I spent the weekend in a terrible, black funk.
Balls to that, says I. So today, I made sure to leave work on time, bought stuff to make real food for dinner (chicken, pasta and salad), had a latte, a pack of trail mix and then went for a run.
Having cared for my body for the evening, time to give my mind a little workout:
30 days of Writing:
4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!I think the first stories I wrote for fun was
Dragonriders of Pern fanfic, long before I knew the term and back when the Internet was the merest glimmer in Al Gore's eye. After that there was a fantasy thing involving archers and possibly elves. It has thankfully been largely forgot.
My BFF wrote most of a fantasy novel for her Ontario Academic Credit Independent Study Unit and let me play in her pond for a little bit (the earliest versions of Katharyne and Rosalyn - originally one woman - were born there), followed by an attempt at a Harlequin Romance that is also best left to the vagaries of time.
5. By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?I suppose, technically, one of my characters is a fetus. That's pretty young. She's fairly inert at the moment though - more a plot point than a character at the moment. Katharyne, Queen of Whatever the Hell I End Up Naming Not-England (Besides Not-England), has three or four children (the number fluctuates), as does Rosalyn but none of them have much of the presence in the story. I suppose my youngest character (apart from Marty Bedell from a TSCC fanfic) is Emma No Last Name, a 17-year-old barista at the espresso bar/bookstore that is one of the main settings of the Werewolf Thing.
My oldest character is Prudence Mary (nee Weeks) Jones, Janey's grandmother. Pru is in her early 90s and is making a short, sharp descent into Alzheimer's when we meet her.
Katharyne, Rosalyn and their peers are my oldest characters in terms of seniority, directly descended from some extremely awful Mary Sue-types I created out of high school. The newest group of characters belong to a short story I began in April.
6. Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol' pen and paper?Right now I'm sitting on the chesterfield in the TV room, watching Arsenal at Liverpool out of the corner of my eye and chatting with my mum. Laptops are marvelous things. I don't have a desk at the moment so my writing habits have deteriorated to catch-as-catch can. Seriously work still requires a table and chairs and coffee - I have been known to haunt coffee shops when on a serious creative jag.
Computer for draft work, pen and paper for roughing out ideas. Once I have the idea in my head, I need to put the words directly into the computer. It's almost like until it's on the computer, it doesn't count.
On the other hand, when things are dragging, working with pen and paper (or pencil and pencil as the case may be) often helps spark my creativity. There are also certain kinds of writing - poetry, for example - that needs to be roughed out on paper first so that I can see the various iterations as I work through them.
7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?Hell yes. It's a very serious case of writer's block or deadline that can force me to put away my tunes.
Depending on the world I'm doing, I listen to vocal or instrumental music. I build soundtracks on my iTunes for various projects composed of songs and instrumental tracks that put me in mind of a character or a mood I'm seeking. My musical tastes tend towards alternative (alt-rock, alt-industrial), rock (with a minors in punk and pop), electronica, bluegrass, trad and contemporary/classical so it's not unusual to find NIN, The Clash, Metric, Mogwai, Lucinda Williams, Altan and Philip Glass mixing it up as I try to structure a chapter.
Janey Jones, the heroine of The Werewolf Thing, was named for The Clash song,
Janie Jones.
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