Writing Meme - Day Six

It'd actually be easier to say where I'm NOT comfortable writing, since I can pretty much write anywhere. The only place where I absolutely could not write was my grandmother's house. It was very weird. I had to spend a day at my grandmother's last year shortly after Thanksgiving (I was keeping Dad company while we waited for Grandma's caretaker to get back from visiting her family for the holiday), so I thought I'd get a lot of writing done, especially since there wasn't any internet connection to speak of. But seriously, I barely got any words done. I was set to call that day a wash, but after I got home, I suddenly was set with inspiration and managed to spend the rest of the night writing up a storm. Crazy.

If I'm inspired, I can write any time, really, but I tend to be more likely to write in the evening than in the morning. And I prefer to write on my laptop than with pen and paper, since I'm always going back and changing a phrase or adding stuff, which is a lot easier in a word program than in a notebook. But I do always keep a notebook in my purse, just in case. And it is a lot easier to jot down something on paper than tap it out on my ipod touch, that's for sure.

Writing Meme - Day Five

I don't usually assign ages to my characters, so I don't have any idea who would be youngest or oldest age-wise. Most of my characters live the nebulous age-cloud of mid-twenties to late-thirties, although I do have one elderly character, Madame Ludlilly, who first debuted in my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel, though she was technically dead (she had a few appearances in flashbacks, though), but also appeared the next year, just barely (she slipped in just before I hit the 50k mark, and after that I was kind of tired of that story, so I never finished it), and still alive.

For my "oldest" characters, see the previous post. As for the "youngest," that would be Mona and her friends, whom I mentioned a couple of posts ago, and whom I'll write more about in an upcoming question.

Midmorning Video - The Peeps

A day late for Easter, but I didn't discover it until just now, so there you go:

Writing Meme - Day Four

The earliest characters I can remember are actually from a VeggieTales RP that I was in back in 1999 or so. For the RP, I created a female asparagus named Chloe who was Madame Blueberry's cook (and who later got romantically involved with Archibald). Over the course of the RP, Chloe's two younger sisters, Marie and Valerie, joined in, and there were all manner of fun adventures with canon characters and originals alike, including the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything actually doing something (trying to take over Madame Blueberry's house), lots of cooking, a game of croquet, and everyone getting shipwrecked on an island. The RP kind of petered out after a storyline involving a cruise, but it was fun while it lasted.

As for the sisters, I don't really remember too much about their general personalities, except that Chloe was the sweet, perky one, Marie was the most responsible one, and Valerie was still in high school and very weird. As part of the RP, Chloe hooked up with Archibald, and outside of the RP's canon, Marie had an on-again-off-again boyfriend (which was my younger self's idea of character humor, since Marie was otherwise very set in her ways).

Actually, I'm not sure if those three came first or if they came after Enrico and Ocirne, characters I made for a Pokemon RP on the old TRHQ board. Again, I don't remember too much about their personalities, but they were twins. I made Enrico first, a Pokemon protector who could turn into a Chansey (though this didn't come up too much in the story), but later on his evil twin debuted, who was a villain and could turn into a Ghastly (though again, this didn't actually come up too much). They both had spiky black hair (to fit the Pokemon anime style) and (inspired by The Matrix), they both wore black trenchcoats. Being a villain, Ocirne was more interesting than his brother, so I remember more about him (though a lot of it was made by the other people in the RP, since it was kind of free-for-all when it came to using characters). He had a lair in Bermuda where he would relax whenever his plans failed, Jigglypuff from the anime series became his hench-mon (and occasionally turned into a real girl depending on the plot), and he had a smoking habit (which mostly manifested itself in his evil laugh being cut short by a coughing fit, followed by him commented that he really needed to quit smoking).

It was actually my older sister who named Ocirne, when I had just come up with the idea for Enrico to have an evil twin and couldn't think of a name. She suggested spelling Enrico backwards, and the result sounded like an evil name to me, so I stuck with it, and I still like it. Enrico was a name I just pulled out of nowhere (not knowing how long the RP would end up running, nor what large parts my characters would play), and my younger self was actually surprised to find out that it was a real name. My older sister also drew a fair amount of art of these two, at my request, though most of it now resides in forgotten sketchbooks somewhere (probably).

Update: Okay, I guess if I really wanted to talk about my very first stories, I'd have to mention that little books that I wrote in first and second grade (as school assignments). But the only one I remember anything about is one about a frog from outer space that I based on a Jeremy Fisher toy I had. I remember writing a number of stories, and meticulously picking out images from Printshop to use as cover images, though.

Writing Meme - Day Three

I usually let my characters drift in narrative limbo (as it were) without names for a long time. I flesh out who they are and come up with a name for them afterwards. Most of the time, I go through a series of names until I decide which one feels right for them (and even then I may not be completely satisfied with it), though if I'm particularly stuck (or want them to have a Meaningful Name), I'll go to a naming site or use my favorite name resource, "Beyond Jennifer and Jason." But then there's the occasionally character who is "born" complete with a name already, though they're less likely to be main characters.

When it comes to naming places, I tend to come up with just completely random names, like Rearn and Losslaria. I'm not very good at world-building, and I guess it shows with my names.

Writing Meme - Day Two

I really don't think I could count the characters I've come with over the years. I tend to make more female characters than male, which is probably because I'm a girl. I do on occasion follow the tropes, though, as my most recent character, Mona, suddenly gained three best friends both so that they could be her Girl Posse when they were younger, and so they'd fit the Four Girl Ensemble, not because she needed them for the plot.

Early on, I had to deliberately create male characters, i.e. they were usually the significant others for my main characters. Which is sort of the opposite of what tends to go on in most media, since Most Writers Are Male. But these days I'm better about making a more even mix of characters, though still slightly on the more-likely-to-be-female side.

Writing Meme - Day One

I've been seeing this circulate around my flist on livejournal, and decided to go for it. For the month of April, I'll be answering questions related to my writing.

It's hard to decide, really. But overall, I'd say that the short story I had the most fun on was a fanfic for "Flint the Time Detective" that was a retelling of Cinderella (although it was really more like the characters putting it on as a play, just with no audience). That one even earned me fanart, though it was lost in a computer crash many years ago ;_;. But it was just very silly and fun to do.

Of the longer (and more recent) stories I've written, I enjoyed my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel for much the same reason, it was just a lot of silly, intentionally overdramatic stuff, and was technically a reimagining of my 2007 novel, which turned out to be not as much fun as I thought it would be, mainly because the main character didn't go anywhere, and most of the action happened offscreen as it were. So in the 2008 novel, the main characters explicitly had the power to travel to different worlds, and were thus obligated to go all over the place. So yeah, a lot more fun the previous year.