#bloody notes

My mock design for my novel cover. I got the idea after doing the business card, and decided to elaborate on the cover design. However, I don’t know if this will be a final design, as I’m not sure I can duplicate anything similar to future novels. So it may be scrapped later.

Whenever it comes to writing, people usually write in one particular genre that is most comfortable for them. For the longest time for me, it was always fantasy. Fantasy was easy to work in. With fantasy, literally anything could happen. There were no rules, except for the ones that you made up for your own world. No one could tell you that it was impossible for mermaids to actually fly through the sky, and angels to swim under water. Because it made sense in your world. As long as you made it believable enough. It was always hard though, because I’d start out with a certain set of rules, very minimal, and that was it. I never really thought about how the land was laid out. I had a vague map in my head for most of the worlds that I created, but nothing set in stone. I just randomly came up with directions and places and forests. Eclipse of Life was a combination of real world and fantasy. It was Earth, but no Earth we would ever know. Cruel Fates was a small world sickened by war with maybe only two masses of land in an ocean that barely covered any part of the globe. Midnight Pegasus was a combination of our world briefly, and then a transformation to another world completely, where I never thought of anything beyond one little kingdom, thought the story was supposed to encompass a whole world. I just had an idea for a story, and wrote. A lot of things were made up as I went, basic myth was set, and everything else just happened. Magic had no limits in most worlds. There was a very rare occasion where I actually wrote how powerful an attack was by the result of a roll of dice. Being able to do anything, perhaps, was too free. Having to come up with all the rules and abilities of kingdoms and races became annoying, and perhaps why I dropped out of writing fantasy. I had dabbled briefly in 100% real world stories. No magic. Just everyday life. I tried to write a high school drama romance, and barely ever got started before giving it up. Then steampunk came into my life. It was everything I ever wanted. I had always had a love for Victorian fashion and the era. A little dash of fantasy mixed in always made me get excited. But it wasn’t for several years that I was finally able to put a name to it. I was instantly in love with the steampunk genre and wanted everything in it. I wanted the fashion, I wanted the jewelry, the art. I wanted the movies and books. I had never thought about actually writing anything in the genre, even after getting so enveloped in it with everything else I did. I had started doing jewelry to sell at conventions. I had tried my hand at making some art work, that sadly didn’t sell because my art is mediocre. I wanted to make all these clothes; I had drawn out and designed several of my own designs and wanted so much to see it on people, because it combined everything I loved—corset, skirts, bustled, vest, ruffles, and asymmetry. Writing didn’t come until much later. Whenever I had time with friends, I tried to get roleplays going. I was always trying to come up with new ideas so that we weren’t doing the same thing all the time. I brought up the idea of possibly doing a steampunk roleplay with one friend, and he got excited about the idea. We sat and brainstormed for a while about what our characters would be like. His was a Victorian Batman. Mine was a tomboy girl from a gang. We had a basic idea of what we wanted to happen and eventually what we wanted our characters to become, but just never had the time to actually play anything out. I had the idea to work on a really detailed opener to see if maybe that could prompt us to finally get started and inspire to make time. In the end, he loved the opening prompt so much, and I had so much fun writing it, that I just kept writing. I threw some ideas off of him, though not many. I wanted most of it to be a surprise, because I never thought I’d actually get to the point of it being an actual book. When I started getting more ideas, I realized I needed to do research and it was actually going to be quite lengthy. Steampunk was a wonderful opening for me, when it came to writing. I had a grounded world with basic sets of rules and everything already laid out for me, because I was basing some of the story off of real history. But with the steampunk twist, I was able to play with technology and a little bit of fantasy and make some things come to life that otherwise wouldn’t have been. My story is an alternate reality, a timeline of Earth that split a little sooner than the Jack the Ripper cases. A lot of elements of our world are there. The lifestyles of Victorian London, Scotland Yard, the famous murders. But my variation made everything my own. The robots, the aeroships, the projectile shooters. Those were my flare in this new world. Not to mention Vanessa’s inability to follow dress code for a proper lady. When the final words were written, and I realized I had actually, for the first time ever, finished writing my own full length novel, I wasn’t taken over by a sense of achievement. I had told this amazing story of a world that was somehow now all my own. And though everything had come to a conclusion, it felt unfinished. And that’s when I realized it. Vanessa and Leon’s story aren’t done yet.

Sometimes I forget that I’ve been writing for more than half my life already. I actually had to count that out to myself because I wasn’t really sure! I knew that I started back in middle school. I was a kid who was really into anime shows and always had these ideas for little side stories or new characters. I had started writing my ideas down. I found some of those old writings and I’m ashamed I ever posted them online for other people to read. But we’ve all been there at one point. We’ve all had a point where we thought we were some of the best writers of our time, with some of the best stories. But after a few years of growth, we look back and think “What on earth were we thinking?!” I had a handful of original works I had started in middle and high school, inspired by some of the strangest things. One was inspired by the fictional title of a book featured in a single episode of a show. The Midnight Pegasus was about a young princess returning to her home country after being in hiding for several years in order to ensure her survival during a horrible war. In this fantasy world that she lived in, all kinds of people lived but coexistence wasn’t exactly the best. Normal humans looked down upon anyone with animal traits. . . such as cat people. The princess meets a young boy in the market who has a golden horn on his head, to which he reveals to her later is part of a curse. His people used to be able to shift between human and horse at will, but now they can only take one form during the day and the other at night, while their human form showed who they really were. So many things were going to happen with the story, and nothing every really took off. The queen passes away young and the father is anxious to settle ties with neighboring kingdoms but the princess doesn’t want to cooperate. War breaks out again, but people with magic abilities are behind it and target this kingdom in particular. Throw in a little bit of Shakespeare with the princess accidentally killing one of her own people when she wants to fight and constantly sees his blood on her hands now. . . “Out damn spot!” Another work was inspired by a set of dreams I had. A world full of mages in the middle of a civil war to fulfill a prophecy of the fate of their world. The white and blue mages were set on trying to keep the world they had alive, but the red and black mages were trying to bring an end to everything so that it could all start over again. The elder green mages stayed out of the wars. One girl was the key to bringing about the fate of the world. . . but there were two translations of the prophecy and so no one was sure of what she would choose, or even who she would be, other than that she was the daughter of an angel and a demon with the ability to learn light or dark. The girl loses her memory and fights to figure out who she is, but no matter what she chooses in the end, she will never know happiness. Unfortunately, I wrote multiple stories at a time, constantly having new ideas for one thing or another and having to keep track of everything in different notes. My head was always off somewhere else and made it hard to keep focused on any one thing. None of my old stories were ever finished, despite having a full storylines set for almost everything. Most stories dragged on for ages, I had one that I worked on for over ten years off and on, and I would no longer be inspired to write them. Either people that I bounced story ideas off of fell out of my life, or it just got boring. There was no joy in writing them anymore. It was hard to write anything for a while. I had given up writing all my silly stories in high school and my fan fictions, and took up roleplaying in chatrooms. Having other people to work storylines with and actually have the unpredictability that I was craving was what I was waiting for. A small group of friends became my core roleplay group and helped to build my way of writing in ways I never thought I could before. I was used to stating simple actions, and with the help of certain roleplay partners, I was becoming between with actually describing what was happening to my characters. “He walked to the door” became “He stomped to the door with heavy boots that vibrated through the floors.” I was so used to writing fantasy and anything being possible that when we finally switched to a futuristic apocalyptic setting for a roleplay in ‘London 2200,’ I found myself challenged. Modern settings wasn’t something I was good at, I liked to be able to travel through forests, but found myself learning how to traverse in the jungles of abandoned cities instead and dealing with the dangers of gangs. And I realized that I enjoyed it. I decided to give another genre I was extremely interested in a try. Steampunk. I got one of my roleplay partners excited about the idea and we started to build our characters for a roleplay together. However, neither of us had time beyond the basic idea of the characters and what we wanted to happen at some point in the storyline. We had no proper storyline even planned out beyond “He’s like a Victorian Batman, and she was in a gang that he was investigating and now works for him.” I really wanted the story to go through, and thought that if we couldn’t roleplay it, because we couldn’t seem to get a good idea of how to start, I’ll go ahead and write a large opening for us to work off of. Except when I did so, I didn’t want to stop. I sent the long opener to him and he was excited by what I had written and urged me to write more. But I had no idea where to go from there. So I took some time to figure out what to do, and planned to write the actual story into a full novel, and told myself I’d use this storyline as my base for a National Novel Writing Month challenge. I had no idea if it would actually work, but the challenge to get it done in a certain time period excited me and I wanted to finish something for the first time ever. I spent a whole month researching the Victorian era. I pulled up a timeline of the era, some details of the fashions and how life was. It was a little difficult to see where I could throw my characters into the timeline of things going on in the 1800s, but I wanted it to be something recognizable but different. When I saw the name Jack the Ripper come up in the timeline, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. The rest of the month, I spent getting every detail I could about the Jack the Ripper cases, the notes that were sent, the conditions of the victims, other possible victims and who he could have really been. There were so many possibilities that ran through my mind and it worked out perfectly. This was the point in history that my world splits from our world, my alternative history. I thought I would be done after one novel, but I’ve found myself madly in love with my own characters and want to write about their stories more. A sequel is already being planned, though slowly. It’s already been some years since the NaNoWriMo challenge that got this novel out, but it’s only been a couple months since I could finally say that the editing process is finally complete and I’m happy with what I have. I can’t wait to get Bloody Notes out for everyone to read. And I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did writing it!

[[More info on the story, steampunk with all sorts of funky robots: http://mikasoranocosplay.tumblr.com/post/74131656928/in-2012-i-participated-in-national-novel-writing ]]