The last four years. Big Changes. Hard Choices.

So a lot has happened in the last four years. A lot of stories have been started, and sadly both friends and stories have been lost. I'll tell you a little bit about that as we go on but first I would like to say one thing.

I love my best friend. To death. And back. Kiki (LiveFreeLoveWell, or now IrelandKiss) is the greatest person in the whole world! I could never ask for a better friend. When I'm upset for any reason she drops whatever she's doing to listen. When I'm blocked she does everything in her power to help. And I try to be as good a friend to her as she is to me. If time could be rewritten and we could redo some of the things from back then I wouldn't change a second of it. Not even my mistakes. Because through those we grew closer together to become the bestest of friends we are now.

But back to our story. So Kiki joined our story and honestly made the whole thing even better. Drama (Allie) was a good writer in my book but Kiki was and still is way better! I can't tell you how much I loved waking up in the morning and running to check if she'd posted yet, or getting a text from her in the afternoon saying "My post it up! :) " I loved reading her work and it was SO easy to reply to. I didn't have to think about it or anything. The words just flowed through my head in continuation with wherever she left off.

(I should put here that in the past year I've totally sucked at writing replies right away but you know... I'm getting better. I am. I swear!!)

Things were going really good for about the first year. When I started school I asked Allie to take over a little posting for me. She wasn't in school and it was hard for me to keep up with a lack of reliable internet access. She agreed and for the four months of the fall semester at university she wrote my characters for me. Biggest mistake EVER!!!

As a writer, I'll admit I'm a bit of a control freak. I know my characters inside and out. I know all of their likes and dislikes. I know their tempers and their mood swings. How they think, how they talk, how their eyes change with their emotions. I know it all just as well as if they were real people. These characters are very real in my head and I know for a FACT that everything Allie wrote for me was completely wrong! She took a strong, confident, sexy male character and made him act like a mushy, feminine, romantic pile of goop. I hated it! I hated reading it. I hated knowing she was writing it. The thought of my suave male lead acting like a sappy teenage girl made me physically sick at my stomach! Of course I never said anything to anyone about it at the time. I'm sure she'd worked hard on those posts and in her head that was how he ought to have acted. But obviously she knew nothing about him because it was bad. And I mean BAD!

When I was able to post again with them, I continued on with the story as if the entire thing had never happened. I wrote my male lead the way he was supposed to have been written and tried my best to never refer to that scene ever again. Things went well again for another several months. Then Allie started school...

The thing about Allie is this. Before she was in school she was at home, taking care of her brothers and her niece and helping her parents keep the house in order. She did a lot of work and her computer time was her only down time. She when she came online and wasn't writing we forgave her. After all, playing solitaire for an hour while chatting with friends took much less brain work than writing three paragraphs. Then again...

This thinking is what got us in trouble. Because see, she had this bad habit of...zoning out. Where she wasn't playing a game. She wasn't chatting. She was simply sitting in front of the computer, staring blankly at the screen. She referred to this as "dying." I can't tell you how many times we'd be in the middle of a conversation, and after ten minutes or more of silence, Allie would finally write "Sorry. I died." It was bad. When she started school, it got worse. She'd "die" nearly all the time she was online. It would take days for her to even read our posts, weeks more for her to reply. Kiki and I started writing separate new stories that only the two of us wrote on JUST so we'd have something to write! It was that bad.

In October of 2010 we'd had enough. We waited for one of the rare times Allie was online actually talking to us, sat down, and told her the cold hard truth. We wanted her characters. All of them. We wanted to take them off her hands, write them for her, and maybe when she had more time in a year or so she could take them back and things would go back to normal. You can imagine that didn't go over well... But we did it anyway. She kept up with the stories more then. We didn't chat with her much but she tried a lot harder to make an effort to talk to us and keep up with the stories. By the middle of September we'd agreed to let her back and things started to be okay again. The three of us were back together and it seemed like she'd changed.

She hadn't.

Almost exactly a year later in September of 2011 we'd had enough. She'd gotten worse. She'd play games when she said she was writing. She'd call us then spend our time on the phone talking to her other friends or her roommate. She'd log in to play games and avoid chatting with us so we didn't ask about the post or lie that it was almost done or flat out tell us she didn't want to write. It was ridiculous! The stories we wrote with her were for fun and there was no fun happening there. It was all so much stress! Kiki and I were actually trying to put a book together. We were working on something that could earn us both money and Allie was wasting our time with all her crap. We'd taken more than enough of her behavior, listened to way too many excuses. We kicked her out for good. We took her characters and cut her off completely. We haven't spoken since...

It was a good decision over all, though. Kiki and I have gone back to having fun writing! We've taken out a lot of the stress of writing. The RPs list has been smooshed down to five stories (which you can link to with the pictures in the side bar) and we're working on a couple books that we're really excited about. I'll talk more about those later.

I hate to say it, but though I'm grateful to Allie for introducing me to Kiki, cutting ties with her was one of the best things we've done for the stories and ourselves. I've found out through facebook now that she'll be graduating soon, and that she's pregnant...but sadly single. I do wish her the best with her new baby and her new job. I hope she's happy and hold nothing against her. Really. But I don't regret what we did. It was the right choice.

Thank you, Drama!

One of the players to join my story was a girl with the screen name Queen of the Drama. She asked to be called "Queenie" so that's what we called her. My screen name was Black Dragon Bride so, through no direction of my own, people started calling my "Dragon." Cool name right?? Anyway... For the first week of the role play, things were going very well. People were involved. They were all communicating and writing a lot. But after the first week one girl stopped writing without warning. The next week two more join, but two left. By the end of the third week we were down to four people who were constantly posting. I was one. Queenie was another. To make matters worse, we were the only two of the four who wrote more than three sentences at a time. The story was going no where, and for us, the more experienced players, it was getting to be a chore to write with the other two girls. After a few days more, Queenie emailed me.

I won't transcribe the entire conversation here, though I very well could. I won't, for two reasons. Firstly, because the conversation was long and relatively boring in retrospect, and I'm sure you're not interested in the tedious details of what exactly was said. Secondly, I'd rather not dwell on the past shared with this girl. Despite the fact that she became a great influence in my life, we are no longer on speaking terms of any kind and I'd rather like to keep it that way. (Whoa... just wrote that in a British accent... Weird...)

The long and short of it is this. Queenie PMed (private messaged) me on the website, expressing her extreme frustration with other the two girls (I assume they were girls) we'd been writing with. She said, in short, "I can't stand writing with these one-liners! It's hard enough to come up with good paragraphs for my characters when I'm responding to a good writer. When I have to do the thinking for both characters it's practically impossible and so stressful!" And it was obvious she was stressed. It didn't take me long to decide what had to be done. That night I closed my RP. For good.

Or so I thought...

After closing it, Queenie and I continued talking. I told her about an RP idea I'd had that was similar to the one I'd just closed, but "better." She agreed to help me open it so we set to work that night.

Of course I was excited about it, but I was even more excited when Queenie sent me this:

And that is how I met my best friend. =)

Too Much Drama

When I first starting writing these role plays, I was bad. And when I say bad, I mean baaaaad!!! Where other people would write two or three paragraphs for their character, I would write one...barely... My proudest accomplishment of the time was a post I'd written consisting of about four long sentences and a quote. And I was writing with the beginners. It was that bad. But I met a boy who wrote with me and showed me the very basics of how to write fuller posts. I took his advice and ran with it. At first, I was just writing with him. A simple story about a girl and a boy traveling together on a quest to find his family. Of course there was quite a bit of magic thrown in there to keep the story going. When I could write an average of two paragraphs per post, even on a bad day, I decided to branch out. At first, I tried to join more experienced RPs. Stories that were just starting with a minimum requirement of three paragraphs per post. I could handle the writing, but the people I tried to write with were rude and stuck up. To the point of kicking me out of a story where I was really the only one trying to even interact with other people. It was harsh. After the third try, I took what I'd learned and put it into my own stories.

First, I would like to say, I'm not proud of how one of my most successful stories started out. See, what happened was, I was browsing the forums for a new story when I stumbled upon one about eight people living together in a house. The story went that when these eight people met, they'd been in high school, but for whatever reason they'd all either left or run away from home. Now they all had to live in one house, paying their share of the rent by working minimum wage jobs and trying to make their way in the world. The characters were split into four couples. Each individual had person problems that translated into couples problems as the story was to progress. I tried to join this story as a girl who's lost her family so moved into this house with her boyfriend and her best friend. I wrote the profile, carefully chose a reference picture, then sent both in an email to the story's creator. The next morning I received this reply:

"Sorry. Another girl asked for this first. Just waiting on her profile. Try another story."

I didn't get it, really. Hadn't his personally written rules stated that he wouldn't reserve characters without a profile? And yet, that's what he was doing for this girl. About an hour later I saw the other girl's profile. Not only had she stolen my reference picture, she's used half of the things I'd written in my profile word for word! That was the last straw. I didn't care about the story or even the fact that she'd stolen my work. What made me upset was the rude and hypocritical acts of the story's creator. I hated that these people thought that because they made the story, they could treat their writers like crap. I wanted to write with people who just wanted to have fun. I wanted to have a place where you could go no matter what level of writing you were, just to enjoy writing. So, I stole the story.

Mind you, I didn't take things word for word. I took the general idea, added a few more of my own to up the character count to ten. Added my own pictures, wrote the description in my own words. By the end of the day, my "better" version of his story was up and ready for people to join. Instantly, there were three profiles in my inbox. All three were added and the posting began.