sesshomaru,” and then someone with master skills then transcribed that comic into amazing descriptive prose. I totally believed every line, so much that I feel like my mind has now accepted this as truth, and I feel like when The Final Act fiiiiinally comes out on DVD here and I see it, at the end I will say, “And then this happened,” and I will be so very very happy.
And this is what leads to my point: what I love about fanfiction is when you stumble across those rare really good ones that fill in a gap in your universe so well that you mentally consider it canon. This has happened to me only a handful of times, but each ones has been worth the search. For example, A New Era, a fanfic for The Oracle Prophecies book series, wraps up the Seth/Mirany plotline so incredibly perfectly, with writing so perfectly spot-on to Catherine Fisher’s style that it feels like Catherine herself wrote it. I’ve read a lot of really good Seth/Mirany fanfics (well, there’s only like 10 total, but they were all good), but that one has been entered into my mental canon.
And when I find a fanfic like this, it’s amazing how it can change my feelings about series. Now I’m overcome with this urge to re-watch Inuyasha, and I feel like I’ll see the ending in a whole new light.
This is the kind of feeling I hope my PGSM fanfics (particularly the newer ones, like “After the End” and “Reunion”) might give to someone, anyone, when they read them. Because I realized recently that just because certain things (like the fates of the Shitennou, or the true story of the past life) weren’t spelled out clearly in the series itself, it’s not cause for distress. Those gaps in the series are what allowed me to invent the stories that I hold most dear. Especially “Guardians.” I know it’s taking me a very long time to finish this fanfic, but the story that I have in my head is so real, it to me is my mental canon. It’s just as true to me as the PGSM episodes themselves. If you’re patient with me while I take the time to tell the story, I hope that maybe by the end, it could become your mental canon, too. 🙂