Currently viewing the category:
"30 Days"
Final question! Tag someone! And tell us what you like about that person as a writer and/or about one of his/her characters!
Since I don’t so much have a blogging community (yet) that I could tag (and since this is technically from a LiveJournal community), I’ll have to just kind of sidestep this question entirely, which kind of ends the whole 30 Days of Writing thing on a bit of an anti-climax, but what can you do?
I would like to tip my virtual hat to J. Koyanagi in thanks for introducing me to the 30 Days in the first place, and to everyone who commented and joined me along the way.
To anyone reading who might be considering doing the 30 Days themselves, I wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a go; I appreciate that we are about to get into the thick of NaNoWriMo, so doing this as well might not be ideal, but the opportunity is always there.
Have I benefited from this mini project? Yes, definitely. If nothing else, it has given me a little taste at the daily goal rush I had for last year’s NaNo, which I am very shortly going to need again, and reminded me why I enjoy writing in the first place.
Of course, for a moment or so after finalising that post, I was feeling a little bit like Judge Dredd must’ve been feeling at the end of…well, Judge Dredd:
My best days are behind me, and I’m back on the road to nowhere. Right?
The feeling passed, of course, because now I have little over 3 weeks to research and outline enough of a novel plot to sustain another 30 days of writing in the form of NaNoWriMo 2010!
Eep.
If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.
How often do you think about writing? Ever come across something IRL that reminds you of your story/characters?
Alright, first off, an apology. You may have noticed there is already an answer to this question, a particularly blunt — and what you may be excused for thinking is an unfinished — answer.
Yes, well, what happened was…I had started to answer the question and scheduled the answer to be released around 6pm, a time I imagined I would be sitting at home busy typing ferociously and would have the time to answer a simple writing-related question, but when 6pm rolled around, I was re-watching series two of Dollhouse at my muse’s house and completely forgot I had a question to answer. So the scheduled one, the empty one, went ahead. Alright? Alright. Moving on.
I do think about writing every day, I tend to day dream quite often, daydreams that involve my characters playing scenes over in my head, scenes that usually see me through sluggish work commutes. My main problem, though — and another ‘quirk’ I’m working to iron out — is that I don’t actually write any of the thoughts I have down. I did however recently sell a kidney, so now I have enough money to buy a Moleskine notebook; we’ll see how well I incorporate that into my writing lifestyle.
In any case, I still think about writing daily, even if I don’t necessarily do very much about it.
I pull inspiration from just about everything I come across; whether it be the music, film, television and gaming that I surround myself with, something as simple as driving in the rain, or the office units I work in (which bear a striking resemblance to the Slayer Vicinity!).
How often do you think about writing? Ever come across something IRL that reminds you of your story/characters?
Every day.
If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.
Have you ever written a character with physical or mental disabilities? Describe them, and if there’s nothing major to speak of, tell us a few smaller ones.
Not really, and not yet.
If you want to get pedantic, I suppose Catrina’s encounters with the Creature in her head could be classed as a form of Multiple Personality Syndrome, but that’s debatable, because — as I’ve said already — we don’t know at this stage whether the Creature is actually real or not.
I had the idea of making one of my characters blind once, but they haven’t appeared in the story yet.
I haven’t worked out whether them being blind would actually contribute anything to the story or whether it would just be something ‘cool’ (I suspect the latter), which was my reasoning for having it in the first place.
If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.
Along similar lines, do appearances play a big role in your stories? Tell us about them, or if not, how you go about designing your characters.
I wouldn’t say they play a big role, but they’re featured prominently enough.
I try not to go into too much detail about every minuscule details of every single character (although admittedly, I do tend to shove it all in at once, usually on the character’s first appearance in early drafts, which I get yelled at for doing and am trying to break the habit), because I think it’s nice to have some freedom in your own mind to envision what the reader wants their version of each character to be like.
If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.
Let’s talk art! Do you draw your characters? Do others draw them? Pick one of your OCs and post your favorite picture of him!
Ohh, how exciting! Right, well straight off the bat…no, I don’t…or rather, I don’t anymore. The one I did try my hand at in various incarnations was Catrina. In ye olde days, I did draw characters…badly…but I can’t find the sketches (thankfully!), so I can’t show you the early ones.
In mid-2006, I purchased a graphics tablet (on a whim, as I do for 99% of the gadgetry I end up with), and I decided that I was good at art. Turns out I wasn’t, but in the brief time before I realised that, I drew some pictures. This was a Catrina attempt, in all her freakishly big-eyed, eyebrow-less glory. She looks a bit like Jessica Rabbit, or maybe a Gelfling, neither of which is what I picture Catrina looking like, at all. Although I do quite like how I did the hair.
Anyway.
After reading The Genesis, Kier Gill (a friend of mine, who also happens to be an incredibly talented graphical artist), became interested in making a graphic novel series to go alongside it, and illustrated Catrina (amongst everyone else) in a way that is about a thousand times better than I ever could. Kier also illustrated the cover for The Genesis. He is still working on the graphic novel, although I have to say he — like me — is a professional procrastinator, so the finished product may be a while coming yet. You can expect it out with the VS sequels.
Now, while my artistic skills could obviously use some work, I think that I am somewhat decent photo manipulation skills (I say ‘somewhat’, because I’m not brilliant…in fact, I’m far from it).
I created the Creature, for example, using a body builder’s torso, a clawed monster’s arm prop, a dragon’s head, antelope horns (or some other gazelle/goat/Bambi type, I can’t remember now exactly which animal they came from) and smushed them all together (the background/scene, FYI, is an amalgamation of the background from American McGee’s Alice and the mirror scene from the PC game Bad Mojo, with the mirror itself coming to me from Google).
This image in particular was also inspired by Apartment 26′s Backwards song, which is also where one of the scenes in The Genesis came from.
I realise I’m wandering off the beaten path of the question towards drawings, as such, but I’m on a roll now, so I might as well show you one more thing, and that’s the Catrina Collection.
What’s the Catrina Collection, I hear you ask, with a sense of foreboding and dread, as well as an overtone of disregard? Well, since I’m no good at art, I try instead to draw inspiration on the things that I insist on doing instead of writing, in the form of making Catrinas everywhere.
The attempt on physical resemblance to Catrina naturally depends on the flexibility of the software in question, as shown in the pictures. My personal favourite is the Second Life version, because the engine is so very diverse in what you can create.
If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.
Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.
Again, nope, but in this case, it’s understandable.
I wouldn’t expect vampires to have the ability to keep animals around them any easier than they would be able to keep humans around for extended periods, since they still have blood pumping through their bodies and undoubtedly after a while the hunger would most likely turn on them. Although that’s just a theory; in truth, I haven’t written any pets in simply because I’ve never considered any of the characters “pet people”.
It could be conceivable that they might have vampiric pets, like Pac Man in Blade: Trinity.
(Yes, this was largely an excuse to put up a picture of Ryan Reynolds without a shirt; how perceptive of you to notice.)
But sadly, at present, none of the characters have thought to put the vampire gene into any furry friends.
If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.
How willing are you to kill your characters if the plot so demands it? What’s the most interesting way you’ve killed someone?
Oh yes, no problem whatsoever. I’d wipe out the entire planet if it the plot said so.
I only have one character that I regret killing off, but that was because it wasn’t integral to the plot, and they would have been a useful addition in later books, but c’est la vie, or c’est…décès, in this case.
Interesting deaths…hmm…most of the deaths are relatively mediocre; everyone’s stabbed, shot, dismembered or blown up.
There is one part where a guy rips another guy’s head off…just pulls it until the head and a bit of spine comes out. I guess that’s…well, no, that’s not interesting as much as gross.
Oh well, maybe the really interesting ones are yet to be written.
If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.
How long does it usually take you to complete an entire story—from planning to writing to posting (if you post your work)?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…
In the space of ten years, I’ve taken one single, solitary book from start to finish.
While I’ve started other books many times, I’ve abandoned them all before finishing them (something I hope to combat in the near future).
In any case, at present, I can only say that I have completed one book, and it took me a decade to do so.
And I’m still not happy with that one.
If you are interested in doing your own 30 Days of Writing, here are the questions.
Subscribe
