This is interesting, although not terribly accurate. When I write men, I write like a man; when I write women, I write like a woman. Which is a good thing, I guess, for realism, but not so much for subversion. Hrmmmph. *immediately sets about deconstructing her writing*

(It's pretty close to androgynous most of the time, mind you, but... well, I'm not sure I agree with their word choices.)

Original || Comment ||

Stolen from Maddie:

Post the first line of a story here, and I'll write the next five.

GO GO GO GUYS.

I'm not sure how many of you have seen Elizabeth Gilbert talking about creative genius, but I saw it a while back and didn't comment, and one of the guys at work brought it to my attention again tonight on Twitter, so I guess I want to hash out my own thoughts on it and find out what you all think, since most of you are my first port of call when it comes to writing feedback and assistance.

( I will cut this, though, because I think I've ranted at incorrigible public length enough for one evening. I DO NOT IMAGINE THAT I NEED TO TELL YOU THIS IS ALL OPINION, BUT FOR THE SAKE OF AVOIDING SNOOTY COMMENTS: IMHO. )

So that's the rant. I'd appreciate slightly saner commentary, since we all know how I get when I'm excited. I want to know what your creativity-inducing triggers are.

Triggers:
MUSIC → Must be regular of beat, remain within a certain pitch range, and connect in some way with the tone of what I am writing. This is why my playlist for The Conductor is more successful in getting me to work than any other playlist — it's very flat and straightforward, which fits Ash's mentality very well.
SOLITUDE → If pressed, I can write with people around, but particularly for story-writing, I have to be in a corner where I can see everyone and no one can be reading over my shoulder. Music comes in here, too, since it helps isolate my brain from whatever is going on around me.
NIGHT → No matter what I try to do with my schedule, I always write my best between 10pm and 2am. I have done, and am doing, my best to alter this, but my head works better at night, probably because at night I feel like I'm just dicking about with words and there's no pressure.
PRESSURE → Conversely, pressure helps because it means that the writing (or other creative endeavour) is the most important thing around. Nothing tops it, therefore nothing has the right to encroach on your focus upon it.
COLD FEET → No, seriously. I find it difficult to write when I have warm feet. They give me an uncomfortableness.
TEA → Not that I can't write without it, but that I have made tea a ritual that lets me focus on my work: I make it, bring it back to my desk, and get in a good five or ten minutes of intense concentration before it's of a drinkable temperature. (And then, if I'm lucky, forget all about it because I'm concentrating too hard on what I'm doing to be concerned with things like tea. Pfah!)
WRITING → Writing this rant helped me focus, because I was trying to prove a point. Perhaps I should make a point of writing semi-structured mini-essays before I sit down to write for AtM et al! We'll see if I can come up with a list of topics to rant about. Let me know if you have any ideas, eh?

That's all I can think of at present. Come and chatter with me, o flist, and yea, also you lurkers of the night. I am less aggressive than the rant would have you believe, especially now that it is 11.22pm and I am kind of tired and cold and ranted out.

[EDIT] And on this note, I want to replace this icon, since it does not actually reflect my views. I'd rather go with sometimes my brain is doing things I don't even know about, because that is certainly truer than I'm just the writer.

Coming down with something, as is my wont when I have been around the children. Glands are up, tonsils aching faintly, but with any luck the multi-vitamin and a decent night's sleep will see me at work tomorrow. Tonsilitis is not something I care to have in my adult life, do you hear me, little fleshsacs. My ears are iffy, too, but that's possibly just a sign I ought not to spend so much time with headphones in.

Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale arrived this morning. Well, technically Friday. It's decent so far, and not as trashy as I was expecting, which is a relief.

I am, of course, supposed to be writing in order to fulfill my self-set fic-finishing deadlines so that I can clear out the fic list and write Real Things but to be honest at the moment I feel like sentences are falling out the back of my nose.

I was talking to Tina last night about methods of novel writing and how, in particular, Book!verse, CC!verse and Rocfall seem to like me to ricochet wildly between them. Conductor is also pretty sharing and caring, although shyer about it than the rest, which just figures, given its protagonists. AtM seems to be the live-in, since it coexists peacefully right up until the wild fits of novel jealousy that involve flinging fistfuls of the story on the floor and making sure it all goes back in upside-down.

Yeah, so maybe I should go to bed. >_>; Yeesh.

Saturday! Day of Doing Things So You Do Not Have To Do Them Later! Today:
- clean bathroom
- tidy desk
- wash sheets
- dry sheets
- vacuum
- fix whatever James did to the last pot when he washed the heavy dishes, sigh. (This is the real reason having sore hands sucks.)
- check that you did not bork /docs Did not bork! Huzzah! This is about the extent of my technical ability, sigh.
- work out whether or not you could really hypothetically write a full draft of AtM by the end of the year, even while working full time
- do your tax
- figure out scening for Debt?
- write until Tina stops hitting you over the internet, ow
- finish lining Hiru
- line Auberon Tol and Kir are totally Auberon, shut up
- redo Skeff's LEGS, GOD, THEY ARE RETARDED, STOP THAT Never mind.

Additionally: Hal Duncan FTW.

Right. Okay. 2k+ from an evening of Tina threatening to take away things she is going to draw/write for me. I can finally throw away this sheaf of notes, which is so old and abused that the paper feels like cotton. And I am feeling fabulous.

Unfortunately I am not feeling sleepy.

We should do this more often, Tina, darling. That was only, what, two hours' writing? We only did about twelve ten minute sessions, I think. In any case: feeling productive = kicking the oh god I suck bawwww in the stomach and dumping it in the river while it tries to get its breath back.

...can you tell I wrote Rook for most of the evening? XD

Now, to bed. Or at least, to reading before bed, since I am distinctly unexhausted.

So despite having buckets of coke yesterday, I slept really, really well last night. I think because just before I passed out, I wrote, and really felt like I was writing rather than just... putting words down. It was good. I was too tired to keep it up for long, but I wanted to keep going. Paper in front of the keyboard for... probably half an hour, then climbed into bed to continue and couldn't keep my eyes open, though my mind was rearing to go. (I reached for my clipboard about five minutes after I turned the light off, and scribbled wildly. I think it was something about Thom but I can't remember what at the moment. Bless that clipboard.)

And... it's Thursday again! o.0 How does this keep happening?

By which I mean "fucking phone fucking ringing when I'm still in fucking bed" but I only dragged myself upright for the second call, so while I missed it, and I'm up, I also did not have to talk to anyone. Score!

EK has moved all the "A Year in Waiting" strips to their own sub-domain so you should check them out! The service industry is thankless, but I liked it for a lot of the same reasons she did.

porn_battle is on again this weekend... I should write for that. None of the prompts are really pinging me, though. What is the world coming to when people cannot give me intriguing jumping-off points for hot hot sex? Honestly.

Things I am Trying to Do/Have Had an Eye Toward Doing This Weekend:
- reorganise Raph-Is's music, video, and art directories
- ... in preparation for pumping everything into Aziraphale and starting again in a nice, logical order. Possibly chronologically, because that's a good proof of productivity, right?
- Oh hell, write those things I said I'd write or I'm going to have to give MM to Wyrren! (I'm not convinced I ever told her about this. XD; Um. Surprise?)
- So, uh, do not write anything for porn_battle until those things are done. Or at least one of those things are done. Oh, hell. Damn you, stepstepjump!
- clean the bedroom
- clean the bathroom
- wash sheets
- dry sheets
- vacuum
- BSG pre-series special thing
- xsltproc again jdsfjahs
- Medieval Faire at the coast tomorrow with uni kids!

I was talking to mum about blogging the other day and why I make use of it. She keeps getting hung up on the privacy issue. "Why would you want to put it all out there for people to see?"

ME: Well, you don't have to. I mean, I could make mine friends-only, or locked just to me. But it's sort of a universal way of keeping in contact.
MUM: People don't need to know what you're doing every day. :\
ME: No, but I do. :\

And it's true. I really use this more for my own benefit than yours. I have a memory like a steel wossname, and I need this, because if I don't write it down, it's lost in an anachronistic haze. And as a fiction archive it's a good measure of when I've been most productive. Also, tagging is better than sorting things into boxes.

That train of thought derailed itself, but I did have a point when I started! See, I should have written it down and then dissembled. I don't have the memory for reverse-pyramid articles any more. ;)

So, I just realised that I had a working writing process. For years. And then I forgot about it. Now I'm going to write it down so I never do anything so fucking stupid ever again.

WRITING PROCESS:
1) On Day One, write stuff on paper. Preferably somewhere you have no computer access.
2) On Day Two (which should directly follow Day One), type Day One's handwritten stuff up. This reminds you of where you are going, and lets you sentence-tweak.
3) Also on Day Two, having reminded yourself of what happened yesterday, write more stuff on paper!
4) Continue!

Note to self: try to give yourself a brief break (perhaps with plotting) between typing stuff up and writing more stuff, because otherwise your hands will die on you.




I don't know why this took me so long to realise. This is how EVERYTHING I HAVE FINISHED has been written. Grey Sky Morning. Uh. Other stu-- okay, everything I wrote to a SCHEDULE THAT I FOLLOWED has been written like this. I knew there had to be a reason for the proliferation of notebooks! Aside from my lack of self-control. I am pretty sure F&F fell apart when I stopped following this process AND NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY.

REJOICE, FOR THIS IS A JOYOUS DAY.

You heard me! :D Frost on my window! How exciting!

This is more face-mashy than exciting, but y'know. Kind of nice that they want to burn the book for its derogatory content rather than its homosexual content, I guess. They're still missing the fucking point, mind you.

This would be one reason to actually have a child of my own. Not that I am the best rhetorical role model, since I frequently resort to jgdhfshjg and YOUR FACE when I can no longer be bothered arguing properly, but whatever. XD

Less groggy today, but not much more sleep. Wondering whether to just take the bandages off and have done with it. Don't want to hurt myself with enthusiasm, though.

Actually have no real idea what to do today. :\ Don't want to read the last Imriel book. (That thing where I stop reading and forget I care? Yeah.) Did plan a Balfour/Adamo thing last night, but enh.

So I have written a total of 412 words on AtM in the last four days.

I thought I was doing REALLY WELL until I knew that.

I suppose this is the ultimate moment of quality vs. quantity.

STILL. FOUR HUNDERD LOUSY WORDS?

GAH.

Is there a reason I didn't know about WriteMonkey until v0.9? SERIOUSLY. This thing is perfect for NaNo. I only cry that it doesn't exist for Mac, but that can be fixed since apparently I'm fixing to become a programmer now. >_> I want to do too much in too vague a way. It's annoying.

Work was good. Rewrote about 35 pages of stuff, which brought me to about 98/650. So, really, I should be able to finish this in the six weeks I allotted. Woo!

Not really tired, but feeling kind of meh. I'm not sure why. I'm actually going to do some writing before bed, now, though - this program is totally awesome.

[EDIT] Yeah, I think I'm irrevocably a Mac and Linux girl now. Crowley is making me want to stab myself. Maybe I'll strip his hard drive and install Damn Tiny Linux or similar... although I'm all used to Fedora, now. :\ Hrmmm.

[EDIT] WriteMonkey = FUCKING AWESOME YO.

I DON'T WRITE ENOUGH. MAKE ME WRITE SHIT.

Stolen from ever-obsessed@LJ: For those unfamiliar, first you pick a letter. Then you pick a fandom (or a crossover) and a character or pairing. For example, A is for Anxiety, Cal/Gillian (Lie to Me). In turn you'll receive a ficlet of some kind. Maybe, there'll even be PORN.

( Alphabetically. )

And I get tired so fast. I am always exhausted when I leave work these days, because I am using too much of my brain. I love it (except for two and a half hours spent hunting for a misplaced '.' in a thousand-line piece of code today...) but, c'mon, guys, I need those brain cells for to write with.

That SSBB entry I wanted to write has to be in tomorrow US time. DO WE THINK I CAN DO IT? ...yeah, me neither. I actually had an idea for this one, though. :( I'm disappointed in how busy my life has been.

Tomorrow I think I'm off to Dad's place, so I need to, uh... get myself organised to write 750 words every day, and talk to Bec on Sunday so she knows what my plans are. And, y'know, take clothes and stuff. I don't know. I'm not even sure they live where they lived last time I went there! My family is full of communication fail.

Seriously considering going to bed now. alleyne, if you're working tomorrow, I should be able to make lunch, but you may need to call and remind me if yesterday was any indication. XD;

I was talking to Tina earlier and I realised aloud that Delan and Ilario are pretty much Subaru and Seishirou if Seishirou had just taken him away that first time, without memory of the loss, so that Subaru lived under his control, to his whim, for as long as Seishirou required him.

I just realised why I've been reading Seishirou/Subaru obsessively all day. I'd forgotten who Ilario was before he was Ilario - not what he was, but what that meant for him.

He's not as altruistic as he had me thinking he was. He was going to be, I think, the good Seishirou, the fixable Seishirou.

I don't think he's fixable any more.

one sentence meme

Leave me prompts and I'll try to write you things. Your choice of fandoms and 'verses, but keep in mind that fandoms less recent than six months are getting harder and harder for me to connect with, with other 'verses cluttering up my head.

plz halp i lose mai will to rite :(

This game looks AWESOME. I'm totally d/ling a demo. 8D

I thought I'd set my alarm to half eight, but after I'd turned it off and lazed around for an indeterminate length of time it was only twenty-five past, so. Uh. No idea.

I know I have to do things today but I don't really feel like moving, let alone being productive. Also, I'm ... well, not scared of starting work tomorrow, but aware that it's there and determinedly not thinking too hard about it.

In other news, I have... well, five days, actually, to hit 105 on stepstepjump. I am currently at 73. The math here is not good. Which means I should try to draw a fuckload today, but I kind of want to write. Then again, every time I sit down to do so I feel paralysed and have to go do something else, so I suspect it is one of those things that I have to sidle up to, write down a sentence as if it has no connection to anything else, and then come back ten minutes later and write a different one. Because apparently I can't take the pressure of putting these things together any more. What if they do not fit. Etc. The only way to fix this is by drabbling with greater frequency, but my hands aren't really strong enough and I'm sodding useless with prompts at the moment, although Swinburne is slowly helping me with that. I really liked the one I gave to ignite last night.

For the time being, I should decide on clothes, I suppose. And have a shower. Meh.

[EDIT] MEH FEELINGS GONE. YES, I JUST BURST INTO TEARS AT THIS TRAILER. OH MY GOD GUYS IT LOOKS SO AMAZING.

And the theme of the day is: Make Laura and Megan Cry! I did not actually cry. Meg may have. Many things went wrong with one customer which caused me to swear imaginatively for most of the day. Also there is a really big sale tomorrow so all the time I did not spend swearing, I spent sign-writing.

And I dropped in my Red Hat paperwork.

And I want to write but I'm too shitted off to do anything productive, and also I'm tired but not sleepy.

Here is the paragraph Mildmay wrote last night when I was not paying attention:

I know it's stupid, but I really thought things would go back to normal once we hit a real town again - if Felix had ever had passing acquaintance with normal to begin with, which some folks might take leave to doubt. He whipped out that smile the minute we hit Viatha, the cult set to work, and I thought, here we go, and tried to look like I didn't mind being ignored for the next decad or so.

But Felix didn't seem fixed on having me ignored. He was paying me too much attention, almost, and even as I was thinking it was stupid and fucking dangerous besides, as far north as we were, it was about as easy to sit on how nice it was, being listened to and looked at like a real person, as it would've been to sit on a five-arm cactus.

And I don't know where that came from or even that it's in a decent Mildmay voice, but, uh, I just. I really don't know. All I've been thinking about for the past few days is the possibility of canon reading lessons.