#you ask me an organisation question like you don't already know i have clown blood

[daisychainsandbowties]

10 17 22 idk if you've done those I'm illiterate

10. Has a piece of writing ever "haunted" you? has your own writing haunted you? what does that mean to you?

EM. YOU. yourself. come over here and ask if i am haunted?? yes, every day, by the image of shannon slipping mary's motorcycle helmet off her head. this:

"then she steps forward and removes Mary's helmet with careful hands and Beatrice has never felt more a voyeur in her life than when she watches Sister Shannon dab the blood from Mary's split lip with the pad of her thumb. Watches Mary bat her hand away, her eyes rolling, "I'm fucking fine" and "Language" a practiced one two punch" ~ tmtl ch. 1

and this:

"Lilith shudders at her touch, makes a mournful sound, then comes awake in an instant.... Beatrice withdraws, sits for a moment on the edge of Lilith's bed before rising. Lilith's melodramatic groan of relief makes her tempted to drop back down, to curl up alongside her and try to pick the pieces out of her, to reassemble them and form an image that's whole, but she resists. All the better to let sleeping Liliths lie."

~ tmtl ch. 3

i terms of other things i think the book of the outsider trilogy by Mark Lawrence is quite haunting, as a story. i find a lot of the poetry i read very haunting. but mostly it is lines like those above - moments of absolute intimacy shadowed by restraint. that line from harrow the ninth that goes "you were so afraid she might touch you. you were so afraid anyone might touch you. you had always been afraid of anyone touching you, and had not known your longing flinch was so obvious to those who tried."

my own writing... sometimes. when i write about sickness, certainly. that feels haunting. but mostly my own writing is when i let the ghosts fly out of the window.

17. talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. tell me about the lore, the history, the things that won't make it in the text.

as you well know i have about eight WIPs. but my actual novel really actually resonates with that very popular line from, again, tasmuir "love is too long and life is too short" but ah... kind of flipped. what happens when the life goes on and the love is there but not the beloved? the story started there, moved onto a dragon with a clockwork heart and a boy and the colour purple, of a very empty landscape and the very loud dead. naturally i have spider-people and none of my characters have bodies without a bit or the horrific or the angelic crammed into them (often both). the lore is a lot, but the story is about gods and spitting in the face of fate. it has Monster Hunter vibes and also a bit of Cormac McCarthy's the road (vast emptiness. two bodies inside it). it has all the things i like - horror and blood and intimacy. but yeah, the lore doc is a chonky boi.

22. how organised are you with your writing? describe to me your organisation method, if it exists.

my entire process involves the notes app on my phone and like three documents all called the same thing except lore 1, lore 2, lore 3 where i dump vomited-up fragments of sentences and half-baked ideas and then occasionally a 8000 word dump of pristine lore. i plot only inside my own brain. my masters thesis supervisor had to cut me open to get a plot outline from inside me, and it was all lies anyway. i am more of a character writer than a plot-specialist, but i feel like once i have My Guys and A Problem the story pretty much writes itself (and i'm so wrong about that). mostly i outline in my brain and then by writing random lines from the start, the midish, and the kind-of-end, and then i do linguistic gymnastics to reach those sentences. (and boy am i clumsy)

i type everything. writing with pen + paper is still not my favourite thing to do - still slow and a bit painful - so i prefer to type. i have calluses, in fact, from typing, which is really quite embarrassing.