There's little Polly Ester, who's never afraid~
1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you've worked with and why.
2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?
3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you're writing about fictional places)?
4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!
5. By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?
6. Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol' pen and paper?
7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?
8. What's your favorite genre to write? To read?
9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.
10. What are some really weird situations your characters have been in? Everything from serious canon scenes to meme questions counts!
11. Who is your favorite character to write? Least favorite?
12. In what story did you feel you did the best job of worldbuilding? Any side-notes on it you'd like to share?
13. What's your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?
14. How do you map out locations, if needed? Do you have any to show us?
15. Midway question! Tell us about a writer you admire, whether professional or not!
16. Do you write romantic relationships? How do you do with those, and how “far” are you willing to go in your writing? ;)
17. Favorite protagonist and why!
18. Favorite antagonist and why!
19. Favorite minor that decided to shove himself into the spotlight and why!
20. What are your favorite character interactions to write?
21. Do any of your characters have children? How well do you write them?
22. Tell us about one scene between your characters that you've never written or told anyone about before! Serious or not.
23. How long does it usually take you to complete an entire story-from planning to writing to posting (if you post your work)?
24. How willing are you to kill your characters if the plot so demands it? What's the most interesting way you've killed someone?
25. Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.
26. Let's talk art! Do you draw your characters? Do others draw them? Pick one of your OCs and post your favorite picture of him!
27. Along similar lines, do appearances play a big role in your stories? Tell us about them, or if not, how you go about designing your characters.
28. Have you ever written a character with physical or mental disabilities? Describe them, and if there's nothing major to speak of, tell us a few smaller ones.
29. How often do you think about writing? Ever come across something IRL that reminds you of your story/characters?
30. Final question! Tag someone! And tell us what you like about that person as a writer and/or about one of his/her characters!
2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?
Hee hee, uh...lots? I'm primarily a fanfic author now, so I have big ole cast lists at my hands. I tend to focus on doubles or triples (I really like threes), but there are bunches to work with. The BSSM stories I write have ten characters at least--five pairings--and then there's the Outers and Chibi-Usa, and villains like Beryl and Chaos. It's hard to start the plot of a GenSen 'fic without eventually including all ten of those characters, too, no matter how you do it. For instance, I have a 'verse in my head that started with just Zoi and Kunz, and then Endymion crept in, and then, naturally, so did Ami and Minako. Sunny's World did much the same thing. I occasionally minimize that cast by just focusing on a group, but there's a natural, hard to avoid creep up to that full ten. (And beyond. Pluto, I'm looking at you...)
This is something of a throwback to the way I used to write original fiction, which was with thinly veiled characters based on people around me. So a couple of the verses I wrote had five, seven, nine different characters, with more often getting introduced along the way as other people drifted in and out of my life. Nowadays, my original casts are smaller--four, five people or so--with generally no more than four major characters, and a handful of minor characters along the way. So Moonchild had Logan, Nym, Mari and Morgan; the Lily stories focused on Ana, Eve, Val and Esteban; the Reader story of long past focused Nyx and her traveling companions, with only one or two others in the wings, aside from the stuff that took place in the present. This shows up in my fanfic, too; Bleach has a ginormous cast, but my focus tended to be on some of the Karakura crew, Renji and Rukia; NuTrek gets narrowed further, down to Kirk and Chapel and McCoy, generally, with an OC or two to round out the ranks; the random anime, Avatar, comic and videogame stories are all generally focused on a pair or a trio. I'm much more fond of dyads and trios now; it's less exhausting, for one. The Six Ways stories, for instance, started out as exploring the V/K dyad across different settings with a short (heh heh, usually) story focus, so I could minimize a little that cast creep.
I'd like to say that I don't have a preference for character gender, but I kinda do, and it's for guys. Which is WEIRD, given that I started writing from a female perspective and for a female perspective, in that Mary Sue-ish way (I'm a woman, it creeps in). But real life interaction and reading has often shown me that I am a bit illiterate in girl bits, because it too often flows from my own experience, where I am also illiterate on the girl bits side. For instance, I don't wear short skirts. I don't have the legs or confidence for it. So my female characters tend to favor longer skirts, even though it's often out of place for them (generally lacking the body and confidence issue), and sometimes doesn't fit the scene at all. V and I have spent some instructive time looking at fancy panties sites and such, simply because I need to know what to CALL certain things (and it's nice to have a design in mind). Lack of confidence in expressing the right amount of femininity means that I often go for a guy POV, though I also don't have all the chops there--but I can fake it, it feels, a bit better at times.
Only a bit--I still have trouble with original characters, as the notes on Moonchild show when it comes to both Logan and Morgan--but the nice thing about writing 'fic is that the original often gives me the props I need to do my best to create a realistic-ish dude. Or, at least, a dude mostly in character to himself, sort of thing. But even writing from a source doesn't give me the best handle on other women; for instance, I do terrible with tsundere female characters because they confound the shit out of me. It wasn't until I watched PGSM that I had any better handle on Rei's character, and she still gets put on the backburner a lot because I can't entirely figure her out. Rukia has taken a long time to do better with for the same reason; she's kinda tsundere, but she's also kinda opaque, and keeping her balanced between canon information and my own views is a thin line to walk. This is not to say I always do well with the men, as my Shitennou will show. They have sketchy characterization to begin with, which gives me some leeway (or a lot of leeway, depending), but aside from that, they're also GUYS, and I still err on the side of making them far too nice and far too clean.
Teal deer, but the general point is: I find it easier to be a confident writer in a guy POV, and tend to be able to only write women who I can understand in some way. But I need to work on the proper balance of asshole in men, especially men in groups, and I need to think outside the box on the ladies more to make them better rounded as women and characters.
Mmm, so much BLAH BLAH BLAH for this meme. Most excellent! Tomorrow I get to talk about coming up with names. I have a feeling I could hit LJ's 10k character limit there, so I'll...try...to restrain myself. A little. ;)