Dragoness Eclectic's Journal

I've been re-reading my old Dragonball Z "Raditz Returns" AU that I wrote 20 years ago, and it's been a trip. The early short stories have somewhat clunky prose and used early dub "canon", which is really NOT canon, but they still work. The first novella, "Raditz Returns", is less sterling than I remember--the dialogue could have been better. Raditz sounds too much like a snarky American from time to time, but there are flashes of the brooding, angsty character that I settled on in the big novel, "Mythic Descent". "Mythic Descent" was a trip to re-read; it holds up remarkably well and I had forgotten how complex a novel it was. The only things I would do different today are, one, put some breathers for the reader where the action slows up in the later 2/3rds of the novel, because whoa! It's non-stop action for the most part, and two, devote a little less text to angsting Saiyajin. I mean yes, there's important character development going on, but I was getting some angst overload after a bit. Also, geez I was brutal to characters! Not that I would change that, 'hero gets beaten to a pulp before recovering and overcoming his enemy' is a very common trope in Dragonball Z. All I can say is "good thing they have magical healing".
In the process of re-reading it, I spotted 3 or 4 OCs that could very well be main characters in their own story.

Off to re-read more of that series. It's all up on AO3 as a series, and appropriately, if sparsely, tagged. Do heed the few content warnings: I don't bother with detailed content warnings much, but when I do tag for content, I am not joking.