From the Get to know your fic writer prompt:
17. What do you do when writing becomes difficult? (maybe a lack of inspiration or writers block)
40. If someone were to make fanart of your work, what fic or scene would you hope to see?
47. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?
56. What’s something about your writing that you pride yourself on?
(I also owe you a comment for your latest When the Sun Rose chapter. I read it, loved it, needed to absorb it, and then Thanksgiving happen so I need to go back and do that).
Hihihihi! I need to comment on the most recent chapters of Dog Days--I keep reading them over breakfast before work or right before bed when both my computer and the parts of my brain responsible for creating coherent sentences are shut down. So no worries on commenting!
Answers to questions:
17. What do you do when writing becomes difficult? (maybe a lack of inspiration or writers block)
For a lack of inspiration, I'll start by getting out a fairly simple crochet project (I have a hard time sitting still and doing NOTHING with my hands) and re-watching the Bayverse TMNT movies again. The opening music, right before Donnie speaks the first words of the 2016 movie never fails to get a nostalgic/dopey grin from this old bando. If that doesn't work, I go to the 2003 TMNT series. If both of those don't work, it's time to reread some favorite fanfics and old RPs.
For me, writer's block manifests as "writer's indecision". I get stuck in a loop of writing, editing, scrapping and starting over, doing "plot maps", weighing alternatives while driving/showering/doing anything else that doesn't require creativity, rearranging, and procrastinating because I CAN'T MAKE UP MY DARN MIND. A little nudge from a reader can help with that. So can doing more of the aforementioned "plot maps" and driving. (My commute is 45 minutes each way, mostly on country roads, so there's mileage for pondering.) Sometimes I'll get into my working file and draft a scene for later in the story--something that's going to happen no matter what I decide on the current problem--and that answers the open questions. And sometimes a new thought bubbles up from the depths of my plot cauldrons, and the problem plot elements are completely eliminated or recast to accommodate the shiny new thought.
40. If someone were to make fanart of your work, what fic or scene would you hope to see?
When the Sun Rose is my current obsession, so that's the fic I'd ask for fanart of! Which scene...oh ye gods, that's a tough choice to make! One of these years I'll teach myself to draw well enough not to blush at my own efforts, then there will be illustrations for every "movie still" that appears in my head as I'm writing. There are lots of them, but the ones that have appeared in the story as so far posted and include at least one turtle include 1) April taking Raph's head on her shoulder and 2) trying to calm Leo down while he's chained to the ciborium in Chapter 1, 3) Leo asleep with his head in April's lap at the end of Chapter 3, 4) Raph lying on his side and petting Donnie's head and telling him he has to get better in Chapter 5, 5) The pictures entered into the court records in Chapter 7 (of the guys' eyes showing eyeshine and Raph's poor maimed tail), 6) The moment in the reunion scene of Chapter 7 in which April is hugging Raph and being hugged from behind by Mikey, 7) Mikey saying "I've got this" to Leo for the second time in Chapter 8, 8) Donnie commenting on "the best thing about being a ninja" while completely tuning out his brothers glaring at each other in Chapter 9, 9) Splinter in his winter gear, and 10-12) Mikey having a marvelous time riding in the pickup truck on the "March for Mikey", standing in the truck bed confronting the detractors with the misspelled signs, and hugging his oversized plush turtle.
That's not counting all the images of humans without turtles in the frame. Or the moments from stories told about the turtles (Mikey on "victim duty", among other things.) If I drew all the illustrations I want to add to my stories I'd be even slower to update than I already am. As it is, I have to be peeled off the ceiling with a spatula whenever someone does a picture related to something I've written.
47. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?
Tough question! I usually start a writing session by rereading whatever I've written most recently. That almost inevitably leads to revising, which leads into adding new scenes, rearranging existing scenes, breaks to check this or that detail via Google, Wikipedia, Turtlepedia, etc., pushing scenes to later chapters, laying out little memory-jogger scraps of dialogue or description to be expanded upon later--writing and editing aren't separate tasks for me. I don't think I've ever finished a chapter in fewer than four separate writing sessions, and I do a "final pass" for typos and embarrassing grammatical errors at least twice before posting. (Yet the embarrassing goofs STILL slip through...) I'd say some scenes have been reread and edited around a dozen times by the time they're posted, and nothing ever goes live without surviving at least three passes.
56. What’s something about your writing that you pride yourself on?
My vocabulary and (I like to think) ability to write dialogue that differentiates between characters. Splinter doesn't talk like Raph, who doesn't talk like Mikey, who doesn't talk like Bernadette, etc. (How I love writing Bernadette!) Making up original characters and giving them distinctive "voices" (word choice, sentence length, casual/formal usage, etc.) is one of the things I sweat over. I don't want them all to come out sounding just like me!
Yay for fanfic! Thanks for the questions and comments!
