It’s just me, I’m still here…

Okay, luckily, I didn’t run out of time or post something else before I remembered the Re-introduce myself blogfest.

So, let’s see… I’m not going to worry about finding something to tell you that you don’t know if you’ve been following the blog closely. That could drive me crazy.

• I love to write science fiction and fantasy.
• I’m a big fan of National Novel Writing Month, and in 2012 I stepped up as a Hamilton ML (local group leader for NaNoWriMo) for the first time.
• I’m applying to four great summer workshops in the US for 2013.
• I’ve almost finished the Holly Lisle ‘How to Revise your Novel’ course
• I collect all kinds of electronic gadgets and gizmos.
• I’ve written fanfic, made fanart and fanvids in the past, but haven’t made much time for any of that fandom stuff lately.
• I love to go to science-fiction conventions.
• I geek out about really obscure math stuff.

And my name is Chris Kelworth. It’s so nice to meet you again!

Buffy’s birthday presents.

Buffy is in her thirties now.

I’ve seen a number of people commemorating the fact that this week, yesterday actually, would be Buffy Summer’s thirtieth birthday according to the hints dropped in the TV show. For several years, each January brought us a new ‘birthday party from Hell’ for the guardian of the Hellmouth, including vampire boyfriends turning evil, losing her Slayer strength, her Watcher getting turned into a demon, her little sister finding out that she was a key, and being trapped in the house by a curse.

It seems as if to mark this birthday, the ‘Buffy season eight’ comics series is finally wrapping up, and season nine will kick off soon, which is cool. I’ve still got a long ways to catch up on season eight myself, so I don’t really know what’s been going on in Buffy’s life since she left Sunnydale.

But at this point, on my writing blog, I’d like to reflect on the debt that I owe Buffy and her friends, (and her marvelous creator,) as a writer. It goes back to the spring of 1998, after that season two birthday episode with Angelus and the Judge, when I first really hit the Internet looking for speculation or clues about what would happen next, and in the process, as I recall, came upon a few Buffy fanfic websites, like slayerette.org and the Slayer’s Fanfic Archive.

Fanart 8: Two Ensemble/focus banners from December 2009

Fanart series index.

I did a few different story banners in December of 2009, and the first one was for another ‘concept crossover,’ Roswell Calling. This time, I took the concept of the Eliza Dushku tv series “Tru Calling”, and wished it upon a minor character from the Roswell tv series, Deputy turned Sheriff Hanson, so that he could use it to save Alex’s life. I also ended up coming with a different back-story behind Alex’s accident, since saving him from Tess on the last day of his life was something that I’d covered years before in a previous story, “Tapping Fingers.”

I actually asked if somebody at Fanatics could make a banner for this story, and wasn’t really impressed with the sample I could, but couldn’t put my finger on why. So I didn’t reply back, and left the story without a banner until I started messing around with a concept of my own, which ended up looking like this:

I’m really pleased with the way that came out, especially the shots of Alex and Hanson in the middle, and the really tiny shots running across the top and bottom of the banner.

Trying to tie up plot holes?

I’ve been working since October (but not during Nano,) to complete a basic first-pass edit of one of my Roswell fanfiction stories, ‘Runaway with me.’ It’s fairly basic stuff – some spelling and grammar checking, basic proofreading, changing phrasing here and there for better phrasing – and also just keeping track of places where the need for more in-depth changes seems glaringly obvious to me. In those spots, I tend to put a very terse note to myself in [square brackets] and just move on. For instance. [Review this for consistency with chapter 17 later.]

I’m noticing a lot of places where I’m needing to put in square brackets, partly because the story was one that I didn’t plan out too much beyond a vague notion of where I wanted some of the plot beats to be going, (Organic Linear Plotting, they call that,) and maybe because it was one of the projects that I would work on for a little and then leave alone for weeks or months at a time.

Among some of the issues that I remember flagging are:

– I’ve included references to later aspects of the mythology of the tv show, such as the Granilith, dream archetypes, and even the Destiny book, that are almost entirely contradicted by the ending that I ended up tagging onto the story.

– Since I couldn’t figure out a good ending to a chase scene at a time, I ended up skipping ahead, describing the aftermath as Max and Liz return to Roswell, and have them figuring out what happened bit by bit, piecing clues together. Unfortunately, not all of the clues mesh perfectly, and there’s at least one place where a particular character, who would know the entire story, keeps procrastinating on filling in the blanks for the other characters, until I forgot that she knows things that she still hasn’t told them, and doesn’t mention it again.

– Somebody spills a drink, and the fact that the broken glass appears unbroken later on is a plot clue – but I described the original spill without mentioning the glass getting broken.

– For some reason, when describing a characters homework, I appear to have made up a poet named Willis Chesterley. Not a horrible thing, but I’d like to find a real poet that fits the reference I think.

– The fact that one character has had her appearance shifted to resemble somebody else, and I think that I have the same characters suspecting this two or three different times without any mention that it’s a thought that’s occurred to them before.

It’s a story that I do really like parts of, but hopefully I’ll be able to figure out a way to sort out a few of the small issues like these without causing other problems or being forced to cut out the parts that I like.

Fanart 6: AU/Crossover banner for ‘The Wizards of Roswell.’

Fanart series index.

Moving forward again into August 2009, I wanted to spotlight a little banner I made for an unusual AU/Crossover fanfic.

Sidetrack: I often find I enjoy playing around with the raggedy edge of crossovers rather than the traditional ‘A meet B’ formula, especially taking a concept from fandom B and transplanting it to fandom A, or re-imagining the characters from fandom A entirely within fandom B. ‘Wizards of Roswell’ was an example of the latter; I took the rules and setup from Diane Duane’s excellent “Young wizards/Feline wizards” series, but not any of the familiar characters like Nita Callahan or Kit Rodriguez. Instead, Max and Isabel Evans and their friend Michael Guerin were teenage wizards in Roswell, and Max saved Liz Parker’s life with magic after she got shot. And then I introduce the vampires.

Getting back to the banner, the pictures are fairly simple. I went with screencaps from the Roswell series pilot, since the fanfic covers some of the same material and would probably fit into more or less the same time period, allowing for the differences between universes. One shot of Michael and Max reacting to the shooting seemed too good to pass up, and I included Liz in the science lab, and a more or less random shot of Katherine Heigl as Isabel, because she’s also an important character. Maria and Alex didn’t make the cut this time.

Fanart 5: Max/Liz banners for ‘Not Written Yet’ and ‘Las Cruces Rendezvous…’

Fanart series index.

I thought I’d spotlight two different fanfiction banners for this week – I did them both during July of 2009, and they’re both centering on ‘Dreamer’ pairing stories. First, ‘Not Written Yet’, which I wrote and finished many years ago, in the winter and spring of 2005, an alternate version of the episode ‘End of the world.’

Fanart 4: Crossover Roswell/Doctor Who banner for ‘Children of the Molecule’

Fanart series index.

Okay, so this banner is from the same series as the last one I showed you before Nanowrimo started, the Kyle/Tess shipper one. It’s for my ongoing Roswell/Doctor Who crossover epic, “Children of the Molecule”, and that introduced a little hiccup in my usual process in that I don’t actually own Doctor Who DVDs – I saw the Billie Piper seasons on rental from zip.ca, which meant waiting in line with lots of other Canadians also waiting to see it.

So, I needed a picture of Tennant and Piper to fit into the finished artwork, and I ended up just google searching for a promo pic, which I think worked reasonably well:

Step 4 in the fanart process is taking resized images from Photo Editor and pasting them into my ‘canvas’ on Paint. This is where Photo Editor really shines, actually – Microsoft Picture Manager can resize and crop nearly as well as Photo Editor, but it doesn’t let you select a region and copy just that to another program – a sort of crop-and-copy in one step that is actually really useful.

Fanart 3: Kyle/Tess banner, ‘My Alien Wife.’

Fanart series index.

I have another Roswell fanfic banner to share with you this week, one of a series that I did in the summer of 2009 in an attempt to stretch my artistic skills. 😉

The storyline was one that was inspired by a challenge on the Roswell Fanatics forum, about any couple but Max and Liz getting married in Vegas, I think. I picked Kyle Valenti and Tess Harding.

Fanart 2: Isabel/Alex banner for ‘Love will last forever.’

Fanart series index.

The second fan-art I wanted to share with you was the first ‘cover art banner’ that I ever made to accompany one of my own storylines. The story in question is fan fiction for the TV show ‘Roswell.’

“Love will last forever” took the death of the character Alex Whitman on the show, and a few moments where Alex appeared to his love interest Isabel Evans, and used that as the basis to set up a ghost love story between Alex and Isabel that sent both of them off on an unbelievable adventure, and for Isabel, a quest to actually bring the boy she loved back to life through alien technology.