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Aug 2024

The amount of time I spent watching celebrity live streams.

Kattar Moon is pretty famous, and I was able to naturally write his live stream without a bit of issue because I (technically no longer wasted) so much time wasted lives streams in the not so distant at all past lol.

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    Apr '24
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    Sep '24
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I keep a running list of idiosyncrasies I see "in the wild." Everything from nail biting and eyebrow smoothing, to shirt tugging and purse clutching gets added to the list, and I use those habits to flesh out characters and make them more real. :wink:

that's a really good idea, I need more of those tbh, to make my characters more unique and realistic. Alicia's main habit is rubbing her knees

The mount of time spent looking at stupid videogame speed runs and challenges. A lot of people think that if you make a story about a game it’s just a linear progression of the start to a generic “final boss”, but pretty much everyone that plays videogames will spend 80% of their time screwing around. The silly side things make the story more fun to write.

Ish? I don’t know how to not massively spoiler it, but they spend like 90%-70% of their time in a game.

what sort of moves? can I guess by your username they do Kendo?

Nah, but since the story involves fighting I do try to visualize anything they do in combat (The ones that are possible of course) and make it happen in real life.

13 days later

This might seem kind of heavy, but hard life experiences in general.

This probably the case for most people, but things like living through a tropical storm/slight flood in a shack ("Rain Dance") and so many things that have been woven into "Damsel in the Red Dress" find new value, when they are written into a story. It feels like the experiences no longer happened for no reason when you can not just express what you went through, but show this to other people who believe that that part of your story matters. Maybe it can help them through similar things as well, if you choose to share it, or finally heal enough/become brave enough to be able to share it.


There’s a brief pause, and I think I can hear doors closing somewhere far away in his background. He asks almost timidly, “Do you want to tell me?”

Yes.

And no.

No no no.

I want to pretend it didn’t happen.

I want him to tell me it’ll be okay. That it wasn’t right.

And I don’t even know where to start.

With the calamity -? Or all of the space in between -?

Explaining what I should have seen coming but never did-

I’m such an idiot.

Maybe if I had…I wouldn’t be here, cowering in the dark, trying to get out of my body.

The tears start to fall in a steady stream like freezing rain.

It doesn’t hurt - or it hurts so completely - I can’t tell where it starts or it ends-

16 days later

My tangent/fickle brain. I've had a bad habit of being unable to pick or settle on any idea since I was a kid. I would constantly rename characters and stuff, or be unable to decide between different ideas for where plots could go. Now that is helping me weave a quite complex plot for Damsel in the Red Dress, where as more ideas come in, it just becomes deeper and more loopy XD.

19 days later
14 days later
13 days later

The amount of time I've had to spend on my natural hair lol. It adds a sense of fullness and realness to Essence's lifestyle and routine. I like adding little parts of normal life to my slice of life stories to make each character feel like an individual you could really meet, so adding in little parts of hair care routines is one more thing that feels like it just grounds the character in reality, despite being the product of my imagination.

25 days later

All the weird quirks that I've noted in children over the years. My FL is caring for a five-year-old, and I have five siblings, so I've spent a lot of time around little little children and gotten so used to their speech and behavioral patterns that writing Ayla (the five-year-old) is a snap

24 days later

My childhood obsession with greek mythology (okay it's not over) but I guess i didn't think i'd end up using this much stuff about mythology in my works. It's constantly used for descriptions, metaphors and analogies in "Damsel in the Red Dress" it's the inspiration behind a modern romance retelling my FL (and editor) is working on an author with in "A Dozen Morning Glories," and it's like 90% of the plot in my new novel (debuting this month) "Crystal Blue."

18 days later

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My obsession with marine biology. Just me and my siblings general obsession with zoology gets to run haywire in this story but I love it. Lots of little random facts and things we know weave their way into the story be it the different kinds of venom some creatures have or the sense of smell of things like sharks.

https://tapas.io/episode/3265010

19 days later