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Well… ten days since summer officially started, and we have snow… No joke, it was snowing this morning. Not raining, fracking snowing! Thankfully it didn’t stick, but for fuck’s sake, COME ON!!

So for a very long time now, I had an idea for an extremely extensive Sailor Moon work, spanning at least every single arc. I had a trillion ideas that I worked through in my head, but it was just a back burner pet project. So I finally decided I should sit down and start writing out outlines for characters, arcs and my changes. I even figured out ways I could work in whole new arcs, and even started working on those. Then I began a timeline of events. It was when my timeline reached page 30 and I wasn’t even a tenth of the way done that it came to me; this wasn’t just off the rails, it had jumped from and then off multiple sets and was now running across the ocean floor, well on its way to Europe. I had completely lost sight of this being a fanfic and it was becoming an original work sometimes featuring plot elements, vaguely, from an old magical girl series. Am I alone in this? If not, did you just make it into an original work?

For me it wasn’t one story, it was more gradual. Like eventually my fan fics started getting more and more distant from the canon and I couldn’t quite bend the characters the way I wanted to without making them completely out of character. I think I kept trying to steer things back into the fandom (It was a while ago, so my memory of it isn’t all that clear). And I tried jumping from fandom to fandom, because though working within someone else’s universe is somewhat limiting, I found it very comforting. It comes with its own fanbase already installed that you don’t necessarily get with originals. It comes with people who know and understand the characters, and those limits it imposes make planning just a little easier (That’s my experience, I can’t speak for others.) But I did eventually give in and start chasing those plotbunnies down the proverbial rabbit hole. For me it was scary, but it was the right move. I’ve never looked back. Honestly I think you should follow your inspiration wherever it needs to take you. If you’re pumped for this, and it sounds like you are because wtf, 30 page timeline?! Bring that world to life!

I notice alot of animes deal with the afterworld, like DeathNote and Bleach. Is there a fascination for this thing? Anywho...just thought I'd throw that in there. Randomly. I like a story that goes along dangerous lines. Very often, I'll have a dream and I'll re-live it over and over making sure I got every detail described down to a "T" For instance, this morning, I dreampt that we lived on a very remote ranch, and as I opened the door to let our cat in, I saw in the distance, a leopard, a grizzly and a cougar respond to my call. The hillside was sparsely treed with an old stand of spruce, so I could see them moving toward me, downhill, rushing with a speed that alarmed me. They knew the door was closing, and I didn't want to leave the cat out with THEM, so I had to hold it open. The moment the cat ran in, I closed the door (the leopard was SO close!), and I thought: "Where are my kids?" There are some nights when I wake up I'm glad there's a body next to me to hang on to.

Character design for fantasy/supernatural/sci-fi setting... A translator, who can speak a new language after sleeping with a speaker of that language.