The Outtakes: Seth dances with Emily

Just a one off with Seth and Emily. I suppose, technically, any scene with Seth is a spoiler, so if you HATE spoilers and ever intend on reading Asylum when it's finished and I start posting it, then don't read this. However, that's so far away, and this is so unconnected to anything else, that I don't honestly see it being a problem. So, you've been warned, spoiler, I guess. :P

Opinion Time: To post, or not to post

One of my characters is deeply disturbed.

DEEPLY disturbed.

Like, takes it out on small children, 5 flavors of crazy disturbed.

Also not human.

The question is: do I share the crap that rolls through her head with the world? I wrote a scene with her and her brother earlier, and it's still got me shaken up. I'm disturbed that something like that lives inside me. But it's part of the world, part of their story, and just plain who they are. However, it's not at all relevant to what they're doing. She's a side character, with no place to go and no major plot point to affect. She just happened to want to share with a pretty graphic sex scene.

So, to post or not to post? I'd intended on posting some more mature stuff in here as I go on, to see what does and doesn't hit the filters, but this stuff is pretty bad. Nothing too terribly descriptive (at least as far as the disturbing stuff goes - the sex is as graphic as any other sex I write) but just... I dunno. It's bad enough even I'm not sure I want to claim, and for those of you that know me, that's pretty bad.

So what would you do, if you have a psychotic violent killer in your head, talking to you about the stuff they would do if their brother wasn't there to keep them in check?

Excuse me, have you seen my serpent?

So, I find myself in an interesting situation: I don't know what my character is thinking.

This isn't for the usual reason of stubbornness or lack of knowledge on his part. Rather, I simply cannot reach him.

I think he is in someone else's head.

The Writings: A bit of Zig

Sometimes, inspiration will strike at the strangest moments.

Cooking dinner earlier, I suddenly heard Zig start talking, and this little snippet was born. It's not as clear in the beginning, because I rushing to capture the dialogue, but as I was able to keep up with it, the writing blossomed, then just as quickly faded. Maybe this will be part of a story I write for him one day, maybe this is all he cares to tell me of it. Who knows? Sometimes, it's just enough for you the author to know, so that when a character references something, you're not completely lost. Sometimes, its fun to collect all these little nothings and share them with your audience (at least I hope you're all having fun :P)

She said What?! Getting to know your characters

My girlfriend and I were IMing the other day, and she shared this wonderful little gem of an idea. I find the concept extremely helpful for jumping back and forth between characters (like we tend to do) and for building up new characters you're not so sure of - or just for fun!

The idea is to take a sentence/concept, and "translate it" into how your character would express it. The examples she gave me when like this:

How to stay on (multi)task

As I've mentioned, my writing partner (Caitlin) and I tend to work on multiple things at once when we write together. It makes sure we each have something to work on when we sit down to write together, for one, and we tend to get distracted and follow plot/character bunnies for two. Currently, we're running ...4? stories in the same world (same neighborhood, actually) and same time frame at once, and so the plot lines are a lovely tangle mess. To keep ourselves straight on what we've already written, we tend to take pretty extensive notes.

These are the notes from Haven, the story I wrote my NaNo to learn more about. The events of my NaNo take place two years before my real time Haven, so you'll see some familiar characters, and some new ones as well. There's also even a proper excerpt at the bottom, so real writing for "Day 8" Hooray!