Sunday 31 October 2004

Pic of the day: A pigtailed little superheroine for City of Heroes.

Astra project(ion)s

In a way, a circle is closed. I realized this when I looked at yesterday's picture. But for good measure I include a picture of her today again, the day before the night of NaNoWriMo.

It began little more than a year ago, in October 2003. The Oct. 25 entry, "Astra and Flashfire". It described a story in a comic book I had recently bought, about a 10 year old superheroine, daughter of a family of superheroes. She was pretty good at fighting extradimensional villains, but wanted to learn Hopscotch. Being able to transform into living plasma doesn't really help with that.

This was just before NaNoWriMo that year, when I wrote about the quarter- demon Jon and his girl troubles, not to mention the troubles his girl had with him. Boys can be pretty blockheaded when it comes to such things, as well I should know.

As soon as that year's NaNoWriMo was over, however, the muses in my head had found a use for Astra. Or rather the concept of an innocent child being born to power and fame, and never having really known ordinary human life. Being in many ways more mature than most adults, and yet innocent beyond most people's imagination. Since girls is not really among my areas of expertise (more's the pity) the girl became the little sister of the main character, a high school boy. The story can be found in my Dec. 3 entry.

Long time passed. I forgot some of the names and dates, and started to assemble the story again on my pocket PC sometime this year. The Visitors now came in 1914, preventing World War 1. They did not stay nearly as long (but I ended up making more of them). The other boy's little sister grew older and got a more prominent role. And so I ended up with this year's NaNoWriMo novel, which you will be able to find on my new chaosnode.net. Actually, the links will probably remain the same for the duration of NaNoWriMo, so you can bookmark them if you want to watch another pathetic failed attempt at novel writing. It may be instructive, who knows?

Sugar High School, HTML version and Adobe PDF version.

***

Oh, and the closed circle thing? In the same October entry, I wrote about a fire-based character in the game City of Heroes which was still under development, not even in beta yet. It would still be a couple months before I learned that I was chosen to be among the beta testers for the game. Since then I have played it regularly. But right now, these last few days, I have experimented with a fire-based character. A pig-tailed girl fighting as a living flame ...

Oh yeah, and I found these archive entries through the techno-magic of Google Desktop, the new Google-search for local hard disks. Yes, I have installed it in my machine and with 6 years of archives, it is kinda nice to have. And what day did I install it? One year after the first Astra entry. ^_^