I'm a Voltron fan of long ago, back when the series first aired in the 1980's.   It was the first anime import I watched on a regular basis, and I thoroughly enjoyed it back then.  I didn't write any fan-fics, but I did draw pictures of the team (And ocassionally the lions when I was in a really ambitious mood).   Eventually I got involved with an anime club from out of state, and graduated to so-called "mature" anime.   Voltron was relegated to the back of my mind, and pretty much stayed there for years.

Much, much later - around 1998 or so - I was net-surfing and came across a Voltron fan page.  I got an attack of nostalgia, used a search engine, found dozens more.  I was surprised and pleased to find that there were so many Voltron fans out there.  I was thinking about making a web page of my own around that time, so I thought "Why not a Voltron page, for old time's sake?"  And so, after much plotting, planning, fussing, cussing, testing and tweaking, I got the final result. The original web site was huge and far-flung and had lots of content and wasn't all that bad, actually.  Not for my first attempt at a web page, anyway.  But it was also very, very large, and it became hard to keep track of everything going on with it.  And after my niece was killed, I lost interest in the web page, along with a lot of other things in my life.  I kept a lifeline of sorts open through my membership in the zany but perpetually cheerful PL&CK mailing list in Yahoo! Groups, but it was only recently that I really put an effort out to revive the old lair.  I suppose I could have just re-created the entire site as it was before, because I'd saved everything to disk - the loss of my fic had taught me a lesson (see the story below) - but I really didn't want to do that.  I decided to revamp things a little and as a result, I have this little set-up that exists now.

And then, there's Lion Tales.  I started writing it some time ago, can't recall exactly when, but I'm certain it was around the time I started working on my web page.  At one point, I lost the original writing because of some stupidity that I don't recall doing. I just knew it was gone, I hadn't saved it, and so much for my Voltron fan-fic.  Then, I discovered Norton Utilities after being told about it by a friend.  As a test of the software, I sent it on a search of my hard drive to see if I could recover my lost fic.  Lo and behold, it worked!  This time, I did the smart thing and saved it to disk at once.  Go me. The rest, as the old saying goes, is history.  When I first started writing Lion Tales, I had a rough (make that very rough) idea of how I wanted it to go.  In the process of creating chapters, I was skipping back and forth between three that I had nearly completed in my head - Personal Demons, which grew out of the original piece, Saralinda and Red Lion Vs the Princess of Doom, but I didn't really have any of the in between chapters outlined in my head or on paper.  I also didn't write the ones I was working on in any particular order; I simply started on the things I was itching to work on the most. As those first three chapters began to develop, I finally started working on outlines for some of the other stories I was planning to fit in between.  In the meantime, I kept hopping back and forth between writing Personal Demons and Red Lion vs the Princess of Doom, but they were coming along in fits and spurts.  Saralinda, on the other hand, literally wrote itself start to finish.  I had actually intended to write A Royal Affair at the time, but it didn't work out that way. I didn't mind, though, because I was very happy with the way Saralinda turned out.  It remains one of my personal favorites to this day. After Saralinda was done, I started writing Personal Demons in earnest.  As that story evolved, Garn wound up going from minor lackey to major character.  Then The Book of Voltron took off, much like Saralinda did, as did From Days of Long Ago.  But by the time I got to Heart of the Defender, I realized that I'd created some major flaws that affected the chapters that came before, the biggest one being that if Dexter and his team joined the VF only a year or so ago, they certainly would have been around at the time of Personal Demons.  On top of that, it seemed to me that Personal Demons needed to be broken up into two parts - one dealing mostly with Tira's origin, and the other retaining the original name with a slight twist on the story theme.  The parts with Tira arriving on Doom and her adventures there then became the kernel that grew into Hagar's Little Helper. Because of all these major and minor alterations, Lion Tales has changed so much that it would do no good to post any of the old stuff. Not to mention the fact that I plan to add a lot of images to the stories.  But that's another kettle of fish entirely.

Okay.  Enough with the Lion Tales babble already.  Allow me to introduce the newest big bot in my life.  His name is Big O, and he's really, really cool.  If you haven't seen the anime series that bears his name, I would strongly suggest that you give it a try.  You might be glad that you did.  I know that I was... Do a web search.  Follow the links (but watch out for the naughty ones; 'Big O' has more than one meaning, after all...)

Which Big O character are you?

I LOVE Big O.  I LOVE Roger Smith.   Maybe I love Roger a little too much. This is what I got when I took a Character Personality Quiz at the Paradigm City web site.   And I took the test twice, then once more just recently, to be sure...