Hello all!

Thank you for visiting my little corner of the eUniverse. I am very new to FanFiction, and have recently started writing my own content. My husband has been my primary inspiration so far, and I have not made my writing public before this. His favorite quote is, "You know how you get to Carnegie Hall, don't you? Practice." So I practice. Recently, I've tried to refine my "writing voice," as I call it, as I hope to publish a novel in the future, which I've been working on since the beginning of this summer.

My favorite books are Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, as Ayn Rand is a personal hero of mine. Check out The Art of Fiction if you enjoy her stories and like to write. Other favorites include To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, The Catcher in the Rye, and all of the stories associated with Lord of the Rings (how do you create an entirely new language??), as well as the Harry Potter series and Twilight series.

I would describe my current writing style as too informative and somewhat dryly academic. Obviously, I'm trying to change that, and to make it more distinct. I don't have a bad sense of humor, so I'm trying to include that more in my writing. Of course, since I've written a lot of drama so far, it's seen more in spells of comic relief than anything. I'm including my writing here and reading a lot of the work posted so that I can refine and improve this style. Thanks to my younger brother who has been a tremendous help with this.

I'm updating my favorite stories and authors, and if you have any suggestions on stories or people to follow, please let me know!

Thank you for giving me the gift of your attention. Enjoy :)

Ch 1: The treatments in asylums were varied, but the most common for severe "lunatics" were the ice water bath, restraints, and shock treatment. Later, the lobotomy was introduced as a tactic for managing difficult cases:

Ch 2: Alice is suffering from organic retrograde amnesia: and . The theory behind my explanation of her memory loss involves how the brain accesses memory and how pain could potentially affect this. Long term declarative/episodic memory (events that happen to you, etc, not skills or language) is stored in the hippocampus and medial temporal lobes of the brain (). This memory is accessed via the limbic system--it controls memory retrieval, not where memory is stored. For example, damage to the limbic system or retrograde amnesia usually leaves procedural memory, such as language and speech, intact. So Alice's access to her memories could be compromised by severe damage to her limbic system while leaving her perfectly able to speak and function. This phenomenon could be possible if she were exposed to ungodly amounts of pain. The limbic system is also involved in pain reception--when your nerves "feel" or receive pain, they pump sodium and potassium ions along your neurons to pass that signal to your frontal cortex for processing. If enough pain flooded the limbic system at once, it could potentially cause it to become "overcharged"--sort of like blowing a light bulb. Is this possible? Probably not. Plausible enough for me to run with it? Hell yes. My brother the biologist said that it could make sense, but she couldn't be malnourished or have a deficiency of sodium and potassium to transmit the charges/impulses from the pain. If Jeremy's gift worked by blocking the sodium/potassium signals from moving along her neurons, she would build up that charge and then basically feel it all at once. So we're going to pretend Jeremy snuck her bananas and the pain that he'd held back from the transformation short-circuited her limbic system, which irreparably damaged her memory retrieval system. Hence, no memories, but intact abilities regarding language, speech, and awareness.