Since you seem to have gotten most of the questions in the ask meme I thought I'd just improvise some slightly different ones. a) What are you favourite genres to write? b) Where do you draw inspiration from for writing? c) What type of settings to you enjoy writing? d) Are there any common themes running through your characters or character arcs you're particularly partial to? (Don't worry about answering them all, hope you don't mind random asks!)
Awww, that was thoughtful of you, thanks! :DD a) What are you favourite genres to write? I write pretty much exclusively fantasy of various flavors, although the book that I just finished writing is steampunk. :)b) Where do you draw inspiration from for writing? Boring house chores. XD Many of the ideas I've been most excited about have occurred to me when I was doing the dishes. Pieces of art I see on tumblr sometimes spark an idea... Ideas come from everywhere, you know? I have a bulletin board now with little scraps of paper on it with sparks of things scribbled on them -- "how to capture fire" and "a wolf made of smoke" and so forth.
I also really love reading books about writing. Two of my favorites are ON WRITING by Stephen King and ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING by Ray Bradbury. Some writing books are really... I don't really have a word for it besides "hippie-ish". Bradbury and King, though, you can trust them to have sensible, practical things to say about it. They're legit.c) What type of settings to you enjoy writing?I'm GENERALLY fond of medieval or Renaissance level tech (plus magic) -- which is actually quite a wide variety. Have you SEEN some of da Vinci's sketches? The man was thinking of everything. Worldbuilding is my favorite part. I do it for funsies to relax. I designed an "experimental" project once for the sole purpose of finding out how much worldbuilding I could cram into one book before it got boring.BTW, if you want to be a good worldbuilder, take an anthropology class. It will really help diversify your world view. d) Are there any common themes running through your characters or character arcs you're particularly partial to?Ummmm... I talked a little bit about this yesterday, about how a lot of my themes are about home in some way: Finding your way home, losing home, discovering you can't ever really go home because the journey has changed you etc etc, building new homes with new people and so forth.
My books tend to be about PEOPLE a lot, rather than about places or things or events -- people are the most interesting thing in the world. They're the same everywhere -- they all have families and people they care about, and things that are exciting or boring or scary. They all make mistakes. They all feel pain, they all laugh, they all cry. So a lot of the themes of my characters and their development are about exploring who they are and how they relate to each other, and how two people (or a group of people) form bonds between them, and what those bonds mean. This all ties right back in to the home themes.Thanks again, those were really interesting questions. :)
