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

[recessional]

Hi. I'm M, and as I was mentioning to someone else earlier today, origfic is actually my home, where fanfic is this place I'm visiting while said home is metaphorically renovated, cleaned out and made a place fit to live again - by which I mean, I've been dabbling in fanfic over the last year or so because a bout with fairly serious chronic major depression along with the Drug Roulette to deal with said combined with finishing my BA, trying to find jobs, losing my roommate and all sorts of other fun shit (not really) has sapped my ability to work on stuff I actually care about.

My original stuff tends to be either fantasy, spec-fic or space-opera type sci-fi. Most of my worlds are secondary-creation (sometimes they're secondary-creation plus "our world" stuff, just for fun), which is to say I am a paracosmist and quite involved in being so.

I write tragedies, epics, and eucatastrophic happy endings when I have them at all. I love working with archetypes and tropes and playing with what they mean, what they tell us, and what people miss when they outright reject them.

I have too many fsking paracosms to number, really, but they'll probably all show up here; the most well-developed so far is the world of Wind of Ashes/Risen After (depending on whether it's before or after a particular catastrophic event), which ranges from high-fantasy to historical fantasy to urban fantasy to apocalyptic fantasy to post-apocalyptic fantasy, to post-post apocalyptic fantasy, to whatever you get when you're still writing stuff about the same world two thousand or so years after the apocalypse when it's only remembered via religion anymore anyway.

Second to that is probably Winter Leaving, my insanely ambitious alt-history-of-Earth, which contains some of my favourite people ever including my pirate, my artist and my artist's wife*.

I have a general label on myself as "not a safe writer"; I write about intense emotions, all over the range, and the purpose of my writing is to evoke them in my readers. This means anything from ecstatic joy and love to stuff which writing has literally triggered my own PTSD into a bad fit, and will (if anything) be edited to be more horrible on the rerun. Obviously, I try to warn for everything I can think of, but if I end the warning with " . . . . look, this is just ugly", take me at my word. *solemn* When I did a "ten things that mean you know I wrote the story", the line "I will probably kill your favourite character, or make you wish I had" featured at #3, and I got a comment-page full of agreement. (Partly, this is because death is a major theme for me, and, well, everyone dies eventually, except for one character, who is cursed to live forever, and would in many ways really rather shuffle off the goddamn mortal coil and just can't.)

My stories tend to be heavy on women being awesome, or terrifying, or both, and one of my general stated purposes is to explore all the different things a person can be and want and become, regardless of gender expectations; this leads to a lot of poking at women and women's roles, but also poking at men and men's roles. Diversity for other things (race, sexuality, class, physical/mental ability/wellness) will vary depending on the setting, but I don't so much try to be inclusive as think that a white straight ablebodied world is a lie, and so poke at it anyway.

. . . uh. I think that's everything! Feel free to ask questions.

*see following note on women: that's how she thinks of herself. She's one of my explorations. I love her like burning.

[whatawaytoburn]

Okay, not gonna lie, you sound like you write some absolutely awesome stuff and I'm absolutely thrilled to see what you come up with.

[recessional]

Hee. Well, thanks; I hope I manage to come up with something you like. I'm looking to use this to sort of ease myself back in to actually doing work on my original stuff, because I miss it.

[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/

[recessional]

(Tricksy threads, always hiding on one).

Thanks. :D Hopefully some of it will entertain when the time comes, anyway.

[hareguizer]

Oh boy, this sounds so much my cup of tea. I can't wait to see what you write! I can see me spending a great amount of my spare time reading instead of writing.

[pitseleh]

Paracosmist! So there is a word for that thing I do constantly. 'Secondary World Fantasy' becomes unweildy after a while.

I learn something new every day!

[recessional]

i got it from Sherwood Smith in a discussion, i think. i kind of love it. it just sounds neat: paracosm!