These are the Editing Notes for my FFVII fanfiction Northern Lights (which you can find at the end of that link).  I will be discussing a myriad of topics along with my frequently tangential and harried editing process.  You should be able to garner some enjoyment and insight from this without having read the story and/or without prior knowledge of the original game, but if you’re a fan of paranormal romance and/or dark fantasy, you may find it to your liking.  The story will be spoiled in this editing examination, though I will do my best to mark spoilers for any other narratives I mention.  Thanks for your interest and enjoy!

---

<–The Box Contains More Chapter 8                            Between the Seams of Chapter 8–>

Holy shit it’s been a while since I’ve updated this.  I have it on my schedule for every fourth Saturday or something like that.  I switch up what I work on on Saturday just because I have so much.  I’d like to say I’ll increase when I publish these, but I’m lucky to get to it when I do.  Just a reminder, I wrote these notes three years ago now while I was editing the fanfiction.  My writing has improved since then (at least I think so), and it’s a mix of then writing and now, though I don’t always indicate where that happens.  I try to remember to use italics when I’m inserting future me into a conversation, but I did some editing on this before like a few months back, so even though it’s future me, it’s not necessary now me lol.  Anyway, if you have any questions, you know where to find me!

10/22/14
Mmmm chocolate…oh wait, oh what?

Welcome back.  Chocolate is like God’s gift to your mouth.  One of the side effects of mostly eating healthy (or at least for me) is going through phases where you just want to eat ALL the food.  That’s happening to me right now.  I eat all the food; weigh myself; flip shit, and then go back on track the next week and hopefully undo the damage.  Tis a long journey, but it’s all about the climb, isn’t it?  No, fuck that…I want the goddamn results.

Ah yes, this is when I was overly concerned with reducing myself down to an impossible size hehe.  I was seriously and sadly obsessed with that…like so many other people.  I have a far different viewpoint on it now, especially since I can’t physically stand for more than ten minutes due to still unknown reasons.

So I asked what your favorite season one.  I’ll answer mine is a brief dialogue.

Random Person: Hey Adrienne, what’s your favorite season?
Me: Advent.

It counts!  It’s a “season;” it’s Christmas, and I love Christmas cause I’m a Christmas goth.  At least I finally found an Advent Calendar that I could get on board with.

I’d drink my Advent Wine on Advent Sunday while watching Advent Children.

I’m not even going to try to ease my way into this conversation to what my editing notes are.  There is no graceful segue.  You’ll have to be content with non sequitur.  At the time of this writing I was helping a friend by beta reading a sexy time part she had to add to a story, and this got me thinking about the line between romance sex and erotic sex.  Romance sex tends to focus on feelings whereas erotic sex focuses on the physical.  Now obviously you can weave physicality into romance sex and emotions into erotic sex, and frankly you have to.  You can’t just have all emotions and feels or fluids and flesh, but there’s a delicate balance between what’s expected in each genre.  She is more of an erotic sex writer where I tend to take the romantic path.  I can and have written erotica (nothing published) and I often push the envelope in the ideas process and then dial it back when it comes to the writing portion and pare it down even further when I edit.

No sexy time for a while yet with this story, though.  What did I say before?  You can’t marry (or fuck) the princess before you slay the dragon, and dear god is there a “dragon” to slay.  Hehe in trope land this is not really quite accurate, as the Dragon is more the Big Bad’s top enforcer.  TV Tropes doesn’t agree with my point of view on this having Jenova as the Dragon to Sephiroth on its page where I really see that as quite the opposite.  Jenova was the catalyst to his insanity, the start of his darkness.  It wormed its way into his head and gutted everything he ever was.  But for that incident (much like Isildur’s refusal to destroy Sauron’s ring), there would be no story.  I know I keep bringing this point up and driving it in (ughhhhhh), but it seems to be a bone of contention with so many people insisting that Sephiroth is just plain evil, but I think my interpretation is far more accurate and in a way darker.  Sephiroth is the Lucifer/Satan of the FFVII world, the fallen angel, the most beautiful and the best…but there’s something worse than he is.  Jenova is the dark source, the antitheses of the source, the distorted absolute.  I don’t know what the Unholy Sephiroth to Kether is (nor would I call or write its name), but that would be represented in Jenova.  I looked it up in my Dictionary of Angels, but I’m till not going to write it, and I talk more about the horrifying implications of Jenova further below in my discussion about war.

But for now we should move on to brighter and happier things, and as such is lacking we shall go to the editing of Northern Lights.

Continue reading →