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madimpossibledreamerNot really high on the spoilers and kind of vague when it is, but if you'd rather find stuff out when I actually get chapters out, then don't read. A fair amount of this is actually referring to things that have been hinted at but not directly stated in the work. Don't say you haven't been warned.
Sometimes Josephine should take her own advice. Seriously, this is one of my favorite parts with her.
Buffy also earns an honorable mention, since I'm writing from her point of view. She's not the easiest to write POV either, which is strange. I have a grasp of her character and what she wants and is and needs to accomplish in the time of the fic, but she might be suffering under something similar to Josephine. I could've written from Josephine's point of view, but that would remove a lot of the mystery I wanted in this fic. How are the worlds actually together? Where does Josephine fit in the family tree? How did she get here? What happened to Fitz's mother? What's her past like?
It'd be a lot harder to conceal things like that from the readers if I was writing from Josephine's point of view.
Buffy's...unhappy. She could not be the Slayer by this point, and she kind of wants that. And at the same time, she doesn't. At least in the fic she came to the realization that as much as she says she wants the normal life, she refuses to let a civilian be hurt on her watch. Like Xander, she's restless, because, well...after war, what do you do? How do you go on? And as much as there's a monster of the week, it's the most peaceful it's ever been, before the fic starts, and she doesn't know how to deal with that. And once she gets her war, Xander, one of her best friends and Sunnydale survivors, is suddenly MIA, and a lot of her Slayers ended up dead. She doesn't want to deal with the situation.
Josephine is like that, only on a larger scale. She was in her 20s, going to college. And suddenly, she's lost twenty years. You wouldn't know it to look at her, and she knows how the current tech and society works, so she doesn't actually come off as one of the older folks. But in the meantime she'd gotten married, she'd had a kid, spent most of her life in an alcoholic haze, only arguing with her husband every now and then and for the most part too drunk out of her mind to even recognize her son's voice, let alone protect him. She's smart enough to notice the signs in retrospect and figure out there were vampires and all matter of things that go bump in the night and she could've been really useful. Her best friend is missing, and given how they parted she's not entirely certain Mercia is alive.
It's interesting to note that Mercia Speedwagon's song is the single most inspiring song in the playlist for this fic. She barely shows up, but given that statement alone she's a pretty integral part of the fic.
She has an obligation to her son. To family. That's the only thing that's keeping her going, but for the most part she's in shock. She doesn't like this world. To the point where I tried to get her to act in this newest chapter, and she decided that she'd rather be in the past, tormenting a family member as sadistically as an innocent kid can by coincidence.
There were a few characters that I was thinking I wouldn't bring in until later, but I'm getting the feeling that I'm going to need to bring them in sooner rather than later, if only to calm Josephine down a little more and get her to stop boycotting this future.
I know I sound like I'm treating her like a real person, and part of that is that, well, partly she is to me. She's partly based on a good friend of mine at school.
Part of it, also, is that I tend to write by getting in the heads of my characters. Once I've got a good enough idea of their voice, what they would do is pretty easy. Plot and characterization is intertwined, in my mind. The whole 'plot vs character' thing to me is a false dichotomy. You can have the most amazing plot in the world, but if your characters suck or I don't care about them, I'm not pulled in. (I like the .hack series okay. Sword Art Online has a very very similar plot, and it's not like it's actually knew because it's something Soul Hackers and something else played around with. I like that plot line pretty well. So I kept watching the episodes, getting until, what, about 7 episodes in and then deciding 'you know what, I really really don't care what happens to any of these characters. It's not even a hate thing for me. They're just blah. For .hack//sign Tsukasa is a bit blah, but I like Bear a lot, and the other characters aren't bad either. I feel some feeling about Tsukasa, though I'm not sure what yet. I'll probably make up my mind later. I really don't like Silver Knight, but the fact that he was English Voice Acted by the same guy that did Cao Cao was pretty amusing. Crim is funny, even though most of my reaction to him is 'what'? Sora's...interesting, considering that he becomes Haseo. He makes a good frienemy, because he's funny but has enough moments where you realize he's nobody to let your guard down around. BT is manipulative. It also helps that it much more closely matches ISO, and I'd only started watching it after I started writing it.) On the other hand, interesting characters in blah plots don't tend to work either. Originality is a big deal, and even though if they're already established characters you can get away with things like omakes, the stories (such as fanfics) that I enjoy the most are the ones with story arcs, mini or middle length or giant length.
The good news is, once I figured this out, I was able to coax Muse Josephine out of hiding with the promise of cookies and friendly banter, and consequently have an idea how next chapter will go. Bad news? School. And I think going through the next couple chapters may take a lot of time and work put into it. I'll attempt to keep up this posting once a day thing, but no guarantees that'll last, and no ETA for the next chapter.
Sometimes Josephine should take her own advice. Seriously, this is one of my favorite parts with her.
Buffy also earns an honorable mention, since I'm writing from her point of view. She's not the easiest to write POV either, which is strange. I have a grasp of her character and what she wants and is and needs to accomplish in the time of the fic, but she might be suffering under something similar to Josephine. I could've written from Josephine's point of view, but that would remove a lot of the mystery I wanted in this fic. How are the worlds actually together? Where does Josephine fit in the family tree? How did she get here? What happened to Fitz's mother? What's her past like?
It'd be a lot harder to conceal things like that from the readers if I was writing from Josephine's point of view.
Buffy's...unhappy. She could not be the Slayer by this point, and she kind of wants that. And at the same time, she doesn't. At least in the fic she came to the realization that as much as she says she wants the normal life, she refuses to let a civilian be hurt on her watch. Like Xander, she's restless, because, well...after war, what do you do? How do you go on? And as much as there's a monster of the week, it's the most peaceful it's ever been, before the fic starts, and she doesn't know how to deal with that. And once she gets her war, Xander, one of her best friends and Sunnydale survivors, is suddenly MIA, and a lot of her Slayers ended up dead. She doesn't want to deal with the situation.
Josephine is like that, only on a larger scale. She was in her 20s, going to college. And suddenly, she's lost twenty years. You wouldn't know it to look at her, and she knows how the current tech and society works, so she doesn't actually come off as one of the older folks. But in the meantime she'd gotten married, she'd had a kid, spent most of her life in an alcoholic haze, only arguing with her husband every now and then and for the most part too drunk out of her mind to even recognize her son's voice, let alone protect him. She's smart enough to notice the signs in retrospect and figure out there were vampires and all matter of things that go bump in the night and she could've been really useful. Her best friend is missing, and given how they parted she's not entirely certain Mercia is alive.
It's interesting to note that Mercia Speedwagon's song is the single most inspiring song in the playlist for this fic. She barely shows up, but given that statement alone she's a pretty integral part of the fic.
She has an obligation to her son. To family. That's the only thing that's keeping her going, but for the most part she's in shock. She doesn't like this world. To the point where I tried to get her to act in this newest chapter, and she decided that she'd rather be in the past, tormenting a family member as sadistically as an innocent kid can by coincidence.
There were a few characters that I was thinking I wouldn't bring in until later, but I'm getting the feeling that I'm going to need to bring them in sooner rather than later, if only to calm Josephine down a little more and get her to stop boycotting this future.
I know I sound like I'm treating her like a real person, and part of that is that, well, partly she is to me. She's partly based on a good friend of mine at school.
Part of it, also, is that I tend to write by getting in the heads of my characters. Once I've got a good enough idea of their voice, what they would do is pretty easy. Plot and characterization is intertwined, in my mind. The whole 'plot vs character' thing to me is a false dichotomy. You can have the most amazing plot in the world, but if your characters suck or I don't care about them, I'm not pulled in. (I like the .hack series okay. Sword Art Online has a very very similar plot, and it's not like it's actually knew because it's something Soul Hackers and something else played around with. I like that plot line pretty well. So I kept watching the episodes, getting until, what, about 7 episodes in and then deciding 'you know what, I really really don't care what happens to any of these characters. It's not even a hate thing for me. They're just blah. For .hack//sign Tsukasa is a bit blah, but I like Bear a lot, and the other characters aren't bad either. I feel some feeling about Tsukasa, though I'm not sure what yet. I'll probably make up my mind later. I really don't like Silver Knight, but the fact that he was English Voice Acted by the same guy that did Cao Cao was pretty amusing. Crim is funny, even though most of my reaction to him is 'what'? Sora's...interesting, considering that he becomes Haseo. He makes a good frienemy, because he's funny but has enough moments where you realize he's nobody to let your guard down around. BT is manipulative. It also helps that it much more closely matches ISO, and I'd only started watching it after I started writing it.) On the other hand, interesting characters in blah plots don't tend to work either. Originality is a big deal, and even though if they're already established characters you can get away with things like omakes, the stories (such as fanfics) that I enjoy the most are the ones with story arcs, mini or middle length or giant length.
The good news is, once I figured this out, I was able to coax Muse Josephine out of hiding with the promise of cookies and friendly banter, and consequently have an idea how next chapter will go. Bad news? School. And I think going through the next couple chapters may take a lot of time and work put into it. I'll attempt to keep up this posting once a day thing, but no guarantees that'll last, and no ETA for the next chapter.
