Monday, May 14, 2012

[AN] From the Ashes- Chapter 2

Hello everyone!

So if you are here, that means that in some capacity you are interested in my fan-fiction From the Ashes. It continues the story of my other story, A Little Ship Lost in Space. Please read that before reading this one. Thanks!

Before I start with chapter 2, I want to answer some of the reviews from the previous chapter.
Anonymous writes:
well done, the inclusion of the nightmare was interesting, but you did refer to Shepard as She once.
Well anonymous I will check out that mistake of mine, thanks for pointing it out! As for the nightmare, yes this is very important. Shepard still has some demons to fight. Sorry but the second chapter will only lead to more questions. Chapter 3 is where you will start getting some answers.

chrizzle88 writes:
I like the path you're taking with Shepard's inner strife with the boy. Not many bring it up in ending or post ending stories and I'm interested to see how you incorporate it.
Thank you! I always feel how Shepard is so underdeveloped in the Mass Effect saga (kinda has to be though), that I always want to give him the TLC when I can. This is obviously one of those times. Even with the Reapers gone, the boy still seems to be there. Well Shepard is in for a nasty surprise let me tell you that.

Now onto my author's notes:
In chapter 2 the reconstruction of Vancouver takes side stage as work starts on cleaning up the city. This story mainly highlights the internal struggle of Shepard and the little boy, still present in his dreams and mind.
A point I want to drive home in this chapter is one prevalent in all of Mass Effect: You can't do anything alone. Just think, Shepard did a lot, but he never could have gotten as far as he could without help from his friends. Since this is one of the main underlying themes of the whole game series, I felt that I should include it in my fan-fic series.
With respect to reconstruction, there is one very big thing that happens in chapter two, but I'll leave you guys to read that.

I don't really want to spoil that much, so later I will post something else that goes more in depth to chapter 2.
 I love comments people! Hope you enjoy the story!

NotCras

Saturday, May 12, 2012

[PP] I'M ALIVE!!!


It's my baby!!
Hello everyone, I'm back to the blog!
Before I go into anything else, I would like to tell you all about why I was gone, if you care please read on, otherwise just skip this paragraph.
Anyway, I was in college back then and I was taking a Robotics class. In addition I am also the new stage manager for my college Glee Club and a college tour guide as well. These three things have single-handily kept me busy the whole 4 quarter, known as d term in my college (we do a quarter system NOT a semester system). First things first we were given a gigantic final project in robotics, where we had to design, build, and control a robot that would compete in a class competition. Although it was a lot of fun, I missed so many meals and hours of sleep over this. I was literally in the RBE lab all the time. The project itself went well, our first round in the competition went amazingly, but then one of our motors overheated (we think so at least) and then things went for the worse. O well it was only a fun competition, no grading occurred during then. Thank goodness.  But that's only a third of what I have been doing. Tour guiding is fun, but takes up a lot of time. When I wasn't in the lab, most of the time I was giving tours to prospective students. Sometimes you meet crazy parents (its never the students themselves xD) but that only makes the tours interesting lol. And finally, being stage manager is a lot of work. Now the stage manager position works a little differently than what you would think. Instead of running the stage and lighting and whatnot, I'm mostly in charge of just concert stuff in general. Therefore I am ordering all the buses, I make sure that the concerts we do generally go smoothly, I keep the tuxes in order, and a bunch of other random stuff as well. It's a lot of fun, even if its a bunch of work.
However, that all finished (mostly) when summer started. My business has turned from that to other things.

I've gotten myself into a tizzy with fan-fiction. I am working hardcore on all my stuff and people are liking it a lot! It's awesome to write up a work and have people love it. My first fan-fic, A Little Ship Lost in Space, is a Mass Effect 3 ending story that simply picks up the pieces that was the ME3 ending and goes from there (indoctrination theory FTW!!!!). The fan-fic itself has 3 chapters and sets me up for other fan-fics. It is my most popular of most viewed of my fan-fics.
My second most popular is Memory Eternal, a fan-fic (that I need to tweak a little) about Thane and his last moments. It won second place in the Retake Mass Effect fiction contest, I was very happy. There are other Mass Effect fan-fictions, but those are the biggest ones.
My newest Mass Effect fan-fic, From the Ashes, picks up immediately after A Little Ship in Space and concerns the reconstruction of Earth, which Shepard gets dragged into. I just posted it today on fanfiction, soon I will get it up on deviant art as well.
Just recently I also went down the Avatar route, submitting No is for Naga, a story about how Korra met and befriended Naga. Although a tiny bit sad, people are loving it!!

My stuff can be found on my profiles on these sites: Fanfiction.net and Deviantart.com. (the links go straight to my profile btw)

Now before I go, there is one last thing I want to go over. I'm going to attempt to change the structure of the blog around a little bit to make it easier to read and more fun (sort of). If you look at the title you can see that two letters, P and U, are bracketed before the actual title. Those are what I will call reference tags, and they denote the subject matter (to a degree) that the post will be going into. So far the reference tags are as follows:
[PP] = Personal post. These posts will be about me, myself, and I. I am shooting for one a week, and anyone who is interested in what's going on in my life can read them!!
[FP] = Feature post. These posts will be anything cool that I find on the web, or to showcase anything awesome that I have done. Look out for these for the cool stuff!
[AN] = Author's note. I used to do my author's notes in the descriptions of all my poems, fan-fics, and art. Since I put the fan-fictions on two sites, I don't want to have to write the author's notes again, plus they take up space and some people don't like to read them at all. That is why I will be moving them all onto the blog, so in the description I can just link them over to here. I also will have the time and space to put in EVERYTHING that I want to say about the piece. The title of the piece will immediately follow this tag, so keep an eye out for these ones.
[EP] = Editorial Post. These posts are ones where I argue my opinion for a certain side, and make an attempt for people actually discussing it on the site (but we will see how that goes).
[IP] = Important Post. Finally, this last post is for anything very important related to the blog or any other announcements. When I have this tag there is something big going on.
I have been debating whether or not to have multiple tags in one post, but we will see how it goes I guess.
Anyway, I have a lot of stuff that I want to put up on the blog, so I'll be busy with that, and of course with fan-fics as well!

NotCras