#i’ve been trying to write a scene where aria discovers who she used to be for like. days now

[gumy-shark]

they don’t know im thinking about all the different Torment Nexuses (torment nexii?) i can put my ocs into

[soul-music-is-life]

I'm kind of with you on the lackluster Pilot episode of "The Perfectionists". I don't know whether or not I'm into it either. And not because of Emison (I'm more of an Emaya fan myself). I just thought it was cheesy and boring. I don't know if I should keep watching. What about you?

I have actually gotten several asks about whether I plan tokeep watching and why/why not. So I’m going to answer it here and just referback to it if it keeps coming up.

I don’t mind the asks at all. I love conversing, but because of the volume of asks about thisparticular opinion this is another long driveling post, and I’m sorry. You can mute my ass if you’re sick of me. I get it.

First of all OP, thank you for not ripping into me about notliking it. Also, Emaya had my heart. I loved them, too. Maya deserved better.

Second, this is a full-scale look at the show from a critic’svantage point. I watched the first episode twice because I thought maybe I hadn’tgiven it a fair shake the first time because I was in a weird mood. But even onthe second viewing I found a lot more that I disliked than I liked. Lots ofpeople are going to disagree, and that’s fine. Just don’t @ me. I’m legit notlooking for that. I’m just a girl (cue NottingHill music) standing in front her ask inbox asking those askers to love her.

Will I keep watching? I doubt it. Given that it only got a10-episode order and The Pilot wasn’t that interesting to me, I don’t see myselfsitting through it for 9 more episodes. My reasoning is two-tiered. Part of itis disinterest and the other part is the creative aspect of it in the media. Saddleup for my “truths” (I can’t remember who said that. Marlene maybe). I gave it afew days and considered it, and what I ended up with was this:

1) I’m just not into it. For the same reasons you (OP) stated.But I’ll also add that for me…it was predictable. I called the twists longbefore they happened. If I’m already doing that in The Pilot I can guarantee I’dbe doing that as the show went on. I’m like 93% sure I know exactly how it’sgoing to end this season. I tend to do that to myself. Being a writer suckssometimes. Because you see the way things are going to go from the beginning. You just have to decide if you want to go on the journey anyway.

2) While the characters were likable (I was surprised by howmuch I liked Ava), they are a bit one-sided and kind of bland (except I foundNolan’s duality extremely intriguing). There is the argument that can be madehere that they will grow, and I do agree with that. But when I watch a show’sPilot I need to care about at least one character to see what’s going to happenand where they are going to go (In PLL it was Em/Aria for me). None of the characters in TP did that for me (noteven Mona and Alison, which surprised me, because I’ve been super-hype for thisshow not only for them, but for the newbies, too).  

3) The plot (so far) just feels like a rehash of everysingle YA mystery novel/TV show that is hot right now. And I am aware that thisis based loosely on exactly that (Sara’s series), but I think maybe I’ve justbecome desensitized to the same cheesy soap-opera-y murder mystery plots. Or perhaps I’m just desensitized to this particular kind of storytelling. It doesn’tfeel new and different to me and it was very strangely paced with too muchgoing on and not enough time to care about it. It just felt disjointed. Everythingabout the first episode just fell flat for me.

4) And lastly, yes, I’d say there is a tiny part of me…likemaybe…6% that doesn’t want to watch because I’m not about that off-screenEmison drama. I knew it was going to happen and I’m not mad about them beingsplit. I’m disappointed (hears “that’sjust ‘mom speak’ for mad!” echoing somewhere) that the marketing team isusing it for ratings. When you have decent writing you don’t need to play games like that to try andget viewers. It would be one thing to be decisive about what happened toEmily/Alison (Split them. Don’t split them. I don’t care. Just make a fuckingdecision because you’re creating a war between fans and you know it). It’sanother thing entirely to draw it out because you need people to watch and talkabout it.

I am also particularly bothered by hearing the excuse (several times by MK) that “Shay was busy”because Marlene literally planned the spin-off in season 6 (confirmed by bothher and Sasha). It. Was. Planned. I say this as a critic and not an Emison fan: Everything about the way they’ve tried to use Emison to generate buzz was underhanded. And saying shit like that opens the door for people to hate on Shay, and that’s really not cool.

Personally, I think it speaks volumes that the producers felt the need to addthe off-screen drama on top of the really decent plot they already had. Theycould have kept it unproblematic with simple writing choices and less inflammatorycommentary. They could have left the PLL drama in the PLL-verse and given thespotlight to the new drama. I don’tagree with creating old off-screen drama with zero chance of satisfactoryresolution all in the name of ratings. I hate marketing shit like that. It’s acheap amateur tactic and it turns me off.

I think the show could have been something special had theynot marketed it as PLL. But they did, so of course there was a certainexpectation. And of course there is some backlash. Because there are these twoworlds that have nothing to do with each other and so far I don’t feel likethey’ve blended it together well. For me, it was like watching PLL, but with less magic and less chemistry. If I had to describe it I’d say it feels alot like a recipe where you’re just throwing a bunch of ingredients into a bowlwith no idea what you’re making and you’re just hoping it’ll be edible by theend. Rather than focusing on the new universe the marketing team chose to focuson Ali/Mona’s new world and the drama that comes with them. And to me that almost says they don’t have faith that TPwould have been able to stand on its own without the PLL universe. Part of methinks I’d be more interested if this had been a completely fresh start. I wasactually more compelled by the newbies than I was Alison/Mona (though I adorethem, too).

That being said, I really wish the best for the cast/crew. I’llcontinue to watch the behind the scenes games/cast antics. I’ve been a fan ofSasha since I discovered PLL (everything about her seems very sweet and genuine andjust positive all around). And Janel as Mona was one of my favorite castingchoices of all time. In fact, I think my very first PLL post here was praisefor Janel. I’ve been following Sydney since she was a smol lil bean on theDisney Channel (and loved her in Tia’s Mowry’s show “Instant Mom”). Sofia seemslike a sweet girl, and I have enjoyed her other work. And Eli honestly justseems like he’d be a cool dude to kick back and have a drink with (is he evenold enough to drink? Jesus, they’re all babies). I love them all. In fact, I’veenjoyed the fun behind the scenes stuff more than I enjoyed the show. I’dwatch a reality show of them all day. That’s where I’ll get my fill. Watching them being goofy.

Final verdict: No, the show will not be getting my views. I’llprobably just watch the absurdity of Riverdale instead. Cheryl is fucking wild,y’all. And I’m kind of living for mean-dark-snarky Betty. And Sweet Pea is like…myfavorite character ever. My dumb asshole child.

As far as whether or not youshould watch it, I have no idea. I have a lot of people asking me my opinion onthat (which, I’m like the worstperson to ask, please don’t give me that responsibility. I don’t even likebeing responsible in the real world. I literally had a cookie and Cocoa Puffsfor dinner). I will say that if you’re only watching for Emison then I’d changethe channel. Because guaranteed it’s just going to make you rage. You’re not going to get anything out of it. Fill yourevenings with something more pleasant and positive for you.

And be nice to others on social media. At the end of the day, it’s only a show. You like it or you don’t.

[penniesforthestorm]

Castle Rock

Part I: Memory and Time

Episode 1: “Severance” Episode 2: “Habeas Corpus” Episode 3: “Local Color”

“What I keep wondering—all the smells we smell, all the songs and pictures—do you lose them all? I mean, wherever you go next, does the tape get erased? And if it does, you aren’t really you anymore, are you?”

“Is that what you’re afraid of?”

 “That’s what I want.”

The above conversation takes place almost halfway into the first episode of Castle Rock, the new Hulu series produced by Stephen King and J.J. Abrams. Henry Deaver (Andre Holland), a death-row attorney, is having a final conversation with his client, a 93-year-old woman whose appeal has been denied. She is musing on the nature of memory, and we get the general idea that her life is full of scenes she’d rather leave behind. For his part, Henry is drawn back to an incident from his childhood: during a freezing winter, he went missing in the woods near his home, and was found by the local sheriff, totally unaffected by the subzero conditions. The sheriff asked what happened to him, but Henry did not remember.            Memory plays an enormous role on Castle Rock, both within the world of the series and outside of it. It’s been established that Stephen King’s work takes place within a connected universe, and ever since Castle Rock premiered, the internet has been buzzing with theories about how it ties into the larger King canon. Now I have to make a confession: I am nobody’s idea of a Stephen King aficionado. I’ve seen several of the most popular screen adaptations of his work, and just through pop-culture osmosis, I’d say I have a general awareness of his major stories, but nothing beyond a surface level. So that’s going to impact how I write about and interpret this series. Honestly, though, I haven’t felt like I’m missing out—the story so far has been strong enough to stand on its own.

In Episode 1, however, a near-immediate connection is established to one of King’s most famous works: The Shawshank Redemption. We see a man (Terry O’Quinn) cooking breakfast for his wife, and they have a brief conversation mentioning the man’s imminent retirement. The man, addressed as Mr. Lacy, drives through town, and on his car radio, an aria is playing. It’s “Che soave zeffiretto” from The Marriage of Figaro—the same piece from one of the climactic scenes of The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy Dufresne plays it over the prison’s loudspeaker system. We watch as Mr. Lacy drives into the woods, stopping atop a bluff. The camera shows a length of rope trailing out of the car, tied to a nearby tree. Mr. Lacy takes the other end of the rope (looped into a noose), slips it around his neck, turns off the radio, and floors the gas pedal, launching the car off the bluff. As the vehicle sinks into the black waters of the lake below, the camera fixes on its back bumper, where we see the insignia of the Maine Department of Corrections, and that evocative name: Shawshank. Then we see Shawshank itself, its stone turrets and barbed-wire fencing rising out of a grey mist. It turns out that Mr. Lacy was Warden Lacy, until recently. The new warden, played by Ann Cusack, listens grimly to the guards as they hint at the prison’s dark history, showing particular interest in a young guard’s remark about a wing of the prison that has stood empty for thirty years. The young guard, Zalewski (Noel Fisher), is sent to count the empty cells, and immediately finds something that doesn’t seem right—boot prints. He follows them to a heavy metal door, which leads to another door in the middle of the floor. Zalewski opens it, revealing only a seemingly disused water tank, and is about to leave when something falls out of his pocket. He crawls down the ladder on the side of the tank, and finds… A chair. A coffee can full of cigarette butts. A metal cage, with a young man in it. The young man, played by Bill Skarsgård, is emaciated and pale, and his bearing is meek and fearful. He does not speak, and more unnervingly, he doesn’t blink, his large hazel eyes staring hollowly at his questioners. Finally, in the warden’s office, he mumbles a name, through a voice that clearly hasn’t been used in some time: “Henry Deaver.” This brings us to the scene I discussed at the beginning. It turns out that Henry Deaver grew up in the town of Castle Rock, twenty miles from Shawshank. Zalewski calls him anonymously, defying the warden’s dictum that the mysterious young man should be kept secret, and Henry comes back home. Over the course of the rest of the episode, Henry begins to realize that something is rotten in Castle Rock. The storefronts downtown are boarded up, his adoptive mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek) is exhibiting severe memory loss, the local cemetery has been paved over, and the kindly sheriff from Henry’s childhood, Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn), has taken more than a neighborly interest in Ruth. Also, no one at the prison seems willing to give Henry any information about his mysterious ‘client’.

In the second episode, Henry pays a visit to Warden Lacy’s home looking for clues, and at first, seems to find a sympathetic ear in the widowed Martha Lacy. But once she discovers who he is, she turns him out. Some people in Castle Rock have longer memories than others. When Henry vanished into the woods all those years ago, his adoptive father, the Reverend Matthew Deaver, was found with his neck broken, and later succumbed to his injuries. The young Henry was suspected of an active role in that circumstance. When Henry visits his father’s old church, the new pastor makes an awkward remark about Henry being ‘redemption in the flesh’. Over at Shawshank, the mystery around The Kid (as he is named in the credits) has deepened. Zalewski, on security camera duty, sees The Kid in a hallway, with a trail of corpses behind him. But it’s a false alarm—everything is as it should be. Meanwhile, Warden Porter is enjoying a drink at a hotel bar when she is interrupted by none other than Alan Pangborn. He tells her a strange story about Warden Lacy—that he claimed to have found and captured the Devil. Pangborn growls, “Don’t let that fuckin’ kid out.” The episode also fully introduces the character of Molly Strand (Melanie Lynskey), who used to live downhill from the Deaver house, and nursed a childhood crush on Henry. Current-day Molly is a nervous misfit, swallowing pills she buys from a scraggly teenager to deal with what she calls ‘other people’s noise’. In a flashback, it’s revealed that she may know more about Henry Deaver’s disappearance than he does—we see the young Molly watch from her window as Pastor Deaver calls Henry outside in the middle of the night. When questioned by the police, however, she denies any knowledge of what’s going on.

Episode 3, “Local Color”, opens with a scene of young Molly walking through the snow to the Deaver house, putting on Henry’s red plaid jacket, and climbing the stairs to where the injured Pastor Deaver lies. Without a moment’s hesitation, young Molly pulls out his ventilator. Now, the viewer knows the answer to at least one of Castle Rock’s mysteries. In the present day, we follow Molly as she prepares to go on a local-access show to talk about her plan to revitalize Castle Rock’s moribund downtown. Molly finally has a face-to-face conversation with Henry, and it leaves her so upset that she tracks down her dealer, who tells her to try her luck out at the motor court. Molly goes to the motor court at night, and asks a little girl if she knows where ‘Derek’ is. The girl points Molly toward a structure nearby, and as Molly approaches, we hear the voices of children. It appears to be some kind of mock trial, and almost all the children are wearing grotesque papier-mâché masks.  The ‘witness’, a little boy, says that the ‘killer’ is in the courtroom, and immediately points to Molly. “Guilty! Guilty!” the children shout. It’s oddly disappointing when the ‘judge’, aka Derek, brings Molly to his perfectly ordinary trailer and they begin to haggle over the pills, only to be interrupted by sirens. The next morning, Henry happens to be at the local police station, trying to get information. He bails Molly out just in time for her to make her TV appearance. After an uncomfortable few moments, Molly bursts out with the truth: there is a young man being kept at Shawshank, without being convicted of any crime. At last, Henry Deaver is formally invited to Shawshank. At last, Henry sits down face-to-face with The Kid. At last, The Kid communicates more, asking Henry, “Has it begun?” in a way that seems fraught with some deeper meaning. Skarsgård’s gawky physicality and hesitant speech patterns make an intriguing contrast to the menacing aura that has developed around him. In the previous episode, he was forced to share a cell with a burly neo-Nazi, and shortly thereafter, the other man suddenly dropped dead. Henry, however, seems instantly won over, reassuring The Kid that he’s there to help.

I’m grouping the episodes three at a time for reasons that will become clear in future installments (hey, look, I can do serialization too!). Before I go, I do want to make a note of the music on the show: the score is composed by Thomas Newman, who has contributed to some of my favorite films (Road to Perdition, Meet Joe Black, and, of course, The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption), and his spare piano chords go a long way toward establishing the show’s eerie atmosphere. I think I have now gone on entirely long enough for this round, but if you like what you’ve read, come back for more! There will be more anyway, because this is my blog and I’ve committed to this, so… that’s that on that.

[waywardoakdown]

stream of consciousness ramble about a story I’m writing below

    To set the stage, I am fourteen years old and watching The Lost Boys for what is probably the fourth or fifth time within the month of June.  I latch on to movies sometimes, for a while it was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I remember watching How to Train your Dragon on close to repeat, sitting in front of Practical Magic for hours at a time.

    In the summer of 2011 it was The Lost Boys.  You see I had come out of my twilight phase before this point, I was buried in The Tale of the Body Thief, in Daniel’s unwilling surrender, in Vampire Academy because the struggle of Rose Hathaway was so endlessly interesting to me.  In Shattered Mirror and In the Forests of Night, because Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was barely older than me when she published her first books.

    I had written vampire stories before.

    Christa Morgan was still the sharp tongued huntress she had always been, fighting for her life and trying not to let her best friend die like the rest of her family had.  But I had hit a rock with her story long before this point, a mountain pass I could not find my way through.  

    Aria and Melody were on hold while I thought over the consequences of a world where eye color could denote whether or not you’d killed someone you were related to.

    Then I was buried in fanfiction to extend this universe that there seemed to be so little of.  My obsessions grew far and I was hungry for whatever was written well, though my standards at the time were admittedly low.  I’ve revisited some of those stories lately, to find them holding up surprisingly well.  

    So I sat down to extend the universe myself.

    Alexandra Blackwood was born of that endeavor, and like me at this start, she was fourteen.  Turning 15 on September 9th.  She wasn’t a self insertion, how Christa started out, she was brash and scared and all around a pretty broken kid.  I’d settled on her upbringing being shit from the start and I pulled from relatives and friends lives to give life to how these things had affected her.  There wasn’t a lot to go off of at first, it was generic as they come when fanfiction sprung from this movie.  Another kid goes off to Santa Carla and falls in step with the boys.

    In this case the only original Lost Boy I kept was David, since in the novelization of the movie there was a post-end scene of him having turned a handful of surf nazis, one being Shane who would move up to Luna Bay with his own crew of exceptionally violet buddies.  I liked the idea of having a new group of people, especially since while I felt comfortable in David in the way I always feel comfortable writing those of questionable morals and exceptional cruelty: I didn’t feel comfortable in my abilities to capture Marko, Paul, and Dwayne.

    Making people scream over my lack of ability to do so was not something I wanted.

    And thus Eric, Kyle, and Jesse were born.

    Only two of them survived into this edition of the rewritten mess, only one of them stayed in his semi-original state (Jesse, my green haired ball of energy).  I wrote the story very fast for my pace at the time, I flew through chapters like it was nothing until about 14 or 15 in.

    That’s when things started getting weird.

    See by this point I was working simultaneously on this mess of a fanfiction, and writing a companion that had the copyrighted materials removed, hence David becoming Daniel, and Santa Carla becoming Twin Lakes (a little town barely a mile across just below Santa Cruz, in case anyone wondered).  I changed the story very little in the first rewrite, which I have since trashed and can no longer see the light of day, though it may still exist on a flash drive somewhere labeled ‘Safe - 23036’ which was the word count at the time.  Pretty impressive for a 14 year old who had never written more than 10k before and that being over the course of years rather than a handful of months.

    I had a cheerleader though.  There was this woman in Australia who got very attached to both versions of my story, and needed something to read after putting her kids to bed.  So whenever I hit a rut I reminded myself I had someone waiting for this, waiting and excited, and forward I plowed.

    Back to things getting, weird.  The longer Alex waited to feed the less cohesive her mind became, she had dreams that lasted days and hallucinations about real people that she hadn’t even met.  Things that, if I remember correctly, still got cut from the last-most-recent rewrite, the one before this one, the one with a little over 2 dozen chapters and a handful of alternate endings and off shoots because gods know I can’t make up my mind.

    Well, scratch that, looks like I did include that weird bullshit in the last rewrite.  Go me, those chapters are absolutely a confusing pile of shit.  But apparently I wanted to keep them.  That rewrite happened in, oh I dunno, 2014 or so?  Maybe it was 2013, I think it might have been.  I don’t know for sure, but I do know it got a huge overhaul and moved further away from The Lost Boys so that it could stand better on its own.

    By this time I think I had changed Alex’s age to match mine again?  16 or 17 or something around there, just because I remember going back and reading and thinking ‘What dumb fuck 14 year old lets herself join a bunch of fuckin vampires, and what vampires allow that???’  So I upped her age a bit, which I’ve done again in the current version, to match my own age, again, making her 20 going on 21.

    I remember the first time I finished these stories, it was maybe halfway through January of 2012 when I started the sequel, having set up for it at the end back in December.  Kayla Raes was born of probably the least thought out romance of all time, rest assured I’ve built up Alex and Isaac’s relationship much more this time.  But at this time they were just, together, because reasons?  I guess?

    Now more than half that characters in this damn book are queer, so whatever.

    Anyways.

    Kayla Raes, who inexplicably has David/Daniel’s eyes and doesn’t think to question it when these fuckers show up and offer her immortality.

    Which she takes and then after realizing that she’s still being controlled, kills the FUCK out of David/Daniel and unfortunately Isaac dies in the process and there’s some bullshit going on there but we don’t need to go into “Free” I really don’t follow that ending anymore.

    Originally Alex either killed Isaac or escaped with him in the end.

    Because I didn’t even touch on the fact that her parents were worthy targets.

    It didn’t even really come up until I did I one shot AU of my own damn story called “Feral” where the boys would just feed people vampire blood, drop them back in the streets, give them a week to kill someone and if they didn’t, kill them.  Alex attacked a woman in the streets, demanded answers from Daniel, originally she turned here, like she killed the woman and that was the end of it.  I wasn’t sure where I was bringing the story from that point.  But it did spawn the beginnings of this rewrite.

    Of Alex becoming a vampire without killing Isaac.

    Now, shoot forward to what is the very beginnings of 2017, I haven’t so much as touched this story in years, I do occasionally re-read it for the parts I enjoy.  The scene in San Francisco for the sake of cementing Alex’s fear of trying to run away from Daniel, the image of his hair soaked red and the bones of that last girl cracking under his hands.  The opening of Alex discovering the whole vampire thing, of almost killing Isaac in the shop, shaking and calling 911 and not quite knowing what else to do or what she’s done.  Jesse leaving to go find his sister Sarah after years of her being a missing persons case, finding her dead just outside Chicago with a broken arm and two bullets in her head.  Things I still loved the descriptions of, things that still flowed the way I felt they did the first time I’d written them.

    But oh gods the mess that was most of the story.

    I opened with a clean slate.

    With one single chapter written.

    Alex discussing the possibility of killing her parents with Daniel.  She’s been fighting for months now, and the pain is so bad most of the time she can barely leave bed.  Daniel is emphasizing her lack of time, and how worried they are getting about her. By this time the ‘they’ is different, still Jesse, but Eric and Kyle are gone and there is now a girl named Moira, who is small and fiery and slow to like people.  

    They talk about her parents, about how nobody could blame her for wanting to see them dead and gone.  She’s afraid to go back and Daniel offers to kill them for her if it turns out she can’t bring herself to do it.

    They go, she kills them, everything is fine.

    That was how this rewrite started.

    That was the only thing I had cemented in my mind.  The vision of her obliterating everything that had caused her pain in the past and using it to move forward.  To start a new life.

    I also moved this shit to the east coast so that I was more familiar with the setting.  Since I’m a Vermonter and I know Maine and New Hampshire pretty damn well, especially the coastal parts of Maine.  She did still spend time in Santa Cruz, but I left that to memory.

    Daniel’s story changed heavily as well, as it had to in order to move away from The Lost Boys, I’ve read the prequel script, I know all that mess.  But Daniel softened somewhere in between rewrites.  He wasn’t the so called ‘big bad’ anymore.  So he was a PTSD kid who had gone to war when he was too young and seen things he couldn’t forget.  In that respect he was molded after my Uncle, though without the denial of his PTSD and massive drinking problem.  

    From that story was born Amalthea, Carter, Lia, and reborn Eric.  Carter fit more closely to what Daniel had been originally, but he was more childish about it.  Amalthea was a placeholder I never replaced because she just faded out of importance so she kept the Last Unicorn’s human name.

    Daniel grew on me fast once he had a background in place, wanting to please his grandfather, wanting enough money to finally propose to Emily Dawr.  The moment when he realizes he’s killed her brother.  When he tells her goodbye, and then following being ready to kill Carter when it’s implied Carter killed her.  Going to check on his sister’s family every few years.  Getting so lonely when Carter and Lia are killed.  Not having the energy to go after Eric and Amalthea afterwards.

    When he comes across Jesse the kid is so bright he’s annoying.  But that fades away fast even though it’s obvious Jesse wants more from him than he’s willing to give.  Not that he’s got a preference either way when it comes to sex but Jesse it just very  energetic and not really his type.  Regardless, they do become very good friends throughout the months where Jesse is trying to get everything in order so that Daniel can kill him.  

    I’d go into why Jesse wants to die but the story does that for me, in his own words, the 80s were a bad time to be gay.

    By the time I’ve gotten all the backstory for the pair of them, Isaac’s story is changing and his decisions are slowly becoming the turning point for every possibility in this book.  He helps Alex get more time by giving her his blood every couple of weeks, courtesy of Carrie who would very much like to know why he keeps asking such questions about how often you can remove certain amounts of blood and what the effects might or might not be.  When Alex does turn, they remain friends, sort of.  Carrie, not knowing who Alex is, has Isaac invite her to their occasional dinner-and-stake nights.  I need better wording for that, they have food and then Isaac trains them to fight vampires.

    Isaac is, understandably apprehensive about this, especially considering everything Alex did/almost did to him.  But she assures him that it’s all much easier to control now and things go smoothly for some time.  One night things, get a little heated while Isaac and Alex are fighting, she feels almost like she’s out of control for a second, and then it stops.  Later on they end up kissing, and there’s a blood exchange, and this leads to Isaac craving it.  Every time it happens, he calls it something akin to an addiction, though after a close call of thinking she might have turned him, they stop.  

    They do continue sort-of being a couple.

    Fast forward a bit, some bad things happen, Alex almost dies, and Isaac tells her he loves her.  To which she responds that loving him is terrifying and she doesn’t want to face the choices that leaves them with.  Jesse reinforces this when he tells her she has to be prepared to watch him die, or turn him into a vampire.  Neither of which Alex likes, not having wanted to be a vampire herself, though she’s gotten used to it by now, and doesn’t think any the worse for it.

    So she runs, and Isaac, having already decided that he’s okay with the likely outcome of their relationship being an eternity of murder, goes to Daniel.

    Rewind a bit, remember that scene I mentioned in San Francisco?  That scene doesn’t happen anymore, it didn’t fit with Daniel’s personality and I knew if he had stayed the way he was originally, Alex would never had trusted him, never have agreed to kill someone, and never have stuck around in the first place.

    Here’s where Eric comes back in.  Taking on all the traits of Daniel and his old self combined with a little touch of carnage soaked madness I attribute to my ever present muse for The Master from Doctor Who.  Sometime somewhere I haven’t figured out when exactly to shove it in, he shows up and decides a little wake up call is in order.

    So like the asshole he is, a side that didn’t really come out originally until ‘Free’ but fuck that story and fuck Kayla and fuck Ally and everything else that happened there- He kidnaps Alex.

    And of course things take a quick turn for the worst.

    But the others show up and whisk her the fuck out of there and I’m like 90% sure Moira straight up shoots Eric until he’s so full of holes it doesn’t matter that he’s immortal.  Because she’s seen this kind of bullshit before and there is no way she’s dealing with it again.

    Alex kills her mother two or three days later, I ended up changing it because she couldn’t kill Jack, every time I sat down to write the scene she’d fly into a panic and so I had Daniel do it.  Well, she had Daniel do it.  These characters talk to me, they appear like ghosts, just visible in the corner of my vision, people fully formed but incorporeal.

    Onward we move.

    This story has been near and dear to me for a long time.

    Alex is probably the most pissed at me of all the characters in my head, and I’ve killed off Emmreth Took more times than The Master would ever allow (like he’d allow it at all, but jfc).  

    She is a permanent resident of my mind, like the Master is.  She doesn’t flit in and out like the rest, she’s just there.  Which is equal parts a help and a hindrance.  With the Master it’s an odd sort of tolerance, because we share certain similarities, and are polar opposites in other areas.  We find destruction highly cathartic, and he’s helpful when I’m drowning in my emotions because he is the kind of person to shut them away and move forward anyways.

    I can’t do that, but his irritation is usually enough to pick me up out of bed.

    Alex is different.

    Alex is all on her, she doesn’t bleed into my normal life, she comes up to talk in regards to her own and little else.  But she’s still there, just outside the edge of my vision, and depending on where she appears from, her questions range from pure curiosity, to fear, to outright pissed off demands.

    Of course, I don’t always have the answers she’s looking for, either because they are out of my control, or I haven’t gotten far enough to decide yet.  Or I’m stuck and can’t decide in either of two or more directions.

[daggerdove]

A really long ramble about rewriting SitD and why sometimes ideas just stick with you and refuse to die.

I’m going to take a break and write in first person, since this is me talking about my experiences writing this story after all, it makes sense.

To set the stage, I am fourteen years old and watching The Lost Boys for what is probably the fourth or fifth time within the month of June.  I latch on to movies sometimes, for a while it was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I remember watching How to Train your Dragon on close to repeat, sitting in front of Practical Magic for hours at a time.

In the summer of 2011 it was The Lost Boys.  You see I had come out of my twilight phase before this point, I was buried in The Tale of the Body Thief, in Daniel’s unwilling surrender, in Vampire Academy because the struggle of Rose Hathaway was so endlessly interesting to me.  In Shattered Mirror and In the Forests of Night, because Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was barely older than me when she published her first books.

I had written vampire stories before.

Christa Morgan was still the sharp tongued huntress she had always been, fighting for her life and trying not to let her best friend die like the rest of her family had.  But I had hit a rock with her story long before this point, a mountain pass I could not find my way through.  

Aria and Melody were on hold while I thought over the consequences of a world where eye color could denote whether or not you’d killed someone you were related to.

Then I was buried in fanfiction to extend this universe that there seemed to be so little of.  My obsessions grew far and I was hungry for whatever was written well, though my standards at the time were admittedly low.  I’ve revisited some of those stories lately, to find them holding up surprisingly well.  

So I sat down to extend the universe myself.

Alexandra Blackwood was born of that endeavor, and like me at this start, she was fourteen.  Turning 15 on September 9th.  She wasn’t a self insertion, how Christa started out, she was brash and scared and all around a pretty broken kid.  I’d settled on her upbringing being shit from the start and I pulled from relatives and friends lives to give life to how these things had affected her.  There wasn’t a lot to go off of at first, it was generic as they come when fanfiction sprung from this movie.  Another kid goes off to Santa Carla and falls in step with the boys.

In this case the only original Lost Boy I kept was David, since in the novelization of the movie there was a post-end scene of him having turned a handful of surf nazis, one being Shane who would move up to Luna Bay with his own crew of exceptionally violet buddies.  I liked the idea of having a new group of people, especially since while I felt comfortable in David in the way I always feel comfortable writing those of questionable morals and exceptional cruelty: I didn’t feel comfortable in my abilities to capture Marko, Paul, and Dwayne.

Making people scream over my lack of ability to do so was not something I wanted.

And thus Eric, Kyle, and Jesse were born.

Only two of them survived into this edition of the rewritten mess, only one of them stayed in his semi-original state (Jesse, my green haired ball of energy).  I wrote the story very fast for my pace at the time, I flew through chapters like it was nothing until about 14 or 15 in.

That’s when things started getting weird.

See by this point I was working simultaneously on this mess of a fanfiction, and writing a companion that had the copyrighted materials removed, hence David becoming Daniel, and Santa Carla becoming Twin Lakes (a little town barely a mile across just below Santa Cruz, in case anyone wondered).  I changed the story very little in the first rewrite, which I have since trashed and can no longer see the light of day, though it may still exist on a flash drive somewhere labeled ‘Safe - 23036’ which was the word count at the time.  Pretty impressive for a 14 year old who had never written more than 10k before and that being over the course of years rather than a handful of months.

I had a cheerleader though.  There was this woman in Australia who got very attached to both versions of my story, and needed something to read after putting her kids to bed.  So whenever I hit a rut I reminded myself I had someone waiting for this, waiting and excited, and forward I plowed.

Back to things getting, weird.  The longer Alex waited to feed the less cohesive her mind became, she had dreams that lasted days and hallucinations about real people that she hadn’t even met.  Things that, if I remember correctly, still got cut from the last-most-recent rewrite, the one before this one, the one with a little over 2 dozen chapters and a handful of alternate endings and off shoots because gods know I can’t make up my mind.

Well, scratch that, looks like I did include that weird bullshit in the last rewrite.  Go me, those chapters are absolutely a confusing pile of shit.  But apparently I wanted to keep them.  That rewrite happened in, oh I dunno, 2014 or so?  Maybe it was 2013, I think it might have been.  I don’t know for sure, but I do know it got a huge overhaul and moved further away from The Lost Boys so that it could stand better on its own.

By this time I think I had changed Alex’s age to match mine again?  16 or 17 or something around there, just because I remember going back and reading and thinking ‘What dumb fuck 14 year old lets herself join a bunch of fuckin vampires, and what vampires allow that???’  So I upped her age a bit, which I’ve done again in the current version, to match my own age, again, making her 20 going on 21.

I remember the first time I finished these stories, it was maybe halfway through January of 2012 when I started the sequel, having set up for it at the end back in December.  Kayla Raes was born of probably the least thought out romance of all time, rest assured I’ve built up Alex and Isaac’s relationship much more this time.  But at this time they were just, together, because reasons?  I guess?

Now more than half that characters in this damn book are queer, so whatever.

Anyways.

Kayla Raes, who inexplicably has David/Daniel’s eyes and doesn’t think to question it when these fuckers show up and offer her immortality.

Which she takes and then after realizing that she’s still being controlled, kills the FUCK out of David/Daniel and unfortunately Isaac dies in the process and there’s some bullshit going on there but we don’t need to go into “Free” I really don’t follow that ending anymore.

Originally Alex either killed Isaac or escaped with him in the end.

Because I didn’t even touch on the fact that her parents were worthy targets.

It didn’t even really come up until I did I one shot AU of my own damn story called “Feral” where the boys would just feed people vampire blood, drop them back in the streets, give them a week to kill someone and if they didn’t, kill them.  Alex attacked a woman in the streets, demanded answers from Daniel, originally she turned here, like she killed the woman and that was the end of it.  I wasn’t sure where I was bringing the story from that point.  But it did spawn the beginnings of this rewrite.

Of Alex becoming a vampire without killing Isaac.

Now, shoot forward to what is the very beginnings of 2017, I haven’t so much as touched this story in years, I do occasionally re-read it for the parts I enjoy.  The scene in San Francisco for the sake of cementing Alex’s fear of trying to run away from Daniel, the image of his hair soaked red and the bones of that last girl cracking under his hands.  The opening of Alex discovering the whole vampire thing, of almost killing Isaac in the shop, shaking and calling 911 and not quite knowing what else to do or what she’s done.  Jesse leaving to go find his sister Sarah after years of her being a missing persons case, finding her dead just outside Chicago with a broken arm and two bullets in her head.  Things I still loved the descriptions of, things that still flowed the way I felt they did the first time I’d written them.

But oh gods the mess that was most of the story.

I opened with a clean slate.

With one single chapter written.

Alex discussing the possibility of killing her parents with Daniel.  She’s been fighting for months now, and the pain is so bad most of the time she can barely leave bed.  Daniel is emphasizing her lack of time, and how worried they are getting about her. By this time the ‘they’ is different, still Jesse, but Eric and Kyle are gone and there is now a girl named Moira, who is small and fiery and slow to like people.  

They talk about her parents, about how nobody could blame her for wanting to see them dead and gone.  She’s afraid to go back and Daniel offers to kill them for her if it turns out she can’t bring herself to do it.

They go, she kills them, everything is fine.

That was how this rewrite started.

That was the only thing I had cemented in my mind.  The vision of her obliterating everything that had caused her pain in the past and using it to move forward.  To start a new life.

I also moved this shit to the east coast so that I was more familiar with the setting.  Since I’m a Vermonter and I know Maine and New Hampshire pretty damn well, especially the coastal parts of Maine.  She did still spend time in Santa Cruz, but I left that to memory.