#will never forget that one post with like over a thousand notes about how Fenris doesn't use contractions in speech

[baejax-the-great]

I think some of the arguments about fan interpretations of characters and OOCness forget a fundamental part of human nature which is this: each of us perceives the world and the people in it in slightly different ways based on our own experiences.

Most people have certain characteristics they consider fundamental to their Blorbo and some characteristics that are less important and could be changed, ignored, or scrapped for AU purposes. Unfortunately, which specific characteristics fall into which category are not going to be the same from person to person. Sometimes the overlap between two people's interpretations will be huge, and those two people will probably enjoy the same fan content. Sometimes not so much.

Personally, I write for a ship that were childhood friends that became lovers. In many AUs, people have them meeting for the first time in adulthood, and for me, that changes the nature of the ship and their characters so much that I can't really get into it. I consider their childhood friendship fundamental to them as people, and those authors don't. Which is fine. Many other people like those AUs. Nobody here is really in the wrong, we just have different opinions on what makes these particular Blorbos them.

In almost all cases, someone out there will find your interpretation of a character OOC. And that's fine. Hopefully they are polite and simply choose not to read your fics/engage with your HCs/whatever. But I think all of us have had the experience of reading a wildly OOC take and seeing other people enthusiastically going along with this "wrong" interpretation of the characters and thinking, "What??!?!"

It's fine. It's normal. It's annoying as hell (people are wrong on the internet), but it's inevitable. And if you find that interpretation particularly heinous to your Blorbo sensibilities, the block button is your friend.

[howlsmovinglibrary]

It’s Research! (Or, why it’s totally ok to play Dragon Age for 100+ hours when you should be writing) - Nine Worlds Convention Panel Write Up

Ok, so I haven’t really done a post like this before, but this panel that I attended at Nine Worlds actually made me feel so much better as a writer, so I wanted to share it!

Basically, four successfully published authors - Taran Matharu (The Summoner series), Vic James (Gilded Cage), Jen Williams (The Copper Promise), and Lucy Hounsom (Starborn) - discussed how entirely unproductive and prone to procrastination they all were, even after becoming serious authors, and how it was *utterly fine* to not be churning out novels at the rate of Brandon Sanderson.

If you’ve ever failed a Nanowrimo goal, or ended up on tumblr rather than working on your WIP (not that that relates to me in *any way* at this exact moment in time), I promise you what you are about to read will make you feel a million times better!!

Basically, the panel began by explaining what their average work day and daily word counts were, which were as follows: 

Lucy Hounsom: starts work at around 10am and never works past 2pm, averages around 1,000 words a day, writes three days a week and works in a bookshop for the other four. On a work day, she doesn’t write *anything*.

Jen Williams: works a full 9-5, 5 day working week, and the only full day of writing happens on a Saturday. She spends most of Saturday on twitter and facebook. She will write on evenings for about 1.5 hrs a night.

Taran Matharu: was the only full time author on the panel - by which he means he doesn’t write anything until around 3 months before the deadline, where he panicks and somehow scrabbles a book together. Most days he falls down research holes or plays video games, and only actually writes for about 1-2 hours a day. He makes up for this by averaging around 1,000 words an hour.

Vic James: when she worked full time, she got up at 5am and wrote for 1 hr every morning. She would average 1,000 words an hour. Now that she mostly writes full time, she still only gets 1,000 words done, in a day, because of how much she procrastinates.

TL;DR: all four authors didn’t do much more than 1,000 words, or 2 hours of writing, on an average day. 

That’s less than Nano asks you to do. I’ve done that on Nano days and felt worthless, because it falls just short of where you ‘need’ to be. It was really nice to here ‘real’ authors talk  about how they genuinely couldn’t write much more than that in a day of work, or about how they had to make do with just an hour or two of writing around a full time working day, and yet had still managed to finish and publish that first novel. A lot of talks about writing that I go to at conventions or writing groups always leave me feeling anxious, like I’m not doing enough - this panel did the exact opposite. I was doing just as much, if not, on a good day, technically more, than they were. I just wasn’t sustaining it, because Imposter Syndrome always hits around a month into ‘not writing enough’ each day.

The tips they had for fitting writing around full time work or study were:

Try to do a bit of work at lunch or on commutes, etc. This didn’t necessarily have to be actual writing, but you could work on planning and outlining what you were planning to write later, so that your writing time is explicitly *just* writing.

Jen Williams said she had to go to her desk straight away when she got home, otherwise she ran out of steam. If she felt like she was still ‘working’, rather than relaxing first and then having to build up the energy again, she just never got anything done (I’m writing this dangerously close to bed, so this may not be a hard or fast rule....)

You must give yourself permission to take your writing seriously. If you keep thinking your WIP is ‘not worth’ sitting down to do, or potentially sacrificing some of your social life for, you’ll never get it done.

Finish mid-sentence, or mid-scene. It forces you to keep up a rhythm of daily practice, because otherwise you’ll know for certain that you’ll forget where you were. Plus it stops you from staring at the blank page at a start of a chapter, utterly daunted and out of ideas. You just continue the obvious trajectory of the sentence.

I’ve already started planning at lunch times, and it feels awesome! I don’t like writing on my lunch break because I have a desk job, so it doesn’t feel like a break, but a few handwritten notes on what I’m planning to write is much more lowkey.

So yeah. They were a super interesting panel, and all just seemed really relatable and ‘normal’. I look at a writer like Brandon Sanderson, with his 3 books a year standard, or people like Marissa Meyer, who basically doubled her Nano goal when writing the first Lunar Chronicle, and it feels so unattainable. I’m out of the house from 8.30am-6pm standard, and that’s without taking any social events into account. I spend my entire day at a computer already, and have carpal tunnel, so my arms ache after an intense after-work writing sesh. Maybe one day I’ll be a full-time author (lol) and be able to write more than a couple of thousand words a day, but right now that’s just not something I can achieve. So it was nice to hear from authors who work with similar constraints, and procrastination problems.

But the title of the panel mentions video games! What about video games?

No fear! There was some video game chat.

Lucy Hounsom has sunk over 100+ hours into Skyrim. One of the scenes in the final book of her trilogy is based mostly on the Staff of Magnus dungeon quest in the Mage Faction plot line.

Taran Matharu’s magic system is based pretty heavily on video gaming (given all the ‘level’ and ‘mana’ stuff, this is not entirely surprising.)

Dragon Age was what got Jen Williams interested in fantasy, because it showed her that traditional fantasy settings could include diverse characters.

And, because I asked the question....

Lucy Hounsom’s favourite Bioware romance is Anders from Dragon Age II.

Jen Williams went through the standard break up conga line across the trilogy - she romanced Alistair in Origins (not as a human noble), then Fenris in II, and Solas in Inquisition.

Anyway, this is now over 1000 words, which means I’ve written just as much as four successfully published authors would’ve done in the same amount of time. To everyone who feels like they’ll never finish their WIP, whether it be because of work and procrastination, just remember that it *is* possible, even if you sink more hours into gaming than you do into your book.