I just took a few online quiz thingies, for nostalgia and all that, because I remember when me and macabre_eyes did them all the time.

Of course they were FFVII character quizzes.

Apparently I am most like Cloud, with Vincent and Zack coming up behind him.

macabre_eyes is coming to the states in a week! I almost bought Dirge of Cerberus (I always spell that wrong, oh well) today because it would have been cool to play it with you, but I realized you'd probably be the only one playing it; I suck so much at games like that and from what I remember of my brief attempt to play it when I rented it, it was pretty lulzy how bad I was at controlling Vincent. Also, I watched the cut scenes on YouTube. Aside from drooling at turk!Vincent, there is no redeeming value in that game (for me).

I did, however, get Devil May Cry today. I always hear about how good it is, and it was 6 bucks used at Gamestop. I may get too tense to play it though. Dante is hot, though.

AUGH, I need to finish Kingdom Hearts so I can get to Kingdom Hearts II, people! I kind of lost interest in it after finishing my first visit to Hollow Bastion. I hate the gummy ship stuff and munny is useless to me. I need to level up a lot because I want to eventually fight Sephy. The game was fun, and I was shrieking at the_staci a lot, but I just do not want to level up 25 levels. Tedious. But...Sephy. With ridiculously long Masamune! He could be standing in China and still kill me with that thing.

I may just skip to KHII and go back to KH when I feel like doing tedious leveling up. :Db (I just want Organization XIII pr0nz, I will not lie).

DOUBLE AUGH, I want to get DS!Chrono Trigger.

So I was just thinking to myself "You know, it's NaNoWriMo! I should get to at least 90,000 words for Desert Garden!", and considering I am over 60,000 words with this last chapter, I think that's very doable, especially considering some of those words will be song lyrics. And writing this story has made me realize something about my writing process and what's really important to me when it comes to what I want to convey. In a writing class I took my senior year as an undergrad my Creative Writing professor told me that no matter what I write the way I present it really grips her and doesn't want to let her go, which for me was one of the biggest compliments I've ever gotten about my writing. As a writer, I really do want to make things stay with someone after they've read it. Who doesn't? She, however, also told me that my plot often takes a back seat to what I want to make people feel, which I can see.

The great thing about writing fanfiction is that you have a ready-made plot. You can choose to stay faithful to it or you can deconstruct it, take pieces from here and there and make something a bit different. This also gives you tons more room to develop character, which is probably the best thing about writing for me. Really fleshing out a character's essential parts is, in my opinion, better than sliced bread. And since I'm a carboholic, that is saying something. :P

I've also noticed that I work my way through the writing process with snapshots. A scene comes to me sometimes and it almost feels like a memory from the character's head, like I'm not me and I'm that character. Everything grows from there. As a person who is deeply emotional (waaaaay too emotional), everything is about feeling for me when I'm writing. How does your writing process start? Do you slip out of yourself and find yourself slipping into the character you're writing?

Anyway, I was just looking at some old fanfiction I wrote and I came across this one little piece ( On the Subject of Subjects ) and I thought to myself "Hey, this was eight years ago and it's not that bad!" If more people wrote Aerith like this, I'd probably like her more. XD Also, I think I also realize that should anyone ever start publishing Final Fantasy fanfiction like they do for Star Wars and Star Trek, I'd be all over that like Angeal on young nubile Zack because I think I will just always have a deep affection and GREAT INNER LOVE for Final Fantasy VII. Call that sad if you must, but I'm totally, at some point in my life, getting a tattoo of the Buster sword. Dreams and honor, yo.

Also: now that I've linked you to that fic. you now have my old FF.net account. Please do not blackmail me. I was young and I typoed with great ease. Also, I did not have a spell checker for a while. Yes.

So. I was type type typing away at this very very overdue chapter of "Desert Garden", my FFVII fic. (wow, it's over 120 pages long in Word now) when I said to myself, "hey, let me see where my notes are for the arc of the story. I went to where I usually keep the notes, as I hand write them on paper as I think of them, and . . . they weren't there.

I looked ALL OVER for them and I was about to have a fit when I remembered that I put them in a journal I had designated for story notes while rearranging my room in September.

Don't you hate when you can't find things? It drives me crazy. And this just proves that I haven't worked on this fic. in a bajillion years (okay, a few months, but still).

Anyway, yay, I have my notes and I have the first few pages of chapter fifteen done. This chapter is going very slow for me, but I'm getting back into the swing of things. Hopefully I still have people out there who will want to read it when it's done. XD;