Foreword

Disclaimers

1. This story is a work of fiction. Any and all resemblance to existing persons or situations, however, is completely intentional.
2. Any secrets divulged to me that have since become somewhat common knowledge are fair game. I apologize if anyone is offended by this; if it's any consolation, the character might not be you and it might actually be a coincidence.
3. I cannot see behind anybody's eyes but my own; therefore, the characters' personalities are probably not entirely like their real-life counterparts. Let's say that this is intentional and that they have become independent entities from those that they are based on.
4. This story is an unedited rough draft. There are typos. There are spaces after each hyphen and long dash to artificially increase wordcount. There are awkward sentences full of filler words. This is entirely my fault. You are free to throw your computer against a wall the next time you see a sentence fragment; I will not, however, pay compensation.
5. That being said, this story is mine (Involuntary Twitch slash Zephyr); you are not to use my real name, by the way). Any plagarism and/or posting without permission will cause me to feel special because you thought this shit was good enough to steal; however, you shall forever live through life cursed, knowing that you stole from some poor 15-year-old girl. Also, I will come and take your firstborn child.
6. This story doesn't have an ending. This is intentional. Most of the chapters are in fact setting up plots. This is also intentional. If people would like to see more, then by Haruhi I'll write more; it's written episodically for this very reason.
7. Finally, MST3k mantra when all else fails: it's only an unedited story posted on some unfollowed blog. Nobody's forcing you to read it, except for maybe me. Boiling self-hatred aside, I really do hope you enjoy this 50,420-word thing. It's my baby, except it's not really a baby, more like unfertilized zygote. (damn that sounds creepy.)
----

Author's notes

'Ey all. So this is my second year doing NaNoWriMo, and let me tell you, it was utterly worth it. Each year, I feel like I improve tenfold. Although I'm still not out of the cliche zone yet, I've graduated from writing shitty vampire romance self-insert novels to hopefully-less-shitty superhero self-insert novels. I have an excuse for all the self-insertion! Maybe. They say all characters are aspects of yourself; I decided to skip all the trouble and just have the character be me with my name changed. That's how she started; what she grew into, though, I don't honestly know.

...Oh, yes. And while I'm at it with the self-insertion, I should point out that nearly everyone in this book pertains to someone in real life! Yes! And you know what else? I'm not telling you who they are! Ha ha ain't I a stinker. Suffice to say they should be easy to guess if I wrote them well at all. Some of the choices for people in this novel may actually surprise you; that's because I came up with the concept around eighth grade. Funny story, that, but since nobody reads forewords I'm not gonna tell it. ...Aw, heck, I'll tell it.

It was a dark and story night... and Ryan was stirring up some excitement amongst our eighth-grade posse by announcing that he was writing a book with people in the group with superpowers at a school for superhumans! Sound familiar? But there was one problem: we had, at a conservative estimate, seventy million people (aka the entire eighth grade) in our social circle. And he chose about fifteen of them. I was not one of those people. I was filled with RAGE! How DARE he! And then I had an idea. A horrible, horrible idea! I was going to take his idea... and write my own novel! About everyone else he had left out! And it would be so much better than his! Ha! Ha! Ha!

So the idea for Gladiator Academy was born. By the way, the school's name comes from when I was writing one of as it turns out many false starts, my dad was watching some Gladiator movie on TV. It has no deep significance. The title-rating website gave it a 20% chance of becoming a bestseller. (Last year's Soundbytes was around 80%.)

Because I was writing it to parallel Ryan's (and later, Lauren's) story, I was limited in which people I could use. That's why otherwise obvious people such as Mina and Lauren do not show up, while people that I barely even know do (the permafroshes at lunch). I was also limited because of grade; in this story, the main characters are freshmen, which means I couldn't include the Freshmen in our group nor the juniors I am familiar with (although they do appear as satellite characters).

As a note: Ryan's school does exist in-universe, in a slightly different form of course. It's where Lucy comes from.

(damn do I have a lot to say!)

...Another thing about reading it. I tried an experiment which I quite liked, which was with shifting viewpoints. When the story started out, only the characters closest to the main character were developed; the rest were largely cardboard cutouts. However, by the end of 50k, I had managed to write a chapter from the point of view of every single one of the girls in the red-orange league (plus one extra for Carrie that was mostly wordcount filler). I got to know them so much better, and they change; this is an ancient and mysterious practice known as character development, unheard of until now.

Also: the story takes place largely over three days: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. It would be cool to make a spreadsheet that shows the schedule for those three days, to assist confused readers. (I've already doodled a rough one in my math book). If I do that, I will post it.

I dedicate this book to my friends; without them, the story would be about one girl wondering why there's nobody else in her league, and why nobody wants to talk to her. Now it's just about the latter.

Okay, enough with the words. The prologue and chapter 1 will be up soon. You may read them.

-Twitch, aka Zeoh, 2x NaNoWriMo winner (of course)

EDIT April '10: Last names have been removed. I'd also like to point out that we are as different from our eighth grade selves as character development over two years can allow, and that in this scenario I was probably the one at fault here (if you want to blame someone) for overreacting. This wasn't meant as a personal attack in any form; Ryan's actually a very good writer and I would link to some of his stories if I could find them. Cheers.