Wrote a post for International Women's Day about my female characters and how much I love them. Yay ladies! *hugs them all*
Aside from that, still having a hard time getting my brain into writing mode for long periods of time, so here's a meme (borrowed from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avanti_90). Questions are mostly about fic, so I'll answer them that way unless it makes sense to delve into book-writing. Pick a number; pick two or three and I might answer them all if I have time.
1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.
2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
3. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?
4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
5. Share one of your strengths.
6. Share one of your weaknesses.
7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you're proud of it.
9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?
10. Which fic has been the easiest to write?
11. Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?
12. Is there an episode above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?
13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?
14. What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?
15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?
16. If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?
17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?
18. Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?
19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?
20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.
21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?
22. Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style.
23. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?
24. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?
25. What do you look for in a beta?
26. Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?
27. How do you feel about collaborations?
28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.
29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?
30. Do you accept prompts?
31. Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?
32. How do you feel about smut?
33. How do you feel about crack?
34. What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?
35. Would you ever kill off a canon character?
36. Which is your favorite site to post fic?
37. Talk about your current wips.
38. Talk about a review that made your day.
39. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?
40. Write an alternative ending to [insert fic title] (or just the summary of one).
Aside from that, still having a hard time getting my brain into writing mode for long periods of time, so here's a meme (borrowed from
avanti_90). Questions are mostly about fic, so I'll answer them that way unless it makes sense to delve into book-writing. Pick a number; pick two or three and I might answer them all if I have time.1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.
4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
5. Share one of your strengths.
8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you're proud of it.
9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?
10. Which fic has been the easiest to write?
11. Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?
12. Is there an episode above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?
13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?
15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?
16. If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?
17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?
18. Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?
19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?
20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.
22. Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style.
23. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?
24. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?
25. What do you look for in a beta?
26. Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?
27. How do you feel about collaborations?
28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.
29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?
30. Do you accept prompts?
32. How do you feel about smut?
33. How do you feel about crack?
34. What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?
35. Would you ever kill off a canon character?
36. Which is your favorite site to post fic?
37. Talk about your current wips.
39. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?
40. Write an alternative ending to [insert fic title] (or just the summary of one).
no subject
Date: 2015-03-09 02:25 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2015-03-09 03:15 pm (UTC)From:#7: 7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
From Children of an Idle Brain:
Finch dreams wildernesses of poetry, absurdities sprouting from the soil of his measured mind, tendrils seeking the sun.
It's said that dreaming is how we work out the problems of our daily lives. Since Finch spends all his days solving problems, his nights perhaps require that sense and logic be put aside. Nathan once joked that he must dream in code. And it's not that he hasn't; but it was the code of miracles, of cloud-castles and star-networks and unimaginable power, imagined. He could have built anything with that code, if only he'd remembered it on waking. But he can't reconstruct the miraculous, only its shadow. All his work is like that, he sometimes thinks: like painting in a mirror, like fiddling with live wires in the dark. The blind engineer, using another's eyes as his hands; and he's done it well, if never perfectly.
In dreams he can do anything, though, and he does. He's been known to fly; he's not above puns or triteness, though when he shows up at the class he's failed to attend all semester he still aces the exam, hacking directly into the teacher's brain if necessary. It's a trick he wishes he could replicate in daylight, if only because it would save so much time. Skating along neural pathways as over smooth black ice, he sees memories frozen underwater, gazing up with pallid eyes. Slicing through the ice hurts, and what he wants is usually on the surface anyway. But he's used to pain, and in dreams he can swing a pickax or throw a stone. He might draw lines on the ice with a finger like a bone saw, and watch it fracture, but the mathematics would swallow him, and in dreams he does not abjure rough magic. When it's John's face under the water, he uses his fingernails. When it's Grace's, he sits back on his heels, a pose he hasn't managed waking in several years, and wishes he'd given her a diamond ring; emeralds are not hard enough to mark the fire-toughened barrier between them. She is perfectly preserved in the shallow grave, warm and living, but he knows she'd rather fight her way out and join him in the cold.
A bell tolls and the dream-structure tilts like a Coney Island ride, shifting to vertical: a window, many windows overlapping on a screen, lakes and rivers and canals, a massive weight of liquid threatening to overflow. He stuffs a finger into the hole in the dike, and holds back the flood. The pressure mounts, cracking his bones one at a time. "Give it to me, Harold," the water whispers, gleeful at his torture. "Give it up. You know you want to tell me." And he does; he wants to shout out the news of his creation: the heavens and the earth, and darkness upon the face of the deep. No man is an island, he remembers, but he is one; water laps in a circle around him, washing away clods and promontories and numbers, and he is all things insular, inaccessible cliffs and Galapagos finches, cotton candy and Dickens and passwords that change every two hours. Isolation is his hallmark; it's stamped in little greeting cards all over his skin, each of them yearning to be opened.
"A September eleventh card," John murmurs, clutching a bouquet of white lilies. "I thought you'd forgotten, Harold." They have eggs Benedict and beer, sitting by the river. It's chilly in the wind, and he unbuttons John's coat to get at the warmth inside, puts his hand over the beating heart; the diamond ring on his finger cuts through flesh and bone like a saw, and inside it's all gears and circuits, and lines of code flowing like blood under the surface. He knows the code, intimately, possessively; he knows it in the biblical sense. Be fruitful, and multiply. I know, because I built it.
The robot isn't John any longer; it's Nathan, and it laughs at him and steals his ice-cream cone and pushes him into the deep end of the pool and he swims.
*
Reasons I am proud of it: SO MANY WORDS, dream-logic and dream-language, flowing associations, canon references and character insights, sense-expressions that sing and shiver and groan. I couldn't (and shouldn't) write like this all the time, but I'm glad it happened here.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-09 03:24 pm (UTC)From:From Offerings:
Miles gave him a you-suffering-bastard look that seemed to presage a hug, but then apparently decided against it. "This," he said, "is where a Vorkosigan should pull out a bottle of booze." He pushed aside folds of the shirt and reached for what turned out to be a small flask clipped to his belt.
"It's not even lunchtime yet," said Gregor.
"You apparently have an insufficient understanding of Vorkosigan tradition. Cheers." Miles unscrewed the top and took a sip, then handed the flask to Gregor. Tasting first to prove to the Emperor he wouldn't be poisoned: also a tradition.
"This isn't maple mead, is it?" Gregor asked.
"Brandy." Gregor drank, and coughed hard. "Sort of," amended Miles.
"Something you found in your father's desk, perhaps?"
"Um... foot locker. God knows how old it is."
"Well," said Gregor, "maybe it'll grow on me." It did, slightly. He'd been very careful to avoid alcohol during the whole Serg debacle, and since he'd begun to recover had returned to his usual ways, drinking toasts in good wine when he had guests, and otherwise mostly abstaining. He could stand to get really drunk, he thought. There wasn't much in the flask, but Miles no doubt had more -- and better -- back at the house.
But before they became incoherent... "Miles," he said, taking one more sip and passing the flask back, "how do you think I'm doing? As Emperor?"
"Huh. Well enough, I think. You've been Emperor my whole life; I really have no basis for comparison."
"Yes, you do."
"You mean my father, as Regent? I was a kid. And... he was my father. And it's different. Knowing that you're not Emperor, I mean. Saves you from... going over the edge. Whatever edge that might be. Stark raving terror, most likely."
Gregor began to laugh. "I was just remembering," he said when Miles gave him a questioning eyebrow lift, "what Ekaterin said, elaborating on her bluff. I was going to give my throne to Xav, with you as Regent. It was what no sane advisor would counsel me to do, a recipe for disaster: a cuckold with total control over an Empire abandoned by a man he'd thought was his friend, fleeing with his wife. And an Emperor barely older than I was when I took the throne. Xav the Doomed. And yet she didn't seem to think it was imprudent."
"She was improvising wildly. You say crazy things."
"Yes, but... I think it would have worked. The circumstances, I assure you, are completely fictitious, but even if it was all true, you're the one I'd trust. To be Regent, and to stay Regent. Even if you hated my guts." He waited until Miles, looking slightly stunned, toasted him with the flask, then added, "As Emperor, I wouldn't trust you a day."
Miles snorted brandy, choked, and had to be thumped on the back. "Agreed," he husked out when he could speak.
"If I live," Gregor said, "I plan to give up the throne when Xav is thirty, or earlier if he says he's ready. That will be quite long enough for Gregor the Already Tedious. But so far I think I've managed basically competent."
"Gregor the Modestly Fishing For Compliments. Gregor the Really Not So Bad. Gregor the Pretty Fucking Good At His Job, In Fact."
"Ha. Gregor needs another drink now." Miles passed the flask.
*
Reasons I'm proud of it: This is one of my favorite fics for dialogue, because Miles and Gregor play off each other so well; the conversation just flowed, with a remarkable amount of trading straight lines and ba-da-boom ripostes for people talking about such serious issues. There are funnier bits in the story, but I like this bit because it shows clearly how much they value each other, how they can be honest with each other, and still go for the one-upmanship. It was all so fun to write, and I remember the feeling of that, and it's great.