Nutmeg, accidental miracles, and the stories not taken

[corivax]

insomniac_tales says:
I'd like to read about your writing process. I get to read a lot of the finished products, but I'd like to know what goes into creating them (the strange little details: do you research or do you use things you already know about?). When do you usually write? Pen and paper or keyboard (or both)? And any other little thing you can think of

Comments

[caladri]

FIRST COMMENT

[corivax]

I was going to bet you ten bucks it'd be the only comment - I think there's a certain length threshold beyond which your chance of getting comments descreases a lot - but urox commented before I could. :)

[caladri]

Yeah but you threw in a poll which is cheating, plus you mention some interesting things even if one skims, though I think you did yourself a disservice by using a table rather than an unordered list. In my style tables lack borders (or did you manually add a border to your table?) and that makes the text really hard to read without highlighting each cell to isolate its text.

[corivax]

Huh. I will throw a border on, then.

ETA: wait, I already did. Maybe I should add some cell padding. Still won't fix what other people's styles do, though.

sundogs

[urox]

Well, if you have a hexagonal ice plate on one side and not the other, there'd be no formation of the second.
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/opt/ice/sd.rxml

Re: sundogs

[corivax]

Hm, that makes sense. I think I was imagining that sunlight was going into the crystals and splitting into two parts, so that if you got one fakesun, you got both of them. Thanks!

[gement]

I'll write your dialogue if you'll help me figure out how to describe things. I don't know how to describe things without getting all AND NOW I WILL STOP AND DESCRIBE THINGS. This is because I am description-blind when I read.

I blame Tolkein. Everyone was tall and grey-eyed, unless they were hobbits who were all red-cheeked and curly-haired, and then there were pages of landscape and poetry, which I tuned out. When physical setting is important to a plot, I generally find I have to go back and reread the descriptive bits, moving my lips.

In my mind, most stories take place in a platonic space where two people just talk and make facial expressions at each other. It's only when I write it down that I force myself to think about how the two people will interact physically, and then usually only with each other, not with their space.

You can bear this in mind while reading me; it may help you make more pointed commentary.

[corivax]

Do you think you really need any description other than how people interact with each other?

I thought the last scene I got to was pretty well described - you talked a lot about how people were sitting, sprawling, pacing...

[gement]

I worked pretty hard on that one. And Gerard's, well, a very kinetic personality, so it's easier with him.

So... when are you coming back to play?

[corivax]

Hm, it just occurred to me that it would be interesting, next time I'm reading, to write descriptions of the way the characters look to me. Probably not useful, but kind of fun. :)

[insomniac_tales]

Thank you, thank you for taking the time to write all that. It's really interesting to me to read how different authors approach things.

I edit once I've posted to terato as well, usually a few times but I still manage to miss things. There was one that I edited days later after giving aquaeri's comments time to sit and work in my brain

[gement]

I'm not sure how old you are, but when I was in primary school 20 years ago, there was already a hard line against physical punishment, and I'd say classroom disorder and difficulty with homework compliance was at about the same level I saw when tutoring in a grade school a couple years ago.

I'm personally in favor of the ban on corporal punishment, as I have more than one friend who was terribly abused by parents who were "just spanking" to excess. My personal experience is that people I knew whose parents resorted to physical punishment were more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems. But correlation is not causation, and that's another topic entirely.

[insomniac_tales]

I'm not for excessive spanking, nor even regular spanking. I'm just pro-discipline. I was never spanked because I never needed to be. I was slapped once in my adolescence and I earned it and I never misbehaved in that manner again. I imagine that's opening a can of worms, but that's how I feel about it.

I'd like our education system to actually teach us useful things. Instead of whittling wooden cars, let's teach kids how to parent (since they're becoming parents now); let's have kids learn real world knowledge that they'll apply to everyday life.

I'd also like to have alternative schools for kids who can't learn in a traditional setting and cause disruptions with behavioral problems.

[caladri]

I'd also like to have alternative schools for kids who can't learn in a traditional setting and cause disruptions with behavioral problems.

My highschool was successfully taking high-maintenance and non-traditional kids and putting them in front of computers to do their classwork. I enjoyed it a lot, though I got chastised for participating in the fora attached to it, though not very chastised. I wrote a long poem about queer identity which caught the attention of the teacher who oversaw the program; she did it because she was fairly non-traditional herself and was very good at providing the right sorts of encouragement for me at least, even if other people in the program took advantage of it to some extent. The worst I did was to IRC from there by setting up a web-based IRC client on my home server.

[corivax]

I had originally typed something explicitly referencing Go in up at the part that now says "the game is more complex than the rules." I'm not surprised you like this one. Go and cooking are both about combining simple things to get entire universes. :)