#Dulce_truco_o_fic, Octubre de fics con temáticas oscuramente deliciosas (Segunda entrada)

 

Decidí registrar otra de mis historia en la temática de Halloween organizada por la página de Facebook Mundo Fanfics Inuyasha y Ranma, y si bien este fanfic ya tiene algo de tiempo publicado siempre ha sido uno de mis favoritos ya que trata de Ryoga teniendo una aventura en la que enfrenta un enemigo sobrenatural en el lugar que menos se imaginó.

La historia se titula Perdido en el Amazonas, y la pueden leer haciendo clic aquí.

Music and writing 4

 It's spooky month!

And for all your background music for scary story writing, we have this very fitting Dungeon Synth album that will satisfy your needs to get in the mood to craft terrifying stories!

Happy (Halloween themed) writing!

#Dulce_truco_o_fic, Octubre de fics con temáticas oscuramente deliciosas

Hace unos días recibí una amable invitación por parte de Howl Saotome de la página Mundo fanfics Inuyasha y Ranma para participar con una historia en su dinámica de Halloween, y al final me decidí a participar inscribiendo mi historia Retrato de una vida perfecta en la convocatoria ya que me parece que queda bien en la temática.

Desde aquí le agradezco a Howl por la invitación, y espero que todos los participantes se diviertan y pasen un buen rato escribiendo historias dentro de esta dinámica.

😄👻

the Fan Fiction Mailing List closed... and I just heard about it.

And just like that, it's gone...

 

It's difficult to believe that the Fan Fiction Mailing list closed, that it is over and done. I joined it in 1997 and published my first three stories there in 1998, and while I unsubbed in 2001 when I moved full time to fanfiction.net I tried to keep an eye on the list's archives until around 2014 or so, when I got too busy to remain involved with it.

I met many fanfiction writers and read many good stories in the old FFML, and while I understand it was time for it to end, I can't help but feel how another important part of my past crumbles and disolves until it fades away like a sand castle at night when the tide rises.

In the end, all that is left are the memories, good and bad.

If I had to describe how I feel, I guess this song is the best way to do it:

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the FFML closing announcement, shared here to preserve it for the duration of this blog.

Dennis Carr on FFML said:

I suppose there's no easy way of putting it.

After some discussion with the moderators and quite a bit of thought
over the past few months, I have elected to close the FFML.

There are several reasons for this, but I suppose it can be distilled
down to two: one is personal, and the other is that time and
technology march on.

The personal end boils down to no longer having the spoons and having
to rearrange my life to better serve me. This is, no doubt, a rather
small thing to deal with - but as I examine my life in middle age and
make changes in how I live my life, I'm realizing I have an awful lot
of such rather small things in my life - and I can either continue on
how I've been doing, or I can sum up what is needed to continue for
(hopefully) another 40+ years. And to be honest, as much as I came to
love this list in the 24 years since I joined, sometimes one just has
to let go of that which they love.

To this same end, I honestly haven't been terribly active in anime
fandom in quite some time. The last time I did anything, in fact, was
a "ghost shoot" at Sakura Con in Seattle maybe 13 years ago. I
haven't been back since, and would like to go again. Hell, even a
story that I started and co-wrote with another author has been sitting
on my disk and taking up space - I might continue it. It's called
Unfinished Business and is a Tenchi Muyo exchange-student story set
where I once lived in north Orange County, California. But I digress.

The other reason, though, seems bigger. It's like I said - time
and technology march on.

This list was created in the early years of the public internet. I
don't know exactly when, as I found the list myself in 1997 when White
Wolf was still hosting and the pseudo-user Tybalt was used by the mods
of the time. In that time since, though, much has changed on the
network. Usenet, for instance, is not nearly as widely used as it
once was, with much of alt.* alone being riddled with spam. Mailing
lists came in to fill in the blanks where Usenet would otherwise not
serve, and while many such lists still exist most have simply fallen
off. Even twenty years ago, we started seeing dedicated websites and
web forums for specific purposes including fanfiction as a whole, and
in some cases those sites gave way to social media sites such as
Livejournal and Myspace - which themselves basically gave way to the
likes of Reddit and Facebook. Even Yahoogroups - our old standby that
we used as backup when Phillip Mak passed on 14 years ago and during
some other server issues over the years - has pretty much been closed
up. And all that is just a mere sliver of the progression out here.
Where I don't deny there is an aspect of not wanting to continue owing
to these changes in how we work on the internet, this evolution unto
itself is indeed a large part of what's driving this decision.

To be perfectly clear, this is not at all about the simple fact that
the traffic on this list has dwindled since even before I took the
list onto my own server. The dwindle is just a side effect of the
evolution. Long time subscribers will remember that, back when I even
discovered this list in 1997 or thenabouts, we would regularly see
upwards of 20 messages per day (and that was a quiet day!) and in some
cases expect to wait at least an hour before our message got fully
posted by the fanfic.com server(s). We were super active back then!
There was indeed a shift when Phillip took it on, things just slowed
down. And yeah, I openly admit that I had some optimism that we would
see list traffic get to the volume that once was - but that was not
meant to be, despite the "hello world" flurry of posts in July of 2007
as the boxes were notionally unpacked here. Either way, to reinforce
- the lack of traffic in and of itself is not a driver in this
decision. That lack of traffic is just a side effect of what has come
to be.

It's not an easy decision for me to make. But as much as I have come
to love this list, it's time to call it a day. This email list, by
and large, has served its purpose and served it well.

As of the time I am sending this email, I have changed list settings
to simply reject posts from anyone who is not a member (previous
settings were to hold email for moderator intervention). ffml-admins
will retain its current settings and will remain live for the
duration, so if you need to ping us off list then please don't
hesitate to do so.

In keeping with the 14th anniversary of opening the list on
chez-vrolet.net, I will close this list completely on the evening of
July 1, 2021. The archive will be packed up as it exists, and I will
have it available for download as a zip file until January 1, 2022.
The mirrors, as linked in the FAQ, will remain online at the
prerogative of their respective hosts. I don't run those, and I don't
get to tell 'em what to do. =)

The usual rules will still apply in the meantime, of course. The
moderator team will remain in place for the duration of the closure
period, and you are welcome to continue to use the list as it has been
used since time(t) = minus infinity - but going forward we are now
officially allowing the posting of links to "plug" yourself and how to
make contact aside from email once the list goes dark. So that we may
keep in contact, I encourage you to share this information. Mine, as
such, is below.

Oh. One last note, because since getting this domain in 2003 I've
seen three people who pronounce it correctly aside from my ex wife and
I (and I gotta spell it every bloody time!) - and I don't know who
here has figured it out.

It's pronounced "SHAY vro-LAY". =D

Thank you, everyone, for being here.

-Dennis Carr
(soon to be former list op)
PO Box 6
Bothell, WA 98041
dennisthetiger@chez-vrolet.net
Home: Dennis' Lair
Dennis Carr
.-------Anime/Manga Fanfiction Mailing List--------.
| Administrators - ffml-admins@chez-vrolet.net |
| Unsubscribing - ffml-request@chez-vrolet.net |
| Put 'unsubscribe' in the subject |
`----- FAQ http://chez-vrolet.net/ffml/faq.txt ----'

Relic from the seas update

I really like this illustration of Splash Woman.

 

 You probably are wondering (or not) whatever happened to Relic from the seas, the Mega Man story I was working on a long while ago and I haven't updated since 2018.

Well, I do have this problem where I lose interest in a project and I stop writing it, which I have to admit is a lousy thing to do on my part, but in this particular case, I haven't lost interest in the story and I even have the whole thing drafted from start to finish.

Then why am I not writing it anymore?

Well, I started studying a Master's degree right about the time when I stopped writing that story, you see, it's not easy to focus on writing something when you have to read tons of material and write several long pages essays every other week, plus Zoom meetings with teachers and also participating in discussion forums with other students.

The good thing is that I'm halfway through and I should be completing my Master's in about a year and a half, which means that once I'm done with that I'll be able to fully return to fanfiction writing.

I know it's silly to expect people to still be interested in the story when that happens, but I hope you'll at least be willing to give it a chance when it returns.

Participation certificate

 Remember how I was telling you about that lemon I wrote and gave permission to another writer to rework a while ago? 

Well, Robot mask told me he sent 'La poción azul' to this dynamic organized by some fandom Facebook group and that every story that was entered into it got a participation certificate. 

Since the story was originally written by me, he shared the certificate with me, stating that even when my name was not in the document, I deserved to know about it because I'm the original author, but he deserves it as well because the reworking job he did made the story a lot better.

It's a really nice certificate, so I thought I'd share it here:

I think it looks nice, congrats to Robot mask for it.

 

So... it seems I have a wiki page? Nice.

The wiki's main image, it's quite funny if you know what is referencing.

 

A friend told me that I had a wiki page at the Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction Wiki which was surprising since I didn't know that site existed.

I went to look at my page over there and saw that my stories all have their own pages, too! I don't know the person who maintains that wiki, but I appreciate that they are so devoted to keep all that information going because I was able to find authors and stories that I believed were lost forever; there's even links to stories from the middle 90's in that wiki, do you know how impressive that is?

Well, all I can say is that this little detail makes me happy, it's nice to know that someone took the time to include my work on a wiki somewhere. 😄

 

Music and writing 3

Sometimes when you need to write sad scenes a bit of music can help set the mood quite well, and I've found that postrock works well in my case; well, often enough that is.

One of the groups I listen to when I want to go for a melancholic or sad mood is I-Human, and one of their albums that works great not just for sad scenes but also for dramatic or even calm ones that you may write to develop the story or to write exposition is this one that I want to share with you:

Lost together fanart #3 in color.

A while back I drew an ilustration based on a scene in Lost Together, the Ranma story I'm cowriting with Daisuki Fox. Due to the whole mess from last year the ilustration was never colored but Dai finally had the time to work on it and here are the results!

First fight against Taro, from chapter 8

I like the anime feel he gave the ilustration with the color and shading, I think it looks really nice and I'm glad he was kind enough to color it.

Remembering when I wrote two lemons many years ago and why I let another writer remake one of them.

Arguably my favorite pairing in Ranma 1/2

 

Here's something that I normally don't talk about much; many years ago I tried my hand at writing lemon, and I wrote a couple of those for the Ranma 1/2 fandom. After seeing the results and thinking of it for a while I decided writing smut wasn't really one of my strong points so I stopped at two.

It is important to mention that I wrote those two lemons in Spanish, as I was experimenting and I felt it would be best to do it in that language first.

Anyway, the first one was a crazy thing involving Ranma and Kasumi titled El castigo de Ranma (Spanish for Ranma's punishment) and it's best forgotten; I guess it should still be out there somewhere, even if the archive where it was published no longer exists. I remember writing that story way back in June 2001, and it was published in July 2001, so by internet time the thing is ancient... and it's also awful as the quality is incredibly subpar. Then again I was just starting back then.

The story had decent reception, though as far as I'm concerned it should be lost to the sands of time.

The thing is, since that story was not flamed to ashes back then I thought I'd try it again, and so I wrote the second lemon I mentioned above. 

And you know what? I actually did like the plot of that one, but never felt happy with how I wrote it, I thought it sucked. I still published it, however. It's a Mousse and Shampoo lemon that revolves around an accident with a love potion, because of that I titled the story La Poción Azul (Spanish for The Blue Potion) and completed it on October 2001, hoping it would be better than the previous one. 

I sent La Poción Azul to this now defunct lemon fanfiction arhive for publication. Looking at very old emails I can confirm it was published in November 2001, and the story was better received than the previous one.

Still, since I didn't feel comfortable writing lemons and finding it difficult and repetitive, I simply dropped the sequel I had planned for it involving Ryoga and Ukyo, and another idea for a lemon dealing with Nabiki Tendo and a young substitute teacher. 

Anyway, back in April this year, I got a pm over at Fanfiction.Net by a guy named Robot mask who said he had read La Poción Azul and wanted to do a remake. I suggested he rewrote the version that was already out there, and he agreed it was a better idea, so he asked for my permision to do it and, given the story was so old I decided to let him adopt it.

And so, Robot mask reworked the story and completed his version late last month, publishing it on Fanfiction.net to good reviews that are asking for a second part. I shared the ideas I had for the sequel with him, so perhaps one day he'll release chapter 2 of La Poción Azul.

You can read Robot mask's version following the link below if you want to, just remember it's in Spanish:

La poción azul

Cover image for the story at Fanfiction.net