Griffalco's Fictional ISOT TL

In today's post we're going to talk about the rise and fall of my first, and thus far only, timeline on Alternatehistory.com.  Wait, what?

Yes, it was called Griffalco's Fictional ISOT TL.  My user name is Nick Griffalco, and if you've ever encountered a user by that name then surprise, that was me.  It was inspired by the Fictional ISOT Map Games, but like my timeline you'll need an account to view those as they're in the Shared World's section.  My timeline is in the Alien Space Bats and Other Magics section, which you also need an account to view, but more on that in a minute.  

The Fictional ISOT map games involve players transporting fictional nations, characters, objects and various other things to an Earth devoid of human life.  Then each player writes a post describing how things play out.  Each post covers anywhere from a third to a quarter of a year.  These games are always creative, I learn about a lot of new series and it's always a lot of fun.  There have been plenty of spin-off timeline written by single author, and so I decided to try my hand at it.  

Actually, it really all started when I decided to create a series of Fictional ISOT maps to post in the map section; which can be viewed without an account by the way.  However, I decided it would be even better if I were to create a proper timeline for the maps to be a part of; so I did.  By the way, ISOT is alternate history slang for a mass teleportation, usually to the past, named for SM Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time trilogy   

The timeline was essentially a scrapbook from an alternate world.  It included excerpts from encyclopedia and newspaper articles, interviews, short fiction, documentary manuscripts, news announcements and much more.  I made sure to fill it up with all kinds of fun series like Percy Jackson, Legend of Korra, Fullmetal Alchemist, Code Geass, Leviathan, Captain Planet, Hunger Games, Neanderthal Parallax, and a whole lot more.  I figured it would be kind of like writing fanfiction, which I have experience with, so how hard could it be?

My style was considered a welcome twist on the Fictional ISOT timeline, and I received kind words and encouragement from many ISOT timeline experts/veterans.  I even got a shout out in a thread about ISOT timelines.  It stood poised to be a great timeline and potentially one of the next big things on Alternatehistory.com.  So, what happened?

Drgyen happened, that's what.  He started out as just another commenter and I was more than happy to have someone to talk about the timeline with.  Soon, however, I was talking with Drgyen more than posting updates to the timeline.  Then things started to get ugly.  Drgyen went from simply suggesting how the timeline ought to go to practically demanding that his ideas be made canon.  Speaking of cannon, I stated from the start that I was going to have a very pick an choose attitude to the canon of the various series I used.  Drgyen, however, always made a point of telling me, in the harshest and most aggressive and attacking way possible, whenever I'd contradicted canon.  

For that matter, Drgyen tended to be excessively aggressive and attacking even when it turned out I hadn't made a mistake.  I should have showed him the door, I should have seen his behavior as a red flag from the start but alas I didn't.  I was so happy someone was commenting I didn't want to screw it up, but I fear I may have in the process inadvertently driven away more level-headed (and much more civilized) readers.  Admittedly, I only really had the vaguest of ideas how I wanted things to go, and I was in large part making it up as I went along, but that certainly didn't excuse Drgyen's excessively attacking and frankly asinine behavior.    

After awhile I began to feel like Paul Sheldon from Stephen King's Misery.  I'd promised myself I'd stop the timeline if it ever quit being fun and began feeling more like a chore.  I wasn't going to continue if it mean I was going to constantly get screamed at no matter what I did.  It got to the point that I could have kicked Drgyen out, but the timeline was such a jumbled mess and so far from my original vision that I decided there was no point going on and so I pulled the plug.  

Still, I made sure to write a farewell address and formal closer to all the fans who'd stuck by through thick and thin, and who had conducted themselves in a much more civilized and polite manner.  I included details on what would have happened and how it all would have had a happy ending (I'm a sucker for those).  I did consider rebooting the timeline and starting from scratch using the lessons I'd learned from the first timeline, but the passion was gone and I wanted to move on to other projects.  

Still, it wasn't all for naught.  I did learn about writing timelines, I got to meet writers I admire and I even got a few good scene/bits of writing after all.  My favorite bits were about the Planeteers (assembled from across the nations of the ISOT), the Olympics and the start of the Jaeger program to combat the Kaiju invasion.  As you can see it was pretty crazy, but maybe it just might have worked under the right circumstances.  

Still, I'd hate to end this post on a sour note.  So, as a special treat I'll show you three maps from various points in the timeline.  

First we have a map from just after the initial ISOT

Next we have from a few years down the line as more nations appear

Finally, we have a map from a few more years after the second map, and when things start to really get fun/crazy

Not featured are the various aliens, both from other planets and other dimensions, that started to show up at this point as well.  What more can I say?  It was crazy, fun up until a point and I hope you guys enjoyed hearing about it.     

Adventures of the Silver Bullets

So in this post we're going to talk about the other pride and joy of my fanfiction career besides Penjackson.  This post is all about Adventures of the Silver Bullets.  I conceived it as a massive crossover with the entirety of fiction at my finger tips.  Basically, the thinking I had for the series is that all fiction is true, but not all fiction is an accurate representation of what happened.  This allowed for characters being slightly off kilter and for me to thinker and juggle things around for the sake of plot.

The setting is actually a multiverse so that anything mutually contradictory could be relocated to a different universe.  Of course, travel between universes is pretty common in these worlds.  Anyway, the plot is that L, the great detective of DeathNote, has assembled a team of young heroes to fight crime in the city of New Avalon and beyond.  Said team includes Percy Jackson, Kurumu Kurono and Mizore Shiriyuki, Edward and Alphonse Elric, and Mako and Bolin.  Joining them would have been a wide selection of former heroes to serve as their mentors including Tenzin, Izumi Curtis and Major Armstrong, and Kraft Lawrence and Holo the Wise Wolf.   

As the title suggests, I originally intended it to a lighthearted Silver Age of Comic Books-esque parody of various tropes and conventions with a fairly episodic nature to it.  Before we go any further I should point out I only ever put out two posts of it, I hit a block with the third and got side tracked by various other things.  So, most of this will be about what I had planned more than what I actually got out.  Just letting you know.  

Anyway, as I planned the series out in my head I decided to keep the lighthearted and episodic tone, but I wanted to allow for character development and exploring some of the darker aspects of the various worlds and characters I used.  For example, Percy start out with a very silly, goofy, happy-go-lucky personality and a perpetually sunny disposition.  Later, however, it becomes apparent that this is a mask he wears to deal with the pain and loss he experienced fighting in the Titan War.  Mizore, meanwhile, has to deal with the whole yuki-onna are sterile by their mid-twenties thing.  That, and dodging repercussions from the yokai community, lead to her wondering about moving to America permanently.  

Then there were the things I figured would make interesting plots, but might have gotten me in trouble with various fangirls.  To start, I was planning on having Mako come out of the closet.  Given how Korra and Asami are canonically lesbian this was pretty Hilarious in Hindsight.  Other people slated to come out of the closet included Nico Di Angelo, and keep in mind that was before he canonically did as well.  However, the biggest shocking swerve was a heterosexual romance.  I was planning on pairing Percy and Kurumu together.  I had originally intended them to have a brother-sister relationship, but the more I worked it out in my head the more I liked them as a couple.             

The villains would very from affably evil punk clock evils, to down right scary.  They were to be part of an organization known as the League of Evil People Doing Evil Things in a Very Evil Way.  They were from across fiction, but lead by the mysterious Man in the Ivory Mask.  The big real was that he was in fact none other than...Harry Potter.  Yeah, in the world of the Silver Bullets the Harry Potter books didn't exactly match up with what actually went down.  That was really an end of series reveal, nothing would be the same and there would be no going back after that point.  

The biggest factor to the cosmology of the series would have been L.  One of the big revelations was to be that he was in fact an immortal almost god-level being, and I could never quite name what his kind would be called.  He would have been thousands of years old, and would have been involved in a polyandrous relationship with about four wives and one husband; said group included Urd, Princess Celestia, Kraft Lawrence and Holo the Wise Wolf.  However, his favorite was always Elsa, but she'd died many years ago, and he would have still been very much impacted by her passing.  

Another big revelation would have been that L was secretly the father of one of the Silver Bullets.  Quick, which if the Bullets looks most like L?  If you said Mizore, then ding, ding, ding, you said the magic word!  Speaking of sudden relations it was going to be a plot point that Percy and Mizore were both descendants of the royal house of Arendelle via Anna and Kristoff, and thus indirectly Elsa as well.  

Well, enough seriousness, let's talk about some of the fun I had planned.  I had so many great ideas that I never got around to realizing.  I had plans for an episode (as I call the chapters) that had Inuyasha team up with the Bullets, but he gets in trouble for destruction of public property and has to perform community service.  Said community service being to volunteer at a summer camp, and having to deal with Percy's perpetually sunny attitude.  Inuyasha initially tires to get fired, but comes to find he likes working with kids.  Also, Lovecraftian monstrosities show up and ass-kicking ensues.  

Another planned idea I had was for the Bullets to enter a racing competition, either for charity or because some villains were in the competition as well.  Ed was to be the driver with everyone else as pit crew, but he gets amnesia in a training accident.  While everyone else tries to get Ed's memory back, Al and Mizore go to train in the art of "car-ate" under the guidance of Keiichi Morisato.  Unfortunately, they don't have a car, but Ms. Frizzle loans them the Magic School Bus.  At the end of the episode the Ah! My Godess character move in with the team.  

I'd also planned for the Silver Bullets to travel to the planet Zur-En-Arrh to team up with their counter parts.  I'd also planned stories featuring alternate universe counterparts to the Silver Bullets, including one universe where they're villains rather than heroes.  Of course, since the Silver Bullets are an international organization with multiple branches, there was always the potential for exploring other teams, or teaming up with other characters.  I'd even had a big event involving Bullets from multiple teams temporarily becoming Power Rangers.  

You're probably wondering why I had them in a fictional American city if I had so many anime characters.  The reason is that I know how to fake an American city better than I can fake a Japanese city.  Also, it came with some great Fish Out of Water moments.  I also planned a series of recurring gags, like Ed not believing Percy is really a demigod, Bolin lusting after Kurumu while she lusts after Ed, Mizore and Al having weird skills they learned from late night TV, and much more.  

I could go on, but I'd be rambling.  Hey, it my blog and I can do whatever I please.  No, I should wrap it up.  Clearly, I was very excited about Adventures of the Silver Bullets.  I still think about it and get new ideas a lot.  Maybe I'll update it again some day, or maybe I'll post snippets of ideas here to the blog.  All isn't necessarily lost, however, I've recently commissioned some art based on the fanfic on Deviantart, and I've got to tell you I'm very excited and please with the results.  Expect that in a future post or two.  

Now that we've covered my FanFiction we can move on to my poems and prose I posted on Fictionpress.  That's a post for next time, and I'll see you then.  

PenJackson: A Traveler for Camp Half-Blood

Well, now that we've got the bad stuff out of the way we can move on to the great and the top notch.  My absolute pride and joys, as far as fanfiction is concerned, are Penjackson: A Traveler For Camp Half-Blood and The Adventures of The Silver Bullets.  We'll talk about Penjackson, my crossover between Percy Jackson and Pendragon, first.  However, we're going to need to cover some background before we get into that.

I'm willing to bet that most of you are familiar with Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or at the very least you've probably heard of it.  Conversely, I'm willing to wager that not all of you are familiar with DJ MacHale's Pendragon series; also known as The Pendragon Adventure and Pendragon: Journal of an Adventure Through Time and Space.  With that in mind, I'll do my best to summarize the Pendragon series.  

Pendragon follows the adventures of a boy named Bobby Pendragon, who discovers that he's a member of an organization of known as the Travelers.  Travelers use the tunnel/wormhole things known as flumes to travel to other worlds known as Territories.  Territories are other planets, located in other star systems, in other universes.  The Territories are part of Halla; all of existence, or the multiverse if you will.  Territories sooner or later reach a critical turning point, and it's the Traveler's job to insure that all goes well.  Or, to put in in Traveler terms, insure that this is the way it was mean to be. The Travelers are opposed by Saint Dane; an evil shapeshifting Traveler who wants to remake Halla in his twisted image.  

Each of the Territories is unique and has a different flavor to it.  Part of what I love about the books how this means there's something new to discover in each book.  We've Medieval and snowy Denduron, the tropical ocean world of Cloral, virtual reality addicted Veelox, jungle and cat dominated Eelong, the tribal warrior world of Zadaa, corporately controlled Quillan, and last but not least Ibara.  There are three Earth Territories, each representing Earth in a different time period.  First Earth in 1937, Second Earth in the present day and Third Earth in 5010.  The Travelers relate their adventures as a series of journals they send back to friends on their home Territories, known as acolytes.  

Now, at this point I feel I ought to warn you that from here on we're going to handle some potential spoilers for Pendragon, spoilers for my fanfic and possibly a few for Percy Jackson as well, so if you don't like that sort of thing I suggest that you stop reading this post right now.  

People who want to avoid spoilers gone?  Good, now then, let's get on with it.  Keep in mind, this was from a few years ago, there are spelling mistakes and the writing isn't as polished as my writing these days.  

So, my fanfic combining Percy Jackson and Pendragon is called PenJackson: A Traveler for Camp Half-Blood.  It follows Silena Beauregard, minor character and daughter of Aphrodite, as she discovers one night, after she meets Bobby Pendragon, that she is a Traveler.  How is this possible?  You see, there's been shifts in Halla.  Series of sub-territories have opened up; Territories within Territories, if you will.  As such, these new sub-territories have there own Travelers, and Silena is the traveler from Second Camp Half-Blood.  

This was the fanfic I really came into my own, and still remains one of the pride and joys of my fanfiction career.  It gave me experience writing from a female perspective, and I know it do sound a bit stereotypicaly girly at points, but Silena is a daughter of Aphrodite, and I had I made sequels like I intended that would have gotten smoothed out thanks to character development.  

I also feel I absolutely nailed it with the balance between the Pendragon and Percy Jackson elements.  The majority of the story is Pendragon with Percy Jackson elements added for flavor, while the bits set on Second Earth are Percy Jackson with Pendragon elements added for flavor.  The characters from both series find themselves in strange new worlds they don't fully understand, but they take it in stride and do their best to figure it out.  Both series serve to compliment each other without one overwhelming the other.  I also loved how I tied the series together with each other.  I had Beckendorf be from Stony Brook and know Mark, Courtney and Bobby from school.  I set the series after Battle of the Labarinth on the Percy Jackson end of things, and between The Quillian Games and The Pilgrims of Rayne on the Pendragon end of things.  

Besides monsters from Greek Mythology appearing across Halla, perhaps the biggest tying between the series was when I revealed that Aja Killian is a demigod; specifically, a daughter of Athena.  I figured she had the personality of an Athena-girl, and she always did kind of remind me of Annabeth.  Plus, her being an orphan let me conveniently avoid any issues with parentage.  Hey, if it happens on the Earth territories, why not on the other Territories?  

I had plans for at least two sequels, one titled Silena the Great and other titled The Half-Bloods of Halla (might have had to have split that one in two).  I got some of Silena the Great done, but I didn't like the direction it was going, and I never got around to fixing that.  We'll talk more about what could have been in future posts.  

Are there bit I wish I'd written differently and thing could could have been improved?  Is the writing not as polished as my writing now?  Sure, and there's spelling and grammar errors, but overall I'm very pleased with how A Traveler for Camp Half-Blood turned out.  At the end of the day, that all a fanfiction writer should really hope to achieve.  At the end of my day I could be happy with how it turned out. 

I've been gushing enough, but you should check out PenJackson: A Traveler for Camp Half-Blood.  Next time we'll talk about the other pride and joy of my fanfiction.  See you then.  

On My Fanfiction: The Not So Good

Remember how I said we'd talk about my fanfiction sooner or later?  Well, that's what we're talking about today.

I officially began writing Fanfiction around my junior year of high school, but I'd been unofficially writing it, if only in my mind, for as long as I can remember.  One of my fondest memories is a little story I once came up with where Hiccup Horrendous Hodock III, SpongeBob SquarePants and Avatar Anng all went back in time to meet young Genghis Khan.  I also remember another adventure where they went treasure hunting with Blackbeard.  Good times, but what about when I started writing down the stories?  

Like I said, I got an account on FanFiction my junior year of high school.  I still have that the account, but most of my old fanfiction have been deleted as I felt they weren't up to snuff.  Still, for all that they lacked I admit I still have a certain fondness for those old fanfics.  There are a few however, that I still regard as excellent despite certain faults they's still have, but that is a subject for another post.  

As for this post, we'll talk about those other fanfics I made.  Right off the bat I knew I was going to use Percy Jackson and the Olympians, one of my favorite series, but I also knew I'd be a crossover writer from the start.  Hey, why settle for just one series when you can have more than one?  Also, it's just fun to combine different series and see how the characters interact with each other.  My first attempt was a story combining Percy Jackson and Harry Potter.  This was probably one of the biggest mistakes I made in my fanfic career.  

As a child of the 90s I listened to the Harry Potter audiobooks like many people, and I appreciate the impact Harry had on fantasy and children's literature.  So don't get me wrong, I like Harry Potter, but only as a friend.  Percy Jackson, on the other hand, I absolutely love.  I know Percy forwards, backwards and inside-out.  Basically, I'm saying that I know how to write a Percy Jackson story a lot better than a I know how to write a Harry Potter story.  So then why did I include Harry Potter?  To be honest I'm not entirely sure myself, but it was my first fanfic, so of course there was bound to be a ton of mistakes.  

The story itself was entitled Percy Jackson meets Harry Potter and King Midas.  As you can see, I got the naming convention from that old Scooby-Doo series where Scooby and the gang team up with the celebrity of the week to solve mysteries.  A lot of my early fanfics focused on being funny and humor.  As such, a lot of this one was devoted to the humor of Harry having ADHD, references to The Hangover and Tropic Thunder, Malfoy being ambiguously gay and a thespian, and Chiron coming out of the closet and kissing Dumbledore.  And all of this was interspersed with a plot to stop the Deatheaters from taking over Camp Half-Blood.  

It had it's ups and downs, and paled in comparison to my later works, but I like to think it was still pretty good for a first try, and that it brought laughs and put smiles on people's faces.  All the same, I did eventually get rid of it as part of a Spring Cleaning of my FanFiction account.

My next fanfic started out combing Percy Jackson and Marvel comics, but quickly degenerated into me railing against how much the Percy Jackson movie sucked and how much Chris Columbus had completely butchered a much beloved series.  Hey, it was a dark time for Percy Jackson fans.  A beloved series had just been butchered to the deepest pit of Tartarus and back by a man who admitted in an interview that he didn't even read the books; they just didn't care, indeed.  

I needed a way to vent and cope; we all did quite frankly.  Obviously, it too was on the chopping block eventually.  Another fanfic I made was basically Marvel 1602 but with Percy Jackson, Harry Potter and any other series I could cram in.  This one suffered from the inclusion of Harry Potter (noticing a pattern here?) and trying to juggle way to many series for my own good.  That and trying to cram way too many plotlines into the same story.

Another issue was that I had most of the nation's convert to either the Greek pantheon, Egyptian pantheon or some illy defined wizard religion.  I had the demigods represent the Catholic nations (Spain was, arguably, the Heart of the West at the time) and wizards represent the Protestant nations as an allegory to the European wars of religion.  As you can imagine, Christian readers didn't take it very well.  

For all its faults it had plenty of memorable moments.  I haven't actually deleted this one yet, but that is subject to change.  We'll wrap this up by talking about one last fanfic of mine.  This one, for all its faults, I just can't bring myself to delete.  I'm just too fond of it.  It's Percy Jackson: The Last Puppetbender.  Yeah, it's pretty much Avatar: The Last Puppetbender but with Percy Jackson references and with some of the jokes altered for the sake of differentiation.  

Sure, it was silly and there's spelling and grammatical mistakes in places, but it still puts a smile on my face when I reread it. I had a few other ideas over the years, Clone High with fictional characters, Percy Jackson vs. Day of the Barney, but I deleted them before they got too far.  

Now that we've got my not so good fanfics out of the way, we can talk about my pride and joys, but we will do that next time.