Origin Stories

[Angmor]

Well, most of the people here wouldn't appreciate this quite as much, but there are a few old fogeys who will remember that the site that started this place was known as Lethrblaka. Back in the golden age of RPing, that was an Inheritance site where I got my start, and eventually grew the courage a skills needed to become the admin of Erisdar, which more people will know of, which not long after led here. Alas, Lethrblaka was deleted, taking a good seven-hundred of my posts with it. But, after messing around with something called the Wayback Machine, I managed to dig out somewhere around my 230th post.

web.archive.org/web/20080201172610/http://lethrblaka.proboards102.com/index.cgi?board=drasleona&action=display&thread=1199330285&page=3
(Copy this into your address box to see it.)

So, those of you in awe of my writing skills, I would appreciate you reading that. My point is, skill doesn't just spring into existence. You have to work at it. The writing that you see from me today is merely the result of many hundreds of posts and countless hours. My hope is that if you see a writer you admire (Probably not me. XD), you won't tell yourself 'I could never be that way' you instead say 'I'm going to do my best to become like that.'
And then I hope you shamelessly copy them. If anyone was around a year ago and read a Karen Traviss book, you would know immediately who I plagiarized... er, borrowed from. Nowadays I still do it, I just borrow from a greater variety of writers. Timothy Zahn, Mathew Stover, and Eric Nylund have all been thrown in the metling-pot of unoriginality that is my writing. It's all just a thousand posts, with each one a little better than the one that came before, multiplied over years.

So, where are you coming from? How did you get your start? I would love to hear about it.

[Emma]

Firstly, let me apologize for the fact that this frickin' thing somehow ended up the size of a post from yours truly. If you don't want to read it all, I blame you not. XD

Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree with the Angster Gangster on this, you guys! For those of you who are in awe of MY writing, please visit the following link and read over the two posts you'll see. I shall give you a minute or two. (Warning- the skin will burn your eyes and you probably shouldn't read them while eating or drinking.)

www.animalpeoplerp.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=ve&action=display&thread=51

Welcome back. I wrote those after THREE YEARS of experience. THREE. YEARS. I remember these two specifically because I was so PROUD of how long they were! Angmor's thingy up there was written after one. Measly. Year. Granted, I think he was fifteen when he wrote that and I was thirteen when I wrote this, but still! I'm also incredibly embarrassed about showing this to everybody, but it's to help drive Angmor's point home.

No, I didn't write two-thousand-word posts without even blinking until maybe... a year... ago. I started RPing on Neopets when I was ten (so no wonder I was fail for so long, right? XD) before someone was apparently impressed enough by my writing to invite me to my first ever Proboards site, Eternity Wolves, when I was eleven. It was sent to Cyberspace Heaven long ago, but the wayback machine did find the homepage:

web.archive.org/web/20070817184314/http://seawolfpack.proboards33.com/

And after that, I made a bunch of sites, mostly animal RPs, and remained a huge noob until a few years later, I met someone that gave me an enormous kick in the can.

Her username was Chikara, and she played a wolf character that was incredibly arrogant, megalomaniacal, and otherwise a total jerk (ironically, now I LOVE jerk characters). My fellow noobs and I were APPALLED that someone who believed she was 'Queen of the World' (that's what the character referred to herself as) had waltzed onto our site. We immediately reported her to the admin and we actually got her banned temporarily. So the RPer wrote this big post explaining to everybody that she was BRITTANY, a highschooler from British Columbia, NOT megalomaniac she-wolf Chikara. This totally surprised me, and after that I started paying attention to her and trying to emulate her. She wrote long, gorgeous posts and I started increasing my length, going from one-liners to several paragraphs at a time. It was also after that that I started adding variety to my characters. They didn't all have to be me.

I followed her to a new wolf site but eventually she dropped off the internet, and I kinda wandered from site to site after that, never staying for more than a month or two on each. I ran a few sites of my own but all of them (except one, and it only lasted a few months) failed miserably. I also experimented with flowery writing on a horse RP site for about a year but then that died. It was then that I found LETHRBLAKA. I'd actually joined twice before, but it never held my interest and whenever I decided to drop a site, it was always the first to go. This was actually after Lethrblaka was attacked by spammers April '08 (I think) and I came back June of the same year. Since it was closed off to new joiners it was a very small community, which is maybe why I stayed. I hate sites that are too big and too busy to really be able to get to know your fellow RPers.

It was on Lethrblaka that I started... being myself. Before then, I was always trying to be the MOST literate, the MOST flowery, etc. Writing a post was supposed to be a thing that took time and torture. On Lethrblaka, for the first time ever, I just sat back, and let myself write without really thinking about it. And I got way better! While I was there, I also met Nayeli, who I am obviously good friends with since I run the site with her, and Angmor, who I am now BFFs with and is my favourite person in the entire world to RP with! =D I wasn't on Lethrblaka for very long before it moved to Erisdar, and there I just stuck with the Lethrblakans and increased my writing skills, and got... decent, finally.

And after that we moved to AoR and... yeah, here I am. XD I'm still very uncomfortable with myself as a writer, as you'll see by my constant hating on my posts, but after looking at THAT post and others... oh dear God, the OTHERS... D8 -eyes burn out-) even people who don't like my writing have to admit that I've improved since then. XD Which goes to show, I didn't get the way I was without being kicked in the nuts (even though I don't have any o.O) and plenty of work and self-contemplation, as lame as that last one sounds.

Another thing I've heard- at writing workshops, you can read manuscripts of famous authors' earliest works. They didn't RP, but they did write short stories when they were teenagers, like most of us here... two I got to read were Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. Le Guin. And I will tell you now- they SUCKED. I mean, really, really, REALLY sucked. And now, they are writing GODS. WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU?!