Elevator, elevator, taaake me home~
Well, that was an unexpected break. Time to play catch up!
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!
7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?
I do! Music is pretty integral into getting me into the writing mood, so it's usually on in the background as I make with the words. (I nearly always have music on, actually; one of the things that was a good demonstration of how stressed I was during Comps is that I couldn't write with music at all, except at the end.) My tested and true method is "One Song on Repeat," where I find a song that works, stick it on repeat in iTunes, and write to it until I can hear the words again (which is usually when it's time to switch to another song.) These can vary dramatically depending on mood. I once had an entire Playlist on Repeat, which was completely random; it was composed of songs I had downloaded and put into iTunes on that day, and it coincidentally turned out to be very good writing music. It contained things such as "Betrayed" from The Producers, "Dirty Laundry" by BitterSweet, a Chinese cover of "mad world" by ah sang, "Counting Cars" by Snow Patrol, and "Burn the Witch" by Queens of the Stone Age. When I say random...it was random.
As to the type, it again depends on my mood and the mood of the story. It is to my somewhat shame that I do really well writing to some VERY CHEESY music, such as "Hands to Heaven" by Breathe, or "Always" by Erasure, but I'll also write to typical pop like "Halo" by Beyoncé, "Jai Ho" with Nicole Sherzer and "Anywhere" by Evanescence, and some slightly better music like "There There" by Radiohead, "For Leah and Chloe" by Lost in Trees, and "You're a Wolf" by Sea Wolf. himawari and raynos often provide good writing earworms. I never quite know what's going to make a writing song, but it does stand a better chance if it's a bit of cheesy, drively pop. SIGH.
I don't tend to pick songs for characters*, but I have often have songs for stories. When I was working on the rewrite for "Scars 2," I made a playlist of bitter, hard pop and rock to keep my mood better synched to Ichigo's. (The rewrite, as it turned out, might have been a bit too bitter, which is why it...stopped.) Some stories have songs because it's what kept me in the mood to write it, like Damien Rice's "Volcano" for writing "Need." Some songs just naturally become associated with the stories I'm writing, because they relate to the plot or relationship I'm trying to convey. Both the JBS and Torchverse, for instance, have songs that go with their stories:
"The Bracelet" - "I'll Be," Edwin McCain (it will never stop being a song for Mako and Neph in my head, ever)
"The Necklace" - "Burn for You," John Farnham
"The Ring" - "Momentum" by Vienna Teng
Their Song has three, two by design and one by coincidence--"Love Suicide" from the game Rule of Rose, "Sway" by Anita Kelsey (specifically this version it must be), and "The Peanut Vendor" as sung by Anacani. Doris Day's "As Long As He Needs Me" is sort of an unofficial tune, from when I was digging through torch-y music to find good exmaples of that genre.
Music acts as inspiration, too. My Ficathon piece last year was not the one I wanted to do, but had to pull it together at the last moment. The actual piece was inspired by "Fingertips" by Poe, and the secondary one was "Save the Last Dance For Me" by the Platters. And one day, by golly, I might actually write both of those stories.
*I have songs I associate with characters and pairings, but I tend to find them later and go, "Oh hey, great song for X!" These include "Invincible" by OK Go (and "One Man Army" by Our Lady Peace and "In the Shadows" by Rasmus, but those weren't from me) for Ichigo, and "An Audience with the Pope" by Elbow for Rei.
8. What's your favorite genre to write? To read?
Urban fantasy, baby. Or, when I manage to find the good writer in me, ~magical realism~. But really, I've never been good at straight up slice-o'-life stuff, and I admire the hell out of the people who can pull it off. Laurell K. Hamilton (don't laugh) has a quote about how she can't look at a field without finding a decaying hand in it, to demonstrate the morbidity of her muse. In that vein, I can't seem to write anything that doesn't have eventual magic, mystical, or fantastic elements in it. It's one of the reasons my sensibility meshes well with a lot of anime; they do the slice of life against a fantastic really well. (One of the reasons I adore NGE so much is because of the very REAL they put in along with the giant, stompy robots and Daddy Issues.) My main show for the past few years has been Supernatural, which is urban fantasy to its core.
My bookshelf reflects this taste: some high fantasy, some low fantasy, some sci-fi, and scads of urban fantasy/paranormal romance series. I was actually thinking of starting a blog about re-reading those series, because what's the point in owning a series if you don't reread it, and I have some of the powerhouses of the PR genre sitting on my shelves right now. I don't read as much academically as I probably should, though I certainly enjoy trivia books. I also like graphic novels and collected comics (in the vein of, say, Penny Arcade or Doonesbury). This isn't to say that I can't read a straight realism book (though point me to one of those, really, and no, romances do not count)--it's just not my preferred choice. I have a discreet and deep love of hard-boiled fiction, too, and finding series like the Dresden Files or Garrett, P.I. that combine both that AND fantasy make me a happy, happy girl. Can't really write it, but it's fun to try!
9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.
Tee-hee-hee, silly meme, don't you realize I don't actually create my own characters?
All right, I do have to make up stuff for fanfic. I mean, BSSM paints the boys in very broad strokes (all of them, though Mamoru does get a bit more detail than the others), so you have to fill in from there. Every 'fic, no matter how closely it hews to canon, involves some amount of character adaptation to the events you're sticking them in. The fun of 'fic is figuring out how to keep that adaptation right on target to the character in the original work. (This gets even more fun in AUs and ARs, where the circumstances of canon get changed, and you have to figure out how that affects the core traits and their outer manifestations. I won't go into it too much, but Amy in Torchverse is still Ami--but she's also way different, because of the circumstances that lead to her being where she is.)
And actually, I tend to get circumstances first, and figure out the characters that fit it later on. Most of my older original stuff is me adapting my friends, and hell, I'm still prone to doing that; the Reader story is just that with people I knew at 21 rather than at 15, and Mari in Moonchild owes part of herself to the Mari I know. (Don't ask me who Ana and Eve were; the best answer is probably "cardboard cut-outs.") Original characters aren't something I do that well; as much as I enjoy making up people and the worlds they live in, it often fails in execution. Figuring out how to change language and voice is hard to fit characters is not an easy thing to do, and I don't think I've made a lot of progress on the differentiation of character from another simply by the voice I use to represent them. (Not by accent--that's easy--but how they structure things, how their thoughts flow, what the mood of the passage being represented to the reader is. Their Song is a place I've worked on this, which was partially motivated by accent, partially motivated by gender. Sometimes I do it better than others; it's something I am going to flagellate myself on in beta.)
Um. Where was I? Filibustering! Okay, backing off from that, the process is: think of a scenario, then figure out a character to put into it. This is how it works out for me about 95% of the time, for both 'fic and original writing. I wanted to write an office story and a non-Alpha werewolf story, and out of that came Logan, the non-Alpha secretary. I wanted to write a fantasy story about how it'll suck to be a demigod, and so we got Nyx, whose combination makes her hideous among elves, and Yrei, whose combination gets him tortured. The character outlines are taken from the plot they'll be serving, and then the detail work is added later to try and round them out. I am not so good at rounding people out.
'Fic is slightly different, because the character (and, in my case, pairing) is often the attractor point. But I'm still more often creating a scenario and jamming them into it than not. I write in universes with such large casts that it's easier, even in AUs/ARs, to put in cameos rather than OCs. Background OCs are easier, because it's just a matter of finding their defining trait to make them stand out for the mo'. But again, that's writing to the situation, not so much the character itself.
I do, on occasion, get the reverse, where a character pops up in my head with more of a personality than a situation attached to them. Atashi Green, the little punk, has never been used, but I did use Wren (the boy without a dad) and Isobel (beautiful hair, apple face) in the Lily AU, where they more or less fit. But it's a pretty rare thing for me to get that; more often, I get characters I know popping up in situations I do not, and so I have to go figure out what the hell is going on. This often happens while driving, so I'll stroll into my apartment muttering under my breath. Space Station Elysium is entirely the result of this, thanks to that "I told you, the next time we met, I'd fuck you or break you"/"Who says there's a difference?" line, which hit me while putting away groceries. This is both lovely (when it works) and HIGHLY ANNOYING (when I can't figure out what the hell goes with that scene, even when the lines are looping.)
Um. To sum up: I suck at character creation. I don't even have dice of my own!
There we go, all caught up! And now I can go to bed, ~whee~
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!
7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?
I do! Music is pretty integral into getting me into the writing mood, so it's usually on in the background as I make with the words. (I nearly always have music on, actually; one of the things that was a good demonstration of how stressed I was during Comps is that I couldn't write with music at all, except at the end.) My tested and true method is "One Song on Repeat," where I find a song that works, stick it on repeat in iTunes, and write to it until I can hear the words again (which is usually when it's time to switch to another song.) These can vary dramatically depending on mood. I once had an entire Playlist on Repeat, which was completely random; it was composed of songs I had downloaded and put into iTunes on that day, and it coincidentally turned out to be very good writing music. It contained things such as "Betrayed" from The Producers, "Dirty Laundry" by BitterSweet, a Chinese cover of "mad world" by ah sang, "Counting Cars" by Snow Patrol, and "Burn the Witch" by Queens of the Stone Age. When I say random...it was random.
As to the type, it again depends on my mood and the mood of the story. It is to my somewhat shame that I do really well writing to some VERY CHEESY music, such as "Hands to Heaven" by Breathe, or "Always" by Erasure, but I'll also write to typical pop like "Halo" by Beyoncé, "Jai Ho" with Nicole Sherzer and "Anywhere" by Evanescence, and some slightly better music like "There There" by Radiohead, "For Leah and Chloe" by Lost in Trees, and "You're a Wolf" by Sea Wolf. himawari and raynos often provide good writing earworms. I never quite know what's going to make a writing song, but it does stand a better chance if it's a bit of cheesy, drively pop. SIGH.
I don't tend to pick songs for characters*, but I have often have songs for stories. When I was working on the rewrite for "Scars 2," I made a playlist of bitter, hard pop and rock to keep my mood better synched to Ichigo's. (The rewrite, as it turned out, might have been a bit too bitter, which is why it...stopped.) Some stories have songs because it's what kept me in the mood to write it, like Damien Rice's "Volcano" for writing "Need." Some songs just naturally become associated with the stories I'm writing, because they relate to the plot or relationship I'm trying to convey. Both the JBS and Torchverse, for instance, have songs that go with their stories:
"The Bracelet" - "I'll Be," Edwin McCain (it will never stop being a song for Mako and Neph in my head, ever)
"The Necklace" - "Burn for You," John Farnham
"The Ring" - "Momentum" by Vienna Teng
Their Song has three, two by design and one by coincidence--"Love Suicide" from the game Rule of Rose, "Sway" by Anita Kelsey (specifically this version it must be), and "The Peanut Vendor" as sung by Anacani. Doris Day's "As Long As He Needs Me" is sort of an unofficial tune, from when I was digging through torch-y music to find good exmaples of that genre.
Music acts as inspiration, too. My Ficathon piece last year was not the one I wanted to do, but had to pull it together at the last moment. The actual piece was inspired by "Fingertips" by Poe, and the secondary one was "Save the Last Dance For Me" by the Platters. And one day, by golly, I might actually write both of those stories.
*I have songs I associate with characters and pairings, but I tend to find them later and go, "Oh hey, great song for X!" These include "Invincible" by OK Go (and "One Man Army" by Our Lady Peace and "In the Shadows" by Rasmus, but those weren't from me) for Ichigo, and "An Audience with the Pope" by Elbow for Rei.
8. What's your favorite genre to write? To read?
Urban fantasy, baby. Or, when I manage to find the good writer in me, ~magical realism~. But really, I've never been good at straight up slice-o'-life stuff, and I admire the hell out of the people who can pull it off. Laurell K. Hamilton (don't laugh) has a quote about how she can't look at a field without finding a decaying hand in it, to demonstrate the morbidity of her muse. In that vein, I can't seem to write anything that doesn't have eventual magic, mystical, or fantastic elements in it. It's one of the reasons my sensibility meshes well with a lot of anime; they do the slice of life against a fantastic really well. (One of the reasons I adore NGE so much is because of the very REAL they put in along with the giant, stompy robots and Daddy Issues.) My main show for the past few years has been Supernatural, which is urban fantasy to its core.
My bookshelf reflects this taste: some high fantasy, some low fantasy, some sci-fi, and scads of urban fantasy/paranormal romance series. I was actually thinking of starting a blog about re-reading those series, because what's the point in owning a series if you don't reread it, and I have some of the powerhouses of the PR genre sitting on my shelves right now. I don't read as much academically as I probably should, though I certainly enjoy trivia books. I also like graphic novels and collected comics (in the vein of, say, Penny Arcade or Doonesbury). This isn't to say that I can't read a straight realism book (though point me to one of those, really, and no, romances do not count)--it's just not my preferred choice. I have a discreet and deep love of hard-boiled fiction, too, and finding series like the Dresden Files or Garrett, P.I. that combine both that AND fantasy make me a happy, happy girl. Can't really write it, but it's fun to try!
9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.
Tee-hee-hee, silly meme, don't you realize I don't actually create my own characters?
All right, I do have to make up stuff for fanfic. I mean, BSSM paints the boys in very broad strokes (all of them, though Mamoru does get a bit more detail than the others), so you have to fill in from there. Every 'fic, no matter how closely it hews to canon, involves some amount of character adaptation to the events you're sticking them in. The fun of 'fic is figuring out how to keep that adaptation right on target to the character in the original work. (This gets even more fun in AUs and ARs, where the circumstances of canon get changed, and you have to figure out how that affects the core traits and their outer manifestations. I won't go into it too much, but Amy in Torchverse is still Ami--but she's also way different, because of the circumstances that lead to her being where she is.)
And actually, I tend to get circumstances first, and figure out the characters that fit it later on. Most of my older original stuff is me adapting my friends, and hell, I'm still prone to doing that; the Reader story is just that with people I knew at 21 rather than at 15, and Mari in Moonchild owes part of herself to the Mari I know. (Don't ask me who Ana and Eve were; the best answer is probably "cardboard cut-outs.") Original characters aren't something I do that well; as much as I enjoy making up people and the worlds they live in, it often fails in execution. Figuring out how to change language and voice is hard to fit characters is not an easy thing to do, and I don't think I've made a lot of progress on the differentiation of character from another simply by the voice I use to represent them. (Not by accent--that's easy--but how they structure things, how their thoughts flow, what the mood of the passage being represented to the reader is. Their Song is a place I've worked on this, which was partially motivated by accent, partially motivated by gender. Sometimes I do it better than others; it's something I am going to flagellate myself on in beta.)
Um. Where was I? Filibustering! Okay, backing off from that, the process is: think of a scenario, then figure out a character to put into it. This is how it works out for me about 95% of the time, for both 'fic and original writing. I wanted to write an office story and a non-Alpha werewolf story, and out of that came Logan, the non-Alpha secretary. I wanted to write a fantasy story about how it'll suck to be a demigod, and so we got Nyx, whose combination makes her hideous among elves, and Yrei, whose combination gets him tortured. The character outlines are taken from the plot they'll be serving, and then the detail work is added later to try and round them out. I am not so good at rounding people out.
'Fic is slightly different, because the character (and, in my case, pairing) is often the attractor point. But I'm still more often creating a scenario and jamming them into it than not. I write in universes with such large casts that it's easier, even in AUs/ARs, to put in cameos rather than OCs. Background OCs are easier, because it's just a matter of finding their defining trait to make them stand out for the mo'. But again, that's writing to the situation, not so much the character itself.
I do, on occasion, get the reverse, where a character pops up in my head with more of a personality than a situation attached to them. Atashi Green, the little punk, has never been used, but I did use Wren (the boy without a dad) and Isobel (beautiful hair, apple face) in the Lily AU, where they more or less fit. But it's a pretty rare thing for me to get that; more often, I get characters I know popping up in situations I do not, and so I have to go figure out what the hell is going on. This often happens while driving, so I'll stroll into my apartment muttering under my breath. Space Station Elysium is entirely the result of this, thanks to that "I told you, the next time we met, I'd fuck you or break you"/"Who says there's a difference?" line, which hit me while putting away groceries. This is both lovely (when it works) and HIGHLY ANNOYING (when I can't figure out what the hell goes with that scene, even when the lines are looping.)
Um. To sum up: I suck at character creation. I don't even have dice of my own!
There we go, all caught up! And now I can go to bed, ~whee~