On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, Jamie and Bridget Wilde wrote:

Woo-hoo! C&C!  ...Most grammatical fixes/typos have been noted and 
snipped for now, as well as anything that didn't really require any
response.

Vincent Seifert wrote:

{YAAAAY! *ahem* Excuse me. But I was afraid that this one was
back-burnered indefinitely, and I'm really glad to see more of it.}

Thanks!  I do try to come out with at least one chapter a year :)

*whimper*
 

Ranma Monogatari
a Ranma 1/2 fanfiction
by Bridget E. Wilde

Previous parts available at http://www.psn.net/~wildeman/bridget.htm

Part 7

The beetle was new to the world, its glistening black carapace
still slightly soft and sticky with the residue of its pupal stage ^�

{Something non-ASCII creeping in there... a comma? emdash?}

At this point, I've had this chapter on so many (&^$*^&%$ word processors
that I don't even know which to blame for this and the indents... This is
what I get for not proofing it in Wordpad first! 

I'd like to recommend PFE to you and to anyone else who is having problems
with non-ASCII characters creeping into their submissions to newsgroups or
mailing lists.  Programmers' File Editor is a freeware program that just
does ASCII, and does it very well.  It's not suitable for composition,
because its wordwrap isn't transparent, but it's very good for going over
a file before you send it out.

I use it for composing C&C.  :)

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe/

journey.  He could only be grateful that the oxen pulling the cart
seemed to have only one speed: slow.  He shuddered to think what might
have happened had they been in second gear.

{heh.  I love the image of an oxcart with a stick-shift.  :) }

Of course, when you start to think about what sort of mechanism you
could use to get them to go faster... ouch!

The sharpened-stick shift did occur to me.  :)
 

 He glanced over his
shoulder once, at the sullenly respectful faces of his own entourage,
and the round, sympathetic expression on Koremitsu's face, before the

sympathetic expression on Koremitsu's round face, {perhaps? not quite
sure what image you're trying to evoke here...}

I think I was originally going to say "round, sympathetic face of
Koremitsu" and changed directions midstream... Just what would a round
expression be, anyhow? 

"The Scream" springs immediately to mind, but that doesn't fit...
 

battle.  He had to escape; one was sure to win soon, and he couldn't
decide which would be worse, the lady or the cat.

{It's a little tiny tiger!  :) }

For a while I was debating whether this was too cheap of a shot - but 
then I remembered that no shot is ever too cheap :)

We're amateurs.  We can't afford expensive shots.  :)

End Part 7

AARGH!  Darn cliffhangers!  I will have my revenge, I swear it.  :)
Yes, I know it's the right place to break between chapters, but... argh.

Well, I hope part 8 comes easily.

I'm sure I'll have it by next June. :P

*whimper again*
 

The Reikeiden Lady may look like Shampoo, and glomp like Shampoo, but
she sounds more like Kodachi. I can't help thinking that the Lady of the
Evening Faces will be much more easily recognizable when we meet her...

I'd think so... The speech problem was definitely one of the big tie-ups
with this story - and not one I'm sure I successfully solved.  But at
the same time, Shampoo has such a distinctively... exuberant... way of
speaking, that didn't really translate well to the Reikeiden Lady, or to
the Heian Period.  One of the main issues being that in this period,
Japanese is her first language so there's no resorting to either comic
errors or accent.

Yes.  I couldn't think of a way around that either.  A glomp is pretty
much the same in any time, though, I suppose.  :)  The cat-motif
sustituted adequately for the curse, and I just knew the Reikeiden Lady
didn't have a curse when Ranma reached for the bucket.  I was glad to see
my feeling confirmed.  A wonderful scene.  :) 

Hopefully the Lady of the Evening Faces will be easier to write as well as
easier to recognize.  "Kodachi" will fit right in -- or think she does. 
:) 


Vince Seifert    Network Analyst     seifertv@csus.edu
Techie: http://webpages.csus.edu/~seifertv/
Fanfic: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/seifertv/toth/
CSUS hired me to build their LANs, not to give away the homeworld.