The Quest Blog


COMMENTARY DONE

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08/25/2010: Chapter 55 up

Here we go.

Chapter 55: Unprepared

Thanks go to elyvorg for a very helpful beta-read.

08/25/2010: Well, damn

Huh. Sure wasn't expecting this to happen. But hey, as they say, characters have minds of their own.

(Still almost done. I'm past that point I was talking about last time; thanks for the opinions. Maybe I can finish it later today, when I'm not at work.)

08/24/2010: Nearly done

So. You may, or may not, have noticed at some point in the past several days that my signature has been saying I'm less than a page away from finishing the chapter.

Well, basically, I'm writing the final scene of the chapter. The scene is just being a little tricky to get right, mostly because it's bringing up a silly made-up bit of Pokémon world mathematics that I'm not sure whether to try to have the characters articulate in full or if I should just mention it fairly out of nowhere with little explanation and make an extra/worldbuilding article about what they're talking about.

There is also stuff earlier in the chapter I'm kind of iffy on, so it may need a lot of proof-tweaking. We'll see.

08/13/2010: Worldbuilding

I went and put up the Power article under the new Worldbuilding Articles section. I ended up not capitalizing it, because it just bugged me, and reworded some other stuff. Again, if you have suggestions for stuff that ought to be touched on, speak up.

08/11/2010: Power

Okay, so remember the worldbuilding articles I was talking about doing a while ago? Well, I've finished at least a rough draft of the first one, on the subject of power (including the Destroyer's power draining). Before I put it up properly, I figured I might as well see if you think this is completely confusing or if I left out something important or if you think something should be expanded on. So basically, feedback, please?

I'm especially iffy on the capitalizing-Power thing. It seems horribly cheesy and awkward but before I did that it was kind of confusing when I then started talking about the power of the Creator which is not actually power as such. Dunno what to do with it.

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08/10/2010: Goofs

In one of my ever-classic moments of working on everything except what people actually want me to be working on, I randomly made the Goofs and Inconsistencies page I mentioned off-handedly a while ago that I wanted to make. Hopefully it will amuse some of you.

If you remember more goofs that I didn't just fix, by all means point them out.

Yes, I've been writing the chapter too. I know progress is slow, but I've had work and friends taking up a lot of my time.

08/02/2010: Tag Categories

I've gone and categorized all the tags into Characters, Other fic-related and Off-topic. Hopefully this will make things somewhat easier to find, though it's giving me an unnerving sense of just how ridiculously many characters there are in this fic.

There has been some progress with the chapter, but right now I'm in a really productive websitey mood, so I think it will have to wait a bit more.

07/20/2010: Spirit, Tagging and Signature

So here it is, that Spirit spin-off one-shot. Nothing spectacular; it's just a brief account of baby Spirit's testing, plus a little bit of seven-year-old May and her father.

I've also finished tagging all my relevant posts in the Quest for the Legends forum as well as some of the Quest Blog forum. I'm thinking about organizing the tags somehow, maybe splitting them into character tags, other fic-related tags and unrelated tags or something like that, to make the searching easier to do.

Finally, you may or may not have noticed, but I randomly decided that in addition to how far into the next chapter I am, I'm going to have a quote from what I've written so far in my signature. With this, I also decided that it's about time I allowed blog browsers to see that stuff without finding my posts at the forums, so my signature is now displayed on Quest Blog posts.

EDIT: On second thought, I put the signature on the main blog page at the top instead. Seemed kind of redundant to have the same signature showing below every post on the page.

07/19/2010: Tags

I've had this idea for a little while about implementing some sort of a tag system here. Now, since I was writing that one-shot with Spirit's backstory, which also touches on May's, and started worrying about whether it was all consistent with everything I've said in Ask the Characters and so on, I went and made it.

Currently, only I can tag posts. This is because the primary intended purpose of this feature is to facilitate a better organization of all the relevant information I've posted on the forum - I want users (and myself) to be able to search for posts tagged with a particular character, for instance, in order to see all questions they've answered in Ask the Characters, any tidbits I've posted about them in threads, etc. If people really want tagging ability, that could be arranged somehow, but right now I don't think the forum is big enough to really warrant it; there isn't much in the way of stuff I'd imagine people would really need to be able to find quickly except for those fic-relevant tidbits.

In any case, I'm still in the process of going through and tagging stuff, so be patient while that happens. If you have any suggestions for tags that already-tagged posts ought to have, tags that should be added in general or not-me posts that warrant tagging, please let me know.

That Spirit one-shot is pretty much finished, but as I said I want to finish the tagging in order to be sure I'm not contradicting myself anywhere; once that's done, though, it should be up pretty soon.

There has also been progress with chapter 55, so yay?

06/23/2010: Chapter 54 up

Chapter 54: Reunion

It's the shortest chapter in a while, at only six pages, but there is stuff happening in it.

Some ramblings, because I'm in a rambly mood; not exactly spoilery:

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06/22/2010: Updates

The chapter is nearly done, I swear. It's just hard to get it to end and I need to be getting to bed since my first day of work is tomorrow.

On the other hand, to practice my AJAX and jQuery skills for said job, I went and randomly made inline editing of posts possible here on the forums. If you click the Edit link on one of your own posts and have Javascript enabled, the post will turn into a textarea and you can edit it right there instead of having to load a new page. Of course, if you don't have Javascript enabled, it'll just take you to the old edit post page and that should work exactly like it used to.

(The coding of this forum is really messy. I kind of want to redo it, or at least reorganize it. But I have better things to do first.)

I also rewrote the About section because I needed to update the age of the fic anyway and then I just felt like it.

EDIT: This is an edit done with the new inline editing thing. Whoo.

Oh, yeah, and feedback on that would be very much appreciated, especially if it's buggy or something.

ANOTHER EDIT: Fixed the BBCode parsing on the blog, which caused line breaks not to be parsed correctly in a post that had been edited inline.

06/19/2010: Happy Birthday to TQftL

On this day exactly eight years ago, my parents got married. And that same day, for some mysterious reason, I felt the urge to start writing a new Pokémon fanfic and created what was to become the most important Word document of my life. Little did I know that at the age of twenty I would still be stuck chugging on with that same story.

Yes, The Quest for the Legends is eight years old today. That makes it older than Mozilla Firefox, older than Firefly, and twice as old as my boyfriend's dog (whose name unfortunately does not involve fire). Happy birthday, my dear awkwardly plotted mess. Know that my love for you knows no bounds.

Unfortunately I haven't finished the chapter, since I've had to do a job assignment all day (monies!), but I will continue writing now and may or may not finish it before I go to bed. In which case, uh, it's totally still the nineteenth if I haven't gone to bed yet.

EDIT: I feel obligated to note that while the server thinks it's the twentieth, that's because it's in London. It's still twenty minutes to midnight on the nineteenth in Iceland. So there.

06/17/2010: Worldbuilding Articles?

One thing I've been toying with the thought of making for a while, either as extras to appropriate chapters or as a section on this minipage, is a series of articles detailing in-depth how some aspects of this fic's world work. Possible subjects could for instance be souls, the Destroyer's power draining, Chaletwo's physical anchor to Mark's brain, perhaps something about the Scyther swarm, even little stuff like the League system, or some reader-suggested topic, if you're curious about something in particular.

Obviously all significant information in such articles would also be revealed within the text of the fic, but less important tidbits that have no place in the story could be brought to light there, and perhaps some information that will only be revealed later in the story might come up. Besides that over the course of a 76-chapter fic, some information inevitably ends up kind of scattered, and collecting everything about some set subjects in one place might help readers keep track of it (and, in the case of less fundamental stuff, stop me from contradicting myself in the future).

Would you be interested in this sort of thing? What sorts of subjects would you like to see written about?

06/14/2010: Progress!

Guess what! Chapter 54 isn't on page one anymore!

So yeah, the beginning was annoying to do, but now I'm past that and I'm on a roll. It's not going to be a very long chapter, so I've set myself a deadline of sorts - I'm going to try to get this chapter up on the fic's eighth birthday, the nineteenth (next Saturday). No guarantees here, but hey, I'm going to try.


On another note, I just ran into a… most interesting problem.

You see, I'm starting to kind of like Molzapart.

The idea of cutting Molzapart out of the fic has always been kind of sentimentally hard, what with nostalgia and everything, but hey, I'd steeled myself up into deciding I'm going to cut him out in the IALCOTN despite that. Fair enough. I mean, Molzapart was never that much of a character anyway, so who cares about cutting him out, right?

However, now I was writing this scene in chapter 54, and I realized Molzapart was going to participate in it, and now he's all there raging at Chaletwo and I think I'm starting to love him a little bit as a character. D: I mean, I was planning to have lots of fun with Mementity, but she wouldn't chew Chaletwo out like this and now I'm having this awful, "Aww, but it won't be the saaaame" feeling. Because Mementity is already defined as a character in my head and she's different and I can't just make her like Molzapart suddenly and argh.

Now I'm really hoping the fifth generation introduces a memory-based legendary that I could feel right about transferring Molzapart's personality onto. Because now he's actually getting scenes and being a character and I have the feeling by the time I'm done with the ILCOE I'm going to love him way too much to just erase him from existence. D:

Yeah. That was me rambling about my silly sentimental foolishness. Ignore me.

06/10/2010: Dramatic Molzapart

This is very out of the blue, but I was listening to some dramatic readings on YouTube and something possessed me to create this.

Dramatic reading of the Molzapart portion of "Molzapart and Rainteicune" by the author

I should warn you that I have the most horrible-sounding voice in the world, the worst accent ever, and really should have done more in the way of the 'dramatic' part. And I tripped up a couple of times, and I sometimes misread a little, and a couple of times I'm starting to burst out laughing and you can really hear it.

It might be good to have the text in front of you if you're going to listen to it, so for reference, you can find that in all its awful glory here.

I also recorded myself doing the first couple of paragraphs of the Rainteicune portion in two different attempts at funny voices and once the Alan detour in a normal voice, but unless you really want to hear that I will hide that away forever.


Chapter 54 is… not really coming along, I'm afraid. But uh, I'll try to poke myself to continue with it. Right now I'm in the process of going through some affiliation requests and the like, so. When I'm not taking lengthy breaks to record dramatic readings of my ridiculous fanfiction, that is.

05/17/2010: More Scyther Bios

Sorry for the downtime. To make up for it, you get two new Scyther spin-off bios, Nightmare's and Stalker's. Of course, Nightmare's is half about Razor and Stalker's is half about Shadowdart, but shush.

Yes, I know I'm not doing it in the correct order, too. I've just been itching to write Stalker's bio for a while.

04/29/2010: Random

Wow, I really want to rewrite Scyther's Story. Maybe I'll redo it for NaNoWriMo and try to get it to 50,000 words - a lot of it feels quite rushed, especially the last couple of parts.

04/25/2010: Not Dead

No, I didn't die in the eruption. The volcanic ash is all being blown away from Iceland and we hardly even know it's there.

I haven't really been writing, though, for several reasons. First, SoulSilver has been very distracting. Second, after focusing so much on writing in March, what with chapters 52 and 53 and the April Fools' chapter, I've been focusing a bit more on The Cave of Dragonflies, both with the capture mechanics, Voltorb Flip guide, the upcoming humongous HG/SS Changes section and the eleventh movie review. Third, my laptop has decided to overheat and turn itself off regularly, which makes me considerably more apprehensive about doing any serious writing on it for fear of it being lost just as I'm in the middle of an exciting paragraph. Fourth, when I do have the opportunity to write, I'm trying to finish chapter thirteen of Morphic, which people have been waiting for for way long and which I'm kind of excited about finishing once I get past this annoying part.

Fifth, even though there is a scene I'm looking much forward to in this chapter, I have a bit of the ordinary block when it comes to the beginning of it; though I've typed the first couple of paragraphs, I don't really like them and have yet to properly decide how much detail I want to go into about what's going on there.

On the plus side, I might be finishing this spin-off one-shot about Spirit's backstory at some point. And yeah, I'll get around to chapter 54 eventually.

04/02/2010: Power of Love: The Making-Of

First of all, I've added to a couple of character bios as well as the trivia in accordance with the real chapter 53. That means spoilers, of course, if you haven't read the chapter yet.

And now it's just the making-of-the-April-Fools'-chapter I talked about yesterday, for those who are interested. Read both the real chapter and the fake one before you read this commentary! It contains major spoilers!

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04/01/2010: Chapter 53 up, really!

So. As you probably guessed, the "Chapter 53" posted yesterday was an April Fools' joke. If you hadn't guessed, this means you no longer have to worry if I've lost my mind. If you had, I hope it amused you half as much as it amused me.

Specifically, everything after "He wished he could help her, somehow" was a joke. What came before it was a sneak peek at the real chapter 53, designed to lull you into thinking you were just reading a normal chapter. So when will you get to see this real chapter 53? In fact, I finished it several days ago - for the first time in this fic's life, I have actually been withholding a finished chapter. (Yes! I really did finish a chapter, and a humorous knock-off of it, within the space of less than a couple of weeks!) So now that it's no longer April Fools' Day on the server, I can now put up the real thing; see the link at the bottom of this post.

For those of you who missed all the fun, the fake chapter 53 can still be read, this time as an extra to chapter 53. If you haven't read the fake one yet, I sort of recommend you read the real chapter first, but it's your choice.

Chapter 53 Extra: April Fools

With this, I also decided that it would be a shame if people could never comment on it again, so I decided to add the ability to comment on extras to the minipage, as well as moving all the comments on the fake chapter over to that comment page.

I'll be posting a bit of a 'making-of' for the fake chapter tomorrow, because I just like to ramble like that. Hope you enjoyed the joke. Thanks to everybody who played along; you all made my day (especially Negrek, who had me giggling for at least five minutes straight). Special thanks also go to opaltiger and elyvorg, who were in on the joke and also beta-read both the real and fake chapters.

Those of you who just posted to tell everybody it's a joke, pssh! Have you no sense of fun? :P

So, well, without further ado, I present to you chapter 53, for real this time. Nine pages. I'm afraid it's… a bit less amusing than its counterpart.

The Real Chapter 53: Away

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