Nightlights

There are just some times when I don't feel like writing, but it isn't like writer's block. I find these times the worst, because I have stories, I have places I want to take those stories and ideas for new ones, but anytime I open up a word processor with the intent to write(and the laughable exception of opening up my blog page was) I can't write. I'm choking now, all the time, and I can figure out why. Maybe it's because I'm tired, or hungry, maybe it's because I'm stressing about finding a new job and hoping that my phone's battery hangs on just long enough so that I can upgrade it next month, maybe it's because a certain special girl and I have been locking horns lately. I don't know what it is, but I just can't focus. I'm at the point again where I'm not sleeping. Not that I can't sleep, because I can, but I don't want to sleep. It feels like a waste again, and I thought that I was past that.

When I was little, laying in bed fending off sleep was what I did. I would lay awake and think up new things every night, alone in the gloom, because I don't like nightlights. I've never been able to stomach them. Not as a child, not as an adult, and there's some inherent logic in the back of my mind that I would rather live in the dark with the creatures than turn on the lights and let them know I'm there. I've always been like this, afraid to turn on lights, afraid to illuminate myself and face the darkness, because, like anybody that has had access to a computer at any time of the night and has read something even remotely frightening, you get the eerie feeling that something is behind you. Even when you know, logically, there can't be anything behind you, one is afraid to turn around.

I'm assuming that I feel like that. The light represents all of the things I'm afraid of. My backlit body is a shining beacon in the darkness, a single, flashing red blinker on a road without street lamps. The darkness, though I've dwelt there most of my life, sees the change and unleashes its terrors to consume me. I've always felt the light would be my betrayer. It represents a small circle of vulnerability, a little glowing circle of self-awareness in a roving sea of dark. When you've known that darkness, which for me is writing and the inside of my own imagination since I was young enough to form words and ideas, the darkness is your home.

All I've done is push it's boundaries, learned its forests and bodies of water. I can write short responses in character, I can write a few paragraphs in character. I've learned to write pages in character and in other characters. The characters can interact now in a believable way, held together by prose that I've practiced and edited and pulled apart before stitching it back together with the curved needle and coarse string I've seen in survival movies.

The dark has expanded to encompass different things, different worlds, old times, new times, but the light is still there. The light is success and it is failure. It's a thing of beauty and also a horrible, ugly, twisted thing. The light is selling on ebook for three dollars, and it's also somebody not liking what you wrote and returning it. It's also somebody getting a free read and giving it back, making you happy for a few hours and then snatching back what they've paid to read what you wrote without leaving either praise or scathing hatred. I am afraid of the light because both success and failure live there, and once I let it into the sanctuary of worlds that I've kept sheathed in dark, everything but the farthest corners will be illuminated and looked upon for what they are.

I'm just hoping that the lack of light so far hasn't led me to create horrid, misshapen things. I can only hope.

Branching Out and Staking My Claim

For some reason I feel like today is Friday. But it's not. I've been rearranging blogs and twitters and tumblrs for going on two days, and I feel like the week is over, that I'm rolling into the weekend and that I'm super behind. It's been 5 days since I've published another ebook and I think that I'm just getting antsy. I want to earn money, and I want to be successful, but I'm pretty sure, not 100%, but like 99, that we all hope to be successful and never want to worry about money during our lives.

During the middle of February I decided that it was time to follow my hopes and dreams, follow my heart, and any other euphemism that involves flying to the moon by the seat of your pants whilst abandoning the rest of the left-brainers. I decided to get published or do it myself, to make my own empire. I stepped into the arena of self-publishing, mind you, into the arena of erotic literature(which I'm keeping off of this blog), and I've sold more in my first week than a lot of others reported. Which I assume means I'm doing something right. So if I can move erotica and erotic romance, who says that I can't do everything I've wanted to do for the past 8 years?

I've already done it with something I thought was a joke.

In 2012, I've become an author. I've written the first full issue of a supernatural fiction webcomic. I've written the beginning of an intriguing, possibly grimdark science fiction novel.

In 2012, I plan to do the following: Solidify my idea for a webcomic and get started on it. Publish short stories under yet another pen name. Get back to drawing and start doing cheap commissions. Partner up, and do as many business related things as possible. Pay back a good friend who loaned me some cash.

"i feel like something is missing, but i don’t know what :T"

I've already partnered up with one person. Freja(the artist behind the image), a good friend of mine, is the artist of the forthcoming webcomic. My girlfriend is running her own blog, and currently helps keep me on track with story ideas and is a great reader for coherence. Hopefully, things will continue to move forward.

I almost hate status quo now. I lost a friend to his constant need for things to always be calm. For me, that's defeat. Life isn't supposed to be about status quo, because sitting and waiting for things to happen, to be settled down at 24, is for chumps. Everything needs to constantly evolve to stay fresh, and I for one, plan on being in on that.

And Then There Was Horror

Which is why I'm branching out. I write what I know and what I love, to emulate a little piece of my own fantasy based on the things that I've already seen, and the things that I wish were down on paper for everyone else to see. The genres I've dabbled in are supernatural fiction, urban fantasy, science fiction, both low and high fantasy, erotica, and a small bit of romance in my high school days.

The one thing that I've never written is horror. I watch horror movies, and the cornier, the better, but also, the more gruesome and eye-gougingly horrific, the better. I love horror premises, that somebody decides to go above and beyond the call of duty to make something miraculous happen only for it to backfire; humans meddling in affairs that don't concern them, animals becoming the rightful masters of the world through gruesome carnage instilled in them through blind rage, inky black blobs that destroy their prey in truly gruesome ways while they're being consumed.

At first I wanted Adelle's story to be one smashing a detective story together with urban fantasy, but now? The story will have the initial setup of a bleak, almost empty town that a detective story would feel at home in, but along will come Adelle, and down will come the world. My initial plan for the novel was to have my little siren play some sort of side role or be heavily involved in the plot twist. This time, I want her to be the plot twist.

Then there's the fact that I want to write some scary, gory prose that people think should be condemned.

But branching out, in the long run, will be more of an experience for me, even though I write fairly often now. So when you see me reading King short stories or Lovecraft, be wary of what you read from me.

I'm available on Tumblr @ TheWandererXain, my professional writing and art tumblr and Kinetijitsu, my personal tumblr.

Follow me on Twitter @ thewandererxain.

A Sample of my Heretofore Unnamed Sci-Fi Novel

Cyle tried not to see what he was seeing, he tried to reject that it was happening around him. All he let himself do was direct his men to flank the beasts, direct them to fire and use as much force was necessary to bring the humongous black masses down. He couldn’t control his breathing, but it shot through his nose and mouth hard, fast, and hot. His hands were shaking, his grip on the blast pistol tight and straight. His finger was pulling the trigger, leveling the pistol and readjusting for recoil.

It wasn’t going down fast enough, and the two behind it charged through the line, scattering the soldiers. One man was unfortunate enough to have his leg snapped under the beast’s weight as it ran through the Seventh and Eighth regiments. His howl of pain wasn’t as brutal, wasn’t as savage as the beast looming over him. In a flash of movement, its jaws had clamped down, removing another man’s head. His neck sprayed blood as his heart beat its last, and the eyeless thing turned to stare them down.

Tylic moved first. He stepped away from them, shouting some kind of obscenity that Cyle was blocking from his mind. The females stood to the right, away from him, and Ferodin crouched next to the darker man, blast rifle raised but quiet.

It moved. The eyeless, black thing leapt at them with its jaws gnashing the broken bones of its enemies. The blood drool hung from its open maw as it roared at them, so close that Cyle could feel the fine, bloody saliva mist and rotten breath upon him. Superheated blast slugs sunk into its flesh and when the thing’s long, armored tail swung at them, Arourin tumbled over.

As soon as the Primus could spare a glance to look at her, the creature’s head exploded. Tylic dropped the detonator pin of his thrown blast charge, offering Ferodin his fist in a friendly exchange. Septimus slapped him on the back, and Arourin smiled. Revy pointed into the crowd. There were still the other two to deal with, and after them, the lowborn.

“I’m fresh out of charges, sir.” Cyle’s hearing slammed back into his head with a bang that confused him. He looked at the men around him, motioned them to him with a swing of his head. They pulled back and took cover behind a barricade that the Eighth had been occupying before everything had gone to shit.

“Tell me that you all saw something I didn’t.” Cyle pointed at Tylic, and then looked at each of them individually.

For a Change of Pace, Let's Talk About the Past

Nano's here, and although I'd love for everyone to think that I'm superhuman and that I've destroyed it and I'm moving on to one of the other projects in my life, I haven't. I've been stagnant, and I've been stagnant for years, not really done anything about it and wasted my time away. Time that I could've spent writing things like the epics that have spawned from ideas that came from late-night AIM conversations, for instance, my latest one about a guardian angel that needs the saving. Lo, I wallow in my existence and instead of making the mark upon the world that I so greatly desire to do, I squander my time away playing video games, or watching television, or even something as mundane as surfing the internet. I waste considerable amounts of time on things that I routinely only averagely enjoy, while I've put my creative outlets on the backburner.

Time used to be that I loved to draw, loved to write, loved to fantasize and act out my stupid fantasies under the sheets until I fell asleep at night. Not saying that I roleplayed alone before masturbating, because that's secretly odd and on an entirely different level than what I mean, but I used to lay in bed, sometimes for an hour, or two, and when I really couldn't sleep, three or more. You see, my mother used to have set bed times for me, but I never really followed them. In my later teens I'd have the telvision on and watch Adult Swim, primarily Cowboy Bebop, all the time listening for the distinctive sound of the footsteps meaning my mother was about to smash my head in for still being awake after twelve. At ten or ten-thirty or some other after primetime hour I used to write roleplay letters to a good friend of mine that always bolstered my imagination and thought it was a good idea to let my mind run rampant. They usually entailed a short sort of cover letter talking about our day in general, followed by us taking turns writing some adventure that our characters would be having, and then finished with a picture of something that had happened in our so called episode. As tedious and time-consuming as they became for me after my undergrad high school years, they were always fun and a ridiculously great exercise because they had me doing the two things that I loved doing most as a hobby, writing and drawing.

And then... Ramza?

When I played out fantasies in my head under the covers late at night in my latter adolescent and pre-teen years, I was some character whose name I can remember, something like Tiko or Teeko or some craptastic thing that you'd expect a young kid to come up with after watching hours upon hours of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Before they aired on Toonami and everyone else saw them, that is. I mean Dragon Ball Z on the WB at 6-7 Saturday mornings and Sailor Moon at 8 on FOX. Most of my friends didn't even know that Dragon Ball Z aired in America before it's Toonami run, and even less about Sailor Moon, although it's all the rage now and will forever remain in our memories as some of the best times we ever had. Moving on, for a short period of time I was Teiko. In my head he was somewhat similar to Gohan of Dragon Ball Z fame and had similar energy based powers. After about two months I dropped the character entirely for an entirely fanbased perception of Ramza from Final Fantasy Tactics. I was Ramza in usernames, in my Link's Awakening save files(on many of which I have never died, once; secret ending ahoy), I was Ramza in my everyday personality whereas my ten-year-old self had previously been Cloud(I even had a 10 year old friend in school that was Vincent, without the Yuffie crush though. I had a certain Lego guy that I called Ramza, and he had the only pieces that I owned from medieval sets: a sword and shield. Lego medieval seems to go in and out of production, but ninjas and dragons and Harry Potter and Star Wars are always on the shelves. Yeah, I own and Imperial Starfighter set, or I used to, until Pandora smashed it to bits like fifteen billion times, but who needs like four hundred blasters? Is it too much to ask to get some swords and shields action going on that isn't Harry Potter, Hermione, and Ron up to something underneath Hogwarts, i.e. the chess match?

Back on topic, I became Ramza, and Ramza stuck with me for years. My character choices for any game I can customize since have become paladins, knights, nobility with a penchant for treating commoners the same as them, and any mashup of those with a helping of noble mercenary since. The bedtime fantasies were all stories about Ramza in an alternative universe with a family entirely of my own creation, the noble house of Beoulve, or sometimes Ruglia, if I wanted to play up Ramza's use of his mother's surname for a more righteous effect. If I'd written down half of those fantastic stories, I could've written a children's book of epic proportions and been rich several times over. But apparently I'm either stupid or was like thirteen because I'm still lower middle class and squabbling about how I should write myself out of this hole I feel like my life is in.

I Feel Like a Linkin Park Song

Let's be clear on this, I mean the old angsty Linkin Park, none of that new soft punk rock jive. I'm not into that, but on occasion, I'm completely into remembering how naive and ludicrously mad at the world I used to be. The odd thing is that I'm not at all angsty about the current state of America, just passing into liberal and downright pissed off. I guess age and enlarged worldview will do that for you.

But seriously? What the fuck happened? I used to be able to stick to writing like it was no joke and pound out chapters that were 10,000 words. Five chapters would've killed my Nanowrimo count, and everyone would've celebrated how awesome I was. I was fifteen, but I could write "high-end fanfiction" as my friend described, like nobody's business. Okay, I might have lied, but I did just check the word count on a chapter I wrote back when I was in high school and it totalled 6.5k. I wrote things like that every night, and it was a natural stress reliever to me. I also think I wrote it during October in baseball season when I had to share the den with my stepdad since he put the second big screen he'd stolen from somebody's curb-trash-dump out there, so that high word count might've attributed to trying to annoy the ever living shit out of him. Last Nano I struggled to pump out 4k for a chapter, and when I read over it I wanted to throw my computer in the trash, hang the paper and dunk myself in the toilet. Why? How did four thousand measly words become a challenge for me to pull off? I used to be able to bullshit a 5k research paper on a Sunday afternoon with time left for me to go hang out with friends. Somehow, along the way, part of my brain must have died and left the rest of my creative outlets to lack without my knowing.

Well fuck.

Nanowrimo and Dahlia; History of the Siren

Nanowrimo 2012 starts in 4 days, and I fully intend to participate and win. Adelle's character, story, and my interest supernatural urban fantasy and detective noir has driven me to try and write a novel detailing what happens to Adelle after Light of May, from another character's leading perspective. The rushed timetable of Nanowrimo would force me to think quickly and act on impulse with the story. Brainstorming and plotting isn't necessarily against the rules, but writing anything before November 1st is. 50,000 words within 30 days isn't anything to scoff at, and many lose every year, but it's a great exercise in writing that I think everyone interested in writing should try at least once. Nanowrimo boasts a large, city-based community to allow writers the world over to communicate, with forums provided to speak on a number of different topics.

I realize, since I am attempting to compose a novel with Adelle in its forefront that I'll need to rehash her history to be completely original. Not saying that I borrowed from anything copywritten, but there were general game-specific terms and pop culture terms used to describe certain things that I wouldn't include within the books internal universe. There wouldn't be a Light of May, or a grand unveiling of magic and supernatural creatures. Many of the political vampire houses in-game despised being outed to the world at large, and many were-creatures felt the same. Letting these creatures of the night roam the realm of the dark at will would fare better in this world. Most spirits and creatures would have the decision to be good or evil, although most would align with their respective natures given that they were raised to be the same. There are always exception to the rule, because that's exactly how it works with humans. How else would the term "black sheep" have come into existence?

Sirens; A Re-History

Anyway, Light of May established sirens, and therefore Adelle, as creatures in human form that killed to satiate their own "murderlust". Sirens in-game were to be feared and known far and wide for who they were. They were to be reported to authorities to be dealt with, but for any character involved in the shadier side of humanity, they were more often coveted for their blood or as playthings for stronger creatures. There wasn't much reporting for many of the sirens in-game, and for Adelle in particular, anybody who found out her true nature was more inclined to use her for her blood because of its effects for spells and vampire ingestion. To survive on my own two feet, sirens are keeping most of the same characteristics, but my own in-universe lore will focus on sirens being descendants of a witch that didn't want to let go of life. I've already named her Dahlia.

In short, Dahlia was born and lived her days out on Anthemoessa -or as it's now called, Capri- as a very beautiful songstress with an aptitude for instrumentals and dance. She could attract passing mariners with her voice as she sang proudly into the oceans from the abundant cliffs surrounding her family's island home. She was often coveted by men from far and wide for her looks and talent, and they often spent weeks attempting to court her before having to continue on their journey. Over time, Dahlia stopped having feelings for the various men that she brought to the island; that's when she turned to coveting what the men brought for her. She collected tapestries being shipped to lords and jewels of kings, using men for her sexual pleasure. Of course, they were all too happy to indulge her greatest fantasies, but the more men she conquered on her little island home, the more and more twisted she became.

The White Word

She soon became unhappy with less than the greatest of gifts and would throw men to their deaths while they were enraptured with her beautiful voice. The cliffs were numerous and remote, and Dahlia would often tell men to stay with her on the island under the guise of marriage, only to destroy them once the ships disappeared over the horizon. But times changed, Dahlia grew pregnant three times and her beauty declined. Men were quick to indulge in pleasures of the flesh but were never sold on stay with a woman mothering bastard children in a house just a few kilometers away from her aging parents. She began to fester in her depression, and longed for the days in the beginning when she was gifted the best in treasures and showered in riches. A man she had murdered long, long ago had brought her a ludicrous gift, but in her newfound time she turned to the decrepit, moldering witches' tome and began to read.

It was a compendium of knowledge, written in various differing scripts and often different languages. While Dahlia had learned many languages from her exploits over the years, she could not read some of the languages, but she painstakingly made her way through the works anyway. In time and with the right reagents she found that she could easily weave white magic with her lilting, pure voice. The children took after her soon enough, and they used their abilities to help their ailing grandparents. Soon they would be old enough to know what kind of woman their mother actually was, and so Dahlia took the tome for herself to learn more and more, falling deeper and deeper into her depression as she realize it was fruitless. She would never again be youthful, despite her best efforts with white magics. Dahlia could heal the superficial and the internal, but she could not reverse age. Her moods grew sour, and eventually the men stopped coming for her.

Her young daughters received the mariners attentions now, they were all young, beautiful, talented like herself. Dahlia's father had taught them instruments and hunting, her mother had instructed them in womanly ways, mending clothes and cooking. She watched over as they danced, corrected their pitch when they sang, and Dahlia angrily watched as she became what she was so many years past. She became bitter with the world and seduced the men away from her daughters, using midnight talk to wile secrets from them about magical artifacts and practices. She healed them when they were ill and sent them away with bounty of both supplies and treasure.

The Black Speech

Years later, she was pregnant again, her daughters into their later teens, one so closely resembling Dahlia that she couldn't stand the site of her beloved girl. The men came for them, but their mother ensured that they were virgin, pure, unadulterated in spirit as their mother had been so easily swayed with sin so long ago. She birthed a son: a happy, healthy boy, the same night a man brought her another book from somewhere far, far away. One of the spells in the book called for blood, and in her quest for eternal beauty, Dahlia sacrificed her newborn. But for the amount of precious life-blood that she had spilt, she had rewound the clock. Finally, finally, she was younger again, but not as she wanted to be. Her daughters, dancers and hunters that they were, were lithe and strong-bodied. Dahlia still held weight from her pregnancy and she envied her beautiful daughters every waking moment, but she would not sacrifice them as she had her baby. They were suspicious and rightfully fearful of their mothers growing power, but they said nothing.

When the men didn't come for quite some time, Dahlia realized that her looks were going, again. One night, as she slammed the girls' meals onto the table, she instructed them to sing from the cliffs as she did when she was young. Her daughters obeyed their mother, fearing what would happen if they did not, the three of them calling sailors toward their small island home from the cliffs with beautiful song. Dahlia killed them, not caring whether the men on the ships saw or not. She performed her blood magics and used black magic to sink the ships that left with members of crew knowing too much. Soon she was as stunning as she was at her eldest daughters' age, and while they had openly seen all that had happened, they didn't dare question just what exactly was transpiring. Dahlia had never wronged her children, and though they feared what she could do, she had all the power, and they doubted that their mother would let them leave. Dahlia's mother died of old age, and her father had a heart attack seeing what seemed to be his only daughter in her young years walk into his home to take his wife away to be buried.

And so the legend began...

Soon, the men began returning to the island to investigate disappearances but found themselves enraptured with the four young women that lived on the island. There was no aging matron that lashed out with black speech and struck men down. Just four women eager to indulge men's desires, hear their stories, accept their treasures. The youngest of the sisters always seemed especially eager to invite the men into their home. But one man returned, and he recognized Dahlia, but at first he told grand stories to the young women of their mother and how two of her daughters were spitting images despite being bastard children. He praised Dahlia's talents and her prowess for knowledge, especially for the metaphysical. He left harmlessly enough, but returned half a year later to visit with Dahlia's seemingly identical twin-daughter. In the dead of night, his crew attacked, proclaiming that the witch known as Dahlia was to be slain for acts against God and his natural world. Without a second thought, the three daughters took up arms against their attackers and slew them.

Dahlia performed her blood ritual and sent her daughters out to see that the ship's crew was entirely slain. When the daughters returned, they were presented with the tome. All three pledged their undying allegiance to their mother and began to practice both black and blood magics. The white word had been easy enough for them all to master, but they all individually stumbled with the black speech, and faltered many times when it came to blood rituals. Eventually, more men came following the tale of the men that disappeared before them, and eventually, all of the women looked similar in age, young forever. For years this continued until Dahlia and her children began noticing that it wasn't forever. They aged very, very slowly, and whenever there was too little blood to go around the wrinkles crept into their faces, ate their hair away, and saw them become riddled with disease.

Putting their heads together, the four wove a spell to summon a demon during an eclipse. In exchange for their humanity, it granted them their eternal life. In exchange for eternal beauty it took their human form. It made them crave blood, and guaranteed their souls be damned upon their deaths in tribute for Dahlia's slain newborn son. However, fluency in the black speech allowed them to evade one stipulation and regain their human forms. A subsequent blood ritual allowed them to switch between an avian form and a human form at will, but their truly inhuman nature alerted animals to their odd presence. Time would show that they would be incapable of caring for male children, but held strong affinity for the magical. Dahlia declared them sisters, but her daughters proclaimed her Matron, and mariner tales imbued them the name sirens.

Anyway, I meant to write a history for Adi here but uh. Oh well? Hahaha, at least, hours later, I have my own origin for the sirens.

Adelle

During my reintroduction to online roleplay communities in 2009, which by the way, took place at a very awesome and still ongoing place called Light of May, I created Adelle.

One of Light of May's mods, LS, is a Photoshop Master in my eyes.

Adelle... well, we can't just jump straight into her character without explaining exactly how she came about.  I can't at least, she's become such a memorable character that I couldn't just drop her after I left the game late 2010.  When I joined Light of May I decided that I was going to actually try and pursue a writing career; I decided to conduct an experiment to see whether or not I could actually write different characters.  Female characters, and good ones at that.

So I started writing.  At first, Adi, as she's so happily known as now, was a little thing.  Light of May is a supernatural game featuring vampires, werewolves, elementals, witches and sirens.  When I initially wanted to apply, I read some of the scenes since they're open to the public.  Sirens captured a part of my mind and wouldn't let go, no matter how hard I tried to shake them.

Sirens

A siren, in Light May lore, is an all female race born with a nigh irresistible urge to murder the opposite sex.  They can assume a bird form and are able to use their voices to enrapture males long enough to deal fatal wounds.  The upside of their murdering grants them eternal beauty and longevity.  The downside?  If a siren wants to live like a normal, mortal woman, resisting the urge to kill, she'll be driven by her need.

The first time I tried to write Adelle for the application, she was a short, suburban, upper-class California girl with a fetish for rapping that turned the siren song on it's head.  Her high-life style of dress mixed with a somewhat ditzy girl's version of political injustice-induced rhymes captured what I love most about writing:  The ability to bring two complete opposites into the same creation.  Needless to say, that idea was idiotic, and I hurriedly revamped her several days later.  Her background stayed the same for the most part, but I embraced what a simple, gorgeous creature I could create by merely letting her do the work.  If you've worked any job in the food industry or retail or had trouble making rent at any time in your life, you could appreciate what an aggravating slice of life Adelle became.  For the most part, her version of angst and the entire world's version of angst are two completely different things.  But try as she might, she would never understand how the rest of us felt, but would always try to relate with a story of, "Oh, one time in college. . ."  She also became quite boy crazy, bi-curious, and a dancer.  At the very least, the fact that she immersed herself into dancing and only sang as a little girl flipped the realization that she was a siren on its head.  All of the other sirens in the game knew beyond a doubt that they were sirens and it was a big part of their lives.  Adi wandered about the little town, a fictional place called Scarlet Oak(mispelled Scarlet Oaks, Scarletoaks, etc. all the time), telling everybody she deemed trustworthy that she was part of a murdering race that the government didn't understand.  She isn't exactly the smartest character I've ever created.

How Adelle developed during my time at Light of May

So not only is Adi horrible at keeping her secret, she's an amateur at her labor of fatality.  Right out of the gate, two other players linked Adelle to their characters.  A trifecta of twenty-three-year-olds, one a pink-haired, lesbian werepenguin, another a fairly normal fire elemental, and then our sweet songbird.  They were old college roomies, the first two having known each other beforehand and meeting Adelle in college.  The camaraderie brought out the worst in Adelle.  They got together over coffee and chatted about anything and everything, squealing, complimenting each others' outfits, and making out.  Okay, that last one was one time deal, and only because Adi got a call from a "hot, older guy" and snuck out during a sleepover with her lesbian best friend.  She's a horrible decision maker, and it rang true throughout her tenure at Light of May.  She often found herself in bad situations, amplified by the amount of common sense she lacked.

For instance, she got mixed up with vampires and by her own choice ended up losing her virginity to one half a millenium in age.  Luckily enough, it was against the rules of the game to turn sirens into vampires, and Adi wasn't willing to let go of her life.  Yet.  Vampires became a thing for her, and by thing I mean obsession, and by obsession I mean super obsession, if that's even a term.  She associated with more vampires than regular people, and even when she was dealing with semi-normal humans she was trying to hide the bite marks and feigning anemia to cover for her less than legitimate blood donations.  Her friends noticed, her family noticed, and then she finally found somebody somebody as crazy as she was.  Another girl, and as boy crazy as she was, Adi quickly began to fall head over heels into a sex-oriented, open lesbian relationship with a high-ranking fire elemental.  Being a young man writing a young woman, a lot of the players quickly forgot that I was even straight, because I was capable of writing Adelle so well.

Addie, the other siren trying to come to terms with what she was.

When Addie appeared one day, I got about ten instant messages within five minutes asking what I thought about the new character.  I played it safe and told everyone that I thought she would be a good addition to the game, and could possibly be yet another ridiculous tangent of plot Adelle could become entangled in.  Addie was short for Addison Rose, as Adi was short for Adelle Ryndana(don't ask, it's a story in itself).  Little did I know that Addison Rose was Adelle, just 10 years in past and hitting both puberty and her siren urges at the same time.  Now I know it seems like I drew a conclusion pretty quickly, but the players I was close with started sending me profile and history details concerning the character that made it clear that they were pretty much the same character.  Addison Rose was completely devoid of understanding the siren lifestyle, Adelle the same.  Beyond that, many of their character traits and even their names and nicknames were similar.  Of course, to top it all off, the player of the newcomer siren messaged me and wanted to start a plotline where Adelle was a horrible teacher to her protege.

I happily obliged.  I mean, why not?  She was offering to let Adelle impress her ridiculous-at-best-morals on a young fellow fledgling.  Adelle's voice wouldn't shut up about teaching somebody so utterly impressionable.  But her morals concerning killing were lackluster at best, which made her ludicrously under qualified to take anyone under her proverbial wing.  Regardless of her inadequacies, the apprenticeship started, and then quickly ended because nobody but myself could stand the actual player.  In the middle of it all, there was a grand scene where Adelle discovered the little bird about to kill in public and whisked her away to kill somebody in private in the next town over.  While cackling.  Crazily.  I personally got nominated for an award that month for a quote of crazy.

By the time this was going on, I played two other characters for plotlines with other players.  One never got off the ground due to being quite eccentric and almost spoke entirely in riddles.  The other was a 12 year old girl from a Finnish family that I was asked to play by a friend.  She was a water elemental in a well off family that loved being the baby and loved misbehaving.  When her mother got pregnant, she started devoting her life to ending that baby before it began.  Being a pre-teen was never as dark as this.

Although I enjoyed playing the girl, she isn't my character.  If I ever had the time to get back into roleplaying, I'd ask to play her again in a heartbeat.  Nevertheless, Adelle is mine, and by the time I was ready to say farewell to Light of May and have my life complicated again by a real job, she didn't feel like my creation anymore.  She was real, more real than I could've ever imagined her being, and between her and the little girl I was writing, I felt like I'd accomplished my mission of convincingly writing a female character.  I learned how to realistically portray an adolescent as well.

After Light of May

But try as I might, there was no moving on, and as my brain would have it, she started developing a story of her own.  I hear that this ends up happening to writers all the time.  A character breathes a life of their own and jumps off of the pages in a way that warrants a sequel, or during a rewrite becomes an entirely different character.   A favorite author of mine, Dan Abnett of Warhammer 40K, X-men and Gaunt's Ghosts fame, once said that in writing one of the books, he lost the novel when his hard drive crashed.  During a rewrite an almost benign villain became an outright murderer.  Of course the story's plot changed to accommodate the character's new found villainy, but the body of work was bone-chilling and benefited from the change as a whole.

This is how I feel about Adelle.  She started out sweet and innocent enough, but a year later saw her becoming engrossed in multiple twisted plotlines and taking on a life of her own.  Although I came up with excuse for her to leave the small town of Scarlet Oak and "move on" with her life, Adelle thought it was time to find out who she was and either fulfill her bloodline's birthright outright, or get somebody to end it.  She started by trashing her apartment, making it look like a hunter was tracking her and fled.  She took on a life of her own and decided she was starting a new story in a new town.

Roleplaying and Me

During the summer months of 2009 I joined an online roleplaying community.  I can imagine anybody that is into writing even remotely has tried online roleplaying.  It's a fun, creative outlet that tests your writing skills in various arenas; speed, vocabulary, indepth character portrayal and development are but a few of the most prominent of skills that are built upon by "good" roleplayers.

I'm in my mid twenties now, but when I first got into roleplaying I was 13, but that's another story in itself.  I was only allotted time to use the family computer after dinner, and after my mom made sure I finished my homework.  But it was with people I knew, people from school, so the situations never got too serious, never developed farther than generic anime plot points, and never got sexual in nature.  Cue 14, where everything got sexual all the time.  By 15 I was knee deep in a horrible, horrible piece of generic Japanese otaku culture writing I called, "Swords of Destiny".  At 17 a friend told me about an online roleplaying community.  People were doing what I was into, people that I didn't know, and they had a themed roleplaying community!

I posted a pretty amateurish application and was in by the end of the week.  Nothing could go wrong!  They had an application process!  It was a Thursday night that we all met in an AIM chatroom to get introduced to each other and get assigned partners to roleplay with that eventually switched because all of the characters were attending a party.  I thought it was brilliance.  Hell, I still think it's an amazing way to get all of your players associated with each other.  It's like playing a game your first day of a new class in grade school.  Everybody learns each others' names, you find out who likes neon green text on a black background, and you personally stand out as the kid that doesn't use AIM default font, background colors, and loves Arial Narrow in red.

As it turns out, my first foray into a roleplaying community didn't end well.  We were all young, and as such, even with mods we broke off into cliques and got lost in personal drama.  Luckily enough, I was a hit amongst most of the community and whenever a new community popped up with the same founding members, I was always invited.  My schtick was that I was male.  Not that I played male characters, which I did exclusively.  I was a male in a female dominated activity, and it made me a hot commodity.  It was never like I was "one of the girls", but my males did more believable male things because I'm actually a straight male, and not a man that's a man, but feels written by a woman.  That explanation will catch up with us, I promise.

Anyway, to catch us up to the lovely 2009 that I was mentioning earlier, I took a few years off.  Life changed, I graduated high school, attempted college but the financial aid kept fell through at the last minute 3 different times, I left a job at Domino's Pizza and started at Chipotle, I got fired by a completely corrupt manager at Chipotle and ended up at a car dealership with a great job moving cars, the recession started and I got laid off, then framed for a stolen check 4 months later, I went to jail and ended up unable to get employment for almost a year, when I ended up driving for the same Domino's I started at when I was 16, 7 years later.  But during the year I wasn't able to find work. I joined a roleplay community formed by the majority of the old people I used to run with.  It's where I came up with the idea for Adelle.