Watched Doctor Who today. I was at my mother's so my sister [who complained that I took the TV] watched it with me. Oh ho ho ho, she liked it. The part where the monster in the closet was trying to get out scared her to death [I was silently laughing at her terror] but I'm sure I could con her into watching it with me again. =D Then I went home and watched Dragon Ball Z Kai. The fact they boiled down the series to 99 episodes has made me fall in love with it all over again. The fights, with considerably less stalling; the OP, even in English, is fun to belt out ridiculously loud and cheesily because it's DBZ and my childhood; Piccolo; Vegeta's sudden British accent. Aaaa. If there was ever a time to get it, now would be the time. Especially if they have an uncut version...
Next, it turns out that I can still get a copy of my story from NaNo printed out for me for free. Awesome. The offer expires June 30th, so that's plenty of time to procrastinate like a mofo in doing the obvious edits. And thinking about edits, and NaNo in general, has made me come to the realization that, aside from my general writing ability getting better with age, I've felt for the longest time that my writing has gotten worse instead of better.
It lacks a complexity I think it had when I first started RPing. My ideas didn't center around one thing. Looking at my very first drabbles I had, they all had nothing in common, but there was at least emotion there. Once I started to focus on certain characters and not just nameless 'faces', my mind can't... get out of the gravitational pull of assigning roles to characters I've created, which pigeon holes me into a certain type of writing. Only a limited amount of scenes can come from those characters. I just can't describe it really.
I don't think I set out with the purpose of RP helping out with my writing. I picked up Ichigo on a whim and wanted to have fun, which I totally did in
sages_of_chaos, and the memories there are still fond ones. Same with Itachi at
sortinghat_rp, and while it certainly helped me in character creation and finding a voice, my actual skills as a writer have plunged into the abyss. I'm decent at impromptu conversations, where I only have to REALLY think about one persons point of view. But now conversations between two of my own characters feels rather wooden to me. They were always kinda 1, 2, 1, 2, before, but the development in that has flowed backwards. Once my Grimmjow muse died, even my RPing has gotten lackluster, though I've tried to bring it back up to snuff. I'm having tons of fun now, but I know it isn't so easy to bounce off my characters as it used to be.
My drawing has also suffered from copious amounts of computer use starting in my second semester in college, but it has been a lot easier to get up to snuff with what I had in years past than my writing. I can whip out full drawings with shading and everything in an hour, if I'm uninterrupted. Maybe 1.5 if I am, considering I've been doing a considerable amount of drawing at work recently >_>, and customers have a pesky habit of appearing. But I'm able to drop it and pick it back up again and draw at least DECENT things for the first time in a while, on a more or less consistent basis. I'm leaning towards pin up girl poses for some reason...
Not so with my writing. Everyone has an off day, but my third person writing, the bread and butter for me, is more off than not. Drawing the emotions in a scene are becoming harder, and it's so few and far inbetween that the words just flow out like they used to, and that makes me sad. I'm not sure what to do about it, besides the obvious 'Write more!' and 'Practice makes perfect!' approach, which has helped in my drawing, but not so much in my writing. I can draw the same general pose over and over with different faces, body types, clothes, not be bored, and get faster and better at it each time. The same can't be said for writing. And my writing and drawing are rather linked, as I see all the scenes I write as pictures first, in motion, and I translate that motion into words. But there seems to be a disconnect, and I don't know how to bridge that gap.
Regardless, I want to start up a new world, but I have two other stories that are trying to come out. Problem is, I'm horrible with plot. I'm much better connecting others' various seemingly unrelated plots given to me into a continuous stream that somehow makes sense logically and turns epic. I'm also not very good with short stories. Even my PWPs always seemed to want to span into 2-3 or more parts. I'm never sure how to end something, which is the problem with all the stories I've written so far. The end isn't ever really the end. It's the segway to something more, but I never quite get into the 'more'. I have to go back and revise the original because I get even more ideas and expand the world and *foams at the mouth* Which is why the first story I wrote in high school stopped halfway through, was rewritten, and the second book was never written, because I realized I had to write three concurrent stories in three separate books that needed to intertwine at key parts to make a cohesive story that I wasn't sure about yet, but involved war and supernatural entities and creating an entirely different world of which I started a map for the region in question but is still in my sketchbook and the basics for the three 'levels' of entities on the world are in my writing journal but not fully fleshed out.
*spews*
The second story I wrote stopped after I lost my notebook with the next part I'd written in it, and then I started up on the sequel, where the base of the world has flip flopped at least three times, so every time I change it, it gets more complex but all the writing I've done on it up until that point is mute because the way the characters behave and are perceived changes significantly depending on the world base I use.
*spews*
Gah, I rambled. But my writing ability isn't up to par with my ideas. That frustrates me. More than my inability to always draw the dynamic things I want, because I'm sure that with time, I could do that, but with my writing, I'm not at all sure...