#y'all continue to enable my navel-gazing and i love you for it mwah <3

[thee-morrigan]

If you're still doing these: 3 and 19 from the writer asks? <3

[weird questions for writers]

i am (and thank you <3)! once again dropping these under a cut because brevity is the soul of wit, besties~

3. What is your writing ritual and why is it cursed?

there are no words. it is a reasonable hour of the day, i am rested and have a free block of time and ample coffee, but i do not have words.

i am in the middle of a seminar and am driven to distraction by the volume of words that have flooded my brain. i try to sketch out the plot ideas i have in the margins of my notes. the seminar ends and i have managed to take two sets of notes -- one for research and one for fiction -- that immediately lose any tether to meaning. (i keep them anyway.)

it is 3am on a workday and i am awake after a decadent 4 hours of sleep. the cat has discovered the bottom of his food bowl is newly visible and has swept every item off my nightstand in protest. i lie in bed trying to bully myself back to sleep for an hour to no avail, then resign myself to feeding the cat. bleary-eyed at the kitchen table, i mainline espresso and bang out an impressively cogent few thousand words instead of sleeping. this is the most productive i will be all day.

(all of this is unfortunately how it tends to go for me - it's cursed because, well, all of it but also bc my partner and i are convinced the cat is actually a babadook)

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

this is going to sound annoying, but i honestly can't remember a time i wasn't writing. i think even when i couldn't really write i was still engaging in storytelling and narrative play. for whatever reason, my adhd let me hyperfocus on reading as a kid (and i started reading pretty early), so pretty much from the moment i could read stories i started trying to write my own. there were always more stories to read, so there were always more stories to write.

it also helped that i grew up in the 90s and was lucky enough to have had a computer and internet access (dial-up, my beloved) from a fairly early age, so once i discovered fandom and places like livejournal (and the numerous homebrew geocities fansites lmaoooo), i got super into writing for online spaces.

since i spent so much time reading and writing and talking about reading/writing, i naturally became pretty good at it for school purposes too, and (shocker) i love both praise and critical analysis, so spent a long time in academia writing and teaching writing. (we can call academia as a whole a bump in the road, but that's a whole 'nother story.)

where am i and where am i going? i like to think my writing has only improved in terms of quality and finesse. otherwise, I'm pretty much doing the same things I've always been doing because they're fun. after all, there's always another story to tell.