Profiles #2

Remember Henry? We met him on Monday. Today meet Henry's wife, Elizabeth. She is the second of four main characters in this week's featured story, Spring. Her appearance is modeled after Nikki Reed, and she is written by me. :) Ladies and Gentlemen -drumroll, please- Elizabeth Toole!

(The following profile was written by Allie before I took over this characters. Apart from a few changes here and there to make the read smoother and the character more accurate, this is Allie's writing.)
Name:
Elizabeth Wisland Toole

Age:
Twenty

Birthday:
May 13th

Race:
Irish, English

Personality:
Elizabeth is definitely not known for being the girl next door. She's a spoiled princess from a rich family, and is used to getting whatever she wants. And, when she doesn't get that, she does whatever she has to do in order to get it. She sometimes can be gentle and welcoming which comes across as being friendly and kind, but she has a horrible temper that easily can get out of control. Outgoing and outspoken, she is not a woman that one would want to doublecross or mess with. She hates to get emotional in front of anyone, in fear of appearing weak, and so doesn't often cry or show that she has much of a heart at all. Perfectionist, neat-freak, and a bit manic depressive... Those who know her would say she's a bit, well, just a little downright crazy.

Biography:
Elizabeth was born in England, raised for two years before her successful father moved the family to Ireland, to avoid an outbreak of the sweating disease. The trip was long, but once they arrived, her father bought a house and they quickly got settled. His business was as good as ever, and soon, Elizabeth was living a life that only few knew in Ireland. She and her family didn't live too far from the Tooles, another wealthy family with a young son only years older than Elizabeth, Henry. They quickly became the best of friends, playing pretend and teasing and chasing one another around their homes.

But there was a family secret, one that Elizabeth herself was too ashamed to tell anyone, even Henry. Her father went to her bed nearly every night since she was a little girl. At first she resisted, but as the beatings got worse and worse she only cried as her father whispered compliments into her ear, how beautiful she was...what a wonderful daughter she was...Elizabeth told her mother, the only person she thought could help, but her mother did nothing. She only glared at Elizabeth as if she were the one responsible...as if she were the one who asked for this. Elizabeth lived alone in a house full of hatred and evil, her father only buying her expensive gifts and surprising her constantly, for her 'good behavior'...She grew to hate the gifts, associating them with the things she was required to do in return, rather than signs of affection. She became bitter and depressed, only putting on a smile when she had to, for appearance sake. All of the men who courted her quickly changed their minds, already tired of her mechanic ways and her lack of true affection toward them.

She turned to Henry for comfort. He was really the only man she could bring herself to trust completely. He had been there from the beginning, and he made the pain of her secret life go away. He made the tears evaporate and turned her frowns back into smiles... When they were seven, she could still remember when he caught her in her backyard crying. He asked what was wrong, and when she told him that someone had hurt her, he had pulled her into a hug and swore to her that he'd protect her. He'd be there to keep her safe. Elizabeth could see herself with Henry... He saw the woman she wished she could be. A sweet, charming young woman who didn't live in fear every night and in bitterness every day. She waited day after day, trying to be that woman, to prove to him upon his return that she was the woman he wanted to be with as well. However, when he brought home another woman with the intention of marriage, she again quickly grew bitter, and had to find a way of making the other woman disappear so that she herself could have Henry, completely. Eventually, it worked. After some manipulation and lying, she was finally able to drive Elena Davlos away, and begged her father to talk to the Tooles about an arranged marriage with Henry. Why not her? He'd known her all his life.

Likes:
Fine Jewelry, Getting Out Of The House, Henry, Nice Things, Shopping, Dinner Parties

Hates:
Her Parents, Her Home, Elena, Night, Bad Hair Days, Thinking About Her Past


Fears:
Her Secret Getting Out, Losing Henry, Bugs, Losing Anything Of Value

The story picks up years later. Elizabeth and Henry are married and they've adopt a baby girl, orphaned and left with Henry's uncle. Unfortunately, the baby is Elena's younger sister. And though she can not bring herself to fully hate the innocent child, Elizabeth can not help but feel as if this baby is Henry's way of staying connected to the woman he truly wanted in the first place. And that, she can not stand! If you'd like to continue reading Henry and Elizabeth's story, just click the 'Spring' link in the side bar. :)

Profiles! #1

Today meet Henry. He is the first of four main characters in this week's featured story, Spring. His appearance is modeled after Chris Pratt, and he is written by the magnificent Kiki! Ladies and Gentlemen -drumroll, please- Henry Toole!

Name:
Henry Toole

Age:
Twenty-Two

Birthday:
July 4

Race:
Irish, English

Personality:
Henry is by nature a very gentle, outgoing, friendly sort of man. He firmly beleives in giving respect in order to earn it, and though he was raised with wealth and privliege, Henry does not rely on his good background to get him what he wants in life. He may be just a little bit spoiled, however, he has a confidant streak that enables him to feel comfortable going after whatever - and whoever - he desires. Don't mistake this for arrogance, though. Henry knows what he has can be taken away just as quickly, and so proves to be a most loyal and faithful companion to friends and family. He is the kind of man that no one can really find fault in, except for perhaps a hint of too much pride and vanity, and is considered one of the "popular" people. Every woman has her eye on him for her daughter - some for themselves - but Henry has no interest in an arranged marriage. He wishes to marry only for love, and may be considered by some a bit of a hopeless romantic. Aside from this, Henry can be a bit of a neat-freak. When things are not in their proper place, he has to find it and put it there, and one of his worst nightmares would be to get his clothes dirty.

Biography:
Henry was born to an English mother and an Irish father, who was the wealthiest landowner in all of Ireland. His mother's family had come over to Ireland when she was a child, and with it being his father's native land, Henry's upbringing was something of a mix between high society and wild free-spiritedness encouraged by the natural world around him. As a result, Henry has retained a sense of respect for the working classes. They must earn their bread, while his is handed to him on a platter, and Henry finds a good deal to respect in those people even though others of his class look down on them. As a child, Henry was given the best education possible. He had the best tutors who taught him everything he would be expected to know as a young man of good society, and by the time he was sixteen, he was considered the catch of the entire wedding market. Trained to take over his father's business from an early age, however, Henry was smart enough to know that he was only desired by so many women for his large inheritance. Not for himself. So he decided early on in his life that he would only marry for love. Nothing else would persuade him into matrimony.

So, when he reached twenty-one without finding a pure-hearted woman to marry, Henry decided his true love would not come from the society beauties paraded under his nose. He left to spend the winter with his uncle in a small village one day's journey from his home. It was there that he met and quickly fell in love with an exotic beauty by the name of Elena Davlos. She returned his feelings, and after some miscommunications and encouragments from her family, she accepted his proposal and returned with him to his home. They planned to marry in the spring, which would give her time to adjust to his lifestyle, and though Henry thought they were happy, she saw things differently. Mere weeks before their wedding, only a few days before her family was due to arrive for it, Elena finally admitted to him her unhappiness here. She said it could never work; they were from two different worlds, and no matter how much pretending she did, she did not belong in his. She would hinder his future as a successful businessman, and overall she said, she loved him enough to let him go. Henry could not dissaude her. She left the following morning, returning to her family in the little village and promising to write to him as his lifelong friend.

Likes:
Nature, reading, children, dancing, music, his family, his friends, animals, snow, sunshine, gambling (a guilty pleasure)

Hates:
Being betrayed by those he loves, being punished for something he is not guilty to, messes, dirt, bugs, getting lost in memories, having his loved ones threatened in any way, not knowing what has become of Elena and why she felt they could not work

Fears:
Losing those he loves, never finding the woman to spend his life with, war coming to Ireland, and birds for some odd reason

The story picks up years later. His first love did not keep her promise to write but he found love again in a wealthy young Irish woman named Elizabeth. Charming when she wants to be but at fault in her pride. He marries her and they adopt a baby girl, orphaned and left with his uncle. If you'd like to continue reading Henry's story, just click the 'Spring' link in the side bar. :)

Robbed!

Today I was browsing through Spring's profiles, adding pictures to our Facebook, and I came across something that honestly surprised me. The long and short of how I made this discovery is this. When the Seasons stories were actually started, I hadn't yet met Allie or Kiki. The character profiles were set up on two different threads, one for Allie and one for Kiki, but Allie started both of them. So when we copied the profile thread links over to our page after taking over Allie's characters, the link to her profile was still at the top of the page.

While searching for information on the profiles, I happened to see Allie's avatar and the link to her profile. Despite the bad blood between us I still think she makes the most adorable avatar outfits. Curious to see which items she'd used, I clicked through her her profile. And there I found a link to her most recent story. Of course curiosity led me to click the link, and while scrolling down I made the maddening discovery that all of Allie's posts contained MY post formats!! Grant it, they were old and hadn't been used in years, and a few of the colors and words were changed. But there it was. All my hard work and she was getting all the credit!!

I didn't say anything, of course, but it's so frustrating to see your work taken by someone else and seeing them get all the credit for it. That made me mad. Not mad enough to confront her and bring up all KINDS of bad blood, but still mad.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever had something stolen from you?

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.

A Whole New World

When I was sixteen, I transferred to a school called Harvest Christian Academy. There I met Eric, still one of my friends today. Back then, he and I were inseparable. We could sit and talk for hours on end about nothing. We texted, called, IMed, and played MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Games) all the time. It was my good friend Eric (Air, I affectionately began to call him) who introduced me to the world of Gaiaonline (dot) com.

For those of you who don't know, Gaia online is a free online community created by those for those who love anime and all things related to it. It has expanded and gained popularity since I joined. Back when I joined, it was a small privately owned website. Now it's got a nice big staff and everything. Very cool. Airic and I were hanging out one day when he told me about this website. I got very excited. You could make friends, play games, own a house, earn money and buy and sell items to create your own personalized avatar. It sounded like fun so I rushed home to create my profile right away. But making an avi and playing games wasn't the only appeal, nor was it the reason he wanted me to join. Airic wanted me to join this site for a very specific reason. To role play!

Okay, now pause this for a second. Not many people these days understand what role playing means in this context. I didn't, and it took me four years to explain it to my parents so let's give it a try here. On Gaia online, role playing is simply this. A person writes up a basic plot summary, then presents to the public a format in which you, the role player, can create your character profile. You put your character's name, age, background, personality, and anything else the RP monitor asks for. Then you submit this application to the RP monitor and wait for a response. If he or she accepts your application, you may then begin to write. Yes, write. You write posts, interacting with other characters and playing out scenes and situations the monitor presents to you. Sometimes this is done in large groups, sometimes privately between a few people. Sometimes people find a partner, and those two will go from RP to RP writing characters for each other whether it be friends, siblings, or even romantic couples. According to the rules and regulations posted by the website, all RP forums must be capped at a PG rating. Which means limited violence, swearing, and sexual interactions. Put basically, you are writing a story, collaborating with several other people. All fun and kept fairly innocent. Airic introduced me into this world in order to write a story with me. I absolutely loved it! I took off in this new world of role playing. I didn't just write with him, I wrote with others too. Lots of others. I joined countless RPs and created even more of my own. There wasn't a story I didn't want to be involved in or a characters I couldn't play. It wasn't long before I was addicted!