Lisa the Legend: Chapter 82 - Last Night on Earth now up! (24th June 2013)

[Gavin Luper]

Hey Charles, thanks for the reply! I wasn't sure if you were still reading or if you had disappeared. Good to hear you're catching up. Yes, I too like Aipom, despite the fact that he's inherently irritating as hell. Lisa somehow puts up with him; I imagine that Gavin's pretty much sick of him by this stage, though.

The plans continue! Without any evidence that sounds like an empty statement! But they do!

EDIT 2/8/07: I finally did the contents page! At long last! Now I realise why I put off doing it for so long: it took me, quite seriously, almost six hours to link all the chapters to the first post in this thread and make a nice, new, neat, shiny table of contents for all of us to enjoy. During that time I also made stacks of notes for the fic, edited almost all of the chapter titles (they had a crappy old format) and changed many of those titles, too (the new titles of which are old to me, but I never revised them online, so they will be new to you), and named each book of Lisa the Legend (somewhat dubiously, but I'm reasonably happy with the result). I also merged the old 'Prologue' with the first chapter, and additionally did a revamp of chapters 1 through 4: they now have proper spacing between paragraphs, (mostly) proper grammar and also there have been several new passages slipped into them that might make for interesting reading if you feel like it. It's mostly things that delve slightly deeper into Lisa's thoughts or add a touch more detail and realism than was there before, nothing fancy. Possibly the most important/interesting addition was in Chapter 3, where Lisa's background is actually mentioned properly, and Tuscany and Charmaine are spoken of early in the fic, which makes much more sense than the first reference to them being much later. Anyway, I hope you guys find the new contents cool and helpful: I definitely have already.

Also, during my travels through just about every post in this thread tonight, I discovered that Chapter 48 still suffers from a technical glitch we had back in 2004, which has skewed some speech marks, apostrophes and the like. I'll get around to fixing that as soon as I can, probably tomorrow night. I'd do it now, but I've yet to get document containing Lisa the Legend on the hard drive of this new computer. Plus, it's half-past two in the morning and I have Uni work to do tomorrow - not to mention I'm pretty damn tired.

Goodnight!

EDIT II: All fixed!

EDIT III - 23rd September: It didn't feel right to revive the whole thread just to post this. I just did a bit of a rework of the first chapter, nothing very major but it possibly reads better now. Hope you enjoy it if you decide to reread it. I've had a slow-burning epiphany with Chapter 62 over the past few days, so that's changing shape now. But it's coming soon. My planning continues, also - I'm sorry it's taking so long! Cheers!

[Master Kirby]

Hi Gavin. Its been quite a while since I posted here last, but I finally got around to reading the new chapter. I have a computer at my new job, so I was able to read during my lunch hour.

While the emotions may have been a little uncharacteristic of Lisa, they do a good job in showing you that she is just a normal teenage girl. She has been through a lot over the past months (months for her, years for us), and while she seems to have adjusted well, she is still human. Now that she has let out all her guarded secrets she will probably feel less of a mental/emotional burden when she reenters the world.

I agree with Lance, that it would be a good idea for Gavin to train his Psychic powers. If it is inevitable that he will be attacked by the legendary psychic, he will need to know how to defend himself. He has teleported a few times, and I remember him using a kind of psychic attack in the past (was it during a real big pokemon competition where someone's pokemon was trapped in the frozen water arena? dratini maybe?). If he is able to construct a kind of psychic forcefield and perfect his teleportation, that would help a lot whenever he is attacked.

I'm glad to hear that you are planning out the future chapters. Hopefully they won't take as long to write if you have the general plot figured out ahead of time. I'm looking forward to these future chapters. It will be interesting to follow Lisa and Gavin as they head out on their separate paths.

[Gavin Luper]

Master Kirby: I hoped you would come back! I saw that you hadn't been around since June, and wondered if you'd left us for good. Thanks for reading and replying once again.

The further away we move from Chapter 61, the more it feels like a real anomaly to me: it definitely was quite uncharacteristic in a number of ways. But what you said - "Now that she has let out all her guarded secrets she will probably feel less of a mental/emotional burden when she reenters the world" (and about showing Lisa as a normal teenage girl) - was exactly what I was aiming for with that chapter. It's just that I didn't carry it off very well, but at the time I thought it was all right. Oh well. You live, you learn.

Yup, Lance is a very clever leader, so he's got a whole lot of schemes going on behind the scenes. One of them is to work out exactly what Gavin's relevance to the Legend (and therefore, the Guard's plans) is; and of course, to help him master his psychic powers. As to the time you referred to in your post, that was at the Water Colosseum in (I think...) Chapter 15; and yeah, I think it was Dratini and Anna's Psyduck who were trapped. Good observation about Gavin, too: mastering his powers would be hugely beneficial, not just for him, but for the rest of the Guard.

To be honest I'm not sure how much of Gavin's journey will be shown ... we'll have to wait and see. Anyway, thanks very much for returning, mate; and I hope to see you back for the future chapters. (Btw - nice call about the 'months for her, years for us' ... We're coming up on six years now. It's terrifying.)

UPDATE

Everyone: Howdy. I think it's about time I shared some actual news of progress with you. Since July I've been fairly vague, so here's something a bit more quantifiable. For my plans for this last book of Lisa the Legend, I've basically split the book into 9 sagas, which are comprised of 2-4 chapters each (do the math if you want an extremely rough idea of how many chapters we'll be ending up with). These sagas are used purely for my sake as I write the book, just so it feels less onerous than embarking upon a massive novel; it breaks it up into achievable chunks. To give you a rough idea of how my planning is going, I've essentially done the planning for 7 of the book's 9 sagas. So I'm getting quite close to finishing the planning stage now. One or two of those sagas need some tweaking, and there's something giving me issues around chapter 67/8, but apart from that, I'm pleased to say it's shaping up really nicely.

I'm at the point now where the next step is to begin planning out the details of the Endgame of the whole fic - the big finale or whatever you want to call it - which is going to be heaps of fun and also quite difficult, I reckon, because it's so involved and full-on. But I'm excited nonetheless, because it's all falling into place now. And lately I've been getting more of an overview of the fic as a whole, and it's really helped to get that sort of "omniscient" perspective. For a long time I've been writing this with almost the same naivete that Lisa once had: now I feel like I'm getting a better grasp on how the world really runs (Lisa's world that is), and her place in it - and indeed, her character itself.

I hope that's a bit more satisfying to read than "planning going well" or whatever it is I usually say. Rest assured this fic is going to be charging onward once again very soon - I wouldn't be doing all this work for nothing! I'm flat out with exams until late November, but then I have three months off for the summer, and I intend to do a great amount of writing in that time.

Chapter 62 sits at just under 3000 words at the moment, but that doesn't mean much, because a lot of it will be changing. Anyway - thanks for being so patient guys (you know, assuming at least a few of you are still floating around somewhere) and sorry for taking so damn long to produce something!

Cheers!

[Karania]

After what seems like an eternity I'm finally back, been completely way too busy to even begin to describe it with school... I found upon my return at least four maybe five chapters that cropped up in my absence, which I think really are good, will definately take some more time to reexamine certain parts for things I may have missed, but I'll defiantley be around more now that my life has basically settled out finally. Though in any case, keep up the good work!

~Karania