Henry's family tree picture post

Follow-up Post: Henry's Convoluted Family Tree

from Once Upon a Time

You're probably still trying to recover from my last gigantazoidal blog post, so I'll try and keep this one a little briefer. Actually, you're probably still not done with my last blog post, which will likely take you months to read and to riddle out, and you were likely drawn to this one because it starts with a picture, which is the first picture I've had in a blog post since May of 2012 when I posted pics of my bunnies, and a post with a picture probably looks quite refreshing to you after all those words in my last post.

But that last bit of writing (well, more than a bit) shows pretty well my writing style when I'm left unbounded. It's so fun to write these blog posts because it's like getting to do a paper with no guidelines or parameters whatsoever besides the ones I set for myself. I simply sat out to write about Henry's intricate family tree, and that I did. Because it wasn't a school paper, I permitted myself to run off on pretty much all the tangents I thought up, and because I found some time for it, it got to be as long as I wanted it to be. It's really rare for me, actually, that I get to fully and completely write something in the way and the depth I intended without being limited by the time I have to write it and the length my paper's allowed to be. It was really nice. I even had time to go back and edit it today! I'm pretty proud of it. Not to say it's perfect, but I'm really glad I did it. It was fun to write and it helped me mentally process the things I've seen in the show. For me, this is exactly what I love to do: to write lengthy and unbounded pieces of writing about things I love, like a spectacular fantasy show with which I have become obsessed. I threw in random notes of humor, and I used a semi-casual writing style, and in the end, I really wrote it for myself. I mean, when you think about the audience of a piece of writing, people who haven't seen the show won't be able to read that blog post and understand it, and people who have seen the show will already have known some of the stuff I went into explaining, so it doesn't exactly fit either of those audiences; I just wrote it as part of my own thought process.

Out of curiousity, I actually copy-pasted it into a word doc to see how long it really was. I knew it was long, but I must admit, even I was surprised to find out that it was twelve and a half pages long, nearly 13 pages. Somehow that lucky number fits for Once, though. But to put it in perspective for myself, I realized that's even longer than the 10-page research paper I wrote freshman year on Art in the Viking Era for World History. The word count is 6,848 words, including the title and footnote. But considering I pretty much wrote all of that in three days, I divided it by three and found that that means I wrote an average of about 2,282 words a day. That really blew me away when I thought of NaNoWriMo, because I struggled to write not quite a thousand words a day during the school week, and I wrote this during the school week. Yes, I have more study halls this semester, and I could justify working on it in class because it was for creative writing, but still, I don't know why it was so much easier for me to write this than it was to write my novel. Well, I guess with this, I wasn't making anything up, and it was better planned. Going in, I knew pretty much everything I was going to write about, and how I was going to organize it. I didn't ever have to think anything up and I did very little research. But still, it amazes me when I think of this in terms of NaNo.

Well, I don't want this little reflection to get too out of hand. I should probably actually explain what this post is meant to be about, right about now. I did intend to reflect a little, but mostly I just wanted to show you all this picture. It's a drawing of Henry's family tree I did in my notebook. It really helped me to draw it all out, which I did as I was writing the blog post on his family tree. Actually, first I just did a sloppy one for myself, but then I thought I could put a picture of it up on my blog, so I went back and did the one pictured here. Henry's adoptive family tree is above his name and his biological tree is below. I color-coded members of his family that show up twice. For example, Rumpelstiltskin's name is embellished with gold spirals. Because, you know, he's Mr. Gold. And he spins gold. Hehe. I just thought it would be helpful so you could easily see all the members of Henry's family that show up twice in his family tree. Each member is labeled with their relation to Henry in the place that their name is. For example, in the adoptive side of the tree, Regina is labeled "mother", but on the biological side, she is labeled "step-great-grandma". You'll probably notice that the picture is edited at the bottom, and I must admit that it's a little bit poorly done. This is because I made an error on the original family tree, so I fixed it then took another picture, but the second picture wasn't as good, so I just took the fixed parts from the second picture and copy-pasted them onto the first and tried to match it up as best I could. The tree's not really that easy to read from this far out, but I tried really hard to get a clear picture so you can zoom in on it and scroll around it and look at it close in order to examine it. If I were you I'd probably just save it then open it and zoom in to read it all. I think it's a fairly good illustration of Henry's family tree and I think it's a good follow-up for my lengthy previous post. I even did some leafy-viney decorations on it with my pen just to make it look nicer. I like that you can see the pink tint to the paper that comes from my pink lamp in my bedroom and the way it's complimented by my silky bedspread, which I used for a background. Well, I hope you find my little illustration helpful, and I hope you like it!

Beyond the violet mist, we concluded our genealogical endeavor by illuminating a tree-shaped diagram to streamline and simplify a convoluted but amazing family's relationships to one lucky and magical little boy, enshrouding the lines of connections in emerald vines and embellishing names with colored spiralwork, as is the style of art in our Lande.