Ask me anything about my stories and/or writing process: inspiration, process, what the hell was I thinking, etc. No limit on questions, just ask away.
Hmm, OK... You've said before that you write fic in order to give the characters (especially Vila, of course!) the happy ending that canon denies them. Are there other reasons why you write?
I write fanfic to make it up to poor Vila. I've always written, or more often made up stories in my head, seeing them play out like films. It's what I do when I'm walking or driving or waiting to go to sleep.
I wrote my first novel (well, it filled an exercise book) at six, called The Adventures of Naughty Amelia. It was about a very bad girl with curly black hair who got away with all the bad things I wanted to do, and there was absolutely no moral to it at all. I remember being sent to another class to read chapters to them when their teacher was away.
I also wrote stories about talking animals about that time, and my mother couldn't understand why because she just never understood the whole concept of fantasy or imagination.
My sister and I were opposites and fought all the time (we still don't get on) but we never went to bed angry as after the light went out, I would continue my long-running serial about three children our age trapped in German-occupied France after Dunkirk. Jenni liked the annoying Mina best, possibly because she realised the character was based on herself. :-P
When I was 12, I wrote two more novels, one based on those WW2 stories, and one set in a boarding school like the one I'd just been sent to--except that it was a Catholic one in Poland for added exoticism. These eventually filled three exercise books each and got passed round the class as each chapter was finished. They were also illustrated in full colour.
I've won a couple of awards since school in short story competitions here, and always wanted to grow up and be an author living by a lake in Italy, but it took Vila's plight to make me write his e-mails. I thought maybe 12 or so people in the SF club here might read them, but when I put them up on my new site and got good feedback, I kept going.
It's been a great way of homing my skills with a ready-made audience, and I may one day have enough confidence to write one of the original novels I still have in my head.
So I suppose the answer is because I'm me. I've made up stories all my life, but fanfic got me to actually put them on a screen and, in some cases, paper.
I probably should have specified "fanfic." I did remember you having original stories you'd talked about working on, too. But I don't think you mentioned the childhood stuff. That's very cool!
I hope you won't mind if I ask you the same question that I asked Astrogirl: Do you do any planning or structuring of your stories before beginning writing, or do you just plunge straight in?
A mixture of both, really. I have to have some idea of where I'm going, but I might not know how I'm getting there till I start writing. So I start with a simple idea as with that last one: Jenna returns to Gauda Prime and finds that Tarrant was a Federation mole. During the writing process however, I decided that Blake would lie to Jenna about Avon because he wanted to use Avon's guilt against him. Often the central theme of a story emerges only when I'm writing it.
At other times, like Through the Gate (the one about Vila and Avon in the afterlife with the cats), the whole thing popped into my head entire, including dialogue, before I started writing. That's relatively rare though and it never happens when writing to order as in a ficathon. It can be a pain though as I feel I need to include all the scenes and dialogue I've 'seen'.
I have two questions, if that's all right (or even if it's not - hee!)
1) Have you noticed any recurring themes in your work, and if so, what are they?
2) Are there any stories you have in mind that you'd like to tell, but you're holding back from writing them because you're afraid you haven't got the skill yet to do them justice? If so, will you tell us a bit about what they're like?
Only that most (but not all) of my stories feature Vila and all of them have hopeful or open endings if not downright happy ones. I like to end on a positive note because that's what I like to read.
Not B7 ones. There's my big PGP which is a bit daunting because of its sheer size, but if I think of it as a series of connected shorter stories, I think that will make it easier for me to tackle.
Otherwise, there are the huge SF novels I've had in my head for years.
One is about a young woman I'm tempted now to make a descendant of Vila because his skills plug a few plot holes. It's the classic story teenagers think up--a plain, unloved, and overlooked orphan whose skills and special talents cause her to have an important place in history. This story has a lot of Star Wars and Gormenghast influence I'd have to weed out before I wrote it.
I have another I'm tempted to call Napoleon Clonaparteabout a boy who gradually realises that he's a clone made from Napoleon's DNA as part of a secret project to raise strategic geniuses for a galactic war. The boy is being brought up on an isolated planet by a cold-hearted military officer who makes him practise war-gaming to the point of obsession, and when Napoleon finds out the truth, he starts to question his unpleasant uncle's authority, the society he lives in (in which clones are used as slaves with no human rights) and thus comes to the attention of the other side. That's about as far as I've got with that one, but I rather like his friendship with one of the cleaning clones at his school.
The there's the multiple-timeline one in which history has split off at different cataclysmic points, so there is our world (but in the future, after a war), one in which the Roman Empire never fell, and one where Atlantis survived due to a choice of a different sort of technology (IOW magic). Merlin and Morgana are Atlantan time-travellers who use other realities as battlegrounds, Rhodri is a Welsh nerd who finds his DNA activates the high-tech weapon Excalibur, and there's also the Roman Emperor Loriana, originally trained as an engineer, who is kidnapped by Morgana and taken to our world to wrest Excalibur from Rhodri (because it was designed to be wielded by a Pendragon or their Emperor). Loriana, however, hides her identity and allies herself with Rhodri. This one has my own take on the timeline thing: once any two timelines are connected to each other, you can't go further back than that as history is fixed at that point. IOW, if Morgana visits our present world from the Atlantan, she can't then go back to WW2 as that's already happened from her POV, thus I get round the old time paradox. BTW I used Morgana's dragon in my B7 story The Stuff of Legends.
Eep, this is stopping me writing my Jarriere one...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
no subject
I wrote my first novel (well, it filled an exercise book) at six, called The Adventures of Naughty Amelia. It was about a very bad girl with curly black hair who got away with all the bad things I wanted to do, and there was absolutely no moral to it at all. I remember being sent to another class to read chapters to them when their teacher was away.
I also wrote stories about talking animals about that time, and my mother couldn't understand why because she just never understood the whole concept of fantasy or imagination.
My sister and I were opposites and fought all the time (we still don't get on) but we never went to bed angry as after the light went out, I would continue my long-running serial about three children our age trapped in German-occupied France after Dunkirk. Jenni liked the annoying Mina best, possibly because she realised the character was based on herself. :-P
When I was 12, I wrote two more novels, one based on those WW2 stories, and one set in a boarding school like the one I'd just been sent to--except that it was a Catholic one in Poland for added exoticism. These eventually filled three exercise books each and got passed round the class as each chapter was finished. They were also illustrated in full colour.
I've won a couple of awards since school in short story competitions here, and always wanted to grow up and be an author living by a lake in Italy, but it took Vila's plight to make me write his e-mails. I thought maybe 12 or so people in the SF club here might read them, but when I put them up on my new site and got good feedback, I kept going.
It's been a great way of homing my skills with a ready-made audience, and I may one day have enough confidence to write one of the original novels I still have in my head.
So I suppose the answer is because I'm me. I've made up stories all my life, but fanfic got me to actually put them on a screen and, in some cases, paper.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
The only things I wrote extra-curricularly before I discovered fandom were teenage ansty poetry about how horrible life was...
no subject
no subject
I think I find it easier to write poetry than to read it.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
At other times, like Through the Gate (the one about Vila and Avon in the afterlife with the cats), the whole thing popped into my head entire, including dialogue, before I started writing. That's relatively rare though and it never happens when writing to order as in a ficathon. It can be a pain though as I feel I need to include all the scenes and dialogue I've 'seen'.
no subject
1) Have you noticed any recurring themes in your work, and if so, what are they?
2) Are there any stories you have in mind that you'd like to tell, but you're holding back from writing them because you're afraid you haven't got the skill yet to do them justice? If so, will you tell us a bit about what they're like?
no subject
- Only that most (but not all) of my stories feature Vila and all of them have hopeful or open endings if not downright happy ones. I like to end on a positive note because that's what I like to read.
- Not B7 ones. There's my big PGP which is a bit daunting because of its sheer size, but if I think of it as a series of connected shorter stories, I think that will make it easier for me to tackle.
- One is about a young woman I'm tempted now to make a descendant of Vila because his skills plug a few plot holes. It's the classic story teenagers think up--a plain, unloved, and overlooked orphan whose skills and special talents cause her to have an important place in history. This story has a lot of Star Wars and Gormenghast influence I'd have to weed out before I wrote it.
- I have another I'm tempted to call Napoleon Clonaparteabout a boy who gradually realises that he's a clone made from Napoleon's DNA as part of a secret project to raise strategic geniuses for a galactic war. The boy is being brought up on an isolated planet by a cold-hearted military officer who makes him practise war-gaming to the point of obsession, and when Napoleon finds out the truth, he starts to question his unpleasant uncle's authority, the society he lives in (in which clones are used as slaves with no human rights) and thus comes to the attention of the other side. That's about as far as I've got with that one, but I rather like his friendship with one of the cleaning clones at his school.
- The there's the multiple-timeline one in which history has split off at different cataclysmic points, so there is our world (but in the future, after a war), one in which the Roman Empire never fell, and one where Atlantis survived due to a choice of a different sort of technology (IOW magic). Merlin and Morgana are Atlantan time-travellers who use other realities as battlegrounds, Rhodri is a Welsh nerd who finds his DNA activates the high-tech weapon Excalibur, and there's also the Roman Emperor Loriana, originally trained as an engineer, who is kidnapped by Morgana and taken to our world to wrest Excalibur from Rhodri (because it was designed to be wielded by a Pendragon or their Emperor). Loriana, however, hides her identity and allies herself with Rhodri. This one has my own take on the timeline thing: once any two timelines are connected to each other, you can't go further back than that as history is fixed at that point. IOW, if Morgana visits our present world from the Atlantan, she can't then go back to WW2 as that's already happened from her POV, thus I get round the old time paradox. BTW I used Morgana's dragon in my B7 story The Stuff of Legends.
Eep, this is stopping me writing my Jarriere one...Otherwise, there are the huge SF novels I've had in my head for years.