Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Stuck as an Angel

Can you love and hate at the same time?


So I tried to cap some last night, but just couldn't get anything moving.  I was hoping that I could get into the mood by making a fun quicky, then use that energy to make a cap for Angel, as she was next on my trade list.  Even chatting with Simone, sharing pictures back and forth, and getting her encouraging ideas couldn't start a spark.

Well that't not fully true.  I could get a spark, but just couldn't breath it into a full fledged capping fire.  I'm not sure I can finish the cap I was trying to make, so I may as well share it here.  This is the image that I was working from (as you can see, I started to throw it into a design, but hadn't done more than make the 'border'):


the idea that came to me the first time I saw this picture was this.  A guy is jealous of his friend's family money.  He works out a way to change into him, not realizing that his friend was just about to be transformed into a a prim and proper daughter.

I think that was interesting, but Simone had a better idea.  The two guys are just friends, but the rich parents don't trust the poor kid.  So they transform him into a prim and proper lady for their son.

I REALLY liked this idea.  I could go with a soft and loving style (he realizes that being his friends girlfriend/wife would let them be closer than they ever could be as buddies), or darker and scarier (he hates that he is transformed, but when he tells his buddy about what his parents did, his buddy just laughs and tells him that he knew all about it.)

But when I opened up word.... nothing.  I had a ghost of a story, and a couple different emotional impacts, but I couldn't get those out into words.  So after struggling with it for awhile, I just saved the Photoshop file and moved on.  No capping that night.

That brings me to this morning.  I was now in a capping mood, but when I brought this image back up... it felt old.  Stale.  I had already experienced the emotional highs that I had last night, and now just had no interest in writing it out.  In fact, even though I probably COULD write it out, I would probably just screw it up, and it would never match what was in my head.

But that didn't diminish the fact that I was ready to cap.  So instead of building me up with a quicky, I just dove into Angel's cap.  When I went searching for an image (btw, I'm still loving on http://fuskator.com/, and am starting my image searches there instead of Google Images), I found this:


I thought it was damned sexy! The fact that I can't see her eyes, lets me put a lot of different emotions into her facial expression.  Lust? Horror? Desire? Fear?  I could make them all work with the right words.  Now it didn't exactly give me an idea for a story, but it worked with one that I had in the back of my head for awhile now.  Going back in time to distract someone, and therefore change the 'present' and 'future'.  I guess I got this idea from Stephen King's newer book "11/22/63" that I'm currently reading.

So I started to flesh out the idea.  Eric in the 'present' is confronted by his future self.  His future self tells him that he has the chance to change history... that he could go back to some horrible point in time (I didn't have a specific event in mind), and stop it from happening by distracting someone.  But the only way to distract him was to give him what he truly wanted... a sexy lover.

Now for some odd reason, I pictured 'Eric' traveling back in time and taking the body of a woman that this person loved.  He would take over his life and instead of spurring him, would make mad passionate love to him.  But when I double checked Angel's preferences to make sure this would work, I realized that Angel doesn't like bodyswaps.  Technically this wouldn't be a body swap, but he would be taking a woman's life over... and that's what Angel doesn't like.

So instead of modifying the idea, I just scrapped it.  But I kept up with the images.  As I looked at them, I thought that the series overall would make a very good loving story.  The woman in the pictures looks like she is happy to be there... but at the same time the guy in the pictures just strikes me as an ass hole.  Someone who looks like he is taking advantage of this girl.

So I started thinking of making it an oblivious style cap.  I know Angel likes those.  And if I could have selected a single image, I may have just done that.  But I couldn't pick.  I honestly felt that any of the images could work.  And as I kept looking at the images the 'oblivious' idea I had started to change.  What if Eric was trapped inside this willing beauty?  What would he be thinking as this man (ah ha!  not this man... his friend!), took advantage?

That got the engines running up into the read and for the next few hours I kept flipping between writing, and designing.  I would get a line or two out of Angel's actions, then go into Photoshop and place some of the photos.  I would then go back into Word and add Eric's thoughts to what I had written previously, only to go back into Photoshop and work on the background image.  Back and forth, back and forth.  This is a little odd for me, as I generally write large chunks of the story, then go through almost all the design work in one swipe.

But I think this disjointed style of writing worked... Eric's voice SHOULD sound disjointed.  There is a scene going on around (and in) him that he really has no part of, leaving him to have half thoughts and expressions of disgust.  The rest of the story was easy to pick up... it was just describing what I saw in the photos, telling how Angel adored her lover, and wanted to make him feel as good as he made her feel.  And of course the last quote from Calvin, wrapping up the story (I actually wrote that quote early in the writing part, knowing that it would go last).

Ironically I never did use the image that started all of this.  But even without it, I really like this cap.  I hope Angel likes it as much as I liked creating it.

Oh, and just a quick aside... according to blogger I've only topped 100,000 page views in a month once.  That was back in February of 2011.  But I can now say that I've hit that mark twice.  Last month all of you created 106,409 pageviews!  Thank you all for reading or at least viewing the caps!

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