God is in the country, the devil's at your door....

[tomakeanoffer]

Music of the day: I'm Always Walking As Somebody Else - American Murder Song

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For the December Talking Meme:

What does your writing process look like? I'm always curious about the vast variety of ways in which different writers work. yhlee

It's a weird thing to articulate but I will give it a go.

First here is an idea, a seed of something that I want to poke ad and knead and see what comes of it. This wined sup sitting in my brain for a little while and simmering as I do other things.

As this is doing that thing, I will occasionally toy with characters, in some way, see if I have a kind of character I want to see in the setting, or if it's a character, see if there's a setting want to see them interact with. I rarely come up with the plot first and setting first is rare. I'm a character driven person by nature.

So, I have a character and I have a setting, or I have tow characters or something like that. The next thing I do is try and come up with a blurb/summary type thing like I've seen some people do. I've been doing this on and off for years but it helps me come up with a very basic outline and stitch together anything I can come up with.

While I am doing the above, I'm also poking through my music and cobbling together a playlist of some fashion. It can be a couple of songs or it can be like Your Heart In My Teeth that has over 50

Even when I do this, I find that I often write to one song in particular. Usually, it's the main song on the playlist but sometimes it's only tangentially related and just suits the rhythm or mood or something else that clicks in my brain., For my Current Project (a not-quite-ghost-story) I'm using the song I linked to above as my looped track.

I usually have one or two false starts, or I start something, get a couple hundred words in, and then let it sit for a while and realize I need to go tweak the thing. The actual writing only takes a few days, maybe a week at most. I have the habit of knocking out as much as I can in as few sessions as possible and I work in short fiction, so I don't have a lot of words to play around with.

This process might look a little different if I were a novel person but, as of right now, I am so, so not. I love the idea of writing novels, I have a variety of things in my brain that I want to turn into longer work, but I really like short stories and feel most comfortable working in that medium.

Speaking of writing, I wrote a few ficlets yesterday, and after I work on OrigiProject, I'm going to go back to writing more. I'm not making a ton of words on any one thing but it feels good to throw words a ta doc an have them stick in any capacity at all

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This looks fun, so why not: Leave a word, any word, in the comments below, and I will tell you a fact about myself relating to that word.

Meme provided by journalmemes.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

sparkle

[tomakeanoffer]

I've recently started playing with makeup. It's more theatrical in nature than anything but it is so much fun and i Love the sparkly, glittery eyeshadow colors that make me feel like a space creature.

[squeemu]

bones!

[tomakeanoffer]

So, I use bones to do divination, which is not a new fact but there we are. I also happen to really love the imagery of bones and especially bones coupled with anything else. There's something captivating to me about how base they are, and I find them all kinds of fascinating.

[squeemu]

Where do you find most of your bones? and if you need to clean them, how do you do it, if you don't mind my asking. (It's fine if it's a personal process!) I've been wanting to expand my own collection, but living in an apartment complex makes it kind of hard to have my own place to do any real work with them.

[tomakeanoffer]

I actually am in the same boat. I love the idea of finding and collecting m own pieces to work with but, for now, I've been in a few situations where I can buy them off people and touch them before I do.

It's something I need to investigate more, now that we live in a place closer to a wooded area but we'll see how it goes.

[lovepeaceohana]

That's a really interesting process - I'd never considered creating a playlist or soundtrack to write to, but given that I'm due to start working on my Yuletide fic and could use the inspiration I'll give it a go :) And what a unique song - it's really compelling, and I can absolutely see how it'd be useful to help get you into a character's mind.

[tomakeanoffer]

Ha, thank you! I've been making playlists for stories for ages and actually, used to play a game with my partner where we'd put music on shuffle, throw out random songs to each other, and make characters or stories off of them. It was so much fun.

[bookblather]

alexseanchai stole mine so... how about art?

Also, I'm like you, stories really have to sit and percolate for a long time until they actually get written. It's kind of nice and kind of... really not.

[tomakeanoffer]

Okay, so I went to the Salvador Dali museum back in Florida, right? I'd only been once but when we went, I was sorely disappointed I did not get the Dali finer puppet.

It was also kind of wasted on me because my eyes were already worse by that point but still, not acquiring that puppet was a Regret.

[bookblather]

omg a Dali finger puppet sounds like the best thing ever.

[dreamerinsilico]

Glad you've had some writing happen!

For the meme: iced tea

[tomakeanoffer]

So, I have no idea how one goes about making iced tea? Is it like making iced coffee? Do you brew hot tea and let it sit in the fridge? This is a gap in my knowledge and I have no idea how I feel about it.

[dreamerinsilico]

Oh! There are a few ways to do it, but I usually brew a big gallon pitcher at a time - about a third of a gallon of hot water over nine tea bags, let it steep 20 minutes - several hours, remove tea bags, sweeten if desired, and fill the rest of the way with ice cubes (if it's still warm/hot) or cold water, refrigerate/serve iced.

[tomakeanoffer]

Oh, cool! I'll have to give this a try at some point with a few different teas I have laying around.

OK, try this

[ng_moonmoth]

amorphous.

I'm over here.

[tomakeanoffer]

So, okay. Here's the thing, if I had my way, I feel like I would be a blur, a thing you can't quite make out but you know is there. I would be something that can exist alongside the world but not seem like it is from it.

I have feelings about presentation and definitions and liminal spaces and people and all sorts of things but I think, if anything, I would like to be undefined, amorphous, and occasionally indistinguishable from the scenery and setting around you.