Thorn Wilde

I've been meaning to do NaNoWriMo for years, but I never got around to it. November always seems to be a bad month for me. So when I heard about Camp NaNoWriMo this year, I decided this was my chance. So, in April, I finished and rewrote Nemesis. And I won! I'm sort of giddy and very pleased with myself right now.

You'll find out in... three chapters. Thank you for reading and reviewing and being supportive! <3

Wouldn't you like to know? At any rate, you'll find out some time tomorrow. Thanks for still reading!

Hi, I'm Thorn. I like chocolate and kittens, and my friends say I'm like a living, breathing Wikipedia.

CHAPTER FIVE Bulletproof Cupid Nick didn’t dare open his eyes until he could hear Dave getting back on his bike and cycling away from him, afraid of what feelings they might betray if he did. His breathing came fast, in ragged pulls, and his heart was racing. At last he opened his eyes and stared into the darkness after the retreating back of the boy on the bicycle. He felt a single tear slide down his cheek, and he shivered, pulling the jacket tighter around himself. Dave’s ja

Never watched either. I may have skipped Buffy back then, but last summer I decided to watch it and got so hooked I watched all 7 seasons (plus all 5 seasons of Angel) in just over a month, and then proceeded to rewatch it five times more. I get kind of obsessive sometimes...

Wow, thank you so much! Those are kind words indeed. I'm honoured that you took the time to write such a well thought out (not to mention poetic) review.

Thanks for reviewing! Weird was kind of the goal.

Thank you so much! Makes me very happy that you thought so.

That's a story for someone else to write, I think. Our narrator definitely has some psychopathic tendencies. Makes you wonder what else in his life might have caused him to be that way. After all, all we get is a series of moments, all of the narrator's firsts, snippets instead of a full picture. There is of course also the question of whether his actions are really cruel or kind. Even though they are selfish in the extreme, he is still giving as much as he takes. Thanks for reviewing! <3

Poor Dave, he doesn't know what to think or how to feel... It's not so easy being him, either. And yeah, Craig is a very mean and violent drunk. One might say he's got issues.

Submitting the next chapter in a minute. Yeah, Craig's a piece of work, to put it mildly.

They can both be painfully English at times, really.

I was rarely that kid at parties, but only because I wasn't smart enough to keep my mouth shut and my head down, lol!

Haha, I'm glad! Don't want things to be too obvious, obviously...

I never watched Fulmetal Alchemist. I used to have a real problem watching things that other people gushed over. I was sort of an entertainment-hipster in my teens. Other things I avoided because people I knew (people I didn't necessarily respect, mind you) loved them included Naruto, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Friends. I was a snob.

Before I started rewriting Nemesis, I plotted it out in detail, chapter by chapter, which is something I've never done before and which was very helpful. However, as I wrote the content of each chapter, parts of the plot that I'd so carefully constructed started to change, because the characters wanted to go in a different direction from how I'd set them to go. I know that some writers plot their novels in painstaking detail (Connie Willis can take two years on just that) and once they start writing they know exactly what's going to happen, they own the characters and everything goes according to plan. Not me, it seems.

Oh, I forgot to mention my first great love where anime's concerned, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Giant mecha with a bit of a twist. That was a truly awesome show!

I started writing Nemesis a decade or so ago. While the essence of the story was the same, so many things about it have changed. Back then, Dave's name was Leo. Leo was a far more aggressive, macho type of character than Dave. When I began to rewrite the story from the beginning, a bit less than three years ago, I found that Leo had changed so drastically as to be almost unrecognisable, and his name had to change. Dave just felt right, somehow. Nick has always mirrored me, to a certain extent. When I created him, at fourteen, his big interests were anime and Harry Potter. He wrote poetry and would, in some sort of dramatic gesture, recite the poetry out loud to himself. But the Nick I write now is a songwriter rather than a poet, his great passion is music and his favourite book is, just like mine, American Gods. He's also much better as standing up for himself, quicker and cleverer. I was always terrible at clever comebacks when I was in school, and if It hadn't been for my friends I wouldn't have made it through those years. But Nick doesn't have any friends. It was suddenly clear to me that he needed some more street smarts if he were to survive school without the safety net of friends. So, instead of being the sad loser that everyone picked on, Nick had to become a loner by choice. A non-conformist. Not good at making friends, but getting by without them. In the original story, Leo was very much superior in every respect. However, Dave meets Nick half-way. They're more evenly matched. The minor characters have also evolved. They were, originally, far flatter, and the antagonists didn't really have motivations. That all changed when I took a leaf out of Neil Gaiman's book, literally. Neil says in his introduction to American Gods that when he wasn't sure what was going to happen next, he wrote one of the Coming to America stories (stories about how people ended up taking their gods, superstitions and deities with them to the new world), and when he'd finished, he knew exactly what was supposed to happen in the main story. Whenever I wasn't sure who a minor character was or what their motivations were, I sat down and began penning a short story exploring that character's origins or an episode from his or her life, and when that story was finished, I suddenly knew exactly what that character would do in any given situation. I call the collection of these short stories Hubris. I shall leave you (if anyone is reading this at all) with the rather embarrassing first paragraph of the original Nemesis, exactly as I wrote it ten years ago: There are many small towns in this world, where everyone knows each other and no one's a stranger. If you would ask any of the residents of one particular suburban small-town who the two boys Leo and Nick were, this is the response you'd most likely receive: Whoever it was would get a faraway look in their eyes and chuckle slightly before turning to you and saying, "Don't even get me started on those two!" Because there wasn't a single soul in this town who didn't know the names of the two archenemies Leo Thomas and Nick Davies. Cheerio! Going to sleep now.

CHAPTER FOUR Bruise Pristine It had only just gone nine and Nick really didn’t feel like going home yet. Zoë was spending the evening at home with her boyfriend, Craig, and Nick didn’t want to be in the way, or walk in on something he’d rather not see. Besides, he didn’t want to come home drunk and his head was still spinning. So he just wandered around town for a while, trying to sober up. Windfield Green was almost entirely empty, though he could hear chattering and music fro

I only just discovered Soul Eater. One of my friends showed it to me a couple of weeks ago. I just LOVE Death the Kid! So funny! Cowboy Bebop is one of the ones I watched back in my teens. I loved it so much! Wanted to marry Spike.

Oh my god, it's been ages since I watched that! I absolutely loved it. I used to attend anime screenings at my local university every Friday when I was in my teens, I watched that there. Which of the ones I mentioned was your favourite, btw?

This was a lovely poem. I have a friend in Boston, but she was luckily not around when it happens. Scary, though...

Oh! How unexpected!

You probably have a point with that, but Mel's commentary is important in a different respect. You'll see soon enough. Thanks for reviewing again! <3