Credit for my profile picture goes to user, “Ricky,” on HDWPapers.com. I do not claim ownership over this image in any way. The image can be found here.

If it wasn’t obvious from the purpose of this website and the heading of this profile, I am a writer that goes by the handle of “Cowjump.” Hello.

In case anyone has trouble reading my chapters with Fanfiction’s format (I know the longer paragraph structures may seem daunting), click here for PDFs of every chapter of every novel I write. This will be updated along with the chapters on this site as they come out.

I have created a Tumblr profile (Click here.) that functions as both an anonymous medium for questions, concerns, and opinions as well as a place where updates on Valence's progression can be found. Said updates would be given when I prove unable to maintain the chapter-per-week schedule and general thoughts on the Valence universe and characterization within it.

Those who are looking for a recap of the live stream I promised in chapter ten, click here. The video is forty minutes long and I apologize if I was not who you thought I was going to be. If you would rather read what I have to say instead of hear me speak, click here for the video’s transcript.

Due to the long-winded nature of my writing style, the subsequent explanations and information will be excessively wordy. To somewhat allay the burden of my overzealous commentary that so borders on becoming rambling, I will order the sections by probable importance to whomever should choose to read this. A table of contents is as follows (for those unaware, the command, “Control F” followed by the input of whatever number correlating to a section should bring a reader to the desired section.):

1. Disclaimer
2. My Plans for Valence: Scheduling, word count, reviews and private messages, etc.
3. What is Valence? A wordy description of what the story is from the author’s perspective.
4. Who I am: Pertinent information about the writer that may shed some light on some aspects of Valence.

1. Disclaimer

I, as the sole owner of the fanfiction.net account of “Cowjump,” claim no ownership of RWBY as a series, Rooster Teeth, or any of Rooster Teeth’s subsidiaries or intellectual properties. The story of Valence acts as a parody of Rooster Teeth’s intellectual property of “RWBY” under the doctrine of Fair Use and is an unlicensed derivative work based on “RWBY.” This story garners no monetary income and is to be considered a non-profit project hosted on a domain intended for extending the liberty of creating technical parodies of another group or person’s work. The use of “RWBY” in my form of parody is neither licensed nor permitted by Rooster Teeth. Should the story of Valence infringe on Rooster Teeth’s copyright in any way, following a notification from Rooster Teeth, I shall remove the story from any and all websites that I, as Cowjump, can access the account of. My views do not reflect Rooster Teeth as a company nor do my views reflect the views of Rooster Teeth’s employees. I, the sole owner of the fanfiction.net account of “Cowjump,” am not liable for any language or ideologies deemed “offensive” or “insensitive.”

2. My Plans for Valence

At the time of the first chapter’s posting, February 27, 2014, I have completed (written and revised) chapters one through six. My logic in the decision to wait to post spawns from an adapted version of Rooster Teeth’s philosophy of making six episodes of a series before releasing the first one. I began writing chapter one of Valence on December 26, 2013, and completed revisions for all chapters thus far on February 23, 2014. My version of Rooster Teeth’s philosophy was to utilize the belief that if one chooses to make six versions of a product first, he or she is able to sufficiently gauge the effort required to create the seventh and subsequent other iterations in a timely manner. I have found that it takes me about 1.5 weeks of concentrated effort to write a chapter of this story, barring the creation of chapter two.

[Edit June 14, 2014] I will no longer be able to abide by a weekly schedule for this story. Updates will occur two days after the chapter is complete. These two days give me the time to make final corrections for grammar, continuity, and any other error that I may find. Chapters tend to be completed within a month’s time at most, but there are circumstances that may expedite or slow this process. I will not give up on this story and I continue to work on subsequent chapters. Thank you for your patience.

On the subject of reviews: I welcome criticism as long as it is citable. Telling me that the tone of a chapter seems off or any other generalities doesn’t help me much. I am one-hundred percent willing to revise my chapters after their posting for grammatical and continuity mistakes. However, in order to do this, I need to know where the error is (i.e.: reference where the mistake is with the beginning of the sentence recreated verbatim.). Otherwise, the only thing I can offer as appeasement is an apology. If a review is given questioning the grammar of a sentence or phrase, one of two responses may occur: 1. I will fix the mistake immediately if the correction makes sense. 2. I enjoy the manipulation of accepted grammar rules to serve a stylistic point, so if a review corrects something potentially questionable but not necessarily wrong, I will attempt to weigh my logic of diction choice or punctuation usage against the reviewer’s. Do not take offense to my potential oppositional response as it is intended only to make Valence the best it can possibly be through a series of checks and balances between reader and writer. Otherwise, I will consider any and all grammatical corrections, though I cannot guarantee a response to every review.

On the subject of private messages: I’d like to openly state that I am prone to social anxiety and because of that, I know the extents to which a person can be awkward. Though my informative writing style may seem pretentious (I’ve read enough of my own works to know.), I am anything but. For the sake of humbleness, I can only go so far as to say that I believe that I am fairly genial. At the very least, I like to present myself in a professional manner and as such, I will never be mean to a person who is being nice. Should I receive a private message or review that comes across as mean, it will simply be deleted. “Mean” in this instance does not mean boldly critical, rather caustic and vicious with no perceivable constructive edge. If you have any questions or comments that you would not like to put into a public forum such as the reviews, feel free to send me a message. I plan on setting up a Tumblr profile to make this asking process easier and available to anonymity. As soon as that is set up, a link will be posted on this profile.

In summary, three main points can be taken from this section: 1. Updates are set for Thursdays (at a time between midday and midnight for the time zone of GMT – 6:00). 2. I welcome criticism in all forms as long as it can be specified within the review or private message. 3. I do not bite; feel free to send me a message about questions, comments, or anything else.

[Edit: April 10, 2014] Due to my inability to maintain my schedule past chapter seven, the weekly schedule is no longer in effect. In its stead, I will be posting chapters whenever they are completed and have gone through a three-day revision process. I am sorry for the inconvenience. I would rather have a quality chapter put out than mindless filler.

3. What is Valence?

Valence is my first true foray into the “romance” genre in terms of writing it rather than reading it. The story is more about the characters than the established canon, and though I try to abide by the limits of the world set in place, I find myself taking creative license over minor aspects. In order to stay within the bounds of canon, I made it a point to get as far away from the standard RWBY universe. I wanted to get away from Beacon, the Vytal Festival in—presumably—the next volume, and from fighting—at least, armed combat. My reasons are threefold:

1. The characterization I wanted to establish could not take up the same space as that of the scripting of the show thus far, so I decided on making my own space (or, rather, my own version of RWBY’s space).

2. The themes, motifs, and—most importantly when it comes to differentiating fanfiction from the canon it’s based around—tone are what makes or breaks a series. While RWBY may have been sporadic at times with its writing, it is what it is and its themes, motifs, and tone are now concrete. Valence is not canon to RWBY even at a perceivable level because whereas the series is focused on combat and conflict of all sorts, Valence is about life and resolutions. At a fundamental level, the two are different. This is not to say that what I am writing is detached; in fact this would be quite the opposite. Fanfiction is dependent on its subject matter, yet completely different from it at the same time. I do not wish to imitate the series, so I chose to write this fanfiction with themes, motifs, and a tone different from that of the series.

3. I cannot and will not write any combat action scenes. I would not do the series justice whatsoever. In order to do this, I need to separate my story from the world of Hunters and Huntresses fighting Grimm and attending a combat academy. However, this does not mean that there will be no action sequences. There will be some few and far between, but all of them will serve a purely utilitarian purpose rather than a confrontational purpose. In the interest of keeping spoilers to an absolute minimum, I will say this: any punch thrown in Valence shall be thrown only in jest.

This is my explanation for why I created this “alternate universe” of sorts. I hesitate to use the phrase “alternate universe” due to the own personal stigma against it. When I see the letters “AU” in a story summary, I know that I will either gradually accept the propositioned world or immediately refuse the story in its entirety. However, there are a few instances where I can accept this “alternate universe” construction.

I will take Valence as an example in order to keep a closed system. There are two main settings to Valence: Beacon Academy and the city of Vale. People who have watched RWBY know of these places and if I were to change them drastically (say, I changed the layout of Vale to mimic New York City), I would lose a noticeable percentage of a potential reader base and I would also have to explain how the world mimics the given city. Instead of changing what the places are and why they exist in the world of RWBY, I altered the scale of the world. Beacon is the same size as it is in the series (I will leave the size of the school up to your imagination) and Vale is geographically, economically, and politically the same with the only difference being that Vale as a city is huge. I will label this version of Vale my “alternate universe” simply because it is not the Vale of RWBY and I very much doubt it will be.

However, I do attempt to make the world I’ve created feel as much like “home” as possible; both for the reader and myself. I plan on taking the world of RWBY, mixing it with my style of writing, and infusing it with allusions both obvious and otherwise invisible to various other Rooster Teeth series. As a small disclaimer within this disclaimer, I would like to say that I will not be attempting to shoehorn references in. There will be no direct quotes from any series or actions that took place in any Rooster Teeth series or Rooster Teeth-related media (i.e. Jeff Williams, Trocadero, etc.).

Now that I’ve sufficiently ostracized myself from the canonical setting of RWBY, I feel it would be opportune to explain how the characters are not canonical either. Due to the series having not yet finished its first season, I have limited points of data to which I can measure my visions of the characters against. This leaves me to take what I can from dialogue throughout the series, extraneous interviews, quotes, tweets from the cast and crew, and, admittedly, other fanfictions to some degree. However, the majority of this information deals with what was during the span of RWBY Volume 1. In order to place the main characters of the show into the world I spoofed and into the situation I fabricated, I had to take some liberties with what will occur in the subsequent volumes and/or seasons leading up to the end of the team’s first year at Beacon. With these liberties taken, I did not create any extra events, purposefully being vague as to allow this story to (hopefully) have a lifespan lasting at least partially through Volume 2. I can’t say that Team RWBY dominated the Vytal tournament and then find out months later that they lost/tied/won by a hair.

As this story is almost entirely focused on character interactions within Team RWBY, I am required to keep the characters in-character. Some motivations and attitudes towards others have been altered, but for the most part, I feel that I have kept the group’s interactions as close to canon as artistically possible while guiding along a romance all the while. All in all, not much has changed about the characters. Over the course of the story, I don’t plan on the personalities of the characters fundamentally changing; rather, I see their interactions and attitudes towards each other subtly transitioning.

With both setting and characters discussed, I feel I should bring the overall discussion back to the original question. What is Valence? Valence is a primarily “Bumblebee”-focused fanfiction dealing with the day-to-day happenings of Team RWBY during their summer break from Beacon Academy. It is my first true foray into the “romance” genre and a stylistically experimental venture for myself into a world of lighthearted fluff. Valence is not a story of answers, but of closure. Valence is not a story of character death and/or revenge, but of living and enjoying life. Valence is not the world in which the story takes place, but the characters that tell the story.

Chemistry definition of “Valence”: The combining capacity of an atom or radical determined by the number of electrons that it will lose, add, or share when it reacts with other atoms.

Psychology definition of “Valence”: The degree of attraction or aversion that an individual feels toward a specific object or event.

(Cite: Dictionary.com)

4. Who I am.

I feel that it is opportune to quote the 1998 classic, Who Am I? and Jackie Chan’s eponymously named character when he asked, “Who am I?”

I am approximately 95% certain that I am not Jackie Chan. In all seriousness, it is imperative for an artist—especially a novelist—to know his or herself, lest focus be lost and logic become porous. Artistically, I am a writer, a musician, and a filmmaker. I list them in this order because I feel that that is the order in which I hold the most skill.

Ever since the fourth grade (when that was shall not be divulged as to limit the amount of information the public knows about the construct of “Cowjump.”), I have had a fascination with writing fiction. Writing seemed only to be a hobby I could indulge in during times of little action or instruction. It wasn’t until my Junior year of high school (for those unfamiliar with the United States’ school system, I was sixteen at the time.) that writing became important to me. Between the fourth grade and my Junior year, I had written a few things, but nothing too serious. It was during my Junior year that I made the initiative to write something—to get back to a hobby created in the fourth grade—and enter a writing contest. I did not win it and I don’t believe I would have deserved to anyways; what I wrote for it was terrible in hindsight. Fortunately, I learned from this that I enjoy writing.

From that experience on, I made it a point to delve further into the world of literature than I had prior, finding minute oddities of writers both classical and contemporary. From these quirks, I was able to assemble a number of theories about storytelling that quickly formed into an artistic philosophy of my own. I had the mechanics part down—the how of it all. What I needed next was a drive to write: a why of it all. Ever since I began writing fiction in the fourth grade, I have remained resolute to my doctrine of motivation: I write to entertain an audience of me. If I—as a self-loathing artist—feel confident in my own work, then there is something redeeming about it. I believe that if I am able to write something and enjoy it weeks or years later, someone else will as well. With my philosophy and motivation combined, I was able to write the stories that I wanted to tell in a way that I wanted to read them.

As to how I got into fanfiction, I barely remember. I believe it was my questioning of the overbearing negativity associated with fanfiction. I believe that I found a few stories that were more engaging and more thought provoking than published books that I was encouraged to read as a child. While not every story was pristine or even comprehensible, there were a few gems in the rough that could make me smile.

As to how I came to write fanfiction for RWBY, the transition was nigh inevitable. I have been a fan of Rooster Teeth since the third season of Red vs. Blue and continue to enjoy all of their content to this day. When I watched RWBY for the first time on Rooster Teeth’s website, I was admittedly underwhelmed. I believe that my viewing experience was undercut by the week-by-week schedule because when I bought the Blu-Ray version of the series and watched it over, I was happy with it. For a part one of a first season, RWBY thus far has been delightful. This was how I came to know of Rooster Teeth and RWBY.

The reason for my transition from reader to writer of fanfiction was admittedly cynical. I felt that there was a plethora of sub-par stories in a fandom separate from RWBY that I was currently absorbed in, so I decided to write something for the fandom (I lost interest four chapters in, yet I still have yet to give up on it.). Unfortunately, because I was unable to stimulate the fanfiction economy with my own work and because the amount of sub-par stories increased steadily, I was forced to find a new fandom—I couldn’t bear to watch something I enjoy burn like that. Months later, I watched the Blu-Ray of RWBY. Soon after, I became aware of the RWBY fandom and its fanfictions. I had always had an uncharacteristic fondness for romance fanfictions, so when I first read a story with a romance between the characters Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao Long, I was sold. The way they contrast and the potential for dialogue both humorous and heavy excited me.

The idea for Valence came from the observation that many of the fanfictions written about what the fandom has dubbed “Bumblebee” were relatively small short-stories, or “One-Shots.” I have always had an inclination towards novels, so I decided to try my hand at bringing a multi-chapter fanfiction to the RWBY fandom in hopes that longer story formats could become more widely accepted. I was sitting in a restaurant on the 26th of December in 2013 and was wondering how I could make myself stand out from the rest of the crowd. Due to the date, there had been a large number of stories centered around a Christmas or winter break theme. Because I am a sucker for happy endings and bringing a smile to peoples’ faces, I thought that a story about summer break would inspire some warmth connected to fond memories of the season and a hope that a particularly cold winter would be bearable. Thus was the basic premise of Valence.

Because I feel that I have rambled for the most part in this autobiographical ego-boost, I shall make the rest of this brief. Though I will not touch on my musicianship (Music theory studies have been fairly irrelevant to my writing process.), I will touch briefly on how being an amateur filmmaker has contributed to my writing style. I have given advice to those wanting how to write a fictional scene well to “think cinematically.” This entails imagining the setting, characters, a rough outline of dialogue, and beginning and end points before introducing the hypothetical camera angle. The perspective, the attitudes, and the diction choice can skew a scene a certain way much like a correctly placed camera can. The scene can be as boring as can be, yet the point of thinking cinematically is to make the scene enjoyable despite the potential uninteresting subject matter. This is a major part of my writing philosophy and I feel that it has worked out well. Because RWBY is a visual narrative, this process is made much easier on both the writer and the reader.

Looking back on this section, I can see how it can be perceived as an ego-boost and while I cannot change the subjective experiences of everyone, I did not write this to boost my confidence. I wrote this autobiographical reflection as an attempt to encourage those who have stories to tell and are hesitant to do so to try it out. But before you can tell the story you want to tell, you need to know who you are and why you want to tell the story.

Thank you for taking the time to look at my story or my profile. Until the next update, stay safe and stay tuned.