Elizabeth
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Joined: 30 Dec 2007
Posts: 172
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 Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 1:48 am Post subject: Benu - Discussion & Author's Notes |
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For any comments about the story.
Author's Notes: This story came out of a forum RP over at Fox Tales Times. It was your basic magic school setting, and I had just finished re-reading whichever Harry Potter books were out at the time, so I thought it sounded interesting, and created Miranda, whose name is taken from the movie Serenity.
Her basic character backstory was pretty much the same as it is in the story. Basically, I was trying to do a bit of a riff on the basic Harry Potter story, by showing a character who everyone thought this prophecy was about, and who everyone treated as special, who had all of that taken away. The whole "..or is she?" angle wasn't there in the RP, though. And yes, her bardiche is pretty much directly stolen from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha.
Veronica came a little later, because I started watching Veronica Mars about that time, and I thought it would be fun to have someone that manipulative, who knew everyone's secrets, and wasn't afraid to use them to get what she wanted. Her last name, Holloway, I chose because it's the last name of the actor who plays Sawyer on Lost, who is another character like that. I didn't really get into much of her history in this story, but when figuring out her character, I did write some on it. Perhaps that will show up if I ever do a sequel.
Like most forum RPs I joined, this one didn't last long. I liked the characters too much to just stop writing them, though, so I started to develop my own magic school and world setting - that would be where the whole separate tribe thing came in, as well as the whole Day of Shadows and everything attached to that - where I could develop the basic stories that I had been planning on doing in the RP. Only now that it was my story, I could do a lot more with them, without it seeming like I was trying to take over the entire RP. The main idea that drove this story was the scenes from the last chapter, which I thought of very early in the process, and then, pretty much, just developed the rest of the story around.
I originally planned to use the story for the Short Story Contest at the AB/DL story forum, but when the first chapter ended up taking about half the page limit for the contest, without actually doing anything besides introducing the main character, I ended up just writing it as a regular story.
Honestly, the story itself didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped, largely because of my clumsy chunks of exposition. I still like the basic story, however, and hopefully, now that I have the world developed, I'll come back to it someday.
If you're curious as to the origins of the chapter titles, here's a response I gave when somebody on the forum asked:
The prologue and first chapter are actually both English, I think, the first chapter being names after a kind of spider. After that:
Verslaan - African for defeat
Lycka - Swediesh for happiness
Oneiros - Is the ruler of dreams in Greek mythology, I believe, but really I just stole it from Sandman
Celszerum - Hungarian for practical, though I added a 'm' at the end to make it more like practicum in my mind
And then all the parts of the sixth chapter are Italian. Inizio meaning beginning, Ragno spider, Argento silver, and Fenice phoenix.
Osa - Finnish for fate
Skjulen - Norwegian for hide, with a 'n' at the end, for hidden, since I don't actually know how to conjugate Norwegian.
Derobee - French for secret
and, of course, Abracadabra means... Well, abracadabra, as far as I know. Honestly, that choice of title was influenced mostly by The Prestige.[/i]
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