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.