Update Schedule:

I don't have a firm update schedule and my releases seem to have slipped farther and farther apart. Currently, I plan on alternating between Escape and my other stories.

Current in-progress stories:

Escape (Naruto)

The Other Side of the Coin (Ranma)

The Rabbit Ascending (Naruto, sequel to The Vulpine Rabbit)

Double the Trouble (Ranma/Naruto, sequel to The Shared Doom)

A Pointed Difference (Worm)

Mater Draconis (Ranma)

The Honor of the Wild Horse (Ranma/Honor Harrington, original name: The Mustang and the Salamander)

Story Starts:

This is a compilations of stories that I started, but decided not to finish and stories that I've started and decided to "park" until I get the time or inclination to expand them.

Current and Planned Additions to Story Starts:

Secret of the Fox (Naruto, 4 chapters, dead): After the encounter at the Valley of the End with Sasuke, Tsunade calls Naruto into her office to tell him a secret that the Third had left for his successors.

Child of the Fox (Ranma, 2 chapters, dead): When Ranma's mother comes to visit, he discovers that she has a secret heritage. He also discovers why his cursed form has red hair.

A Mother's Love and Sacrifice (Harry Potter/Percy Jackson, 1 chapter): Lily's divine heritage means that she doesn't die, exactly, during the encounter with Voldemort. However, she can no longer stay on the mortal plain either. She entrusts her daughter Mary to her Great-Aunt Hestia. Mary goes to Hogwarts with the intention of converting her fame to her birth mother's so that she does not fade. Fem!Harry. No mortal/demigod PJO characters.

The Seven Daughters of Harry Potter (Harry Potter, 1 chapter): On his fourteenth birthday, Harry finds the Dursley home invaded by seven different green-eyed girls his age all claiming that their name is Lily Potter and that he is their father. Time travel.

Jedification (Worm/Star Wars/Warcraft, 2 chapters): Taylor is kidnapped by a Leet driven insane by Uber's death and used as an unwilling guinea pig in his Jedifier.

A Different Sort of Family (Harry Potter/MCU (Thor), 4 chapter): Harry’s parents weren’t who they thought they were.

Completed Stories:

The Missing Bijuu (Naruto)

A Pleasant Sort of Hell (Ranma/Honor Harrington)

There and Back Again (Ranma/Naruto)

Ranma Saotome and the Maiden's Daughter (Ranma/Percy Jackson)

The Vulpine Rabbit (Naruto, sequel in progress: The Rabbit Ascending)

The Shared Doom (Ranma/Naruto, sequel in progress: Double the Trouble)

Love and Ramen (Naruto)

Chapter Size:

My chapters are typically 2,000-3,000 words. I don't see this changing. Occasionally they will be longer or shorter. This is the size that works for me. If I made longer chapters, my overall speed would be slower as I would procrastinate more.

The Baron’s Guide to “Olde English”

One of my pet peeves is the mangling of Shakespearean English. Shakespearean English is called by linguists Early Modern English, but many know it as “Old(e) English.” The purpose of this guide is to help authors not to make some easily avoided mistakes while trying to give their stories some flavor.

First of all, what linguists call Old English was spoken from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of what is now England in the Fifth Century until the Norman Conquest of England in the Eleventh Century. This means that King Arthur and Merlin did not speak it because his stories place him in the time period after the Roman withdrawal and before the Anglo-Saxons took over. What King Arthur would have spoken would have been Brittonic or Latin. Brittonic being what the inhabitants of Great Britain spoke prior to and during the Roman occupation of southern Britain. Modern Welsh is descended from one of the Brittonic dialects. Most writing from King Arthur’s time period would have been in Latin, even after the Roman withdrawal.

The Founders of Hogwarts, assuming they were English rather than Scottish Highlanders or Norse, would have spoken Old English as Hogwarts was founded around 990. Old English is also known as Anglo-Saxon and is not mutually intelligible with Modern English either in written or spoken form. This means that if Harry Potter or someone else from the modern era gets transported back to the founding of Hogwarts, he couldn’t understand Godric Gryffindor without magic to interpret for them. For kicks and giggles, someone made an Anglo-Saxon edition of Wikipedia. Check it out at ang dot wikipedia dot org to see how different Old English is from Modern English. You’ll probably only recognize one word in ten or twenty. Most writing during this time period, especially formal writing for book or important letters was still done in Latin. The most famous writing still extant in Old English is the story of Beowulf.

Middle English is what was spoken from the Norman Conquest in the Eleventh Century until approximately the late Fifteenth Century. There isn’t really a distinct changeover between either Old English and Middle English and between Middle English and Modern English. Spoken Middle English at the beginning of the time period will sound more like Old English and that spoken at the end of the time period will be more like Modern English. The most famous written work in Middle English is the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. Unlike Old English, a Modern English reader can understand Middle English if they squint at it although there will definitely be words you won’t have a clue what they mean. Your mileage may vary. Check out the Wikipedia page for the Canterbury Tales for a sample. Important written works from this time period were still often written in Latin or sometimes Old French, especially in the earlier portion.

The defining works for Modern English are those of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. The enduring popularity of them has ensured that English has not changed that much in the last four hundred years—although High Schoolers who have to slog through Shakespeare may disagree. As I mentioned at the beginning, Shakespearean or Elizabethan English is called by linguists Early Modern English. Early Modern English is often used in fantasy novels to indicate old fashioned speaking for flavor. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you don’t have “historical” figures speaking it anachronistically.

If you include Scotland in the mix it becomes even more complicated. Linguists are not really sure what type of language the Picts spoke, who inhabited the Scottish Highlands prior to the Roman occupation of southern Britain, but the best current guess is that Pictish was a Brittonic language or similar. By the Tenth Century, Gaelic from Ireland had largely supplanted Pictish. Gaelic is a Celtic language like Brittonic or Welsh, but not as closely related as descendants of Brittonic like Welsh, Cornish, or Breton. The Angles settled in Lowland Scotland, so the Lowlands spoke Old English and then later Middle English. However, since Scotland was an independent kingdom until the Eighteenth Century and the Act of Union, English developed differently there and a dialect of English called Scots with a different literary tradition, including spelling and vocabulary, developed there. Nowadays, most linguists and the United Kingdom itself consider Scots a different language than English. There’s also a Scots Wikipedia page that you can check out at sco dot wikipedia dot org. To an English reader, the Scots page is understandable, but very oddly spelled.

If Hogwarts were a historical place, when it started, lessons would probably have been taught in Latin, since most educated people knew it and various people on Great Britain spoke Old English, Old Gaelic, Old Norse, and various Brittonic languages at the time (Cumbrian, Old Welsh, and Old Cornish) with only the Brittonic languages possibly being mutually understandable. Hogwarts would have switched to Middle English at some point as the Norse were driven out, the Scottish throne dropped Gaelic in favor of the Middle English dialect that was the ancestor of Scots, and England took control of Wales and Cornwall.

Thou vs. Thee vs. Ye vs. You

In Middle English, “thou” was you singular and “ye” was you plural (“y’all” to people from the Southern U.S. or “you guys” to Californians). By Shakespeare’s time, ye and thou were pretty much interchangeable and eventually thou, thee, and ye were dropped and we only say “you” nowadays. Thou and ye were subjects and thee and you were objects. For those that have forgotten High School English, subjects are the doers and objects are what things happen to. For example:

Thou jumpest the fence.

Ye jump the fence.

I gave it to thee.

I gave it to you.

If you can substitue me or us and it sounds correct, then thee or you would be appropriate. If I or we sounds correct when substituted, then thou or ye would be right.

Thy and thine are the equivalents for thou as my and mine are for I and your and yours are for ye (old fashioned) or you (modern).

Verbs paired with thou end in -est with a few exceptions. Just like you can’t say “he jump” you can’t say “thou jump.” It’s “he jumps” and “thou jumpest.”

Thou givest.

Thou breakest.

Thou shalt.

Thou art.

Thou dost.

Thou shouldst.

Past tense is similar:

Thou gavest.

Thou brokest.

Thou jumpedst.

Thou wert.

Thou didst.

Thou walkedst.

You can only use these verb forms with thou. If you want to give other verb forms an old fashioned feel you can change the -s ending to -eth. For example:

He jumpeth instead of he jumps.

She doth instead of she does.

It hurteth instead of it hurts.

Note that there are insular Modern English dialects that use thou or thee still that may use it differently than what I’ve described, but if your shooting for old rather than isolated or back-woodsy, the above is the way to go.