Greenstorm's Journal

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

I can sum it up: "Fuck the muse." I don't write when inspiration strikes, I don't wait to get seized with a passion and fury to create and communicate, I don't try to alter my mental state by getting drunk, high, wasted, plastered, or otherwise out of it. I sit down, and I get the words out.

Assuming I'm at home and not traveling, assuming I've gotten my head clear enough, assuming I haven't devoted the evening to something that's going to get me some income, assuming I'm not out of it because of something like a cold or food poisoning - trust me, it was memorably bad tofu - then I'll get my ass in the chair and work. The AIC Method isn't elegant, and it's less about elegance and more about results. The results are 1,000 words when I'm composing. I may write a few more than that one night, meaning that the next night might see me writing a few less to get to the next thousand according to the raw wordcount. The raw wordcount is key at this stage. I don't write out of order as a matter of course; I can't tell myself the story that way. I write it from beginning to end as best I'm able so I can figure out what the story is, so when I go back and edit everything, I can work at getting it to what it needs to be.

I write quietly, without music or background noise. I write at varying speeds, sometimes getting 1,000 words an hour and sometimes averaging out closer to 250. I'll let inspiration arrive at its own pace, and I usually seek out inspiration and passion and ideas when I'm not writing, so I can save up the energy for the work. I write at night, sometimes in the dark and sometimes before sundown depending on the season. I find a lot of pleasure to turning off the overhead light, turning on the desk lap, and sitting in a little bubble of words - I stumbled over it some decades ago, and the only time I've shifted from that was because of one telecommuting job with a set of on-call hours that had me working in the afternoons, which I still look back on as a fairly bizarre time. But it worked for that time frame. Because it was when I got my ass in the chair and wrote the words.

Walks help. Bike rides help. Going to the movies helps. Going to art museums works, too. Reading nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and going to live performances all help feed the creative spirit. But not the muse. I don't want to think about it in those terms. Nights when I don't write always feel a little bereft. I could be at the movies, I could be out with friends, I could be visiting Paris, and as good a time as I'll be having - and trust me, while I haven't done all three at the same time, I've done each of them alone and in varying combinations, so I can say that even doing that, I'll be thinking about what scenes I want to work out and the story I want to tell. I'll sometimes take longhand notes to help get words together so I can figure out if they're the right way to approach an idea, and that helps a bit, but it's not the same as sitting down and writing 1,000 new words, or cleaning up a chapter, or filling in something I set aside to research later to avoid breaking the creative flow, or line-editing according to someone else's patient notes.

I've joked there's only one proper writing method, and that's whatever works for the individual author to get their words out. I've also joked there's only one kind of writer, and that's someone who gets the writing done. I can advocate for what works for me. I can't say it'll work for everyone, but I'm willing to go on record about its success rate at finishing what I start.

Ass In Chair. Learn it. Love it. Live it. Because it always happens one word at a time.

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

Top Ten Times I Called It In And Walked Away

In no particular order, not alphabetical, chronological, or according to any level of importance -

1. Supernatural - I know people who watched it all and my hat's off to them, but after season eight, I knew it wasn't for me anymore.

2. Teen Wolf - sometime in season three or four, it went from being a show on MTV to an MTV show, and I was done.

3. House - end of season five or six, when not only had the characters grown stale, but the lighting had gone sour.

4. True Blood - somewhere in there, between seasons, I realized I couldn't do it anymore.

5. Game of Thrones - for all that I was enjoying myself, I realized it was a provisional, conditional love, and the creators had violated the last of those provisions.

6. Marvel comic movie adaptations - animated and live-action Spider-Man movies, Deadpool, the X-Men region, TV shows, the MCU as a whole. Much like House, the lighting's sour and the characters aren't nearly as much fun to watch anymore. I'll still come back from time to time, and leaving the movies is different from leaving the fandom, and it's not my fault they set standards that they then failed to meet.

7. X-Men comics in general and Joss Whedon in particular - because even though I watched Buffy and Angel long after walking away from Whedon, I knew from seeing him kill off a character he said he loved writing that he wasn't someone I could trust anymore, and when Marvel gave the go-ahead for that move on top of all the other repeated future ends of the world, I knew I couldn't trust them either.

8. No small number of fandom-based podcasts - because I don't have much patience for "um" and "like" and "you know" and other such filler words when I know you've taken notes and prepared for this well in advance, and you've also set up multiple Patreon tiers. When there's money involved, I expect you to use your time better than that.

9. Stargate Atlantis - because for all the raw entertainment value it offered, that value came tempered with a feeling of obligation and a gradual lack of playfulness - which can be done, provided the show commits to being more serious. I didn't get a sense of that.

10. Doctor Who - because the tidal nature of the show meant it'd gone out, and I never bothered to wander back to find if it's come back in, which told me all I needed to know about how much I'd enjoy spending more time with it.

Let me emphasize this isn't an anti-rec list, this isn't a set of warnings about not getting into something to begin with, this isn't even much of a set of complaints. This is something that, for all the frustrations involved, makes me happy because learning to know when to stop is a very grown-up skill. Knowing when you need a break or you've had enough takes work, and acting on that takes additional work. It's something that can be applied to situations more serious than a TV show - a friend who's no longer fun to hang out with, a job that's draining you dry. Walking away from something that ultimately doesn't mean much makes it easier to do it for something significantly more serious.

I could probably come up with another five or ten without much trouble, but if I did, it'd turn into an airing of grievances instead of a meditation on learning a new skill in a safe, controlled environment.

Some months ago, in an attempt to clear some congestion, I started adding ghost pepper flakes to my morning eggs. A few weeks ago, in an attempt to punch up the spice, I started adding a crushed up chile de árbol or two. Now I'm finding the issue with a meal's heat isn't the spiciness, but the temperature when it's served right from the stove.

I've now realized I don't have much of a context for what constitutes spiciness anymore. I can tell when there's some heat, I can tell when there's a fair amount of heat, and I'm going to have to keep looking for ways to get the kinds of lovely warm, playful sensations from good restaurants into my own kitchen. But not until I work through more of this bottle of ghost pepper flakes, because I've only got so much room in my apartment - which I suppose is all the more reason to try the Calabrian chili oil I bought on impulse a little while ago.

I know the trick to hailing a cab is less it being all in the wrist and more it being a white woman in a dress, but I like to think the wrist helps.

Challenge #5

In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your wishlist if you feel comfortable doing so.

1. Every time this comes around, I say I'd love to read a post-canon Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic set at least a couple decades after the show, long after the world's learned the truth about Slayers, vampires, demons, magic, and the endless battle between good and evil, where Buffy's famous enough that her arrival is heralded much as Miranda was in the "gird your loins" scene from The Devil Wears Prada, with Buffy having learned to command that level of respect and control. Few people write Buffy as an older woman, and even fewer try to reckon with a vastly changed world years or decades after the end of the show. It's possible this is already written and I just haven't seen it; if that's the case, I'm wishing someone would send it to me.

2. For ages, I've thought a vid of Peggy Olson from Mad Men to "All The Nasties" by Elton John would be an excellent character study. Beyond the on-the-nose of Don Draper to "sacred cows just fake it" and the turn of a show about advertising to a song about cultivating images and the struggle to be seen honestly, I can't ever get the image of the outro and the last "oh my soul" being Roger playing the piano while Peggy roller-skates across the empty SCDP offices, effortlessly leaving the frame as the song fades away.

3. If there's any Tom Cruise or Top Gun icons out there, please let me know. As was the custom, as I still enjoy doing, I'd love an appropriate fandom icon.

4. Related, fanart of the two live-action Interview with the Vampire Lestats where they're kissing while hovering and the actors' real-world height difference is both mitigated and made clear would curl my toes in the best way. If this is out there, please let me know; if not, please let me know about anyone's taking IWTV commissions and I'll see what funds I can budget.

5. As ever, as always, as usual, transformative works based on my fics. Fanart, banners, covers, podfics, moodboards - it's always a joy and it never gets old.

The Pitt continues to know what it's doing, while my own accomplishments largely consist of having cooked a pilaf for some upcoming lunches and arranging a short-term gig for a few days next week. Not too much editing, largely on account of global events and flashbacks to 2020 and a little bit on anticipation for the new episode. Hopefully more soon would be nice.

Also, since tagging on Tumblr is the new version of fandom icons, I decided on a Pluribus tag: we'll eat you up we love you so.