Why I Haven't Posted Anything in Ages: Half and Half
So it was settled that theprawncracker and TogetherAgain would be writing "The Time the Muppets Beat Time." Fantastic! All they had to do was finish the stories they were working on at the time.
Well, at that time, theprawncracker had two projects going. First, he was doing commentary on his story, "We Know That It's Probably Magic." Second, he was writing "Muppet High Revisited," a re-write of his first Muppet fan fiction, "Muppet High." (He was mostly changing it out of script format.) TogetherAgain only had one project going: "Swamp Call." So, who finished first, and who took a while and held up the writing of "The Time the Muppets Beat Time"? Well... Allow me to remind you that "Swamp Call" was, at that point, TogetherAgain's longest story, both in actual length and in how long it took to write. Therefore, theprawncracker was done first. And TogetherAgain... took a while.
Well, theprawncracker got impatient and started writing another story. And then TogetherAgain finished "Swamp Call," but theprawncracker was still working on his new story, so she got to sit around and let her stories brew... which means that Vim was having a field day with that potential trilogy I mentioned earlier. And then it was Winter Break and TogetherAgain left town for another one of those crazy conventions hosted by her youth group. She had a lovely time, but then the plane home was delayed, leaving her to sit in the airport and pretend to be social with some of her crazy friends. She got bored, of course, and she wanted to write. Well, "Swamp Call" was done, so she obviously couldn't write that. She couldn't work on "The Time the Muppets Beat Time" without theprawncracker. She could have started on that trilogy, but she hadn't quite ironed out the details, and it was silly to work on multiple stories at once anyway. So TogetherAgain took out her notebook and started to write a cute little one-shot story. It ended up playing off of the theme of the convention a little, which made the ending more powerful than she'd planned it to be. Not that she was complaining. She entitled it, "A Gift," and she posted it as a late holiday present to the forum.
Finally, theprawncracker and TogetherAgain were both done with their other projects and ready to work on "The Time the Muppets Beat Time."
Their original idea was to write it on MSN Instant Messenger, with one window for writing the story and one window for discussing it. To do that, they had to trick MSN into having two windows open for essentially the same conversation. It ultimately didn't work out very well, because what one person typed in the "conversation window" would pop up in the other person's "story window" and vice versa, and they eventually figured out that it worked much better if they did it all in one window and just discussed the story in parentheses. But I'm getting ahead of myself. After much discussion, theprawncracker started the thread, and after much more discussion, TogetherAgain posted the first chapter.
Writing this way turned out to be a slow process, as it required both TogetherAgain and theprawncracker to have several hours to sit down and write, at the same time. They were both in school, and they both had lots of homework, so getting that time was difficult at best.
And then, just to complicate things, theprawncracker started having computer problems that made it next to impossible, at best, for him to get online. And he was moving. And by the time his family was settled, and his computer was functional, and he was back on the internet full-time... TogetherAgain was leaving the country. It was summer vacation by then, you see, and she was off on a big trip with her youth group to spend one week in Poland, touring various Holocaust-related places, and five weeks in Israel, touring as much of that country as was safely possible. (Did I mention yet that this youth group is an international organization? That might help clarify how this sort of trip, those conventions, and that camping trip were all offered annually, among other things...)
But I'm getting very far ahead of myself once again. You see, "The Time the Muppets Beat Time" ended up changing the very way that TogetherAgain defined herself.
Because they were both writing the same story, one reader- reportedly The Count, though sources are quite fuzzy on the matter- started to say that theprawncracker and TogetherAgain were half each other, and the idea stuck, to put it mildly. It helped that in conversations over MSN Instant Messenger, theprawncracker and TogetherAgain had a habit of saying the same thing at the same time. So TogetherAgain was half theprawncracker, and theprawncracker was half TogetherAgain. Naturally, they each began to refer to the other as their "other half." This eventually led to some confusion as to their marital status, so allow me to clarify that at this point the two have still never met face to face (or back to back, or side to side, for that matter).
Now, I mentioned that theprawncracker had some computer issues and then TogetherAgain left the country, so I'm hoping you figured out that there was a huge chunk of time in which it was impossible for any of "The Time the Muppets Beat Time" to be written. Please, do not be fooled into thinking that because of this, there was nothing going on...
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