Reply to this meme by yelling "words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.
Kitty
I have always loved kitties, and we had bunches of them when I was little. HOWEVER, due to the fact that my father apparently was stuck on litter shoveling duty semi-permanently, when we moved away from my grandmother's house, we got a dog and cats were not allowed back in the house, no matter how much we begged.
Fast forward to 1999. I'm a sophomore in college, my brother's just graduated and moved into a studio apartment in Chicago. He wants a dog, but he's gone a lot on business, so he gets a scrappy orange kitten named Dominick, who is a crazyass cat and does thing like get stuck clinging to the top of the blinds when they, ah, unexpectedly go up, falls in the toilet, and steals oreos out of the cupboard.
Fast forward to 2002. I've graduated from college and am unemployed, yay, thanks to a recession, and thus am stuck at home in semi-rural Illinois working in the office of a Sears store (this was seriously the worst job of my life, and I spent 3 summers and 2 Christmas seasons working in a specialty ham store. And one year at college working in the cafeteria.) My brother had remodeling or something going on that summer, so he deposits the cat at home with my parents, where I am promptly chosen as the sucker.
Fast forward to 2003. My brother adopts a very ill Boxer. Dominick is unamused.
Fast forward to Spring, 2004. I am in grad school at the University of Wisconsin, having decided to postpone the real world for another couple of years, and I get a call from the brother. Do I want to adopt a 5 year old, bitchy brat of a cat? Uh. Sure.
So I get a cat the next fall, and he's spoiled all year by me, my roommate, and half our apartment building, before I graduate, attain gainful employment, and move him to New York. Where he just has to make do with me. We'll stop here.
Dan
So, um, I have a really really clear character type, and that character type is the highly intelligent, quietly dangerous sort. Sometimes a sidekick, more frequently a rival, it's pretty much guaranteed that my favorite character in any given series will fit into this archtype.
Dan Dreiberg doesn't really fit into this archtype, but he's my favorite Watchmen character anyway, He is highly intelligent, even though Adrian and Manhattan get all the press for their brains. You just have to look around the Owls' Nest to realize that in any other group, Dan Dreiberg would be the brains of the outfit.
In a way, Dan doesn't really fit neatly in a box, and that's part of why I like him so much. He's a complete geek with a couple of Harvard degrees, and he can totally kick hardened criminals' asses, without a whole lot of effort and while being a good 7 years out of practice. He's pretty timid in some ways, and completely badass in others. He's maintained some kind of friendship with everyone from Rorschach to Adrian Veidt, which indicates a kind of flexibility, but his reaction to Adrian at Karnak indicates that there are some things he doesn't compromise on. At the same time, despite how he lashed out at Adrian at Karnak, I can see Dan...eventually forgiving him, or at least seeing his point. He's not an absolutist. He's an idealistic pragmatist.
Dan Dreiberg is a complicated nice guy, and that's what I think I like best about him. He's full of contradictions, and that makes him fascinating to think about and interesting to write.
Spies
Oh my lord, spies. Okay.
I was never really a big James Bond or Mission: Impossible person. I watched the movies and liked them despite the fact that I can't really stand Tom Cruise (random note: THANK GOD THEY DIDN'T CAST HIM AS ADRIAN VEIDT), but I was never really into them until I started watching Alias in 2004. This was towards the end of its run, and it was really better in the first couple of seasons, but I was completely into the whole complicated espionage world in a major way. Alias was the first non-anime fandom I was really into, and I wrote fic for it from 2004 to 2006, when the fandom started to peter out and I moved on to more active fandoms.
About a month and a half ago,![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
glasspyramids had an idea for a spy AU, which was awesome except...it pretty quickly morphed into an original story. Within two weeks we had damn near 60K words of a first novel, ideas for at least one more, and even though we're not actively writing right now (theoretically, we're supposed to be editing, but I haven't done any for a...week), it's still eating my brain and looks to be doing so for a long, long time.
It's important because it's the first original thing I've written that has surpassed about 5K words. Ever. Before we did this, I kind of doubted that I'd ever make it as a novelist simply because I couldn't manage to sustain a plot for that length of story. But I guess I can, even though it's currently kind of a mess and in need of at least three editing passes and a great deal of expanding before its anywhere near submittable. The thing that excites me about it is I can see the skeleton of a really terrific story and I know what needs to be added or changed to get it there. It's one of those situations where writing isn't easy, but it feels natural, and those come along rarely enough for me that I know it's an awesome thing when it happens.
OTP
I used to have tons and tons of OTPs, but nowadays I really have only a few, and they need to fit a few criteria. It's not that I can't break them up, because I have a deep-seated love of angst that dates back to being exposed to Emily Bronte at a far too young age, but I can't really see any other relationship really working in the longterm. They have to be beyond cute together, they have to have a connection that can't ever be completely irradicated. I hesitate to say soulmates; there are some OTPs I have that I wouldn't call soulmates, but they're irrevocably connected for one reason or another.
And finally, because I'm shallow and also because it leads so nicely into word number five: they have to be scorchingly hot together. Without a doubt.
Porn
Like every other red-blooded rabid fangirl, I love porn. But Jesus Christ, sometimes I hate writing it. It's that whole balance of keeping it hot while keeping it realistic. I mean, its not like I'm silly enough to have ever used, say, peanut butter as lube, but still. I write slash, and it's not exactly something I have personal experience with. So I have long stretches of time where I'll RP porn, but I won't really write sex scenes in solo fanfics, just because the balance of heat, realism, and keeping the feel of the whole story is really hard, dammit.
Which is not to say that I don't encourage everyone else in the world to write some for me.
Holy crap, that took a long time.
Kitty
I have always loved kitties, and we had bunches of them when I was little. HOWEVER, due to the fact that my father apparently was stuck on litter shoveling duty semi-permanently, when we moved away from my grandmother's house, we got a dog and cats were not allowed back in the house, no matter how much we begged.
Fast forward to 1999. I'm a sophomore in college, my brother's just graduated and moved into a studio apartment in Chicago. He wants a dog, but he's gone a lot on business, so he gets a scrappy orange kitten named Dominick, who is a crazyass cat and does thing like get stuck clinging to the top of the blinds when they, ah, unexpectedly go up, falls in the toilet, and steals oreos out of the cupboard.
Fast forward to 2002. I've graduated from college and am unemployed, yay, thanks to a recession, and thus am stuck at home in semi-rural Illinois working in the office of a Sears store (this was seriously the worst job of my life, and I spent 3 summers and 2 Christmas seasons working in a specialty ham store. And one year at college working in the cafeteria.) My brother had remodeling or something going on that summer, so he deposits the cat at home with my parents, where I am promptly chosen as the sucker.
Fast forward to 2003. My brother adopts a very ill Boxer. Dominick is unamused.
Fast forward to Spring, 2004. I am in grad school at the University of Wisconsin, having decided to postpone the real world for another couple of years, and I get a call from the brother. Do I want to adopt a 5 year old, bitchy brat of a cat? Uh. Sure.
So I get a cat the next fall, and he's spoiled all year by me, my roommate, and half our apartment building, before I graduate, attain gainful employment, and move him to New York. Where he just has to make do with me. We'll stop here.
Dan
So, um, I have a really really clear character type, and that character type is the highly intelligent, quietly dangerous sort. Sometimes a sidekick, more frequently a rival, it's pretty much guaranteed that my favorite character in any given series will fit into this archtype.
Dan Dreiberg doesn't really fit into this archtype, but he's my favorite Watchmen character anyway, He is highly intelligent, even though Adrian and Manhattan get all the press for their brains. You just have to look around the Owls' Nest to realize that in any other group, Dan Dreiberg would be the brains of the outfit.
In a way, Dan doesn't really fit neatly in a box, and that's part of why I like him so much. He's a complete geek with a couple of Harvard degrees, and he can totally kick hardened criminals' asses, without a whole lot of effort and while being a good 7 years out of practice. He's pretty timid in some ways, and completely badass in others. He's maintained some kind of friendship with everyone from Rorschach to Adrian Veidt, which indicates a kind of flexibility, but his reaction to Adrian at Karnak indicates that there are some things he doesn't compromise on. At the same time, despite how he lashed out at Adrian at Karnak, I can see Dan...eventually forgiving him, or at least seeing his point. He's not an absolutist. He's an idealistic pragmatist.
Dan Dreiberg is a complicated nice guy, and that's what I think I like best about him. He's full of contradictions, and that makes him fascinating to think about and interesting to write.
Spies
Oh my lord, spies. Okay.
I was never really a big James Bond or Mission: Impossible person. I watched the movies and liked them despite the fact that I can't really stand Tom Cruise (random note: THANK GOD THEY DIDN'T CAST HIM AS ADRIAN VEIDT), but I was never really into them until I started watching Alias in 2004. This was towards the end of its run, and it was really better in the first couple of seasons, but I was completely into the whole complicated espionage world in a major way. Alias was the first non-anime fandom I was really into, and I wrote fic for it from 2004 to 2006, when the fandom started to peter out and I moved on to more active fandoms.
About a month and a half ago,
glasspyramids had an idea for a spy AU, which was awesome except...it pretty quickly morphed into an original story. Within two weeks we had damn near 60K words of a first novel, ideas for at least one more, and even though we're not actively writing right now (theoretically, we're supposed to be editing, but I haven't done any for a...week), it's still eating my brain and looks to be doing so for a long, long time. It's important because it's the first original thing I've written that has surpassed about 5K words. Ever. Before we did this, I kind of doubted that I'd ever make it as a novelist simply because I couldn't manage to sustain a plot for that length of story. But I guess I can, even though it's currently kind of a mess and in need of at least three editing passes and a great deal of expanding before its anywhere near submittable. The thing that excites me about it is I can see the skeleton of a really terrific story and I know what needs to be added or changed to get it there. It's one of those situations where writing isn't easy, but it feels natural, and those come along rarely enough for me that I know it's an awesome thing when it happens.
OTP
I used to have tons and tons of OTPs, but nowadays I really have only a few, and they need to fit a few criteria. It's not that I can't break them up, because I have a deep-seated love of angst that dates back to being exposed to Emily Bronte at a far too young age, but I can't really see any other relationship really working in the longterm. They have to be beyond cute together, they have to have a connection that can't ever be completely irradicated. I hesitate to say soulmates; there are some OTPs I have that I wouldn't call soulmates, but they're irrevocably connected for one reason or another.
And finally, because I'm shallow and also because it leads so nicely into word number five: they have to be scorchingly hot together. Without a doubt.
Porn
Like every other red-blooded rabid fangirl, I love porn. But Jesus Christ, sometimes I hate writing it. It's that whole balance of keeping it hot while keeping it realistic. I mean, its not like I'm silly enough to have ever used, say, peanut butter as lube, but still. I write slash, and it's not exactly something I have personal experience with. So I have long stretches of time where I'll RP porn, but I won't really write sex scenes in solo fanfics, just because the balance of heat, realism, and keeping the feel of the whole story is really hard, dammit.
Which is not to say that I don't encourage everyone else in the world to write some for me.
Holy crap, that took a long time.
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amused
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