@reigningmuses asked: ๐ - do you listen to music when you write? with lyrics, or without? ๐งถ - what do you think this hobby has taught you? ๐ - what's your favorite thing about this hobby?
๐ Questions For The Roleplayer! โ accepting
๐ - do you listen to music when you write? with lyrics, or without?
It largely depends on my current mood and how bad the ADHD side of the brain is being at the time โ if I'm having really bad brain zoomies, all bets are off, though I'm usually struggling to manage to put words together into coherent sentences at that point anyway, so it's unlikely that I'm doing anything more than writing very rough first drafts to be heavily edited and posted at a later date.
When I do listen to music, I technically have playlists for many of my muses, or at least their fandoms, in a mix of stuff with lyrics and simply instrumentals. Though given the fact that I'm prone to singing along with instrumentals just as much as I am with lyrics, it really doesn't matter much there. (How much of that is left over from having been a band geek, I don't know, but I also can play by ear, and singing along with it helps me figure out which note is which in order to then kick it into actively playing along, even with something relatively new to me. It only takes a time or two for me to figure out how to play something, and let me tell you, heavy metal on a flute and/or French horn is hilariously delightful.)
๐งถ - what do you think this hobby has taught you?
Before I started writing on tumblr, I would write in strict chronological order โ mostly because, at the time, I was writing a full on novel series as well as several long fanfics, so it made sense to do so, especially when things like outlining don't do shit for me (ah, the days of undiagnosed AuDHD and not knowing just how much that probably contributed to such things, so I had just haphazard notes everywhere and constantly carried around multiple notebooks and notepads so I could keep track of ideas because I'd forget them otherwise) โ and even one of my long term writing partners of over 10 years before tumblr, the rp was a singular thread and in chronological order, though more by their choice than mine, because I would have been fine writing ahead in many cases, given the pacing that that one was drawn out for the longest time (seriously, there's like 50k words of it that are just the first 2 or 3 days of the characters having just met).
Writing at more just... whatever I want to without having to worry about filling in the gaps each and every time has honestly been a relief for the ADHD side of things, since I can then bounce around and then effectively fix things later with some "missing scenes" ficlets to fill in the gaps as necessary to make the timeline a bit more coherent, because as much as I do bounce around, there is continuity behind it still โ outright one-shots that don't allow for character development or building dynamics will inevitably bore me if that's all I'm ever given, because I'm here for those things more than I am any aspect of social interaction that some people are here for. (I'm simply too introverted and too socially anxious to talk to everyone on even a remotely regular basis, plus I'm time blind af and have zero friendship decay, so I honestly don't even notice that it's been months or even longer since I last heard from someone, I'll still just be all "FRIEND!!" whenever I do.)
๐ - what's your favorite thing about this hobby?
Being able to explore various AUs and scenarios in a collaborative sense rather than simply writing fanfic on my own. Like, do I still write that fanfic? Yes โ I just don't always have the energy to actually edit it, or sometimes even finish it, so it's more likely to stay on my hard drives rather than ever being posted on AO3. But I also enjoy when people really get into the idea of one of my AUs I've posed and think about how it affects their muse then, and then we're building off each other for a divergent AU from the concept that I originally presented (because I don't work out how every other character is affected by the AU except in the broadest strokes of major plot plots in most cases, unless it's for a character that I also write and thus I may have an idea of how my portrayal of them would be affected by things, if it affects them at all, as not every AU is some big worldshaking thing, and most only affect my muse and maybe some of those directly associated with them).
