I’m not officially on social media, but I do peek at non-civilization-destroying venues from time to time. I see a lot of writer games, of which WordWeavers seems the most fun. Per the official Google Doc:
WordWeavers is a writing game on Mastodon created by Branwen OShea and Alina Leonova. The hosts post daily questions for each month.
Start anytime, answer any questions you want, skip as many as you feel like. Use the hashtag, talk to other writers and have fun!
The only rules: be respectful to others and use CWs (content warnings) for posts that might be triggering.
Everyone is welcome to participate 🧡
I can’t participate there, so I’m going to participate here!
What is your SC’s relationship with their parents?
They’ve been separated by a curse for 20-some years of Hero’s life, during which his mother died. His last interaction with his then-beloved father involved said father bellowing for a sword to cut off Hero’s hand, so Hero has some complicated feelings. He is nonetheless determined to break the curse and free his father (and others), though he intends not to stick around for the reunion.
Who is the most influential person in your MC’s life?
She had two mentors, one for book learning and social graces and the other for fighting, killing, thieving, escaping, lying, etc. The former saw too much of himself in Heroine and kept a distance between them in an effort to prevent her from following in the footsteps of his regrettable past. The latter kept Heroine close, the better to mold her.
She prefers the former as a person, but with the level of rejection there, she had to take the praise where she could get it, even if it more often than not was accompanied by a slap.
Is there a genre or type of story you’ll never write?
I’m not going back to contemporary romance. I have given up on this world, and that is not a head space from which HEAs set in it are possible.
Does reading your own words bring you joy?
Joy is a strong word, but sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. When there are years of distance between writing and reading and I’ve forgotten the work that went into it and I’m laughing and sniffling and swearing in the places readers are supposed to laugh and sniffle and swear, I’m open to the possibility I did a decent job.
Do you draw inspiration from other characters?
Sure. Sometimes I feel a character’s creator dropped the ball, missed the point, told the wrong story, etc. I know people tell the stories they want to tell, regardless of whether a different story would be more interesting to me personally, but the gut reaction is still “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!” I don’t share that feeling with the creator as if it’s supposed to be relevant to them, but sometimes I have to pursue justice for the wronged character on my own time.
I have a secret Willy Wonka-esque project in which raffling off one’s legacy proves to be a huge mistake that needs to be rectified a few years later. A character in my current series is heavily influenced by a character from FFXV who could have had a much better arc and whose origin was completely botched. But between correcting the other writers’ “mistakes” and reshaping the character to fit into the situation and setting I’m working with, they grow into something else. There may be enough traces for some readers to identify the inspiration, but expecting a transplant of the whole source character will cause disappointment because it’s not fanfic.
(Not a criticism of fanfic. Our reasons and goals are just different—which can be said of any two writers. Categorizing defines expectations so readers aren’t disappointed.)
How often do you back up your work?
My word processor autosaves every 5 minutes. My documents folder backs up to a thumb drive hourly. I email my current projects to myself at the end of every work session. Once a week, I get the SSD out of the fire safe long enough to do a backup. Nothing’s perfect, but cosmic forces would have to conspire against me to wipe out all four precautions at once.
I back up my website when something like this question reminds me I should. 🤪 I don’t care immensely about the blog content, but the static pages (which were recently updated with new links) would be a bear to recreate.
With self-pub, you take on a publisher’s responsibility of asset preservation: ebook files, print book files, cover art files, audiobook files, etc. The distributors to which you upload those files are not a substitute for file storage. Most don’t have a backend option to retrieve your files. All do some amount of file conversion to meet their requirements, so even where you can download files, they won’t be your originals. (If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen someone ask how to get a lost Word document back after epub conversion so they can make changes, I could afford to become fond of good yarn and I’d be typing this on an iMac.) If you use a cover artist or formatter, they may have their own data disasters or go out of business, so don’t rely on them to hold onto files for you forever.
If you have any writing, art, audio, video, or anything else important to you on any platform that could be shut down or turned into a dumpster fire at someone else’s whim, either maintain your own copies of those things or embrace their fleeting nature.
