Chatter Post!

[white_aster]

Yay and welcome! First of all, thank EVERYONE for joining the comm! We've been tickled pink by the turnout, and we hope that everyone will have an awesome time writing and reading!

In the interest of tiding us over until the bingo cards are given out on the 1st, why don't we have a good, old-fashioned introduction post! Feel free to mix and mingle, introduce yourself and your writing, talk about the weather, ask questions, or anything else that comes to mind! :D

Comments

[eisen]

I'm Tara! And original fiction is where I love to reside, although I've written about as much of it for public consumption as I have of fanfic ... which is to say: not a lot.

I'm hoping to use this as an excuse to charge up the old batteries and see if I can't convince myself I can make something interesting without making it epic in scope - I work best in fragments, as it happens, but everything I write keeps trying to be bigger than a fragment and thus terrifying.

The bingo offers an opportunity to take fragments of that wider scope and just tell those and maybe work the tapestry in around them - I like these characters, I've just no faith I can do their stories full justice, so it's a good way to take the pressure off.

Most of the stuff I write about tends to be either post-apoc or high urban fantasy - tonally, I tend to pinball between RIVERWORLD and BLADE II on the scale of thoughtfulness vs. "cool bits". I have one major overarching metaworld that pretty much everything I write comes back to, the Black River construct, and so the titular not-really-body of water shows up as metaphor and symbol and obstacle and destination in a lot of my stuff; it may not show up as a major facet, and thus might not show up in the stuff I write for this bingo, but it's in there somewhere. Don't know why, don't know how, but it's stuck. Things that'll show up in my story besides that include but are not limited to kemonomimi, vampires, werewolves, fairies, witches, ghosts (hungry and otherwise), all sorts of inhuman creatures not previously listed, giant robots, gods, mad scientists, cyborgs, soldiers, bureaucrats, torch singers, bartenders, outlaws, thieves, prostitutes, lawmen, wandering strangers, impossible machines that aren't giant robots, sentient nonhuman organisms, metafictional concepts (i.e. "am I in a story or aren't I?"), superheroes, time travel, and trains. (Don't much care for cars, for some reason.) The kinds of people that show up in my stories tend to be queer, many of them disabled, several are poly, most of them very young but several who are very old, and they're all kinds of fucked up. The tag I use on my DW to talk about my original fic is "this story ends in bloodshed" for a reason; not all the blood's metaphorical. That said, I love happy endings, but I'm the type of gal who considers END OF EVANGELION a happy ending, so take it with a grain of salt. I'll warn for as much as I can, but often times the best thing I've found for my original works is just to say "these are not nice people and this is not a good situation and it's going to hurt" and leave it at that.

I'm intensely interested in nontechnological expressions of the Singularity, as just one thing I like to fixate on - just how far into strange ways can you go and still be recognizable, does anyone besides yourself still need to recognize you to still be you, what happens to a world where these options exist and can they be regulated or should they be, etc. etc. I also like exploring the ways privilege and kyriarchy fuck people up - and I don't necessarily pick characters who I agree with to explore these things through. I find trying to justify how someone who is otherwise a decent person can believe hateful things a fascinating, if draining, exercise, but I also find exploring the ways in which awful, despicable people can be inexplicably kindhearted to be just as rewarding - I don't have many straightforwardly heroic people I care to write about, I'm afraid, although I've a few here and there. I like urban environments and I like crumbling ones better; I've a love for cities gone feral. And - of course - I like violence. I don't write about peaceful lives - I'd love to be good at it and I might write about moments of relative peace in amongst the chaos and violence of my characters' lives, but I'm drawn towards catastrophe like flies to a corpse. It doesn't have to be stylish, but it helps. I'm a romantic at heart - although I try not to be Romantic about it.

As influences go, I'm heavily indebted to the works of - in no particular order - Guillermo del Toro, Tim Powers, Watsuki Nobuhiro, China Mieville, Fritz Leiber, Kathryn Bigelow, Kevin Williamson, Tsurumaki Kazuya, Yuki Kaori, and Gerard Way. But I like to think I'm a lot queerer than all of them. (This is definitely a delusion of grandeur, I know.)

I figure you have an even chance of getting fic from me about:

The Dead City - a New Weird West sort of thing, about a city called Absolution and the living desert it's feeding on and the sins of the past and the idea that redemption and revenge are not so different, actually, and neither one ends the way you want; it's a queer love story (or three, or five) and a tragicomedy and a mystery play and about five different other things, set in a city where all the sins of the past can be forgotten, a city whose own sins are coming home to roost.

A Wolf at the Door - a rollicking action-horror melodrama about a family of vampire hunters with a nasty little family legacy courtesy the big D himself, spanning the years 1890 through 2017, and along the way including weird science, magic, the potential end of the world (multiple times), several games of poker, and a road trip.

The Guns of Revelation - being the story of the second year of the war between the city-states of Asagrin and Chettle, and the triumph, tragedy, and failure of the 83rd Public Defense Battalion, M Company; a story about science and magic, gods and the absence of, mud, war, camaraderie, and survival - and giant robots.

The Beetle Valley Irregulars - remember those kid detective supergroups back in the day, the ones who ran around solving mysteries, righting wrongs, saving the day, having magical adventures in faraway fantastic lands, with magical friends and fizzy drinks and simple, good, kind, morals - whatever happened to them? What happens to a vampire, a fairy, an elf, and two utterly normal girls when they grow up in fantasyland, far away from home? Whatever became of those crazy kids who just wanted a friend in each other - the kids afraid to grow up?

House of Jealous Lovers - in a broken land of hungry fog and devouring mist set adrift from the passage of time, filled with strange monsters and stranger gods, five not-really-strangers have to survive by any means necessary, even if it means forgetting and discarding everything they know - but moving on isn't as easy as it seems, when your life is on the line.

Without Feathers - the Revelation of John tells of seven lampstands that represent the values of seven "churches" that will hear the call of God in the last days - but who are these lampstands, what are they, and if they are actually people, say, seven girls from all over the world, can they save the world before God decides to end it? How? And who in their right mind thought "what if Sailormoon met the Revelation of John" was a good idea for a story?

The Black River - on a planet ripped apart along all axes of space and time that shifts with every step, it's the unalterable black line that circles the world - someone's gotta walk it; it's got to end somewhere; what's waiting there at the end? Nobody's sure. But the only way to find an answer is to start walking - past Asagrin, past Chettle, past Beetle Valley, past the lands of mist and hungry fog, past Absolution - and keep walking until you reach an end - your end. The River waits.

Uhm. I think that's a good introduction, right?

[takerzmuse]

...hi. *waves* I'm Grassy and most of my writing has been fanfiction, though I have some bits and pieces of origi-fic I've worked on - but never finished - in past years for NaNoWriMo. Figured something like this would help me out a bit with stringing together what I've written before and, um. Just playing around with my characters/world and having fun with them. *shrugs*

Yeah, I'll just go hide in this corner over here...

This got way longer than intended.

[dingsi]

I'm late to the party, and signing up was a spontaneous thing. I'm still not sure how I feel about it: hopeful? scared? desperate? excited? - Possibly all of the above. My expectations are really low, though. In so many years I've only written a handful of drabbles when it comes to fanfic, and original fiction has gotten reduced to RPing with a friend -- which is much fun, btw, and I couldn't wish for a better writing partner... but it's still not the same as a story in prose. And I miss that. There's an origfic-shaped hole in my life, so to speak. I've considered joining challenge communities before, but usually they didn't allow for original fiction, or they had weekly prompts or such a tight deadline that I crumbled into an insecure heap just from reading the profile. I'm terrible with deadlines. Or pressure. Actually, let's just call it "I'm a bundle of writing-related neuroses" and be done with it. As your community has "NO PRESSURE!" practically written in bold red letters over it, my goal is as follows: I will hopefully finish something from my bingo card. And then I will feel accomplished because 1 > 0. \o/ The end.

So, what can you expect?

For one, my stories all started out as something to entertain myself with when I'm bored or before I fall asleep, so they don't have as much structure as, say, some novel you're planning. Basically, I'm writing snapshots. There might be a connecting story arc but there's lots and lots of "free space" available inbetween.

Two, the relationships and character development are more important than the worldbuilding or plot. Which doesn't mean I don't care for that sort of thing, or that there weren't constants and facts ... but they take a backseat and I don't keep a box of notes or online wiki somewhere. (Perhaps I should?) Usually mood and imagery are the driving force. (On rereading, this sounds terrible, like I'm just a hack trying to find excuses why he doesn't have to keep up with characterisation and stuff, but I don't know how to explain it any better.)

Three: I tried to write characters that weren't queer in some way, but it just doesn't work. I seem incapable of having totally straight main characters. Later it turned out I can't have 100% gay or lesbian main characters either. I'm not doing this because of the misguided and ultimately condescending opinion that "everyone's bi at heart" -- thankfully I outgrew that phase in my teens *cough cough*. It's just that a) I think sexuality and desire are both more complicated and complex than we're generally told, and b) somehow the charas grew that way. I mean, even the ones I thought to be gay or straight eventually piped up with "well, that one time at college..." or "okay I'm not into women but if I was I'd totally [gushing description of adored female person]". Or "but we were drunk!" *hands* (To be honest, I like them that way.)

Four: a lot of people described their stories and I tried, but it only made me think I'd suck as someone in charge of advertising. Goth vampire has a silly sense of humour! Watch him feed his frogs! Grumpy ex rock star struggles with abusive past! Is also kinky! Guy who had a crush on ex rock star in their teenage years is now happily married but the couple is open for moresomes! And kinky. There's really lots of kink, actually, but mostly in the "After doing the dishes, I hurt my lover in ways we find exciting, and they told me I look sexy in my Birkenstock's and grey sweater that my dog had gnawed on again" way. There's also magical tattoos and dead brothers and longevity treatment and laser-guided amnesia and dude someone shoot me already.

[ignotussomnium]

Hey, I'm Tash, and I've never done a writing challenge thing before so crossing my fingers. Fanfiction's never really been my thing, so fic challenges just don't spark my interest.

I like modern fantasy, and my main influences are things like Sandman and Pan's Labyrinth. So less urban fantasy vampires and werewolves and more eerie unknowable-things-are-hiding-in-the-shadows. I like playing with ideas of what it means to be 'human,' perceptions of reality, mythology, politics, linguistics.

I've been working on this one series about dreams for a while, but it's gotten so cluttered that I'm going to have to go back to basics and rework it. Typically I tend to overorganize things, and plan and plan forever until a project becomes a veritable hydra. So hopefully this'll help actually get me writing. Also I signed up for the Gen+Romance card because I don't have much experience writing romance and want to work on fixing that.

[crossfortune]

*pokes head out of corner* Hi. I'm Lynn, and I'm really bad at introductions. I tend to write a lot of modern fantasy, whether it being wholly original or stuff based on tabletop writing. Most of the settings I've poked at and built recently have been very human-centric, with humans being the most important and a lot of playing with the nature and meaning of free will.

[hobbit]

I am cairea hobbit, often known as just cairea! For some reason I don't capitalize my online nick!

I write mostly in small private RPs that are a mixture of fan-worlds and original worlds, and it's been a while since I did any real writing on my own. I'm hoping to get more into the groove of writing longfic here.

I write a lot of fantasy with a good dose of ghost-y hijinks. Everybody needs ghost-y hijinks, right? I have a Victorian England setting that is just bursting with characters I'd like to further define, as well as some D&D and Mutants and Masterminds characters that might turn up from time to time.

[ar]

Hi! My name's AR, and I really want to win NaNoWriMo this year. (I've tried something like four times and never once won. Not once. D: face.) I figure original fic bingo can get me all ready with ideas for November!

I'm currently interested in writing midgrade novels, and in specific, my roommate's gotten me interested in writing talking-animal stories. I like YA novels, too, but not nearly so much, if only because there seems to be a wider variety of things that I'm interested in (i.e., not Twilight, second-world fantasy, or Gossip Girl stories) to be found among stories for younger readers. I like some novels for people my own age, too, but I tend to be happiest reading things that aren't literary tragedies or genre fiction. Urban fantasy in particular has burned me enough that I tend to give it the Frysquint. I find that I just don't like the conventions of most genres as they're written for adults, idk. I guess I'll always secretly be eight years old on the inside.

I love fairy tales, stories that read like fairy tales even without any magic, slice of life stories, dystopias, classic novels, and historical adventures. Stories where women take the forefront, or PoC, or queer characters (especially queer women), are all mad exciting. I'm currently in the mood for stories with happy endings, or at least hopeful ones. Books I've had a lot of fun reading lately include Poppy by Avi, Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. I've been struggling to get through Malinda Lo's Ash; it has a lot of things I really like in a story, but my eyes glaze over within a page or two of her writing. Idk, maybe I'm just not in the right mood for it.

Oh, and I like comics (strips and books), too! I've been working on trying to write scripts, but it's really difficult for me. D:

I haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to write for my bingo cards--possibly something I've already been working on, possibly something entirely new--so I can't say much to that. But it's nice to meet all of you, so on and so forth. ♥

[pitseleh]

Hey, I'm Pel, and I probably like worldbuilding more than I do actually writing. I'm doing this bingo to possibly try to trump this bad habit of worldbuilding and worldbuilding and never getting to the actual writing part.

I have a shit ton of worlds, but I'm going to try to focus on two; Beler, my main one, and a yet-unnamed one (I call it the IDEKverse) that I work on the side. Beler is possibly too big for this Bingo despite being a Ruritania; IDEK is probably more the right size, despite having nothing to do with Earth. Both are Secondary World Fantasies (Paracosms?) that are heavy on the cultural/sociological/anthropological aspects rather than the fantasy bits; in fact, IDEK doesn't even have any magic.

Hopefully they won't be as incredibly convoluted as the seem to me; I can understand what's going on, but lord knows if anyone else can.

Regardless of all that, I look forward to a fun and friendly enviroment in which to post my works (they might include illustrations/comics, as I am more of an artist than a writer; we'll see). It's very nice to meet everyone and read about their works! I look forward to the first of October!

Tentative introduction

[missingopossum]

Hello, I'm Shona. I'm here via the link in the community promo comm; I've just set up my DW account this week as part of a plan to encourage myself to write more and when I saw this brilliant idea I decided that I wanted to give it a go. I'm really looking forward to it.

As to what I write, it's pretty much all original fiction tending towards SF and occasionally wandering into fantasy. I shall shortly be having my first attempt at erotica / porn for this year's NaNoWriMo - I've worked my way through three different genres in three years so adding a fourth to the collection seemed kind of like the natural next step, really. I'll see if I still think it's a good idea after November, but on the whole this challenge can only help spark ideas!

By the way this is the first challenge I've ever seen for original fiction. Great idea and kudos to you for organising it!

[kylaye]

Hello!

I'm kylaye, a 17-year old cisfemale living in Singapore (NOT a place in China). I write mostly poetry, although I'm trying to regain the swing of prose. I write about relationships, love, education, science. It's hard for me to create characters and see them through, but I will try.

Mostly, I love words. Nice to be here (:

[cade]

Hello everyone. I'm Cade, writing for NaNoWriMo 7 years including this one, writing otherwise for over 20 as a hobby.

I used to write fan fiction almost exclusively, but in the past few years I've been switching over to original work. Not a judgment of any kind - it's just that my tastes changed and I'd also rather work on things I can sell someday, so the only fanfic I'm adding to my plate is the kind based on public domain work.

I'm hoping here to flesh out some characters from my 2007, 2008, and 2009 NaNoWriMo novels (all originals), and maybe even lay out a little groundwork for 2010 in the early weeks. 2004 is getting a massive overhaul right now, but it technically is fan fiction (of the sellable kind) so I'll pull from '07-'10 for the bingo.

My serious works of late usually involve some kind of gender variation, in a sci-fi setting. The Last Guardian features a world where all the women are barren and only a small number of male-appearing intersex individuals can bear children. Explaining how this fits into Bounty Hunter Games (which needs a retitle) spoils the whole thing, so I'll keep my mouth shut and keys untapped. Hand of Winter features a girl who would have been a boy but her parents had her implanted with a chip that would override her genes and cause her to develop as a girl. Unfortunately, long after they're dead and she's adopted into an extremely primitive, superstitious native population on another planet, the chip malfunctions and stops working, triggering a rapid transformation that nobody can explain except as an act of their Gods and Goddesses.

I don't have anything strongly in that vein planned for 2010, but there's an ungendered character as part of the supporting cast; like in previous works, this is completely normal for the native population of the planet from which ze comes. All are human; I don't write non-humans, exactly. Some characters are arguably non-human, but they descended from humans, and their genes altered through intentional manipulation on the molecular level, natural selection, or simple eugenics/dysgenics.

I also sometimes do ordinary modern-day fiction but when I do that, it's normally for NaNoWriMo wordcount filler and/or free DIY therapy, and I don't intend to sell or share it. Most of my modern-day fiction is crud and either wish fulfillment or nightmare exploration. Or both. I can multi-task.

[azuire]

hello! I'm azuire and I think I'm late to this party.

I write everything from form poetry to scripts, genre to "literary". in other words, if it's out there, I've probably tried it. most of it is running around terrorising the voices in my head (I think one is on holiday in Brazil), and the rest is housed at sushiandchai.

I signed up on a whim, let's see where this bingo card takes me :)

cheerio!

[asharia]

*waves* Hi, I'm Xocoatl. I'm mainly a fanfiction writer over on Livejournal but I've always played around with my own fics. I'm glad to see a bingo that caters to original fiction since all the others won't let us play there *pouts* I also write poetry when the mood strikes which isn't as often as I like.

I have no clue what I'm going to write yet, my muses are being finicky. Hopefully I'll get sparked when I see my card :D

[gehayi]

*waves*

Hi, I'm Gehayi. I like AUs, history, urban fantasy, science fiction, and fairy tales revisited. I need to expand on a medieval steampunk novella I wrote not long ago; I've broken it down, and I need to add about twenty scenes. Things that'll show up in my story include but are not limited to: multiple viewpoints, mad science, medieval robots, revivifiers, Macgyvering (by another name, obviously), implied robot sex, one zombie, airship battles, hot air balloons, political intrigue, family conflict, treachery and women being awesome.

Because I'm hoping to get this published, I won't be posting the scenes. I'm sorry about that, but I really, REALLY need to get this published.

[bigbrasskey]

I'm Carla!

This is...well, this is my in a brand-spanking-new username because of Identity Issues, so I'm hoping to start off my new start maybe around here. I'm told I give really good gush, which I hope to get to liberally employ here! Nothing like gurgling over what you loved in a story to cheer you up.

UM. I love animals, art, simple things: being outside and just watching any kind of weather, hugs, good food, good books oh lord. I am huge on speculative fiction - on taking humans, people of any stripe or skin or sentience, and plunking them down in bizarre places and exploring who they are, what is different and what is the same, what is fascinatingly foreign to this new world and what is achingly familiar in the experience of any living thinking being. I like to explore how human humans can be when they're not really humans at all. ALSO I LIKE EXPLOSIONS. AND LADIES MAKING OUT. Really, ladies making out with anyone, I'm cool. Fantasy, steampunk (I'm just starting to actually understand the genre, and I think it's thrilling me) sci-fi, magical realism (unf) and much else.

I like...well. Tanya Huff's Valour series, Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series, the Vampire Hunter D books, Tolkien, Elfquest, Lilith Saintcrow, K.J. Bishop, Alice Borchardt, L.J. Smith, Janet Fitch, Cindy Pon. Barbara Hambly. Michelle Sagara. Many, many, many more.

I tend to write girls! Girls who love each other, girls who would kill for each other, also girls who love monsters and vice versa. (Red Riding Hood/Big Bad Wolf OTP) Girls with embroidery, girls with swords, girls who are soft and sweet and want to settle down, girls who are the destructive equivalent of a walking atomic bomb with a bad temper. (I tend to be a het 'shipper, but all of my original stories seem to turn into manifestos about how my heroines would move the earth for their girlfriends.) Fairy tales and games therein with meta. Dystopic, steampunk - ugh, sci-fi that's not quite hits so many buttons I don't even know - cities in the air, cities in the earth, cluttered eclectic magic in unexpected things - rooms full of dusty sunlight, papers and glass or bronze globes, empty intricate birdcages hanging from the ceiling, bookcases stacked with scrolls and leather-bound books and figurines of china or bone side by side with tarnished keys and leather maps, steamer trunks on the ground and richly coloured paintings half-hidden behind the very ordinary curtains - magic in everyday things, Alice in Wonderland inspired stories where things don't quite dance to our tune... Werewolves with some thought put into how a wolfish psyche influencing a human one might actually act (as in, not 'oh, he can do x/y/this atrocious thing and it's not his fault because of the ~~animal inside~~!') Dragons. Oooh, I love me some dragons. Queens. Empresses. Kings. Knights. Giant machines. Sentient machines. Mazes. Political games. (I don't know that I write them very well...) Fealty. Lovers pitted against each other for opposite causes. (I'm addicted to happy endings like woah, though. >.>)

I LIKE TO BLOW STUFF UP, DID I MENTION?

I've finished three novels (two for the same contest on different years, one finished in three days - meeting the deadline - and one in four - missing the deadline.) I want to get back into the groove of loving my writing, though.

[kunenk]

Right so uh. Hi! I'm Kunenk, and I write mostly fantasy. Probably what I'll be going for most here is this story with two girls, one of who has effectively adopted two griffin kits. They're… somewhere between piracy and running a service, because they like not being arrested. :|a

[jadekirk]

Hi, I started out writing an original character in the Doctor Who universe but then I decided that he needs his own story detailing his life before and afterwards. Of course he doesn't lead a normal life at the best of times and I'm hoping this series can show what a bisexual polyamorous red haired chef with severe immortality issues can get up to.