Copywork, Word Count, and a Little Bit of (Sailor) Nothing (Stephen Gagnes, 2000)

Kind of a disjointed rambling on several topics here.

Earlier this year, I started going copywork some nights, especially if I wasn't feeling up to regular writing. It's an old way to practice writing at pretty much all levels. From basic practicing handwriting/typing (the mechanical act of copying) up to doing analysis and practicing your own writing. Basically, pick a piece that you like and rewrite/type it.

Handwriting is more traditional, but I mostly type. It's easier to do comments that way, and one of the pieces I'm doing is heavily formatted. I'd have to get a whole stack of different pens or something to try to do it justice.

Sailor Nothing by Stephen "Twoflower" Gagnes started in 2000. It was published ~monthly until it wrapped up in 2001. It was a hugely popular fic back in the aughts, that's become controversial with age. Short version:

1. It's fairly graphic in a way that was popular at the time, but frowned upon now. There's some level of sexual assault (mostly implied or attempted, no actual sex scenes) in most or all of the chapters.

2. It exists in this weird limbo of "not really a Sailor Moon fanfic" and also "set in Japan, but misses details and is obviously Western." I like to think of it as a sort of meta-fanfic of fanfiction from the period. Of course it takes place in Japanifornia, that was the style of the time!

I'm one chapter in. I think it mostly still holds up.

Quick notes/summary on Ch 1:

  Shoutan Himei is Sailor Salvation. She's aided by her talking pet cat (Dusty) and berated by her "Kamen" Magnificent Kamen. Around age 11, he gave her the ability to transform, and she's been fighting the Yamiko (people's repressed badsides turned into monster clones) for the last five years. She's very tired. After ripping a Yamiko apart with her bare hands (instead of using her attacks) one too many times, he "fires" her. She thinks she's depowered and going to live a normal life. She's not, she's just Sailor Nothing now, so her transformation is dark and grungy and her attacks change.

We also meet her "friend" Aki, who is mostly just mooching her homework. She's a member of the fashion club. She gets character development later.

A couple other characters get name dropped.

It's very web fiction. There's font and color changes, simulated IM chats, etc., etc. It gets more elaborate later.

 Having reread it a bit more slowly this time, I think the writing is pretty decent. There's a fair number of proofreading errors, but nothing horrendous. I think Gagnes is an excellent visual writer:

Television’s warm glow acts as a demi-omnidirectional light source. The colored, shifting lamplight of televisions expands out from the rectangular screen to light what’s just above it, just below it, and what’s in front of it… light spreading rather than simply directing itself along one vector. Yet, it only can light things generally in front of it… the dim patches of wall and floor behind it have to survive on the leftovers of radiosity, light bouncing off the objects of the room and back again.

I'll be poking my way through the rest over time, as I'm apparently on a magical girl kick at the moment.

For reasons that probably made sense at the time, I did a little comparison of the opening chapter lengths, post frequency, etc. of some different web serials:

But first, I tried to have AI find the word count. That seemed like the kind of pointless busywork it's supposed to be good for. The AI numbers are in parenthesis, and are (respectively) slightly more than half and almost double the correct answers for the first two.

Sailor Nothing:12800 (7400) 1/month? 

Worm: 2900 (4200) 2/week 

DCC: 3750 (3350) 5/week (bundled)

Once you account for the different cadence (monthly vs semiweekly) Sailor Nothing and Worm are pretty close. Dungeon Crawler Carl is substantially faster, but he's also a full time professional. It's also garbage and filler heavy, but that's its own thing.