Ramblings of an Australian Writer

Day Twelve: In what story did you feel you did the best job of worldbuilding? Any side-notes on it you'd like to share?

You know, I've been thinking on this all day and I still don't have an answer. Everything I write is set in the real world. If I can find it on Google Maps and Google Earth, I'll use it. I've set my stories all over the world and in the known universe: Rome, Italy; Sydney, Australia; Vatican City, Italy; Duneedan, Scotland; Cambridge, England; Mt Brocken, Germany; Russia; Paris, France; the planets of Saturn and Jupiter.

So I haven't really created a world per se, but I've used everything I could find through researching about existing locations to fill out my stories. I think the place I've fallen in love with the most has been the catacombs underneath Paris. Some sites with information and photos of this incredible place are below.

Flickr set with some excellent background information.
Val de Grace room photos.
Cataphiles in the catacombs.
Urbains de la ville de Paris et alentours. (In French.)
Les salles. (Photo galleries in French of some of the rooms in the catacombs.)
Port Mahon in the catacombs.
Thirty Hours Under Paris - weblog report with photos.
Catas.
Paris Underground.

Oh dear. That's rather a lot of links. Oops! I think you can tell how much I love this place and how fascinated I am by it.

I've had several very busy and hectic days, hopefully now things are winding down for the moment, I'll be able to get back to doing each day as an individual post and not have to double up again for a while!

Day Ten: What are some really weird situations your characters have been in? Everything from serious canon scenes to meme questions counts!

Weird is relative, I guess. Getting trapped in the Paris catacombs certainly isn't normal, but it is in the context of the scene. Falling in love with an Archangel isn't something that happens every day, either. I suppose when Archangel Gabriel got turned into a tiny ginger kitten with wings and went hunting for food with a Hound of God in his wolf form at Taco Bell would certainly count as weird. It was definitely amusing!


Day Eleven: Who is your favorite character to write? Least favorite?

Favourite without a doubt is Gabriel. I have had many loves over the years in the course of writing, but at the moment, it's Gabriel. His potty mouth and warped sense of humour entertain me endlessly and the way he's able to set that aside and pick up his sword to be the Archangel of War at a moment's notice is fun to write. He's probably the character I've done the most agonising over too - from wondering if I should phonetically write his accent when writing dialogue or not to mashing together a lot of different religious stories and a heavy dollop of creative license to create his background, a lot of work and reading has gone into creating him.

My least favourite would be Sander, one of the villains in the Order of Shadows trilogy. He is... vile. So vile that I hate writing him and feel my soul shrivel a little when I do write him. He's necessary for the narrative, however, so I grit my teeth and bear it. As I write this, I've just had a thought on how to make him even more awful. I fear my brain sometimes, I truly do.

Day eight: What's your favorite genre to write? To read?

To write: supernatural themes, fantasy, m/m romance. To read: fantasy, history and auto/biographies. That was easy!

Day nine: How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.

There isn't a process per se - usually the idea comes to me while I'm in the bathroom. Doesn't matter what I'm doing - taking a shower, brushing my teeth, whatever - the bathroom is the Room of Wisdom, aka RoW. Nearly every idea for plot or characters or dialogue has come to me in the RoW. I've also gotten a lot of ideas from my dreams, which usually results in waking up, staggering half asleep to the laptop and getting down enough to be able to work with it when I'm awake for the day. On occaision, I'll wake up completely and write solidly for several hours before going back to sleep.

No great revelations of writing secrets here, I'm afraid. It just happens when it happens, and usually the RoW or my dreams is when or where it happens.

Day Seven: Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?

Yes, I do. I have a playlist of music I call my "Music for Writing" playlist which features music from bands such as Evanescence, Nine Inch Nails, Miranda Sex Garden, Medieval Babes, Tool, A Perfect Circle, Muse and the Smashing Pumpkins and VNV Nation. I find that I can write more easily with music playing, even though my mind isn't entirely on the music, it serves as a background while I write.

A few years ago, a friend told me that a researcher had done a study into the kinds of music that stimulated creativity. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the study or the researcher, but my friend told me that there are certain rythyms in different genres of music that stimulate productivity. I have found that this is true for me.

Sometimes, I do make up playlists for a story or a relationship within a story, I like the challenge of being able to create a story within a story through music. My iPod has quite a few such playlists.

Day Six: Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol' pen and paper?

In the living room, on my comfy sofa. Usually late night/early morning is my most productive period but if the weather is cold and rainy and the sky's overcast, then pretty much any time of day.

I prefer to use my laptop but that's due to several reasons that have more to do with physical limitations than anything else.

Day Five: By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?

I'm not sure who the youngest would be, most of my characters are in their mid to late twenties or thirties. In fact, most of the time, I don't really state their age, just make it clear that they're adults. Actually, now I think about it, the youngest is probably Chase, aged seventeen, for the currently stalled Clockworld project which was to be a series of stories for young adults in the sci-fi genre.

The oldest would definitely be the Archangels. They're all older than time itself, and immortal with it, though not immune from injuries or death. It's hard to find a character I write that is older than the Archangels, considering that!

Day Four: Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!

One of the first stories/characters that wasn't appallingly Mary Sue drivel and will never see the light of day because of it's awfulness is the story The Corazon Empire and the lead character, Dregen. The Corazon Empire was a sci-fi-fantasy story set on a planet called Corazon, with a city-continent of the same name. The rest of the planet was uninhabitable, resisting even the most advanced terraforming techniques. The lower levels of the city were full of pollution and garbage and was where the lowest social groups lived, the poor and homeless. As well, it was the part of the city given over to drug trafficking and prostitution. The highest levels of the city were where the rich lived, the rulers, the socialites, the politicians and the religious order that was the main religion for the Empire.

The story followed Dregen from childhood, born to poor parents and living not quite in the lower levels but near. He was gifted with music and his father was a trader who died in a space accident when Dregen was twelve. At thirteen, his mother sold him into slavery and Dregen was taken down into the lower levels of the city to work for his owner. When he reached adulthood, he was turned into a rent boy. It could be said that this is not exactly the happiest of backstories but I chose to make Dregen's life in the brothel a happy one - he had friends, he had an adult encourage him in his music, he found a place to hang out with like minds who loved music, he joined a band. He was good at his job and well paid and got on well with his clients.

In his twenties, Dregen met two acolytes from the temple in the upper levels of the city. At the same time, political machinations were going on and Dregen and his new friends and others were caught up in the political games that ended with the planet itself taking revenge on the ruling class. The city was destroyed as the residents who realised this wasn't a joke fled into space on deep-space freighters in an exodus looking for a new home.

The story is full of all sorts of cliches of the genre: mystical powers, made up science and technobabble, magic, politics, poor boy is elevated to almost messiah status. It was around 210K words all up and I don't really have any plans to revist it and rewrite it or fix it up or anything.

Yesterday was a busy day so I didn't get the chance to post day two of the meme. Not that my answer to that was terribly long, but time got away from me.

Day Two.
How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

Oh boy. A lot. I tend to have a cast of hundreds, mostly supporting because no one lives in a vacuum and people are going to meet people as they go on their journies. I don't really have a preference either way for writing men or women, but most of my writing is m/m so therefore the characters are predominantly male.


Day Three.
How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you're writing about fictional places)?

It varies because names are something that I always find myself wildly indecisive about. One character, for instance, I wasn't at all satsified with the name I gave her and kept changing it, going back and doing a find/replace on her name every time I changed it. Finally, I polled my LJ friends to see which name they prefered and it was one that I hadn't used up until that point. I changed her name - again - to fit the results of the poll and the name stuck.

Usually, I'll look at baby name sites or historical name sites, particularly medieval. I'll look at sites that focus on names from a given nationality, such as French names, when I'm writing a French character. Sometimes, I've used names that are historical. Rarely will I use a name that I simply like the sound of because, as with aforementioned female character, I'll find that if there's no background to that choice, I'll keep changing it in a frustrated quest to find the name that fits the character. I suppose having done medieval reenactment and working out persona names and stories/histories helps in that regard, too.

For places, if I get really stuck, the Place Name Generator is a great tool to get ideas from. Another good resource is Seventh Sanctum. The Fantasy Name Generator is another great source for ideas.

Writing Meme Day One: Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you've worked with and why.

So far, there are two. I am, I admit, my own harshest critic but there are two projects that are like my babies to me, even though one isn't finished and the other needs to be beaten into some semblance of acceptibility before I even trot it past one of my Awesome Editors. That one is a completed first draft, the first one is about half way through.

The Order of Shadows Trilogy: is half finished, I started it a few years ago intending it to be one novel and it's grown into a trilogy. The reason I haven't sent the first novel out for editing yet is that I want to finish all three for one thing and for another, I know how much I hate it when I'm reading a series and it isn't finished yet, with no clear sign of when the next book in the series will be released or, in some cases, if it ever will be released. The frustration at being cut off half way through a highly engaging story and left with a cliffhanger has made me determined not to do the same thing and I want the first drafts of each novel finished at the very least. The story is set in a dystopian future where humanity has returned to a medieval, agrarian lifestyle sans the majority rule of the landed/titled classes but with an overall rulership by a seemingly benevolent quasi-religious order called the Order of Shadows. The story follows an accolyte of the Order as he uncovers the truth about the history of the world post the Apocalyptic event that set back technology to the middle ages and his companions that he meets along the way. Book one is set in the Temple of Shadows itself, inside Mount Broken (a play on words of the real name of the mountain - Brocken) in Germany, book two is set in the catacombs beneath the city of Paris, France and book three will be set in Russia. The events take place five hundred years in the future.

Broken Wings: is completed, and now I need to go over it and make it read like a story of some kind rather than a hodge-podge of words and ideas. The latter is all very Dali-esque but doesn't really make for a good narrative that people will want to read. I need to understand that as well as being my own worst critic, being my own favourite comedian isn't really conducive to writing a good story and in-jokes are all very well and good... unless no one else can get the joke. The story is set in the present day with the Apocalypse looming over humanity. (Hm, I'm detecting a theme here.) It is set in Scotland, the Vatican and Sydney, Australia and features Archangels, demons, humans, war, and the beautiful coastline of my country. This is a m/m romance novella, clocking in so far at 50K words but I'm sure that word count will change drastically by the time I and my Awesome Editors have beaten it into shape. My love of this story is firstly the idea of it, even if I know I have to alter a few things so as not to send medievalists like myself into a raging fury (I know how nitpicky I can be of anything set in or with a basis in medieval history, so I know I have to alter a few things to make it clear that this is fiction). However, my main love in this story is the character of Archangel Gabriel, who I am not ashamed to admit is my baby and continues to surprise me no matter how much I write him. Just when I think I've got a handle on him, my muse decides to take an unexpected turn with the character that makes me love writing him all the more.

Both stories required a lot of research and world-buildling. Research is something that I am good at and I love it. Everything I've written has involved tremendous amounts of research; once a research junkie, always a research junkie, I suppose. I've learned a lot in the course of researching things for these stories. World-building has never been a particular forte of mine, but in the cases of these two stories, I've found myself creating worlds that, while set in real places, are fantastical enough to be, I hope, plausible as a possible future or alternate present. Both stories also meant I spent a lot of time playing around with Google Earth, particularly Order... and I've found myself becoming distracted by random tangents as I work out how far a horse could travel in winter from Mount Brocken towards Paris and what historical landmarks one would find on the way, the sort of terrain that needs to be covered. There's also the joy I get from writing certain characters; in Order... it's the Varangian Guards, who are the protectors of the Royal House of Russia and can be hired as expensive and efficient mercenaries. In Broken Wings, it's Gabriel and his brother, Michael.

A writing meme that I thought would be good motivation and fun to do for May. Gacked from erastes, the full list of questions is beneath the cut. Basically, answer one question in a post per day. As May has 31 days, I'm not sure what I'll do for day 31 but I'm sure I'll come up with something. Maybe a picture post of who I imagine as my characters or something. I shall percolate.

( Thirty questions for the month )