Have you ever had one of those times when you started to create something that was going to be small, and it decided to grow out of control?

I was going to make a music video for Harvey from Farscape, centering around his perspective on the events of "Infinite Possibilities". I wrote out the outline, chose the music, started adding slides and clips...

...and then realized that what I was creating was turning into something more like a mini-episode.

At first, I wasn't sure how to feel about that. If the video gets too long, will people want to watch it?

But then, Harvey never does get an episode of his own. Which is very regrettable, because he's an interesting character in an unusual and rather tragic situation. So much missed potential there.

Sure, what I'm creating won't quite have the production values of a Farscape episode. I don't have a million bucks to throw at it, or Wayne Pygram to voice Harvey's musings. (Though, I know YouTube has someone who's gotten good at vocally impersonating Scorpius; maybe I should recruit him.)

All the same, I think it's turning out pretty well. It's kind of like a cross between a music video and a fanfic, and it pulls on all the right heartstrings. In some ways, creating it has been kind of a saddening experience; it's a deep dive into the mind of a very lonely neuroclone. So if you enjoy sympathetic fanfics about characters whose viewpoints aren't explored much in-series, I think you'll like this.

What do you think? Would you enjoy a fan-made Harvey mini-sode?

Sometimes, when I'm writing a scene, I have specific things I want to get done in it.

Lines have to be spoken, actions have to be taken, and then the characters can move on.

When I write the scene in this way, it's... functional. It gets the job done, and moves the story along. But it just doesn't have the emotion and magic that I want to infuse it with.

Have you ever had that problem? A time when you were writing something, and you knew that all the requisite information was being conveyed, but you just weren't feeling it?

One of the ways I've found to deal with that is to stop and really picture what's happening in the scene. Imagine the details. Lighting. Temperature. Sounds. The things that linger in the air.

What is the POV character feeling at that moment? What do they notice, in their current state? How are their perceptions affected by the way they feel at that moment?

It's the difference between saying "He walked across the crosswalk to greet his girlfriend, who had just gotten home from a year-long study trip", and

"As he reached the edge of the curb, time seemed to slow down. The clouded sky pressed down around him, thickening the air, and he had to remind himself to take a breath before stepping onto the street.

People were moving, crowding around him, a tangible blur of clothing and noise. His eyes seemed to reflexively filter them out, searching for the one crisp, clear face on which they longed to focus.

Would she remember him as vividly as he remembered her? Had she missed him? Or had the year they'd spent apart weakened their bond, maybe even tempted his girlfriend of six months to seek out other company?

A third of the way, halfway, all the way across. For a moment, he stood alone in the crowd, searching the tide of faces... and then, there she was."

I don't know about you, but that second one definitely draws me in more, and makes me more interested in knowing what happens next.

What about you? What methods have you found to infuse interest and emotion into what could have been a dry, merely functional scene? I look forward to reading about them in the comments.

Sometimes, I almost feel bad for liking a character.
 
Sure, the character is cool; they’re smart, suave, competent, complex, and have a style that’s all their own. But in the case of ‘guilty pleasure’ characters, either they’re the villain of the story, or some of their flaws make liking them feel almost like being the girl we’ve all heard about, who keeps on falling for the wrong guys.
 
The thought crosses my mind, and sticks: “Am I just being a dumb fangirl who falls for all the typical traits, while wearing the typical blinders?”

Have you ever felt like that?

Sometimes, it's enough to make me wonder if something's wrong with me.

...And then, lately, I decided that that was enough of that. OK, the character has flaws. And sometimes they're the villain. But they're a really, REALLY interesting character - and, in a few cases, they're also very hot.

If I like them, I like them, and that's just how it is - why make myself wrong for that?

Take the good traits, enjoy them, and maybe ignore the bad traits or downplay them... just a little. After all, it's not like I'm going to marry this collection of ideas, words or pixels.

It's interesting that these musings come at a time when I'm starting to go easier on myself for my own flaws, and on others for their flaws as a result. Hm, who knows - maybe these 'guilty pleasure' characters are just the practice I need for this stage of my personal growth.

What about you? Have you ever read about or watched a fictional character that made you feel a bit uncomfortable about liking them? What do you tend to do about it?

A little while ago, my younger sibling showed me an awesome AMV. It was based on the anime "Stein's Gate", and set to the song "No Light, No Light" (which I loved so much I ended up buying it - take that, copyright police!)

If you want, you can watch it here:

In fact, I liked the song and the video so much I was inspired to make one of my own, for John and Aeryn of Farscape. The lines "No light, no light in your bright blue eyes" and "You want a revelation, you wanna get right, but that's a conversation I just can't have tonight" were so perfect for them.

I thought about featuring Scorpius, another blue-eyed character from the show, but the theme and the character just didn't fit quite as well as blue-eyed John and "I want to talk less!" Aeryn.

So, here it is: the triumphs and trials of their tumultuous relationship, set to drums and powerful female vocals. Enjoy.

I'm excited. :) While it's often hard to tell during a first draft, I think I'm past the halfway point in "Heroic Lies"!

When you're running a startup business and setting up a product launch, finding time to write can be a challenge, though I'm getting better at it. I think it's going to be easier from this point forward, though; when I first made the outline for this book, some of the scenes were more fleshed out in my head than others, and many of the scenes in the second half are partly pre-written.

This will be the part of the book where the stakes, the backstory, and the depth of the characters' emotions are fully unveiled. No more secrets, for the characters or the readers.

A big, tangled web of lies will come apart at the seams, and then there will be fireworks.

This is gonna be sweet. :)

My goal is to have the first draft finished by June, and the finished product published by December.

I want to publish a book every 1-2 years, and so far, I'm on track for that. Go me!

We all know how fans love to romanticize their favorite characters. Bad traits are minimized. Good traits are played up. Biology is rewritten.

Because apparently fangirls prefer their male characters in estrus.

I got a chuckle out of this Google search, because the concept of Sesshomaru going into heat just doesn't work.

Unless he's secretly female or FTM trans.

Bonus points if you know what 'in heat' means, without looking it up.

For those who haven't looked it up (say, the people responsible for that search result), surprise! It doesn't simply mean you're horny.

It means you're physically female, and your body has declared that it's ready to get pregnant, in a way that male biology can't imitate.

So, sorry, fangirls - it looks like you can't count on the female reproductive cycle to get your Mary Sue into Sesshomaru's pants. You'll have to actually give her a personality and - gasp! - maybe even write some character development and a PLOT in order to accomplish that. Good luck!

Have you noticed any other fan-bloopers like that?

If you've got a bizarre and amusing "Fans Fail Biology Forever" story to share, I'd love to see it! Just post it in the comments so we can all enjoy it.

I love making music videos. It's one of those things that I once thought I would never have the patience and expertise for, but it's actually easier than I ever expected it to be.

At the end of the day, when I don't have enough brainpower to write anymore, but I want to do something creative and watch it come together bit by bit, making a music vid is a really easy, relaxing way to finish off the day.

Until suddenly it isn't.

I'll admit, there were a couple times when I feared I would have to scrap the whole hobby, because what had once been fun and relaxing was becoming a pain in the neck. Fortunately, I found ways to fix those problems, so now I want to share them with you, just in case you've run into any of those issues.

1. When you get the clip you need, make a copy.

Don't just start editing it. You could end up splitting or removing something you want, or trimming the start and end points only to have the clip turn out to be too short to match the music.

Instead, copy the clip, then paste the copy where you want it, and edit the copy. Yes, you'll have to remove the original clip afterwards, but that's far less of a hassle that having to find and import the clip all over again or undo your work because you accidentally ruined it.

2. Be careful how many clips you use.

In one of my more complex MVs, when it was rapidly moving from one clip to another and thus had a high number of clips, the files started to get corrupted. At first it was only after I'd been editing for a while, then it was after just a few clicks... after a while, I couldn't even play the video without Movie Maker saying it was corrupt. That was the glitch that made me fear that my hobby wasn't going to work out.

Then I tried to run another project with fewer clips, and it worked just fine. It was simply the case that my more complex project was overloading the system.

How do you fix that, without removing necessary clips from your project? Save it as a .AVI file. This will convert the whole thing into a single video file, so when you import it back into Movie Maker, it will only have one file to think about instead of dozens of fragments from lots of different ones. With fewer plates to spin, it should work more smoothly.

3. An easy way to avoid clip overload in the first place:

Sometimes, when you need to have a transition between scenes to keep time with the drum beats or lyrics in a song, you can use the preexisting scene cuts in the clip itself.

If the video you're working with cuts from one scene to another, or changes camera angle, or something like that, see if you can time it so that the scene change matches the rhythm or lyrics you're trying to time it to.

By using a single clip as footage for two adjacent verses or drum beats, you give Movie Maker less to think about, and less reason to corrupt all your files in an act of self-defense.

There you go! Three handy tips to keep Movie Maker from driving you crazy.

Do you have any tips you'd like to share?

If you share my enjoyment of making music videos, and you have a tip or a glitch fix that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. It might just save me some frustration in the near future.

There you go! I hope my tips helped, and I look forward to reading yours.

I don’t mind the occasional damsel in distress. The little girl in a house fire, the civilian in a war zone, the badass warrioress who was legitimately outnumbered or outmatched, but still put up a fight worthy of who and what she is before being taken down... those all make sense.
 
But then there are the ones who have absolutely no reason to even need rescuing in the first place. Take this sorry specimen, for example.

I dearly hope that she wasn’t like this in the original books, because the movie version is just forehead-smackingly bad.

“Bernard, help! Wait for me!” she cries pitifully, while attempting to flee from a predator.

What.

To start with, she’s a mouse.

What is a mouse? It’s a small furry animal that tends to respond to threats by running away from them. OK, so it’s not a very badass form of life.

​But still, I think we’ve established that it knows how to run away.

Except for Bianca. Apparently she fails at being a rodent.

But at least she’s only the janitor, right? She’s not a trained agent or anything, so she has every reason to need to be rescued by the... wait.

They’re trying to tell me that the rescue agent - who I HOPE would have had some training, considering the fact that she represents her entire country in a field-work-heavy rescue organization - doesn’t even know how to run away without being dragged by the paw?

(Also, have the makers of this film ever tried to run while holding hands? It’s harder than running with your hands free.)

I don’t mind the Damsel in Distress trope when it makes sense, but... wow.

If you're going to use it, make sure that it makes sense in light of the characters' personalities, professions and abilities. And that it doesn't completely violate common sense.

Is there a shred of logic in this example, of which I’m somehow unaware? Let me know if you could find it!