Two new sections added: Jimmy
Neutron and News Archive. As I add more to
the front page here, old sections will be moved to the archive. As for
Jimmy, well, I broke down and wrote a quick one-shot that has since spawned a
universe around it. The one-shot's posted there now, but others will be
coming.
June 28, 2007
Look, Ma, no pop-ups! No flashy banners! Yep, I shelled out the
money for a hosting package after 12 years. Also did a little tweaking on
the index pages, making them a little easier to read (to my eyes, anyway; if you
disagree, tell me). Original short stories are going up as you read this,
and Designs of Greatness, my online romance novel, is being tweaked and brought
over from its previous location.
And I have fallen prey to a new addiction: Jimmy
Neutron, Boy Genius. (shakes head) I've got to stop watching
Nickelodeon Marathons. Currently, I'm working on a Jimmy/Cindy story,
"When We Were Eleven."
June 1, 2007
Okay, so Power Rangers Generations has looped back around to second-season.
My beloved second-season. Most of my MMPR fics are set in that season, and
even when I go back and re-imagine, it's usually around that sophomore year.
The nostalgia kicks in. That was my senior year of high school.
Second-season MMPR is what made my best friend my best friend. We're still
friends today. Second-season is when they had to start filming more of
their own morphed fight scenes, because they were running out of Zyurenga
footage.
It was second-season when I bought all the fan magazines, and saw the quote from
Haim Saban that he felt the show could go on for ten years. Ellen and I
laughed at that, thinking of the then-24-year-old David Yost, Amy Jo Johnson,
and Walter Jones still high-kicking and backflipping in their mid-thirties.
We had no idea that the show would start reinventing itself every year, that a
man named Judd Lynn would introduce the concepts of "continuity," "back story,"
and "plot." No idea that Saban would sell off his entire company to
Disney, that the backbone of FoxKids would migrate to ABCKids....no idea that
Saturday morning television would more or less self-destruct, due to the
parental notion that every minute of a child's life must be scheduled and filled
with organized activities.
Second-season was when I started writing PR fanfiction. "Saga of the White
Ranger," originally just dubbed "Saga," was inspired by seeing the White Ranger
toys in the 1994 Sears WishBook (I think it was Sears; it may have been JC
Penney). It was hand-written in pencil in a green spiral-bound
single-subject notebook. That notebook was passed between Ellen and me; if
I'd written the night before, I'd hand it to her during homeroom. She'd
read and pass it back; I'd write during study hall (and sometimes during
class!), and pass it to her at lunch (I only had two classes after lunch), and
she'd give it back during chorus.
I don't know how long it took me to write Saga; I picked up other notebooks, and
started writing other fics in the middle of it. Wedding Bell Blues,
Serious Affairs.... Ellen got her own notebooks, and sometimes during
homeroom, lunch and chorus, it just looked like a swap meet. That's when
the sleepovers started. So many things that became canon in our shared
fic-verse were things role-played at sleepovers and never recorded on paper.
One such session that stands out: we were at her parents' house, in the hot tub,
talking so long that the emergency shutoff kicked on.
It's been thirteen years since my love affair with Power Rangers started, and
despite some missteps, I still have that initial thrill of glee when watching
the older episodes. I still try to catch the new series, and the first few
episodes of Operation Overdrive really caught my interest, more than any series
since Dino Thunder (SPD and Mystic Force both fell flat for me).