Here I was, just editing my novel, and suddenly...it's late.

Whoops.

Time well-spent, though. I think the narrative is at least passable. Still not satisfied, but it's good enough that at this point, I'm just saying, "Time to move on."

...So now I'm back to the point where I was at, before my second-guessing kicked in.
...Still calling it progress!

Still got some of it left, though, and hoping to make it be productive! I suppose I can start with the notes I wanted to type up even on Friday, that I never got around to. Basically, for red hood rider, remember the vampire-blood master duo? Since they're effectively Heroes Of Another Story (quite literally, actually), I decided to go into a little bit more depth for them.

We start with the vampire. His name is Daniel. Born a Dhamphir, Daniel was turned full vampire as soon as he could be. (Thanks to his aging at human rate, this was determined to be his 21st birthday.) While most vampire children age quickly, Daniel's growth was a bit more gradual, thanks to an accident in his youth stunting his accelerated growth. (In other words, instead of aging rapidly to adulthood, he aged like a normal human.)

He was tutored by Victor Zu, who happened to be his father's sire. His father died in the accident, leaving him in need of one. This means Victor is in human terms both a grandfather, foster-father, and private mentor. (Vampires' relations are sort-of difficult to relate to human equivalents.) He's about the same age as Richard, with them having grown up together.

Fighting-wise, he's just about Lord-level ability-wise, thanks to a transfusion he received when a child to save his life. (A result of the accident, yes.) Also, by having had the accident, by traveling during the day, and with him having undergone the black cave training as part of his ritualistic turning, not to mention feeding consistently from a SOLID source of blood, he's pretty tough.


His friend and traveling companion, Richard, is the descendant of the victor clan's first grandmaster. (I think adding names to the clans was one of the changes I made in the notes file not on the blog, so, uh, that you'll need to know. First clan, viper. Second, wasp. Third, gentlemen. Fourth, rose. Fifth, dragon. Sixth, guy. Seventh, victor. Gentlemen's rapiers for obvious reasons, fourth is rose because of symbolism, fifth is dragon for elitism, sixth is named after the clan founder, seventh is named after the friend of the clan founder.)

Unlike most blood masters (who mostly remain stationary, relatively), he travels across the world. As a result, I made the call that for pragmatic reasons, he's a gun-and-knife wielder rather than the fully-traditional bow-and-sword(katana) of the clan. (However, he has also been trained in bow-and-sword, having them available to summon.) This is actually considered an acceptable, albeit unusual, combination, as of the 1950s:

Most clans, if they were to decide to travel, aren't that suspicious. The vipers can easily. The wasps, not too much harder. They don't attract attention. The dragons' weapons are too small to attract attention, and while the guy clan's drill is certainly unusual, it doesn't actually draw attention. (People just kind-of filter it out.) But when it comes to the gentlemen, rose, and victor clans, they carry actual, very visible, weapons. Gentlemen generally only leave for special affairs and in such situations make sure they don't attract attention. Rose clan members always stick together, so they don't leave too much.

...But the victor clan actually has tradition in traveling. Before the victor clan's first grandmaster settled into the role, after all, he was a traveling warrior. So come modern days, and they are the clan most likely to venture out, yet also the clan with the most visible weaponry that is unusual, noticeable, and not exactly subtle and in many cases not even legal.

So that's why they allow for the substitution: guns preserve the intention and feeling of using a bow, while being generally more legal and more easily concealable. A combat knife, when applying blood to it, preserves the intention and feeling of a katana, while certainly being more legal and easily being more concealable. The clan, after all, has always been one of the most pragmatic clans, and while they have traditions, they're the most loose about enforcing them, ironically out of tradition. (Because the first grandmaster was notably not exactly a part of the tradition.)


There is another important blood master in their lives, though. Her name is Miranda, and she's a rival of equal strength to Richard. (Well, Richard's stronger slightly, but Miranda has much better technique...so if anything, she's better than he is, to his chagrin.) She owes this to her hybridized style of dragon and guy origin. Her parents were from each clan, and rather than choose one (as all other prior blood masters of mixed clans had done), she trained extensively in both, eventually crafting a customized dagger that allowed her to combine both clans' styles in her attacks.

She is therefore unique among blood masters in being the first person in blood master history to have ever combined two clans' styles. Richard's ancestor came close to that definition, as he was proficient in multiple styles. People other than him have done similarly in blood master history. Yet even he didn't actually hybridize styles. When he formed a clan of his own, he used his own style, not relying on the others at all.

This makes Miranda an abnormality, but while it's something new, it's not something she can exactly pass down easily to form another clan. (Realistically, rogue blood masters existing outside the seven clans hold a better chance of becoming an eighth clan than she ever could.) Like Richard, she travels a lot.


This stuff will only get a passing mention in-canon, though. Speaking of which, today, I wanted to explain a concept in the Rubyverse, soul severing, but to do that, first you need to know how souls work. Basically, souls are the primal, ethereal, essential core of a being. Everything alive has a soul--even things questionable: AIs do, golems of sufficiently advanced design (basically, magical AIs rather than tech-AIs) do, even undead do.

They exist outside the boundaries of space and time and plane, transcending all of existence. (A consequence of this is that, yes. Albeit extremely rare, it is possible for a soul to exist twice in the exact same time just in two different hosts.) They serve as a unifying force, bonding people together, creating life. But because they exist outside our understanding, they need an intermediary--the spirit.

The spirit is what passes to the afterlife that being is destined for, existing outside of space, but not time, and with a built-in transition between planes. As such, the spirit contains imprints of the mortal realm, making each spirit sharing a soul a different person: they're different, but linked.

Then, when it comes to our world, the spirit is separated into body and mind, here in the mortal realm. This link is flexible--death is cheap, with beings that never had a body/mind existing purely as spirits being able to manifest, and with people who have died able to come back, and for people not dead to be able to visit these planes, and so on and so forth. Basically, spirits can become flesh and blood, and minds/bodies can die and become their spirit form.

Important to note, though: The Mind Is not A Plaything Of The Body. Nor is the body entirely controlled by the mind. Both have some independence, yet hold a combined form of the spirit, which merges them. Spirits are thus the true "essence" of what we know as a person. It's what they are, who they are in their entirety.

But since the mortal realm may not necessarily reflect their full self, spirits can be different from bodies, and often are. An easy example would be the death of an old person; their spirit will retain their form from whatever they truly identify as, usually a younger self of some kind. Another example: any transwoman would be a woman in spirit, because while their body might not match, their spirit manifests in their mind.

So basically: souls are things that are very, very sacred. (Spirits are important, but risking them is merely risking your afterlife, akin to risking your life but moreso. Risking your soul is so much more than just you.) Things that endanger them are appropriately incredibly desperate and dangerous if self-inflicted (you're basically risking not just you, but every person your soul's ever been in or ever would be, a really, really big thing when you consider the length of time), or appropriately despicable/reviled if invoked.

(Incidentally, selling souls is something that nobody actually does. Bargains on souls, sure, but actual sales? It's hard enough for a demon to enforce a contract on a spirit, yet alone, an eternal soul. Even if they COULD, though, most demons wouldn't. They universally find the idea of damaging a soul despicable, and buying a soul they know always carries that risk of harm, which they do not want.)

So with that in mind, what is soul severing? Considered second only to soul destruction (even soul consumption/absorption is considered less-abhorrent, since the soul is almost always restored eventually), it is universally considered the cruelest thing that can happen to a soul. And in many ways, it's actually worse than soul destruction. Why?

...Because it's actually something that is outside the control of any force. As you might be able to infer from this exposition, soul severing disrupts the natural order of the soul. It permanently renders the soul cut off from the ethereal, essentially meaning each reincarnation has no ties to the previous, which creates broken, wrecked, and weak spirits. (They need that bond to their past spirits in order to get "proper formatting", so to speak.)

A secondary consequence of this process is that the soul severed can never use magic again, ever. This is so strong, beings that aren't strictly magical like vampires cannot turn them. They're completely unable to process magic, of any type, good or bad, whatsoever. While this does give them a limited form of anti-magic, they can never extend it to others; it is purely on their own body, and they can be indirectly affected by bad magic but not by good magic. Meaning that, basically, all the bad stuff of magic happens to them, yet none of the good.

The soul of a soul-severed person has essentially become trapped, its sense of transcendence permanently altered into a flawed, warped state. The spirits they reside in often live miserable lives, holding similarly-poor afterlives, unless special care is taken for them to be raised and nurtured back to health.

Basically, soul severing is considered the ultimate nightmare, full of suffering. (This is one reason it's arguably worse than destruction: souls destroyed can't feel the pain. Severed souls can.) A soul can never be more damaged than by being soul-severed. It is the one thing. It is the one and only thing about a soul that is truly irreversible, because this damage exists outside the control of powers.

Heck, even destroyed souls exist within the realm of controlled powers, but soul severing defies existence. Merging, splitting, birth, and destruction, all fates for a soul are considered more preferable. Destruction might be the worst fate a soul can have inflicted on it, but near-universally, there's a way to reverse that. (Think Chrono Trigger, for saving Chrono: difficult, but not impossible. He was utterly disintegrated, obliterated, erased from existence, but because he was important, it was possible to bring him back.)

That's because, though, the soul's destruction happens within known forces (even if said known forces are incomprehensible), all tied to the ethereal. Destroyed souls retain their connection to it, thus, by using it, they can theoretically be brought back...yet soul severing is absolutely, entirely, permanent. And in a world filled to the brim with exceptions, I use that word sparingly.

It does hold some rather large plot significance, as something that a 1,500-year-old necromancer warns Ruby of. (Basically, he's afraid that she might suffer it if she's not careful; he has very good reason to be afraid.) He's one of less than five people who knows souls intimately enough to know what he's talking about. (Lucy, as in, Lucifer, that Lucifer, is a second, and Saul the Seller, one of Ruby's rogues, is a third.)


Unrelated, but...If you're wondering about necromancy: it's actually pretty ethical when done right. It binds a soul to a body, which sounds bad, but the soul is asleep, used just as a conduit to grant life to the undead being resurrected. (Because Undeath Always Ends, and souls transcend the boundaries of time, this is absolutely harmless to the soul. It's something unnatural, but not abominable.) The main difference between these undead and living is that the necromancer creating the undead is the one to create the spirit, with the spirit not inheriting traits from the soul.

There's a bit more to it than that, but basically, the necromancer is artificially making an entity of their creation with a random soul yet with a spirit of their choosing, usually loyal. These undead can actually eventually develop: most if destroyed disappear into nothingness, their spirits having been artificial. However, undead that are of sufficient intelligence and/or age can, upon their death, maintain their spirit, coming to whatever afterlives are available to them. They can also develop their own soul, at which point the necromancer is forced to release them from control.

There is a slight risk of the undead with its artificial spirit bonding to the sleeping soul, essentially leaving the soul packing "extra baggage" that is likely not properly imprinted, but such cases are rare, and easily healed for the soul, given that the spirit would not mean harm.

It's still a taboo, of course, but it's not nearly as evil as its reputation suggests.

Bipolar disorder, autism, not sure which of them is the cause, probably a combination of both, but needless to say, having them sucks. In this case, I think on the bright side, I've finally, finally figured out the problem with blog days like this. It's not that I don't have enough time to write. I've got plenty.

It's that my mind is literally being overwhelmed. My mind is racing with all the thoughts from the last 48 hours. Watching Andromeda, the staff meeting I went to today, red hood rider notes, the bunch of productive real-life stuff I did like hand out part of my novel, and so much more, all flooding my brain.

My brain is being asked to channel all of that info at once into something productive, and it simply can't. Basically, I'm overloading. SO much stuff happened, that there's SO much to talk about, that there's just SO much competing space, and my mind simply doesn't know what to do with it all, and in an effort of self-preservation, shuts it all down, saying, "busy. Come back later".

...And then, the files get deleted and the history I had planned on telling gets lost.

So good news, finally figured out the issue, bad news, absolutely nothing I can do to solve it. Maybe I need to carry on my person a portable notebook to write things in? That could help.

I had a really long day with some really important stuff happening in it, meaning lots of real-life content I could talk about (I know it's all nice a good and all to blog non-stop about a comic, but sometimes I do like to keep you updated on my life), and, yes, I do have new story stuff to ramble on, it's just...I'm so tired right now that the thing I want to do most of all is sleep.

Maybe tomorrow.

For Red Hood Rider, it's an irrelevant detail for the Rubyverse, but for the first time ever, I'm giving the Blood Masters another name.

In my mind, in all the stories that have featured them, I've always called them Blood Masters, similar to Shadowmasters. (They're an import, I said this before, not something I created specifically for the Rubyverse.) But today, I randomly decided, "Hey, basically every element--and then some when you think technomancer--has a name, so why not blood masters?"

Result? Now, their technical name (and I do stress, TECHNICAL; they're always called Blood Masters because that's the name I invented for them and I'm sticking to it, dangit!) is Ichoromancers, since I did a quick 30 seconds of skimming to confirm terms like pyro- and cryo- were Greek in origin, and then typed in 'greek blood' and voila, the magic of google told me about Ichor.

It might have the meaning of gods' blood more specifically, but given what Blood Masters can DO, that doesn't stop the name from being any more appropriate! (I know, I know, -mancy means 'talk to', but still appropriate all the same, because they're effectively communicating with their own blood and/or the blood of others.)

I made this because as I'm typing this, I've been updating my notes file with my stuff from recent blogs, expanding upon it. (The new format contains a ton of extra stuff, slightly more organized in some cases, slightly more prone to tangents in other cases, but with said tangents always adding a ton more.)

Feels good doing all this writing, but I DO need to do other stuff soon.

Red Hood Rider continues to go fairly well. I named Ruby's love interest (who she'll meet at either 17 or 18, probably 17, depending on when I'm able to write her in episode-wise) last Thursday, and went into details, but never wrote anything down. I've kept the thoughts alive, though, and finally wrote them all down.

Her name is Rin Takeyami. Don't go looking for any meaning in that name. Rin is a name I like. Takeyami was just a name that popped into my head. Maybe it is a reap Japanese surname, maybe not. Maybe it holds actual meaning in Japanese, maybe not. I wouldn't know. It came into my head and seemed right, so regardless of whether it's a real Japanese surname or not, it at least sounds like a Japanese surname (so, yes, explicitly As Long As It Sounds Foreign), thus, it's her name.

She's Japanese-American, with her parents having raised her in America her whole life, though she is bilingual (though because I'm not, this'll only show up in occasional foreign cursing) and knows of her father's country's customs. Her father is often away on business, and her mother passed away when she was fifteen (or thereabouts), so she's mostly home by herself, thus, how she encountered Ruby. (She's home-schooled partially, attending the same school as Ruby.)

I do invoke a bit of But Not Too Foreign, because she looks mostly Caucasian, but in my experience with people of mixed heritage, this isn't actually that unusual: they mainly seem to take from the gender of their parent. For instance, one family I've met had two sisters that look exactly like their Asian mother, yet have a brother who looks almost exactly like his Caucasian father. (To the point where people often ask if he, or they, were adopted, when no, that's just how it turned out.)

She is a lesbian, which is something that wouldn't please her father normally, but while her mother was still alive, she managed to make a very persuasive argument to her father that basically left him being okay with it, even if it isn't what he would have wanted. (Basically, she points out in America, women are to some extent expected to be strong and independent, and she could succeed him in their family business, arrange for an heir, and continue the family name...OR, she could disown him, go off on her own, and still make a name for herself anyway.)

I kinda like her.
(...Since she's Ruby's love interest, I, uh. Kinda need to specify that I like her as a character.)

It's not EXACTLY Writer's Block, it's more like Editor's Indecision. But close enough, since the result is the same: zero progress. Basically, while I'm satisfied (for the most part) with the prior content (even copied it onto my flashdrive and will print it out tonight, to hand over to my family), I'm having trouble progressing beyond Chapter Two in my novel, because the narration feels awkward and even forced.

It's important exposition, fundamental to the plot, containing foreshadowing and callbacks, but it's just not working right for me. It's just...ahg! I can't explain without showing it to you, which I really shouldn't be doing. (It'd also be very, very large.) But basically, while the intro seems fine, the third person piece seems like it's just info-dumping. (Which, well, technically, it is, but I want the writing to be solid enough to disguise that, and...right now, I don't think it is.)

And I want to display so many things that are meant to augment each other but which currently just feel like the contradict each other and/or transition awkwardly. Basically, I want to show the backstory of the world. I want to also explain a few of the key differences between humanity and téanity (the name of the other species in the story, essentially an offshoot of humanity many, many, many hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago), how they're pretty similar, but distinctly different...biologically and culturally, with an importance placed on the cultural differences in them.

I want this to come from a figure that's meant to be a wise mentor. Yet I also want to portray him as not being a perfect human being. Cool, yes. Awesome for what little his part may be, yes. But I want his philosophy, while leading into the main character's philosophy, to not be perfect, for him to be flawed.

...And I want to also display the main character's flaws in the first person portions, yet how they're slowly (slowly! Not all of a sudden!) coming to their current philosophy which kicks off the majority of the plot. I'm trying to keep said first person narration realistic, too, at least realistic to the levels as can be expected of a person semi-lucid dreaming about memories, can be. (Hey, that might not seem too plausible, but...I've had nights like that. Where I was remembering the past, in my dreams, and retained some ability to think. Still was asleep, but I had that ability to think.)

It's requiring a lot of skill, precise, tight writing, and I don't think I'm getting it, much to my absolute frustration. I'm a good writer. I'm a darn good writer. I usually am overly-humble about these things, even self-depreciative, insisting that I suck, insisting that I'm not too good, but writing is basically the one. One. Thing where I tell myself. "No. You don't suck. You ARE good." It's the ONE THING I allow myself to have that absolute pride in.

So I know I can do it. I know I have the skill within me to write something that captures all of it. But I'm really, really frustrated right now, because I'm close to getting it yet not quite there. I'm not at the level of writing I should be at. Now, I know I'll never get things perfect. That's why I'm on chapter two and not still on the prologue. I'm done with that. Not going to touch it. Not going to rewrite it again, it's as good as I can do.

...But the current chapter, Chapter Two? Isn't. I can do better than this.

Hell is fire and brimstone, Hell is ice, you know the two. If you're a long-time reader of my blog (or just an obsessive binger), then you might remember my take on why Hell is actually a mixture of the two...of why Hell is Water. And if you couldn't tell already, I just had a day reaffirming my belief.

Hell is having so many patrons that you have FOUR guards actively involved...then having one guard leave yet still being at the same number of patrons. (For those not in the know: that's 75 people in the pool at the same exact time.) Mostly kids, at that! Hell is when--even after a special group of people left--you're still at a high two-guard ratio.

Hell is when you lose your third guard yet maintain that number of people, still mostly kids, most of them not familiar with pool rules as they're not regulars. Hell is when you finally do get to a one guard ratio...and it's still a high one-guard ratio that you maintain for THE ENTIRETY OF YOUR SHIFT. (In the 20s.)

Hell is having every family leaving replaced by a fresh new family that will be there for two hours (the average time a family stays in the pool, I've found), causing a break even in numbers. And Hell is having no rest, no food, no drink, and no break for two of the three hours you're guarding, because of this continuous cycle at work.

...That being said, I can't complain too much. It is my job, after all. To a certain extent, days like this are preferable from a work perspective: I'm actually earning my paycheck. I'm doing something full-time, whereas on a normal day, I run out of things to do, which is bad as far as work is concerned. (They don't like you slacking off.)

And while it might feel like hell, when all was said and done...no incidents happened, meaning that ultimately the only consequence of the day was me eating much later and being far more exhausted. Speaking of which...well, I was planning on doing something productive between work and dance, but after going through THAT, I have a better idea:

Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepp......

So my parents are watching a show that I'm behind on, effectively meaning I can't be out in the living room at all. What that means is more time to work. I suppose I'll also use the time to briefly mention a note that I made in passing during my ramble about blood masters when it comes to red hood rider.

In this case, about magic, and magical fatigue. Basically, I've said many times before that in the Rubyverse, there's dozens upon dozens upon dozens of magical systems, but most of them more or less draw from the same basic forces. Essentially, there's nearly-infinite amounts of energy when you go digging into different sources, but no mage, not even Master Azev (one of Ruby's rogues, who is basically a villainous version of Doctor Strange), has absolutely infinite magic.

An example I want to talk about is the Elemental Eight Riders. They have a rather large magical reserve, one which differs from Rider to Rider, but which is always vast. D.D. and Hannah have the largest natural amount, though Whitney's efficient usage of what she has places her on their caliber. Ruby and Amy both have their conflicting powers (both being creatures of light and darkness) give them an immense boost, but that's not infinite.

Vili also has a lot of power, but hers mainly comes from the technique of drawing magical energy from surrounding sources. This is the technique I wanted to talk about. Almost universally, magic works on the principle that the user has a certain natural amount of magic in their body, but the ability to draw in extra magic from other sources. Some magic systems have virtually zero body-magic (thus, rendering using it akin to Cast From Hitpoints levels of dangerous) and are nearly-entirely based around drawing things in from whatever fuel the magic uses, while other magic systems have it almost entirely come from the user themselves with any drawing from others being borderline black/forbidden magicks.

The Riders fall in about the middle, overall, where they hold this immense natural reserve yet are perfectly capable of drawing from the environment to fuel their magic. The thing is, though...there's something near-universal about drawing magic into the body: it's taxing. No matter what the magic is being used for, and no matter what the source of the magic is, that tax is existent in every form of magic in existence in some form or another.

It manifests differently in each of them, but it's an unwritten magical rule: over time, stress builds. This is what I referred to when I was referring to magical fatigue. Blood Masters, the example I used it for, can live for centuries, via the mastery of the magic in their blood. But that magic exudes a slight tax, no matter how minuscule, on them, and as they continue to age, the more magic they have to use to maintain themselves and therefore the more stress they're placing on themselves. In short, the tax grows with age. And, eventually, after centuries, they simply can't take the fatigue anymore, and their body fails.

Magical fatigue is not often lethal, though. Magical fatigue is basically the body rejecting the magic, in an effort to maintain itself: the magic would kill them if it was used any more, so the body cuts itself off from the magic to prevent that from happening. So the only times magical fatigue kills are when the body needed that magic to live (as in, a no-win scenario where magic kills them and lack of magic kills them), or the magical fatigue is overridden and the person decides to use the magic anyway.

A far more benign case of magical fatigue can be found in D.D. and Whitney when they synchronize their abilities. Because they can both break the second rule of thermodynamics, essentially, by touching each other, Whitney gains free ice and D.D. gains free fire, giving them new magical reserves of energy each time they do it.

However, this process involves them creating/drawing in new magic rather than using their own reserves of magic (the whole point of it being to replenish their reserves), and so, magical fatigue begins to build up each time they use it. If they use it too much, then their bodies will literally collapse, giving out on them and having them pass out from exhaustion.

Soyeah. That's magical fatigue. I think it's a pretty neat concept myself, and I'm glad I had this chance to blog about it. Totally would have remained an obscure background detail if I hadn't had the time to think about it and blog about it just now.

So, uh. Go me, I guess!

I generally hate late-posting blogs by a day or two (or three, in extreme cases), but sometimes, all I really can do is write/type it out and not post it. That was one of those times. Sleep > blog being posted. Sleep probably would rate above writing a blog for most people, but while it doesn't rate higher than blog-writing, I'm not real strict about having the blog be posted the day-of.

After all...things like power outages happen, and then there's Christmas vacation where I'm in Oregon with no actually-working internet for a week. (It does, it's just SO abysmally slow that I really can't do anything.) So it makes sense that I write daily, post as I can, always posting the moment it becomes convenient to do so.

Like now.

Anyway, while not specific to recent stuff, something that I'm probably going to do is more red hood rider stuff. More specifically, Jocelyn Samara, author/artist of the comic Rain, gave the advice that for her webcomic, she works on something Rain-related every single day. Maybe it's not a drawing, but she'll always do something, as to make it always be on her mind every day.

I pretty much do that already, but I want to put it into practice even more. I can't really produce art that fast, but what I can do is note compilation and/or scriptwriting, both of which I can do plenty of in a day. While NaNoWriMo means it's a reduced priority, I still think it's good to do.

...Speaking of NaNoWriMo...that might actually be good advice to keep me working on the novels. Not necessarily writing words every day, but doing something for each of them would be a good idea. Not exactly sure what at this point, but if I can manage to keep them in my head and work on them, I'll be golden.

Yeah, my life's pretty crowded, between job search, lifeguarding, activities such as tae kwon do and dancing, comicfury, mafia stuff, red hood rider, and my novels, but somehow, I think I'm actually kinda sorta balancing them all! (For the most part, anyway.) I might not have the IDEAL balance, but I have balance all the same. Feels good.