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

[amethystfirefly]

Hehe. I know what you mean. XD I have a feeling that my LJ time is going to get significantly pushed down when I get into the groove of writing again.

[silenus]

Hi there. This account actually belongs to two people, glitterstim and zomnomnoms. We write professionally under a joint pseudonym and will be handling each of the pieces as a team. Our last novel was published in January of this year, and we've been rather blocked since then. We're hoping that this challenge will eventually result in us handing in another manuscript to our editor. Even if it doesn't, we should still have a blast, so it's all good!

So far we've written more erotica than anything else, most of it with a speculative bent. This time around we're aiming for dark fantasy with strong romantic overtones. We spent today hammering out the world we want to play in and designing the story's feature creature. Consider us stoked.

[silenus]

That's exactly how we're looking at it too. I was moping about because we're so blocked, and then I stumbled on this comm. My writing partner and I decided it was fate are are actually having ideas again. Will wonders never cease?

[silenus]

Sounds like you're already hitting the target from some of the responses here!

[whatawaytoburn]

Personally I would not mind that list going on. It is an awesome list. It is a fantastic list, it is a list I can't wait to see explored.

[parhelion]

Hi. I'm Parhelion. Writing is a hobby that suddenly took off on me a decade back, dragging me across a lot of odd terrain on the way to becoming a sometimes fan, sometimes original writer.

My fandoms are pretty obscure; when it comes to the original stuff, I mostly write single-gender historical romances with the occasional fantasy thrown in for variety. My published stories and novels are also pretty obscure, come to think on it, but at least they keep me away from more ingenious forms of mischief.

After finishing off a long year and a short novel, I wanted to write a few bits and pieces just for fun. I was delighted to see this community go live since I've had very good luck and a lot of enjoyment joining Yuletide and other fandom challenges and exchanges.

[mercredigirl]

Hello! I’m mercredigirl, though you can call me whatever is convenient, within reason. :)

I’m sixteen, Straits Chinese, ND and queer; and so my stories tend to reflect a certain feminist, postcolonial bent, whether in my original fiction or my fanfic. I’m signing up for a GRK card, because I tend to write gen, and I am rubbish at writing porn – so, hey, why not practise? Expect literary/realist fiction or SFF.

*is so excited!*

[persiflage_1]

After three years of writing mostly Doctor Who fanfiction, I started writing a futuristic police procedural back in February. My main character is Maru, a female no-nonsense police officer who believes passionately in law and order and Justice (with the capital J!). She's strong, determined, fiesty and smart, but occasionally prone to impatience when others don't keep up with her.

My 'verse is a collection of 11 planets, 8 of which are inhabited by descendants of Earth's evacuees (Earth became increasingly uninhabitable over the space of a couple of centuries, so humanity headed out into space). I've got regular humans, four armed humanoids, shape-shifters, sentient dragon-like beings, sentient tree humanoids, sentient bird humanoids, and centaur-like beings. There's also a race of omnipotent non-corporeal aliens who will eventually be revealed to be the big bads.

The society on which most of the stories are focused is made up of mostly polyamorous bisexual humans.

[staranise]

Hi, I'm Lis; when rename tokens come out I'll be staranise and my writing journal will move over to loveandwar.

I wrote Stargate fanfiction until an unfortunate (?) confluence of fandom and creative energy produced an AU that ate the world my brain, to the point that several people have asked me why I don't just file off the serial numbers and make it original. (Answer: because then it loses all the awesome resonances!)

But beyond that, I was raised in the Canadian West and dragged to rodeos as a child, so I've written a couple of Western stories that could loosely be filed under "romance", though one of them's about the difficulty of hiding a longstanding semi-incestuous poly triad in late 19th-century New Mexico. They're known as "The Ridiculous Cowboy Story" and "That Other Cowboy Story".

All the Years After is a story in larval form. I know it's about a young woman named Magritte whose home is destroyed in a bombing, who joins her country's army to combat an invasion, and after the invasion, works as a saboteur and underground resistance fighter. It's steampunk-ish, but inspired more by Japanese fantasy than Victorian literature, and draws a lot of resonances from World War II.

By Our Old Hands is an old story I still haven't quite dealt with, in a fantasy society somewhat like post-Reformation Germany; a duellist finds himself helping an exiled princess-of-the-blood navigate the alliances and politics she inherits when her father dies, and she unexpectedly discovers she's been set up as her grandfather's rival. This one is very informed by my studies of how people viewed human nature over the years, so none of the characters have twenty-first attitudes about who they are, what love and fidelity mean, or what loyalty is.

I also have an unnamed story set over a thousand years after the magical apocalypse, in a nordic gender-egalitarian society, which is a shared project with recessional and celeloriel, detailing the formation of special police investigators who can breach the culture's strict taboos of privacy. But that won't be public.

I like going for really psychological plots, and surprise myself every time I turn out cotton candy fluff. I'm also studying psychology of aesthetics (read: psychology of art) this term, so who knows what I'll come up with.

[white_aster]

It is! :D Chii is the Epitome of Cuteness. :D I love that manga!

[white_aster]

IT IS BIG ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE! That is its beauty! :D :D

[white_aster]

SUCCESS! :D

[white_aster]

Oh man, I got nothin' to say but your writing sounds TASTY. And kind of what writing is supposed to be: an exploration of how we are and how we can be and how we MIGHT be. Can't wait to see what you write! :D

Now in the right thread! \o/

[white_aster]

Heh, sometimes the story where you can't remember where you're going is a blessing in disguise: you can tear it apart without feeling like you're destroying something precious. :P

[white_aster]

Hi hi! Glad to see you over here! Yeah, since I don't post on LJ anymore, I guess our advertising over there was pretty much depending on word of mouth from the few LJers who still followed me. I keep thinking that I should go post to a few writing comms over there, but to be honest am a bit intimidated (I'm kind of afraid we'll get five bajillion folks, and I kind of like the idea of this being a smaller challenge, at least until I get the hang of it!) >_>

[white_aster]

Bingo challenges lend themselves incredibly well to world-building, I find. I might do a personal challenge, writing something small and worldbuildy for one of my less-developed 'verses in one of the larger bingo patterns or something, to do just this kind of exploratory research. :)

[white_aster]

Things Being Awesome is one of my FAVORITE themes! \o/

[white_aster]

Naoto! <3!

Your worlds sound like tons of fun! Bingos are great for exploratory stuff, so good luck! :D

[white_aster]

Heh, you saying "subdivisions" makes me want a comic now about all the spec fic's living in the suburbs, with each of them having a subdivision. Urban fantasy complaining about fantasy's dragons being parked on their side of the street, fantasy complaining that dystopian's permanent cloud of doom is messing with their property values, etc etc. :D

Not posting publically is fine! Good luck!

[white_aster]

Oh man, I will be so tickled if something that comes out of this actually gets published! :D I hope that you find something that inspires!

[sterling]

Almost forgot about urban fantasy. I'm pretty fond of that, too.

That would be a pretty funny comic. Surely someone has illustrated that, right? (Or perhaps our nerdy writer humor is not that widely appreciated. Say it ain't so!)

Thanks! ^_^

[alwayswondered]

I'm in the same boat. I used to write all the time and then one day I just…stopped. And now it's become a huge source of anxiety and self-doubt, and I can't write anything AT ALL. I'm hoping this will be fun and help me write for enjoyment again, and stop taking it all so seriously.

[alwayswondered]

I'm Stella. I used to be über-prolific (the last novel I wrote was 240K words) but then I hit the age of 18 and suddenly everything became Very Difficult; I got obsessed with how good my writing was (or wasn't) and basically just got myself into such a state that I can't write any more because I'm so unhappy with the results. I still have characters living in my head, very clearly defined and familiar to me, but I can't plot to save my life and I don't seem capable of coming up with ideas any more. Just people. I'm hoping I can use this challenge to find the fun a little and ease back into writing gently. My long-term goal is to tap back into the well of creativity that seemed so bottomless when I was younger and dried up so suddenly. I'm hoping it's all still there!

[inarticulate]

Oh, ugh, I know exactly how that is, and it's miserable-- I hope you find it again. ♥

[senmut]

Hello, all. I am Filly, and while I write a lot of fanfic in many different fandoms (mostly drabbles), I actually began in original fiction. As most of my worlds were built with my late partner, it took me some time to get back to where I could write original again.

HOWEVER, those muses came back, and her muses began to talk to me, and I've been slowly spending more time in those worlds, and beginning to hear new ones whisper to me.

My current universes (made with her) are a mythos-heavy fantasy world and a parallel Earth with magic that never faded away fully...that one runs from near the fall of Sumer all the way into the far future, so it crosses a few genres.

So looking forward to this challenge to see if I can either flesh some of that out, or draw up the whispering worlds.

I have a comm rec to add for a resource: build_a_world.