Hi!

Somehow, you've stumbled across this blog. It is a place where I post my writings: original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; and the occasional stab at fanfiction. The original premise was to kind of...retire finished works here, but I seem to be putting up partial, unfinished, and ongoing stuff here too.

That being said, I should probably plug some disclaimers in here. In the case of fan works, I do not claim to own the characters, the settings, their universes, etc. Those rights remain with their respective creators. I'm just a fan doing this for fun, not profit. (If you should run across something that does not have a disclaimer but should, please let me know. I don't want anyone thinking I have rights over something that belongs to someone else.)

As for original works...well. That's fairly self-explanatory. The original stuff is mine. Always has been, always will be. Should you, for some bizarre reason, want to archive something, please drop me a line so I can go check it out!

Anyway, happy reading!

Bridging the Divide

I know, it's been ages since I've written anything here. That's because...well...there are a number of reasons, chief of which is that I've been focusing almost exclusively on retooling Entropy and setting up a page with AFF. (You can find that page here, though it is only, I repeat, only going to house my fanfiction, and there's precious little of that right now.)

As for Entropy, I'm going to be going through and uploading the new versions of the chapters sometime soon, so that we're all on the same page, metaphorically speaking. At this time, I don't plan to put up any of the other, shorter fics here. I think I'm going to go back to my original plan of making this blog be for my original stuff and not my fanworks, but I'm not going to get rid of Entropy here yet.

Random Subject Change: epigraphs and epigrams. (Not to be confused with epitaphs.) I'm wondering how well they work as focusing tools. You know, sometimes you'll read a book and it will have a few lines of poetry or a quote at the start of a chapter/section. That's what I'm talking about. I guess I'm wondering about how they cause a person to focus on the contents of a chapter. I'm not in the habit of using them, mostly because I'm concerned I'll get too married to an idea or subtext and ignore the other possibilities and directions the work could take. What if I were to choose and apply them after the chapter is done? I wonder how that would go...

Anyway, must go do other writerly things!

~Later

Clearing up Confusion

I have been really busy over the past few days. Really, really busy...like working eight or nine hours every day writing and editing. What is it I am working toward? I suppose I'm preparing to transfer my fanfics (what few there are) over to a designated account (with another host) just for fanfics. I'm looking at a timeline of a few weeks to complete this process.

As I prepare for the move, I'm going through the chapters of Entropy posted here. I'm giving them an extra edit and polish before posting over at the new spot. This means that what is posted here for Entropy is growing increasingly obsolete. Should I bother posting the newest versions of chapters here?

I have not yet decided if I'm going to remove the fanfics from here entirely or not. I am somewhat concerned with someone out there somewhere accusing me of plagarism, despite my carefulness to keep everything I do linked together through various means. Perhaps I will make a redirect index to replace the current chapter index?

Of course, this also brings up the question of new Entropy chapters. I have two more that currently have no internet home. Should I continue posting here and then there? Or should I only post over there? I don't want to exclude anyone...

Ah, administration. How I loathe you.

In addition to the fanfics, I've been grinding away at some original fiction. Also, I woke up this morning and did a rough draft of a poem. I was up ridiculously early today and managed to start off on a good writing foot (though I did have a nap this morning as well, after a few hours of working.) I did something like ten or eleven hours' worth of writing stuff today. If only I were this productive every day! Also, I wish I wouldn't feel so wiped from doing all that work.

I have not been doing well on the daily freewrite and weekly book review goals I set myself. If I even get a freewrite in, it always ends up being something I don't want to share...which is frustrating because part of doing the dailies is to share! As for the book reviews, again, it's a matter of not feeling that what I've read is fit for public consumption. I mean honestly. I read no less than two books a week, and sometimes upwards of one book a day. There's no excuse!

Argh. My brain is fried and I have the attention span of a cracked-out hamster.

~Later

New Story is a Guinea Pig?

I have a new story for you to read. It is a Naruto fanfic, though I could make very minor changes and it could stand on its own. (In fact, I'm considering doing that, but instead of making it into an original, I want to see how it works out with different characters from other fandoms. It's a fiction experiment!)

After some serious thought, I'm shaking things up a little in how I'm allowing people to view this particular story. It does contain some objectionable content, so I didn't want to just lay it out and accidentally whammy anyone. Instead, I'm providing a link to the story, which is in the extremely-convenient-to-me Google Docs. (I love the whole mass of kissing-cousins Google products that are bundled into gmail accounts. It's like I have a chicken coop full of chickens ready to lay eggs when I need them.)

Warnings for the story:

*Angst and general craziness
*sexual innuendo/suggestive dialogue
*thematic elements
*mention of the existence of porn
*gay guys co-habitating
*gay kissing
*two guys groping
*kittens...but not in a nice way.
*pervy old ladies

So that list? I may be over-exaggerating the importance of some things and under-representing others. I don't want to give too many specifics because I'm worried it will ruin the story experience. I will not lie. This story is not a happy story. It is unpleasant and a bit disturbing, but I promise I wrote it with love.

Now that you have been thoroughly warned, read the new story, Liability, here.

I don't know. Does this system of delivery work better? I may back-track and convert all the really long entries on here into GDs. I suppose aesthetically it's not everything I'd want, but maybe I can tweak it.

I think this is also a good (temporary) compromise while I consider whether I need to use Blogger's adult content filter. While there are many benefits to filtering, I hate that it's an all-or-nothing deal on here. For now, this is as close as I can get to selective filtering. Is it working for you?

Later!


Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.

To Filter or Not to Filter?

Well! Entropy is currently about halfway to its intended destination of its main characters getting it on. With that in mind, I'm considering the pros and cons of filtering for adult content. Pros include, obviously, not getting sued by enraged persons stumbling across my blog and avoiding the possibility of Google shutting me down for what could be construed as breaking the rules.

When I first signed up for a spot here, I looked over the adult content policy very carefully, with an eye towards the future possibilities of sex scenes in my writing. The hard lines of the policy dictate that one must filter for adult images and/or video. There is no rule about written "adult situations."

However, I kind of see it as a courtesy to filter. I'm pretty sure not everyone on the internet is going to want to have what I will post right in their faces. However, I'm not sure exactly how the content filter works. Does it do a blanket for the entire blog, or just specific entries? Ideally, I'd like to be able to do it on a case-by-case basis...because I find it equally unfair that people would have to skip over all the other, non-sexually-based writing, just because my blog warns them that there may be some naughty stuff. It's not like I'm running a porn shop here! Writing that happens to contain occasional sex, is not the same as nothing but sex that's in written form. (It's like the difference between all squares being rectangles and not all rectangles being squares.)

The good news is that I don't have to make any real decisions until later. Maybe I should do a trial run and see how the A.C. filter will affect the blog?

Anyway, I'm going to be working on chapter eight this weekend. I plan to be done by Sunday evening...but I'm not-so-secretly hoping that I'll be done by bedtime tonight. I always think I'll be done faster than it turns out being, though, so don't hold your breath. ^_^

Later!

Minor Updates

Chapter seven is coming along pretty swimmingly. I hope to have it up either this afternoon or a little later this evening, after dinnertime. I've successfully caught it up from chapter six's cliffhanger. I just have to edit it now. I'm finding myself liking chapter seven a lot, which is making me reluctant to make major changes. This could be good or bad. I can't tell if I happen to like this particular crappy writing, or if it is in fact good and I am subconsciously recognizing the awesomeness. I am so well-trained in self-effacement... I can't tell the difference between my best and worst writing.

I've also put up a nice new header image today, to help spiff up the place. Like the last one, it's a photo that I took. Well, technically it's only part of a photo, but what the hey. Using my own images feels like a narcissistic thing to do. I just really want to avoid rights-infringement troubles. (If I actually thought my photos were any good, then I'd know I was being egotistical, right?)

Anyway, off to work I go!

Later!

Is this any better?

As you might notice, I've been tweaking the layout to provide more space (read: width) for the place where the posts go.

How's it looking? I've checked it in Firefox and IE and it looks okay to me. (Granted, my computer runs Windows XP at that something-by-1024 pixels resolution.)

If you're reading this post via email digest, I'd suggest going to look at the actual blog. I am going on the assumption that the email version of the posts are somehow conveying the content and stripping the formatting right out. Or maybe it just is all "there's a snazzy post; click on this link and get redirected to the blog from whence it came!" I don't know.

Is it weird to want to put myself on my own blog-email-contact list just to see what everyone else is getting? ...I totally just did that. Let the magic commence!

Later!

p.s. Chapter seven should be coming in fairly short order. I looked it over, and, actually, I think it needs a lot less editing than most of the chapters I've done so far. (This of course translates to "I don't hate it and feel obligated to rewrite all of it! Yay!)

p.p.s. Yep. I knew it. The email digest strips the formatting. It's really a shame. It looks so pretty on the actual blog!

Quick note!

Someone mentioned to me recently that the "follow" feature wasn't working correctly. Therefore, I took the liberty of hooking the followers into the email system. Hopefully now, every time I make a post on here, you all will get an email! *Testing, testing, 1,2,3.*

(If you don't want this potentially irritating method of notification, let me know and I'll take you off the list. ^_^ )