(Spoilers for You Only Live 18 Times are complete. If you’ve not read it and have any intention of doing so, this essay isn’t a good idea to read first.)
I don’t know exactly who my target audience for this essay is honestly, but in my conceit, I felt like writing it anyway. You’re welcome to ignore it. No sexy khajiits here, alas. But I wanted to write something about my process of writing fanfiction, and YOL18T is a good example of that.
First, the concept of my Spyjirra stories started out simply enough – I got the idea of basing a story on the old 007 movies, but with a sexy Ra’Jirra khajiit and set in a future Elder Scrolls universe. I wouldn’t say I literally copied from the movies, just got some general outlines from them. However, I had to upscale the TES technology to roughly 1700s era, with some bits of technology more advanced, others less than the literal period. So we have rifles and handguns, but no motorized vehicles. Magic still exists, but is fading.
When I started YOL18T I first watched the old Bond movie You Only Live Twice. In it, “American and Russian spacecraft go missing, leaving each superpower to blame the other.” The protagonist fakes his own death, then is sent to investigate in Japan. They discover it’s a conspiracy by SPECTRE, the standard organized villain corporation.
So I start with a similar plotline, but spacecraft are obviously way too advanced for even my future-TES universe. Instead, the plot revolves around ships with a new technology – engines. Hammerfell and the Imperials are the two superpowers, with Hammerfell playing the part of the Russians, though not quite exclusively. In fact, I have Hammerfell being the more technologically advanced of the two. Anyway, so instead of spacecraft, both countries are testing new powered ships, but they are both destroyed and each side blames the other.
In my story, Elsweyr plays the part of the English, ostensibly an ally of Cyrodiil but Ra’Jirra leans towards liking Hammerfell better after the last story. The Aldmeri Dominion plays the role of SPECTRE, and I conceived of them having a submarine and torpedoes that they used to destroy the ships – though the submarine is magically powered since the Altmer still possess decent magical abilities.
I was able to link the first story to the second by having Ra’Jirra’s fake suicide done in Hammerfell where she meets a couple of characters from the original story. But the main new OC is Wears-Only-Ropes, an Argonian sailor who is on the Imperial ship that is destroyed. It seemed natural that, since this story would be very naval-oriented, the Argonians with their ability to breathe underwater would play an important role in any navy, even though their own country is resolutely neutral and not really even ocean-going.
(Forgive me pls for posting Wears-Only-Ropes images you’ve already seen. I am still in mourning over her, in a more real sense than I have any right to be.)
In the Bond movie, a large portion of it is devoted to James Bond visiting Japan and some serious time is taken in describing the society there. I thought that having Ra’Jirra visit Argonia, (The Argonians wouldn’t call it the Black Marsh after all), would be a natural replacement for Japan. So similarly I spend some time imagining the society that the Argonians would have. Even the Sumo wrestling scene gets an equivalent Argonian sporting event – chase the eel.
So while I do follow the plotline of the Bond movie in very broad terms, the specifics are very different obviously.
Anyway, as I was writing, I realized early on that Ra’Jirra needed a partner – primarily so she has someone to talk to and I don’t need to have internal dialogue, but also to give an alternate viewpoint on occasion. Since I tend to write sexy scenes once in a while, a male khajiit would make sense. (I don’t think it’s too sexist to have her be hetero. Besides, I had a rather clear lesbian scene in the prior story with her anyway.) Then I realized that it would be cute if her partner was an Alfiq – one of the more bizarre forms of khajiit in that they’re basically the size and shape of a housecat, but intelligent – though TES sources indicate they can’t speak. So that would be a bit of a problem. I worked around that by having him be a biologist of sorts working with Lycanthropy who had been turned into an Alfiq. Also, he gets to turn back into his native form of a Cathay when the moons are aligned. So Ra’Jirra and he can occasionally have Sexy Fun Times. Plus he can talk. Okay, that’s a good OC and should be fun to play with! A spy organization like the HMSS would certainly have good use of someone like that.
I then started the story with a chapter on Wears-Only-Ropes and the destruction of her ship. Rather liked how it turned out. I thought it made for a pretty good “hook” to start the reader out with something big. Then I had to abandon her for most of the next half. In fact, she doesn’t actually meet Ra’Jirra till ¾ of the way through the story, so she gets a few more chapters from her point of view. But I came to really like her as a character. Mixing some bits I knew of pirates (women pirates would typically go shirtless as did the men) I had the concept of her “wearing” ropes as a bra of sorts, thus the name.
Another thing that originally came from the Bond film… in it, James Bond flys a mini-helicopter at one point. Well, a helicopter is way too advanced, but I came up with the CATv3 instead – a sort of Jet Ski/Waverunner thing. Once I had that, I had to give it some sort of weapon. A set of mines would make sense, as the thing would be bouncing all over the waves so trying to aim it with a gun in the front wouldn’t really work. As soon as I got the idea of a mines on the CATv3, the logical way to destroy the sub became apparent.
But the mines would be surface mines, meant to thwart attackers chasing her on boats or similar. The submarine would be deep underwater… how? Oh. OH! OOOOOH!
Suddenly, Wears-Only-Ropes’ fate was sealed. She would have to take a mine down to the sub. Ra’Jirra couldn’t do it even if she wanted to. Argonians can breathe underwater. Ra’Jirra can dog-paddle for a little bit.
Even then I had hoped to have her survive. I really had grown fond of her. But, minimal though it is, I do try to ground my stories in reality as much as possible given The Elder Scrolls-inspired world. I researched underwater explosions. I’d hoped that perhaps an underwater explosion – given the density and non-compact-ability of water might allow her to live. But my research showed that, far from being safer than airborne explosions, an underwater explosion is even more deadly. And the explosion would be huge. The mine wouldn’t just detonate against the hull of the sub, it would trigger the explosion of all the torpedoes within.
Fight as I would as a writer, I couldn’t justifiably have her live. Any number of solutions were possible, but they all were just too outlandish and smacked of Deus Ex-Machina solutions. No, she had to die in the explosion. Granted, she’d expected to. All her ‘family’ and friends had died in the original ship torpedoing at the first chapter. It would be fitting that she would sacrifice herself to their retribution. I couldn’t deny her that. So, though I don’t explicitly make it clear, she died.
It’s weird how such a thing can affect me, her author. I really feel bad about it, even though it was both fitting and made for a more impressive story IMHO. I’ve toyed with the idea of her Twin Sister, etc, but that doesn’t feel right either. No, she’s a one-story character, and YOL18T is her story as much as Ra’Jirra’s.
One other thing, I needed a core motive for the Dominion’s action. Sure, they were trying to instigate a war between Hammerfell and Cyrodiil – but WHY would they want to do that? The answer was right in front of me. Technology vs Magic. In my TES-future universe, magic is dying. The Altmer of the Dominion are the last capable magic-users (to any large extent), but the humans and their rapidly increasing technology were threatening. But not just that. I conceived of them using their magic to look far into the future, and what they saw there was a world in which humans were the only intelligent inhabitants. The khajiit, argonians and mer were all gone. It gave them a much more noble reason for their actions – even if they were also self-serving. And therein lies the core of the sequel and end of the trilogy actually. In YOL18T, I didn’t do much with that, other than have the Dominion explain their reasons to Ra’Jirra.
And that’s how YOL18T was conceived. I am currently doing an audio-recording of the story chapter-by-chapter. I’m not a good voice actor at all. In fact, I just pitch-shift my voice to portray the different characters in it. I spend most of my time adding background effects so it’s not quite just a dry reading. Though I’m also currently writing the sequel and last story in the Spyjirra trilogy, I think YOL18T is the highlight – even though the current one is a “bigger picture” story than either of the first two and really doesn’t track along with the Bond movie in any way.
But I do miss Ropes. She deserved more than a single story. The one thing I might do someday is write more of her backstory. But prequels are a tough sell, esp. when you know how her story has to end. Eh… maybe not. I tried to write a prequel once for Katia to explore her life before she came to Anvil. I aborted it as too depressing. I really prefer happy endings. So probably Ropes is gone for good. I hope her story is good enough for her.
I thought I’d upload this spontaneous nakked female catto sketch.
Was playing with more animalistic anatomy, hence the digitigrade paws and full-on cat head
I found a shy Prequel adventure fanart artist which has an actual talent in drawing beauty khajiits and he’s my buddy here. Wanna share him with you cuz I really like his works.
Actually… not so fast. Better close up those ass cheeks Katia. We’re not 100% leaving Tumblr just yet.
Everybody else is announcing where they’re moving to post-Tumblr.
I think I’m going to be a bit different and not abandon Tumblr altogether, but instead using it for an announcement platform. I’ve never cared for Twitter and have no affection for any of the other alternatives. Perhaps if everyone coalesces around another platform, then I’ll go to it too.
Because the majority of my posts are in “story” format – that is, text interspersed with images and the images need to appear in specific places, I’m actually moving (have moved) all my stuff to WordPress. Why? Because they have an Import function that keeps stuff intact mostly.
I actually have 9 Tumblr blogs total, for different purposes. So now I have 9 WordPress blogs instead. Here they all are, with the corresponding URL for the new WordPress blogs. Note that I’m still working on the navigation and layout, but the posts are all there at least.
So what I’ll do is, when I put up a new post, I’ll just link to it on Tumblr. I think that’ll work. At some point I do hope another site gains enough traction to make sense to switch to. WordPress just really isn’t a social site. Their focus is more on easily creating web sites. But most everything transferred well and so is intact, which at this point was more important to me than social features like reblogging etc. All the tumblrites I know are splitting up to different places anyway.
So that’s my plan. I’ll keep posting to Tumblr, but just with announcements of new updates and links to the updates on WordPress.
There may be exceptions to that. Tumblr’s a hard habit to break, but that’s my gameplan going forward.
As for the WordPress blogs, I’m still working on fine tuning them for navigation, especially the fanfic ones, but all the posts are there so it’s just a matter of me learning what adjustments I can make to get them more navigation-friendly.
I’ve used Tumblr for years now, because I’m really not an artist. More of a wannabe writer that also likes to color drawings by others. Yeah, it’s a form of coattail riding, I’ll be the first to admit. But I also have tons of stories where I inserted images in appropriate places – some of them lewd, some not so much. But now most have been flagged and I’ve started backups on all my blogs to get everything off Tumblr as fast as I can.
What I’ll do with it all, I really don’t know – but at least once I’ve got everything out of the cloud and onto a nice USB drive, I’ll be master of my own content’s destiny again. And that will be a good thing. Unlike a lot of people, I’m really not all that pissed at Tumblr. I don’t like it, but I understand it. However, I do have a nice chuckle imagining the eyes of their ‘powers that be’ as massive numbers of people depart. The issue as I see it is a common one these days – do social platforms bear responsibility for the posts generated by their users? And it’s a question that has raged since the days of BBS’ in the 1990s. (I always come back to that since it’s my old stomping ground).
My personal feeling is that no, they don’t. Unless they decide they do. But once you take up the mantle of Content Police, you’ve also just taken up the inherent responsibility for it. Seems fair to me really – after all, platforms like Tumblr are making their $ off freely-donated content in exchange for a platform that allows others to find their content relatively easy. If Tumblr thinks that keeping their app on the Apple App Store is most important (they’re wrong, but it’s their decision), then Congratulations! With luck, their app will get back on the App Store and no one will care about it any more.
No, the real problem as I see it is with Apple. They pull the app from their App Store because SOME people that use it post objectionable content. Well, okay. Good thing NO ONE on Twitter does anything like that, right? There are surely no objectionable posts on Facebook either I’m sure. They could easily put a caveat and/or warning on the app, but no – they just pulled it. Again, it’s Apple’s right to do so – it’s their store. But I really hope all you iOS users think about that. Why you’re using any Apple product I really can’t fathom. (Full disclosure, my SO also uses an iPhone, as much as I’ve tried over the years to get her to stop.)
So at this moment I’m backing up all my Tumblr blogs. (I hope. Tumblr SAYS they’re backing up. I bet that server farm is suddenly balls-to-the-wall backing up though.) Don’t worry too much about the disk space, Tumblr! I promise once I get all my content off, I’ll wipe my blogs and save you every bit of space I ever took! Just think of all those squeaky clean servers you’ll have pretty soon, and bandwidth problems will be a thing of the past as your usage drops to a trickle! Woohoo! You did it! You’ve made yourself SQUEAKY-CLEAN! Kinda like a desert.
Im currently trying to decide where to move to. If I just did straightforward art, theres plenty of places, but I do all these stories with illustrations too. Not sure yet. Sofurry has been my go-to alternate so maybe there, but its not ideal.
bdprequel 