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December 11, 2013

I have been writing fiction for many years as a form of relaxation. My first foray into fan-fiction is in the Ranma universe, or at least the sick and twisted ruin of it that I will probably produce. I have several stories on the boil in this vein at the moment, but most are not ready for publishing. I much prefer to release a story only when it is either completely finished, or close to that, mainly because I personally find it really annoying when a good story, started years ago, stops half-way through because the author lost interest, died, got eaten by an alien, or any of the many perils that await the incautious wordsmith. Look under the bed, people! Landsharks are everywhere!

I believe that spelling, grammar, layout, things of that nature, are all as important to the story as the actual words. More so in some cases. Internal consistency is also critical. Many otherwise very good stories I have read over the years have been spoiled by a lack of attention to the details, which is a shame. These days it doesn't take much to run a spelling and grammar checker over your work. Personally I use LibreOffice at the moment, which while not perfect is pretty damn good for being completely free. The spell checker is a bit slow, especially when you drop a 300K word document on it, but it does work.

All this said, I'm not perfect by any means. I do make mistakes, although I do my best to catch them before posting anything. Proof-reading your work is critical. Even with the best intentions, unfortunately sometimes a typo slips through. I'm always happy to hear from someone who has found mistakes, especially if they point it out politely. One thing to note, I was educated in both Canada and the UK, so to US readers some words may seem misspelled. They're usually not, they're spelled correctly, unlike what you were taught in school :)

Many thanks for all the very nice reviews I got for Aftermath. It was the work of two evenings, seemingly coming from nowhere. I have found over the years that sometimes stories have a need to be written, the author is merely there to type them up and make sure the spelling is right. In much the same way people are a tool that cats use to open cat-food cans.

Other times they can be a real pain, lurking at the back of your head for months, reluctant to come out and play. Or half-way through you suddenly realise the story you're writing isn't the one you thought you were writing, which can be weird.

One more thing.

I'm not one of those people who get bent out of shape when the characters in a piece of fan-fiction behave out of character. That's half the fun of writing (or reading) fan fiction in the first place. I do appreciate someone who manages to write completely in-character characters, it's much harder than one might suppose. For some stories it's important, for some it's fun, and for some it just gets in the way. So please don't be offended if I drift away from what you believe is the correct way a character should behave. It's only a story.

I have started posting the first few chapters of the follow-on from Aftermath, which is much longer and more of a real story, currently 13 chapters and about 51K words. I hope it meets with approval, but as I said it's mainly for my own enjoyment. I'm sure some people will like it, some will just go 'meh', and some will hate it to the depths of their shrivelled blackened souls. I would obviously prefer to have more of the first category than either of the other two, but...

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December 21, 2013

Thanks very much to everyone who has read and commented on Aftermath and Desperately Seeking Ranma. The comments and reviews are much appreciated.

The latter is currently at 17 chapters and 81K words, which is 165 A4 pages in 12 point Open Sans font! In the format of a paperback, this works out to about 300 pages, which is a decent novel length. There are probably at least four to five more chapters to go, I would expect it to end up at about 125K words in length or so. Progress will slow for a while due to Christmas, New Year, and family. And work. And the weather.

It's interesting to see that judging by the traffic statistics, approximately 42% of the visitors who read the first chapter seem to go on to read the rest. At least the numbers are about that proportion, although for some reason certain chapters get considerably higher visitor stats. For example chapter 9 has more visitors than the chapters either side of it. No idea why.

I've got a couple more stories half-done for the Ranma universe, one is around 40K words at the moment, the other is nearly 270K words and only half done. This will probably be split into three books in the end, at the moment it is one huge document of nearly a megabyte in size, 524 A4 pages so far. The big one I started writing about six months ago when I was at a bit of a loose end and it just kept getting longer. When I'm finished I will have to go back and edit it down a bit :)

One of the problems I found is that I kept having ideas that could lead in more than one direction. Since I'm reluctant to abandon one for the other, I sometimes reuse basic concepts in different stories, so people might find something in later work that is slightly reminiscent of something in an earlier one. Hopefully no one will mind. The large story is actually the first one I started writing as a Ranma fanfic, a couple of concepts from it spawned the sequel to Aftermath. I don't intend to publish it until it's finished.

It's always difficult to come up with genuinely new ideas in a fanfic universe, especially one that is both as rich and and as mature as the Ranma one. Practically every idea that could be come up with has already been tried, often more than once. Hopefully, even when I have managed to invent something several others have previously invented I can at least handle it in a different and with any luck entertaining manner.

Oh yes, Desperately Seeking Ranma isn't meant, or at least wasn't originally intended, to be a full blown anime crossover. So there will probably not be any interaction between certain groups of partially dressed schoolgirls with too much magic except where it's needed. Or funny.

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November 3, 2014

After some experimentation and comments from readers, I have placed the character list for Desperately seeking Ranma here:

https:///document/d/1szka75s0_N9v61J4rowDaqGa_yKzze_msc2R2fE3PjQ/pub

It contains spoilers for the story, which may possibly interfere with your enjoyment, such as it is, of the tale, so be warned! You can't unread it...

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August 14, 2015

Been a while...

Too many things to do, but life goes on. Desperately Seeking Ranma is now well over a million words, close to 1.2 million with the prequels, which now number four, all of which is so vastly past anything I every expected to end up with I can scarcely believe it. Yet there is so much more to go.

Enormous thanks and appreciation to everyone who has read, enjoyed, and commented on the story so far. There is a significant amount of brand loyalty going on :)

Hopefully I can continue to be of some amusement value to everyone for some time to come. It's amused me as much to write it as it apparently does others to read it.

I also note with some shock that the reader 'KitsuneHerikawa' has gone to the trouble of creating a wiki for the DSR series, which is far above and beyond the call of duty. I'm impressed speechless by it. And kind of pleased. It's found at sisterhood-of-doom dot wikia dot com

In addition the first bit of fan art for the story (and quite possibly the only bit of fan art for the story) was done by another reader, tommygunner70. It can be found at tommygunner70 dot deviantart dot com

Again, I'm very impressed and pleased.

(sorry about the link obfuscation, there seems to be no way to consistently put good links even into a profile anymore for some annoying reason.)

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November 22, 2016

Been a really long while, hmm?

I didn't expect to have a six month hiatus, I have to admit!

I must apologise for it. Life got rather complicated for more reasons than I can go into here, nothing phenomenally serious, just lots of little things that all added up to taking far too much of my time to allow for the sort of long thinking and writing periods that are needed for keeping a plot as complicated as the DSR one going. Once the momentum is interrupted, you take a surprisingly long time to get back into it, and if something else more important comes up right in the middle of that, well...

:( Annoying.

A couple of weeks turns into a month, then two, then before you know what's going on half a year has roared past in a cloud of dust leaving you blinking and wondering what happened.

But such is life.

So the end result is that I've let this drag on far too long without touching it very much. Not something I was planning on doing at all. I've been keeping my hand in with smaller projects, and adding to the half dozen chapters I was working on when I sort of got side-tracked, but I haven't quite finished any of them. I did manage to start half a dozen side stories as random ideas struck me and when I have an evening free, although whether I'll continue any of them beyond a chapter or two I don't know yet. That's what got me into this mess to start with :)

As I have said in the past, I fully intend to finish this story, for whatever value of finish is appropriate, and I will do so. It will just take a little longer than originally planned!

Before the ship of ambition foundered on the rocks of reality I was working on a good half dozen chapters covering some time to come in the DSR universe, with something like 100kwords written somewhat scattered amongst them. Soon, the ship of ambition will get salvaged, refloated, brought up to current nautical code, and sail off into the mists of creativity once more...

...This metaphor may have got away from me.

But what I mean is that I will, hopefully by Christmas if not sooner, restart things here. I can't promise to keep to that schedule exactly, and I can't promise to be able to keep up the pace at the rate I was running at a few months back due to work and other life based crap, but I'll see what I can do. I want to see where this goes as much as anyone!

I appreciate all the PMs and reviews asking me if I was OK. I am, life was complicated, not actually bad as such. Just annoying.

And I'm sorry that I told a few people by PM that I was going to post the next chapter more than a month ago then ran into more problems which made me miss that timescale. Like I said, annoying :)

With a little luck the annoyances will go off into a corner and sulk over the holiday period and into the new year allowing me to get back to the important things in life, ie spending far too much of my time writing silly stories for free for people I'll never meet!

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May 8, 2017

Hello, loyal minions!

Well, this is embarrassing.

Life. Who needs it :( Way too complicated.

What can I tell you?

Minor but tedious and time consuming medical issues, work related stuff, financial annoyances, family problems... You name it, I've had it.

Unfortunately, that takes the front seat, pushing the serious business of writing to the back seat, if not the trailer being towed behind the car.

Which got left at home.

With a flat.

Anyway, enough about me. How are you? Hope you're all doing reasonably well, so I can be mildly envious of people who know where their towels are :)

I do have some nearly finished chapters of DSR, two half finished ones for Xander sees an Aoyama (Ms) , and a couple of sketched outlines for some more short stories. As well as a mostly done second prequel for DSR, which slots in after The Fugitives and explains more of the backstory. I am attempting to get enough of my life together to finish one or more of these and resume updating on or about the one year(!) point of the unexpected hiatus I ended up with. So, around the end of this month, unless the universe takes another dump on me.

Hopefully it will refrain from doing so, it's getting annoying.

Peace be upon you all, keep smiling, and I'll be back. (That's in an Austrian accent, by the way, it makes it much more believeable)

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October 31, 2017

What can I say? The best laid plans of mice and me, I guess :)

Things never quite go the way you're expecting. Family issues, life issues, work issues, you name it, they all conspire to get in the way of doing your hobbies. Every time I think I've slain the dragon of irritation the little sod revives and comes back for another go at me! Death of a thousand minor annoyances, rather than any one huge problem, which is admittedly better than it could be, but is still a right pain.

I intended, (honest, really and truly!) to be back writing more DSR and various other things as mentioned in the previous log entry months ago, but what can you do? That is still the plan, I will get back to it I promise, and as mentioned more than once, I ain't dead yet. In fact, I'm doing what I can to avoid that entirely. So far it's working... However, I can't put an exact time on when this will happen. Every time I try I find myself, unwillingly, passing on false information so this time I'm not even going to try. Or, actually, let's try this.

I'll be back writing the story you people seem to want within the next mumble-mumble months/years (delete as appropriate). That should do it!

I have to confess I haven't even had time to look here for months, so I have a crapload of PMs to read and answer, and slightly embarrassingly I'll have to reread a certain amount of my own damn story to figure out where I got to so I can work out what I was intending to do next in the first place! Which in turn means more time is required for doing that, on top of everything else.

Gah.

An old friend poked me about it, mumbling something about getting back to doing something useful with myself, or I wouldn't even have written this right now, as I'm completely snowed under with random work and the like. So you can blame thank him for this update to my status. Since I don't have a new chapter to present to you all (although that will happen. Eventually...) I decided I'd post something else just to show that I really am still alive and kicking. Quite hard, sometimes.

It's a story that was a spinoff, as was DSR, from a precursor story back in the dim mists of time, ie around late 2011 or so, based on a couple of ideas I had that led down several different paths depending on how you thought about them. More details are in the notes in the story. Hopefully this will do as an intermediate step before the full resurrection of DSR.

Which WILL happen. Promise.

In the immortal words of Christopher Robin:

Backson. Bisy Backson.

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November 7, 2017

Wow.

I'm somewhat startled at the response to my latest story, and very pleased too. Thanks for all the reviews, I can't believe how many there were in only a week! Except for a couple of trolling arseholes, of course, but people like that are ever with us, even if I personally still can't understand the attraction of reading something you don't like then complaining about it. Or even worse, complaining about something you didn't read at all. But they're wildly outweighed by the positive responses so on the whole no harm done!

I will have to think about whether I continue the story. As I said in the previous entry, I did have a few ideas for where it could go, but never bothered following up on them. Having reread it again, and read the comments on it, perhaps it's something I should look into when I have a spare moment. That's unlikely to be immediately, I'm afraid, as life isn't quite so helpful as to allow me to write whenever I want to, but hopefully it won't be too long. Even so, when I have time to properly write again, it'll be DSR I concentrate on to start with.

But I must say that the nice reviews have rekindled a desire to write more as soon as I can arrange it. Thanks very much for that.

Honestly, I mean it :)

I'll try to make more time for this activity than I have done in recent months. I'm slowly making my way through a huge number of PMs and will attempt to answer all of them, but I'm afraid that while I'd like to respond to all the reviews as well, I probably can't manage it. I do read them all, though, and appreciate them. Well. Most of them...

Anyway, that's all from me for now. Thanks again for the overwhelmingly positive feedback, keep smiling, and I'll try to come back for longer as soon as I can.

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September 7, 2019

Holy crap, has it been nearly two years now since I last updated this? I didn't think it was that long...

Logged in for the first time in over a year to many, many PMs, lot of reviews and one or two personal attacks. Always nice to know I've affected someone enough that they feel it appropriate to have a go at someone they've never met for entirely pointless reasons :D

Life has been... well, life, I guess. Health issues, financial issues, family issues, you name it. All the things that tend to make one sigh, then stick one's head under the covers and hope the world will go away and leave you alone for a while. Needless to say, it seldom obliges :(

So the upshot is that I've had little time and inclination to do much in the way or writing for a good long time. It's not something I planned on and not something I like but it's how things have gone.

However...

I am still not dead, most of the big problems are now more or less in the past, and I am finding myself missing my stories. I've been reading a lot of other people's ones and thinking that perhaps I should at some point get back to some of the unresolved issues surrounding our protagonists. They have many things yet to do, of course, and are probably feeling a little annoyed that I abandoned them so suddenly. I feel sure they'd understand even so, but would like me to get back to work :) I'm also being prodded by friends who seem to feel the same.

What to do... ;)

I suppose that sooner or later I really do need to put a little effort into this. I don't like leaving things unfinished, and a mere 1.4 million words of story is nowhere near finished! So I think I'll be looking at my notes and unfinished work from the last time I did any of this stuff and seeing where it would go next. A fair amount of the next chapter was written, although it wasn't in one contiguous part, and I expect I could probably work out all the missing parts if I put my back into it.

I can't promise when this will happen, but as I said a long time ago, there is a plan and part of that plan involves finishing Desperately Seeking Ranma.

So we'll see what happens. Maybe by Christmas I'll find myself in a position to excrete the next installment of this epic in your general direction. I can't promise anything, as life is still there lurking in the background like some sort of lurking thing, but I'll see what I can do.

In the meantime, I will just mention that a good friend of mine, and one of the most verbally enthusiastic people urging me to 'bloody well get back to doing something useful' as he puts it, has spent about three years so far writing an enormous story which is even more complicated than mine is, and longer to boot. It's called Taylor Varga and can be found on this site. It's set in the Worm universe for people who haven't come across it, but takes the setting and applies demonic lizards to it to make it better.

Worm is grim enough that the concept of 'applying demonic lizards to make it better' is actually a thing :D The author has used, with my happy backing, many of the magic theory and time travel concepts I came up with for my own work in his story, and in fact it's more or less set in the same extended multiverse. There is a set of semi-canon omakes which have Yori and a couple of others playing a cameo role, although not so far a credited one. He's also interested in collaborating on an actual proper crossover at some point which I'm fairly keen to see happen, so that's another good reason to pick up the story!

Anyway, if you're interested, check his work out. Like any story, it won't suit everyone, as nothing ever does, but if you like humor, demonic lizards, and puns, it may be of interest. I certainly found it hilarious with a lot of interesting ideas. Some of which I may steal... It's also even longer than Desperately Seeking Ranma at about 1.8 million words so far and growing steadily.

With that, I must get back to doing actual life for a while. But I will, eventually, return!

See you lot around.

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