Whoa.
I was going to take yesterday off; I have a busy few weeks ahead of me, and I have to be careful to give myself some down time so I don't get overloaded. But I wasn't having much luck relaxing, and I'd outlined my new Vampire Big Bang plot bunny when I had sleeping problems last night, so I figured I'd write a couple hundred words and call it a night early.
Cue 7 am, and I'd written 12,540 words in about eight hours. I have over two-thirds of the rough draft written, and the minimum needed word count for the fest. That's a new record for me!
It's a classic example of what happens when I hit the manic side of bipolar: dedication to a single task to the exclusion of everything else and sleeping problems. It's now 8:30 am, and I'm still too wired to sleep, even though I can feel I'm exhausted. What'll probably happen next is that I'll manage to pass out somewhere between nine and ten, I'll wake up at four pm, and I'll either spend the next week in a major slump, or I'll have another day or two of the same before the slump comes. Either way, sleeping's going to be extremely difficult.
Whee.
While I wait for my body to wind down, have a couple more days of the 30 Days of Fanfic meme! And if I'm not too out of it when I wake up, I'll do my best to answer comments. (The rest of the meme.)
6 - When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?
Short answer: I have no preference. I write the characters I like, and they end up both male- and female-identified, as well as neither or somewhere in-between.
Longer answer: I don't think on the gender binary. (I identify as genderqueer.) When I'm writing a character, I'm not thinking about their gender unless it's a very clear part of the story. I've written characters as trans* in two different stories, so it does come up. But in some parts of fandom, male characters are more likely to get attention, so if I get ideas with female characters, I do my best to follow and develop them.
I could write more on my own difficulties with gender and how they manifest in my fic. But that's a tangled mess that I have problems sorting through on a good day, so I'll leave it for now. It does influence the genders of the characters I write, though.
7 - Have you ever had a fic change your opinion of a character?
Not particularly. The closest I came was with "And I Learned the Truth": it was the first time I'd really tried getting into John Winchester's head, and I'd been very ambivalent toward him as a character. (I've always loved JDM, though. So I've wanted his John back a lot.) I liked writing it.
But the show's done more to change my mind on him than anything. When I found out Mary was a hunter, I automatically assumed the knowledge screwed with John's head when he found out (which is the personal canon that led to "And I Learned the Truth"). And then he was an angelic vessel for Michael? So badass!
(Those aren't all my feelings on John, but I can't get into the rest of them without sounding like I'm bashing. I find him very interesting, though.)
8 - Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.
I definitely write OCs. They've all been secondary or background, of course. But in fiction-based fic, there are never enough canon characters to fill things out completely, and it feels forced if I try. In RPF, it squicks me to use the usual suspects as really evil villains* or murder victims, and I like the use of OCs as family for privacy reasons. If I take care to protect my own family when I talk online, I'm definitely not going to use someone else's without really thinking about it.
(*Having said that, I'm writing a bandom fic with a bandom persona as a villain. It's based on a video, which is why I'm making the exception; I didn't do it first.)
Generally, just making sure a character isn't a primary part of the story is enough to keep Mary Sue-age from happening. The simple act of existing as a secondary character means everyone won't be worshiping that character on an altar, and that character will have only a piece of the solution to a problem at most, and there can't be overwhelmingly rare physical attributes to pull that person out of the background.
But people write primary OCs that aren't Mary Sues. I've read it: this fic, for instance, has an original POV character that sees Sam and Dean and is barely noticed by them. She's an observer and nothing else. I haven't written a story like that because I've never felt the need, but they're there, and I think they work.
I could also talk about the somewhat recent movement to reclaim the Mary Sue concept - some people see Mary Sues as a natural part of development (in some cases), or a way to reclaim power from the Gary Stu figure so often seen in canon media, or even as a fun crack genre, all of which I can see - but I'm actually pretty ambivalent either way. I don't find Mary Sues automatically negative, though.
Also posted on Dreamwidth (
comment[s]). Feel free to comment on either entry.
Cue 7 am, and I'd written 12,540 words in about eight hours. I have over two-thirds of the rough draft written, and the minimum needed word count for the fest. That's a new record for me!
It's a classic example of what happens when I hit the manic side of bipolar: dedication to a single task to the exclusion of everything else and sleeping problems. It's now 8:30 am, and I'm still too wired to sleep, even though I can feel I'm exhausted. What'll probably happen next is that I'll manage to pass out somewhere between nine and ten, I'll wake up at four pm, and I'll either spend the next week in a major slump, or I'll have another day or two of the same before the slump comes. Either way, sleeping's going to be extremely difficult.
Whee.
While I wait for my body to wind down, have a couple more days of the 30 Days of Fanfic meme! And if I'm not too out of it when I wake up, I'll do my best to answer comments. (The rest of the meme.)
6 - When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?
Short answer: I have no preference. I write the characters I like, and they end up both male- and female-identified, as well as neither or somewhere in-between.
Longer answer: I don't think on the gender binary. (I identify as genderqueer.) When I'm writing a character, I'm not thinking about their gender unless it's a very clear part of the story. I've written characters as trans* in two different stories, so it does come up. But in some parts of fandom, male characters are more likely to get attention, so if I get ideas with female characters, I do my best to follow and develop them.
I could write more on my own difficulties with gender and how they manifest in my fic. But that's a tangled mess that I have problems sorting through on a good day, so I'll leave it for now. It does influence the genders of the characters I write, though.
7 - Have you ever had a fic change your opinion of a character?
Not particularly. The closest I came was with "And I Learned the Truth": it was the first time I'd really tried getting into John Winchester's head, and I'd been very ambivalent toward him as a character. (I've always loved JDM, though. So I've wanted his John back a lot.) I liked writing it.
But the show's done more to change my mind on him than anything. When I found out Mary was a hunter, I automatically assumed the knowledge screwed with John's head when he found out (which is the personal canon that led to "And I Learned the Truth"). And then he was an angelic vessel for Michael? So badass!
(Those aren't all my feelings on John, but I can't get into the rest of them without sounding like I'm bashing. I find him very interesting, though.)
8 - Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.
I definitely write OCs. They've all been secondary or background, of course. But in fiction-based fic, there are never enough canon characters to fill things out completely, and it feels forced if I try. In RPF, it squicks me to use the usual suspects as really evil villains* or murder victims, and I like the use of OCs as family for privacy reasons. If I take care to protect my own family when I talk online, I'm definitely not going to use someone else's without really thinking about it.
(*Having said that, I'm writing a bandom fic with a bandom persona as a villain. It's based on a video, which is why I'm making the exception; I didn't do it first.)
Generally, just making sure a character isn't a primary part of the story is enough to keep Mary Sue-age from happening. The simple act of existing as a secondary character means everyone won't be worshiping that character on an altar, and that character will have only a piece of the solution to a problem at most, and there can't be overwhelmingly rare physical attributes to pull that person out of the background.
But people write primary OCs that aren't Mary Sues. I've read it: this fic, for instance, has an original POV character that sees Sam and Dean and is barely noticed by them. She's an observer and nothing else. I haven't written a story like that because I've never felt the need, but they're there, and I think they work.
I could also talk about the somewhat recent movement to reclaim the Mary Sue concept - some people see Mary Sues as a natural part of development (in some cases), or a way to reclaim power from the Gary Stu figure so often seen in canon media, or even as a fun crack genre, all of which I can see - but I'm actually pretty ambivalent either way. I don't find Mary Sues automatically negative, though.
Also posted on Dreamwidth (
comment[s]). Feel free to comment on either entry.