The Quest Blog
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11/09/2012: NaNoWriMo: Day 8
It's mine and Shadey's anniversary today; we went to see Skyfall and I otherwise spent a lot of the day with him. So again, not enough writing. I finished chapter 66, but now it's nearly half past four in the morning and I'm starting to get a headache, so I'm calling it quits even though I'm only at 314,754 words - 1205 today, 457 words behind where I should be for NaNo. I'll do my best to make up for it this weekend.Even without being part of the revised plan, two interesting things happened as I was writing this chapter: Alan's issues came out like whoa, and despite my having decided several times that Mitch was not going to be in this chapter, he was in it anyway. So in the end this chapter is wayyyyy far off what I originally intended it to be. I barely even remember what it was supposed to be. Something that didn't seem like it could fill a chapter.
11/08/2012: NaNoWriMo: Day 7
I have not had a good day today. Lack of sleep and being generally tired at work and then missing half of the evening trying to take a nap and bleh.I was so tempted to just leave it at the few hundred words I'd typed on the bus to/from work, but because I'm taking this way too seriously, I forced out more words and I'm now at 313,549. I only wrote 1151 words today, swallowing up 505 of the 510 words I'd gotten ahead yesterday, but I'm still on schedule, just barely.
Now to go to SLEEP.
11/07/2012: NaNoWriMo: Day 6
I'm really digging how well I'm keeping this up. After the past several years where I've failed pathetically at pseudo-NaNoing, I thought I might just have lost the ability to write terrible fast nonsense.I'm at 312,398 words now; I've finished chapter 65 and am now on the third page of chapter 66. That's 2036 words since yesterday and 10,510 total NaNo words, 510 ahead of where I should be assuming 50,000 words for the final product. In terms more in line with what I'm actually doing, I've written just over three chapters out of the nearly fourteen I had left when I started, which is promising since that's more than a fifth - of course, that would be assuming the remaining chapters are about as long as these three, which I have no idea about. The next few chapters are probably the ones I'm most unsure about content-wise; some spur-of-the-moment stuff that happened in the past couple will affect what happens in them, and as always my ideas like to flow best while I'm actually writing the fic so now I've thought of a bunch of things I'd rather do with them than I'd originally planned (which is fine, because I wasn't that wild about the original plan). This will be interesting. Hopefully I can keep up the pace and the result will not be irredeemably nonsensical.
Chapter 72 is probably the next one I've been looking forward to for an appreciable amount of time, so getting to that will be exciting.
Also, it's not quite as ludicrously late as yesterday! Victory!
11/06/2012: NaNoWriMo: Day 5
310,362 words now - that's 8484 words written total (I should be at 8333) and 1746 since yesterday. Still doing chapter 65; I just started the seventh page of it. There's a battle going on, which is always good for NaNo because so long as I can concentrate on writing (which I admittedly wish I could for more than ten minutes at a time) they flow a lot quicker than dialogue/character-heavy scenes - the action is much more spontaneous than having to think up vaguely intelligent lines in a conversation.I haven't read over any of this battle at all yet. Part of me thinks once I do it's not going to make any sense whatsoever. Let's keep it that way. It's NaNo.
I've discovered I kind of like writing Preciure. He might get more lines when I edit.
Meanwhile, holy hell it's late and this is not healthy. I think instead of the past few years where I've kinda sorta intended to do NaNo but it just fizzled out, my brain has now decided that my 1667 (or preferably more) words a day must be finished AT ANY COST and the procrastination I do makes me stay up ridiculously late in the night finishing the writing instead of going to sleep thinking falsely that I can make it up later.
11/05/2012: NaNoWriMo: Day 4
I'm at 308,616 words: 6738 words into November (where I should be at 6667 for regular NaNo, so I'm slightly ahead now), with 1942 written since yesterday. So I'm back on track! Whoo.(Well, technically it's twenty minutes to four AM, so it's not quite today. But I attended two parties today, so I don't think you can blame me for making up for it by writing into the middle of the night.)
I might still write a bit more before going to sleep - I'm thinking about getting something to eat, and I'd write while eating - but anyway, I'm feeling reasonably good about my progress now, as well as about my determination to write. I finished chapter 64 this afternoon and am on the third page of chapter 65 at the moment; it'll probably be somewhat on the long side so I don't know if I'll finish it tomorrow, but hopefully the day after that.
There are a lot of bits that are going to need substantial additional work during the editing - I'm really feeling the oh-dear-this-is-way-too-fast-to-be-any-good. Remember how I'd edited and posted the entirety of The Fall of a Leader by sometime in January, when I did that for NaNo? Yeah, no, that's not going to happen here. Still expect I'm going to spend my days being I FINISHED MY FIC MUST EDIT enough for it to not take years or something, but definitely longer than TFoaL.
11/04/2012: NaNoWriMo: Day 3
I should never post chapters while trying to write, because when I post chapters I spend the rest of the day uselessly refreshing the places I posted them. And then suddenly I went and started rereading Morphic extras, which really didn't help.So I'm still a couple hundred words behind - the current word count is 306,674, which means I've written 1578 words since yesterday if I'm not mathfailing again. I really am hoping to make it up tomorrow, and definitely to finish chapter 64 (one of those chapters that turned out a whole lot longer and more interesting than I thought it would - it had "stuff happens" in its plan, but once I started writing it my brain took that to mean taking on May's issues).
11/03/2012: Chapter 62 up
Chapter 62: DiplomacyIf you haven't been following the blog, I'm attempting to finish the fic for NaNoWriMo, so hopefully there will be lots of updating after November is over. See the other recent blog posts for details.
Thanks to elyvorg and opaltiger for betaing the chapter.
11/03/2012: NaNoWriMo: Day 2
Technically I should have posted this (and chapter 62) yesterday, but shush, I was ridiculously tired.Basically, I didn't get quite as much writing done as I would have wanted because I was traveling most of the day and my laptop's battery was limited. I'm at 305,096 words, which means 3218 words in altogether, which means I'm almost on schedule (115 words behind) thanks to having been comfortably ahead yesterday. And it's the weekend, so I should have plenty of time to get ahead again today.
That being said, I don't think I should deprive you of chapter 62 any longer, so before I get back to frenzied writing, I'm going to make some final tweaks to chapter 62 and get that up. Watch this space.
11/01/2012: NaNoWriMo: Day 1
I'm probably not done writing for today yet, but so far I'm at 303,960 words, which means 2082 words since yesterday, and chapter 63 is done (as well as the "Chapter 64:" with which the title of chapter 64 starts). Which is a pretty good first day! Only thirteen chapters left.Also, fun things are happening. There is Robin Riverstone. (Look! She wasn't Random Side Character #451 with too many random personal details!) And Chaletwo is now in May's head. I don't think I'm going to be able to resist making gleeful comments about what I'm writing as I progress, which will probably make increasingly less sense as I go on.
Also also, I am using opaltiger's computer! This is exciting.
11/01/2012: NaNoWriMo: begin
The Quest for the Legends Word document is currently 301,878 words. This will be our starting point. This isn't primarily about 50,000 words, of course - if the average chapter remaining is so much shorter than the average chapter so far that there are fewer than 50,000 words left, I'm not going to go pad it out or something - but it's fun to keep a word count anyway.I actually already started chapter 63 yesterday, but like I said, we're treating this as the starting point, which simply happens to be a bit closer to the end of the fic. I'm hoping to post daily progress posts in the hope that this will shame me into getting a decent word count every day instead of putting it off.
Right. It's on, fic.
10/31/2012: Chapter 62 done
I finished the chapter a few days ago and have now read over it again making revisions. Unfortunately, however, I'm at elyvorg's place right now and can't actually update the site or even access the Internet from my own laptop. I'll probably put up the chapter on Friday, when I get back to Iceland, and if everything goes according to plan, by that point I'll be well on my way with chapter 63 if not done. You won't get the NaNo'd chapters until sometime after November, though I hope to be posting here regularly reporting on my progress.10/19/2012: NaNoWriMo
opaltiger has convinced me to attempt to finish the fic for NaNo this year.It's not quite as much of a stretch as it could be: the projected remaining length of the fic shouldn't be that much longer than fifty thousand words, I have planned out what's going to happen in the rest of the fic, and it does happen that motivation is probably the biggest hurdle on the way right now, because the next of those chapters I'm actually excited about writing because I've been planning them for years is quite a way off at this point. Also, there are some chapter splits I'm not actually sure of in the plan, for which it could actually help considerably if I wrote the entire rest before I started posting everything - otherwise we might get a repeat of chapter 46.
Hoping to finish chapter 62 before that. It turned out a bit differently from what I expected, so it's shorter than I thought it would be. I really just need to go and get it done.
07/24/2012: Prophetic?
I dreamt that I woke up one morning really stoked about writing the final chapter of the fic. I got the whole thing down in one sitting and posted it everywhere and felt marvellous to have finally finished it.Then as nobody was commenting on it, I suddenly realized that I wasn't actually up to the final chapter. I mean, I knew that the characters were still on their way to fight Raudra and Puragon again. So why had I just been writing the final chapter? Finally it occurred to me, within the dream, that I'd dreamt I'd written all the intervening chapters, and that was why I'd woken up thinking all that was left was the final chapter.
Then I frantically scrambled to delete it before everyone would see how the fic ends ahead of time, except Serebii had been reorganizing his fanfic forum so that there was a special subforum for "Epic Fics" and most completed fics had special separate forums of their own and I couldn't find it. And then my computer had a virus that was preventing me from accessing the Internet by spawning windows with ocean backgrounds that kept trying to download things and would always pop up again when I closed them. I woke up before ever managing to remove the chapter.
This is totally going to happen.
06/21/2012: Chibi Pika continues to be amazing
Because they made this.I want to flail and put it everywhere, but I'll settle for putting it here (and also in the fic art section when the internet cooperates).
06/19/2012: Ten Years of TQftL
As of today, Mark Greenlet and his poorly-thought-out adventures have been part of my life for a decade, and at my current writing speed he's going to be for at least a few more years (and then it's the IALCOTN, if I ever finish that). It feels strange to think he ever wasn't or ever won't be.Happy birthday, my dear slightly-slow brainchild. I don't think most people would be proud of having spent ten years of their life writing a Pokémon fanfic, but I am.
Chapter 62 is coming along, not very fast but I don't think it'll take that long. (Then again, you should never take my word for that.)
06/08/2012: Legendary Pronouns
There have been a lot of queries regarding the fact Mew is referred to by both 'he' and 'she' in chapter 61 - most of them noticing one instance and assuming it's some kind of a typo.It is not a typo: Mewtwo consistently uses 'she', while Chaletwo and Mark's narration consistently use 'he'. (And May, you may also notice, uses 'it' - which means in this chapter the same character is referred to by all three standard English third-person singular personal pronouns, something I quite enjoy.) This is because in the world of this fic, all legendaries who are genderless in the games are biologically sexless single-individual species that don't have a gender as we know it. Some of them - like Chaletwo - prefer to be referred to by one particular pronoun anyway; others don't, and much like with Pokémon nicknames, the pronoun used in any given instance is up to the speaker. Mew is one such legendary.
This is not a new thing; I've been consciously writing it that way since at least the beginning of the HMMRCIG if not longer, and outside the fic I've been explaining this to readers for about that amount of time. The first time I found occasion to actually bring it up in-story, however, was the first time the opposite of the usual pronoun was actually used for a legendary: chapter 51, where Entei used 'she' for Mew. I threw in a paragraph of Mark remembering that Mew has no grammatical gender preference - kind of out of nowhere, but it was at least intended to introduce the concept to readers so they wouldn't be confused. And it seemed to work: I can't recall anyone expressing confusion over it then, so I actually was kind of surprised by how many people were completely puzzled when the same thing happened in chapter 61.
Now, I said I'd been consciously writing it this way since at least the beginning of the HMMRCIG. If this were a newer concept, it would probably be a bit more refined and informed by modern ideas about gender - but the fact it is old means that pronoun use has been an active part of the characterization for ages. So now that I've found an excuse to ramble about that, I will! :D
06/04/2012: Chapter 61 up
Chapter 61: MewtwoThere is plot! Gasp.
Fun fact: If you read Morphic or follow my Twitter or whatever, you may know of the time I made a typo and wrote "He was fucking scientist" instead of "He was a fucking scientist". Well, apparently there is just something with me and forgetting articles before phrases in the form [expletive] [noun], because I'd read this chapter many times over before opal (who betaed the chapter) found out I'd managed to write "It doesn't mean he's goddamn Destroyer", instead of "It doesn't mean he's the goddamn Destroyer".
Another fun fact: this chapter has way too many italics tags.
02/04/2012: Chapter 60 up
Chapter 60: The SwarmSorry it took longer than I thought. I figured it would be in the six-seven pages range, but it turned out to be thirteen, and then I kept redoing bits that didn't seem right.
As I said, it's about Scyther. I'm not sure how well this chapter works for people who haven't read the spin-offs; nothing about it should be confusing without it, but some lines probably won't really have any meaning to you. I don't know how much that hurts one's ability to enjoy the chapter on the whole.
Thanks enormously to opaltiger for beta-reading.
Then it's chapter 61. I don't know how long it'll take. It is a plot chapter, though, which is nice. Will it intrigue you if I tell you the working title is 'Mewtwo'?
EDIT: I added to Nightmare's character ramble.
01/05/2012: Chapter 60 progress
Thought I'd write a bit of an update. I'm on the seventh page of chapter sixty, as my signature says, and the going's pretty fast when I'm actually working on it. I don't know when I'll finish, exactly, because I'm still not quite sure how long it's going to be (I'm going to wait for how things evolve organically to decide whether and how certain things should happen), but I'm at least definitely more than halfway done.I quite like this chapter so far. Writing it feels like writing Scyther's Story/The Fall of a Leader. I'm a little worried about how this chapter will come across to people who haven't read the spin-offs, though; maybe it'll just seem to be introducing a bunch of tangential stuff without going into it properly. Oh, well. It all does serve a purpose and I don't think it's confusing without having read the spin-offs, so it should be okay.
I dreamt something about Mark and May being engaged for an arranged marriage or something (it could also be that they somehow got engaged by accident or that it was necessary to save the world or whatever; either way, they were still twelve). They were having lunch somewhere talking about how annoying that was and how they're kinda friends and all but why do they have to get married? I really enjoyed that dream because they were delightfully in character about it and I just generally love dreaming about my characters. Also, it just amused me that even in a dream where they're somehow engaged, they're just there going "yeahhh no".
12/14/2011: Ten years
Today it has been ten years since I wrote my first piece of Pokémon fanfiction. By which, of course, I mean Molzapart and Rainteicune.Incidentally, it has also been ten years since Chibi Pika (also known as the creator of the best thing ever) started their silly often-revised still-in-progress legendary-heavy Pokémon fanfic, because clearly we are psychic twins. So clearly the essence of today is best described with this thing they drew for me that is also the best thing ever. :D
So yay.
Chapter sixty is going pretty well. I've been busy with tests, but since today was also the day of my last test, I'm going to be able to get going with that again now. Whoo.