Answers to today’s questions at thefridayfive @ Dreamwidth
1. Where do you get ideas/inspo for your writing?
Anything scifi I’ve ever watched or read. Also some erotic novels I bought in the 90s from the Black Lace series, particularly the historical ones. And all the fanfic I read!
2. Do you have a favorite place to write?
Nope. I write on my couch or at my desk, but usually on my couch. I’ve tried writing outside on my tiny back yard and in a cafe, but I can’t concentrate – there’s too much noise and too many things going on as people pass by.
3. What are your tricks for getting through writers block?
I haven’t found one that works. I’m not sure it’s a writer’s block I have though – I’ve always had difficulty starting (even back in school!), and after I got ill, I just don’t have the energy to be creative much. So it’s now hard because of that + still hard to start! Usually if I can keep writing, forcing it out, for about 30 minutes, it gets easier and easier after that and eventually I get into a “zone” where I can write for up to 6 hours without problems and a few short breaks not breaking the “zone”. But then I’m wiped after that, but feel good.
4. Favorite genre to write? Do you have a different favorite genre for reading?
I love writing fanfic smut! It’s definitely my favorite fanfic genre to write. As for reading – fanfic, I love reading smut as well. But I also love very much long, plotty but smutty fics that stick to the canon era/world, picks a point and then goes on to extrapolate how the story might go from there! Game of Thrones Sansa/Sandor fics are great for this! I love so many of them.
I also enjoy writing horror occasionally, and that’s where scifi comes in.
As for reading published novels – I read detective/crime novels the most. In recent years, I’ve re-discovered my love of scifi reading… but only read more recent ones, such as The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey, White Space series by Elizabeth Bear, Semiosis series by Sue Burke. I loved Seven Eves by Neal Stephenson. Because at some point I got so fed-up with the “classic” scifi – Asimov etc. and one of the reasons for that was, that women characters were either absent or did nothing important and the men were the only heros. And I also found a lot of the writing style of the classic scifi boring. So I stopped reading scifi somewhere in the 90s.
My most favorite genre to read is a mix of of action-adventure/bit of romance/thriller/supernatural so novels like Dean R. Koontz writes, that type of thing.
5. What is something you really want to write but haven’t gotten around to yet?
In my case it’s more like, I’d really really like to not loose all interest once a story out of my head on paper/computer so I could post it to my site and AO3. But ever since I got ill, whenever I get the story out of my head, whether that’s on paper or Scrivener/FocusWriter/LibreOffice on the laptop, in its very raw, vomited form – I lose ALL interest. It’s done. It doesn’t even come to my mind anymore. And it’s too raw and uglymangled to be shared – half of it might be in English, some in Finnish, skipping bits of scenes or dialogue just to get it out, with the intention to write the bridges (usually just a sentence or two per missing bit) later on while cleaning it up. But cleaning up never happens because the story is done, complete once it’s out, and I can ramp up exactly ZERO interest to do anything further with it. It simply is DONE.
That never happened before I got ill.