#for those who don’t know Eight is one of my iterator ocs

[chaotic-minds-think-alike]

Beasts of the crawling kind

[bigmoodword]

11/11/11 Tag Game

tagged by: @confunderewrites ! ahhh! these are great questions! thank you, thank you, thank you.

Rules: Answer 11 questions, ask 11 questions, and tag 11 people to answer them

1. How many abandoned WIPs do you have, if any?  Which one would you most likely pick up again if you had to?

several, including a goosebumps-inspired horror story and a very julie of the wolves tale told from the wolf pack’s perspective. that said, most of these come from my pre-college days, so i’m not terribly inclined to resurrect them.

butbutbut! the one wip i’m trying to salvage has been mentioned previously as the crazy complex story i’ve cut in half, leading to [ stray ] and hopefully an urban fantasy wip down the line. once upon a time, this wip was on fictionpress, but ah, i deleted it wholesale when i decided it was dumb. i really, really regret that (don’t ever do it, friends!), and the only reason it’s still on my radar today is because i recycled a few ideas/characters for a roleplay.

2. Do you have an OC that floats in and out of different stories?  i.e. your guinea pig for alternate universes.  Do they have their own story?

my immortal. haha this party-hardy character has a tendency to pop up as a supporting character in different wips. it’s very... “always the bridesmaid but never the bride,” you know? they could have their own story. maybe. we’ll see.

3. If your WIP was being made into a movie, would you want to be hands-on or hands-off?  As in, what level of creative power would you want?

for stray, i’d have a couple firm ground rules, but so long as the core message is in tact? nah. i’d actually look forward to the differences, because seeing someone else’s creative take on the same idea sounds delightful.

4. What’s a trope that everyone loves but you can’t stand?

this is tough. i don’t think there’s a trope i can’t stand whatsoever. well-done tropes are well-done tropes, and even if i might not fawn over one quite as much as others, i can respect why it’s popular. 

so changing the question a bit: what’s a well-loved iteration of a trope i can’t stand? the tuxedo and martini agents in the first kingsman movie. tonally, that movie is a mess, and i didn’t like how the first half built up the kingsmen as emblematic of an ideal/positive masculinity only to become... well, the exact same james bond power fantasy i’ve seen a thousand times before. no lie. it was kind of a bummer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

5. For your characters, do you have specific face-claims in mind or do you leave it up to reader interpretation? (within reason of course)

i have some vague face claims in mind, but those face claims are still only approximations. ideally, i’d be a good enough artist to draw the characters myself, but alas! my own sketches are just approximations as well. 

i’m actually happy to trust a lot of a character’s appearance to reader interpretation. so long as the broad strokes are there, i love the unique details people come up with on their own.

6. What is your oldest WIP?

ahahaha. so again, the og wip i’m currently trying to partition out is the oldest wip still standing in some form, but! to actually shed a little more light on it... it was an urban fantasy story that featured eight major characters and rotating perspectives. so you know. kinda crazy in scope. 

in short, a demon, an immortal, a werewolf, an average human, a fairy princess, two seraphim, and death himself all want to stop the apocalypse, but they can’t see the forest for the trees. they’re all so consumed by their own issues and so convinced of their own righteousness or another’s evil that actually working together is nigh impossible. 

i think of it like a stageplay with a single set. like. the point isn’t the apocalypse itself. it’s how all these wildly different personalities clash and create a puzzle of unreliable narrators. in theory, the goal is to try and uncover the real “truth” everyone’s talking around, but by the end, we’ve turned the very concept of an objective truth on its head.

suuuuuper lofty. /coughcough;

7. Is there anything your characters have done while you were writing that just came out of nowhere?

love. my characters falling in love (and i mean real love, not just a crush) almost always comes out of nowhere. i never plan on it, and one day i’ll write an exchange, note a little bit of chemistry, then step back and just. oh. yeah, i guess they’re a thing now.

8. Is there a writing decision you were surprised you made?  (ex: killing off a character, taking the story down a different path, etc.)

i usually have things super plotted out, but sometimes certain themes kind of creep in. for example, i have a tendency to flirt with christian motifs, then one day all those threads finally came together and i realized i’d written something honestly kind of blasphemous? :X 

i liked the low-key commentary on trends in u.s. christianity, but not being religious myself, it also felt kind of mean. it was also pretty preachy, so. ;P

9. Do you bounce ideas off people when writing?  Or do you tend to wait until the first draft is completed?

so in a lot of ways i’m addicted to the relief of someone else saying “yeah, this is a good idea.” i want it. it inspires me to keep running with whatever i’m doing. but on the other hand, if i get a vote of confidence, i’m terrified of losing it. i want to keep checking in. i want to keep asking about new ideas. it’s no bueno, so while i like bouncing ideas off other people, it’s generally better for me to keep most things under wraps. at least until i’ve finished a first draft.

10. What is your favourite place to write?

at home. curled up on the couch with a blanket. surrounded by the soft peeps of my birds and the millennial elevator music known as chillmix.

11. Two of your protags from two different WIPs just switched places.  How do they react?

in stray, an unnamed character well-equipped to handle the criminal underground breaks out the guns (both arms and firearms), then turns to lily and tells her point-blank that he admires everything she’s trying to do. lily.exe is broken.

meanwhile, in unnamed character’s world, carter’s unconscious, foaming at the mouth, and probably bleeding. he was just told all those things that go bump in the night are real, and realizing he’s a fragile human, he fainted. on the way down, he hit his head on a nice man’s expensive coffee table. that nice man is attempting cpr.

Tagging: [ @illthdar ][ @multifacetedscorpio ][ @quartzses ][ @shaping-infinity ][ @honiewrites ][ @penzag ][ @scribble-dee-vee ][ @theswordofpens ][ @thelittlestspider ][ @bookenders ][ @waterfallwritings ]

Your questions are:

1. using one sentence summaries, can you tell me about your wips?

2. what inspired them?

3. which of your ocs do you most identify with?

4. if you’ve ever cried while reading, which book cued the waterworks?

5. how do you conduct research for your wips and what’s the most interesting thing you’ve discovered in said research?

6. thus far, which scene has been the most difficult to write?

7. which of your ocs do you like the least?

8. which pov and tense do you prefer to write in?

9. do you write poetry?

10. who is your writing role model?

11. if you could give your younger writer self some advice, what would it be?