Pretty Rad

he filters the water with his hand

and when the bugs and cigarette butts

have all been plucked from the water, he struts

down to the nearest high end restaurant

and says, "it's organic and gluten-free.

you....

we r besties

1. What font do you write in? Do you actually care or is that just the default setting?

2. If you had to give up your keyboard and write your stories exclusively by hand, could you do it? If you already write everything by hand, a) are you a wizard and b) pen or pencil?

3. What is your writing ritual and why is it cursed?

4. What’s a word that makes you go absolutely feral?

5. Do you have any writing superstitions? What are they and why are they 100% true?

6. What is your darkest fear about writing?

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

8. If you had to write an entire story without either action or dialogue, which would you choose and how would it go?

9. Do you believe in ghosts? This isn’t about writing I just wanna know

10. Has a piece of writing ever “haunted” you? Has your own writing haunted you? What does that mean to you?

11. Do you believe in the old advice to “kill your darlings?” Are you a ruthless darling assassin? What happens to the darlings you murder? Do you have a darling graveyard? Do you grieve?

12. If a genie offered you three writing wishes, what would they be? Btw if you wish for more wishes the genie turns all your current WIPs into Lorem Ipsum, I don’t make the rules

13. What is a subject matter that is incredibly difficult for you write about? What is easy?

14. Do you lend your books to people? Are people scared to borrow books from you? Do you know exactly where all your “lost” books are and which specific friend from school you haven’t seen in twelve years still possesses them? Will you ever get them back?

15. Do you write in the margins of your books? Dog-ear your pages? Read in the bath? Why or why not? Do you judge people who do these things? Can we still be friends?

16. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever used as a bookmark?

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

18. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end. Spicy addition: Questioner provides the passage.

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

20. If a witch offered you the choice between eternal happiness with your one true love and the ability to finally finish, perfect, and publish your dearest, darlingest, most precious WIP in exactly the way you've always imagined it — which would you choose? You can’t have both sorry, life’s a bitch

21. Could you ever quit writing? Do you ever wish you could? Why or why not?

22. How organized are you with your writing? Describe to me your organization method, if it exists. What tools do you use? Notebooks? Binders? Apps? The Cloud?

23. Describe the physical environment in which you write. Be as detailed as possible. Tell me what’s around you as you work. Paint me a picture.

24. How much prep work do you put into your stories? What does that look like for you? Do you enjoy this part or do you just want to get on with it?

25. What is a weird, hyper-specific detail you know about one of your characters that is completely irrelevant to the story?

26. How do you get into your character’s head? How do you get out? Do you ever regret going in there in the first place?

27. Who is the most stressful character you’ve ever written? Why?

28. Who is the most delightful character you’ve ever written? Why?

29. Where do you draw your inspiration? What do you do when the inspiration well runs dry?

30. Talk to me about the role dreams play in your writing life. Have you ever used material from your dreams in your writing? Have you ever written in a dream? Did you remember it when you woke up?

31. Write a short love letter to your readers.

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

33. Do you practice any other art besides writing? Does that art ever tie into your writing, or is it entirely separate?

34. Thoughts on the Oxford comma, Go:

35. What’s your favorite writing rule to smash into smithereens?

36. They say to Write What You Know. Setting aside for a moment the fact that this is terrible advice...what do you Know?

37. If you were to be remembered only by the words you’ve put on the page, what would future historians think of you?

38. What is something about your writing process YOU think is Really Weird? If you are comfortable, please share. If you’re not comfortable, what do you think cats say about us?

39. What keeps you writing when you feel like giving up?

1. Every time I open up a new Google Doc, I change the font to Georgia (still size 11), justify the lines, add a space after paragraphs, and pull the margins outward by 1/2" each to fit more words on the page, then update the Normal Text to match this set up. One of my biggest pet peeves is the fact that updating the Normal Text doesn't travel across every document; it'd make my life a lot easier if it did. If you know a way to change this, please tell me.

2. Absolutely not. I've tried to write by hand several times; my record is ten pages before my hand cramps up, but usually I don't get past four or five. Access to typing has ruined me.

13. Action scenes are hard for me; I always feel like there's not enough adjectives to describe what the characters are doing, but then I show the scenes to my sister for feedback and she gently says that there is such a thing as being too descriptive.

(Seriously, I've made progress but one of my works from when I was younger, maybe fifteen? Includes stuff like: "She set her half-melted mint chocolate chip Blizzard onto the rusty hood of the truck, kicking her feet back and forth in the gravel and swatting gnats away from her face as she watched Ricky skipping stone across the lake, whooping when he made a particularly long shot." Yeah, you can picture it perfectly, but there's just so much going on in one sentence - and there are five more sentences in the paragraph, y'know?)

Oh, and it's really easy for me to write smut. Honestly it's something I'm proud of; no offense to any growing writers out there, because I wasn't so great at smut either once upon a time, but I feel like at least 80% of the smut I read these days was written by 13-year-olds who had/have no clue what sex is like + a small vocabulary. Anyone can get better with practice, just like I have, and for me, writing smut and coming up with plausible plots for inserting it into my stories naturally comes easier than most things.

16. Starburst/chocolate wrappers, I guess that's kinda weird haha.

20. All of my loves come from writing (be it from video games, TV, movies, etc.), so the choice is easy for me: I'd want to be able to finally complete my works and publish them.

30. One of my favourite, most detailed worlds stems directly from a dream. I was in the middle of nowhere studying wildlife, and a spaceship crashed outside my house. I went to the wreckage and found an injured alien, one that was completely unique that I'd never seen in the real world before. There's more to the dream, but long story short, as soon as I woke up I drew the alien and started making a world around him, and his people and planets and all the other species and cultures and technology that came after that was completely spurred on by that one dream.

36. Trauma, bad relationships, recovery, finding yourself, losing yourself, falling out with loved ones, finding new people to fill that void; most of what I know is how to make a realistic character that goes through a lot and comes out the other end looking like shit but feeling free. Pretty much all of my protags have some sort of phoenix arc like this, because it makes me feel good to see other people rising from the ashes like I had to.

37. Probably that I was a nymphomaniac.

The Wet slop

Unconfirmed MILF sightings

Dark caverns nobody knows about

The deer with the human face