Grown-ups

Steph, you haven't posted in the longest time! It's good to have you back!
Heheh. I remember the name Mesmeroc. It's an awesome name!
(Ever since watching the Vlogbrothers, I find the word "awesome" popping up in my vocab a lot more. Ellen and I have been getting quite hooked on them.)
So, yet again, I've been falling behind. There's several things I want to post about.
In case you can't tell, for my creative writing stuff, I'm trying to give each topic its own post. So there's at least three more I need to write.
Ellen, if you get any cool new exercises in your creative writing class, post them on the blog! And post some of the stuff you write too!
And I promised I'd keep you updated as I try to write my Katani story (before I think of a story title, I usually just call it by the names of the characters, and Katani is the main character this time).
So, I started the new story about 3 days ago, you may recall. I haven't worked on it since. I mentioned that day my heavy work load? Well, The day after I started, I had to do something I'd never done before. I guess because of summer vacation, I'm not back in the groove yet. And my 7-page research paper on salt marshes was put off almost entirely until the last day (I should have been researching when I was writing the first chapter for Katani even though Katani hasn't even been introduced yet.) Never in my life has my procrastination been so bad that I had to stay up until 2:00 AM to finish a paper. And the very next day I had to finish a creative writing assignment (which I will post about) and an article review. But the CW was fun, so that's OK.
And I finally have time to get to work on my story again. Though I need to put up a fanfic chapter too...
So, I've come up with some new ideas for Katani's story.
I read quite recently how it can be really cool in a story to have friendships and partnerships between kids and adults. I haven't given it too much thought. But it really can be cool! I've done it a little bit without thinking about it much, like with Master Jaiyer.
In a lot of stories, you get only adults doing the action. Or in kid/young adult books, it's usually kids and teenagers that save the world. But when kids and adults WORK TOGETHER, it achieves a whole new level of awesomeness (see, awesome is taking over my brain). And there are some great examples now that I think about it. Like Fullmetal Alchemist. I just got a phone call from Ellen a few minutes ago because she'd just finished watching FMA Brotherhood and she was really hyper. She finished in in, like 4 days!
OK. Back on topic.
So, again, before I thought about it, I was already kinda planning on that sort of age alliance thing. Cause we got the Beta Gang, who are adults (at least in their 20's, I haven't decided yet). But after thinking about it some more, I wanted to do more of that. I think it was just earlier today that I thought of this. The days are turning to mush.
So, at the "school" where Katani is, Katani and his friends signed up for the younger division (they only recently lowered the age limit to allow younger people to take part cause they're desperate to fix the statues). But there have to be older members working on this project too. Veterans who've been working at it for a while. Until today, I didn't have many plans for them. But now I think I really need to include them. There's a whole new area for making up new cool characters! So, maybe some of them help mentor the younger recruits. And then I started designing Katani's mentor in my brain. He's gonna be fun to write for!
Oh yeah! I came up with some back story for Kon too. I thought about it today as I was reading a book for my Resource Analysis class. I know the teacher. He's cool. Anyway, the book was called Totem Salmon. It's about what's happening to the salmon in today's world. It's not good.
But since this story isn't environment-based, I need to include some sort of environmental theme. I must!
So, it was an answer to a question I had already. The question was: what do Kon and the Betas do when they're not ganging around? They're old enough to need a job. And I could imagine Kon doing some heavy work. And then it kinda clocked that maybe he works on a big fishing boat! He can haul the nets! And then I could include stuff about sustainable fishing and everything!
I'm having so much fun developing the characters for this story! Especially since there's lots of them! This is good though because in "Of Spirits and Demons," I don't think I spent enough time on character development. I'm gonna have to go back and fix that eventually. So, I'm realizing how amazingly fun it is to make in-depth characters. I'm pretty sure that anime and manga are what helped me learn about diverse characters.