The Quest for the Legends

I'm at 331,417 words now - unfortunately not caught up yet, since I only managed 1743 words today, but hopefully I can continue to whittle that down in the next days (I'm at 29,539 words right now for November, where I ought to be at 30,000, so I'm 461 words behind).

This is a really nostalgic part of the story - basically everything happening right now is calling back to some of the early chapters. On the one hand, this made me reread some of those early chapters and discover gems of my fourteen-year-old self's writing such as "A bearded man, most of his bearded face hidden in shadow" and "She didn’t say anything to him and they just walked down the stairs, ignoring each other very ironically." On the other hand, when I was going to reference how May came with Mark to confront the Mew Hunter largely because he'd also stolen her Larvitar, I discovered that that never happened, because apparently the version I was remembering was the UMR and I took that part out in the ILCOE. (Originally, they had a full five-on-five battle in Rainbow Woods, leading to all of Mark's Pokémon fainting, and May lent him Larvitar for the rest of the journey, leading to the Mew Hunter stealing him when he stole Mark's Pokéballs; in the ILCOE, I decided the full battle was unnecessary, cut it down to just Dratini vs. Larvitar, and removed the bit about Mark having Larvitar entirely.) It was pretty strange; the ILCOE has been the official version of the fic for so long that things that used to be in the UMR - like Mark randomly encountering the Waraider herd near Ruxido sometime in chapter 28 or so - tend to slip my memory entirely until I start thinking about that version specifically. This weird reversal of that principle has never happened before.

It is so weird to be writing this. It's seemed like this way distant vague future something for so many years.

It must be pretty good to look back and see everything you did.

Assuming you make your goal of finishing it by the end of November, and I believe you will, how will you about releasing the chapters? Will every chapter from 64 to the end go up simultaneously, or will you have some kind of release schedule - like one chapter a day, or something?

I'm going to be editing and posting them one by one. "Finishing" in NaNoWriMo doesn't mean you're done and just have to worry about posting the chapters - the output is inevitably mostly crap and needs to be severely reworked into a presentable form that makes sense.

The editing will presumably not take nearly as long as it would have taken me writing the chapters from scratch, but from your end it's going to look like I'm just writing a bit faster than usual - the updates are going to be one at a time, in order, on a when-it's-done basis.

If I have anything to do with it it will be done a great deal faster than if she was writing them from scratch. >:(

You still arguing about getting the chapters before she releases them? Come on!

this is completely off topic, but am i the only one who's wondered what butterfree looks like??

Look at the "about me" section or whatever it's called on TCoD.

haha i mean how she actually looks, not just a description :P i think seeing a picture of her and shadey would be cool :)

Here you go. Unless there are some privacy settings I'm not aware of that make you unable to see it because how do I shot Facebook. (EDIT: Changed the link to one somewhat more likely to work.)

As with all photos of me, I look kind of strange, but at least I'm not smiling enough to get the axe-murderer look. Meanwhile, Shadey looks like a pair of arms with a head.

Bwahaha, my lulzy attempt at drawing you for that comic last year actually did kind of look like you! xD I feel pleased.


Oh yeah, and <insert obligatory comment about being indescribably excited for the fic progressing so well, even if we'll have to wait for it to reach a decently readable state.>

It did look like me! I was impressed and wondered if you had actually seen a picture at some point.

(Speaking of which, I've been looking for that comic and couldn't find it on my computer. Do you still have that somewhere?)

I actually had not ever seen a pic–I was just working off the description on your site. xP

And yes, I most certainly still have that comic. :3 It's still sans the opening panels with preteen us magically starting our fics on the same day, but ah well.

Gah….I derped the bbcode…now I look like a doofus. >: (it…it worked when I tested it elsewhere.)

Ah, what could fake legendaries be if not automatically awesome?

Yeah, my BBCode parser is pretty fragile. In this case, it was the quotes that were confusing it (because I never use quotes in my BBCode). I fixed it!