Cadence lives in the house of Annesley, just on the outskirts of Sherwood Forest. She is happy there, learning the skills of womanhood from her mother as well as the occasional lesson in archery or sparring from her father.

 

But when a menacing sheriff, Guy of Gisborne, attacks the castle and village and kills her father and mother, and Cadence flees to Sherwood, she learns that roughing it in the woods isn't entirely as perfect as she grew up thinking. With the rising civil unrest and an unfolding mystery of what happened to Robin Hood, Cadence learns how to lead, fight, and win. And how her past can help her.

 

I've been working on this one on and off for the past several years. Very early on in the process, I learned I did not know enough about the things I was writing about. So between spurts of drafting, I do research on Medieval history and culture, Robin Hood, and anything related that might be useful to producing a believable if not totally authentic work.

 

It's been such a fun project that has grown near and dear to my heart. Now anytime I hear the name, Robin Hood, I perk up and nerd out!

Set in the Underground, before the events of Toby Fox's Undertale, Sans has a good life. He's got a solid, well-paying job in the Royal Laboratories, and aspirations to become the next Royal Scientist.

 

But his ticket there proves more than ineffective. On the contrary. After an experiment gone horribly awry, Sans is left with low HP, low energy, and strange dreams - just in time for those six humans who changed the Underground in their own ways to start showing up.

 

It started out as an innocent question. "What if Sans had met all the humans who came through the Underground before we, the player, and Frisk get to explore it? And what if those interactions helped shape who he is by the time we meet him?"

 

Thus my first attempt at a fan fiction was born. If you haven't had the chance to experience Undertale, first of all, go do that. It's an amazing, inspirational piece of work, and I've never met anyone who didn't have at least one good thing to say about it by the time they finished.

 

A lot of people don't take fan fiction seriously. I'm not saying you should. There are fundamental things about fan fiction that prevent it from becoming a truly respectable "genre" of literature. But I have found through this pet project and through reading the other couple of works I've found and liked that you can learn a lot about writing and story telling in fan fiction.

 

For those aspiring story tellers who are just starting out, sometimes it can be the best thing you do to try your hand at a fan fiction. It gives you the chance to work with and build off of elements already in place, be they the characters, the setting, or what have you, without having to come up with everything from scratch right away. It can teach you how to write with things you already know, which can translate into discovering characters and settings of your own.

 

Fan fiction not only helps you build good writing and story telling skills if you let it, but it allows you to push the limits of creativity.

This is a project I have barely started. As I listened to The Adventure Zone, I made note of the scenes I just knew I was going to have to draw, turn into a little comic, or maybe even animate.

 

I currently don't have a set dead line for this, as this is really just a fun little side project to do in my spare time.