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mindsplintersNext time I go somewhere cool and edgy for a haircut, I'm taking someone with me that will reinforce my balls. Though it's good to get some of the ends off, layers put back, and have my curls bounce back into place. Looks cute! Just not a dramatic change.
1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you've worked with and why.
Oh, heavens. This is actually a hard question because I'm not very good at having one favorite at a time. My love is slutty and spreads all over the place like margarine.
Back in high school, there was a world that my best friend at the time and I created together that tempts me back to it every now and then. (A lot of worlds, really, because we were chronic world-builders.) This one was a tiny town, isolated and picturesque and somewhere kind of vaguely Texas-wards. Desert and cowboys, you know. Petra Sophia was the town equivalent of Callahan's Bar - you found it when you needed it and it was a place where anything could happen. Where the only tax collector that came to audit ended up staying to become a cowboy and flirting with the kindergarten teacher. Where an old Chinese man ala Pai Mei ran a grocery and picked up a waifish hitchhiker to teach her about the real world in a place where they still believed in chupacabra sightings. Where a world-famous artist can hide away and enjoy being courted by the willful post-mistress. It was a world based on characters and set up to handle whatever little short stories we felt like writing.
I loved Angels and the shared history created and distance makes it hurt less. Kingdom fills me with the glee that shared-worlds provide. EI was turning into something blindingly fun, too, but I pulled back too soon. It lingers in my head so I probably should revamp it. I put a lot of work into building that up from the basic concept, developing the logic and science behind a post-apocalyptic world. It might have been trite in some ways and expected - aren't most Big Business Causes The World To Go Wrong ideas really? - but it was fun and I know I hesitated too much on some of the things. If I go back to it, it has to be stronger and better thought-out, more dirt and reality. An underground of genetic freaks wouldn't be necessarily pretty, after all. There are logistics that I skimped on.
... I have a lot of worlds in my head, really. Both fanfic-based and not. The list is horrifying if you want the truth but I have little reservation and will tell you about any of them that you care to know about. I have 90% of my notes about these things, stretching back to 1996. Now I feel old.
2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?
This is a much harder question than it should be. I have a lot of characters in my head and they have varying levels of activity. I find that almost no character truly dies in my head and this is a problem because it means I still have a character from Gargoyles roaming in the dim hallways of my noggin.
My active roster stands at 11, I suppose. Strangely for me, I have way more active women than men at this moment - 7 to 4. Usually I do my best to keep my ranks even but I've been faced with a combination of more inspirations for females and games that do not actually require more men. I usually try to take turns, following a female creation with a male creation and vice versa. I like playing both and tend to approach a character by their archetype more so than their gender. Gender informs but doesn't always mean as much as the soul of the character for me. After all, you can find both saints and sinners amongst both men and women.
3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you're writing about fictional places)?
Nine times out of ten, the names I use mean something to me, representing the character in some way. It might be something obvious or a bad pun with myself. I also do my best to have the ethnicity reflected in the name and have only sometimes really messed with this rule for myself (see: Rayya Veritas - deargodwhy?). There have been a few times when I have chosen a name strictly based on sound/feel. These mostly happen in my little private RPs when a character is demanded immediately but I've been lucky in that Charlie is, well, Charlie and so on. Only one character came to me fully named and without any kind of conscious influence. Jackie's first appearance was in a series of serial dreams that I had which I translated into stories. I had no choice there. Do you really think I would have willingly named someone Jacqueline Quentin Arcana?
Even if the culture is alien, I still usually try to adapt something with meaning. The most recent example would be Arcadia's Vaiko. Based on the image I had for Arion being a a world that was the bastard child of Waterworld and Pirates of Darkwater, I shamelessly stole and warped various Polynesian name-bases.
1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you've worked with and why.
Oh, heavens. This is actually a hard question because I'm not very good at having one favorite at a time. My love is slutty and spreads all over the place like margarine.
Back in high school, there was a world that my best friend at the time and I created together that tempts me back to it every now and then. (A lot of worlds, really, because we were chronic world-builders.) This one was a tiny town, isolated and picturesque and somewhere kind of vaguely Texas-wards. Desert and cowboys, you know. Petra Sophia was the town equivalent of Callahan's Bar - you found it when you needed it and it was a place where anything could happen. Where the only tax collector that came to audit ended up staying to become a cowboy and flirting with the kindergarten teacher. Where an old Chinese man ala Pai Mei ran a grocery and picked up a waifish hitchhiker to teach her about the real world in a place where they still believed in chupacabra sightings. Where a world-famous artist can hide away and enjoy being courted by the willful post-mistress. It was a world based on characters and set up to handle whatever little short stories we felt like writing.
I loved Angels and the shared history created and distance makes it hurt less. Kingdom fills me with the glee that shared-worlds provide. EI was turning into something blindingly fun, too, but I pulled back too soon. It lingers in my head so I probably should revamp it. I put a lot of work into building that up from the basic concept, developing the logic and science behind a post-apocalyptic world. It might have been trite in some ways and expected - aren't most Big Business Causes The World To Go Wrong ideas really? - but it was fun and I know I hesitated too much on some of the things. If I go back to it, it has to be stronger and better thought-out, more dirt and reality. An underground of genetic freaks wouldn't be necessarily pretty, after all. There are logistics that I skimped on.
... I have a lot of worlds in my head, really. Both fanfic-based and not. The list is horrifying if you want the truth but I have little reservation and will tell you about any of them that you care to know about. I have 90% of my notes about these things, stretching back to 1996. Now I feel old.
2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?
This is a much harder question than it should be. I have a lot of characters in my head and they have varying levels of activity. I find that almost no character truly dies in my head and this is a problem because it means I still have a character from Gargoyles roaming in the dim hallways of my noggin.
My active roster stands at 11, I suppose. Strangely for me, I have way more active women than men at this moment - 7 to 4. Usually I do my best to keep my ranks even but I've been faced with a combination of more inspirations for females and games that do not actually require more men. I usually try to take turns, following a female creation with a male creation and vice versa. I like playing both and tend to approach a character by their archetype more so than their gender. Gender informs but doesn't always mean as much as the soul of the character for me. After all, you can find both saints and sinners amongst both men and women.
3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you're writing about fictional places)?
Nine times out of ten, the names I use mean something to me, representing the character in some way. It might be something obvious or a bad pun with myself. I also do my best to have the ethnicity reflected in the name and have only sometimes really messed with this rule for myself (see: Rayya Veritas - deargodwhy?). There have been a few times when I have chosen a name strictly based on sound/feel. These mostly happen in my little private RPs when a character is demanded immediately but I've been lucky in that Charlie is, well, Charlie and so on. Only one character came to me fully named and without any kind of conscious influence. Jackie's first appearance was in a series of serial dreams that I had which I translated into stories. I had no choice there. Do you really think I would have willingly named someone Jacqueline Quentin Arcana?
Even if the culture is alien, I still usually try to adapt something with meaning. The most recent example would be Arcadia's Vaiko. Based on the image I had for Arion being a a world that was the bastard child of Waterworld and Pirates of Darkwater, I shamelessly stole and warped various Polynesian name-bases.
