New blog, updates to lastprospekt.

Hi, first blog here. I have some legacy blog posts I could bring over, but I decided not to. I've been blogging in some form for more than ten years. I don't mean to say that I have a bunch of "experience" in the "blogging" field, since half of that time was spent on LiveJournal, but, well, I have a bunch of stuff. Pretty much no one needs to read any of it. 

In any case, I'll start on the thing I originally wanted this blog for - lastprospekt. The project has been dormant for way too long, and about a week ago, I began again on it in earnest. My world and character bible has balooned in size about ten pages since then, with real content, and I've gotten a lot of stuff written that has remained in my head for years and years.

It's a little weird nailing down stuff that is amorphous in my brain. The biggest thing I wrote down was the system of powers, which was integral to the unnamed assassin's guild I have been developing. When I first came up with a concept for it, I had been writing an espionage story with a bait-and-switch sort of hook. The story starts out with a young male being seduced by the famous adult daughter of a powerful man staying at a hotel. (In the original story, he was a young teen, with her being a pedophile, but as of now I'm unsure if I want the story to be quite that racy.) As it turns out, the young man is actually a female shapeshifter who murders the celebrity and steals some important mcguffin from the father. As far as I had gotten with the background is that she has a protege she works with, and they work for some shadowy organization. As I expanded the idea, I came up with a good way to introduce supernatural elements and "powers" into an already fantastically not grounded in real life story. My point of the anecdote was that the power was so nebulous when I came up with it, but now I have the mechanic that spawns the powers, which concerns the spirits of those with powers and how their powers live on through those they come in contact with. I've left it diverse and open, which is how I want it.

In any case, the assassin's guild, which started out as a sidestory, became a great story to introduce as a very large part of the main story. In fact, some of the characters I came up with for the sidestory were great fits for characters in the main story, and the powers were wonderful additions in giving them motivations and whatnot. I always enjoy condensing down my characters and giving ties between all the different stories I work on.

One of the other things I tend to do a lot in my stories is have major character changes. When I started with characters in 2001, there were five characters that still exist in the current story. The story was a typical Japanese anime style thing with a young male going on a quest from his small village to greater things. This main character was a spiky blonde, Tetsuya Nomura inspired protagonist by the name of Vertei. His motivation was to save his sister, Song, from the evil Harl by seeking her out in the giant mechanized metropolis Hiirol. He finds his parents captured in the jail there, and meets a girl named Celenei, and together they save Song from Harl.

Only a couple of years after I came up with that, I changed Vertei considerably. Well, not considerably. His character was still the same. I just thought it would be much more interesting to have the general Japanese anime protagonist personality stuff in a small, raven haired female package instead of a generic spiky haired male one. Admittedly, the character, who is now known as Vereille, is much different than she was even back when I changed her gender and design to what it is now.

As for the other characters, they are pretty much universally different as well, but exist in some capacity. Song remains Vere's little sister, but has gone through many name changes in the meanwhile. Song became Kerisong, Kerisong became Kerisonne, and Kerisonne was condensed to Kerinne. Curiously, her personality had not, as she remains very cheerful and optimistic in the face of Vere's skepticism and pessimism.

Celenei doesn't exist in that capacity any more, as a love interest for Vereille. Instead, the character was mostly reused but this time as Celenne, Vere and Keri's mother. Heckt, their father, is still a part of the story as well. Harl remains the antagonist, but, er, in the draft I was talking about before, he was a giant computer system. He isn't, anymore.

In my tangent, I meant to illustrate one point - how drastically I can change characters. Nothing is set in stone. Changing Vertei to Vereille was probably my favorite change, and I just recently made a similar change. For a long time, the story had a character named Garion, who was the dark, brooding ally to Vereille and the protagonists of the story. For a while, he worked with Heckt at his government organization and was meant to be the "Angel" to Vereille's "Buffy". 

Three separate characters stared at me. I had for a very long time had the character of Eironne, Vereille's older sister, who had been a wonderful happy person until she was emotionally and physically hurt in an accident. When she recovers, she is possessed by forces of evil and is eventually rid of them. I also had Garion, the brooding hero who pretty much takes center stage later in the story. Then I had the character I made for the assassin's guild, a young man driven to paranoia when his teleportation power manifests itself.

Then I thought, what if all these are the same character? Essentially, Eironne was gone. Vereille no longer has the older sister. Garion and the assassin are no longer male. It introduced a wonderful little subversion of formula in that our two main characters are female, but are attracted to each other and have similar sexual tension to any male and female duo, when in most other stories they would be either best friends or rivals, which is the fate of most relationships between females. Garionne (Gah-ry-on-nay) was born.

Very excited for the future of what I have to write. I have a whole new story I'm working on, which is helping me nail down some societal things between the different races of the world that I've created. I'll talk about that at some later date.