http://clampfix.fanworks.net/x-fix/stupidnotes.txt </head><body><pre>Or: When Perfectly Simple Plotlines Go Horribly Wrong I'll try to restrain my ranting, but forgive me for one second. ARGH! How could this happen? Why wouldn't it stop? Why? Why? Why? Okay, I feel better now. Basically, this story started out as a relatively simple one: Hey, what if I swapped Hokuto for Subaru? And was intended to concentrate on the relationship between Hokuto and Sei-chan. And then I just had to get clever. I blame the spirit of Hokuto - if she HAD been here instead of Subaru, she WOULD have gotten into everything and everyone. Continuity suddenly became a crucial factor and I absolutely HAD to include every event and every person. This was mistake number one. Mistake number two was thinking that concentrating on two characters but still having them interact with all of the OTHER characters would be possible. No. I definitely now have a better understanding of why it's so hard to write film scripts with five or six main characters. And finally mistake number three was bringing in the CCD crew - which is why this story has a side story to explain how that happened. I've more or less stuck to the actual continuity of X, with one major difference (Sei-chan! *sniffle*), and I have to say it's been very challenging working within that. The other weird thing about this story was the development of its "moral", which was a surprise to me. The "moral", of course, was Hokuto's oft-repeated lesson that one should not give up on happiness just because of possible future sadness. Something some of the X crew should certainly keep in mind. (SUBARU!!! I AM looking at you!). I'd also like to apologise for the X-movie-like way in which I rapidly disposed of a whole lot of characters, but they just had to go. And I thought it was mean not to say how they died. This sort of thing is why the story kept growing. I would particularly like to apologise to Sorata, who I truly wanted to save, but in the end had to kill off. It wasn't personal, I just couldn't think of a way to save you. Anyway, I hope everyone enjoyed the story and noone was too confused. It certainly wound up being more disjointed than I intended overall, and I'm considering going through the whole thing and smoothing it out a bit by removing some conversations and some attention to characters which slowed the plot down. For example, most of part four could go. Anyway, it's now 3.11 in the morning over here, so I should probably stop rambling on and boring everyone. However, before I go there are two people who I must acknowledge. Dreams of Sakura and Truth have been the most supportive readers and most persistent enquirers for the duration of this story and I'd like to thank them both. Now please stop asking me when the next part is out! It's done! There is no more! Oh, and for those who wanted to hurt me for some of Hokuto's lines in the last part, I should add that the "Love is Blind" line was thought up while I was telling my SO about the storyline while waiting for our Chinese takeaways, and upon hearing that line he thumped my shoulder. When I asked him why, he said he was doing that for all of the readers who got to that line and wanted to hit me, but couldn't. So you have all been avenged, and I'm very sorry, but I just had to use it. The previous parts of The Stupid Tree are all up on my website: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~jaelle/clampindex.html along with all of my other Clampfics, and I will be updating it soon to include these new parts. I think that's everything, thank you for reading this far. And remember: never run with scissors! It's all in good fun until somebody loses an eye. *flees the wrath of rather a lot of people* Jaelle</pre><p><a href="./">Back</a></p><p><a href=http://www.dreamhost.com/donate.cgi?id=216><img border=0 alt="Donate towards our web hosting bill!" src=https://secure.newdream.net/donate1.gif></a></p></body></html>