queenlua

My public stuff is fic updates, meta, and perhaps occasional musings on non-fannish things (writing, birds, etc).

Random life commentary, or general commentary that happens to include potentially personally-identifying information (for some relative value of that term, anyway) is private. I like my secret internet double-life, yo.

If you want to be friends, just leave a comment here (all comments screened). If I've seen you around, or you convince me that we have some stuff in common, I'll probably add you!

Well since Rethi and Raphi are doing titles, and since it's been a few months since my last titles infodump, might as well do another one :D

( Titles pt. 2Collapse )

Also the last time I did an author's-notes-type-thing was last October, since I never have enough thoughts on any one story to make an actual post about, but here's a roundup of random thoughts on stories I've written since then.

( ErrataCollapse )

I'm sort of 100% a sucker for personality tests, personality typification based on arbitrary nerdy things, etc., so here's where I'm collecting my results. I will probably append to this periodically and just link it from my "semi-friends only" entry rather than spamming everyone's f-lists with this nerdery every time :P

• MBTI ¹: ENTP. I score really high on the P (perceiving) category in particular, and pretty high on E (extroversion).


• Enneagram ²: 9w8. Surprised me at first, since I was expecting 7w8, but yeah, overall I'm pretty chill/trusting/confrontation-adverse, it makes sense.


• D&D alignment ³: neutral good (which I guess makes me like the worst hacker since I'm pretty sure we're all supposed to be chaotic neutral oops)


• Magic the Gathering colors ⁴: Blue/Green.


• Avatar: the Last Airbender element: Air. I feel like people kind of misinterpret the air nomads as being all ~spiritual~ and ~deep~ and stuff, which they were... but they're also nomads, free-spirits, conflict-adverse (to the point where uh they kinda got wiped out for it)... I'm kind of flighty so it kind of fits :P

* * *
¹ http://www.personalitypage.com/html/info.html
² http://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/test.php
³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)
⁴ Writeups on red, green, white, blue, and black, but if you're familiar with the game you can probably intuit how they align with personalities—blue is snobby intellectuals, red is firebrands and rebels, etc

Vague thoughts that occurred to me the other day while thinking about two interactive fiction (IF) games I've played lately: Depression Quest and Kim's Story.

( Read more...Collapse )

So I put a vague throwaway reference in lust like remembrance to this random-headcanon-I-made-up-on-the-spot-but-rather-liked, where Shinon left Daein with Greil. Since I made it up on the spot, I didn't give it much thought, beyond a general feeling, and the feeling was: (1) Shinon is pretty bitchy about being with the mercenaries, (2) we're given some heavy-handed hints that the main reason for him bothering to stick around is some intense admiration for Greil, so (3) seems like that sort of admiration may have started young.

( vaguely trying to hash shinon stuff outCollapse )

For anyone who cares:

FFN's newest update renders the whole site in this god-awful Open Sans font, which makes everything really scrunched-up and ugly to read (to my eye, anyway).

My solution (Google Chrome only):

• Go install Stylebot
• Go to Options > Styles > Add a new style... > enter URL: www.fanfiction.net, and for the style itself, just drop this in:

  body {
  font-size: 13px;
  font-family: Verdana;
  }

• Save and you're good to go!

Obviously you could enter any font size or font family you're interested in there; I just went with what was the old FFN default. I'm not aware of a Firefox equivalent to Stylebot, but I'd be surprised if there isn't one—anything that lets you load your own stylesheets should do this.

I've thought for a while that it would be an amusing project to see someone make a stylesheet that makes FFN look like AO3, or vice versa, but not amusing enough for me to actually do it :P

Inspired by amielleon's similar tumblr post.

I decided to dive through what I could find of my old stuff and see how my writing's changed through the years. Several RPG posts are included just because I put a lot of effort into RPGs for a great portion of my writing journey and whatnot. I didn't go out of my way to find things that were especially good or especially embarrassing (though some of these are indeed embarrassing)—mostly I aimed for things I thought were fine/good/okay at the time of writing, rather than finding things that I thought were THE GREATEST THING EVAR or THE WORST THING I EVER WROTE at the time of writing.

( Legends, 1999Collapse )
( Dawn Warriors, 2000-2002ishCollapse )
( RPG post, 2003Collapse )
( short story, 2005Collapse )
( Distant Thunder, 2007Collapse )
( RPG post, 2007Collapse )
( North Star, 2008Collapse )
( short story, 2011Collapse )

I guess the trends aren't that interesting. I mean, the early stuff's just stilted in obvious, hey-I'm-young-and-getting-used-to-this-writing-thing ways, everything in the 2003-2006 era tends toward purple-ness and melodrama, and things seem to start settling around 2007, with several awkward bumps and edges that get sanded off later. I still see the earliest form of a lot of the rhythmic tricks I try for pretty regularly nowadays, though. Maybe that's about when I was finding my "voice" (whatever the fuck that means)? Or maybe I've just been stagnating/progressing more slowly since then, whichever :P

Sometimes I wonder why I write prose when I am entirely too fond of language that calls attention to itself. Or too fond of snatches of handfuls of words, rather than whole paragraphs/sentences. Or something.

Let me explain.

So I dug up this old bit from a Jack Vance novel today, because little snatches of it were echoing around in my head, and because it was driving me batty that I couldn't remember the character's name (Navarth, my dear friend, how could I forget you?):

"See me! I am Navarth, called the mad poet! But is not every poet mad? It is inevitable. His nerves are conductive and transport uncontainable gushes of energy. He fears—how he fears! He feels the movement of time; between his fingers it is a warm pulsing, as if he grasped an exposed artery. At a sound—a distant laugh, a ripple of water, a gust of wind—he becomes sick and faints, because never in all the extent of time can this sound, this ripple, this gust recur. Here is the deafening tragedy of the journey which we all undertake!"

That is such a glorious introduction. I mean it's great in part because of its subject matter, but I think so much of it has to do with its form—the way the words are chosen. Read it again now, notice those words—conductive nerves, which make us think at once of electricity—but then we get uncontainable, which is striking because ordinarily we don't think of nerves as containing anything—but here they contain, they contain the electric-life force, and just as we feel that rushing through his nerves we feel ourselves rushing through his words, a stuttering staticky ecstatic rush. Not a dash or an exclamation or a comma is misplaced. Read it aloud; feel it.

Like, I also have this pile of "writing prompts" on my computer, only that's a lie, sort of. Only rarely do they actually prompt me to write anything directly. Mostly it's just a magpie's collection of little phrases and word-snatches I hear and I particularly like and want to save forever because they are beautiful.

I'm scrolling through the list of prompts for examples...

( This turned into lengthy incoherent fangirling. Seriously.Collapse )

amielleon thought this might be a good resource, and let's get real, I need extremely little motivation to write about alcohol.

Also wow this got long oops.

( My background.Collapse )

( What and how people drink.Collapse )

( How much to get drunk?Collapse )

( How drunk people act and feel.Collapse )

( Hangovers.Collapse )

Feel free to let me know if I missed anything.

Was talking with a friend about the relative difficulty I have with writing various characters, and realized, hey, this could be an fe-bruary post.

So, ranked from easiest to hardest, this is how difficult I've found it to write various characters. Note that doesn't imply that any of these characters are the easiest or hardest to write in general (my writing experience may be very different from anyone else's), and in some of these cases it may simply be I wrote a character in a particularly easy scenario (i.e. writing Nailah doing stereotypical badass things is likely much easier than other, more nuanced takes on Nailah). Also it certainly doesn't mean anything like "which characters I write best" or whatever—this is more about how hard the experience of writing them is, regardless of how well or poorly they ultimately turn out (and some of these have turned out badly indeed).

So yeah, the list:

( list all the things!Collapse )