State of the Neko address: week 56

song+ Back to December- Taylor Swift- Speak Now
book+ only the one i'm hacking at mentally
quest+ getting ready to sew again
upper+ i've passed 10k words!
downer+ i'm still not quite feeling normal again
attire+ pajama pants and a tank top
drink+ dr pepper

as much as i've grumbled about not being a writer, today i passed the 10k word count. (specifically 10,075 words as of 6:30 this morning) it's still a very rough draft but i'm reaching the point that i'm more pleased with how my characters are turning out. there's still a good bit of the story i have yet to figure out and capture, but it's fleshing itself out steadily. sometimes the development is in words and sometimes it's as costumes the characters would wear. when the costumes come to me i know that the next thing i need to do is figure out why they need the particular costume. it's led to a richer world than it'd be otherwise. world expansion via wardrobe may be strange to some, but it makes perfect sense to me.

this monstrous thing i'm writing started as a kind of fan fiction exercise, but honestly at this point the people i've made up are more interesting than the ones i started with. it's hard to write the stereotypes convincingly since there's only so far i can relate to the clichés inherent in the original material. i love it so far as relaxing and enjoying other people's work, but real people don't really slot neatly into character archetypes, so the flawed individuals i'm getting to build for myself are far more arresting and i'm more and more fascinated writing them. initially there were the three characters i was writing that i didn't make up, and now i'm up to six original characters that have taken up twice the word count of their parents. that's about all the others ended up being in my story, enough exposition to realistically set up the world as i wanted to play in it, then they got shifted off to the background. so i could do the fun stuff. i've got more new characters hovering on the periphery of my mind ready to flesh out the world further. even if they don't figure prominently in the story, knowing them can only serve to increase the depth of the world i write for the others.

otherwise i'm doing okay, but unremarkably. i do think all this writing is serving its purpose and getting me past the funky mood that's kept me from really accomplishing anything potentially lucrative lately. once i don't think i'll automatically screw up anything i attempt i should be able to get some things made and listed for sale. that'll be nice.

i will say that it's really annoying when i find myself finally settling into the established vocal patterns of characters not from my own mind and the spelling/grammar check i run highlights the entire conversation green as it's made of sentence fragments. yes, i'm aware thanks, but it's how the morons have been established speaking, so when i say to ignore it could you just IGNORE IT? ugh. sometimes i think the grammar check is out to make me nuts. the stuff i write for my own characters is green line free, with red squiggles occasionally pointing out that i'm lapsing into things other than english in my spazzy typing. i'm a great speller, but i do type kinda like a monkey attempting dictation. my speed is decent, but there's a high likelihood of the initial draft of anything at all looking like shorthand for an eldritch language. i spell check everything before sharing it for a reason. >_>