September Surprise Story Week: 1.77245: Sebastian: Random: 1040 words

On the way home from college Sebastian walked past a box. It wasn't remarkable in any way so he would have probably walked straight past it. Then he heard a noise. Someone else may have heard it and thought that it was their imagination. For a moment he did think it was in his imagination, but he decided he'd have a look just in case it was something. People did leave things, vulnerable things like kittens and puppies, in boxes. When he peered into the box it was dark. He didn't want to move any of the flaps in case he disturbed something. There was something that moved in it. A small something with a tail. The tail looked like it belonged to a lion. He blinked, sure that he couldn't actually be looking at a lion. Lions were wild animals and not the sort of thing you'd leave in a box.( Read more... )

Continued here (LJ link).


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Thoughts

I've just been making some notes on characters I want to write about and things that I feel I need right now, like a couple of maps and lists of magics or characters so I know what I'm doing. The lists of magics are going to difficult because a lot of them are still in the process of being created. When I write I basically write about what I know before working around that, which means I know certain parts but the rest of it doesn't really exist in my head. It's not until I have someone doing a different part of the magic that I know what's happening there. Nothing I write is ever completely thought out when I start and often I find things changing as I write.

I have a love hate relationship with that process. Some days I am happy to let things work out the way they do when I'm writing because I've never been able to work from a definitive plot or keep characters out of storylines when they have something to say that they think will add to whatever it is I'm writing. That's probably why I'd never really be any good at being published by one of the big publishers. They'd want me to take bits out that I thought were important and I don't think they'd appreciate having a huge cast of characters simply because some of them won't shut up. :) Other days I just wish I could plot something out, write it, and then not have one of the 'secondary' characters step up to wake me round the head with a plot line. I don't know why. I've never been like that.

The other thing I find myself wanting to do is change decisions and show why certain choices worked better than others, which means that I could easily end up with six different versions of a story. It interests me to see the way my characters deal with different situations. Maybe I sound really weird when I say this but when I write I let them make their own choices as though they're real people. Then they want a redo because they know they haven't made the right one. It's like life, only you get the chance to have a redo. However there are some stories where I know the decisions wouldn't be different. The characters in the Donor House are one example. Every one of the characters I have written about or am thinking of writing about would absolutely stand by the decisions that they made and make the same choices if the situation happened again. I don't know why.

Anyway, the plan at the moment is to get some full character lists down, especially for the stories where I shove a collection of characters into a house or a school and then leave them to it. I think I like writing about communities more than I like writing about anything else because I like character interaction. I am much more a character writer than I am a plot writer, and maybe that's why I've never been able to stick to a plot. I really wish I had is more people naming characters so I don't have to. I'm really stupidly picky about names.

Say Yes to Gay YA

What I've read today is so very wrong. Anyone who writes or reads or wants to read about gay characters should go here: http://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/969022.html. If this is seriously what agents are doing then I think something needs to be done about it. There should by LGBT characters in books and all other mainstream media to show the teens out there who are gay, lesbian, bi or transgender that there's nothing wrong with being who they are. My partner and his brother are both bi, but that doesn't change who they are. I love my partner and the fact he fancies guys isn't going to stop me from loving him because I fell for him, not for his sexual preference. There is nothing wrong with people who are LGBT - they're just people who have a different sexual preference to me.