The Quest for the Legends

Yesterday I did one of the stupidest, most pointless things ever, namely to go through the entirety of the fic and change how the various italics are marked up. Everything used to be em tags, which didn't make semantic sense - em tags are for emphasis. Now that the HTML5 specification gives i tags an official purpose of marking up things to be read in an "alternate voice or mood" and other conventionally italicized purposes, it is plain that they are actually definitively the Right Way to mark up things like thoughts and telepathic speech, with classes to assign them different purposes. So now, every single line of telepathic speech, every single line of thought, every single book title, etc. etc. etc. in every chapter of both active versions of the fic, extras and spinoffs should be marked up in an amazingly semantic manner that looks visually identical to before! Isn't this exciting?

Well, there is one discernible purpose to all this, which is that in theory, if I wanted to decide to style these different things differently, I could do that. So if I decided to stop italicizing thoughts, that would be a couple lines of CSS, without affecting other italics. And I ended up giving the "read" class (for signs, etc. that the main characters read) a serif font. But the rest is just plain italics exactly as it was before.

This has been me telling you nothing has changed. Except that serif font.


Chapter 64… is not getting worked on much at the moment. I've been randomly in a website mood recently, hence all the updating TCoD and now with the BOOYAH SEMANTIC MARKUP FOR MY FANFICTION thing, and when I'm not doing that I tend to be working on those Serebii contest reviews. I've been thinking about it quite a bit, though, in terms of what purpose it needs to serve for the story and how to go about achieving it, so all this time hasn't been entirely unproductive - I was dissatisfied with how the chapter progressed but I've mostly figured out what blanks I need to fill in.

Yesterday I did one of the stupidest, most pointless things ever, namely to go through the entirety of the fic and change how the various italics are marked up. Everything used to be em tags, which didn't make semantic sense - em tags are for emphasis. Now that the HTML5 specification gives i tags an official purpose of marking up things to be read in an "alternate voice or mood" and other conventionally italicized purposes, it is plain that they are actually definitively the Right Way to mark up things like thoughts and telepathic speech, with classes to assign them different purposes. So now, every single line of telepathic speech, every single line of thought, every single book title, etc. etc. etc. in every chapter of both active versions of the fic, extras and spinoffs should be marked up in an amazingly semantic manner that looks visually identical to before! Isn't this exciting?

Well, there is one discernible purpose to all this, which is that in theory, if I wanted to decide to style these different things differently, I could do that. So if I decided to stop italicizing thoughts, that would be a couple lines of CSS, without affecting other italics. And I ended up giving the "read" class (for signs, etc. that the main characters read) a serif font. But the rest is just plain italics exactly as it was before.

This has been me telling you nothing has changed. Except that serif font.


Chapter 64… is not getting worked on much at the moment. I've been randomly in a website mood recently, hence all the updating TCoD and now with the BOOYAH SEMANTIC MARKUP FOR MY FANFICTION thing, and when I'm not doing that I tend to be working on those Serebii contest reviews. I've been thinking about it quite a bit, though, in terms of what purpose it needs to serve for the story and how to go about achieving it, so all this time hasn't been entirely unproductive - I was dissatisfied with how the chapter progressed but I've mostly figured out what blanks I need to fill in.

Yesterday I did one of the stupidest, most pointless things ever, namely to go through the entirety of the fic and change how the various italics are marked up. Everything used to be em tags, which didn't make semantic sense - em tags are for emphasis. Now that the HTML5 specification gives i tags an official purpose of marking up things to be read in an "alternate voice or mood" and other conventionally italicized purposes, it is plain that they are actually definitively the Right Way to mark up things like thoughts and telepathic speech, with classes to assign them different purposes. So now, every single line of telepathic speech, every single line of thought, every single book title, etc. etc. etc. in every chapter of both active versions of the fic, extras and spinoffs should be marked up in an amazingly semantic manner that looks visually identical to before! Isn't this exciting?

Well, there is one discernible purpose to all this, which is that in theory, if I wanted to decide to style these different things differently, I could do that. So if I decided to stop italicizing thoughts, that would be a couple lines of CSS, without affecting other italics. And I ended up giving the "read" class (for signs, etc. that the main characters read) a serif font. But the rest is just plain italics exactly as it was before.

This has been me telling you nothing has changed. Except that serif font.


Chapter 64… is not getting worked on much at the moment. I've been randomly in a website mood recently, hence all the updating TCoD and now with the BOOYAH SEMANTIC MARKUP FOR MY FANFICTION thing, and when I'm not doing that I tend to be working on those Serebii contest reviews. I've been thinking about it quite a bit, though, in terms of what purpose it needs to serve for the story and how to go about achieving it, so all this time hasn't been entirely unproductive - I was dissatisfied with how the chapter progressed but I've mostly figured out what blanks I need to fill in.

Yesterday I did one of the stupidest, most pointless things ever, namely to go through the entirety of the fic and change how the various italics are marked up. Everything used to be em tags, which didn't make semantic sense - em tags are for emphasis. Now that the HTML5 specification gives i tags an official purpose of marking up things to be read in an "alternate voice or mood" and other conventionally italicized purposes, it is plain that they are actually definitively the Right Way to mark up things like thoughts and telepathic speech, with classes to assign them different purposes. So now, every single line of telepathic speech, every single line of thought, every single book title, etc. etc. etc. in every chapter of both active versions of the fic, extras and spinoffs should be marked up in an amazingly semantic manner that looks visually identical to before! Isn't this exciting?

Well, there is one discernible purpose to all this, which is that in theory, if I wanted to decide to style these different things differently, I could do that. So if I decided to stop italicizing thoughts, that would be a couple lines of CSS, without affecting other italics. And I ended up giving the "read" class (for signs, etc. that the main characters read) a serif font. But the rest is just plain italics exactly as it was before.

This has been me telling you nothing has changed. Except that serif font.


Chapter 64… is not getting worked on much at the moment. I've been randomly in a website mood recently, hence all the updating TCoD and now with the BOOYAH SEMANTIC MARKUP FOR MY FANFICTION thing, and when I'm not doing that I tend to be working on those Serebii contest reviews. I've been thinking about it quite a bit, though, in terms of what purpose it needs to serve for the story and how to go about achieving it, so all this time hasn't been entirely unproductive - I was dissatisfied with how the chapter progressed but I've mostly figured out what blanks I need to fill in.

Ack.

It's now been a year since I started my NaNoing efforts for this fic, and thus eleven months since I technically finished it. In that time, I've posted one single chapter.

This should not be what the rest of this fic's lifetime will be like, honestly. It's just that this chapter is really hard to get right, and I really want to get it right. Mostly, on both counts, that's because of May. Normally I have it easy: Mark is a very cooperative narrator, because he is generally straightforward, quite introspective and usually honest with himself. If something is bothering Mark, I can just write "It bothered Mark that…" and it will be both an accurate representation of how he mentally frames it to himself and easily communicates information about what's going on in Mark's head to the reader. May, on the other hand, has about a billion different things going on in her head and she hates half of them and doesn't want to acknowledge that they exist or if so only in the briefest and vaguest of terms, and on top of all that Chaletwo is in her head reading her mind right now and that makes her mentally clam up even more than usual. This all makes her way more interesting than Mark (at least in my opinion), which is why I extra-specially want to get this chapter just right, but on the other hand it also means writing a chapter that mostly revolves around what's going on in May's head, like this one, takes some figuring to work out how to smoothly show the stuff I want to communicate within the rather uncooperative framework of her narration. Really interesting figuring! But also kind of time-consuming figuring, and the result of the figuring often involves some delicate tuning and long story short, I'm still working on getting it right because of all that.

Unfortunately it's not all good news for what comes after the chapter either, even though this particular issue is specific to it. I never really liked chapters 66-70 and they keep bothering me: essentially it's a five-chapter arc that as it stands could almost be cut out without impacting the rest of the fic, which is always a bad sign. I say almost because actually just cutting them out would leave a bunch of setup leading nowhere and a bit of character development for Alan would be missing and a minor loose end one of them addresses would be left hanging, but the rest of what happens in them is, right now, just setting up the rest of them and then more or less restoring to the status quo, which makes them feel pretty pointless (to me, anyway). So I want to work out a way to integrate them better with the rest of the story, too, and that will also take some figuring.

But I will soldier on no matter what. Never think the fic is dead. I couldn't quit it if I tried.

Ack.

It's now been a year since I started my NaNoing efforts for this fic, and thus eleven months since I technically finished it. In that time, I've posted one single chapter.

This should not be what the rest of this fic's lifetime will be like, honestly. It's just that this chapter is really hard to get right, and I really want to get it right. Mostly, on both counts, that's because of May. Normally I have it easy: Mark is a very cooperative narrator, because he is generally straightforward, quite introspective and usually honest with himself. If something is bothering Mark, I can just write "It bothered Mark that…" and it will be both an accurate representation of how he mentally frames it to himself and easily communicates information about what's going on in Mark's head to the reader. May, on the other hand, has about a billion different things going on in her head and she hates half of them and doesn't want to acknowledge that they exist or if so only in the briefest and vaguest of terms, and on top of all that Chaletwo is in her head reading her mind right now and that makes her mentally clam up even more than usual. This all makes her way more interesting than Mark (at least in my opinion), which is why I extra-specially want to get this chapter just right, but on the other hand it also means writing a chapter that mostly revolves around what's going on in May's head, like this one, takes some figuring to work out how to smoothly show the stuff I want to communicate within the rather uncooperative framework of her narration. Really interesting figuring! But also kind of time-consuming figuring, and the result of the figuring often involves some delicate tuning and long story short, I'm still working on getting it right because of all that.

Unfortunately it's not all good news for what comes after the chapter either, even though this particular issue is specific to it. I never really liked chapters 66-70 and they keep bothering me: essentially it's a five-chapter arc that as it stands could almost be cut out without impacting the rest of the fic, which is always a bad sign. I say almost because actually just cutting them out would leave a bunch of setup leading nowhere and a bit of character development for Alan would be missing and a minor loose end one of them addresses would be left hanging, but the rest of what happens in them is, right now, just setting up the rest of them and then more or less restoring to the status quo, which makes them feel pretty pointless (to me, anyway). So I want to work out a way to integrate them better with the rest of the story, too, and that will also take some figuring.

But I will soldier on no matter what. Never think the fic is dead. I couldn't quit it if I tried.

Ack.

It's now been a year since I started my NaNoing efforts for this fic, and thus eleven months since I technically finished it. In that time, I've posted one single chapter.

This should not be what the rest of this fic's lifetime will be like, honestly. It's just that this chapter is really hard to get right, and I really want to get it right. Mostly, on both counts, that's because of May. Normally I have it easy: Mark is a very cooperative narrator, because he is generally straightforward, quite introspective and usually honest with himself. If something is bothering Mark, I can just write "It bothered Mark that…" and it will be both an accurate representation of how he mentally frames it to himself and easily communicates information about what's going on in Mark's head to the reader. May, on the other hand, has about a billion different things going on in her head and she hates half of them and doesn't want to acknowledge that they exist or if so only in the briefest and vaguest of terms, and on top of all that Chaletwo is in her head reading her mind right now and that makes her mentally clam up even more than usual. This all makes her way more interesting than Mark (at least in my opinion), which is why I extra-specially want to get this chapter just right, but on the other hand it also means writing a chapter that mostly revolves around what's going on in May's head, like this one, takes some figuring to work out how to smoothly show the stuff I want to communicate within the rather uncooperative framework of her narration. Really interesting figuring! But also kind of time-consuming figuring, and the result of the figuring often involves some delicate tuning and long story short, I'm still working on getting it right because of all that.

Unfortunately it's not all good news for what comes after the chapter either, even though this particular issue is specific to it. I never really liked chapters 66-70 and they keep bothering me: essentially it's a five-chapter arc that as it stands could almost be cut out without impacting the rest of the fic, which is always a bad sign. I say almost because actually just cutting them out would leave a bunch of setup leading nowhere and a bit of character development for Alan would be missing and a minor loose end one of them addresses would be left hanging, but the rest of what happens in them is, right now, just setting up the rest of them and then more or less restoring to the status quo, which makes them feel pretty pointless (to me, anyway). So I want to work out a way to integrate them better with the rest of the story, too, and that will also take some figuring.

But I will soldier on no matter what. Never think the fic is dead. I couldn't quit it if I tried.

Ack.

It's now been a year since I started my NaNoing efforts for this fic, and thus eleven months since I technically finished it. In that time, I've posted one single chapter.

This should not be what the rest of this fic's lifetime will be like, honestly. It's just that this chapter is really hard to get right, and I really want to get it right. Mostly, on both counts, that's because of May. Normally I have it easy: Mark is a very cooperative narrator, because he is generally straightforward, quite introspective and usually honest with himself. If something is bothering Mark, I can just write "It bothered Mark that…" and it will be both an accurate representation of how he mentally frames it to himself and easily communicates information about what's going on in Mark's head to the reader. May, on the other hand, has about a billion different things going on in her head and she hates half of them and doesn't want to acknowledge that they exist or if so only in the briefest and vaguest of terms, and on top of all that Chaletwo is in her head reading her mind right now and that makes her mentally clam up even more than usual. This all makes her way more interesting than Mark (at least in my opinion), which is why I extra-specially want to get this chapter just right, but on the other hand it also means writing a chapter that mostly revolves around what's going on in May's head, like this one, takes some figuring to work out how to smoothly show the stuff I want to communicate within the rather uncooperative framework of her narration. Really interesting figuring! But also kind of time-consuming figuring, and the result of the figuring often involves some delicate tuning and long story short, I'm still working on getting it right because of all that.

Unfortunately it's not all good news for what comes after the chapter either, even though this particular issue is specific to it. I never really liked chapters 66-70 and they keep bothering me: essentially it's a five-chapter arc that as it stands could almost be cut out without impacting the rest of the fic, which is always a bad sign. I say almost because actually just cutting them out would leave a bunch of setup leading nowhere and a bit of character development for Alan would be missing and a minor loose end one of them addresses would be left hanging, but the rest of what happens in them is, right now, just setting up the rest of them and then more or less restoring to the status quo, which makes them feel pretty pointless (to me, anyway). So I want to work out a way to integrate them better with the rest of the story, too, and that will also take some figuring.

But I will soldier on no matter what. Never think the fic is dead. I couldn't quit it if I tried.

No, the fic is not cancelled, and for your information it never will be unless I die in a sudden accident. I have some changes I still need to make to chapter 64 in accordance with some comments from my betas, but it shouldn't take too long at this point - I just have less free time than I'd like these days and there are a lot of other things besides this fanfic competing for space in that limited free time.

Hey, and sorry for so long without updates. For those of you who aren't following my Tumblr, there is one sentence I'm still trying to get right in chapter 64, and I'm slowly inching closer to it. It seriously shouldn't be long now. If any of you are still reading, this would be a good time to refresh your memory on what's actually going on in the fic (but if you can't be bothered, I'll update the Plot Recap page when the chapter goes up either way).

Chapter 65 really should be relatively quick. I've mentioned before that I have some issues with chapters 66-70, though, and I'm hoping to get back on my originally intended "show several chapters to betas and make edits to all of them before posting anything" plan. So that could take some time. Not as long as chapter 64, though. Chapter 64 was 100% me being a ridiculous perfectionist about it because it's May. Normally I'd have posted it like a year ago.

And just to give you something after all this time, here's the first scene. It's not hugely remarkable, but it's something.

The quickest way to Acaria City was to fly. Skarmory couldn’t fly as fast as Charizard with a trainer weighing him down, so May borrowed Mark’s Charizard. It was strange flying an unfamiliar Pokémon, and despite how many battles they’d been in together, she could never quite shake the feeling that she just didn’t trust him like one of her own.

(Chaletwo didn’t comment on that, but he was probably rolling his immaterial eyes.)

They reached the city in the evening and checked into a trainer hotel. Chaletwo hadn’t talked to her most of the day, which made her almost forget he was there at all; if anything that bothered her even more. She didn’t know how Mark could stand this.

“He can stand this because he doesn’t freak out over it,” Chaletwo said as she entered her room and collapsed onto the bed. “I don’t understand why you’re so tense. You know me; I know you; I already know your Tyranitar killed a boy. Exactly what are you afraid of?”

She winced. “That’s not the problem,” she said, turning onto her side.

“Then what is? Do girls your age think about boys or something? Because I assure you I’d tune that out anyway.”

“No!” She sat up in disgust. “What, is Mark thinking about girls all the time?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“Good.”

May lay back down with a sigh. There was silence.

“You still haven’t told me what –”

“Thoughts are supposed to be private,” she said between gritted teeth.

“I’m not going to blab everything you think to Mark, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Again, that’s not the point.”

“Then I don’t have the faintest idea what is.”

What was the point? May wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that. Thoughts were random and uncontrollable, and people should have conscious control over how they appeared to others. That didn’t mean they had anything to hide. It was just… who you were was the choices you made about what to say and do, and if somebody was reading your mind, you didn’t have a choice about anything. It was creepy and terrifying.

“What? Of course you can still choose what you say and do. It’s not mind-control.”

May clenched her jaw and thought about empty white space.

“If it helps,” Chaletwo said after a moment, “I don’t have to read your thoughts all the time. I can tune you out completely unless you ask for me or something important is going on.”

She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

Chaletwo gave a long telepathic sigh. “If you insist. What do you think of our prospects without Mark?”

“We have Robin,” she said.

“She’s a whole lot better than nothing, obviously, but you and Mark did train for a couple of months for legendary battles, which she hasn’t.”

“But Robin is good at battling, which Mark isn’t, so that pretty much balances it out.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. Mark made it to the quarterfinals of the League. I realize you’re the more skilled battler, but…”

“Mark is okay,” May said firmly, “but Robin is top-notch. She’ll pick up the strategy in no time. If anything we’re better off now.”

Chaletwo sighed again. “Well, I suppose optimism is nice. Either way, you should get some sleep; tomorrow will be a long day.”

May nodded and stood up to brush her teeth, and Chaletwo didn’t speak again for the rest of the night.

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

[Reposted because the minipage wigged out on me and as far as I can tell the e-mail notifications didn't actually get sent.]

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

[Reposting because of technical issues.]

It's here, at long last.

If you have no idea what's going on in this fic anymore, you might want to wait a bit while I finish posting the chapter elsewhere and then update the plot recap page - I would have done that first, but you've all been waiting long enough already. I'll update this post when it's done.

Person who tried to contact me about having your account deleted a short while back, I'm sorry I lost your IM before I could respond. If you see this (and I apologize for you getting another e-mail notification about some Pokémon fanfic you don't care about), can you e-mail me from the address you're registered as (so I can be sure it's actually you)?

[Reposting because of technical issues.]

[EDIT: The Plot Recap page has been updated.]

Chapter 65: Three Dragons

Oh, look, it's a chapter.

You can read all about the sordid tale of why this chapter took so long on my Tumblr, which, uh, may be a better place to hear about QftL progress these days than the Quest Blog. I'm not going to try to convince you it's worth the wait - I don't think it is - but at least now I can write some other chapters! That won't take as long!

I'm still planning to finish chapters 66-69 in one batch and then post them on a schedule after they're all done, so don't expect 66 too soon, but still definitely sooner than these past two. There is no excuse for the past two.

I'm working on chapters 66-69 simultaneously right now because I might want to rearrange some of the material in them, which means it's taking a while, but once I'm done I'll probably post all four of these chapters with a week or so in between. So, there won't be more quite yet, but there'll be plenty of material when it does come!

Actually, I should probably write about my progress more on the Quest Blog. I've been mostly using my Tumblr for it.

Like I said in my last update, I've been doing most of my rambling on the progress of TQftL on Tumblr lately, so for those of you who aren't following that, here's an update on how it's going.

As I've explained before, I'm editing chapters 66-69 at the same time for various reasons. I'm pretty much entirely done with 66 unless I make some last-minute decisions, have made the major additions I needed to make to chapters 67, 68 and 69, and am in the process of smoothing them out better and deciding what to do about a couple of scenes in chapter 67. Once I've finished all these chapters, I'll be posting all four chapters on a schedule.

My speed has been picking up quite a bit recently because I've been doing a thing where I work on the fic for at least half an hour daily. This has been helping me a lot - I've had problems with not writing anything for long stretches of time, or rereading but then wandering off to do something else before I manage to make any actual progress, and half an hour is just enough to get me past that threshold into doing some useful work (I'm allowed to write for more than half an hour, of course, if I have time and energy). Moreover, by doing it every day, I can keep up my general train of thought a lot better than when I leave it for weeks and then come back to it - I remember what I was thinking the day before and it's easy to come back to it. So, if you write, I highly recommend doing this. It's a lot of the helpful things about NaNo without the pressure to churn out words regardless of sense. (Not to knock NaNo, mind you; just getting the words down somehow is a great thing, too.)

So, it's been a while, but as usual, the story is far from dead, and in fact, I expect it to be picking up the pace from here on.

Chapter 66: Doubts is finally up.

Chapters 67, 68 and 69 have also been completed; they will be posted on the following three Thursdays. Thus, chapter 67 will be posted on February 25th, chapter 68 will be posted on March 3rd, and chapter 69 will be posted on March 10th.

I also updated Alan's character bio (contains spoilers for chapter 66), because did you know Alan has all of the issues.