Talking About My Characters’ Looks And Also Struggling With Picking Just One Character || Beautiful People

I’ve never been the kind of person who likes designing how a character looks. For me it’s almost as tiring as writing a first draft–I’m very indecisive so designing a character’s looks is not really my thing. What happens when I create a character goes something like this: I create a scene in my head (usually when I’m sleeping because dreams represent the best of us all) where there are characters who associate in order to do something, or it’s a scene that develops characters, and there they are!

Beautiful People: WRITERLY RESOLUTIONS AND GOALS FOR 2016 || For When You End Up 6 Months Into The New Year And You’re Practically Like “MEGA-SHRIEKS!! I KNOW NOT WHAT TO WRITE.”

After watching, like, 2 whole seasons of Hawaii Five O and a season of Say Yes to The Dress, I feel like pulling my eyes out of my skull. And so, as usual as a response could ever be to a feeling like that, I went to write this story I am working on that I might add on to for NaNo this year. But then again, NaNo is like in 11 months so I’m sure I can think of a billion more ideas for that. And here I am, a professional procrastinator, thinking ahead 11 months. I have no clue where my priorities lay right now. 

This is a meme hosted by Cait over at Paper Fury who I pretty much blog-stalk and use as an excuse to get myself cake like twice a week. She is pretty much the blogging guru and if you do not read every one of her posts then you are an outcast. *clap clap* It is also hosted by Sky at Further up And Further In and she is the most sarcastic person of like ever so you will love her.

WHAT WERE YOUR WRITING
ACHIEVEMENTS LAST YEAR?

See, said professional procrastinator as I am (I was holding this off because I had to think about my answers) I am a heavy thinker as well. I think deeply and thoroughly and am never satisfied until my brain answers its own queries. Therefore my more satisfactory, prideful writing achievements last year were all creditable to my thinking.

I did some great character investigating and a crazy whole lot of mad-libs with my short stories and plots. Another writing achievement was that I really thought through all of the passing dialogue between characters and figured out my style and how to make each voice one of its own, since, to be real, character depth comes from dialogue which, I digress, is like a 60% component of your character. I guess it is pretty important.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR TOP PRIORITY WRITING PROJECT FOR THIS YEAR?

FINISHING MY DRAFT OF THE STORY I’M ON RIGHT NOW. I’m not an avid writer like I’m a tedious reader. I think through stuff a lot, like aforementioned. Therefore wherever I am, I’m always inventing up new scenes between characters to explore them and elaborate and I myself better shape the creatures that walk around my story currently.

Therefore, I don’t write a full draft of my story in weeks, or a season. Usually it’ll take me 8-10 months to write my draft and be pleased and know I’ve added up all the constituents of the plot. And besides, I am a rebel. I stray from the path. I ally with little Red Riding Hood. The wolf can go eat someone else’s grandmother at the moment. And Squashhead agrees.

But I’m getting off of topic right now, evidently. It’s not just straying from the path I have a problem with. When I occur a (very common in my case) writer’s block, I just go back and edit previous chapters (which results in adding stuff which results in subtracting stuff which results in turning everything into a super funky wonkalicious not plot-following at all story), when I should be focusing on completing a draft and then finishing editing. So my top priority this year is going to be to stay committed to WRITING the draft and THEN editing if I get around to it in ’16.

 

LIST 5 AREAS YOU’D
LIKE TO WORK THE HARDEST TO IMPROVE THIS YEAR 

Five areas I’d like to work the hardest to improve this year can really easily turn into ten bajillion kajillion areas I’d like to work the hardest in. See, I’ve got some writerly strengths. I am very good at wordplay. I’m now renowned for my dialogue skills. And I am very good at creating original, different, various character who often refuse to cooperate with the plot.

So as I do have strengths, I have humongous weaknesses that don’t just deal with commitment. And I don’t think I can make you laugh like Cait can, but whatever. I’ve literally wrote a whole series thing based off of dragons and sphinxes and griffins and serpents and, yes, unicorns. But I drifted from that because things went too wonky and I just couldn’t write it anymore. But I’m sure I’ll integrate those key magical parts into my other projects. Not subject to copyright.

BUT FORGET THAT BECAUSE WHEN I TALK ABOUT THE WRITERSPHERE I GET WAY OFF TOPIC LIKE 8464536283746 TIMES.

• I’d like to work hard on not making my chapters like 30 pages long. Because, you see, I am not J.K. Rowling. I do not need to make each chapter 30-40 pages long when in truth I should be making each one like 10 pages long. Forget the length, I need to stop filling in the mad libs with a bunch of fluff; I need to be concise, expressive, and the ultimatum of all storytellers with my writing. I do not want to cream people with cotton candy because I have too much fluff. Not that I’d object if you want to cream me with cotton candy. “Cream” meaning lovingly feed, you know. Well, forget it. I don’t like cotton candy. I like cotton. And I like candy. But the inventor of cotton candy should have never clashed them together causing a cotton/candy world war.
• BRANCH OUT WITH THE WRITING. Sanctum fumat, I really need to do this. High five, Cait. I should stop sticking to my same bittersweet, sulking, gloomy characters. I know they’re incredibly fun to write and even more entertaining to create humongous plasters of graffitied backstories for these little dark chocolate creatures, but I still want to be able to write springy, happy characters. Sort of like Winter. And branching out includes diversity. Not just diverse sexuality, or diverse races in the story, but actually cultivating diverse characters. Diverse beliefs//religiousness, diverse personalities.
• Walk away from elaborating too much on characters’ appearance. I like to write lengthy fluffy stuff that puts cotton candy to shame since it should just be cotton as one thing and candy as the other, anyways. If you were here with me, you would see Squashhead vigorously nodding behind me and trying to type in his own little bit of nonsense but I refuse to let him get his hands on my keyboard because UEhuwewehIWUEHUwrgwrgiwuriwugyGEUIWEIUGIWe he does not know how to type. *huffs angrily* You know how when writers make every concise detail of their character’s appearance known, it’s a bit hard to visualize them. Like that, I want to provide the bare minimum of exterior facade description of characters, and write enough for them to be distinguished, but to be easily visualized. Plus, I want to deepen the stuff on actual inner character appearance. Like, personality.
• Stop holding it off. I, legit, keep my writing stuff away when I feel like I’ve hit a wall in my writing and don’t feel like continuing and elaborating and writing. Then I hold off writing and I never get to the part that I just want to damn write and have been looking forward to all the story. Because, you know, once in a while you got to “BREAK DOWN THE WALLS”.

ARE YOU PARTICIPATING IN ANY WRITING CHALLENGES?

No. Like, write blah blah blah stuff (I refuse to add blanks made of underscores because I don’t want to turn even my blog posts into mad libs) in blah blah blah time? I don’t do those. I don’t like to force myself to write.

Even if I push myself to move past a writer’s block, I don’t like to force myself to write because the words will flow much prettier, and smoother when I’m not forcing it to happen. And I can’t really keep up with those writing challenges because I’ll end up skipping out on one day and then the next and the next and the…next. So, I might take some up during Summer vacay but at the moment, nada.

WHAT’S YOUR CRITIQUE PARTNER/BETA READER SITUATION LIKE AND DO YOU HAVE PLANS TO EXPAND THIS YEAR?

I’m going to answer this question the way I understood it. I think it’s asking first do you HAVE any critique partners/beta readers and what is your opinion on that and situation ON THAT and do I have plans to get more critique partners/beta readers this year?

So do I have any critique partners/beta readers and what is my opinion on that? No. I’m sorry because I don’t like sharing my work before it’s done and half of that is because I am somewhat insecure about my writing and another key part of the story is that, deos knows I did not like this, when I did share some stuff with my friend, she was editing it and then we went on like that and after a while she started suggesting different stuff for the story and telling me that she thought that we had actually come up with the whole story together. I did not like that one bit. So now, I don’t want anyone to read my writing until I edit it three hundred million times, and I don’t really trust anyone at the moment.

DO YOU HAVE PLANS TO READ WRITER-RELATED BOOKS THIS YEAR? OR ARE THERE SPECIFIC BOOKS YOU WANT
TO READ FOR RESEARCH?

No, no. I don’t read books for writing, sure I’ll take online lessons and read articles and OTHER BLOGS, but I don’t read books specifically for writing. Let me tell you, I do not take writing to be a mandate of perfection. I do not research on writing. I read a lot of magazines and articles about writing and to be real, the best source of writing development, knowledge, and information comes from other blogs that I read themselves. Being a blogger has really reflected on my writing and blogging helps stimulate the creativity that blows in my mind.

PICK ONE CHARACTER YOU WANT TO GET TO KNOW BETTER, AND HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ACHIEVE THIS?

ONE????? ONE????!!!!! If Cait can cut to the chase and say she wants to improve on ALL OF HER CHARACTERS, I will not abide by this alien word “one“. I would like to familiarize myself further with my female leads. There’s like 3, and 2/3 of them end up alive at the end of all this. I want to make them more known to me, because the story I’m currently working on only features my male leads, and so I’ve gotten pretty familiar with them because they are my fam, and so female leads, please bow to me for the moment being and please, please cooperate with my bios of you.

*your head perks up* What is this bio that you speak of, dearest Veda? Okay. Let me tell you, people, LET ME TELL YOU. I’m pretty sure like 99.999999999999% of you know this, but then again, I came into the blogosphere and the bookosphere not knowing what OTP stood for, so I guess we can all forget my geek-y-ness and just let me tell you. A character bio is often the mad libs for a character’s appearance and the best source of suggested character face and bod intel is Pinterest. BECAUSE THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS. But my character bio’s are a pizza cut in half. Half of the pizza screams my person and half is all prettiness. I’ma probably do a post on this, granted a short one, but hustle anyway because this is fun on its own.

DO YOU PLAN TO EDIT OR QUERY, AND WHAT’S YOUR PLAN OF ATTACK? 

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWDS. This is hard; see, I plan to edit after I finish a draft which will take a good big portion of the year, and my plan to edit, like normal is, is to read over my book, and write down questions in my journal while I do it. Then on another file, I type up and answer the questions. THEN I DO THE WHOLE SPELLING GRAMMAR BLAH BLAH BLAH STUFF.

So, yes, basically, I’m interviewing myself on my story. It’s like a query, but it’s a one-on-one interview, one being me, and one also being me. If you get it. It is fun to interview myself, because I am so nervous and I can NEVER TELL WHAT I’M GOING TO REPLY BY. Forget that. I’m me. Of course when I am interviewing me I will know what me is going to say. In case you didn’t notice, I and me are the same creature. NOT PERSON. CREATURE. But yes. In case you didn’t notice.

TONI MORRISON ONCE SAID, “IF THERE’S A BOOK YOU WANT TO READ, BUTIT HASN’T BEEN WRITTEN YET, THEN YOU MUST WRITE IT.”  WHAT ARE BOOKS THAT YOU WANT TO SEE MORE OF, AND WHAT “HOLES” DO YOU THINK NEED FILLING IN THE LITERARY WORLD?

I want to see more of epic fantasy. I finished Queen of Shadows, and Rowaelin is pretty much my hardcore ship even though I’d like to steal Rowan for myself. AND LYSANDRA!!! Aelin really needed a girlfriend after Nehemia, and I’m so glad she’s got Lysandra. This is good for her. And also Lysandra and Aedion need to be a thing because I really need more wife-turns-into-ghost-leopard-and-practically-tackles-husband. I am laughing so hard. HA HA HA HA HA HA. No, that was real. And that part when Manon flies overhead on Abraxos over the castle to, like, check in on Dorian–is anybody else direly hoping Manon and Dorian become a thing??? Forget this book, I have so much to say and you will be getting a humongous review soon. I am behind on my reviews.

But I rebel against the path yet again. I want to see more of epic fantasy because, sure, fantasy is well and all, but epic fantasy really hits it out of the ballpark, and my experience with the Throne of Glass saga has really pushed me to read more epic fantasy. And another one is like, historical fiction, I guess? Like, retellings of the civil war and other climactic things because they are fun to read. AND ANY RETELLINGS IN GENERAL. Marissa Meyer brought back retellings and I need to read more. And historical fiction, and STEAMPUNK like the Infernal Devices just SPEAKS TO ME, you know.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO HAVE ACHIEVED BY THE END OF 2016? 

So I have two projects I’ll give you a bit of intel on. One is my brain work, and one is my soul work. And all are 100% bookworm since you must know.

Sci-fi Alien Thingy

Do not take me wrong folks. This isn’t Star Wars and it’s not a horror story. This is real and good. I thought of it a while back and told my cousin who is awesome and she hates writing and isn’t drowning in books like us, and she NEVER wants to hear my ideas, but when I told her this thing, she was listening for once and she was all HECK THIS IS AWESOME. So pretty much I want to write this draft this year, because it has all sorts of planets and galaxies and interplanetary and intergalactic wars and aliens and humans and disguises and STARS. Yummy, isn’t it? I REALLY WANT TO FINISH THIS DRAFT THIS YEAR. I must push it.

Parallel Universe Magic Different Species’ Thingamabobber

My little cousins are catching up on me with their Cat-in-the-hat blabber. But I want to do this one bad, because I sort of was inspired by the concept of Shadowhunters, a hybrid species that has duties to its own and wars and other blather. So hybrids and wars and sacred, ancient magic and beings before time and gods and kin and all this lovely humongous net of blurb that has been boiling in my head is going to really have to be drafted this year.

—–

So there you have it. I want to finish two drafts this year and that is a HARD goal for me to achieve and so I will really have to work it and balance it out with my blogging, so please pardon me if I do not appear as much as I did last year because I will, heck, enjoy writing these stories.

Good lord, I’ve got a lot of things to do in 2016!!! And now I really want to go watch Cupcake Wars or Cake Boss, which, by the way, is coming over here where I am and I will be visiting that bakery to read and chill with friends like a bazillion kajillion times. Because I am me. AND I AM FREAKING OUT CARLO’S BAKERY IS HERE YASSSSSS. But my plans for this night will be to read a little and then finish my sketch-of-some-art-related thing tonight because, no joke, I have been burying my face in my Mac this whole day, and I do not have glasses and have no plans to get them. Pray and choke on it. 

Have you done Beautiful People this month? if you have, leave me a link! if you have not, will you be joining in? are any of YOUR writing goals similar to mine? do you think I’ve set reasonable goals? have you learned more about me as a writer in this post? AND MOST IMPORTANTLY WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MY WRITING PLOT IDEA STORY THINGIES???????????? gimme all the intel, my precious folks. so far Squashhead has not been helpful critiquing my story idea. all he seems to come up with is either gibberish or pleading me to write a book starring Squashhead, the great adventure. one of which he is NOT. he guarantees it will be a best-seller, but I have my doubts. SO WHAT DO YOU FLIPPING THINK OF MY STORY IDEAS FOR THIS YEARS?