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. 🙂

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

I figured it’s been awhile since I gave an update on what I’ve been up to recently, so I thought I would… do so. Uhh…

Lisa need brain for smart making.

I’m kind of stuck on Guardians right now. I’m not really sure what to do next. Well, I know ~in general where it’s going, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to start the next chapter, what all to include in it, etc. This has happened before so I’m not terribly concerned. I feel confident that it will come to me when the time is right. It’s like how, with chapter 6, I kept trying to force myself to work on it, but it never felt right; then one day, inspiration struck, and I’m really happy with the final product. So I’ll just wait for that to happen again with chapter 7. This probably isn’t terribly reassuring for my readers, but, you know. It will happen when it happens. XD

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about other projects. For like… 3 years (headdesk)… I’ve been working on a Dark Ace/Cyclonis fic on and off. I feel like the day that it will be complete is soon approaching… mwahaha. It’s an origin fic that I started on long, LONG before the “Origins” episode aired. I mean, I started on it like after episode 6 aired lmao. So it’s going to be VERY different from the actual “Origins” story, but I like it and I think Darklonis fans will like it, too, and will be willing to forgive the alternate reality of it all. Expect lengthy, lengthy notes to go along with it when I finally post it, because I have a lot to say about this one.

I also started working on something really random the other day. If it makes it further than the scribblings phase, I’ll update you.

I’m re-reading the Oracle Prophecies so we’ll see if that Sethany fic ever comes to fruition.

And that’s what I’ve been up to.

I was sitting there reading an interview with Stephenie Meyer about The Host, and I got to, “Did any of the characters surprise you while writing?”

And she said the usual, “I am constantly surprised by my characters when I write—it’s really one of my favorite parts. When a character refuses to do what I had planned for him or her, that’s when I know that character is really alive. There were several characters who caught me off guard with The Host.”

And I was sitting there going, “Oh please, Smeyer, whatever, don’t give me that crap, you can write your characters to be whatever you want,” when I read the next sentence.

“One in particular was slated for a bit part as the wingman to the villain. Somehow, he knew he was more than that, and I couldn’t stop him from morphing into a main love interest.”

And then I went, “OH MY GOD. ORION. IAN IS ORION. HOW DID I NOT SEE THIS BEFORE?”

Orion is a character from my Atlantis fanfic, The Dark Ones*. He’s an original character that I originally intended to just be a wingman to the villain, but then all of a sudden he just morphed into this really important character. He also happens to be the most popular character in my A:TLE fanfic universe. I have had people send me fanart of this character. I love Orion to bits and I laugh about how originally he was supposed to be this little toadie and OMFG I AM SMEYER. I AM SMEYER!!!!

And I love Ian so. I can’t imagine how that book would have been without Ian…or Orion. *facepalm*

*(Okay, shut up, I was 15 when I came up with that title)

TYPOS!!!

Nothing chagrins me more than reading a fanfic that has been published for like 3 years and realizing that I left TYPOS in it!!!!!!!!!! How did people read it all these years and know what I was talking about?!

“I’m sure you’ll get over that once you’ve gotten to know that THEM like I’ve gotten to know Serenity”

“Nephrite had only the highest respect for the Master, as did all the Shitennou; this wasn’t WAS why he was so deeply shocked by Endymion’s reckless behavior in dealing with the Moon Kingdom.” WAS! WAS! Of course it WAS, the sentence doesn’t make sense otherwise! Where was my proofreader?? (n/a, that’s where)

FML.

YES, I am updating Guardians of the Earth and the Moon…TODAY. Chapter 3 will be up by tonight. You have my word.

EDIT: WHY DIDN’T ANYONE EVER TELL ME THAT THE VERSION ON PGSM-FANFICTION.NET IS SO BAWLED UP?? AND WHY DIDN’T I EVER READ IT MYSELF?

NO ONE READ IT THERE. EVERYONE READ IT AT FANFICTION.NET DX