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!

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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.

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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.

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Archive of Our Own

07 Jun 2012

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

  1. Going through and manually pruning the tags seems like a pain-in-the-ass job and I want to spare the AO3 staff trouble where I can
  2. I want people to be able to find my fanfic and I don’t know how long it takes for the tags to be grouped up
  3. Plus, since it’s done manually, I don’t want my tags to fall through the cracks and never get joined up with the other Neph/Ami fics or something
  4. And I guess it’s just as well that it get tagged under that, even if it’s a Silver Millennium fic, for the same reason that I used their modern Japanese names in the fic in the first placr—people know what I’m talking about that way.

I’m just an obsessive, compulsive, nitpicky perfectionist. Can’t help it. 

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Fanfiction.net rage

04 Apr 2012

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.

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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… :'(

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It’s almost time

02 Apr 2012

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. 🙂

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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.

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Hey, an update

26 Sep 2011

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. 🙂

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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 🙂

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