One girl writing twaddle

This should be fun.

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:21:23 -0800

This should be fun.

"Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed."

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 11:33:05 -0800

“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.”

- Ray Bradbury

"Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or..."

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:35:05 -0800

“Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”

- Katherine Mansfield

Thoughts:

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:10:01 -0800

Thank goodness for my vivid dreams because I just wrote 1000 words inspired by the one I had last night and I’m pretty sure I can write at least another 1000.
Holy fuck that scene was (emotionally) hard to write.
I totally got this! I can totally write 4000 words today!
omg that fucking scene.
…how unethical would it be to put my college essays into my NaNoWriMo?

Yayyyy! :D

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:30:57 -0800

Yayyyy! :D

Well, this is going well.

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:20:51 -0700

Well, this is going well.

Day 02 – Your first love, in great detail

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:40:05 -0700

“I’m only 19; I haven’t had my first love yet! There was this one girl though, at college. She was… incredible. If I talk about it I know I’ll end up sad and tired, but now that I’ve started I can’t really stop. We met because the drama department at our school had a sort of publicity stunt in the beginning of the year to get people interested in drama. She was in it, and the second I saw her… I don’t believe in love at first sight, but there was something about her. When I saw her, I immediately wanted to talk to her and know all her secrets and hold her hand and… As Arina would put it, she had a ‘black hole aura.’ I guess you could say it was just my loud and obnoxious hormones telling me to go sex her up, but I’d like to think otherwise. It doesn’t really matter either way, I guess. Anyway, my roommate was into drama, so I offered to go with her to the audition for the show. I think I claimed it was for ‘moral support.’ So I went and this girl and I started talking and eventually I asked her out. On our date I remember thinking Arina was kind of right about the black hole aura thing. She made me want to stop talking for once and listen to everything she had to say. Eventually we started dating and things were… interesting. Sometimes I’d try to make plans and she’s brush it off saying stuff like ‘we’ll figure it out.’ The thing with me is I like concrete things. I wanted to know that we were going to see a movie this Friday at 8, not that we’d eventually see a movie together at some time on some day. So there was stuff like that. But then there were days where we’d spend ages together, just lying around, being lazy. Times like that made it seem like everything was okay in the world, even if it was just for a little bit. I know, how cliché, right? People are getting killed and tortured and raped and I’m lying around in bed with my girlfriend. I guess I was just… I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t think it was love—we were too selfish to love each other. I guess most people would say it was infatuation. Whatever it was, it was intense. The problem with that was that when things weren’t good, they were really bad. We had fights that would go around in circles like you would not believe. I’d rather not talk about the rest, if you don’t mind.”

Day 01 – Introduce yourself, in great detail

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:09:06 -0700

“Why should I introduce myself to you? If you don’t know who I am, you probably don’t need to know who I am. I’m not about to go blabbing about myself to every stranger I meet. That would be truly stupid.”

I'm gonna post some old stuff from last year lying around in my drafts.

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:33:06 -0700

I kind of want NaNo to start already.

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 23:25:44 -0700

I think I need the distraction.

Hi! I thought I’d ask you for ~advice~ on something. I’m doing a bit of worldbuilding for some far-off project, and I’m making this a world that’s not based on any Earth culture. All going well, but now I wonder, what’s the best way to describe a POC if there aren’t names to ease it along? There is no China-analogous culture for me to name a chap Shang so everyone can assume they’re Chinese, so… what are tasteful terms to describe features like eye shape, skin colour, etc.?

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 11:36:05 -0700

So I ran into this problem when I was writing awhile ago with Jhenne-bean. We both play in the same A:TLA roleplay, and I play a (lightly tanned, with yellow undertones) firebender, and she plays a waterbender (who is for all intents and purposes brown, while my character is not).

We like to play with the cultural dynamics of their relationship, but I noticed I also needed to be able to describe her character (Karasa) in the third person without…describing a candy bar.

(Bear with me here) First, I pointed out my problem - I can’t just call Karasa brown all the time. So we tried to come up with alternatives to see what we would get for “black” or “brown” skin and again with all colors/tones and this is the list we had for skin (roughly):

chocolate, bronze, golden, dusky, caramel, sandy, tan, chestnut, coffee, mocha, copper, tawny, olive, ebony, black, cinnamon, honey, peaches & cream, peach, gold, milk/milky, pearl, paper, linen, fair, snow, yellow/yellowed, parchment-like, sallow, ivory, pale, alabaster, wan, pallid, waxen, ashen, chalky, bloodless, bone, cream, lily, sun-touched, rosy, ruddy, tea, dusty, teak, beige, pasty, plum, dark, light.

And then hair color/texture/styles can be important: fine, wavy, curled, curly, sleek, soft, springy, tightly wound, coarse, thick, auburn, mahogany, inky/ink black, soft black, charcoal, brown, black, blonde, red, strawberry blond, dirty blonde, sand, reed, wheat, gold, queued, topknot, braided/braids, twists/twisted (a braid with only two twisted strands of hair), dreaded, looped, umber, amber, ebony, dark, nut, light, shiny, etc

Eyes could be: almond, round, drooped, wide, lively, small, big, angular, striking, sharp, dim, watchful, ovular, lidded, hooded, deep-set, wide-set, closely set, hawk-like, catlike, arched.

Noses: hooked, small, big, beak, beak like, broken, bumpy, flat, blade like, wide, flared, inset, etc

Lips: thick, thin, small, (I usually describe actions with lips more than anything else, so smiles, grimaces, pursing of lips, etc occur more often than the shape of lips themselves - cupid’s bow, that sort of thing.)

Obviously there are way more but we had to sit and ask ourselves what would be tasteful (puns aside) and what wouldn’t be. For us, as long as we didn’t go overboard on the food references, most of those words are fine. Obviously, someone doesn’t need to be described like a starbucks drink - “I’ll be having the tall mocha with cream please.” it just… doesn’t work.

You’ll notice I left out “wild” or “frizzy” for hair, because these can quickly gain some negative connotations if you’re say, referring to someone who would be black. I think when we laid out adjectives used for colors across the board, most of them were objects (like woods or papers or something) or foods (chocolate, peach, cream, mocha, etc), the problem is in making a point to describe one set of people as more normal and the other set as more “Exotic”. When you only describe using foods or objects as metaphors for POC it becomes a problem. (It bothers some people more than other - so. But for an example, I have stood in a Latina group and been told that they “Had girls from the darkest chocolat to the lightest caramel” and I jokingly commented that I was a bit leche or milk. My grandparents call me “Weda” which is slang for Whitey. They called my brother “Wedo Ike” as in White Ike, as in Dwight D. Eisenhower levels of white. Uh…that’s off topic. But different cultures have different phrases for colors.)

I avoid things with negatives that are obvious - I wouldn’t say someone is dirt, or mud colored, and maybe not pottery either. The Help went really wrong when they compared someone’s blackness to that of a cockroach.

Not everyone is going to agree with my list of descriptors, but in a thoughtful context, I don’t think they’re offensive on their own. But comparing someone’s skin to a bug? Bound to raise some hackles.

That’s why non-earth based cultures are so difficult, because part of the basis of world building is to give people a starting point for what to expect or not from a new culture or people. When adjectives fail, cultural markers can pick up where they leave off, even if they’re not from a straight up fantasy country x, y, or z.

I like this article:

Because so much of fantasy takes place in settings that in no way resemble the real world, featuring species that in no way resemble human, fantasy writers often have trouble dealing with regular people. This is something that, I think, isn’t as much of a problem for mainstream writers, because they can simply describe the world around them and come up with a reasonably accurate representation of humanity. They can also fall back on the plethora of real-world terms used to describe human beings, racially and otherwise. But using these terms makes no sense if you’re dealing with a world that doesn’t share our political/cultural context. You can’t call someone “African American” if your world has no Africa, no America, and has never gone through a colonial phase in which people of disparate cultures were forcibly brought together, thus necessitating the term in the first place.

That said, it’s equally illogical to populate your fantasy world with only one flavor of human being, which is what far too many fantasy stories default to. Granted, many fantasies take place in confined cultural spaces — a single small kingdom in a Europeanish milieu, maybe a single city or castle within that city. (But how did that castle get its spices for the royal table, or that lady her silks? What enemy are the knights training to fight? Even in the most monochromatic parts of the real Ye Olde Englande, I can guarantee you there were some Asian traders, Sephardic or Ashkenazic Jewish merchants, Spanish diplomats or nobles partly descended from black Moors, and so on.) I get that lots of countries on Earth are racially homogeneous, so it makes perfect sense that some fantasy settings would be too. But whiteness is the default in our thinking for Earth-specific cultural/political reasons. So while it’s logical for fantasy realms to be homogeneous, it’s not logical for so many of them to be homogeneously white. Something besides logic is causing that.

So. It’s a good idea for all fantasy writers to learn how to describe characters of color. And I think it’s a good idea to learn how to describe those characters in subtle ways, since they can’t always rely on Earth terminology. Now, doing subtle description increases the chance that the reader might misidentify the character racially — and to a degree, I think there’s nothing you can do about that. You’re working against a lifetime of baggage in the reader’s mind. But you can still insert enough cues so that when combined, they’ll get the idea across.

- Describing characters of color

If someone else wants to make suggestions, I welcome it. :x

Not writing a fantasy but I feel like maybe possibly this could be useful? We’ll see. Although I have to say that I’ve never liked when foods are used to describe people’s skin.

This is a census for Tumblrers doing NaNoWriMo.

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:48:05 -0700

blogofimpossiblethings:

Reblog if you’re participating! I figure a Tumblr-wide support group may come in handy…

Hello, neglected NaNo tumblr.

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:55:00 -0700

I’ve missed you so.

My writing was utterly insane. I was ahead for like a week, and...

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:25:51 -0800

My writing was utterly insane. I was ahead for like a week, and then the show got really intense and I died.

:D I WON! [I almost completely neglected this tumblr and just...

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:25:01 -0800

:D I WON!

[I almost completely neglected this tumblr and just posted everything NaNo-related on my regular one, but whatever.]

This is basically my NaNoWriMo.

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:43:25 -0800

This is basically my NaNoWriMo.

Caught up a bit today. I put in my essay, which I’m...

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:29:00 -0800

Caught up a bit today. I put in my essay, which I’m guessing gave me about 1200 words, plus 200 words of context for the essay to be mentioned. Then I wrote about 700 words at school/rehearsal.

I hope this means I’m out of whatever writing funk I was in. Of course it would happen hell week. D:

Just wrote 2000 words inspired by this. :D

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:25:00 -0800

Just wrote 2000 words inspired by this. :D:

Now I’m only 900 words behind!

1300 words behind. D:

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I can’t write because I am just too tired to. It’s really frustrating.

Mehhhhh.

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:22:47 -0800

I need someone to kick my ass into gear.