Writer's Ramblings
It's all kooriyoukai's fault ♥
1. Keyboard or biro/pen?
Keyboard. Keyboard. Keyboard. When I'm writing I usually find that my thoughts go too fast for me to write longhand and as all my fics get word processed anyway, it doesn't make much sense to hand write something that'll only end up getting typed up later. However, if it's just a snap of an idea, a line or a thought or a phrase or something like that, then I'll grab the nearest pen and scribble it down on whatever I can reach; preferably something resembling paper but I have been known to use body parts when need's must (usually mine). Speed usually takes precedence over neatness and coherency at times like that and if you're sitting in the middle of Pizza Hut, or in a friend's room then there's rarely a computer to hijack. That and I don't particularly like my handwriting, properly typed stuff is better ^__^
2. Beta or no beta?
No beta as such. It's very, very rare that I actually think I need someone else to cast an eye over a fic to pick up any spelling/grammatical mistakes because my own internal editor is usually good enough to catch them all. But having said that, I don't like posting fics that are completely unseen by anyone else to a comm. Call it paranoia or low self esteem or whatever, but I'll usually throw it at my sister or KY for some (almost) immediate feedback just to make sure I'm not totally barking up the wrong tree with my characterisation or whatever. I guess that's also why I tend to post stuff to my own LJ first, because there have been times (especially with chapters of NB) where I've put a chapter up on my journal, someone's pointed something out and I've gone back and changed a couple of paragraphs or added a chunk of extra exposition or description or something before posting it to TxN (see, there is method to the madness... sort of ^_^;)
3. Title?
Titles are almost always descriptive and very, very short! A quick look back over the Tenimyu stuff I've written and the muse-related stories of the past few months kind of gives away my love of single word titles ^^; I hate thinking up titles, but I find it easier when it's for a short fandom piece than for my (much, much) longer original stories. If something has been heavily influenced by a song or an idea then I'll use a line or a phrase (like ' Speeding Cars', 'Nile Blue', or, one of my works-in-progress, ' Two Steps Forward, One Step Back') otherwise you get something like 'Study', 'Reunion' or ' Chocolate'.
4. Smushy or smutty?
I don't write smut! *coughs* Okay, ignore my protests because I have written an NC17 (only one mind you!) and every other chapter of Nile Blue contains making out in deserted corners (or one of the boys jerking off ^^;) and some of my best stories are the ones with copious amounts of kissing in them... so clearly I do write smut ^_^;;; But... there's also a lot of fluff, just look at chapter 14 of NB or some of the older, shorter fics from the spring. Basically with TxN I write both, often together along with angst, introspection and random details from their real lives. The muses are utterly smut free (thankfully) and the rest of the fanfiction I've written was so long ago that it's usually angsty/introspect or fluff/humour rather than smut. Which leaves the original stuff and that's... complicated and long and full of far more action, betrayal, battles, death, history and change than anything else I write. But there's no real smut in any of those stories which is why they need re-drafting.
5. Summary?
Usually. Sometimes they're good, intriguing summaries. Sometimes they're utterly pointless because I don't want to give away something pretty important (like whose perspective it is).
6. Funniest Fic?
... err... do I write anything funny? Well I suppose Tuti's funny. And Daiki, but I don't think they really count because that's just the characters rather than the fic and it isn't hard to let Tuti be funny! I suppose ' Don't Panic Baby!' probably counts as my funniest fic to date although a case could be made for some of the drabbles I wrote back when I was doing FMA_100 every week. One week the challenge was death and I wrote something in my summary or author's notes using the phrase 'funnily enough' (which I tend to over use when I'm being a bit sarcastic) and someone, it might even have been Eli, basically challenged me to write a funny death fic in 100 words... which I did. Twice. If I remember rightly it was something to do with Havoc forgetting to water Hawkeye's plant so it died (drabble one) and her shooting him (drabble two). Well... I thought it was funny anyway!
7. Most popular fic?
I think if I say anything other than Nile Blue I'll be shot! But having said that... well, it's weird because all I get first hand from NB-readers are the comments they leave and then people like KY and Eli turn round and tell me people are getting restless waiting for the next chapter or they've asked KY to ask me how it's coming along because she's got more influence over me subtlty is clearly not one of my strong points there which really takes me by surprise! It's not that I expect everyone who reads it to comment every single time I put a chapter up, but... well that is the only way I know for sure people are still following it!
8. Most fun to write?
Narnia. I haven't even posted any of it yet but... it's just so, so good! Basically while KY writes about Tuti, Nagayan, *pnish* and all the good guys, I'm writing the bad guys' side - the Hyotei boys (and Wada) in military uniforms, terrorising the countryside as the White Warlock's Secret Police *___* I'm six chapters and thirteen thousand words in and I'm loving every second of it. It's one of those fics that I love so much I don't care if no one else reads it (well, apart from KY!) and it lets me play around with a fantasy world (always my favourite kind of writing) and the myu-boys at the same time. What could be better? But the absolute best bit of working on the Narnia fic is collaborating with KY - bouncing ideas off each other and discussing all sorts of different things and feeding each other's creativity. Writing can be such a solitary, isolating pasttime, especially if you're wrapped up in a world that no one else really understands but sharing it with someone else makes it so much easier to be inspired and enthusiastic about what you're working on.
It's weird because I used to think that writing was something I did best on my own, cut off from other people, but actually over the last year and especially since I started first Nile Blue and then Narnia, it's been made really obvious to me that working with someone else makes me capable of far more than I'd be able to manage on my own. It's not that I don't get flashes of inspiration on my own or can no longer write when holed up in my room, I do and I can and I have been doing so over the last few months since I left uni but talking ideas over with someone else who asks the right questions or makes the right suggestions or just listens in the right way makes such a huge difference! And you know, that's probably the single biggest reason why there have been so few fics from me over the last few months and especially why NB has been coming out so slowly - because I've been cut off from my chief source of inspiration (and no I'm not talking about Tuti)
9. Best and worst?
Best? ' Study'. I don't know why, but when I re-read it I can almost forget that it was me who wrote it and just enjoy it as a story rather than looking out for mistakes or things that need tweaking, which is what I usually do. It's got some of my favourite lines of dialogue I've ever written and despite the fact that I really wasn't very happy when I wrote it (it was written the night before I took the very abrupt decision to go home for a week during my last semester at uni) it's also one of the best examples of a night when the writing worked and took me away from all the things I was stressing myself out over. That and... I don't know, it feels kind of unique for some reason, something about what it says about Nagayan and Tuti.
Worst? If it's a question of the Tenimyu stuff, then there's a couple of short fics from when I'd only just started writing TxN that aren't very good. Overall, if I'm not happy with a fic then I don't show it to people because I don't consider it to be finished!
10. Coulda Been Contenders?
Oh that would be 'The Re-Education of Colonel Mustang'! Sometimes I wish I could get back into writing FMA fanfic just so I could finish it because it was fun and angsty and silly and I'm an unabashed Hughes fangirl so he spends most of the fic meddling with... interesting consequences *laughs* It hit about 20 chapters (none of the chapters were very long though) but then I got distracted by something... can't remember now what it was... oh yeah, Tenimyu!
11. Strengths?
*frowns* It's different things in different fics or fandoms. What I think I do well with TxN I don't or can't do with my original characters. What works when I'm writing fantasy stories is utterly wrong for the real life ones. This is the kind of question I think other people would be better at answering about me than I would! Heh, too much of a perfectionist, that's my problem! Maybe perfectionism is my strength. That and Tuti ♥ No prizes for guessing my favourite myu-actor ever...
12. Weaknesses?
Smut. There are very few times when I think I've pulled it off convincingly - read into that what you will.
Certain characters also give me problems. I don't think I write a very good Nagayan, chapter 10 of NB being one of the few exceptions when I think I got it right. Actually, aside from Tuti I don't feel overly confident writing any of the myu-boys unless the situation is so abstract (i.e. in Narnia!) that I feel capable of taking huge liberties with everyone and everything... that's probably not the best thing for a fanfic writer to say, is it?
13. Dirty Little Secrets?
Do I dare own up to sometimes wishing I could put Nile Blue on hiatus for a while?
Somewhere amongst all the stuff I've ever written there lurk a handful of Mary Sue's - in my defence though, I was thirteen when I wrote them! And the charms of Doctor Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1 are kind of hard to resist
There's a really long, potentially smutty TxN fic that I've been working on for months and months that I hope to finish one day but no one should hold their breath waiting for that one.
After watching the 'King Arthur' film a few weeks ago, I really want to write an epic fic about Arthur and Lancelot... some of their lines and it was just too easy... *hides*
Random, unrelated note - I never thought I'd say it, but I'm back with the property deeds and I'm so relieved to be there! After three days in the other office fighting with the finance deeds, I've been shunted back to where I was because we're trying to empty some of the offices and filing cabinets ready for the office-move in November. It's only a temporary reprieve because I'll be back tackling the finance deeds again before too long but it's a nice break! There's something very, very wrong about saying this but never mind
Oh and I'm sick - physically sick because I've caught Mum's cold and now Dad's going down with it too.
1. Keyboard or biro/pen?
Keyboard. Keyboard. Keyboard. When I'm writing I usually find that my thoughts go too fast for me to write longhand and as all my fics get word processed anyway, it doesn't make much sense to hand write something that'll only end up getting typed up later. However, if it's just a snap of an idea, a line or a thought or a phrase or something like that, then I'll grab the nearest pen and scribble it down on whatever I can reach; preferably something resembling paper but I have been known to use body parts when need's must (usually mine). Speed usually takes precedence over neatness and coherency at times like that and if you're sitting in the middle of Pizza Hut, or in a friend's room then there's rarely a computer to hijack. That and I don't particularly like my handwriting, properly typed stuff is better ^__^
2. Beta or no beta?
No beta as such. It's very, very rare that I actually think I need someone else to cast an eye over a fic to pick up any spelling/grammatical mistakes because my own internal editor is usually good enough to catch them all. But having said that, I don't like posting fics that are completely unseen by anyone else to a comm. Call it paranoia or low self esteem or whatever, but I'll usually throw it at my sister or KY for some (almost) immediate feedback just to make sure I'm not totally barking up the wrong tree with my characterisation or whatever. I guess that's also why I tend to post stuff to my own LJ first, because there have been times (especially with chapters of NB) where I've put a chapter up on my journal, someone's pointed something out and I've gone back and changed a couple of paragraphs or added a chunk of extra exposition or description or something before posting it to TxN (see, there is method to the madness... sort of ^_^;)
3. Title?
Titles are almost always descriptive and very, very short! A quick look back over the Tenimyu stuff I've written and the muse-related stories of the past few months kind of gives away my love of single word titles ^^; I hate thinking up titles, but I find it easier when it's for a short fandom piece than for my (much, much) longer original stories. If something has been heavily influenced by a song or an idea then I'll use a line or a phrase (like ' Speeding Cars', 'Nile Blue', or, one of my works-in-progress, ' Two Steps Forward, One Step Back') otherwise you get something like 'Study', 'Reunion' or ' Chocolate'.
4. Smushy or smutty?
I don't write smut! *coughs* Okay, ignore my protests because I have written an NC17 (only one mind you!) and every other chapter of Nile Blue contains making out in deserted corners (or one of the boys jerking off ^^;) and some of my best stories are the ones with copious amounts of kissing in them... so clearly I do write smut ^_^;;; But... there's also a lot of fluff, just look at chapter 14 of NB or some of the older, shorter fics from the spring. Basically with TxN I write both, often together along with angst, introspection and random details from their real lives. The muses are utterly smut free (thankfully) and the rest of the fanfiction I've written was so long ago that it's usually angsty/introspect or fluff/humour rather than smut. Which leaves the original stuff and that's... complicated and long and full of far more action, betrayal, battles, death, history and change than anything else I write. But there's no real smut in any of those stories which is why they need re-drafting.
5. Summary?
Usually. Sometimes they're good, intriguing summaries. Sometimes they're utterly pointless because I don't want to give away something pretty important (like whose perspective it is).
6. Funniest Fic?
... err... do I write anything funny? Well I suppose Tuti's funny. And Daiki, but I don't think they really count because that's just the characters rather than the fic and it isn't hard to let Tuti be funny! I suppose ' Don't Panic Baby!' probably counts as my funniest fic to date although a case could be made for some of the drabbles I wrote back when I was doing FMA_100 every week. One week the challenge was death and I wrote something in my summary or author's notes using the phrase 'funnily enough' (which I tend to over use when I'm being a bit sarcastic) and someone, it might even have been Eli, basically challenged me to write a funny death fic in 100 words... which I did. Twice. If I remember rightly it was something to do with Havoc forgetting to water Hawkeye's plant so it died (drabble one) and her shooting him (drabble two). Well... I thought it was funny anyway!
7. Most popular fic?
I think if I say anything other than Nile Blue I'll be shot! But having said that... well, it's weird because all I get first hand from NB-readers are the comments they leave and then people like KY and Eli turn round and tell me people are getting restless waiting for the next chapter or they've asked KY to ask me how it's coming along because she's got more influence over me subtlty is clearly not one of my strong points there which really takes me by surprise! It's not that I expect everyone who reads it to comment every single time I put a chapter up, but... well that is the only way I know for sure people are still following it!
8. Most fun to write?
Narnia. I haven't even posted any of it yet but... it's just so, so good! Basically while KY writes about Tuti, Nagayan, *pnish* and all the good guys, I'm writing the bad guys' side - the Hyotei boys (and Wada) in military uniforms, terrorising the countryside as the White Warlock's Secret Police *___* I'm six chapters and thirteen thousand words in and I'm loving every second of it. It's one of those fics that I love so much I don't care if no one else reads it (well, apart from KY!) and it lets me play around with a fantasy world (always my favourite kind of writing) and the myu-boys at the same time. What could be better? But the absolute best bit of working on the Narnia fic is collaborating with KY - bouncing ideas off each other and discussing all sorts of different things and feeding each other's creativity. Writing can be such a solitary, isolating pasttime, especially if you're wrapped up in a world that no one else really understands but sharing it with someone else makes it so much easier to be inspired and enthusiastic about what you're working on.
It's weird because I used to think that writing was something I did best on my own, cut off from other people, but actually over the last year and especially since I started first Nile Blue and then Narnia, it's been made really obvious to me that working with someone else makes me capable of far more than I'd be able to manage on my own. It's not that I don't get flashes of inspiration on my own or can no longer write when holed up in my room, I do and I can and I have been doing so over the last few months since I left uni but talking ideas over with someone else who asks the right questions or makes the right suggestions or just listens in the right way makes such a huge difference! And you know, that's probably the single biggest reason why there have been so few fics from me over the last few months and especially why NB has been coming out so slowly - because I've been cut off from my chief source of inspiration (and no I'm not talking about Tuti)
9. Best and worst?
Best? ' Study'. I don't know why, but when I re-read it I can almost forget that it was me who wrote it and just enjoy it as a story rather than looking out for mistakes or things that need tweaking, which is what I usually do. It's got some of my favourite lines of dialogue I've ever written and despite the fact that I really wasn't very happy when I wrote it (it was written the night before I took the very abrupt decision to go home for a week during my last semester at uni) it's also one of the best examples of a night when the writing worked and took me away from all the things I was stressing myself out over. That and... I don't know, it feels kind of unique for some reason, something about what it says about Nagayan and Tuti.
Worst? If it's a question of the Tenimyu stuff, then there's a couple of short fics from when I'd only just started writing TxN that aren't very good. Overall, if I'm not happy with a fic then I don't show it to people because I don't consider it to be finished!
10. Coulda Been Contenders?
Oh that would be 'The Re-Education of Colonel Mustang'! Sometimes I wish I could get back into writing FMA fanfic just so I could finish it because it was fun and angsty and silly and I'm an unabashed Hughes fangirl so he spends most of the fic meddling with... interesting consequences *laughs* It hit about 20 chapters (none of the chapters were very long though) but then I got distracted by something... can't remember now what it was... oh yeah, Tenimyu!
11. Strengths?
*frowns* It's different things in different fics or fandoms. What I think I do well with TxN I don't or can't do with my original characters. What works when I'm writing fantasy stories is utterly wrong for the real life ones. This is the kind of question I think other people would be better at answering about me than I would! Heh, too much of a perfectionist, that's my problem! Maybe perfectionism is my strength. That and Tuti ♥ No prizes for guessing my favourite myu-actor ever...
12. Weaknesses?
Smut. There are very few times when I think I've pulled it off convincingly - read into that what you will.
Certain characters also give me problems. I don't think I write a very good Nagayan, chapter 10 of NB being one of the few exceptions when I think I got it right. Actually, aside from Tuti I don't feel overly confident writing any of the myu-boys unless the situation is so abstract (i.e. in Narnia!) that I feel capable of taking huge liberties with everyone and everything... that's probably not the best thing for a fanfic writer to say, is it?
13. Dirty Little Secrets?
Do I dare own up to sometimes wishing I could put Nile Blue on hiatus for a while?
Somewhere amongst all the stuff I've ever written there lurk a handful of Mary Sue's - in my defence though, I was thirteen when I wrote them! And the charms of Doctor Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1 are kind of hard to resist
There's a really long, potentially smutty TxN fic that I've been working on for months and months that I hope to finish one day but no one should hold their breath waiting for that one.
After watching the 'King Arthur' film a few weeks ago, I really want to write an epic fic about Arthur and Lancelot... some of their lines and it was just too easy... *hides*
Random, unrelated note - I never thought I'd say it, but I'm back with the property deeds and I'm so relieved to be there! After three days in the other office fighting with the finance deeds, I've been shunted back to where I was because we're trying to empty some of the offices and filing cabinets ready for the office-move in November. It's only a temporary reprieve because I'll be back tackling the finance deeds again before too long but it's a nice break! There's something very, very wrong about saying this but never mind
Oh and I'm sick - physically sick because I've caught Mum's cold and now Dad's going down with it too.