User blog:Thantosiet/Guess what fic's getting another reboot?

I've been pretty inactive for the last...year or so. Mostly personal issues, which thankfully are under control now. So I'm back now, and while I'm still gonna clean house a little here and there, I'm also going to work on my own fics for a bit.

That brings me to the one I currently have in progress: Shattered Hourglass. I've actually rebooted this one...twice before, though the original original draft never left my personal files. There have been a couple of different reasons for this, usually because I didn't like the direction or felt I'd rushed through it. It's rather different this time.

First off, I've been collaborating with Aaron Thall, and together we wrote a crossover called the Multiverse Crush Crisis, which involved the Hourglass Rangers. He made some suggestions about how the Akra could function more like monsters, ideas which I liked, but which had to contradict some of the things I'd established in my stories. Worse, they were good suggestions.

Also, Shattered Hourglass was not only intended as a team fanfic, but as a Mary Sue parody. Each of the Akra is based on a particular set of cliches I've seen in Power Rangers stories. Thing is, my attitude towards Mary Sues has softened over the years. Maybe it's because I just don't read a lot of fanfiction nowadays, but I can't find that old hatred of badly written OC's anymore. It's a newbie learning to write, it's not that big a deal. Plus it ends up taking away from the actual story and characters, so the end result just comes off kind of disjointed. I feel like I have to commit one way or the other.

Because of those two things, I'm starting over again. The Akra will be more explicitly monsters, and any Mary Sue cliches will be subservient to the main plot, not the other way around. The Rangers won't just stop and sit around making jokes at the cliches. I'll probably tweak my female Ranger a bit too, because she came off kinda bland last time.

So yeah, Shattered Hourglass is gonna change again. If you guys want to look over the current version and give me any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!