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Ask me questions
I do this on Tumblr sometimes, but I haven't really done this here, and I have some new people following me, soooo ... ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija did this as an alternative to doing the December/January question meme, and it seemed like a good idea. Plus I'm feeling chatty today.
Ask me things? Non-personal questions preferred - anything about any of my fandoms, books & media, fandom in general, my writing, stuff like that is fair game. Or if you really have a burning curiosity about anything specific about me. Feel free to crib questions from other people's Dec/Jan talking memes if you want to, because I've seen some of those I'd love to answer. XD
rachelmanija did this as an alternative to doing the December/January question meme, and it seemed like a good idea. Plus I'm feeling chatty today.Ask me things? Non-personal questions preferred - anything about any of my fandoms, books & media, fandom in general, my writing, stuff like that is fair game. Or if you really have a burning curiosity about anything specific about me. Feel free to crib questions from other people's Dec/Jan talking memes if you want to, because I've seen some of those I'd love to answer. XD
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- What was the most counterintuitive thing about learning to write romance when you started?
- How did you first get into Cherryh?
- What is your favorite thing about writing?
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- What was the most counterintuitive thing about learning to write romance when you started?
There were a few learning-curve things, but I think the biggest one was learning to keep the book focused at all times on the central couple and the relationship between them, rather than on the plot, because if you don't do that, it doesn't feel like a romance! It was
It was a difficult thing to wrap my head around because it's exactly reversed from most of the other writing I'd done, where every scene has to serve the plot, and here, every scene has to serve the relationship, and every or at least nearly every scene has to either include both people, or include the other person as a presence in the book (e.g. one-half of the couple talking to another character about the relationship, or planning a rescue of the love interest, or whatever). You can get away with a little bit of non-relationship-focused content - indeed, I think the best romances actually do that; they paint in a big-picture world around the couple without losing their focus on the couple. But in the end, everything - every major scene, every big plot turn - has to come down to the central pairing and the twists and turns of their connection to each other, and that was a hard thing for me to learn how to do.
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In my teens, when I was reading ALL the things. Several of Cherryh's books were among the numerous fantasy and SF books I read during that time. Rusalka and Heavy Time were the ones that made the biggest impression on me, both of which I adored and read over and over (and Heavy Time in particular I think was an influence on my writing and the development of my original scifi worlds). I can't remember what else I read of hers at that time, though I know there were others - Cyteen was definitely one of them.
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I don't know if everybody gets this, but when it's going well (as opposed to those days when you have to just slog through and try to put two words in front of each other, sigh), I almost get high off it. It never precisely feels like I'm just channeling the characters writing themselves, like some people talk about, but when it's going well, I lose myself in it. Basically, I love the actual act of writing, the putting-one-word-in-front-of-each-other part.
... At least when it's going well. When it's not, it's a miserable slog. I guess it's like how some people really like jogging or running, but there are nice jogging days in clear fall weather, and there are jogging days in pouring rain, and you have to deal with the one sort in order to get to enjoy the other.
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The actual act of writing is addictive. I may not even be chasing that 'high' that you speak of every time I write, but just knowing that it exists and I've felt it before is often motivating.
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Less personal: What epic fantasy series do you think is less well-known than it deserves to be? Hard mode: Not counting Death Gate or Shadows of the Apt.
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I was actually just talking to someone elsewhere on DW about this in the last couple of days. A few no-particular-order things:
- Alaska has a huge amount of climate diversity; I don't think people realize how much. The farthest southern parts (the Panhandle) are basically like Seattle or Vancouver. Where I live now, Fairbanks, is very dry and cold and doesn't get much snow. Where I grew up (near Anchorage) is moist and coastal and gets tons of snow.
- Arctic snow is mostly very dry; the texture is like fine sand. You can't make snowballs out of it. This wasn't true where I grew up, where we got a lot of sticky, wet snow, but in Fairbanks you get maybe one snowfall a year that you can build a snowman with. Otherwise it's just loose, dry, sandy snow. This is usually even true when it warms up and gets above freezing. The snow just doesn't stick to itself.
- In severe cold (below about -30F, which is roughly what it is right now), the laws of physics behave differently enough that you can actually notice it. Distant sounds become incredibly clear and loud since dense, cold air transmits sound more effectively (like, traffic on the highway, a half mile away, sounds so loud you'd think the cars are driving through the front yard). Diesel and propane both stop being liquid at about -40, so diesel trucks won't start and people who use propane for heat or cooking insulate their propane tanks so their stoves will still work. Car engines tires freeze flat on the bottoms and it feels like driving on a gravel road 'til they warm up and get round again. Boiling water exposed to -40 air will instantly and explosively convert to steam. (I think I've posted about this before. It's really cool.) Your eyelashes freeze together and so do your nose hairs. Taking deep breaths hurts (and can even be dangerous; there are times when I've coughed for hours after running or exerting myself and then taking too many quick breaths in extremely cold weather, because it does damage your lungs - that being said, I'm pretty sure it's an urban legend that you can actually freeze your lungs and die).
- All the cars here have plug-in cables dangling from under the hood for the engine block heaters, and all the parking lots (where one might expect to park a car for more than an hour or two, e.g. not the regular grocery store parking lot, but definitely where the employees park) have banks of electrical outlets. Somewhere between 4-8 hours is how long you can leave a car parked and unplugged before it will cease to start.
- Winter farther south is not necessarily that cold (the Anchorage area rarely gets below 0F in the winter and usually is more like in the 20s) but it's LONG. I don't think I realized 'til living in Illinois that in temperate climates it regularly warms up and the snow melts. That just never happens here. Once you get snow, you have snow until April or May. Or at least that used to be true. The Anchorage area has been getting much less snow and has been having warmer, rainier winters because of climate change. We're having warmer winters too, but for us it's the difference between a month of -40F vs. having it hover around 0 to -20F for a month, which is ... well, obviously a lot warmer (and it is a lot warmer!) but not quite the same kind of visible difference as having mostly snowy winters vs. mostly rainy winters.
- Alaska is also really spread out and expensive. Here in Fairbanks, all our groceries come up from Seattle, either by barge to Anchorage and then by truck for the other 350 miles inland to where we are, or by truck all the way. We do still have all the normal foods you can buy elsewhere, but produce is pretty expensive, and there are generally a few times per winter when I go into our big grocery chain store and there'll just be like ... a whole bunch of carrots spread out in a thin layer across the entire produce section and not much else, and a note saying that the produce truck was delayed by bad weather on the Alaska Highway and there won't be any lettuce or other highly perishable items until next week. These are the things that remind us we're living at the very end of a pretty long supply chain.
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Heh. On the flip side of this, I once as a beta had to gently explain to a writer (from I think somewhere in the Nordics) that they ... couldn’t really have a big spring thaw as an emotional metaphor/climactic moment in their fic set in central North Carolina. I mean. It’s North Carolina. If the snow sticks around for 48 hours anywhere out of the mountains, people will be talking about it for years.
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Living in Illinois was a revelation on all kinds of levels, because suddenly SO MUCH made sense to me about the way people dressed and generally the way people lived in earlier time periods in places like, say, England. It's not like I didn't know that a temperate climate is warmer overall than the Arctic/Subarctic climate we have here, intellectually at least, but I guess I had always kind of imagined it as the same sort of winters except they didn't last as long. Finding out just how much warmer Illinois winters are, I had a bit of an epiphany about how it was that people could manage to get through winters in medieval times without, well, dying.
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wrt: severe cold
Yeah just today I was moaning about our cold weather here and I looked up your temperature and...um. Yikes. The bit about cold air feels very real because last year we had -20s (-4F) and it felt painful to breathe.
And yeah, we don't really have snow here yet. We had 2 snowfalls and then had above freezing temperature and it all melted. It's super cold this weekend though (for us).
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I've wondered this for years, and never quite got round to asking!
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(j/k)
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Ideas I haven't started ... HAHAHA. Hundreds, probably. Dozens at least. Every one of my fandoms has an "ideas" doc with a bunch of scribbled notes for fic I'm not writing. Most of it is incredibly vague, though, like "strip poker" or "Peggy assigned to someone as a bodyguard" or "Jack is replaced by a Skrull".
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Ah, definitions. So variable. I consider anything a WIP if it's got something written (as a scene, not "A: Says this. B: says this" style notes) and / or a mostly complete (if general) plot outline. Abandoned... as in you're 100% definitely never picking it up again, or as in shelved?
Lol what did I expect? Scribbled notes are kernels. I could make a bag of popcorn with mine. But they spark ideas! Peggy as a bodyguard, that sets off possibilities...
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- What are your three favourite tropes in fiction and why?
Thanks for answering and giving me ideas about doing a post like that myself :)
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Three favorite tropes ... I'm going to answer with the caveat that these probably aren't my only top three (it's really hard for me to pick #1 favorites like that; it's more like I tend to end up with a favorites pool) but they're three of my favorites.
- Enemies/antagonists becoming friends.
I am such a sucker for this. Especially if there's a really steep turnaround, not just "mildly disliked each other" but from actively trying to kill each other to willing to die for each other. And especially if whatever factors caused the antagonism in the first place are still there, and occasionally cause them problems, but the friendship is strong enough to overcome it.
- Redemption arcs.
Related to the above but not precisely the same thing. I love the kind where a character has to struggle uphill (IN THE SNOW, BOTH WAYS) trying to become a better person, getting stomped on with the consequences of their own bad decisions the whole time.
With both of the above tropes, I think the mood whiplash and the tension of then-vs.-now is a big part of what I love about it. I especially love them if they're a little unexpected - not a character you really thought was going to do that, or at least not in that particular way, but then they do and it's sooo satisfying.
- Hurt/comfort.
Always a favorite. I could probably do a whole 'nother post on everything I love about it and why, but mostly I think it's the vulnerability, especially with really prickly characters - I love watching (or writing) characters pushed out of their comfort zones and forced to acknowledge their own softer, warmer feelings.
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I think it's a combination of things. It's partly the tension between who they want to be (or could be), and who they currently are, and who they used to be. I really enjoy characters in mid-trajectory from being worse to being (somewhat) better. I also really love the push-pull between characters like that and the (usually) more idealistic characters they end up becoming reluctantly fond of. I love redeemable asshole types but not usually in isolation; I love the way their cynicism and selfishness plays off a character with a much more altruistic view of the world, and I love watching that better side of them get dragged out of hiding through wanting to protect or help someone else.
I think what it comes down to is that I really love emotional tension in fiction - between a character and their worse self, or their past self; between a character and another character who represents another set of values - and I especially love it when it feels like it's skating along the edge of an emotional epiphany or an outburst of ~feels~ but hasn't quite fallen over the edge yet. Buildup to catharsis is so my thing. I think this is why I'm much less likely to go for characters who are simply unproblematically close than for ones who are constantly teetering on the edge of disaster; it's a sort of version of "will they or won't they", I think - exactly the same kind of emotional tension - except it's "will they do the terrible thing or the good thing?" But I also want the general emotional trajectory to be in an "up" direction. Characters can backslide, relationships can get upended, but I always want the hope that they'll get out of it and get themselves back to a better place.
So the farther a character has to go to get themselves to a good place, the more interesting they often are for me, as long as they're in the process of getting there.
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One specific thing that comes to mind that I really love about her as a character is that she doesn't fight like female characters typically fight on TV. For one thing, she doesn't use the high-kicking, balletic style that's given to 99% of female action stars. It's clearly a deliberate choice, because Dottie does use that style, but Peggy's a brawler - she fights dirty, she uses improvised weapons, she uses a lot of practical takedowns and attacks that you (typical viewer) could easily imagine yourself learning and using, and it made me realize how frustratingly rare that is for female characters in visual media, even media that otherwise does a pretty good job with its female protagonists, and doubly so for a female character who is not otherwise enhanced or superhuman.
The other thing about the way Peggy fights is that she is clearly aware of her own strength and capability to commit damage, and
neverrarely uses it gratuitously. This is actually not true of movie!Peggy (I'm thinking about the scene where she punches the guy in the lineup, and also where she fires the gun at Steve). These are both actions that would be incredibly inappropriate for a male character but we're sort of conditioned by TV/movies to simply accept women hitting, punching, shooting at, and otherwise attacking male characters for humor where it would be a) not funny, and b) completely unprofessional for a male character to do the same thing; it's all part of an entire complex of humor that goes along with women's anger being funny-scary (eek, she's so mean!!) but not actually capable of causing damage. The thing about TV Peggy is that she does not do this. There are even multiple times in the series where male characters are like "go ahead, come at me" (e.g. Jack in their confrontation in S1, or Jarvis when they're sparring in S2) and she's like "... no" unless they give her no choice because she knows she can hurt people when she really lets go. Even that one time when she hits Howard for lying to her, he's really pushed her, she's incredibly upset, and she doesn't slap him, she punches him hard enough to leave a hell of a bruise. She comes across as a person who knows she gets violent when she's upset, knows that she's strong and well-trained enough to really hurt people when she does that, and consequently tries not to, most of the time.Basically, Peggy's ability to do damage is treated the same as any male TV protagonist - in the fighting techniques she uses, the way she tries to restrain her own capacity for violence, and the amount of damage she does when she attacks people, and I really appreciated that.
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