#aroandroid

i'm sorry but you w h a t

I probably have a bit of a hoarding problem? 

Hey there! 

Seasoning wood is not always necessary! It comes down to what you’re carving- if your object is made out of greenwood and will have a lot of exposed end grain (the fibers running vertical through the tree), it’s far more likely to warp/ crack, because water evaporates faster out of the end grain than the sides of a piece of wood. However, if you swiftly carve down the end grain into a more rounded shape, water is likely to evaporate more evenly and your object will be safe!

I bounce between seasoning wood and carving green; I sort of accumulate wood that I see and like the look of, and often it sits around my house for months before I think of what I’d like to do with it; other times, though, I carve fairly green, and the shape of a spoon has little enough exposed end grain that I’ve never had a problem with cracking.

man, I almost never get a chance to talk about them! I’ve been working on these characters for a literal decade, and I do almost nothing with them. Here we go!

1: Your first oc ever. 

My first oc is actually still kicking around. He’s had a lot of names over the years, and his role has changed a lot as I’ve grown up. He started off as a young adult named Wind, plucked from a sci-fi world and thrust into a fantasy world, chosen one, magical cat monsters, secret past, etc. I was 10. I’ve done a lot of work on this setting over the past ten years. His name is Ido now, first of all. Second of all, I dropped a lot of the sci-fi and all of the fantasy from the setting. It’s still sci-fi though. The characters all live on a planet which isn’t Earth, and most of the stories involve getting everybody off of that planet to colonize space and hang out with cool aliens and shit. It’s just a lot more grounded than it used to be.

Currently, Ido features in two stories I’m working on. In the first, he’s a survivor of a war that is slowly causing the planet to freeze solid. Society has basically collapsed, and Ido is working to save everyone that he can, by flying his airship out to frozen-over cities and bringing the survivors to the equator, where it’s still warm. In the second story, Ido is a minor character, the leader of small faction in an orbiting city, and the grandfather of one of the main characters. His primary character trait is that he radiates calm. He’s like a capybara, always at ease and able to soothe those around him. He’s like a super-therapist, except he’s also a zeppelin pilot.

27: Any oc’s inspired by a certain song?

Not really. I do have a character which is inspired by a character that was inspired by music, though. She’s basically a carbon copy of V.T. from Cowboy Bebop, the Heavy Metal Queen.

45: Any characters you know longer use?

Oh man, so many. The biggest cuts came when I dropped the fantasy elements to my universe. An entire continent disappeared with that change, and a bunch of characters went with it. More recently, there were some characters who I’ve kinda lost interest in. There was Danien, the illegitimate son of a prince, and his companion Cosa, a fisherman who helps him escape just before the war collapse thing. He originally had a role in Ido’s story, but it made things too complicated, so I kinda dropped it. Aspects of his character are being recycled into a new character that I’m working on, though, so not all of that work was lost.

50: Just talk about whatever.

Okay, can do. I have high hopes for the story I’m working on right now. A problem I’ve had with writing in the past is that I can see grand structure, but not fine details. Like I said, I’ve been working on this universe for over a decade, but I have almost no characters or stories to populate it.

This time feels different. I can see all of it so vividly. The story isn’t huge. I plan to keep things sort of episodic, without much overarching plot. It’s just the characters interacting with each other and the world. There’s no big, universe-redefining events or conspiracies. It’s just normal people living in the world that I created.

I think the reason this story is working where all my other attempts failed is because I’m not writing about a person-v-person conflict. Most of my setting depends on decades of war, which is really hard for me to write, because I don’t really understand the emotions behind that kind of conflict. I’m really bad at being angry :P

The stories I set during those periods just didn’t work. There was no way for me to reconcile the character’s own goals and problems with the grander narrative of the world and it’s conflicts. The reason this story is working is because the conflict is between people and nature. The characters are all basically good people, working hard and helping each other to survive a difficult period. The wars are over, the damage is done, and now the story is about helping each other pick up the pieces, and heal. Those sorts of stories resonate much more strongly with me. 

HOW

LOTS AND LOTS OF GRINDING. I multitasked to an extreme degree all day. Working on art commissions; talking to people AND ALSO COLI GRINDING.