30 Days of Writing: #14

14. How do you map out loca­tions, if needed? Do you have any to show us?

(is it just me or are these questions getting stale)

I've mapped out, officially, the landscapes of Nagnomei and, more succinctly, that of its capital region the Royal North.  There isn't anything dramatically awesome about these maps.  They were mostly just done by my hand for my  own political reference - hopefully, if the are published, they will have been redone by somebody more "in the know" of such things.

I also map out certain buildings.  I bought a graphing notebook from my student store and sat down to trace out exactly the scales and arrangements of character houses/apartments/etc. that I want, since lots of scenes take place in such areas.  It's really helped me out, especially since some places were not exactly clear in their layout in my head and this helped force me to write out exactly how they should be - I always enjoyed doing that kind of thing anyway, haha.

You can see the maps for Nagnomei in its official download page.  I'm way too lazy to upload them here again. =P

30 Days of Writing: #13

13. What’s your favorite cul­ture to write, fic­tional or not?

That's kind of an odd question.  And it may seem like an easy one for me to answer, but it really isn't.  I do a lot of writing based on Japanese culture (or even parts of stories set in Japan) but I wouldn't necessarily say it's my favorite.  I guess I don't really have one.  Although I would be lying if I didn't find my fictional Fairy-Amazonian culture quite fascinating to preach about.

I failed at this question.

30 Days of Writing: #12

I can't draw maps like this.  At all.

12. In what story did you feel you did the best job of world­build­ing? Any side-notes on it you’d like to share?

I'm pretty sure this has already kinda been asked before...and my answer is more or less the same. Nagnomei is by far my favorite world, probably because I built it from "scratch". including geography, culture, and religion. I've managed to work out almost all the kinks by now, and that's a huge thing for me.

Probably the way it's changed the most since I first imagined it is the size - the continent used to take up both northern and southern hemispheres of the planet. As I got older I realized how dumb this was and scaled it back so it's now a northern continent only. The far north is the southern arctic area, and instead of a "south pole" the southern most parts are just coastal (although ironically not tropical). I also had to do this because parts of the series includes traveling the entire continent on horseback, and this needs to be done within at least 3-months-time. This also forced me to perfect the inter-kingdom highway system - gotta make sure all those major villages are easily accessible, right? Right.

The best part about working with a whole continent that includes almost every major geographic feature - plains, desert, jungle, mountains, foggy coast, valleys - is that I can just keep expanding parts of it as I need/want. And for someone who has an imagination as cray-cray as mine, that's a plus beyond measure.

30 Days of Writing: #11

omg. GET IT?

11. Who is your favorite char­ac­ter to write? Least favorite?

It was inevitable that this question should arise eventually, so I was pretty prepared for it. Being asked who your favorite character is is like the previous entry I wrote about being asked which novel is your favorite - after a while you start thinking of your original characters as "children", and being asked to pick a favorite feels like parental heresy. But since this question is more about asking which is my favorite to WRITE (or not write) it doesn't feel so bad, because there are pretty simple reasons for this.

All but one of my favorite characters to write is female. (Why is this not a surprise?) And to just get him out of the way right now, my favorite male character to write is good ol' Zachoran. I can't say no to writing about an academic in power with tons of money and a perchance for general debauchery. He's also my male outlet for fun times with romance. (I've gotta have at least one.)

For the sake of simplicity, I will for now only mention one favorite female character to write, who just happens to be in my other series. Before her "creation", I could've easily picked another character, but the fact of the matter is that Yumiko is one of my most fascinating characters to write - if only because I almost never know what she's going to do. Like how she just SHOWED UP one day in a scene and was suddenly a main character. Thee problem with her though is that she tends to do very immoral things, which, at times, can upset me. So in this instance, I suppose she's also my least favorite.

All right, I lied. There's actually one last character I want to talk about, and, quite possibly, she IS my favorite character to write at all. My only regret is that she does not show up in her series until about three books in, so all of my real experience in writing her comes from side projects. But Charletta just kinda fascinates me: she's from a completely different culture, with different values, and just isn't bothered by much of anything. It's kinda become a game of mine to see if I can piss her off somehow. Clearly I need to write her more.

There are other characters in the past that pissed me off to write, but after so many years I've grown accustomed to most of them and have learned their traits and morals to the point that conducting any scene with any character more or less goes smoothly - character development rarely holds me up. In fact, if anything blocks me, it's sentence structures, but that's a totally different topic for another day. Oye.

30 Days of Writing: #10

10. What are some really weird sit­u­a­tions your char­ac­ters have been in? Every­thing from seri­ous canon scenes to meme ques­tions counts!

Oh my God, I think I am in love with this question.

Ironically though I'm sitting here trying to think up an appropriate answer.

But when you just kinda let your scenes go wherever they want (like I do), then your characters end up in some serious whacky hijinks that make Hanna Barbara look tame.  One of my favorite things to do is mess around with gender norms.  In one series I have a male character that at some point has to go undercover as a female to get information out of another woman.  In another series a male character gets physically transformed into a female for about half the book.  Should be noted that one of these men handles their role a lot better than the other...which is part of the fun in itself.

Otherwise the "weird" situations are mostly small in nature, or at least in the scopes of the plots.  Of course I could argue that, since I write fantasy, nearly every major situation a character is put into is a "weird" one:  case in point, being told that you're a reincarnated soldier sent to stop the Earth from being destroyed - and you've died 99 times before. Or finding out that you have to go pick up a piece of paper, but only after passing seven ridiculous trials first - and even though you've got some immortals with you, everyone is still a pussy and won't go in first. The definition of "weird" has to be pretty wide in my stories' cases.

But then if you made it too wide, I suppose, suddenly my stories get very boring. Hm.

30 Days of Writing: #9

9. How do you get ideas for your char­ac­ters? Describe the process of cre­at­ing them.

 Is this a legit question? I guess there are writers who literally sit down to draw out every detail of ever character, but for me I just bust them out.  When I know a new character is coming in, I don't think about them, I just let them come in and do their thing.  Sometimes the appearance is inspired by a real life person or rendering I see, and sometimes I freely admit I make a character that I just find attractive. (These are usually minor, fluff characters though.)  The only characters I may sit and plan out extensively ahead of time are antagonists, as I usually need them to be a very specific type of entity - plus, let's face it, antagonists are a lot harder to make original and not so cliche.

As for their personalities, I literally discover things about characters as I write them.  I found out that one of my characters apparently really loves black because it's most of her wardrobe (and no, she's not emo or goth, it's just how it worked out/it looks best on her), another character hates cherries, and of course, another character wasn't supposed to exist at all, but she showed up in a scene one day and basically told me, "Biyatch, I'm one of your main antagonists now.  Have fun."

So there is no "process" to writing my characters.  They just kinda exist and I work from there.  That's how it goes, yo.  I'm sorry it's not more fascinating than that...

30 Days of Writing: #8

THEY ARE ON A MASTER QUEST. 

8. What’s your favorite genre to write? To read?

I think it's pretty safe to say that I need a huge heaping help of fantasy in any story I write.  This goes hand in hand with my favorite genre to read, which is obviously fantasy. My problem though is that I am so fickle when it comes to reading fantasy - it's easy for me to get disenchanted or even more critical of stories in the fantasy realm than I would in any other classic genre.  Such crazyness can probably be attributed to the fact that I've read so much epic/high/adventure/urban fantasy in my youth that I've hit burnout these days, and thus, only the super awesome fantasy stories can actually get by my eyes.

I was always the kind of little girl that enjoyed the ideas of going to a different place than where I lived, partly because I lived in rural Oregon and it was boring as snuff, and partly because I loved anything that activated my crazy-ass imagination..  Fantasy required an openness to things that simply did not exist in the world, like magic, mythos, and general other-worldly debauchery.  It was also incredibly romantic which fit my equally incredibly romantic personality, even at tender elementary school ages. Books are not the only fantasy realms I enjoy - no big secret that I love fantasy video games and movies as well.

There's something about playing around with fantasy, whether it's entirely creating your own world or working within the boundaries of our own.  Both of my series parlay one or the other, and this is another reason why I go back and forth on working on them - sometimes I want to work with familiarity, and other times I just want total free reign to say what the rules are and who's in charge. 

Of course fantasy is not the only thing I write (or read).  Sometimes, especially for short works, plain fiction is best.  I also am a huge fan of writing romance as well, but that's one of the easy genres that mixes with just about all the others. 

So on that note, even though this is a meme anyone can pick up, I want to ask the readers out there how they see themselves in this:  do you often write the same genres that you read?  If so, does that make you an even pickier reader of those genres?  I want to know how cray-cray I am.