Friday 17 March 2023

 So I asked ChatGPT:

Tell me about "Sailor Moon 4200".

And ChatGPT replied:

"Sailor Moon 4200" is a fan fiction series written by Erin Ptah. The story is based on the "Sailor Moon" anime and manga series created by Naoko Takeuchi, but it takes place in the year 4200, several centuries after the events of the original series.

The plot of "Sailor Moon 4200" centers around a new group of Sailor Senshi, who are the descendants of the original Sailor Senshi. The main character is a teenage girl named Karen, who becomes the new Sailor Moon. She is joined by a diverse cast of characters, including other Senshi, humans, and aliens.

The story explores themes of identity, relationships, and the consequences of actions. It also features elements of science fiction, as the characters travel through space and encounter alien civilizations.

One unique aspect of "Sailor Moon 4200" is that it is written in a serial format, with new chapters released regularly on the author's website. The series began in 2002 and is still ongoing, with over 170 chapters currently available.

Overall, "Sailor Moon 4200" has been well-received by fans of the original "Sailor Moon" series, who appreciate the author's attention to detail and the way she has expanded on the original mythology.

I…I don't know what to say.  (I forgive you, Erin.) 

Wednesday 22 September 2021

Minor Update to Chapter 15

Thank you to the anonymous Fanfiction.net poster who caught a couple of continuity problems:

During the scene in which Sese is listing the problems with the Council the name of the Chairman is wrong, it should be Fukuda Ikemoto. Takeda Ryobe is Number Three.

When Suzue and Keiko go from the airport to her house they take a bus but in chapter 12 they took a train. I suppose that it is possible that there could be more than one way to go from one place to another, the train service be stopped or inconvenient or in chapter 12 they weren't going to her house, but still it caught my attention.

Good catches, both.  I have posted a corrected chapter 15 today, both on my website and on Fanfiction.net.

Tuesday 24 August 2021

 Chapter 15 Released

Took far too long.  I know.  But here it is, at last.

Please note that this chapter has not been pre-read.  Nobody's had a sneak first look at this.  So, if you spot any mistakes, or typos, or anything that contradicts previous chapters or just pain doesn't make sense…I'd love to hear from you.

I'll be posting it on FanFiction.net when I get a chance. (That may take a bit longer, because FFNet loves to tinker with formatting, so I'll have to work a bit to get the chapter looking the way I want it to. But I'll get to it.)

And finally...yes, I have started work on chapter 16.

Sunday 4 July 2021

 Finished

Yes.  Believe it or not, chapter 15 is now finished.

I'll be proof-reading it over the next few days. I doubt that any of my old beta readers (what we used to call "pre-readers") are still anxious to do the job, so the posted version may end up being the beta. But we'll see.

Monday 10 May 2021

A slight update

My web-page has probably been offline for a few days. This is due to my having some difficulties with the company that hosted my web (and also email)…namely, that the company went totally belly-up.  However, I have now (I hope) got everything working on a new hosting platform, and all should be working again.

While I was at it, I’ve also reworked the main SM4200 page a bit.  Apart from a minor tweaks, the changes were:

  1. Chapter 15 has been retitled. (Yeah, that chapter you're waiting for so patiently.)
  2. All chapters are now HTML-only. (The text versions are still there, but there's no longer any link to them.)  This is mostly because the forthcoming Chapter 15 will be HTML-only; I'm not planning to create a text-only copy.

Tuesday 1 September 2020

Podcast Fame

The Retro Fanfic Retrospective podcast about SM4200 is now online.  You can check it out here.

Monday 10 August 2020

An Update, and a Little Background

So. Still alive, still writing (now and then). I am literally on the last sequence of Chapter 15, and the other night I surprised myself by churning out over a page of copy.

I was contacted recently by the people at Retro Fanfic Retrospective with the news that they intend to discuss SM4200. Incredibly flattering, of course! (Er, whatever they end up saying.) This led me to re-read the Author's Note to chapter 7 (which is their stopping point), and that led me to send them some further author's notes…which, of course, they may or may not use.

I thought I might reproduce them here, with a little editing.

I gave a few hints about the further shape of the story at the end of chapter 7. Quite a lot more has been revealed since then, of course; I hope my hints have been borne out satisfactorily!

I commented back then that my characters’ names didn’t have the double meanings or linguistic wordplay of the original characters.  However, when I did get access to a good Japanese dictionary, I picked kanji spelling for a few of them that does have a hidden significance (though possibly only to someone who doesn’t know much Japanese).  For example:
  • Miyo: 三世
    The individual kanji can be read as “three/generation” which I thought was a nice reflection that she’s in her third lifetime.
  • Ochiyo: 稚代
    Actually her name is just Chiyo, with an “O-” prefix that she picked up as a child (possibly due to bossiness).  The kanji can be read as “younger/generation”—the significance, of course, is a bit obvious.
  • Sadako: 節子
    This can also be pronounced "Setsu-ko"…and is basically just her little joke.
The story is plotted out all the way to the end—though not generally in a great deal of detail, because when I planned it out I didn’t want to put myself in a straitjacket.  Plot points have shifted around a bit since I first planned it out, but not in a really major way.  I wrote the epilogue (“Coda”) back when I was writing chapter 9, or somewhere around then, and it still holds up pretty well in the light of the chapters written since, which is a comfort.

There are some plot points which have crept into the story where I don’t know how they’ll ultimately be resolved, and I’m keeping an eye on those (i.e. I have a file with a list of things I need to work out sometime), but I won’t be too upset if minor points are left hanging in the end: after all, real life is never really very tidy.

Mostly, my motivation for plotting it out in some detail was so that I could let Itsuko/Rei have visions of the future which I knew would come true.  A few of them have already occurred: for example, from her visions in chapter 3, we’ve already had Serenity’s ghost speaking to a kneeling figure, and the man wearing gloves (the Chairman of the Serenity Council, of course; we’ll learn more about those gloves in chapter 16), and Itsuko’s office in ruins.

Of the visions in chapter 11: well, the shadowy figure holding a fire-pot is herself, moving the Sacred Fire. The puppy should be obvious now. And Sailor Moon embraced a naked woman in chapter 14.

Still a few unfulfilled prophecies to go, of course!

Wednesday 1 November 2017

Still alive

In the immortal words of GLaDOS...I am, in fact, still alive.

And I haven't given up on SM4200.  Really.