The Quest for the Legends

Depends on what you call "are you still"; I haven't been writing it for years, but I would like to continue it at some point in the future.

They're not at any particular level.

The fake chapter was written in one day. The real one took something like two weeks after that.

Butterfree, when you started writing the fic did you know exactly what was going to happen or did you make it up as you went along?

It was all made up as I went along, or rather slightly ahead of it. Which is a good thing, because whatever this fic would be if I'd planned it out in its entirety when I was twelve, it certainly wouldn't be any good.

And what spoilers? There aren't any spoiler tags on this forum, if that's what you were wondering about; it's pretty much assumed that the entire forum is stuffed with spoilers and you shouldn't be here if you haven't read the ILCOE.

You don't ask me for ideas for titles. Come on. I named my fic "The Quest for the Legends".

Marge comes from "mar", one of many words meaning the sea in Icelandic. As a rule, I name my characters the first thing that pops into my head when I think of the character. Marge is the only one of the Gym leaders with an actual semi-subtle pun, with Flora and Sparky just there to parody the games' Gym leader names.

Of course it has a nostalgic tug, but that doesn't make it any good as a title and I acknowledge that.

I told Larissa (owner of my first sibling site) once. Odds are she's forgotten it, though. :P And if she remembers, she's sworn to secrecy, so.

There has also been a guy who claimed I'd told him when I hadn't. He swore up and down that he'd honestly thought he remembered me telling him when I confronted him about it, but the ending he thought I'd told him was absolutely nothing like the real one, so I have no idea where that came from.

(Also, only 76 chapters? Is that just what you have planned so far or is that the definite ending?)

That's the definite ending, unless I end up splitting up some of what's currently supposed to be a single chapter or otherwise tweak the chapter structure. The fic has been planned chapter by chapter to the end already; it's just a matter of writing it.

Probably Dragonite too, yeah. Though I also like Garchomp.

Just like when the third and fourth generations came out, yes, there will be fifth-generation Pokémon and moves I'll pretend were always there once the English names of everything are out.

Oh, you're giving me way too much credit. A great majority of the stuff that gets answered in Ask the Characters is being made up on the spot, with me trusting my (usually pretty good) memory to make sure I won't contradict it later. I've still made plenty of goofs, mind, and retconned other stuff subtly in the story.

Iriesce is pronounced "Eerie-esk" in my head, but I know that doesn't make much sense and I pronounce half of the normal Pokémon names wrong anyway, so.

I'm not really planning to write more backstory one-shots for the moment - the point of writing one for Spirit is that she actually had relevant stuff happening in her past that I don't really foresee coming up in the story because it's not that important. The other Pokémon with relevant backstories all pretty much had them explained in chapter 27. If I feel the urge I might do one for Letaligon or something, but don't count on it.

User tagging would work basically the way you suggested, Rose - there would be Butterfree-tags and user tags, but kept separate both in the post display and the tag searching (so that you could search only for posts I tagged with whatever).

English, always. I couldn't possibly take them seriously if I were imagining them going "Scyther, scy, scyther! Scy scyther, scy ther scyther" all the time.

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.

So then do you give certain pokemon accents when you imagine them talking?

No. I don't think in accents.

Does the destroyer know they are the destroyer? I mean like, do they actually do the draining on purpose, or is it uncontrollable? Could they physically stop draining everyone's powers, or does the role destroy their minds so they can't help it?

I'm afraid I can't tell you that. You'll just have to find out.

I was thinking more along the lines of "attachment-to-the-silly-idea-sense," but it seems like you'd have to take in account both senses when you change something. So, um, describing the closest thing to a method you use when that happens would probably be best.

It's pretty much a matter of thinking very hard about the new way I want it to be and why it's strictly superior to the old way. After a while, the new way starts to feel familiar and I can push the cringeworthy old one out of my head in the knowledge that the new way is much better.

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.

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.)

Are the "interesting characters" interesting from the start, or do you experience a burst of impulsive brilliance at some point in their characterization that makes them fun/funner to write?

Well, when I initially create characters, it's usually in the form of "Okay, I need a guy here who does this; let's call him Bob." It's then as I proceed to explore Bob and why he does what he does that he may or may not become interesting. So they definitely aren't inherently interesting from the start, but the elements that make them interesting once I start exploring them have often been there from the start; it's not that all of a sudden I make them interesting so much as just that I discover that they're interesting. I don't really like to think of any part of my character writing stemming from anything that could be called brilliance.

Do they ever have conversations in your head in entertaining hypothetical situations?

Not really. They live within the world of the story; I frequently think through scenes from both the past and future of the story in my head, but they don't appear as voices commenting on unrelated situations or anything.

Do you ever see something a fan has speculated on and implement their speculations at all? For example if a post here read "if such and such happened, such and such might not do this" or something to that effect, would you consider this when writing whatever it applies to?

No. I'm extremely averse to anything that could be construed as stealing other people's ideas, so generally, if people post suggestions of what "should" happen or the like that aren't just what would have happened anyway, I'd be more likely to go out of my way to do something completely different.

Occasionally, something people say inspires me to think of something, but then it's always indirect, not a direct implementation of what they suggested.

Also, do you have a vegetable aversion at all?

Not really. I don't particularly like most of them, but there are also others I do like, and the texture doesn't bother me.

Oh, my poor precious neglected fic.

So here's the deal. I'm writing the last chapter of Morphic (after which I can then rewrite the whole thing). And a series of Morphic-related… things. And working and doing university homework and trying to work on my site and so on and so on and long story short, I still haven't started chapter 56, or done much in the way of planning it or the like. Even that explanation of the Waterberg principle is sort of hanging in limbo right now.

So I suppose I owe you at least a little bit of an apology for making you wait. At least chapter fourteen of Morphic will hopefully be up sooner than later if you read that, and after that I may be in a more TQftLy mood. And I may still rewrite Scyther's Story/The Fall of a Leader in November.

Oh, I'll finish it first (no more of this tortuous delay before you can find out how it ends), but after that, yes, it's rewriting time. After all, when I started that thing my idea of what would happen in it amounted to "Some religious fundamentalists want to kill them at some point" (…and one of its primary genres was supposed to be humour, and nobody was supposed to die, but that's another story). I introduced important-sounding things that ended up never being brought up again (the random boy Mia takes a liking to in chapter 5/6, for instance) and spent literally the whole first half of the fic just introducing the morphs, before anything actually happened. And then there are logic issues like whoa.