oh_crime | Member Posts

Today I wanted to stay home from work, so I did. To celebrate myself, I made my favorite vegetarian tortilla soup and ate it with Wisconsin Organic Fontina that I got at HEB (before people panicking over the weather cleared the shelves).

It’s pretty good. It is extremely smooth and mild when you first bite into it, but then you find that it’s a bit crumbly and has a slightly sharp flavor. I actually really liked it. I had it with Hatch green chili pita chips and spicy pumpkin tortilla soup and it was a good combo.

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Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge. The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

10 happy times

1. Quiet mornings before my wife gets up when I can read, write and update my DW with Ella nearby.
2. Hammock time with Ella.
3. Browsing in a bookstore.
4. Cooking for my parents and/or wife.
5. When I'm in the midst of a solid piece of writing that is flowing.
6. Puttering around outside looking at trees and rocks.
7. Listening to music, discovering new-to-me music, talking to people about music.
8. Sending and receiving snail mail, whether it's Postcrossing or mail to/from people I know.
9. Figuring things out, making something new, having to work out how to put something together.
10. When you see something or hear something and it sparks an idea.

used_songs

Challenge #7

LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

I like my ability to be all in and focused in a conversation with a student, especially when it comes to their writing.

I like how I can chain together random things and make something beautiful.

I like my purple glasses.

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Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

I keep copious notes on my phone and in commonplace books of raw material for writing. I collect stories from people, interesting words, bits of poetry, images, etc. When I have an idea for something, I page randomly through all of that and see what if anything sticks. Then I do an enormous amount of research (my favorite part of the process) and start a google doc with research notes and chunks of writing. Sometimes I do a sketch to help visualize the motion of the plot. When I wrote a crossover that involved House of Leaves, I sketched the house I was using as my setting so I could keep the physical space in front of me.

Then I write from both ends and the middle in pieces that are gradually stitched together. I'm not great at plots; I let the imagery and characters do the heavy lifting.

Once I have a draft, I rewrite it obsessively until I'm happy with it.

( pics )

I also generally carry sticky notes and have a lot of things jotted on those. I've been keeping commonplace books since middle school (they were spirals back then), so I have a lot of material. Honestly, I never have used most of it directly in my writing, but I feel like the ideas I have tried out in those pages are like training for when I do write a completed pieces. And sometimes I just enjoy writing short pieces that no one else will ever see, just for me.

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Challenge #9 at

snowflake_challenge

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

I cheated and read an article online that listed a bunch of tropes and these are my findings. I like hidden worlds and secret societies, but I strongly dislike chosen one stories. And I don't read a lot of fantasy, so I don't tend to encounter hidden worlds much. I guess I just like the idea of their being a secret mirror of our society. I've written a couple of fics where various pantheons of gods intersect with modern society and with each other because I like imagining what might be going on that we don't see.

I LOVE me an amateur sleuth. That's why Miss Marple has always been my absolute favorite, closely followed by Jessica Fletcher. Right now I'm reading Three Bags Full where the sleuths are the ultimate amateurs - a flock of sheep whose shepherd has been murdered! I also like amateur spies like Tommy and Tuppence and Mrs. Pollifax.

If I like the source material, I will try almost any type of AU. The only kind I tend to bounce off of are set in school; as a teacher, I find them so unbelievable that I can't suspend my disbelief.

I'm also very fond of crossovers. Sometimes I'll see someone bigging up a crossover on the AO3 subreddit and, even if I know nothing about either canon, I'll give it a try. I also really enjoy writing crossovers; it's like weaving together two different fabrics or putting together a puzzle.

And while we are on the subject of things I like, I love writing and reading drabbles. I enjoy a fic where someone has provided a link to a playlist. I like when people play around with form and experiment, even when it doesn't quite work. I like an author with audacity.