This journal exists for me to get feedback on my fanfiction and my writing ideas. If you want my normal blog then go to Sarapen (remember that you can leave comments under your DW name by using your journal address - i.e., deleonjh.dreamwidth.org - to sign into OpenID.

Anyway, what follows is the master list of my stories. There aren’t that many, but cross my heart I will finish every fic that I’ve started. So far all I have are 1 Ranma 1/2 and 5 Avatar: The Last Airbender stories. Note that spoilers abound for these series.

You might also notice discrepancies between the versions uploaded on different sites. Just know that the absolute final version is the one posted on Archive of Our Own.

Comments or questions are welcome anytime (even months later if you want); leave them on this post if you don't want to do it at FF.net or AO3.

Finally, please realize that I explicitly could not give less of a crap about protecting young children or the sensitive from the bogeymen of sex and violence. My stories don’t revolve around those subjects, but if they come up and you don’t like it then please don't blame me, you were specifically warned about the possibility. Assume that all of my stories are at least rated T for Teen.

Despite all appearances, I seriously am writing. Mica and claudiapriscus on AO3 kind of got me doing it all over again for He Said, She Said. Take a look:

“So what did you think of the play?” mumbled Toph around the stick of barbecued banana slices that was currently in her mouth.

“Two thumbs up,” said Zuko. “The director’s thumbs, I mean, since I’m going to cut them off and shove them up his ass.” He demonstrated his pique by kicking down a banner pole whose sign read The Life and Death of the Prince of Ill Luck.

Sokka snorted at Zuko’s answer. “Hello, jerkwad, did you not get the memo about not being a bad guy anymore?” Sokka kicked down another banner pole, not because he hated the play but because as a good boyfriend he felt obligated to act on Yue’s behalf when the play was a blatant plagiary of her novel. Also he liked kicking things.

Zuko punched a hole through a backdrop showing some icebergs floating on the sea. “Me, not a bad guy anymore?” he asked. “Says who? I never promised anything to anybody. Anyway, who says good guys can’t cut off the thumbs of people they don’t like? What, are the good guy police going to arrest me for that?”

“Uh, yes, and they’re actually just the regular police,” said Sokka as he tore apart a set of red Fire Sage robes.

“For the love of crap, can you two just make out already?” interrupted Toph. “I swear, you can cut the sexual tension with a knife.”

Sokka turned to Toph in annoyance. “You know, Toph, life isn’t one of the borderline gay romance stories you pay people to read to you. Just because two people argue with each other doesn’t mean they’re secretly in love. Almost one hundred percent of the time it means they genuinely disagree with each other.”

Toph was too busy enjoying her banana slices to give a properly derisive jeer to Sokka’s pronouncement and in fact all she could manage was a sarcastic roll of her eyes.

“Hey, what are you kids doing backstage!” demanded an angry bearded man who Zuko assumed was the stage manager or something. He didn’t bother to find out but instead smashed the chair he was holding over the man’s head instead of smashing it on some Ba Sing Se palace scenery like he originally intended. Taking the man’s intrusion as a cue, he sauntered casually out of the back door whose lock he had bashed open with a rock – this was only after listening to ten minutes of fumbling and cursing from Sokka before the other boy admitted that he couldn’t pick the lock (and only after Zuko had broken the lock did Toph reveal that she could have used her metalbending and saved everyone the trouble).

Much later, on their way out of town and back to their camp site Sokka observed, “You know, for a play that’s supposedly about the ‘Prince of Ill Luck’ the majority of the story revolved around the whole Katara forbidden love angle.”

“Yeah,” agreed Zuko as he walked along swinging a wooden sign that said Colonel Kinjo’s Travelling Players, “It’s like they wanted to make a stage adaptation of Thunderstorm but kept getting forced to make a straight propaganda piece instead.”

“What kind of propaganda piece makes you feel sorry for the bad guys?” asked Toph as she finished her snack and began cleaning her teeth with the barbecue stick she’d been eating from. “Zuko’s supposed to be the traitor but the play ends with Katara crying her eyes out and promising to avenge his death.”

“Good point, it gets kind of weird near the end, doesn’t it?” said Sokka. “But can we agree not to tell Aang that he spends the Battle of Ba Sing Se screaming and hiding under a blanket?”

“No, we can’t, because I’m going to tell him that as soon as we see him,” promised Toph. “I even memorized the lines his character was shouting at Azula: ‘Take Sokka, he’s stupid and ugly and no one likes him.’”

Sokka huffed in annoyance and stuck his hands in his pockets. He should have known Toph would remember that line. “You know, Toph, maybe we really should come clean to Katara about where we’re getting our money from,” he threatened.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” said Toph as she threw her skewer at Sokka’s head.

“So you’re cheating at crooked dice games,” said Zuko. “You’re just doing the same to those gamblers that they were going to do to you. How can that be wrong?”

“Exactly,” said Sokka.

“For sure,” agreed Toph.

They were both glad that Zuko had been too distracted by seeing the advertisements for the play that he didn’t ask how they’d scored same day tickets for what was obviously an incredibly popular show. If he had known they’d scammed the tickets from some rich jerkoff then he would have probably thrown a hissy fit about them risking the mission or something.

Honestly, for a firebender Zuko could be a complete wet blanket. No wonder he and Katara got along so well. All Toph and Sokka did was trick money out of people who had too much of it. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Seriously, I’m writing. This excerpt is the opening of a project I’ve had on the backburner for over a year now, tentatively titled The Year of the Dragon:

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that we used to be at war with the Fire Nation. I can still remember running for my life as the last of their raids ravaged my clan one final time; I can still remember how I screamed and screamed when I discovered what they’d done to my mother. I can remember the look on my father’s face as he and the other warriors left to join the fighting and I can remember the long days of waiting that followed immediately after, days where every now and then my chest would clench and I would think, This, now, is the sign that my father is dead.

But days turned into weeks, then months, and then years, and every now and then I could swear I felt a premonition of my father’s death, but every time I’d shake it off as nothing but love and worry mixed together. Finally, a ship from our Northern cousins came, its passengers bringing strange stories of the Avatar returning and defeating the Fire Nation. Our enemy was beaten, they said, and now the war was over.

To think that the battle for the fate of the world had come and gone without my tribe even knowing. How strange to have your universe turned topsy-turvy and not know about it until weeks later. But that’s pretty much the story of my life.

I want to start writing again. I’ve kind of been distracted with my new-ish job, but I still want to keep with the fiction, both fan and otherwise. And guess what? That’s just what I’m going to do.

Also, I hadn’t realized it, but my return to fiction writing apparently happened on July of last year. I’ve been back in fiction for over a year now! Well, technically I kind of dropped off with it for the last few months, but that was only a temporary situation.

Expect more anon, gentle readers. And no way am I taking another four year break like the last time.

“Fuck.”

Wow, who was the potty mouth who was cursing so early in the morning? Katara lifted her head and looked around the room where she’d woken up. She was apparently lying in a hammock attached to the walls of a room made entirely out of metal. There were miscellaneous bags of something lying on the floor (dimly, Katara remembered that the floor on a ship was called the deck). Some of those bags looked familiar, and it took Katara a moment to realize that they belonged to her and Sokka. Was Sokka here too?

Oh, there he was sleeping in the hammock on the other side of the room. From the loud snores he was emitting, he hadn’t been the one who had greeted the new day with a hearty f-word. “Fuck me.” See, there it was again. It was coming from someplace really close by, too. So close that she could have sworn it was coming from her own mouth. “Merciful spirits, please fuck me dead.” Oh wait, it was coming from her own mouth.

I thought that finishing off He Said, She Said would be fairly straightforward but I seem to have  come up against a wall. The last two chapters have been going through the Stations of the Canon, as it were, by following the progression of the episodes of Books One and Two. However, Part 2 ended in a way that blasted that sequence apart, meaning that there is no way Part 3 will resemble Book Three in any realistic fashion. I could still force the story to follow Book Three but doing so would lessen the narrative as a whole since the plot would not flow naturally in that direction. Which means that I have to write more original stuff for the story.

Of course, I’m not averse to originality, but the bigger problem is that the ending of Part Two necessitates a change in tone from comedy to drama, at least in the beginning. However, drama is harder for me to write than comedy and thus it will take me much longer to finish the fic. Getting the whole thing back on track to a ridiculous adventure would mean slightly more work as well.

Really, there’s nothing for it but to do it. I find that when I’m stuck on a story that the simple act of writing gets the creative juices flowing and ideas start popping into my head.

Anyway, I have a hankering to add the next part of The Dog who was a Prince, which should probably help with my other projects. Immersing myself in Avatar fics should also help.

So there you go, folks, you heard it here first: A new chapter from moi will appear on the Etherweb soon-ish.

This chapter was actually ninety percent finished by the end of February, the only thing left was the big showdown at the end. But then I got a new job and that kind of slowed down my writing by a fair bit. It’s another long one, but guess what – the fic is 66% finished. Only Book 3 is left, the epilogue is actually already done. How about that, huh? I’m looking forward to actually finishing a multi-chapter fic.

“Princess Azula, I think you’ll be interested in this message,” said the governor of Omashu. Azula took the scroll from him and quickly scanned through it, then slowed down to read the message again more thoroughly when she realized what it was saying. “Well, girls,” she said to her friends, “it seems my brother has finally shown his true colours.”

“What do you mean, Azula?” asked Ty Lee. Behind her, the governor had silently retreated out of the room. Azula’s only answer was to turn the scroll around so that Mai and Ty Lee could read it. The tassel was in the gold and red pattern that meant an official message involving a royal wedding. Had the Earth King finally gotten engaged? Then Mai and Ty Lee took a closer look.

“Zuko’s engaged to Katara, ‘Master Waterbender and daughter of Chief Hakoda of the Southern Water Tribe’?” quoted Mai.

Fun Elizabethan fact: “wherefore” means “why”. So when Juliet asks, “wherefore art thou Romeo?” she means “Romeo, why are you Romeo?” To explain more clearly, Juliet is asking why her beloved is Romeo, i.e., a member of her family’s sworn enemies. It’s obviously a rhetorical question, since it’s not a question anyone can answer. “Wherefore” thus does not mean “where”, and it is incorrect for someone to use it in that manner. This piece of trivia about Early Modern English is brought to you by my sense of responsibility about not updating in too long.

There’s an explanation behind my absence. To sum up my situation succinctly: I have a new job, it’s got crazy hours, but the pay is pretty damn good. I barely have time for anything else now, though, and my scarce downtime is mostly taken up by decompressing. I’ll still be keeping my hand in, but I won’t be as visible online as I used to be.

That is all. Carry on with your normal routine.