I have started rewriting and editing Dolls of Wax, Eyes of Glass for April's Camp NaNoWriMo. Since I do not plan to repeat myself, because not a lot of the story has drastically changed (partly because it didn't take me so long to finish the first draft), I will not be including the characters' bios again. So if you wish to learn more about the characters, I recommend checking out this post or looking at this page.
Let's begin:
Synopsis-
Genre: Gothic Horror | Historical Fiction
Maltida Moore was found dead at the castle, her brother, Felix, is missing. No trace of him was found except an eyeless wax doll made in his likeness. What happened at the castle is unknown, but it is as if something evil is lurking within it...something evil is causing these terrible events to happen.
How the editing is going so far-
At the moment, I am rewriting the part of the novel that is told from Felix's perspective, since in the first draft, I did not really focus on his that much. (I focused on Matilda's more.) By focusing on him I have managed to figure out details about him that I did not discover before.
I've also been working on figuring out his voice more. I have it somewhat figured out, but I want to get more into the details about him, because like Maltida he is a complex character.
I am in multiple "cabins" this Camp NaNoWriMo: one that I am running, and one I am just a member of. In one cabin there was a character development question prompt, which I answered for Felix. I discovered elements about him through doing the exercise. For example, some random things I discovered about him were that he wanted to visit France, and that he used to (long ago) tell stories to his sister, Maltida. Felix in the first draft mostly kept to himself, so I am so glad that he is finally speaking to me and revealing his secrets.
(Image from Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/312859505337819468/)
Other parts of my rewriting work taught me about Matilda.
I found this painting. It was a catalog cover. It took me a while to find the original painting, but when I did couldn't help but write a scene inspired by it told by Matilda. The castle in my story is surrounded by a forest and trees, and I could imagine Matilda choosing to walk through it and reading there, and having something mysterious or unexplainable happen while she was there.
I have also started expanding on scenes that didn't get much attention in the first draft. The first draft in a way acted as an outline for the novel. For example, I created a scene (which wasn't really a scene in the first draft since Matilda simply told the audience she stopped at a village), and added in details like what was going on in the village, who the people Maltida met were, and even what the village looked like (the general mood/atmosphere).
I've also been focusing on keeping the audience questioning whether what the narrators are saying is true or not, because I want the readers to be confused as to what is actually happening and have to decide on one of the many answers provided by Felix and Maltida. My goal is to create something similar to what happened in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, where there are several answers as to where Ichabod Crane went--whether the headless horseman actually kidnapped him or whether he left because Brom "Bones" scared him away.
So, that has been how Camp NaNoWriMo has been going for me so far.
I am happy to tell you that I have finally fixed the doubling effect in the character interview with Phoenix, and I plan to have it edited and posted sometime soon. I'm sorry about the delay.
But now on to this post. Here's the next installment of Using Polls to Create Art. Unless otherwise stated, all of the art in this post came out of majority votes...
This was not a majority vote. When I made a poll about which character I should draw, people started wondering "what does a ghost bride look like?" and "what would a ghost bride mermaid look like?" because of the questions that were circling, I decided to draw the ghost bride as a mermaid.
However, I did also draw the majority vote, which I will include in the next post, but since this post is themed around mermaids/merman it won't appear here.
I asked the voters whether I should draw a sailor or a siren, and a siren ended up winning.
So I drew Oceana again. I may end up doing a digital version of this drawing in the future.
In this poll, the pollers helped create an original character who is a merman. I'm not sure what to call him, so if you have any name suggestions I would love to hear them in the comments below.
Ophelia as a mermaid. This was fun to draw.
Phoenix as a merman. I decided to make his tail feathery almost like a bird's feathers, but actually a fish's tail.
This is breaking from the mermaid theme a little bit. I had the voters vote on what should appear on the cover of The Case of the Poisoned Goblet. The three things that needed to appear were Annabelle, Ophelia, and a dragon. I ended up having the dragon appear on the poisoned goblet, and I thought it would be neat if Annabelle and Ophelia appeared above.
I wrote "Blood Ghost" a while ago for a songwriting class. The prompt we used was to rearrange words from a preexisting song to use in an original song. When I returned back to the song to record it, I decided that some of the lyrics I had fit the song and others did not.
In the final version of the song, I added some new and original lyrics. So, here is the lyric video:
And if you just want to listen to the audio, here's the song on Bandlab:
🎶 Lyrics 🎶
Under Southwest Bridge,
Waiting for the Blood Ghost.
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
Hatred of light, hatred of blood, hatred of the Blood Ghost.
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
Many tales of old were told,
Of the entity
Who will now forever be
In our memory
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
Searching for shelter, struggling in prayer, fighting against the Blood Ghost.
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
It is said that your children it will take,
in its wake,
where they go,
we never know,
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
In life it was said to be a fair maid,
But she faded and turned into a shade,
Now she haunts looking around for blood,
And many have succumbed,
to its will,
Because an empty shell it wants to fill,
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
It is coming tonight with hatred in its eyes.
Last three waiting, last three waiting, last three waiting, waiting, for the Blood Ghost.
I am having a bit of technical difficulty with the video of Phoenix answering viewer's questions. There is a weird doubling effect in the video. This caused the editing of the video to be slowed down. I don't know when I am going to be done editing it, since I am still trying to sort that technical difficulty out. But, I will post it when it is ready. However, I figured while you were waiting, I'd talk about what the first draft of The Mystery of the Body Thief was like. I am halfway done with rewriting and editing the second draft.
I think this is worth talking about since the story itself went in a very different direction than I thought it would go in the second draft. But if I had stayed with the idea of the first draft and with how the series would have gone this is how it would have gone...
Also if you would like to check out some posts about the novel, that were written while I was writing the first draft, I recommend checking out this one. And if you want to read about how the story is now, I suggest checking out this post.
Let's begin:
The 5th book instead of the 1st-
Originally this was going to be the 5th book in the series. I had sketched out several other books before it, which...didn't end up working. As I was writing The Mystery of the Body Thief, I realized that it would work better as the 1st rather than the 5th book in the series.
There are going to be prequels, though. They won't necessarily follow the same plot-lines that the original four other books I had in mind had, but they will show what Annabelle was like before the events of book 1 and 2 of the series. She did in fact solve cases before them.
Annabelle was going to end up with D.I. Time-
(A drawing I drew a while ago of Annabelle with her and D.I. Time's children)
Even though this plot-line did not end up happening, it was a possibility that it would end up happening in the series as I originally planned it.
I had thought giving Annabelle a love interest would be interesting as a subplot. And I decided that D.I. Time would be the perfect character for it, because they were both detectives and liked solving mysteries. But then the characters had a mind of their own and Annabelle decided that "no, I am not going to marry D.I. Time and you cannot make me." So, that plot-line did not end up happening, and I am glad that it didn't.
However, in the second draft it is being used as a conflict that D.I. Time loves Annabelle, instead of there being a romantic subplot between them. I can't say how it is used exactly, because of spoilers, but it does cause a lot of trouble and confusion for them.
There was an all powerful sorceress (who had multi-colored hair)-
(Some of the concept art for her)
This idea ended up not succeeding at all, partly because when I did start world-building the idea of an all powerful sorceress who knew the future (but didn't really try and stop it from happening) didn't fit with the world.
She had an interest in card reading, zodiac signs, and other things, and she was also very, very, magically powerful (and randomly had hair that could go through all the different natural hair colors one could have).
This didn't work, though, because everyone would be wondering "why didn't she just try to stop it??" and "how did she get to be so powerful??" But certain elements of her character ended up getting dispersed throughout the novel. Ophelia has some of the aspects of the sorceress (some but not all) as well as having powers herself. Also, since magic is a thing that more than one individual could obtain, it makes sense that other characters would have powers (that could be learned) too. Two of the characters who ended up getting powers were D.I. Time and Annabelle herself.
The world's setting was originally alternate history instead of a wholly original world-
The world was originally an alternate history set in Shakespeare's time, because I (once again) wanted to reference Shakespeare. But, I realized later on that I wanted a world that was more High Fantasy than Alternate History. Also, a lot of the characters were non-human, even in the alternate history setting, so it made more sense to me to have it be High Fantasy.
While in some alternate history stories there are characters who are non-human (ex. Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell). In my story a majority of the characters are non-human as opposed to just one or one that wouldn't be noticeable. In addition, Dragon's Province (Dragon-spire at the time) seemed to be its own country not connected really to any real world place. Because of these things I felt it made sense to switch to High Fantasy.
But it also made sense to switch because I wanted to make my own world with its own rules, its own magic system, and its own history, rather than write an Alternate History. While I do love alternate history, for a Fantasy series I really wanted to come up with a whole new world like Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal or other equally amazing Fantasy settings. I wanted people to step into a whole new world they had never heard of and get immersed in it. I thought maybe I could even get readers to do the kind of things they do with Hogwarts houses and Camp Half Blood cabins, where they decide what they would be if they were in the story (which of the gods or goddesses in the story would favor them in my story's case), or decide if they'd be an elf, a dwarf, a fairy, or a human. Anyway, that is one of the many reasons I switched it to High Fantasy.
I thought it was YA-
(This is not The Mystery of the Body Thief, but it reflects what I thought the series was like around 2016-18)
It turns out, none of the characters are teenagers. (Except for maybe Marigold? But she may be older), and yet younger me kept insisting (well not in front of anyone, just in my...head) that it was a young adult book, even though the only YA book I had read was Percy Jackson and (maybe) Harry Potter. My grasp of the genre was very, very limited.
The target demographic was changed more to Adult rather than Young Adult. While this doesn't stop teenagers from reading it, they aren't primarily the target demographic for it.
I didn't create a magic system-
It originally had no magic system, because originally magic was something only a few people could obtain, including the all-powerful sorceress and a few other characters. And while in the first draft there were characters who were born with magic, there were a lot less characters who got magic from learning how to use it. Because of that, the gods and goddesses who taught characters magic didn't even come into play until the second draft.
I admit that I did not put a lot of thought into the magic in the first draft. I knew magic existed in the world, but instead of having a reason simply for existing I just slapped it in without thinking about how it affected the world. Also, along the lines of the magic system, Ophelia, D.I. Time, and Annabelle didn't have powers in the first draft of the story. Ophelia wasn't even a priestess/healer: she was a nurse. And D.I. Time was pretty much just a detective. This post was the first time I actually started thinking about how the magic system worked.
And that's all. There were other things that changed in the story as well, but they were small things or things that contained spoilers in them that I couldn't share without giving away the story.
The celebration for my blog's anniversary will be longer this year, because the Q&A with Annabelle and Phoenix will be divided up into two posts like the Q&A about my novel I did lastNovember. (The reason is both the videos are long and I don't want to bombard you with two long videos in the same post and also because the characters are not from the same story).
A few posts ago I asked for questions. These are Annabelle's answers to your questions (and reactions to your impressions). In the next post, Phoenix will answer your questions, so stay tuned. Anyway here are Annabelle's answers:
It was really fun to answer in character. And it really helped me understand Annabelle better.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What powers would you like to have? And what magical creature would you like to be able to turn into?
So, these are drawings that didn't really fall into a category. They were ones that I didn't make with polls so couldn't include them in my Using Polls to Create Art series, and they weren't for Inktober so I couldn't post them there, so I ended up creating a new series. This is a series for art I don't quite I have a series for, called Miscellaneous Drawings.
Here they are:
I updated my header!
I felt it needed to be changed, since my drawing style has changed a bit.
I also decided to have lights surrounding Arcasia, (it's up to interpretation whether these lights are ghost orbs or fairies). Also, this follows a story from the last header, which you can look at here. That header showed her fighting a monster of some kind (which isn't visible to the viewers). But in the current header, the danger has passed, and she is exploring the calmer part of the forest where she sees the ghost orbs or fairies.
Anna (left) and Kitty (right) at the ball from Anna Karenina.
I am currently reading it, so I drew something based on that scene.
In a previous post, I mentioned that Riona used to be human before she could shape shift back and forth between a phoenix and a human. This is what she looked like when she was a normal human.
She used to have blondish/brownish hair before she turned into a phoenix. When she is able to turn back and forth between human and phoenix she has red hair with blue highlights in it (in order to mimic a flame).
A drawing of Tauriel. I did this artwork for an original song I wrote about Tauriel, which I plan to post in the future.
I drew this for the Bird Whisperer Project (if you scroll through their Facebook you will be able to see some of my drawings). However, since they moved to twitter and I didn't have a twitter account (I don't really want one actually), and couldn't send in this drawing and it didn't get posted.
So I thought I'd post it here instead.
Here are some eye drawings, I am currently learning how to draw eyes realistically.
I tried to put these realistic eyes into my current drawing style, and this was the end result.
I think I made the eyes a little bit too big, but other than that I actually do like the end result.
A drawing of a crossover between Brave and Tangled.
**warning this post contains spoilers for Disney's Frozen**
I have been thinking about the plot of Frozen, and why it failed as a story for me. I did really enjoy watching it when I was younger, but then I got older and started noticing plot holes in the story here and there. Admittedly, Frozen did inspire some things in my writing (e.g. evil prince characters). However, I feel as if some elements of the story telling failed. While from an animation stand point the animation is the highlight of the movie, there are some elements of the story that need improving.
I am also using this as an exercise in rewriting, given that with one of my novels that I am editing, The Mystery of the Body Thief has some elements that need changing and I was stuck on what to change to get across the point I wanted. Sometimes when you have that difficulty, it is much easier to rewrite someone else's writing than your own. This allows you to look at your writing challenges from a different perspective.
I am also probably going to turn this into a series called "my rewrite of [blank]" so if you know of any TV shows, movies, or books that you feel like need improving story-wise that you would like me to see rewrite in another installment, I'd love to hear it in the comments. (It has to be one I've seen though, so I may not be able to do every suggestion.)
Let's begin:
Hans would not be a villain. Instead, he would be misled-
The problem I had with Hans was that he suddenly (out of the blue) became a villain, wanting to rule the kingdom and tricking Anna into loving him. I could not find a way to make it so the twist made sense in the story. So, in my rewrite, he would instead be the person he was showing Anna he was: kind, generally trying not to hurt anyone, and slightly awkward.
(Image from wiki fandom, https://frozen.fandom.com/wiki/Hans_Westergaard?file=Hans_and_Elsa_in_the_dungeon.png)
Instead of wanting to claim the kingdom, he would believe Elsa was evil and was hurting Anna. And in doing that, his motivation would be to defend Anna from her sister. Because his kiss wouldn't work on Anna, he would think to go to extremes to have to kill Elsa in order to free Anna from the curse.
This would backfire, but instead of Hans getting punished for his actions (or Elsa getting punished for almost killing her sister), they would make up in the end and resolve to be friends. Also, they would resolve that they should communicate better in the future.
Elsa and Anna would not be fully separated from each other-
Anna has more scenes with her love interest than she does with Elsa. In my rewrite, Elsa and Anna would have several more scenes together. This would not just tell the audience, but show them that they love each other as sisters. And since the story is much like Cupid and Psyche, where someone has to fight to get the person back who they love, showing their sisterly love for each other would be necessary in making the story work.
The problem is, the scenes we do get of Elsa and Anna show how aloof Elsa is from Anna and that she is ignoring her. Instead, we need to see scenes where they actually talking to each other and interacting in a loving way, in order for the audience to believe they really love each other.
And while Anna wouldn't know Elsa has powers until later, there would be some comedic moments of Elsa going out of her way to hide her powers. This would also show how hard it is for her to lie to her sister.
There was actually a deleted scene from the original movie that I feel would fill the gap for this, which was "the dressing room scene":
We would see their bond, and because of that in the end it would confirm to the audience that the true love they saw was really sisterly love instead of needing to be told that by Elsa.
Kristoff would not bring Anna to Elsa's castle. Instead, he would be replaced by someone else-
The problem I had with Kristoff was that as a love interest he overshadowed the sisterly love of Elsa and Anna. So, he would be entirely cut out of the movie and instead be replaced with three different characters. Each of these characters would help Anna in getting to the castle, without one being more important than the others.
(Quick sketch of what she could look like)
The first character would be a thief girl, who would show up for part of the time and help Anna part of the way. But she would have to stop because she wouldn't be able to travel the entire way. This character was taken from the original story that Disney based the movie on, "The Snow Queen." I thought basing a character on one of the characters from it would be fitting as well as alluding to it.
The second person to help Anna would actually be Sven, and he would help her by leading her the second part of the way. This I took from Fairy Tales since in a lot of fairy tales, princesses or princes have animal helpers who help them or come in when they're needed.
The final person would be Olaf. Anna would get to see what Elsa is able to create with her powers, but also she would see that not everything that she creates is bad and that there is good in Elsa's magic.
These friends who helped her, would then come back to lead her back to the castle after she got hit in the heart with ice magic by her sister. But they wouldn't overshadow the relationship.
Anna would face some real dangers in finding her sister-
Instead of a simple journey to the ice castle, Anna would have to deal with real dangers throughout her journey that would propel her forward to helping her sister.
The wolves from the movie would remain, of course, but there would be more dangers than the wolves and the monster Elsa created. Anna would have to go through challenges presented by people along the way, each trying to steer her away from rescuing her sister but pushing her forward to doing so in the end.
(Image from wiki fandom, https://frozen.fandom.com/wiki/Oaken?file=Oaken.png)
The guy with the sauna, Oaken, who appears briefly in the movie, could serve as a challenge for her. He wouldn't be evil per se, but he would tempt her and try to stop her from continuing on her journey.
Because the sauna would be welcoming and warm, she would want to stay there instead of venturing out into the cold. So, she would have to fight to get back to the quest to save her sister. This would act as a challenge like the island of the lotus eaters in The Odyssey.
And given the addition of the thief girl, Anna may even get robbed by bandits (because she is a princess, the richest person in the kingdom, going alone on a journey). Eventually she would get the help of the thief girl who is part of the gang of bandits. The Thief girl would decide to help Anna eventually, after having to be convinced.
All these events would happen in an episodic way and then lead up to Anna's finding Elsa.
There would be scenes jumping back to Hans taking care of Arendelle-
Because there would be a lot of intense and stressful scenes of Anna fighting against the urge to turn back and go home instead of finding her sister. As relief scenes, we would see Hans trying and failing (and sometimes succeeding) in taking care of Arendelle, while the princess and queen are missing.
Since Hans is the youngest in line (with twelve older brothers), I doubt that he has much experience with taking care of a kingdom. He would know how to provide food and shelter for people (as we actually see in the movie), but we would see him failing at other things.
And that would provide comic relief from time to time. It would also serve to enhance the plot, because it would show what was going on in Arendelle and how eternal winter hurt it. But it also would show how unsuited Hans actually is at ruling a kingdom.
But despite all this, some of the citizens would make comments throughout (perhaps in song form) that he seems like a better ruler than either Elsa or Anna, who abandoned Arendelle when it was at its weakest and not sending someone else out to find Elsa. While Hans would be protesting that he's just taking care of the kingdom until Anna return, there would be some citizens questioning the whole situation.
While (if) there were to be a song within in the sequence (the sequence itself would appear much more than just once), I don't imagine it being exactly like the song "Prince Hans of the Southern Isles (Reprise)" that appears in the broadway musical version of Frozen:
Since that song takes a more serious tone than I imagine this subplot having, I could imagine taking some of the elements and just turning them around into being more like complaining from the citizens point of view.
Here's what I imagine the song being like (the chorus that is). Interestingly, I imagine it sounding a little like this song and having it be sung by the ensemble:
🎶 Our queen froze our kingdom,
Our princess left us to die,
Now all we can do is groan and sigh,
But the thirteenth in line,
Seems very fine,
Compared to our royalty who decided to resign. 🎶
Of course, but this not the whole song, but it is the gist of what I feel like it would be.
The trolls would be used briefly-
They would show up in the beginning to erase Anna's memory of Elsa's powers and make Elsa insecure about her identity and her abilities. And they would show up to tell the heroes what to do about Anna's frozen heart. But they would not have a musical number, because it feels like it drags on a little too much and because in this version of the film Kristoff is nonexistent.
They may, though, hint that Anna needs to find her true love. Of course, the characters would assume her true love was Hans. And in the end the audience and characters would find out it is in fact Elsa. This change has to happen, since with the original plot, the movie tells us that Elsa is Anna's true (sisterly) love. However, that version of the movie shows Kristoff as her romantic love more often, and that really confuses the audience.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------How would you rewrite Frozen? Would you watch my rewrite of Frozen?
