Just uploaded near-exact copies here of the characters I introduced to SoFurry late this morning. And if you think that by combining the two of them you'd be able to approximate my mindset and attitude, well, you'd be annoyingly right :P

I really try to be better, but I just want to regress most of the time. And goof off spending 4-plus hours writing up the backstory for characters who've been annoying me forever, the rest of it.

I once thought I could make Chrysi (ComicChrysi as the strip would have referred to her) in particular into a profitable little vixen, but that ship sailed when I didn't have anything up by 2009. Short of a "literary-agent-to-the-literary-agent' hypothesis, it'd be really hard to get a comic going now that's presented as though it's being drawn in 2005 or '06; were i to try I can just imagine two massive problems. First, that I always wanted to write semi-topical humor (else why a webcomic? I mean, we're talking a medium where even Berke Breathed gets his hyper-topical work up as soon as it's done, and later than what would be expected from any other type of creator, but a large part of the reason is that he has to be in position to experience the topicality of whatever he's after, That's a big part of the appeal (particularly considering that I'd still be prone to schedule slip, particularly if I had to draw my own work, and that's more forgivable in people ripping their gags from the headlines) gone by the wayside because I didn't get going soon enough. (As for why they have to be picked up on sometime in the first decade, suffice it to say that Kat's father–Chrysi's legal father–managed to leave Kat exceedingly pissed, particularly when the REMote wave was being shaped and unleashed. And he spent the first several years of the century being flown coast-to-coast on business trips. Plus the REMote's need to undo two deaths of people Kat wanted to be a lot closer to her, and that ineviable need for Death's books to be balanced…I think you can judge where this is going without my holding your hand any further.)

And then there's the additional issue that yes, I lived the 2000s. Probably significantly more so than a generous segment of the fandom, considering that your average listener/viewer of, say, Furcast has never lived in a world where it was acceptable for people to just come through whatever door of the school they wanted, no matter the time of day, as long as they were either a student or somewhat expected by the faculty member in that area. Nor have they ever seen a view of the Twin Towers that wasn't recorded significantly earlier than they saw it. But that's a double-edged sword; anything I have living memory of, particularly if it happened after I left school and is thus less prone to being pinned into place in my brain by just what I was spending most of my days doing, I'm likely to conflate as 'being relatively recent'. And that, in a period work, is an invitation for a lot of anachronism and very little of it creative.

But ComiChrysi and her family still keep crying out to me half my nights. The only things bothering me worse are a pair of alt-Potterverse-history plotbunnies, one with just enough tie to JKR's universe that I've been wasting the last year trying to file enough of the serial numbers to make it possible to profit off it rather than just losing sleep (hey, any budding saviour-of-the-universe could be so frustrated by how vulnerable the mundanes among us are to wizardry as to say "NO. MORE. MUNDIES," at just the time that a wish-granting being or device is in position to grant it…by granting every last human in the world a magic core!), the other unfortunately definitely FF.N and AoOO territory forever, thanks to it coming from the 'on' of Dumbledore and Harry's final conversation being a literal train. Specifically, one that morphs into (well, a facsimile of–we're not so much time-traveling as being dropped non-linearly into an afterlife that largely approximates the first one) the Hogwarts Express from their first year. No matter when that first year was, and for anyone who was aware of the magical world. And the newly-minted kids in this afterlife maintain all the memories of their first one. Yeah, probably not spoiling too much to say it's a last-chance testing ground for the ones who screwed up royally in terms of going Dark during the first one.

But I digress, the point here isn't to try to appeal to Pottermorians, the point is that I'm being driven almost mad by these living, breathing people in my head, whose adventures I'm still witnessing (though not so much actively shaping as I would have been had I got the chance to do the comic. Bringing Chrysi's legal father back from the dead as her (KID!) full-sister (a form s/he'd remain in even if somehow relieved of that body too) , even the 'how do I become a necromancer' jokes that lead into it; this sort of thing has haunted (no pun intended) half the time I'm awake and a decent portion of the time I'm asleep. And if nothing else, I've gotten their names into your heads now (Well, OK, not Ray/Rae's yet. I'm probably going to offer that little calico as an auction character because I really don't like playing too far away from my own RL personality :P) and you might be interested in seeing what I do with them. Ugh, without illustrations. On a series in which I would have been requesting more sight gags than your average week of Bill Holbrook strips.

And even this was mainly just posted to get the thoughts off my head. Though I honestly hope someone sees it someday and asks what I can do to get CCW going or something ;-

And incidentally a pen-name of a pen-name (you didn't honesty think my legal last name is Cat, didja?) is exactly what I hope to use it for IRL as well.

I don't have too many followers yet, but besides my political rants I've also spent way too much time making it perfectly well-known that Chrysi Cat would rather not spend any time not sucking a pacifier and wrappeid in absorbent padding. And that's probably more than enough to assure that if they knew Chrysi Cat and her pen-name were the same people, I'd probably be in for at the best no sales and at the worst a Moral Majority attempt on my financial life :-P