Better Not Be Stingy or Your Nightmares Will Come Truuuue

Well, here they are - the final set of chapter notes for HOAW. For better or worse!

Happy Halloween!

Chapter 10:

References:

- The Real Ghostbusters - "Roben's Spirit Guide", Morgana's reference material, is a take on "Toben's Spirit Guide" from RGB.
- Morgana's backwards-spell to open the door ("Nepo rood") is a reference to Zatanna from DC Comics.

Somehow Morgana watching calmly as candy flies through the air strikes me as funny. I guess because it seems to imply that this is an everyday occurence for her, or at least something she's used to.

I had a real problem in writing this chapter, because I honestly really wanted to have the rain pouring down (SO spooky, you know) but I also needed Gos to be trick-or-treating the whole time. Well, I was always more than willing to go out in the rain on Halloween, but I think I might be pushing it in this one. ;)

Another track from the Beetlejuice soundtrack inspired the tone of this chapter once DW and co. go into Beth's house. All the funhouse stuff is there specifically because the track has funhouse-style music in it. Is that cheating?

Richie was hard to write because he was more or less unsympathetic. Even giving his reasons for doing what he did failed to make him sympathetic. More scenes are written from his POV mostly so that I could try and figure him out a bit. Stella was more straightforward - she made a decision rashly and then regretted it when her spell started to claim Beth, so she decided to cancel it. Richie was harder because he didn't have the regret that Stella had, nor was he inclined to give up his chance at freedom the way she was. Not that I think it was a mistake for me to write him that way, only that it made it harder to find a way to *like* him.

Anyone wondering how, exactly, zombies could burst through the floor of the house's *second story* to attack DW can consider that he's also being attacked by staircases and banisters. *G*


Chapter 11:

References:

- None for this chapter!

Some of the transitions here are jarring; I'd had some constructive criticism when I wrote these scenes that jumping from POV to POV within a scene was poor writing (although the person who told me that was much much kinder in their phrasing *G*) because it implied omniscience. So I was trying very hard to have only one POV per scene, or at least not a whole lot of hyper bounce-arounds. Over time I found that this method of writing didn't work for me, and tried to adapt it so that if I switched POVs in a scene I could at least have a clearer transition to it (which may have been what the commenter actually meant), but at this point it's just choppy little scene changes but with how they're structured I don't want to take the time to reorder them.

Always feel kind of good about myself when I reach the point in a fic where DW gets to be heroic. Since I am at that point in this fic (after 11 chapters!), I now feel good. Also, I liked writing him fighting Malachai, since I feel like it's the most in-character I have DW in this entire fic.

Y'know, rereading this now, I find something very moving about LP's statement that he would never give up trying to save Beth, even when he could no longer see her... I guess that's lame, being enamored with my own writing, but honestly, when it comes to the Beth/LP stuff I am oddly hard to please with my own writing so I thought it was worth noting that I actually *liked* something. (A lot of the other parts in here either leave me cold or even make me cringe a little... I *so* overwrite these things, or else I underwrite them.)

My hope is that Richie's sudden change of heart is a) believable, and b) kind of endearing. I would like it to be one of those moments where you kind of grin a little while reading it. If readers didn't like him up to now, I hope maybe they forgive him a bit at this part.

On the other hand, in retrospect I do wonder if perhaps Richie ends up becoming a bit of Marty Stu, joining Darkwing in fighting Malachai. I had intended it just to give him a purpose for being there, but it does feel to me like it takes away some of DW's thunder, now. Oh well, once again - what's done is done.

Oh yes. I think I failed to mention before now that, rather than sounding the slightest bit like Michael Keaton OR Beetlejuice (lol), the voice in my head for Richie is Steve Buscemi. Very weasely. (I am allowed to say that because, believe it or not, I have the hots for Steve Buscemi, and have for abooooouuuut... five years now? When did I see "Ghost World"? That long, anyway.)

The old "house pulling itself apart" idea came ultimately from The Haunting but I do believe that it's been in a lot of haunted house films.

The brief, quiet conversation between Morgana and Darkwing at the end here is meant to feel very intimate - I sort of wanted to acknowledge a bond between them.

Epilogue

References:
- The Last Unicorn, for Stella's "remembering" tea; the influence here was the laughing skeleton who "remembers" wine enough to get drunk off of it when it's not really there.
- The "going into the light" idea is not specific or unique to one source, but I was thinking explicitly of The Frighteners in this one. Which is kind of odd given how I use it, but oh well. *G*

Although Stella is definitely at peace in the end, I also found something a little chilling about her and Richie simply... *disappearing* like that, and ended up reflecting that in Beth; this is why, despite her sympathy to Stella, Beth is left more unsettled by this ending than anything else.

You may be left wondering if this is for certain the end, or if there are still any ghosts in Beth's house. Well, short answer "yes" with an "if", long answer "no" with a "but..." No, that's a Simpsons quote. The answer is, there are not *currently* any ghosts in Beth's house. If you can call that an answer...

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living

Chapters 8 and 9 of HOAW; this will be followed by the remaining chapters tomorrow, probably in the morning. I also have a picture to post! Not by me! Which makes it even cooler :D

Chapter 8

References:

- "Calvin and Hobbes", which long ago inspired the "lobotomy" gag of carving pumpkins. It just seemed SO Gosalyn...
- The Wizard of Oz, in multiple ways, most prominently "I do believe in spooks".
- BIG reference to Beetlejuice in Morgana's spell, which is as close to word-for-word from the movie's exorcism scene as I could get it. I actually did not get it right going by ear when I wrote this... I have since checked the closed-captioning and corrected it. Mostly. *sigh*
- And another reference, this one kind of more subtle: Gosalyn is actually describing Beetlejuice when she asks Stella if she can make herself look scary "like in that movie".
- The other movie Gos eagerly mentions is, of course, The Exorcist. That movie scared my sister so much it made her CRY. :D
- Third reference to Beetlejuice in this chapter: The phrase "Death for the dead" in reference to exorcism comes from there.
- "This is my 'resolved face'" is from "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" (it's a Willow line, from season 2 I believe). Cute and, I think, quite Beth-ish.

I don't know but there is something about the sentence "I'll let you carve part of the face" which, as innocently as Gosalyn may mean it, is just sadistic and wrong. :D

I had initially intended Beth's repeated versions of "my house is haunted" to be a reference to "The Real Ghostbusters", where in one episode Winston just disbelievingly repeats "I have sold my soul to the devil" until someone - I think Ray? - points out that it's just a minor demon. (That sure helps, huh? The chant then becomes "I have sold my soul to a minor demon.") ANYway - I felt like it turned out flat on paper, so I just kept the very basic idea.

Beth is too upset and freaked out to be polite or bother to hide the fact that she doesn't like Morgana, here. Naturally no one actually picks up on it. *snerk*

To the best of my knowledge, it really IS dangerous to break a circle during a seance, since the circle is the protection or something. I've never been in a seance. At least not a real one. ;P

So I hope that it doesn't seem out of character for Beth to be so gung-ho all of a sudden about helping Stella. I feel that it's in her character a lot to want to help people, and that she decided that the ghost was just unhappy and needed help, so she'd do it. I know that's kind of a 180-degree turn from her skepticism earlier, but now that the whole thing has a "human face" on it, so to speak, she's much more sympathetic.

One could wonder why, precisely, they're going to let Gos go out Trick-or-Treating when they've got this whole thing planned. The real-life answer is because I needed Gos to be doing something in the climactic scene; the within-the-fic answer is that, if you've heard of fury and a woman scorned, that's nothing compared to the fury of a woman who has missed out on Tricks-or-Treats. (Thank you, "Great Pumpkin"!)

Chapter 9:

References:

- One more Beetlejuice ref for the win, as Richie dusts himself off when he re-enters the story... This is done in the manner of Michael Keaton in the movie, when he says "It's showtime."

OOoooh spooky spooky house! I feel like this opening scene to this chapter is a little overwritten, because it's very much a visual scene in my head and that, naturally, can't be conveyed well into text. Ah well. I do like Gosalyn going back to her window in the hopes that NOW she'll be able to see some ghosts, though.

Drake and Beth's chess game is a lot like the ones I used to play with my husband. For the record, in this game, Drake is me. *G*

"What could happen to her in the hour that she'll be out?" Dun-dun-dunnnnn! Watch me make use of my very subtle foreshadowing! Gape in amazement! ;D

With Beth running around her house calling for Stella, don't you just want to make a "Streetcar Named Desire" reference?

By the time it's turning to dusk and Beth realizes she's been running around her house for three hours, at this point I wanted to imply that the whole reason she went over there (and the whole reason Drake let her) was because the house was sort of working on them both, warping their judgment. I think that's probably clear from how Beth wonders why she lost track of time, etc, but since I spell things out in these notes, consider this one spelled.

The entrance of the ghosts is another sequence written to a track on the Beetlejuice soundtrack - at the moment I couldn't tell you the name of it, though I think it's "The Exorcism" or something, but it's track number 13. Stella's entrance is approximately 52 seconds into the track, which I know because I am listening to it now. *lol*

Okay... what do readers think of Richie's return? Did people know he'd be back? Was it super-obvious that he was a ghost, and was the presence in the wall? I wanted to leave that a mystery until this point and have a little tiny fakeout, implying that the other presence was Malachai trapped in the house. Instead, what Morgana mistakes for two presences is actually three: the woman, the one trapped in the house - Richie - and the "angry" one, which is Malachai. So did it work as a mystery or was it obvious? I genuinely want to know, so please leave a comment if you have one! Even if it's "it was obvious", I still wanna know.

There is no intention of implying a romance between Stella and Richie, btw. Though if anyone wanted to read it that way I wouldn't stop them. But I didn't craft one.

While I'm rereading this now, I am pretty confident I did a decent job of maintaining the surprise with the spell that gets set on Beth. I don't see any major giveaway on that, but if I'm wrong, please do let me know. Sometimes subtleties are not my real strength. ;)

I've seen "The Exorcist" about 2,000 times and it keeps getting funnier EVERY TIME I SEE IT

HOAW Chapter notes continue!

Chapter six

References:

- Henna-Barbeara is my incredibly brilliant reference to Hanna-Barbera. No, seriously, I think that might be the best name-pun I've ever come up with. Sad, really. *G*
- "That Sinking Feeling", just for the Frosty-Os cereal.
- Poltergeist - "This house... is clean!" As delivered by the medium.

Shout-out for finding a way to write Beth waking up in LP's bed! (Hubba-hubba! Hey, I'm rated G.... approximately. ^_~)

They do not show cartoons anywhere on network TV nowadays on Sunday mornings (they barely show any on Saturdays), but when I was a kid... which I will only say was approximately when this show was airing... they did. Usually it was all Scooby Doo and Smurfs and things, and I didn't usually watch them, but obviously SOMEONE did so why not Gos? *G* They also used to do music videos out of cartoon clips, especially at Halloween. I distinctly remember one for "Bad Moon Rising".

Drake's characterization in this scene - most specifically his "voice" - had a lot of help from Darkwingpsycho and LadyJess, both of whom understand him a lot better than I do. ;)

One thing about ghost stories I've never fully understood is the whole "seeing things that aren't there" part. Just because I don't understand it, though, doesn't mean I won't use it - as evidenced by Beth's ability to contact the house's previous owner on his unlisted number. The only problem with this scene is that it doesn't actually give her any new information, other than the fact that the hauntings escalate until Halloween and then die back down on November 2 or so. Which isn't necessary to the plot. Ah well.

The only problem with the Beth's "I'm sorry, Drake" face is that unfortunately, at no point in any of the fics I've written has Beth ever really said "I'm sorry, Drake, but..." Heh, oh well! Once again if I didn't point these things out probably no one would notice. ^_^;;

Chapter seven

References:

- I think the idea of camping out in the living room comes from Poltergeist as well, but it might not. I do know I saw it in a ghost movie.
- Although nothing in it is a direct reference, the ghost sequence in this is influenced in large part by The Blair Witch Project, mostly in terms of the characters' reactions to what is going on. Mainly Beth's reactions, in fact - the gasping, "What was that!?", and so on is based largely on Heather, the girl in that movie. (Of course in the movie it was "what the *bleep* was that?!") Oh yes - and the description of Beth's breath hanging in the air before drifting away is an image that appears (purely by fortune) in BWP, too.
- The Haunting is somewhat directly referenced in that Beth is holding Drake's hand so hard it "felt like she was breaking his fingers" - which is in my favourite scene of that movie.
- The appearance of Stella, and her movements, are based on the movements of the titular ghost in The Lady In White.
- Help!, the Beatles movie, for Drake's line "I take back every bad thing I said about you". I think it's Help! - it might've been Yellow Submarine.

Drake's thought about how he "might as well just marry" Beth - in a *negative* way - was kind of a deliberate nod to what a bad couple they would actually make. *G*

So, this is the chapter where things start getting, and staying, genuinely creepy. Actually this is probably the creepiest chapter in the story, at least in my opinion. I probably ripped about half of it off from other sources, without knowing it. Oh well. It's all collective memory anyway, right? ;P

Case in point: the sequence where LP hears what he thinks is Beth come into the room and stand behind him. That's the kind of thing that gets me each time.

In addition to a nod to The Blair Witch Project and the specific reference to The Haunting, as noted above, this whole sequence with the appearance of the ghost owes some inspiration to The Haunting in general, which is sublime in its use of tension and fear in the middle of the night. The presence of barely-heard voices also is drawn from that film, mainly a scene in which Nell hears the voice of a man chanting or reciting something - you can hear his voice, but can't make out a single word, which is very creepy. There's also a woman laughing or maybe crying, and a baby crying... Unsettling scene, just wonderful. *fangirls The Haunting for like the fiftieth time*

I have always wondered about how this reads to other people reading it for the first time. Anyone reading, or who has already read it: what's your impression of this scene? What do people make of the shape that goes running down the hallway? Does this inspire curiosity to know what's going on or is it just "ho hum, ghosts again"?

Who else thinks LP is milkin' the whole being-scared thing so that he can keep clinging to Beth? ;) Heh, in fact, I like that idea so much that I just went back and attributed it to Drake. Your call whether or not it's true...

The Perils of Ficcing

*lays head on desk and sighs*

Well, first of all I just posted another chapter on FF.net of All About Elizabeth, which is y'know. Fun on wheels. ;) No, I like it, actually. Present-day stuff (if you consider 1993 to be "present day" which for the sake of this fanfic we shall), and I get to introduce Beth's younger brother, whom I still know next to nothing about. I don't know yet if he wears glasses or not (Candy does - or rather, she needs them, but she has contacts; Beef doesn't need 'em) but I *think* his hair is slightly too long. I am pretty sure it's brown.

Eventually I'll work Kit, the youngest, in there too. I mean if I didn't it would just be danged lazy, you know? ;P

However, I have the spare time to write tonight and I've been in a real writing "groove" lately but what happens all too often is that I spend my days thinking of what I will write next, then I sit down to do it when I have a free evening and all my drive goes *poof!* out the window. Or um... out something that would make a "poof!" noise. (Baby powder bottle?) The problem I run into is that I don't want to write any of the scenes I am currently at in my fics. I only have two that I'm working on right now - AAE, and the rewrite of TWC1 - and I don't feel too much like doing TWC1 just yet but I am getting annoyed with Beth's therapist and don't feel like writing him. Nor do I feel like doing a flashback. This is all a little maddening since, with a handful of exceptions, that is all this fic is about, so I'm kind of stuck.

That's the problem I run into now. For years and years I've been teasing myself with the romance stuff - I don't write it all that well, so I try to limit myself with it and mostly just write the sort of tension of it. But I really want to write it for real, and sometimes it reaches the point where everything else is just the stuff I have to get through before I can write a good romantic and/or romantic tension scene; I have destroyed myself a little, I think. *sigh*

(Can you believe I've been drawing this relationship out for 14 years now? What the heck is wrong with me? :P)

Does this happen to anyone else? Do you ever get writer's block specifically because you want so much to write a particular thing, and get bored with/don't feel like doing the in-betweens? Fortunately sometimes it does pass and I can get good blocks of actual STORY done; sometimes however, it gets really bad - and this is the worst - it gets so bad that I can't actually even skip ahead and write a scene I've been wanting to do, because it doesn't come out right, so instead I sit and stare at it with even more self-induced block. AARGH. This is why I was not cut out for this.

I'm serious about that question, though. I'd like answers if anyone has any to give; discussion is totally cool by me. I believe I have it set so that you can post here without having a blogger account - if not, leave a message on LJ and I'll see if I can change my settings.

Aaaaand this? This right here? Is called procrastinating. :P Give me strength, folks. Deep down I would like to maybe get some part of a chapter done on TWC1 or something, tonight; I'd settle for making it through the first section of a flashback if I can't do TWC1. But c'mon. SOMETHING.

All About Elizabeth, act II chapter IV

Why do I do "Acts", you may wonder? This isn't actually what I was intending to write a post about but as I wrote the subject line I kind of thought that. It goes back to when I first started writing DWD fanfic and instead of writing in chapters I wrote in three acts. This was because I thought of the fics in terms of "scripts" (even though they weren't in script format) and I was trying to have good commercial break space. XD So all my first fics have three acts, and I used to get very frustrated when I had to break from that format. Then my fics just started getting longer and longer and I realized it was time to loosen up somewhat. (It's important to remember that I was fifteen when I started writing these fics; it explains a little bit more about my Idiot mindset. ^_~)

Anyway, I do like the idea of "acts" and though I do tend to separate them into chapters I still think of the acts themselves as having some kind of either unifying theme or unifying timeline. I also like to have as close as possible to an equal number of chapters in each act - HDF had 4 chapters per act and initially AAE was going to have either 2 or 3 chapters per act, but it's been growin' lately. Later maybe I'll write a post about longer fics and how I don't like them (er, writing them - love reading them, don't be fooled ^_~), it's rather confusing even for me.

ANYway. First of all this post was supposed to let anyone reading know that I've posted chapter 6 of All About Elizabeth on ff.net, which closes out Act II. This fic is pretty explicit about the themes in each act but Act II was Beth's early years at school. It's the "School" Act because it focuses specifically on her time there; it's not the only section that will deal with her childhood, nor is it the only section that will deal with her school life, which I know seems counterproductive but in this case the Act was about her school life, rather than just making use of it.

...Yeah.

So! The experiences Beth goes through in school. If you haven't read the chapter yet you might want to before you read the rest of this post. *G* As I was writing it I kind of wondered if I was being accurate. I, like a LOT of kids, did not have a great time in school (particularly elementary school which is what this time period covers); I was not one of the popular ones and was alternately ignored and/or made fun of. However I didn't really ever have an experience like Beth did... I never had a friend turn on me that way and I was never exactly a "group" target. So as I wrote the whole thing I tried for realism but worried constantly that I was overdoing it.

It was, and is, important to me not to give the impression that Beth has it worse than anyone else. Part of why Beth's shrink talks about Nicola being unhappy in the final part of the fic is because - well, first of all I think Beth needs to have that pointed out to her (even though she STILL doesn't get it), but also because I wanted to reinforce the fact that Nicola was not really *just* a jerk, not just a girl who turned mean for no reason. Similarly I think most kids who appear to be jerks are like that, because ANY kid can be mean. My daughter, sweetest kid you will ever meet if she's in the mood, is now two and she's at that stage where she'll just walk up and hit another kid, especially if he's smaller than she is. They're all like that at her daycare. It's weird to watch. XD Then they're like "whaaat? I didn't want to HURT him, I just wanted to kick him hard and see what he did!" 9_9 Point being: kids are just selfish, contrary, and on occasion mean-spirited little beings, even the good ones. Even Beth, who can be goaded into betraying a confidence and saying the most hurtful thing possible. If I had written this chapter from Nicola's POV we'd have had a very different story.

Well, there's me preaching. ^_~ I will say that I've had some very good feedback from a couple of people regarding Beth's experiences being something they can relate to, so I feel rather good about this section. I never want this story to be a "poor BETH, look what she's going through!" story even though I think it'll come across that way by necessity... growing up is HARD but this is an exploration of what has made Beth who she is now, not an excuse to look back at how hard she's had it. Everyone has had it hard. It's hard to get that across in a fic written almost exclusively from one POV, but I'm trying. :)

See the latest chapter here.

Soundtracks, and A Question

First the question. Amanda asked how to subscribe to the posts here... I have noooo idea. *lol* I'm sure there's a way to set up a feed so people could get it sent to their LJ friends' lists or something... which would be way convenient. As it stands I don't know what to do to do that, and I'm too lazy to look into it right now. Part of the reason I'm lazy is because what I want to do is ultimately have this blog housed on my website, specifically in the same spot I'll be housing my fics, in which case you can just pop in to the main site there and catch up on any updates I've made. However right now I don't even know how to get email notifications when people comment on my posts. *lol* I know housing it on my webpage is totally possible and involves something to do with FTP, but right now I don't have any info on FTP so it's something I'll have to research at least slightly, and I don't want to do that right now. Haha. XD

Well, moving on. I don't have any kind of segue at all for this so I'm just gonna bounce right on in!... From the number of "songfics" out there I assume most people have a kind of soundtrack, at least in a minor form, for their fics and/or characters and/or "universes". Naturally I do, for nearly every series I've ever written for. In fact I have an EXTENSIVE one, in two parts, for my Darlingverse series... but I digress. :) My Webfoot soundtrack, in terms of a solid thing, is still growing - rather slowly at that - but I had been thinking about it recently as I wrote and I came to the conclusion that the soundtrack to Beth's life, just in terms of the general sound of it, is mainly comprised of 80s music. There's some 70s music in there too, and perhaps a bit of very early 90s (and of COURSE, if I find contemporary songs that fit, I'll go anachronistic and use them for inspiration), but mostly Beth follows a particular time period for the sound of her life. I wish I had good examples... LOL, I don't really, it would just be a lot of the stuff you might hear on the radio at any given time. "Walkin' On Sunshine" is as much a good choice as Blondie or Hall and Oates. It's not necessarily stuff I like (though I do love Blondie) as it is just the time period, because I figure most of Beth's formative years were in the 80s.

I've never really actually out-and-out specified the timeline I work with, I realized. I'm kind of doing that in AAE, but for the record to explicitly state it: Beth was born in 1967. The first story in the Webfoot Chronicles takes place in late summer of 1992, and Beth has just turned 25 (her birthday is in July).

Going back to the subject of soundtracks, I do have some specific songs for specific scenes and I've been playing with the idea of getting an account with, um, what's that set-up called? "Jigg It" or something? Anyway I've thought of getting an account with them so I can put up streaming versions of these songs here. :) I'll post about them more in later days!

Now we get to the point where I HOPE I'll be able to keep up on this blog. My work is about to get heavy-time crazy since a coworker just left, another is having surgery next week and will be out for 6 weeks, and in another two weeks a third coworker is going on vacation (it was planned and paid for way in advance or else she'd reschedule, but she can't). So... KABOOM. ;D

Ummm... second post?

Well, now just to make it interesting and keep people interested (yah right) I guess I'd better actually talk about the topic of this blog.

I'll start it out with a simple subject and one that people often wonder about when it comes to OCs in fanfiction. The simple question: is Beth based on me?

Naturally, the answer is less simple.

When I was younger and first started the stories, I was like "NO! Definitely not!" I mean, isn't it obvious that she isn't me? I don't wear glasses! And I'm not a genius! And I'm not really super-skinny! And now years later it's like... boy I was naive. *lol*

The long and short of it is that, I believe, anyone who creates a character is at least in part writing themselves. Even if the character represents a part of them who is the opposite of what the author stands for, in order to write a convincing character they must get inside their heads... they must write a person, and in order to do that you can only really draw on your own experiences and thoughts. Henny is as much me as Beth is, in some ways (and as such I'm surprisingly fond of her; I am the only person in the world who is ^_^), but when it comes to protagonists, especially in fanfiction, they are nearly always at least partly the author. It's not a hard-and-fast rule but it's a pretty strong one.

None of which is to say that Beth is based on me, or that all OCs are just avatars of the authors writing them, or anything like that. It's different; this is influence. No characters can escape the influence of their writers. Making up "ways" in which the OC is different from the creator is just denial. So as I got older I grew to sort of embrace the elements of myself that I share with Beth; there are a lot. We both talk a little too much, we both question how we appear to others far too often, and we both wear our emotions on our sleeves.

There are major differences too, of course. Many of the ways in which Beth behaves are not patterns I follow, but they're patterns that I try to understand. Beth puts up with more than I do, for reasons that - as cliche as this sounds - I'm only just now coming to understand, myself. The funny thing is that when I first started writing the Webfoot Chronicles in 1994, I spent all this time denying how much of myself was in this character yet at the same time when something happened I knew how she'd react. I didn't have to think about the hows and whys, I just wrote it, because obviously that's how she would react. It's how I would react, or sometimes, how I would LIKE to react; therefore it's how it goes. Now, even as I've accepted Beth as a part of me and me as a part of her, I take more time to think: never mind what I would do. How will Beth actually respond to this?

I am glad I've waited this long to write "All About Elizabeth", and I'm also glad I'm doing it now, at the same time that I'm starting to heavily revise the first few stories. I have a backstory to look at, patterns coming to light and I'm going "this has been here all along?" And at the same time I can go back and just slightly emphasize one or two things in the early stuff that is explained - or at least pointed to - in AAE. It's cheating in a way to go back 13 years later and "restart" the beginnings... but at the same time I feel like it's the right time.