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bigcats-birds-and-books · 9 months

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Writer Life: Part 3.

Here are All The Notebooks I Own! Everything in the first picture is what was in Part 2 but Stacked (wow I go through a lot of paper).

The second picture is ALL. The back left two stacks are everything that's written in; everything else is Yet To Be Written In (although the blues and yellows splayed out front are for Lucius stuff and NaNo 2023 stuff, respectively, and that little flask-looking journal will be Bitch Journal Volume 2 when I fill up Volume 1). Also pictured here are my plot note cards! I started those in high school when I was trying to keep track of a trilogy, and I haven't looked back since.

By Total Counts, I have:

33 empty/unused notebooks (including: 13 gifted notebooks, 6 salvaged partial notebooks from other projects, and 6 bookmarked for specific usage imminently)

74 used/full notebooks (including although not limited to: 14 Lucius notebooks, 7 Driscoll notebooks, and At Least Six (6) Alicia notebooks, plus whatever loose leaf Alicia I've got squirreled away)

Consider this a Defense of the Honor of Writers Everywhere--sure, we have a lot of notebooks as a group, but!: At least some them really do get used!! And that's including the fact that the ~Vibe~ must be Correct™.

Part 1 | Part 2

#personal #writing #my writing #writer life #notebooks #y'all i'm literally floored by this lol #i've never counted them all before #and i have the object permanence of a fruit fly so like. if i don't see them they simply Do Not Exist #a lot of these live in the refrigerator tower of writing which is. opaque.#so this was a hell of a trip for meeee #anyway i DID manage to make them all fit again so that's nice!!#now i better. go do the tasks i was sposed to do today XD huh...

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bigcats-birds-and-books · 4 months

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Hello!

I stumbled upon your blog when searching for anything about Hiron Ennes’ book Leech and ur blog is so nice! I love Leech so so much and am hoping to find folks to talk about it with because I’ve been obsessed with it since I read it over year ago. I hope this isn’t too weird of an ask but it’s just such an excellent book!

hello and welcome, and thanks for your kind words!! it's delightful to find another LEECH enthusiast in the wild--what a deeply fucked up weird little book that has my whole heart!

i was actually shuffling books around last weekend to make space for what i'll read this year (i'm in a temporary living situation, so most of my library is in storage), and i decided to leave LEECH unboxed so i can reread it this fall. i'm obsessed with the POV and the voice and i'm VERY looking forward to a tear-it-apart reread now that i know some of what is going on. what a neat book!!

#answered #asks #weirdest-tree-in-the-forest #i don't get enough mail to have a mail tag so i appreciate you dropping into my inbox a lot for real!#i love talking books!!#i'm sorry i don't have more than general incoherent screaming for you but GOSH WHAT A BOOK!!!#(i tend to forget specifics not long after i read because of who i am as a person (object permanence of a fruit fly))#but enough of this one stuck with me that i KNOW i want to reread it closely and love it all over again but Deeper #i'm just. so completely obsessed with the POV and the voice and the tone and the vibes and the atmosphere #leech (beloved)#leech #hiron ennes #(also the author's name is just like. so supremely cool.)#(i know that's not actually the book but. hot damn what a NAME.)

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bigcats-birds-and-books · 5 days

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1, 12, 14 for Lucius and Driscoll? 👀

HELLO FRIEND THANKS FOR ASKING!! referring to this post.

since this all qualifies as Deep Lore Hours (which i love!! you're the best!!), and i'm a wordy person, have a cut checkpoint on your dash:

1. What was the first element of your OC that you remember considering (name, appearance, backstory, etc.)?

lucius actually happened because i asked claire for a starting blirb [sic] in ms. mecoli's creative writing class in high school (remember that???), and she gave me a bit about lucifer standing outside a churchyard with a big black dog*, and i thought "hm. bit on the nose," (for the weird little christian fiction thing i thought i was writing, which has obviously since mutated Significantly), so i changed it to lucius. originally he was the Antagonist™, and human although he didn't realize he came out of a test tube just like bewinged lili did, and all i knew about him was grown-up white dude with black hair.

obviously, he has since undergone SIGNIFICANT revisions (lol. lmfao, even), but embryonically he started with a modified name!! (i went digging through my archives, and i do in fact still have the index card with claire's pencil writing below my pen request! wild.)

(i don't actually remember when i decided he needed wings too, but i think it was around the time i realized i wanted my protags to be all Not Exactly Me, and therefore boy protag would be Different, and then he got his black wings!)

*the big black dog has also made it back into this version, after falling out of the intermediates!! vanya, my beloved, ...

for driscoll, i vaguely remember the purple hair probably being first (i recall chewing on finding The Right Name for a while?). to confirm, i went into THAT archived notebook (red, helpfully labeled "LIMINAL PREWRITE," with "LANGUAGE AND COMP" obliterated beneath thanks again, high school).

weirdly, the first four (4) pages of the driscoll thing is NOT the character profile (that shows up on page 5, and does mention purple hair/brown eyes/physical appearance), but one of these OC ask meme type things, transcribed into the notebook. hilariously, the very first question is "If they want to buy a firearm, what would it be for?" which. omg. (my answer eventually got to "no they wouldn't lol," but it's wild to see how that slow revelation happened on september 3, 2017, when i was first figuring this kid out.)

so apparently first for driscoll i wrote some random character finding Q&As, and then i have the story of their misplacement, and then the physical details, which: wild, on all fronts, to me. (it's a good thing i keep my notebooks in an archive refrigerator tower, or i would've bluescreened on driscoll 100% haha.)

12. What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC (any form of art: writing, drawing, edits, etc.)?

oooh, good question. my lucius answer is probably biased, because i hadn't started doing the Bitch Journal while i was working through that drafting/those revisions (and i have the object permanence of a fruit fly), but i THINK my biggest difficulty was figuring out the right balance of ~Interiority~? and i still don't love where i left that querying draft at (now, after four years' distance, lol), but getting the right balance of Thoughts and Reactions down on the page was difficult for me, which i suspect was because i've been too in his head for so long, if that makes sense? like the things he notices and what he narrates on imply enough of the interiority to me that i don't see gaps readers do (because, shocker, they HAVEN'T been living in his head since uh. 2007.). and i think i cut away some of the interiority in my preliminary Wordiness Passes, which nerfed me, but i started fixing that in the fourth draft!

my driscoll answer is just. a web of angst lol. and i know most of it is Living Situational/Circumstantial, so we're going to Ignore That and just answer with the Actual Textual Difficulties.

so: driscoll's Actual Textual Difficulties are mostly that i started out writing thing as "someone i'd like to be" with regards to kindness and gentleness and how much they care about people, but somehow i had to backpedal and get a Character Development Conflict in there, which is hard when my starting point was "very good noodle." i think i'm getting there!! but nesting competing wants into a late-stage draft without breaking anything (or, y'know, while finding stealth-broken things that i didn't think were), is a Trying Time™. i'm leveling up about it! enjoying the leveling up!! i'd be leveling up faster if i wasn't burning all this emotional bandwidth on a bullshit living situation! we're fine!!

14. If you had to narrow it down to 2 things that you MUST keep in mind while working with your OC, what would those things be?

OH FUN, i percolated on this on my WHOLE BIG WALK yesterday, thank u for this enrichment

lucius: first, physicality is key. he has to be Very Aware of where he is in physical space/how much of it he's taking up (because an 18+ foot wingspan really doesn't fuck around, and only half the time is he somewhere that his dimensions are accommodated). when his awareness slips, it (1) has to be for a good reason and (2) usually results in something breaking, and both of those are fun to play with >:D

second, what he notices needs to read like More Than Human--he's got raptor vision, and he's spent half his life around other hybrids with combat training, so he's very visually Intense™ and good at reading a wide variety of body language. and because he's Friends with these combat trained hybrids, he's asked a lot of questions, and he notices a lot more than human people would.

driscoll: first, child, you have physical limitations, and you ignore them at your own peril. i put this kid in a shifting monsterscape armed with pretty much just a flashlight and the distinct ability NOT to be able to run away from their problems (because their lungs don't cooperate), so both driscoll and i have to be very aware of the Exit Plan for any situation they get themselves into (and they get into a Lot of Situations).

second, another dual-wielding type of thing: driscoll is both weirdly in tune with In Between and mostly cannot tell people that, so how i write about them navigating has to change depending on who they're with. hazard is the only one they're fully open with at the start, and they have to be carefully guarded with the other walkers/crew, AND they have to tell newly misplaced just enough to inspire confidence without revealing so much that they (the newly misplaced) will be Suspicious if they stick around to become townspeople themselves. it's a Lot to keep in mind (perhaps uh. More. than i kept in mind. in drafts two and three lol. we're working on it.)

THANKS AGAIN FRIEND THIS WAS SO FUN!!!

#ask meme #ask game #oc asks #lucius #driscoll #in btw #aw #vanya #(mentioned)#hazard #(also mentioned lol)#pyr0clast #text #writing #answered #forreal thanks friend i love this shit i'm sorry i'm so wordy i did try to peel some filler words out lmao #loved going into the deep lore and reminding myself where they came from :)#the pros of being a paper hoarder lolol

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