Captain’s Log

May 20, 2012

We just went live! Let the Summer of Steampunkery begin!

We are currently sitting in a Village Inn with our new writing group, and we have uploaded our first chapter. Spread the word. The adventure has begun.

-jane

March 25, 2012

WE NEED YOUR HELP.

First, I owe the verse/sphere an apology. Our lives have taken a huge swerve to the crazy and we had a lot of grown up things we needed to take care of. But I wanted to tell you about our new push forward.

This summer, Alex will be staying with me, and I have also been invited to become a part of a writer’s workshop in July. This means we are putting all of our efforts in the spring and summer to getting the first book ready to go. We have our hearts set on making Abbey and Prower’s adventure come to book form and find representation for publication. This means we need your help.

FOR NOW: We have our very first draft published online. This is a rough sketch made from what we did through our messaging and lettering to each other. It is in no way ready to go. But that’s pretty typical for any sort of book’s beginnings. Got any ideas about what could be changed? Please send us a message or comment on the different chapters to give us some advice! Are you an aspiring editor looking to get some experience under your belt? Do you know an awesome company who would be interested in our YA series? We’d love to work with you! And we’ll probably buy you cookies! Hell, I’ll make you cookies! … Or Alex will, because I would probably burn the apartment down.

SOON: We will take down these chapters we have posted, and we will re-vamp the site, adding not only Book One back into the web fray, but also the two unposted books. This will mark our entire Rather Prolific trilogy here online for you to read.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!: We’re going to start live chats, online games, and other fun activities for all of us to get pumped about steampunk! Please subscribe to us and join us on twitter (steampunkaneers) for more information!

Thank you for listening to this important announcement.

Jane

December 18, 2011

Hey all! Unbelievably, we are done with Book One! As such, I felt like it was time to finally update.

After finishing my first semester of law school, a break was well-earned. Jane and I are visiting friends in the great North and generally being festive! It’s so much easier to be jolly when the tests are done and break has commenced. Jane and I will be staying in a very fancy hotel in Chicago for a couple days, and then it’s off to Christmas with the families. We are editing Book Two over the winter break and can’t wait to get more posted! It’s been a fantastic trip so far, so wish us luck on the second half of our trip.

Alexander

December 11, 201i

Here’s another trinket of awesome found on the web, talking about steampunk:

Here is a song we’ve been writing to for a very long time. It’s one of the many songs that encompass the soundtrack to Rather Prolific. Enjoy.

December 10, 2011

We’re heading towards the end of Book One on this site, and we’re excited for it! Book Two is almost done and ready to go live! In the meantime, we sit on the couch enjoying one of the weekends we have together and I am introducing Alex to A Christmas Story for the first time! He fell asleep once, but I’m sure I’ll hook him soon.

I’m grateful to be able to spend the holidays with the ones I love. This next week is our final week of working, and then it’s time for the holidays.

Alex and I will be heading out to Milwaukee, Chicago, and KC next week, and I can’t wait to see all of my old friends again! Alex will be meeting some more of them for the first time. Chicago during the holidays is amazing, and I can’t wait to show off the Marshall Fields windows. (And yes, it is still Marshall Fields in the heart of true Chicagoans).

In the meantime, we will study for finals and watch A Christmas Story.

Jane

November 30, 2011

We have exciting news! I (Jane) have been selected to be in the Steampunk Shakespeare Anthology (www.steampunkshakespeare.com). I’m so honored to be in the final eight that will be included in the book, and I hope that you all will support the book and continue to support Rather Prolific.

Alex and I are elated. And I thank Alex and my other friends for helping me edit and revise my submission to SSA. Hopefully more news on this soon!

It’s just awesome.

Jane

November 20, 2011

Alex headed home for Slapsgiving, and that gave me a weekend of freedom. Aka it gave me a weekend of attempting to furiously clean my apartment, hang out with friends who aren’t Alex, and write on my independent project in order not to think about how much I miss Alex. This led to a writing party at my place with two of the writers for Rather Prolific, and we wrote for five hours and scrapped the whole thing. But it was still fun.

Christmas is almost here, and that means Alex and I are heading back for Chicago to see my friends. He’s never met Pat, who is one of my bridesmaids (and ironically a boy). So we’ll go up to Milwaukee to say hello to Pat, and then head back down to Chi-town to take in the sights of the Lincoln Park Zoo all lit up, and downtown smacked to the hall decks with the best hot cocoa in the country and the biggest German fest in Daley Plaza. I’m looking forward to the vacation and getting away from work for a while, although work has been very rewarding.

I also cleaned my writing desk today. It is now beautiful and clean.

This writing desk was ten dollars. It’s got seven drawers and it’s made of like oak or something equally impressive. The chair comes from Alex’s old apartment where I would write for like nine hours a day while he was at work over the summer. There’s Lappy in the middle, then my notebook to the right. The red book to the left is “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making,” which is pretty cute although not my favorite. There is a glass of Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi, which is the choice drink for Jane’s writing sprees. Then Huh the Pumpkin, who Alex abandoned because he doesn’t love pumpkins. It’s okay Huh, I took you in. The red box holding the manuscripts is actually salvaged from my neighborhood’s Borders which closed this August. I think it was originally a tray holder or something for the coffee house. And then the painting of the tree, which Alex picked out for me and I actually just hung today. Settled under it is a Dictionary of Poetic Terms and my Kaplan GRE Study Book. So there you go; my writing space.

I also found this very cool song about steampunk. You should check it out.

November 12, 2011

We have started back up on the writing and posting thing. Thanks so much for sticking with us and being so awesome. Our fanbase has started to actually become a lot larger than we thought it would, and that’s awesome. The first book is almost done, and I can’t believe it!

Jane

November 8, 2011
So it’s been now more like three months without an update. Alex has started law school. I have been swamped with work, putting in thirteen hour work days. On the weekends, we are traveling to see each other and trying to eke out 48 hours to spend time together. And somehow we are going to find our way back to the Second Civil War. I promise you, we are not done with our story.

In our personal lives, Alex and I went to look at the place where we are having our steampunk wedding. It is a castle on a hill that I swore we couldn’t afford, but we can. Amazing. We told the wedding planner what we were planning on doing. “A steampunk wedding.”

“A what?”

“You know, Victorian sci-fi … like uh … Wild Wild West … or uh … H.G. Wells …”

“….”

Alex sighs. “Goggles.”

“Ohhh!”

So Alex and I are awaiting the big day far far away from now. But Prower and Abbey are with us every day as we try to navigate these hum drum adult lives we’ve got for ourselves now.

On another note, whilst trolling the internet, I found a very cool site that has very cool photographs on it. Check this one out of the Dover twins.

http://www.old-picture.com/daguerreotypes/Augustus-William-Hazard-Moses.htm

And there’s more where that came from!

Also, at the beginning of October, Alex and I went to a steampunk ball dressed as Abigail and Prower. I’ll post some pictures soon. We got a grand entrance under our pseudonyms.

Talk to you soon,

Jane

August 21, 2011
So it’s been quite a while since an update (about like three weeks). This is due to my starting my new job and Alex starting his law school. This weekend I’ll be moving into my new apartment, and Alex has already gotten settled into his new city and new house. I went to see his house after we rode our first roller coaster together at the amusement park down the road, and I gotta say … his house looks exactly like the house I grew up in, and it’s kind of awesome creepy.

But just because we haven’t been updating doesn’t mean that we haven’t been writing. We’re almost done with Book II and have written two hundred more pages than what we’ve got posted. We just needed to stock up on stuff before posting anything else.

Just to be clear: what you’re reading is what we call a “rough draft.” Yes, we want to publish this into a series, but the reason why it’s on the net right now isn’t because it’s polished and ready for such things like publication. This is raw and completely convoluded. So we’re working on making it a lot more clearer. BUT! I am so excited as to some of the stuff that happens at the end of this book and in the next book.

One of those things is a character who is brilliant and I can’t disclose yet. Dover also becomes quite interesting now that he’s not love triangling it up, and the verse gets a hell of a lot bigger as they meet up with other airship pirates and visit other states and territories, including Texas and California. It’s been so much fun to write this story, and I don’t even care that it isn’t anything but a raw outline; it’s a kick of a time.

In our personal lives, it’s been a trying month. Alex moved further away, and we’re just all kinds of stressed. But my birthday and our anniversary are coming up, and we’ve got Rather Prolific to get us through stuff. Thank you for reading and I hope you continue on the adventure.

Jane

July 26, 2011
Last night, my  best friend joined us for our writing session from New Hampshire. So here in the 21st Century, we had three people in three states writing one scene. It was brilliant, and a definite breakthrough for writing. We may have four people in four states join us tonight. That’s three time zones.

This past weekend was our last weekend in the apartment. I packed up my stuff and brought it back north. For our last night, we ate Chinese and watched Atonement. We also bought a cake that looks like a cheeseburger.

We have a month now where we aren’t going to see each other. It was a long goodbye in my driveway. And it is going to be a long four weeks.

Jane

July 17, 2011
Summer graduate school is a pain, and so I decided to update the site and the log instead of writing that midterm that is due  tomorrow. It seems like a good plan which will only end in awesomeness.

Just updated the chapter where we meet Archibald Lord. And also just got back from a double viewing of Harry Potter. Which by the way is awesome and still the book was way better. As an avid Snape fan, I am glad to announce that I was not brilliantly excited, but at least pleasantly pleased.

Alex and I spent the weekend with his family, and I actually fainted in the car because of our lack of air-conditioning and the 105 degree heat striking the plains right now. But then we got our AC fixed, and all was well once more.

Both Alex and I are readying to move into our respective apartments. My apartment will be with my brother and his girlfriend, and he’s getting a studio by himself. We’re trying to configure our weekends and who’s going to be where and who’s driving how long and this and that. Some decor that we’ve accumulated together is being divvied out, especially the gigantic green tapestry that has the Tree of Life painted on it. We think it’s probably going to go in my place because we’re going to spend the most time there in the first semester.

Getting feedback on these characters has been a bit of an interest for me and Alex. Right now, it seems everyone’s is Quinn and Hopfrog. Quinn doesn’t surprise me, but when we were writing Hopfrog, Alex called him Jar Jar Binks and said he was annoying. I took that as a terrible insult, but wrote him anyway. I like my little moppy haired ginger. Although I have plans to steal the reins of Quinn from Alex … although he won’t let me.

Thanks again for reading. We’ll keep writing. We’re about a quarter through the “Second Book.”

Jane

July 4, 2011
Our stats are going up as the days pass, and I am completely flabbergasted that people are reading this. I mean, it’s awesome. Please keep reading. And it’s exciting.

Now that we’re onto the second book in our writing-ahead-of-what-we-post, we’re having to delve deep into my favorite character (although Alex created him): Quinn Adams. You don’t know Quinn well, but my oh my, do I love the bugger. After spending an hour and a half talking to my old writing partner from Chicago about what she thought of our little project here (she’d just read through it for the first time) and getting positive feedback from her (and she’s a harsh critic, and yes I know I’m using a lot of parenthesis), and then talking to Alex via my fancy new iPhone (or as facebook pirate language calls it, my talking parrot) about what was in store for Book Two, I am so excited about writing this thing.

Writing Steampunk is a pleasure. Alex and I have begun to create a small arsenal of steampunkery novels, and we plan to trade off our reading material. Right now, he is immersed in Skybreakers and I am reading Leviathans. I also have Boneshaker in the queue. And I think I know why I love this genre so much. In order to like it, you have to have both an imagination and a sense of humor. And I feel that the best kinds of writers have a sense of humor, and the worst kind take themselves entirely too seriously.

We also have been researching Galvanism all night long, and while I knew most of the basics from my research on Frankenstein, this was all new to Alex and all he could say was “Cool!” over and over again. “What about time travel?” he asked me out of the blue, and I said, “Not in this book. It wouldn’t make any sense.” And he said, “The next story then.”

“The next story?” I said. “You mean we’re going to write another story? After Rather Prolific?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Wow, you like writing?”

“Uh, yeah?” he said. “Why do you sound so surprised?”

“I just thought you might be doing it because I do it,” I said. “Wow, that means a lot. We’re going to be writing partners!”

“Better,” he said. “Co-authors.”

People may think it’s difficult to co-author. And I would agree. I have tried it with other writers before, and it doesn’t work too well. Egos fly, people want to be in charge of this or that, people don’t agree with the way the plot is going so they just yank the proverbial carpet out from under you … but Alex and I seem to get along fine. We’ve not yet had an argument about a plotline or a character or a setting. The closest thing to an argument we’ve had was who would write Quinn Adams. He won, since he thought of him. Damn you, Adams.

But all I can say is thus far, Rather Prolific is a lot of fun.

In our personal lives, Alex is driving up here to spend the Fourth with my family. We’re doing the whole shebang; grill out, fireworks, setting off near-to-illegal rocket explosives in my dad’s front yard … I’m so grateful that Alex could get here for this special day, and I am so happy we get to watch the pretty lights together.

Happy Fourth of July!

Jane

June 23, 2011
So as you can see, there are some pictures up. And some new pages. While Alex and I write our final chapters of what we’re calling ‘the first book,’ I went ahead and tried to spiffy up the site.

I think the crew came the hardest for me to find pictures of. Fitzy is exactly how I pictured him, but it surprisingly took forever to find one of Emma Rosen. Emma, the blonde steampunk hot chick, was the hardest person to find.

Abigail was also very difficult. As a mutli-faceted character, it needed to be a picture that showed a woman who was both immature and alluring, and still comedic but sad. In other terms: an actual girl.

Here are some pictures that were vetoed:

Alluring and comic, but a little too alluring and comic.

And too serious. Lord, look at her all proper.

And the face? What?

So the one we ended up deciding to go with isn’t my favorite, but it’s better than alternatives. Although I do like Number 3′s pants …

Jane

June 17, 2011
So even though we’ve only posted about seventeen chapters, we have most of the “first book” written. It’s equalling up to about 300 pages thus far. A lot has happened between the last post I made public and where we’re writing today. And a lot of it has been so much fun to write! There are a lot of new characters, a twisting plot, and I hope some scenes that I at least thought were entertaining. Especially this past week, I was jumping up and down in my seat because one character was about to go and toff off another important character, and I’d been waiting days to see it come into fruition.

However, last night was difficult on both of us. If you’re a writer, you know what slump I’m talking about. It isn’t the slump of not knowing what to do, but much worse: not knowing whether or not what you’re doing is going to work. It was what I call the “Kuzco in the Rain” moment, where all of the characters are down on their luck and nothing is looking very optimistic for the future. How does one write through that slump? How do the characters pull themselves back out of the hole?

There has been a quiet stirring about our story, and we are very grateful for that. Please continue to spread the word, add us on twitter (steampunkaneers), and give the weblog link to any other airship pirates out there who would enjoy a good romp through 19th Century US Alternative History. We have punch and pie.

Also, there are no chapters missing from the blog; I just can’t count.

-Jane

June 8, 2011
Started our Twitter account yesterday: www.twitter.com/steampunkaneers. I also joined up with a Midwestern steampunk group online. And Alex got a hold of his best man in Afghanistan to tell him the good news. We’ve been writing nonstop for the past week, and we’re about seventy chapters in, even though we’ve published only about eleven chapters. Watching these characters slowly grow from where they are on this site to where they are now in the yet-to-be-posted story is a mindtrip. This tale’s a definite prolific adventure, and there’s a lot of crazy coming your way. Just this week, we’ve had love triangles, steampunk lighters which accidentally turn into steampunk light sabers, iron men, and creepy galvanistic Frankenstein children. Not to mention a saloon scene and the razing of an entire forest.
- Jane

June 1, 2011
From time to time, Alex and I will attempt to update the Captain’s Log to update you on our lives, what’s going on, and how the writing is fairing. We just returned from Chicago for our engagement party with some of my old college friends. It’s always a real fun mindwarp to move away and return for a reunion a year later. But I did get a very good picture of Alex writing a portion of Rather Prolific at the greyhound station on the way home:

We’ve got two notebooks we write in, and I was lazy this time around, so we just started scribbling back and forth while we sat waiting for three hours. Alex’s tee is probably what I appreciate most about this snapshot, though. We got stopped on Belmont by some guy who grabbed Alex by the shoulder and boomed out a “The Wall, right?” “No, Captain Hammer,” I attempted to explain. Alex feebly apologized to the guy for not knowing anything about Pink Floyd, and we went to get pitas from a place called Eat a Pita.

So that is another reason why the updates have been slow, because of Alex’s apartment’s inability to have internet and our engagement party. It was very awesome; so many people showed up, and two very good friends took up the bill for the whole shebang unexpectedly! I feel so blessed to have these people in my life, and to have Alex to celebrate having.

The rest of the weekend was full of Kung Fu Panda 2, my friend’s goodbye roast, and ComedySportz.

Also, Alex and I are readying ourselves to hand-make our wedding invitations, since we found ourselves in a crafts shop last night and learned two things: One, Quidditch goggles will most definitely work as steampunk goggles, but not for seventeen dollars … and that wedding invitations can cost up to like 250 dollars. Who the hell pays 250 dollars for pieces of paper?!

- Jane