dS = dQ/T

So, uh, hi Dreamwidth. Long time no see. Like, a year long time. Damn. Most of my writing is posted on tumblr these days and I'm doing an OTP challenge for Zack/Jason on there and all.

Three guesses what brought me back again. Still waiting on my bingo card (I seem to have posted like half an hour after mod bedtime, oh well) but the brainstorming is rolling right along.

It's a shame I didn't participate last year when I was all about writing Sherlock fic, especially since a lot of it did end up kinky. Ah well. Hoping to get some Homestuck stuff for this year, although right now what I'm getting excited about is all Zack, Jason, and Sarah. I'm probably going to be crossing over stuff for Kink Bingo and the OTP challenge. Also might still try to do that meta on why the Reichenbach tea scene is so kinky to me for my wildcard or something.

Sort of on that note. Personal writing challenges/prompts/things to think about for Zack and Jason, which I may or may not try to address in the process of doing KB:

• Jason wearing his glasses instead of contacts
  
• Jason in cosplay
  
• a time that Zack is upset about something and Jason comforts him, anything involving Susanna is a cheap shot
  
• a time Jason used a safeword because he was uncomfortable, not because he wanted to check on Zack
  
• what is Zack’s favorite physical trait on Jason or favorite part of his body?
  
• what’s their go-to restraint equipment? In high school? In the universe where they have a Shadyside apartment?
  
• decide Zack’s music preferences once and for all
  

Also, especially since there's an extra long amnesty this round, I think I seriously going to try for that whole card bingo. ...you know, the one I've been planning out a framework for over the past two years. Zack, Jason, roleplaying a kidnapping. I'm also starting to think about this weird big Homestuck AU as possible subject matter for a whole card bingo. We'll see what the card gives me to work with.

OH HEY I GOT MY FUCKING CARD NOW. Yesssss.

chastity devices	dressup	breathplay	possession / marking	confined / caged
danger	plushie or furry kink	sensation play	anonymity	drugs / aphrodisiacs
suspension	guro	wildcard	queening / facesitting	pictures
tattoos / tattooing	bites / bruises	enemas	virginity / celibacy	teasing
in public	fisting / stretching	leather / latex / rubber	torture / interrogation	tentacles

And hey look it will actually be phenomenal for playing into that Homestuck AU so maybe that really will be my whole card extra goal (...sorry Zack/Jason whole card extra that's been living in my mind for eons).

THUS CONCLUDES MY TRANS*&GQ BINGO
FUCK YEAHHHH

Paper Crowns and Cardboard Swords
prompt wrestling/grinding at kink_bingo
fandom Wraeththu
wordnumbers 528
summary Cal reminisces on Uigenna games.
notes It's been entirely too long since I've read Wraeththu, plus I never read the second trilogy at all, so the characterization might be all kinds of wonky. Especially Cal's voice. God why did I decide to write in the first person.

( It was so much simpler to live as barbarian kings. )

YAY FINALLY fic number two for my trans*&genderqueer bingo at kink_bingo <3 geez it only took me half a year.

Inherently
prompt authority figures at kink_bingo
fandom That Cheap and Sacred Thing
wordnumbers 2143
spoilers for TCAST (also you'll be extremely confused if you haven't played it. And if you haven't played it, why not? It's brilliant.)
summary Elly's always been ready to give Autumn anything she wants.

( But above all, Autumn shouldn’t be thinking what she is right now. )

Oh hey guise guess what it's Valentine's day. Somehow the prevalence of chocolate within our traditions for celebrating this day made me think about two chocoholic characters who I haven't written about in ages. So here's two little pieces about those characters celebrating Valentine's Day with their respective lovers and with their One True Love chocolate. Both are suggestive but not explicit.

WHY IS EVERYTHING SO GAY.

characters Tybalt and Robyn
source Sublimation
wordnumbers 440
( mercenaries and chocolate. )


characters Makari and Luna
source Imperfect Unity
wordnumbers 386
( husbands and obedience and chocolate. )

fin.

So lately I've been getting into Gravitation again after the YEARS (I mean, at least 6?) it's been since I first saw it. <3 Glorious. Tohma was totally the character who made me fall in love with yanderes. I mean of course I didn't know the term at the time, but ever since Tohma I've been infatuated with the sorts of characters who are sweet and adorable on the surface but actually massive creepers.
Also, I think Shuichi and Eiri's interactions heavily influenced the way I wrote Makari and Luna just now. Especially impatient Makari. Weeeeird.
Also also, so much lulz at a) the remixes and b) people's underage readers' reactions to them.

Also played Phoenix Wright (just the first one) recently and obsessed over that for a brief while. WHAT TOOK ME SO LONG? That game is amazing. And Edgeworth is amazing, and Ema is amazing.

FURTHERMORE I am well on my way to becoming a nerdfighter.

So much fandom, so little time...

Speaking of time. I'm, bizarrely enough, making good progress on inkingitout! Um, what?! Succeeding at a writing challenge? A TIME-BASED one? Me? Blasphemy!



Almost 1/5 done and less than 1/6 done the year... hope for me yet! Also, I wrote a total of 1495 words tonight. Score!

Annnnd I will be releasing a tiny VN soon! And snail-paced progress is being made on the last scene of RESET. Well, damn. Things are happening.
More info on the VN stuff at http://entropicgames.blogspot.com ~

Now if only I could manage that "school" thing too...

A few days ago was the birthday of Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd who ended up leaving regretfully early, and one of Jason's biggest inspirations. Jason would probably be holed up in his room all day, blasting old Pink Floyd and smoking up and painting. So in that vein, I decided to try listening to a bunch of Pink Floyd and writing RESET again. It, uh, still was not terribly successful.

In a way it's hard to get in the groove of writing RESET because of the concentration it takes to get into Jason's mindset--moreso than with other things because he's really dancing on an edge here and I need to know him well enough to decide when he's going to keep smiling and when he's going to snap and when he's going to cover it up again and when he's really going to break. And because, hell, do I really want to be in his head? This visual novel was largely born out of my worse moments and admittedly it does scare me a little to get too close to that.
I think this is why I need breaks from RESET sometimes. It's like how Neil Gaiman has said he enjoys writing horror short stories but couldn't write a horror novel because the mindset it takes to write horror is not a place he wants to be for all the time it takes to write a novel.

Anyway, listening to Pink Floyd is a nice easy route in to Jason's head, so... I'm trying. Yeah, I'm officially ready to get back into working on RESET.
(I've had Walking on the Moon stuck in my head all week though)

...which is actually lame timing since it's BCM beta time (YAY YAY YAY). Oh well, since when has time been my friend? But so long as I'm in the right mindset, maybe I'll work on art when I get tired of sitting front of the computer. :D Yay traditional art. Digital art may be so much more flexible, but I just love sitting down with a sketchbook and filling a page with ink.

So in case anyone didn't notice, the first month of 2012 is already a third gone. My winter break has gone by crazy fast this year, especially for being longer than usual. I think it has to do with falling into too much of a routine. I'm pretty much just where I should be with inkingitout... which is bad, because I'll be writing a lot less once classes start. Ah well.

Right, so we're already distinctly past the whole "new year!!1" mark. I would have liked to do some reminiscing on 2011 and some drawing of conclusions and observation of trends, but it's feeling a bit late for that now. I did, however, make three resolutions:
Do something creative everyday this year ie writing, drawing, crafting... essentially, everyday I want to turn a thought into a product at least once. I tried this a few years ago and it went kind of well for a while but then fizzled out, so I'm going to try to keep it going longer this time.
Spend less time doing nothing i.e. refreshing the same web pages over and over again, looking for something to distract myself with, waiting for things that aren't happenng...
Make my own lunch more often instead of eating more expensive, less healthy campus food.

Oh hey, remember that writing meme? Uh, yeah, I'll get back to it eventually. But along the lines of my January introspection I think I'll pause to consider a deeper question about my writing habits, because it's been on my mind.

why do I write?
I write because it makes me happy, and maybe other people too.
Because there are all these ideas that float around in my head and I can't get any peace of mind unless I put them down on paper.
Because I love each and every one of those little ideas, but my memory doesn't have enough room for them all, and I want to be able to see my ideas again later.
There's something simply amazing about being able to bring something into existence, just that process of taking something from an idea in your head into a tangible thing. There's intrinsically something about that process that makes me happy and relaxes me. And for me, it really is much, much more about the process than the result. I'm more of a starter than a finisher.
Sometimes when I'm writing it occurs to me that I'm writing the same damn thing that somebody else wrote before, or that whatever I'm writing is just pointless and I'm not actually expressing anything, and that frustrates me. And then I step back and realize, who cares? I'm writing this because I want to; I don't need any more reason than that. And if I realize that I don't want to then I don't have to.
But there's something to those worries too--I don't only write because I enjoy the process. Being able to share something I've written for someone else's enjoyment is awesome. Sometimes I can just share something I've written for myself and somebody else might like it as is, which is cool. But sometimes I do try to write things as well as I possibly can, and learn new ways to write better, for the sake of the other people who might read them. Sometimes the extra effort is worthwhile--not always, but sometimes.
And my reasons for writing versus my reasons for sharing my writing are two entirely different things. It took me a long time to realize that. Some things I write are stupid and awful and I'll never share them, but they're still fun to write. If I'm bothering to share my writing, I do like it to be something that I actually put effort into and tried to write well, and that I can see some kind of value in.
I suppose I do also try to improve my writing for myself, so that I can do my ideas justice. Overall, though, I'm not massively focused on growing as a writer. It's not something that I "take seriously," although to be honest I don't think life is something that I take seriously, anyway. It's important to me that I write because I'm a happier, healthier, less stressed person when I do, but it's not important to me how I write.

Ugh, finally! Since I came home on the 22 it's just been An Awful Lot of Running to Do everyday. Grandmother wants to see me, presents to buy and wrap, brunch at aunt's, dinner at other aunts, everybody coming over for Christmas dinner, friend-who-doesn't-get-along-with-my-other-friends wants to see me, parents want to spend time with me, 8 hour D&D session, and of course watching Doctor Who or Torchwood pretty much every night with my dad... Today is the first day since I've been home that I could wake up whenever I wanted and the only thing I need to do today is get a haircut.

And yes I said D&D session. My very first one!! It was fantastic. I mean, we're just a group of strange strangers trying to find a nest of oversized bugs inside a mining tunnel (though there are hints of bigger or at least arcaner things happening), nothing too exciting yet, but fuck yes I am playing D&D. In the spring when I visited this group of friends I got to ~watch~ a session their other campaign (and briefly roleplay an NPC and hit on my friend's character although my NPC ending up betraying her :c ), which was a far more epic one than this. But still, now I get to actually play! Whoooo! It's very sad, though, that I'll only be in town for one or two more sessions.

I didn't actually make a new character because this may well only be a three week campaign and then I'll never get to use him again, or if we do continue it it won't be for several months, so I didn't want to get too attached to somebody new and then have to put them away. D: I tried to make the character Zack plays in D&D, but managed to basically make Nikolai's fantasy-world version from Threefold Revolution with a touch of Zack for good measure. He's a human warden named Iseah (see what I did there?) and he can turn into a willow tree. |D Well I mean, it's his daily (polymorph for the duration of the encounter) and I haven't used it yet and won't use it much because in retrospect it's kind of lame that I can't freakin' MOVE if I'm a tree, but it's become part of his identity, hehe. I'm basically playing him as a tank--his armor class isn't great but SO MUCH HP and pretty much all of his attacks give temporary HP to someone or another and he gets to MARK ALL THE THINGS.

Tl;dr, D&D is amazing I need to do this more often.

Right now I'm trying to finish up my Secret Santa. Ugh so laaaate. >.< Learned my lesson, never again will I try to "develop the characters as I go." This thing has been such a headache to write, but it's 2/3 to 3/4 done and I'm finally at a point where I mostly know what all needs to be written and how to write it and I just need to do it. I just hope my recipient is even around to see it. D: She hasn't logged into LSF for a few weeks.

So yes, I will be getting back to writing meme very soon! To be all ~new year retrospective~ like I'd hoped, I now have three days in which to do 18 questions, as well as trying to get a minibingo blackout at kink_bingo, which will probably be downgraded to one line bingo all at exactly 100 words (finished those five) plus a tiny/obscure fandom line bingo (BCM, Wraeththu, TCAST, maybe Echo Bazaar). I already wrote the one for BCM, and it's Natsume/Yukinari. |D Only 100 words though~ and kind of filthy haha oh well.

So here's just one writing meme question for now and then it's back to, well, writing!

13. What's your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?
The main focus of Polyethylene--the settlement of runaway teens and twentysomethings in the empty "new slums" of Boston. I love the chaos of their lifestyle and their particular brand of despair. They're mostly the kids who were Going Somewhere when it was suddenly all tugged out from under their feet. The ones who were at the good schools but suddenly you had to be either a millionaire or a true genius just to stay there, the ones who grew up promised everything and then had to watch their families and their world slowly fall apart, the idealists who wanted to start a revolution, and a few who are just sick of playing by the rules. They're very lawless and have an intense sense of competition and survival of the fittest, but at the same time they all have a very deep bond and understanding of the madness that brought them to live in empty old storefronts. It's a fairly gang-like culture, really--they value force and cunning and deceit, but once you've sworn your loyalty, defying it is the worst of sins. They do value compassion and trust very highly too, actually--they're just expected to pour all of it into one or two people and be completely ruthless toward everyone else. Maybe they're fun just because it's not all that often I get to write a culture with such a different morality, where theft and violence are just part of life and nobody's really accountable to anyone.

(09) How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.
Hmm, a very good question! allegory has such a logical answer, ahaha. My process is very chaotic. Which is fitting, I guess.

Honestly I feel like mostly they just come to me--there isn't a much better explanation than that. I will say that it tends to be characters first, then stories built around them. The idea just floats into my head of a person with such-and-such traits, and maybe a second person and the way they interact. Every now and then I deliberately create a character, usually to fill a role necessitated by another character or by a story. But mostly it's just an idea of a person or a collection of traits that gets stuck in my head (things I observed in real life or maybe in other people's fictions) and eventually develops autonomy and starts doing things with the other folks in my head and asks for a name and stuff.

I think the best way I can explain is just to give a few anecdotes. Zack and Joseph were created because I felt like exploring somebody raised by a single, bisexual, open-minded parent and the unique way it would build his assumptions about relationships and gender roles and things like that. And then I also liked the idea of someone who was really geeky but also liked to cook and sew, and at the time one of my favorite characters to write about was a Aubrey and I wanted him to know a cool open-minded tailor who regularly took in the busts of dresses for him, and those traits all got lumped into Zack.
Jason, on the other hand, was created specifically to fill in Zack's backstory (more on that when I get to question 19).
Aubrey was deliberately an amalgamation of several camwhores, well-known traps, and characters from copypastas.

As for the process of fleshing out characters, it tends to be a matter of sticking them in new situations and deciding on a whim that they're going to respond to it this way and then sticking to that first decision. I very often end up putting little pieces of me into my characters. Sometimes it's big, like pawning off my grand philosophical quandaries on Jason, and sometimes it's small, like deciding that Aubrey likes David Sedaris because that's who I was reading that week.


(10) What are some really weird situations your characters have been in? Everything from serious canon scenes to meme questions counts!
I have done depressingly few silly character memes. But that's okay, because weird stuff goes down in my normal writing plenty often.

I wrote Joseph/Mel once, which was pretty weird--that is, Joseph hooking up with his son's boyfriend's sister. I'mma cross my fingers and call it non-canon, but still.

There's a lot of weirdness in the Heresy. I mean, it kinda opens with the protagonists getting drugged by soothsaying spooky chicks and then becoming hermaphroditic parahumans. And then universes start collapsing in on each other...

In my pantheon, Loki's wife pretty much divorced him, took on a male persona, and claimed to be him.

Annnd then there's Kitty-ko's family situation in IU, where thanks to the magic of time travel her parents are stuck being 5-7 years older than her, whoooops.



ETA, my life tomorrow:
-frantically compare formula sheets in chem lounge
-Quantum exam
-cry
-FUCK YES SEMESTER IS OVER
-Christmas shopping at Shizen
-laundry D; SERIOUSLY KURA DON'T FORGET THIS
-outline ~last scene of RESET~ like a boss
-write ~last scene of RESET~ like a boss
-recycling day
-dinner with Elijah&Lester
-write like a drunken boss?

Four questions today! Since I didn't do them yesterday~ Pretty serious wall of text below, even for me.

( Names, ancient stories, character ages, and where I write! )

By the way, my coffee&writing endeavors the other day were largely successful! <3