So I can't say I remember which came first, the fan website (of woggy #25 fame) or my fanfic, but sometime around the creation of one, the other soon followed and the two have been married ever since. Whatever its beginnings, the Animal Crossing fanfic called (in its entirety) The Heroic Epic Saga of Brave Mita is the first and only fanfiction I have ever written in my entire life. And following in the tradition of most fanfictions I have otherwise seen, as well as in fine woggy tradition, this story was earnestly begun with plans for the future and intends to someday have an ending but has not to this day actually ever been completed.Somewhere around the time I began Hermita's fan website, I decided it had been so long since I had written anything that to write something less serious, just for fun, certainly wouldn't hurt even though in the past I might have thought of fanfiction as something that was beneath a serious, adult writer (which is probably why I had never tried it before). It turned out that unlocking my creativity unfettered into a fanfiction, with no serious purpose or hope of publication, was exactly the sort of thing I needed in my life to get my personal energies (specifically of the writing kind) flowing in a positive creative direction again after many years of extreme abandonment. Since it was a non-serious endeavor, I took to writing this story from the point of view of Hermita, an overly-serious and extremely earnest and self-important character I had created in the course of playing my favorite videogame. As such I wrote in a style I often had fun writing in the past but one I knew was a little over the top, a sort of 18th-century paid-by-the-letter over-wordiness, which I knew would be perfect for Hermita. This let me be as maudlin and overwrought as I wanted to be since, after all, the point was to be maudlin and overwrought. It was incredibly fun to write.
"Surely, I realized, Mother Nature was one kingdom where Nook held no court. Surely the trees would continue to provide their good graces without his interference. If bees were but the justice meted out for such dalliance, I agreed to the terms. I began to shake trees with abandon."
In addition to being fun to write, I also realized as my story was going along (and I started receiving really positive feedback from others, especially young others) that while this project was just something I had started for fun, and was, in the end, not a piece of writing I'd probably ever be able to even publish (being based on characters of a copyrighted game) it was still anyway something that felt important, with a dignity and quality and importance of its own that I had never expected. Through this fun endeavor I was able to not only tell the story of a videogame character and her adventures, but also found myself able to work through some personal demons of my own through the characters and their struggles, as well as being able to tap into, in a youth-friendly form, complicated struggles and issues that both individuals and societies have been dealing with since civilizations began. Things like slavery and political oppression, political and personal tyrants, overcoming difficulty and diversity with dignity, creativity and strength, and all sorts of other things I had really only jokingly imagined when I first began making a story and website of this character.
"Truth be told I wasn’t immune to the boiling of blood that my abuser was undoubtedly attempting to create within my personage, but I was with a great power of internal will able to hold such simmering to a temperature just below the point of conversion to steam and pleasingly, I was able to keep any visible signs of such agitation at bay via my studied concentration and genuine interest in the craft and manufacture of the incongruously exquisite timepiece. I assessed the facts of the situation, which were exactly that I was in no worse of a position than I was the last time Mr. Nook, so similarly rageful, had handed me the last shirt of similar type. He was, after all, entirely incapable of forcing me to wear the shirt, the same as he was utterly powerless to force me to un-agreed upon indentured servitude. "
After the first chapter or two was completed, alot of my Hermita-directed creative attention was diverted into the creation and upkeep of the website itself, as well as the occasional actual gameplay used as origin material for both the website and the story, I did for the most part make a pretty good effort to get out a new chapter of this story at the rate of about one new chapter per month or two. There were certainly longer breaks at times, but in general I had been pretty good at it.
However, it's probably been almost a year since I've written any new content for the actual story itself. I've written plenty of material for the rest of the website, alot of which will certainly be able to be used in future chapters of Hermita's story, should I actually allow the storyline to travel all the way through to its successful conclusion, but since you generally publish a fanfic in chronological order, and I had chosen to begin at the very beginning of her story, there are plenty of chapters in between that will need to be filled.
Now, since I am writing this story and updating it as if Hermita is writing it herself as her personal memoir, all of the stops and starts do make sense, since she is, fictionally speaking, a woman very busy with the duties of her revolutionary cause, not the least of which was her town getting bombed and having to go fugitive to escape to another land via hot air balloon, where she had to start reorganizing her cause and setting up a new home base in a new land. Storywise, she doesn't often have free time to just sit down and finish off her memoir. However, with my bringing both her cause and my (ahem, her...) website to a conclusion, both she and I will presumably have alot more free time to devote to the completion of her story.
While I did describe in woggy #25's entry that I plan to bring the site to a halt, I do plan to check up on it now and again to add any user-submitted content, but also to add chapters to her memoir, which is also housed right there on the site. Of course that means I've got to pick up the keyboard again and get going with her story. I do have the benefit of knowing already where her story is going, plot-wise. It's really all just a matter of spending the time to sit down and get it done.
Things Left To Complete This Woggy Project:
- complete woggy #25, at least in some reasonably conclusive fashion
- begin writing Chapter 8
- post chapter 8 to Hermita's site
- write and post next chapter
- repeat, repeat, repeat until the final chapter
- decide what if anything to do with the completed story
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