Welcome to “Sailor Wings,” my fanfiction blog. Here you can find notes, explanations, and rambles pertaining to my fanfictions published under the penname SailorDonut. If you’d like to know a little more about this blog, please click here. Enjoy your stay!
Well, after a couple years of thinking about it, I’ve decided to go for it and share with all of you my Professional Author Identity™! This is because… the last book in my sci-fi trilogy releases today! While I’ve written a number of other books under two pen names, this series is the number one series of my heart, and that’s because it incorporates so many elements of fandom I love. First and foremost is Atlantis, which should be apparent just by looking at the covers of the books.
But there are also elements of PGSM (particularly in the couple of Henry and Tamara, who are drawn a lot from my take on Zoisite and Minako in my PGSM fics), and a lot of Final Fantasy X/X-2 as well. You can hear about some of my fandom inspiration for the series on this episode of the Jewel Riders Archive podcast I did last year alongside my sister, who also transitioned from writing fanfics to writing books:
Maybe I can’t manage to finish one measly PGSM fanfic, but I did manage to finish a three-book-plus-one-novella series that spans 1500 pages, and I’m darn proud of it! If you’d like to check the series out, you can do so here.
For now, I’m going to take a break and see where the inspiration strikes next. Maybe 2024 will be the year I go back and finish some fanfics! It will be (oh god) the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of “Guardians of the Earth and the Moon” next year (the 20th anniversary of the show’s debut was a couple weeks ago! Can you believe it??), so maybe it will be the time to finally put that story to bed!
I know it’s been a long time! I haven’t actually gone anywhere, but I also didn’t really know where to tell people what I’ve been up to. And then I remembered the existence of this blog! 😂 This is actually the perfect place for me to leave this note, so that’s what I’m doing.
So, even though the last prose fanfic I wrote was apparently back in 2012, I was working on fanfic for most of 2013 and 2014 in the form of Freaky Gone Fabulous, a Monster High comic. I really, really love that story. I love how the comic panels look, I love what part of the story I’ve already told, I love the scripts I’ve already written. I absolutely do not want to leave it abandoned. I want so badly to go back to it.
But a bunch of junk in my life really just conspired against me. I developed a seizure disorder, and sudden chronic pain that made doing things like bending over the tables I had the dolls set up on to photograph them really painful. I also had been using the woods behind my house as scenery for a lot of the panels, and then the woods were sold to a developer who turned it into a housing development, and that sucked and stressed me out, which exacerbated the health problems, and yadda yadda.
Anyway, that’s really not the only issue with continuing both the webcomic and with, you know, ever finishing “Guardians of the Earth and the Moon.” Because I had the bright idea of writing a book, and that book wound up getting published, and suddenly it’s been, like, what? Six-and-a-half years? And I’ve got two pen names and writing books has eaten all my time. I think if I wasn’t sick I could manage to juggle both, but trying to manage both writing novels and writing fanfic/taking pics and doing the Photoshopping for the web comic while simultaneously being chronically ill has just proven to not be doable. I can’t even write more than one freaking book in a year if I’m lucky.
(Part of me wants to tell you about my books, and part of me feels weird about connecting my fandom identity with my… “professional”…? identity. I mean, I haven’t exactly been secretive about the fact that I’m into fandom. It probably wouldn’t be hard to figure out if you knew what to look for. But I just feel like I’m doxxing myself. Maybe someday I’ll just go for it, though. My first book was based on Atlantis and the second one has a couple that absorbed all the feels from my ZoiMina fics, so it does have some crossover appeal here. 😂)
Last summer after I finished a novel, I thought I would take a break and finish “Guardians of the Earth and the Moon.” It only had four chapters left according to my outline—that wouldn’t take that long, right? I mean, it’s a fanfic. I figured it was probably like a third of the length of one of my novels, that would be easy. I could whip those four chapters out in a couple weeks and be done with it.
Then I managed to get the whole fanfic together (good God, I wrote fanfics in separate documents for each chapter, what in the actual) and looked at the word count and then started sobbing because it already was longer than every single one of the books that I’ve written on my romance pen name and it’s not even done!
(I write longer books on my SFF pen name, but come on, this is a freaking fanfic, it shouldn’t be 300+ bound pages wtf.)
(And it’s only eight chapters long! How can I possibly have spread 50,000+ words over eight freaking chapters??)
Anyway, I was plunged into such despair that I didn’t even reread it. But I will someday. I really, really don’t want to leave these unfinished fics out there. I may not wind up writing any more once I get Guardians and FGF finished, but I at least want to end my fic career with no unfinished fics.
And probably then I’ll tell you all my pen name(s) and you can look for all the PGSM and Atlantis references in my books. There are a lot.
This is probably the raciest thing you will ever get out of me. I was so scandalized with myself when I wrote it, and I thought, “Oh dear, I should probably rate this M.” Then I went and read some other M-rated fics to compare and lololololololol I am such a prude. Oh my goodness.
Anyway. I thought I would play around with Akumi‘s personality in this one. After many (many many) rewatches, I started to wonder if—even though she claimed to remember everything in Act 21—if Akumi might have had some false memories embedded in her to make her think that she was the original/dominant personality, that she had always been Ami and that other girl who kept trying to invade her mind was some kind of hostile invader. Hence, she is fighting to retain her identity the same way Shiroi did in A Melody to Forget; but inversely, because this time, it’s the Dark Kingdom personality who is fighting against the True personality.
Just something fun I thought I’d try.
Anyway, I’ve been wanting to write something like this for at least 5 years now, but it never turned out right before today (you know, the day I sat down to write the next chapter of “Guardians” and somehow this came out instead). I take some kind of sadistic pleasure in playing with Kunzite’s unrequited love, and setting him up only to be let down instead.
I PROMISE I have something nice for him in the future, though. I just have to finish “Guardians” first, because there’s no way I can write the Something Nice for Kunzite story without obnoxiously spoiling the end of “Guardians.” Just four more chapters, just four more chapters…
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:
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…
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.
Tags: melody to forget
Back at the beginning of April, I requested an AO3 invite code, and it came through today! Yay! So you can now find me on Archive of Our Own.
I think I’m getting the hang of the site for the most part, although I am still having trouble with the tags. I had an easy enough time tagging my other fics, but when it came to Guardians, I hit a roadblock. See, the way the suggested tags are set up, it should be, for example, “Mizuno Ami | Sailor Mercury/Nephrite.” I didn’t really like that for Guardians because she’s not really Ami Mizuno. I do call her “Ami” because we were never given names for the Silver Millennium Guardians, and I thought using their Japanese names would make them more identifiable than if I made names up. But even though it was done out of necessity, I’m still not really happy with it because it would make more sense for them to have different names, like Serenity and Endymion.
So when it came to tagging, I kind of just wanted to say, “Sailor Mercury/Nephrite” because that leaves it ambiguous. But when I tagged that, it said it wasn’t an active tag. So I changed the tag to be “Mizuno Ami | Sailor Mercury/Nephrite,” but then I saw when I clicked on it that there are some fics, that pop up under that, that are tagged “Nephrite/Ami.” I guess AO3 staff goes through and groups up all the tags? But I kind of want to avoid that and just go with the pre-established tags, because
I’m just an obsessive, compulsive, nitpicky perfectionist. Can’t help it.
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. 🙂