My Daughter Wants to be Scrooge McDuck

That's not just a clever title. It's the honest truth. And to be fair this bothers me not at all. XD

Anyway I thought, just as a change of pace from the 30-day-meme I've been doing about my writing, I'd start the TWC2 Chapter Notes. I haven't done any chapter notes in a LONG time. First I guess I should check and make sure I haven't already started these...

Okay, checks out. Let's go!

References:
-Title: it's a line from the Beatles song "Yellow Submarine": "Sky of blue/and sea of green/in our yellow/submarine". I was on a HUGE Beatles kick during most of high school and this was written in the height of it.
-Obligatory callback to "Night of the Living Spud" with the Lyceum Nycanthropus.

I began this first scene about a year before I actually started writing the full fic. I think I started the fanfic in the second half of 2010, but I had the opening sequence done, I think, in late 2009. If not then, then in like early 2010 or so. I was trying to get back into writing after a really long hiatus during my second pregnancy and my son's first few months.

Laelia is in fact an orchid; I went looking for plant names for things like orchids that could be rare but work as actual names.

The conversation between Beth and LP initially got away from me and they started talking about how he knew Gizmoduck personally and all this stuff and it was like "STOP FLIRTING AND STAY ON SUBJECT!" They *always* do that. I had to send it to Amanda and have her tell me exactly where to snip it. ;)

I'm not really sure of the pacing of this scene or - well, the circumstances; and I'm not sure how much sense it makes for Beth to be so into Drake. I just kind of have to go with it. I have to be honest; I don't remember what it's like to have a crush on someone. ^^;

The inventory - when I wrote this the first time, I had the same thing in here, despite not ever having had a retail job. It was just vague and mainly involved me having Beth stay late to "do the inventory" which meant counting hte stock, since that's the textbook definition. However it's now slightly augmented by real-life experiences with retail - the late night and the counting turned out to be true, I ignored the fact that no retail store would have only *one* person do the retail, but I added stuff with paperwork. The paperwork is killer.

That's about it for chapter 1...

30 Days Meme day 12

Day 12 – Have you ever attempted an “adaptation” story of a favorite book or movie but set in a different fandom?

...noo... not REALLY but that doesn't mean I won't ever. And a few times I thought about doing it, I just never actually started. I cowrote half of an unfinished "Ranma 1/2" adaptation of "The Princess Bride" that broke the 4th wall a lot, and after I was in "Jesus Christ, Superstar" one summer I really wanted to do a DWD fanfic that vaguely followed the same storyline only it would be DW being sort of "discovered" and becoming verrrry popular, eventually lauded as the "Savior" of St. Canard, until the people turned on him. No, he wouldn't be crucified. XD

I actually had a badass "death/rebirth" scene in my head set to the title song, though. OMG. It's so badass. ...In my head. :P

One fic I thought for a long, long time I was going to do was a Reboot/DWD adaptation where they all get sucked into a computer wtih Megavolt as the villain. Various corresponding roles would be filled the various ways (DW as Bob, Megavolt as Megabyte, Gosalyn as Enzo, etc. I think I had Beth as Phong, lol) and they would encounter an internal virus, Hexaducksimal, hahahaha. It's too dated now though even though Reboot IS AWESOME STILL.

Two others I still might do: a story inspired by the Urusei Yatsura second movie, "Beautiful Dreamer", which I won't give any details on 'cause it would spoil the story, and a full-on series called "Quacktron Leap" which is a parody of "Quantum Leap" but instead of going through time, DW goes through dimensions with Sara Bellum as his guide and each dimension is an alternate of his own based on a fanfic. XD I still think that idea is awesome.

30 Days Meme day 11

Day 11 – Genre – do you prefer certain genres of fic when you’re writing? What kind do you tend to write most?

Ummm, nearly everything I write has to have some element of humour in it. I don't think I write humour as a genre the best (I think I do best as a "blend" and I just call my stuff "gen" most of the time), but I can't really write without a certain amount of humour. That's probably because I prefer comedies for the most part, so not having any humour would be entirely out of line.

I also tend to put some element of romance into a lot of my fics, but it's nearly always unresolved romance, unrequited or just general unresolved tension. I *definitely* would not call myself a romance writer.

And finally I guess... well, I *like* to have actiony plots. I'm not especially good at them as they take a lot of planning and effort to pace on my part, but I really prefer to have them when I can. I used to just write plots in order to have an excuse to write a fic about other things, but the actual plot/stories became important to me as I got older, and I generally feel like I'm cheating if I have a plotless story now. Which is too bad, because I *definitely* have an easier time writing purely dialogue or introspection fics. (I can write drabbles without a plot and be guilt-free, but that's because they're only like a couple hundred words.)

None of these are really precisely a genre though. I think of genre as being purely, or at least *almost* purely, one thing. My fics really are mostly a bunch of stuff stuck together. ^^;

30 Days Meme day 10

Day 10 – Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn’t write, or a pairing you didn’t like, and found you could?

So, woohoo! I actually did this ten days in a row!

I've written outside my comfort zone in "Xena" before; I've actually written some minor slash in that fandom, which is out of my comfort zone mostly b/c I don't actually see most of the characters as slashable within XWP canon. (I should explain, I usually won't slash characters who aren't gay, unless there's some REALLY good chemistry between them) So, in a challenge to write slash, I picked Joxer's brother Jett and Ares. It was actually, in my opinion, a pretty good story. :) But since I don't see either character as gay it was a little hard to do easily. (However I could more easily see Jett as being gay than I could see Joxer, and I can actually believe that the gods in Xena would have sex with either gender if they felt like it, so it wasn't TOO far off the beaten path for me.)

Otherwise, well... I dun think so, honestly. I actually hate the way I write romance and so unless I have a very particular pairing I want to see (like Joxer/Gabrielle), I won't usually write any shipping fic at all.

...So I'm just gonna throw this out here, I'm starting to feel uncomfortable and pretentious for my last couple of posts, particularly the one about OCs. I think I'm just going to expand on what I said there a little and clarify one thing: the only OC of mine that I don't feel is really a Mary Sue is Beth. The others, yeah, I just have to admit they are. That's a big part though of why I don't actually write them. The "Ranma 1/2" spinoff is inside my head for my own enjoyment and won't be written out. I know I've been a little weird about that, talking about the fandom as if I do write for it or do plan on writing my wishfulfillment spinoff... I totally don't, just to clarify. ;)

(So don't hate me!! ^^;)

30 Days Meme day 9

Day 9 – Pairings – For each of the fandoms from day two, what are your three favorite pairings to write?

Now I need to go back and open day 2 :D
Okay, for a lot of them I don't have any, b/c I don't write ship fic for them. (Since most of them were drabbles, that's largely why)

FMA, Inuyasha, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer I had no fave pairings to write. I wrote a couple of vaguely Buffy/Spike fics but that was just playing with the theme as canon, not actually writing the pairing.

Of the other drabbles, I kinda had pairings, but didn't explore them and there wasn't more than one:
Princess Tutu: Fakir/Ahiru (even though she was a duck - it wasn't like that XD)
Revolutionary Girl Utena: Utena/Anthy (that's what my drabble was about, in fact)
Fruits Basket: I did not write this, actually, but I hearted me some Kyo/Kagura. It's pretty much the only type of fic I read, even though I never wrote it at all.

Nothing really in TTA.

Real Ghostbusters, I didn't write any pairings, but if I had it woudl've been Egon/Janine. There were hints of that in the fic I did anyway.

Now the three main fandoms:

Ranma 1/2: Actually Ranma and Akane was the big one. If I had done my spinoff, even though it was really a sort of parody, they were intended to end up together (in a kind of subtle almost-offscreen way. And in the final episode they break up but they get back togehter in the last few minutes; it's background, but important). I LOVE Ranma/Akane. It's the only pairing in the show that I really, really feel. Other pairings would've played with Shampoo/Mousse, and I guess if I was writing in general I'd have done Ryouga/Akari since I totally ship them. But Akari didn't exist in my spinoff 'cause I cheat. ;D ...I hate Ryouga/Ukyou. Not because I'm jealous but because it's a made-up pairing. :P The anime kind of sort of pushed it, because it never got to the parts of the manga that started bringing in alternate relationship options for the rival characters. So Akari never existed and they put in hints of Ryouga/Ukyou instead and BLEAH. I don't really like Ukyou that much to be honest.

XWP: Joxer/Gabrielle and that's about it. That's really the whole purpose I had in writing the fanfics, was to write decent Joxer/Gab fic. I did write a few fics that addressed Xena/Gabrielle subtext but it always broke them up and usually paired Gab with Joxer instead. It's really because I just felt that the Xena/Gabrielle pairing was portrayed so unhealthily, it never seemed romantic to me - just obsessive. I could've handled a polyamourous relationship with Joxer included, but Xena/Gab alone was too heavy.

Darkwing Duck: Darkwing/Morgana, Beth/Launchpad (I'm sorry, I always feel bad confessing that my OC/canon ship is so close to my heart, but it's not as if I pretend otherwise), and that's about it. I don't honestly write many pairings. *shrug*

30 Days Meme day 8

Day 8 – Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they’re not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.

Finally a question that really really relates to me instead of me going "Not really", lol!

Ahem. Yes, yes I do. ;)

Well, I don't honestly know how successful I am in making my OCs not Mary Sues. I've had enough feedback about Beth over the years from many people who have said she's not one, so although that doesn't mean that there aren't people who DO think she is one and they're just not telling me, it at least means that there are enough people who think she's NOT and tell me so. :)

Other than Beth, my OCs are primarily either secondary characters (like Henny, Beth's family, etc) or else they're borderline Mary Sues. I never had any OCs at all for "Xena", but I mentioned that my X-Men character was a pretty blatant Sue for years and years. And even now, I've tweaked the heck out of her, but she's really still pretty borderline. (I don't actually write fic with her though so she doesn't precisely count.) The other borderline Sue is my "Ranma 1/2" persona, and she's really as I said, a persona. That's what makes her borderline - her name is Rebecca and she has a lot of my characteristics, exaggerated for comedy.

So. My methods of not making Sues is to give the characters as many reasonable flaws as I can. Then I cross my fingers and hope that I've made them into believable characters, with enough bad points to cross out the good points but not so many that they are hard to like... For instance:

-"Rebecca" the Ranma 1/2 persona is based on me, has my name, bears a physical resemblance to me, and is paired with Ryouga Hibiki. However, to counter all this I set the tone of the series (it's a "spin-off", remember) as very farcical, in the same vein as "Ranma" or even more so, as Rumiko Takahashi's earlier series "Urusei Yatsura". Rebecca is cheerful and exuberant and a lot of people like her, but that's partly because they only see the cheerful and exuberant part of her; in fact she's also very pushy, has a bad temper, and is really selfish. In a comical way, that's the thing that's hard to explain. She's very childlike; she loves other people and being with her friends, but she expects things to be a certain way, and when they are not, she can get indignant or even angry. The only person to see this most of the time is Ryouga, who consequently spends most of the series trying to get away from her. But she's in love with him, and decided after meeting him that they're going to be married, so dammit, THEY ARE GOING TO BE MARRIED. XD And becausee everyone likes Rebecca so much, he feels like he'll get the blame if he actually dumps her, so he puts up with her being around in the hopes that eventually she'll get sick of him and leave. XD

-Aquaflame, of the X-Men: she's got a lot of superpowers and initially (when I created her at age 10) she was one of those Mary Sues who I understand is somewhat rarer than the others, who gets injured a lot to get attention. (I had NO CONTACT with any other fans at the time so it amused me to find out that this is actually A Thing. XD) She's developed a lot in the past 20+ years. In efforts to make her a deeper character I gave her anger issues. XD She's very emotionally shut off and expresses a lot of her negative emotions through anger. I actually dont' think I've been successful in making her not a Sue, but I have tried. But yeah I don't use her anyway, so. ;)

With Beth - that's where I've put the most effort. In addition to making her neurotic (lovably so, I hope) and totally normal other than her intellect, I've made HUGE efforts to keep the tone of the series and the characterization of the canons as close as I could to the show. I think that's hard, because to me it involves getting inside their heads, and to do THAT you have to fill in a lot of blanks to make them more rounded as characters. But when I do that, I try to do it in a way that follows what we've seen in the show, rather than revealing secrets or making things darker or just making up stuff that seems like it would be cool. I also try to do it in a way that matches the depth I give to Beth - all the characters should feel like real people, but also like cartoon characters at the same time. I want them all to feel equally believable and equally at home in the same series, and I especially want Beth to fit the tone of "Darkwing Duck" and be someone that you could technically see being in an episode (albeit, a bit simplified).

I think that last goal is a bit lofty and I don't think I quite make it, but it's hard for ANY fanfic to accomplish that with an OC that becomes an addition to the main cast. Honestly I feel successful just if I have characters that people like to read about, whether it feels like an ep or not. :)

30 Days Meme day 7

Day 7 – Have you ever had a story change your opinion of a character?

I'm going to assume this means while writing and not while reading.

Ummm, not really, no. I guess, actually, there have been a couple of times that I've written a particular character and enjoyed it so much that I've become really fond of the character, but to be honest, I can't think of any particular examples. I sort of want to say Honker but I've liked him for ages, so I don't think that's right.

The only time I can recall that really happening in the recent past is with one of my own characters (Candy, Beth's older sister) and I'm not sure that counts. What happened was just that her character developed through the writing, and she developed into something different from what I thought she was. That's all. :)