BronxWench

My avatar is a fairly generic drow elf female, no specific NPC or PC that I can recall. Or was... I am now channeling Flemeth, a rather interesting NPC from Dragon Age 2. Or maybe not.

I gamed online with my husband and his Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory clan under this name, and then began posting fanfic elsewhere under this name. I'm sort of used to being Wench by now.

Well, yes. I miss all my pets that have passed away, up to and including one particular fish. But I still think that mourning someone for 400 years, unless they're a bonded mate, is a little too long. All that the elf could have to offer is lost while they indulge in their grief. Case in point is another abused NPC from NWN2, Daeghun. He comes across cold and emotionless, and they drop the teaser that his wife died in the original attack on West Harbor. Okay, 18 years of mourning is not excessive by elven standards, or even human standards, but the elf could possess an emotion or two by now. I shouldn't complain, though. It's all fodder for the overactive imagination that drives me.

Specifically, in my NWN2 world, the PC is supposed to have a shard of a sword buried in their chest in infancy. The game timeline would have that occur approximately 18 years prior to when the game begins. Sorry, but the elf PC was not an infant when the shard would have to have been buried in his/her chest if said elf PC is 120 when the game begins. Logic gaps drive me batshit. Traumatic events in even an elven version of childhood or adolescence should definitely have a lasting effect. No arguments there from me. The "leave the past behind" philosophy should apply more to mistakes made and lessons learned, and also to not allowing the sorrow of losing a shorter-lived lover to color the rest of one's life. Yes, you mourn, but mourning for 400 years would be excessive. And yes, while older usually means wiser, smarter and more powerful, I always keep in the back of my mind that true wisdom occurs when we realize how very little we do know. Approaching life with an open mind and a willingness to see it fresh, treating each new day as a new experience, well, that has virtues all its own. I'm hardly the same person I was at 20, or 30, or even 40. Honestly, I'd slap my 20yo self senseless were I to meet me.

Elves being more my obsession than vampires, there's also the mindset of the elves in question to consider. I tend to stick with the Forgotten Realms version of elves, with a smattering of Tolkien thrown in, and it is not uncommon in that fic/game world for elves to take human lovers despite a huge disparity in lifespans. Elves also mature at a slower rate, and young adulthood for an elf would put them perilously close to the squick line in terms of age gap to begin with, so as a sensible elf-obsessed writer, I make the mental adjustment and assume any reader will do so as well if they're playing in my fandom. One interesting bit of FR elven culture is the notion that the past serves as lessons for the future, but living in the past makes a longer lifespan intolerable, and therefore, living in the now is encouraged. A younger partner, human or elf, does not necessarily become a mere protege, or even bed toy, under that outlook, but a way to approach life with the fresh viewpoint of the younger partner. What does drive me insane, however, is the game writers' complete lack of regard for these niceties. If I game with an elven character, that OC should NOT be 120 years old when the storyline of the game calls for an OC to have endured a traumatic experience that in the world timeline occurred 18 years ago. It's thoughtless writing, and eggs on people like me to insist on driving a double-decker bus through the resulting plot hole. Trust me, I do NOT need encouragement.

From a purely personal perspective, old age is very much a state of mind. I've known people who acted much older than their chronological age, and then there are people like me who get challenged on their age constantly. Despite being six years older than my husband, most people assume I'm roughly that much younger than he is. Go figure. I attribute it to the fact that I never cry if I can resort to being a sarcastic bitch and/or laughing instead, and damned good genes (thanks, Mom!). Well, that and sex just gets better as I get older.

I've been concentrating my writing in the NWN fandom, and there's a small core of decent writers who do give some good concrit. We've gotten to know each other pretty well, and I can count on them to poke me hard when I go off on a tangent. A lot of it is via PM, which is fine by me. And yes, I did NaNo this year for the first time. It occurred to me that I was sustaining better than novel length on fanfics, and when my muse gets cranked, I'm good for some seriously scary output. NaNo is harder in that I'm not taking time to edit as I write, and my inner editor required a massive intervention as a result. I also tried not to write elf smut for NaNo, which was a huge mistake, and one which shall not be repeated. The challenge is a blast, though. I took today off, but I'll reach the 50k words tomorrow by my word count widget. I'll add a little more and submit Sunday, since I hear their word count widget is not as generous as mine. Margins of error, my new golden rule. I'm good with about 5 hours of sleep, as long as I keep pounding the caffeine.

Heh. I'm going for it. I've gone insane, truly I have. I'm still writing the parent story. And then there's the other story languishing on my HD because I really need to spice it up more, and didn't want to make heads explode elsewhere. I started the rewrite, trying to tame it, and now I get to put back all the parts I cut out, and ramp those up. Of course, NaNo should be done by Sunday, which will give me back that time, and since the family's already trained not to bother me unless blood is involved... Sleep is vastly overrated anyway.

Oh, gods... I'm not sure if I love you or hate you, KS. It occurred to me that I could most likely post a rewrite of the relevant sections of the parent story, edited to include all the good bits I had to edit out while writing it, and to exclude a lot of extraneous plot stuff that works elsewhere but really doesn't fit the slant of this fic. On the bright side, the writing is basically done. I just need a more reliable source of my current favorite coffee, preferably administered intravenously.

I suppose the logical place for me to start is to say that while I'm not new to writing fan fiction, I'm new to writing on AFF. Alchemy is actually a plot bunny that latched onto my ankle with nasty sharp teeth and refused to go away. It spun itself off a rather long fanfic called Stormborn over on (cough-cough)FFnet, in which a certain sarcastic elven wizard features prominently. Because he is who he is, he insisted that I write a back story for him, and that would be right about when my ankle came under attack. I'm trying to stick to both the OC game campaigns for NWN and NWN2, as well as the character development I've done in the parent story, while still writing the parent story, a NaNo entry and a few other projects. I am now officially addicted to espresso and chocolate. Having said that, I wanted to reply to my two wonderful reviewers, Shadow Knight and wanderingaddict. It's always encouraging for a first story to get attention so quickly. Shadow Knight: I do agree that the rape scene is sketchy. I will admit to actually having a great deal of trouble writing that at all. I much prefer consensual sex, which puts me in a bind when I need to write noncon. And yes, the snark develops over the course of the fiction, as Chapter 2 shows. I've never seen Sand as fluffy in the slightest, and even in the throes of passion, he is still the same edgy, sarcastic elf we all love. I'm glad the sex works in Chapter 2, and I will have to work on spicing it up a little more, since Vale and Sand are not a one-night stand by any means. There's some big time jumps, which is why I did include dates throughout the chapter. I was hoping to imply, but probably need to make it clearer, that Sand has spent nearly a year in contact with Vale, and has been interested in Vale, but still resents being forced to work for Neverwinter. And, because I am an utter geek, thank you for loving the elven! I actually work from the glossary and grammar rules, and while it can be painstaking to find a way to phrase something, I love the challenge. Finally, this really is my first slashfic, so I'm loving the feedback. My elves don't view same gender relationships as out of the ordinary, so I can't see making them stick to purely het affairs, even if the parent story is het. wanderingaddict: I actually feel like I should begin by saying this is partially your fault, you know. I read Ceald Amothien first on FF, and then here, and was totally blown away. I am very much a fan of Valen, and gods-be-damned, that was HOT! Okay, fangirl rant over... Vale is a character that really screams to be developed, in my opinion. He's snarky, powerful, and he's an elf, which should pretty much say it all. And then there's Sand, also snarky, most likely powerful (but not sharing that with the Neverwinter crew) and an elf. It had to happen. As far as my timeline for Alchemy goes, it begins well before the NWN OC campaign, will surf past that and the NWN2 OC campaign, and end up well beyond that. For the record, I am pretending that WotC's 4e crap does not exist, and the Spellplague never happened. Anyway, I will check back here, and would love to hear more from you, since I am having way too much fun with my elves and have a feeling I might be revising another story that's been bouncing around my HD to fit AFF.