That's right, dudes and ladies--TMOH's epic but tragically unfinished Discworld fanfic We Rob Banks, as seen on fanfiction.net and in part on this very site, may be returning to the interwebs! Since my year-long Teatime burnout ended two weeks ago, I've been debating resurrecting the story, but though there's some parts of it I still love there's a lot I'd like to change, especially in the plot hole department. This means I'm going to be making some pretty substantial changes to the fic some of you know and a few of you possibly even love, probably right down to the very format. But how do I know I'm changing it in the right ways? I don't, and that's why I'm turning to you, my potential (and perhaps former) readers, to tell me whether my current plans are going well and what you'd like to see next. With the story figured out ahead of time, WRB 2.0* will be far less likely than its predecessor to meet an untimely end.

*For the record, I'm almost certainly going to change the title.


Here's my problems so far:

*While the drabble-chapter setup I used in the original fic was convienent to write and some of my reviewers said they liked it, I think it's part of what led to WRB's death. Because each chapter could only be 100 words long, forty-seven chapters left our protagonists still wandering around in the Sto Plains.
*Teatime's resurrection is a gigantic plot hole. Why does he come back alive, while Carcer's stuck as a zombie? Why does that not happen until after Carcer's dead, too, even though that's two years later? What the hell is up with his hourglass in chapter 47? I need a better explanation for his continued presence post-Hogfather if this fic is even going to pretend to make sense.
*After a couple dozen chapters, the old fic fell into the trap every episodic story risks tumbling into: rambling pointlessness at the expense of the main plot thread. Why do Carcer and Teatime need three chapters just to get hold of a new horse and cart? Why do they hang around in a bar for an unspecified time afterwards? What were they going to do once the highwayman thing gets resolved, and why did Teatime's end of that get ignored? What role is Susan going to play in the story? If I rewrite, I'll need to tie these things back in better or cut them out altogether.

And here's my proposed solutions:
*There's two different ways I thought I might want to go on the format change:
*First, and probably easier, would be to do it as a long fic with normal-length chapters. For the first few chapters, I could basically just patch together the existing drabbles with additional elaboration and filling in of the gaps between scenes; once I got past the good bits, I'd just write the rest from scratch.
*Alternatively, I've considered turning the old fic into a shiny new webcomic, which would take longer and force me to give up most of the descriptive bits of the fic, but which would also let me make use of the visual concepts that underlie a lot of what I write. Plus, the ability to tell part of the story via drawings would help it move along faster than any prose style would, so it'd cut down on the slowness issues of the original.
*I'm also come up with a new way of dealing with Teatime being dead during the fic--he's technically a ghost, but in the time since his death (more on that in a minute) he's figured out how to possess people so that he can interact with the physical world. Unfortunately for him, he can only inhabit bodies that have already been, er, vacated, so he's stuck hopping from corpse to corpse as each temporary form starts to decompose. This leaves us with two possible options regarding Carcer:
*One, Carcer's still alive; if I do this, the fic would be set during the year between Hogfather and Night Watch, when Carcer's 29 and hasn't come to the attention of the Watch yet. This inverts the dead!Carcer/live!Teatime setup of the original fic. It also means that Carcer's crimes won't be as big of a deal as they were in the old story, since Vimes doesn't even know who Carcer is yet, so they're not getting pursued as fervently or showing up in the papers as soon. And since Carce has to come back to Ankh-Morpork in the end to participate in his canon storyline, we know a little more of what's going to happen. Whether these changes are for better or worse isn't really clear to me yet; that's one of the things I want y'all to tell me.
*On the other hand, both Carcer and Teatime could be undead, with one a genuine zombie and the other the aforementioned ghost-piloting-corpses-thing. This keeps most of the old fic the same, but there'd be a little change to the protagonists' dynamic--there's no way either one could be threatened by the other's Knife Nut tendencies, so short of them threatening to torch each other a la chapter 16, they can't control each other like they normally would other people. Again, don't know if that's good or just overcomplicated.
*Finally, I need to come up with a sufficient number of individual, episodic, road-movie-esque plots to sustain a story that follows Carcer and Teatime from Ankh-Morpork all the way to Genua. Most modern road trip films don't even try to send a car from one coast of the U.S. to the other--for two guys in a one-horse cart with frequent distractions and side trips, it'll take months! Consequently, I need to know what kinds of sub-stories y'all would like to see them subjected to so I'll have some idea of how to fill in all that time. And since I've got to plan a whole story out beforehand if I'm to have any hope of reaching the end, I need to know what to put in now in order to get there later.


So, what do y'all think? Is this worth doing? What do you think of my plans so far? Are there any problems I haven't dealt with? What do you want me to add?

Things in my life that are suddenly awesome again--with exclamation points!

J-Pop!
The Sims!
Dinosaurs!
Mr Teatime!
probably more stuff I haven't thought of yet!


(Gods damn you, finals week!!)

I went in to delete some seriously-disliked drabbles on ff.net today, and I think I'm officially the first person there to start using character tags in the Discworld section. I don't know whether this is totally awesome or just pathetic. The fact that "Carcer" currently returns more hits (read: four) than "Susan Sto-Helit" or "Sam Vimes" (zero and zero) is definitely hilarious, though.

(You may be interested to know that "Jonathan T." and "Findthee S." also produce more hits than every major, likeable character in the series (one each) thanks to their respective appearances in "We Rob Banks" and "For Good Measure." WHAT THE HELL, FANFICCERS. THIS SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING. TAG YOUR ENTRIES, KTHNX.)

That is all.

Based (quite heavily) on information from The L-Space Discworld Timeline and c_carol Night Watch Timeline, I've developed a timeline detailing all the important events in our favourite fictional psychopath's life, including his encounters with the events of other Discworld books and the events of my fanfiction. It's all fanon, of course, but it's as accurate as I can get for the world of my fanfic.

All years are on the UU calendar.

( The Timeline )

Why yes, I can! Specifically the Discworld Mapp and The Streets of Ankh-Morpork. On my dorm room walls, over my bed. :D SO COOL.

In the process of gleefully finding every possible landmark on the A-M map, I ran across something kind of nifty and rather fic-inspiring:
1. In my Carcer-fanon, Carcer's dad was a butcher.
2. In "In The Blood" (I think), I made an offhand reference to the Dun family living on Elm Street.
3. The Streets of Ankh-Morpork shows the slaughterhouse district at the rimwards end of Elm Street, meaning that Carcer's family probably lived in the half of the street below Paradise/The Pitts.
4. According to the map's accompanying booklet, this is the same part of Elm Street where Mrs Cake lives (more or less).
5. If Carcer is 30 in Night Watch, then he's 25 or 26 in Reaper Man, making him the same age as or slightly younger than Ludmilla Cake. Could they have known each other as children? I'd write something about that, but I don't know where to go with it.. But of course--Mrs Cake joins every religion in the city for just long enough to wreck the infrastructure the whole church when she leaves, right? So she joined Carcer's dad's when the Dun kids and Ludmilla were youngish. XD I still don't know how I'd go about writing that, but...yeah.

I put way too much thought into these things, don't I?

 According to this website, the last public hanging in Britain occurred on May 26, 1868.

According to the implications of Vimes's speech at the end of Night Watch, Carcer will be tried "before the dew's off the leaves in the morning" and hanged the same day--which, since "today" is the Glorious 25th of May, will be May 26.

Who else suspects that was intentional?

So you guys remember my original Sims 3 Starving Artist Challenge, right? Well, it, uh...didn't go so well. The kids didn't grow up well, and then there was a huge birthday-cake-induced fire, and then I went off to make sure Bella and Mortimer Goth got married and went back to find out that Iris and the twins had moved away when I wasn't looking. D:

Therefore, I'm restarting. And, so far, it's going a lot better. Here's what I've got Photobucket-ed so far (and still huge, because I forgot to resize):

( Hu family - Generation 1.0 )

Next time: Birth! Death! Lesbians! Infidelity! The fastest childhood ever lived! Ande a thousand Elephants!

The Starving Artist Challenge continues with more overly-large screencaps (don't worry, I know how to make them smaller now. I think.)

( It is can be babiez tiem naow? )

I've figured out where the screenshots go (be warned, they're crazy huge), so:

( My Sims, let me show you them. )

I HAVE SIMS 3 NOW ITS AMAZING. :D :D :D

Last night, I dreamed that Lucy Saxon, dressed as Night at the Museum!Amelia Earhart, wandered into my room and gave me a hug.

I don't know if I want to know what that means. D:

...so it's not too late to remember what today is. We may not have been there ourselves, but we've seen it through the eyes of someone who was.

To everyone who's ever done the job they didn't have to do:
Truth, justice, freedom, reasonably priced love, and a HARD BOILED EGG.










(I know, I know, it's only fiction.  But frankly I see more truth in those books than I have in any religion, and I feel like I ought to acknowledge some part of that at least once a year.)

I've always wanted to write a commentary of some sort on Night Watch, if only to indulge my dual loves of literary analysis and Carcer Dun. The local language-arts competition gave me an excuse to actually do it, so now that it's over (I got second place in Analysis of a Symbol) and online postage doesn't matter, here it is:

( A New Suit and a Sword: Weapons as symbols of Carcer's power and social status in Terry Pratchett's Night Watch )

Medium: Books
Fandom: Discworld
Subject: Carcer Dun (from Night Watch)
Title: Gee, Officer Vimesy!
Warnings: none

( Gee, Officer Vimesy! )

Comment with a prompt for any fandom you know I write, specify characters, and I'll reply with a one-sentence fic.

Fandoms I'm willing to write, whether or not you've heard of them:

• Discworld
• Gattaca
• Romeo and Juliet
• Harry Potter
• Redwall
• The Secret of NIMH
• Wyrd Museum
• Castle Cant
• Finnegan Zwake
• Road Rovers
• Popular

Original fiction works, too, and if you want be to write something that's not on the list, just ask me if I've seen/read it and I'll see if I can't give it a try.

(...I like a lot of kids'/young adult media, apparently.  Hey, cartoons are fun.)

Does anybody remember who made this icon?  I ran across it several months ago and forgot to put the creator's name (or even the comm it was from) in the filename, and now I don't know who to credit for it.  :O  Help, please?

Because I don't trust my bookmarks to actually list the site or myself to ever find it again.  XD  I'll add to this as I come across other stuff I want to save.

The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test 

The Freak Test

...is awesome. :D Amongst the more interesting things I've discovered with it:

* For "We Rob Banks", the second-largest number of visitors (4) and the second-largest number of hits (59) are from Pakistan, of all places. :O Top in both is the USA of course, with 18 visitors and 290 (!) hits. (Which, come to think of it, are probably mostly me. ^^;)
* There's apparently one Swedish Discworld fan out there reading my Carcer fic--(s)he is responsible for 11 hits (one for each chapter) on "A Demon on Both Shoulders" and another on "Practical." The former also has a reader from New Zealand and one from Singapore. I LOVE YOU INTERNET. YOU WORLDWIDE WONDER.
* Readership on "We Rob Banks" has seriously dropped since I started it--Chapter 1 had 31 hits from 30 visitors, which became 18 hits from 17 people for Chapter 2, and by Chapter 47 it's down to 9 of each. :( Is it the length that's scaring people off, d'you think, or have my summary and genre changes done it, or what?