On Monday, August 26, 2002, at 09:11  PM, Gary Kleppe wrote:

     In the middle of the clearing sat a girl meditating in the lotus
position.  She was an exotic beauty; unbound purple hair cascading

I strongly suggest you avoid using goofy hair colors in a prose story.

In anime, you can have details that everybody understands are just eye
candy. In prose, details are expected to matter. If you described a
character as having abnormally huge eyeballs, the readers would wonder
how and why they got that way, and would expect people looking at those
eyeballs to at least view them as strange (unless such eyeballs are the
norm in your world, in which case you've got even more explaining to
do.)

If such eyeballs are the norm in a fictional world, you have absolutely 
no explaining to do, since from the characters' point of view it's 
perfectly normal, and you'd have no reason to mention it. The same goes 
for hair colors. Anime characters HAVE goofy-colored hair, and if you 
are writing about anime characters, it's silly to avoid giving them 
goofy-colored hair in some attempt at lending "legitimacy" to your prose.

I strongly recommend using goofy hair colors in anime fanfiction.

I'm not really saying that the shows' creators really do expect you to 
believe that everyone has huge eyes and black lines along the front edge 
of their noses. But hair color I do not put in the same category.

You might as well say that characters don't really glow blue or green or 
red when they're emotional, or that they don't actually pull mallets or 
microphones or out of nowhere, or that they don't actually have 
transformation sequences or long attack phrases, or that they don't 
really bound across rooftops or crash through solid walls and get up to 
fight again, because people in the real world and in standard prose 
stories never do such things. But these things are possible and expected 
in anime settings, and so are goofy hair colors. (And in fact a lot of 
those things, *including* goofy hair colors at times for various 
reasons, are not unknown in non-anime prose genres.)

Amazon, Xian Pu."

That's not her name. It's given clearly in the original series as "Shan
Pu." (And Mousse and Cologne are Mu Si and Ke Lun, FYI.)

In pinyin, there is no sound spelled with the letter digraph "sh." The 
"sh" sound is spelled with the letter "x." Japanese doesn't spell with 
roman letters either, so it is most definitely not given clearly as 
"shan pu" in the original (unless it's spelled somewhere in romaji that 
I'm not aware of). If you find someone who knows Mandarin you should be 
able to affix a pinyin spelling to the kanji for their names; you might 
look at other Chinese languages and romanization schemes as well, as we 
do not know which of the languages called "Chinese" they speak.

backed up against the elders.  Now that she was closer she saw that 
they
too were transparent.  Taking a deep breath, Shampoo hoped she'd be
able to pass right through them, but as she backed up they raised their
staffs and fenced her in; these spirits would see that she faced the 
law.

staves (I think)

Either one. Merriam-Webster's (www.m-w.com) gives "staffs" first and 
"staves" second; "staves" appears to be less widely used nowadays.

Peter


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