#ftpp

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Googling “can deer roll their eyes?” is, uh...

Well, I’ve seen a LOT of information about hunting but I still don’t have an answer. But they do have very long horizontal pupils

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Half the problem with editing is that I’ll be doing it normally for a bit and then I’ll be stuck on the same scene for three days because I’m trying to shove twelve more jokes into this clown car of a third draft.

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Guns or Swords? Non-magical combat tropes.

I’m comparing and contrasting three worlds here, because I think it works neatly. This is... mostly rambling, not advice. Carmena

The first is the world of my Fairy Tale Police Procedural, which is extraordinarily loosely based on the late 15th century. (About as loosely based as Discworld is on... anything.) Fireworks exist, but guns don’t... at least in any reliable and accurate form. But they have crossbows. Somewhat expensive, but accurate, deadly, and long range. And they have laws about who can carry a sword in public, when, and if it needs to be sealed for people’s protection. The guard is usually armed with batons, on the theory that criminals should be captured alive, and that weapons for the guard are for self defense against someone attempting to slug them or pull a knife. Could you kill someone with a baton? Absolutely, but in theory a heavy stick isn’t something where every time you use it you’re probably intending to kill your target. Telmide (One out of many Adeptsverse worlds...)

Guns exist. Machine guns exist. There are still less guns in 1920′s Cygnathium than there are in modern chicago, and Lindsay’s knowledge of guns pretty much boils down to which end points away from the shooter. That said, she doesn’t precisely go up against the mob (at this point) so I’ll deal with how she reacts to a gun pointed at her when I come to that bridge. Full disclosure: Lindsay’s gun ignorance dates back to an argument I had with my high school creative writing teacher, who insisted that every author needed to know all about guns so their characters could identify them, and I strongly disagreed, given that sometimes your character has never interacted with guns in their life. Then again, I’m 90% certain he didn’t realize it was possible to write a story about a demisexual lesbian detective in an alternate history 1920 with magic, because his hatred of genre was well established.

Rishathsverse

Projectile weapons punch holes in ships, and weapons with gunpowder are an explosion or fire risk even when unloaded. An electricity based stunner will take down most varieties of aliens, and the lethal amount of shock will depend on their size and anatomy, so you can use a stunner as a nonlethal weapon if you don’t set it to maximum. You can also seriously fry any exposed control systems with an electrical weapon, at great risk to yourself, considering that might be what keeps the oxygen flowing on this ship. For this reason, most spacefarers keep knives on hand - both as a close quarters weapon that they know can’t damage the ship, and because they’re a more useful emergency tool than a stunner. You will probably never be boarded outside of a star system, but if you damage or disable your ship in interplanetary space you can be just as dead as if you’d done it traveling above light speed. The cheapest method of ensuring a relative lack of weapons at any spaceport remains metal detectors, so a lot of boot knives are advanced ceramics. Stunners and guns are still present on several planets and you never know on the way down exactly how things might have changed in the weeks or months you were in transit. Estella never uses her knife to intimidate anyone, because Rioch, for all his pretty feathers, has a velociraptor style killing claw on each foot and generally doesn’t wear any protective shoes or socks unless he has to.

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Scenes cut during Camp Nano

1) Eight becomes embarrassed at the mere suggestion that one or more of his coworkers might have sex lives. 2) A bit character chews the scenery. 3) Hazel accidentally takes Eight on a ghost tour.

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@seeingteacupsindragons tagged me for a first and last lines meme. I’ll be using the fairy tale police procedural because... it’s current. There’s not lots going on in the WIP department at the moment, at least not things with more than one character.

1: Choose any three or more characters from a WIP and give us each of their first lines:

Jack: “Not another tall one.” Hazel:  "What a mess." Ejiro: “Oh good. Maybe we’re done.”

2. Now the last line you wrote for them:

Jack: “How well can you swim?” Hazel: “Xe's going to take a week to walk out into the country and sink into some loam, really rejuvenate the roots.” Ejiro: “If it turns out xe's dead, and you just forgot to add up some math right, they are never going to forgive you.”

3. A fun fact about each of them. Jack: Jack has been known to pick his partners’ pockets for stress relief. Rouge catches him about a quarter of the time. Hazel: The shorthand that Hazel uses to label her alchemical reagents is incomprehensible even to other alchemists. Ejiro: She has three younger sisters and a younger brother, and she wears her hair in an orange fro-hawk because she got pissed when her brother finally got his growth spurt and got taller than her.

I tag @aesterea, @firewritten, @lady-redshield-writes

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Unscheduled Character Rambles: Rouge

- Her full name is Jeanne de le Drac Rouge (Jeanne of the Red Dragon) but nobody in the guard calls her that anymore because Jack has called her Rouge since the minute they got stuck together. - Le Drac Rouge is the roadside inn that has been managed by her extended family for three generations now. It is currently owned by her grandfather. - Jeanne’s mother is the inn’s brewer, and her father was a traveling merchant. According to her mom he was a very tall man with a great singing voice and a deep appreciation of good beer, but he’s never been back and nobody in the family knows what happened to him. Rouge likes to think she might meet him someday by sheer happenstance, but she’s almost thirty now and she knows it’s not likely. - Rouge likes to knit but doesn’t always feel that she has enough people to knit FOR to justify buying new yarn. - Rouge is seven feet tall, fat, and strong enough to lift an ox back onto their feet. - She spars with Sergeant Bruin, a talking grizzly bear, semi-regularly. She can’t outrun him, however. - Though she can throw Jack over her shoulder and sprint, which is pretty damn helpful considering how often Jack can’t keep his fool mouth shut.

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Hazel Hornbeam

I’m procrastinating editing, so here are some random facts about Hazel Hornbeam, the guard alchemist/artifact neutralizer in my Fairy Tale Police Procedural.

- Hazel is autistic, and past special interests have included plant hybridization, geometry, and secret codes. Alchemy is her most enduring one, though. (And it does sometimes have connection to the other three.) - Her best friend through her teen and tween years was a talking horse. She used to spend a lot of time reading aloud to him, and sends him letters even though he needs a scribe to read or reply to them. - During her university years, Hazel tried to make her way into social groups by dating one of their members, which didn’t go well because she’d loose all her new friends when the break up happened. - Her paternal aunt and uncle set her up as the acting landlady of an apartment building that they own. Hazel tends to try and fix building problems her tenants bring her herself, with magic, which has caused a couple tenants to stop coming to her with these problems. - Hazel sings or hums a lot when she’s happy or working in her lab. - Hazel’s maternal relatives are the descendants of silk merchants who traveled to the Dales about a hundred years ago. Due to the fact that her family produces almost exclusively girls, they all have last names that reflect whatever heritages that members of the family married into. - Hazel keeps knotted string and a polished piece of quartz in her pockets at all times to stim with. She’s also fond of playing with candle wax, except for the part where she has to peel the cold remnants off her fingers when it isn’t warm and squishy anymore. - Hazel and the rest of her family use names in their ancestral language as secret names to guard themselves from rival users of magic. Hazel is technically her middle name, but she’s never gone by anything else outside of the family.

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9, 13, and 22 for uhhhhhhh.... let's say Hazel?

9. Biggest Fear: Hazel has childhood experience with autistic shutdowns, which mostly involved loosing her voice and ability to communicate with words at all. She has mostly succeeded in finding coping mechanisms and has only had about three in the years since she left home for university, but her biggest fear is having one bad enough that she would be forced to rely on someone else to keep her life in the city together. She’s driven by the need to prove to people (her extended family that babied her, ex classmates who thought she was weird, etc.) that she is perfectly capable, thank you.

13. Reactions to being suddenly hugged? Don’t touch the alchemist without permission and at least several minutes advanced warning! Some exceptions apply for her talking animal friends and aquaintances: Hazel doesn’t see contact from a dog or horse as invasive, and it’s only sometimes startling, especially compared to a human grabbing ahold of her. 

22. How does she cheer herself up? Hazel is fond of tackling problems by aggressive focus on an aspect of them that she can fix, and of taking out work stress on whatever alchemical puzzle she’s currently working on. It’s restorative, and people are scared enough of her lab that she can be sure of solitude and nobody watching or listening if she starts singing the same verse over and over again to her beakers.Loneliness is harder for her to find a good way to deal with. Her family is very far away and making new friends is not easy, especially when places like the theater, taverns, and the markets are noisy and often smelly. She tries to chat with her tenants about alchemy or gardening, without a lot of success, and she goes back to the university to talk at the librarian ghost sometimes.

Fortunately, since she started working with the Unusual Phenomena team, she has at least one person who will listen patiently to her alchemy rants and who will drink green tea with her: Livius. Maybe someday she’ll actually invite him into her lab and not worry about him touching things.

Send me more character asks!