My Writing - How I started and where I'm going

This is a lot of rambling, but for those who are curious...

Somebody asked me about my writing. And I've gotten the question several times.

Well I actually get two slightly different questions.

The first: Where do you get your ideas?

I can't answer where I get my ideas. I just kind of do... I don't know where I get my ideas... they just they attack me and tie me up and threaten me with sharpened sticks. They spawn like rabid little bunnies. I am never I repeat never suffering from writer's block. I might obsess over phrasing and details but I always have something I want to write that's drawing my attention. This is actually the problem somtimes because I become overwhelmed with too many ideas and it makes it hard to focus on one story.

I suppose I could say life, art, music etc inspire me but the truth is everything inspires me.  I am rather oblivious in my everyday because of this. There is always and I do mean /always/ something going on in my head. My husband says I'd be terrible at zen. My husband is actually rather good at meditation and can clear his mind... I can't. Even if I do the follow the road to it's end... well it never ends because it just twist and twist and twist. It's just the way I work. And yes I'm a bit of a spaz because of it. Sorry.

The second: How did you become such a good writer?

I don't really see myself that way. Even though I love to write and I love what I write and I love my little plot bunnies I don't see them as anything remarkable. Really. I look at my stories and I see that they've been done before. I  see mistakes and things that just well that I'm just not happy with. Ask my beta or Demo... I'm seriously self conscious about my chapters and I panic and say I hate it and shove it at them and ask them to tell me what's wrong with it. And sometimes after I finish a chapter I love it and others I still dunno if I'm happy with it. Oddly very often even if I think the chapter is lacking other people really really like it and then I'm pretty sure I'm just worrying over nothing.

Don't get me wrong I don't think my writing sucks and I can definitely see improvement even just in the short time I've written fanfiction. It's just that I just don't see myself as being all that good.

That said I think I owe the writing skills I have to several things. Lots of English classes, a really good creative writing teacher, lots of practice, and being unpopular and so lots of time spent reading. I read in class, at home, you name it. I used to walk between classes with a book in hand and have actually walked into a wall that was beside me and not in front of me because I wasn't paying attention.

My grammar still sucks IMO. I need to take about a million more English credits. Thankfully I have an awesome beta to help make up for my suck as grammar skills.

WELL those questions also got me to thinking about my writing in the light of when I started and all that.

How I started

My mother swears I've been telling stories since I was like 3. I used to tell her about my nonexistant teachers.

I remember telling stories with my brother and a little with my older sister (she was less fun). We told all kinds of stories with dolls and little toys and yeah barbies although I didn't like barbies as much. My brother and I would go in the backyard and build mountains of mud and pretend they were caves or piramids and we had a whole river set up and at the end of it a dragon lived and would eat people. And then he and I would go tell stories our little sister Niki about the valley of the unicorns and my brother would draw pictures of it. I'm not sure if it was derived from an already existing story though or I'd make it into a children's book. I have a very vivid imagination so it can be kind of hard for me to tell if the memories of telling those stories were just stuff I made up or something I saw (and sorta my version of fanfiction). I have several children's stories that I've come up with over the years from having little sisters and well babysitting a lot.

Then I won a prize in 5th grade for a story I wrote on the enviornment. It was super cheesy/cute. I kind of wish I still had a copy of it. But that I think was the thing that made me aware that I was at least somewhat talented.

It was in 8th grade that I started writing my first 'novel' of sorts although I never finished it. It was about Tigeans (humanoid tigers) and it was post apoctolyptic and a space opera. I was very absorbed in that even during high school. Originally there was just my character Kiara Bai Hu (last name is chinese for Whitestripes because she's the reverse of a white tiger) and only a vague idea and then I met Iris and so I of course had to have a character for her Tigris was her original name and then we changed it to Tylean. And I added in various people I knew namely a guy that I adored because he was one of my hero's as a kid. Mark Welsh - Maliek. He was a couple years older, brother of a friend that lived by my grandparents and he'd save me! He saved me from the wasp that stung me (took me home and did first aid) and he carried me home when I sprained an ankle and well he was just always doing stuff like that so I had a HUGE crush on him and idealized him.

Then I got really into Mercedes Lackey and other fantasy books and decided I wanted a fantasy world. I was probably 16. And this fascination was the basis of my Ellaysia stories (a piece of which I posted in a journal awhile back). And it was very elaborate. I have a ton of classic fantasy races changed of course to suit my world. There are hints of greek mythos in it too. And in truth I'd like to rework the story and the world and actually write several of them.

I also spent quite a bit of time RPing on mucks. Not a massive amount of time since they're a dying breed and well I hmm ran into certain social things that pissed me off and well stepped out of the muck/mush/mud community for the most part. I only RP with certain people and I RP online and table top. Plus I RP in games. Shadowbane was the first place I became really engrossed by RPing. My character had a very detailed past. BUT I didn't do the fluffy bunny RP. I tended towards the raving lunatic slaughtering other people while RPing end of the spectrum. So while most of the rpers on the server were a bunch of care bears I was a bloodthristy little wench who was still loved by all. So well RPing helped with character development. Seriously! RP a character and you will LOVE that character even if they are an evil little bitch. It also makes you think about things so that the character isn't as flat as a pancake in personality. The advantage of gaming while doing this is that while I was(AM ) a badass there was generally enough other badasses that mary-sue-ism gets toned down. So MMO + RP = WIN besides it's fun. Just avoid or better yet kill the carebears. Even if you have to make up an excuse like your character has multiple personalities and is quite insane... sorry she isn't aware of what she's doing. Which is what I spent a lot of my time doing before I started writing fanfiction.

Fanfiction is a fairly NEW thing for me. I mean I guess Nat and I kind of toyed with it before. We'd make up and tell stories about various things. Backstreet Boys, Animorphs, Valdemar, X-men/spiderman (always in combo), and Wolf-riders (graphic novel). But I hadn't really felt any interest to actually write any of them. I was far more into my original stuff. Then I started watching Inuyasha and Iris started writing fanfiction for something and so I ended up reading and obsessing over Inuyasha fanfiction but only felt mildly interested in possibly writing some eventually maybe... probably not.

Naruto wasn't something I liked at first. I saw one episode (sexy no jutsu) didn't see all of it and didn't get the joke and didn't want to watch it because I thought Naruto and the squinty eye thing he does was annoying. BUT Iris made me sit down and watch it with her (because we got through all of Saiyuki) and well I got hooked about the time they introduce Kakashi (I know that was what 3 episodes in?) And so she started showing me fanfiction for it... and introduced me to some doujins of KakaIru and well the rest is history. I'd found my OTP!

Where I'm going -

I'd like to finish up my current project list and then start working on a few original fics/doujins. Although, I need to find an artist for the doujin that would well suit the doujin. That or buckle down and actually apply myself... I'm so lazy though... I'd really really rather write.

The first story I want to work on is either Myth of the First - Legend of the Unicorn an Ellaysia story or Ghoste Myste's story (currently untilted) also and Ellaysia story. I've commissioned pictures of Ghoste Myste and her love interest... yes both are oddly enough het. Mind you I hadn't written yaoi or really gotten into it until Naruto. I mean I read some shonen-ai and a few yaoi manga but not much because they can be so damn hard to find. So most of my original stuff is het.

And then I want to work on the doujin and I've decided I want it to be a doujin and not a story. And it doesn't have a title but the main pairing is YURI and the secondary pairing is YAOI and they're kind of rivals with each other. It's set in modern day (AU - Japan a big city - undecided as to what city) but they pretty much run one district. I need to flesh it out a bit more with Nat before I get to it though. Hence why it's at the bottom of the list.

AND no none of that means I'll stop writing my fanfiction it just means that when I get there I'm going to focus on the original stuff more. At least that's the intention. And this may be quite a while in coming since I seem to keep adding to my projects list....