[laughs] Yeaaah, I check LJ a lot more often when I'm home and not busy -- I don't check it half as much during the school year as I do when I'm at home for vacation. XD; My problem with using blogging/comments as a forum for keeping in touch with my offline friends is that most of them are on GreatestJournal (which I honestly forget to check, half the time >_>), and several others are scattered around with private domain-type blogs, or on Pitas, which has no convinient flist. But at the same time, when I do check my GJ, it's really nice to be able to keep up with the folks from school, so I know no one's died, or had anything horribly traumatic -- or, conversely, I know if there HAS been something, and I can send my condolences.
Hrrrrm. I still don't quite get lyricposts, I think. I've never done it myself, but I suspect that if I were, I'd do some kind of "songfic" formatted entry, where I'd have lyrics, write something, lyrics, write something. And it would probably be hideously disjointed and stream-of-consciousness, because I don't make sense to myself when I'm especially tired/unhappy. XD;;;
See, the thing with original characters for me is that I have to believe in them as real people; I've got to be able to say yes, this could be a real personality, even if the character is some kind of demon, or alien, or some otherwise not-quite-human character. The easiest way for me to do that is to lift traits/quirks from myself and my friends -- I have an original character with a particular speech tic that I used to use a lot during middle school, and I know my friend Sharky has at least two characters quasi-based on me, in the sense that they're cheerful, loud, and spazzy -- that's not really all of me, but she can still take some cues in how I react to figure out how the character might react, and then let them develop.
And, see, I work in a different method than you do -- when it comes to original fiction, I tend to imagine the characters first; I doodle someone idly in classnotes that I like the look of, and expand upon him/her, start sketching out people who're related to this character somehow, and then, eventually, an idea coalsces out of what I'm doing. The novel I'm working on right now started with me going back over the old folkstories about foxes I read as a kid, vague dissatisfaction with the youko/kitsune craze some anime fans have, and this one sketch I have of a lady with really bizarre tattoos on her back. XD So really, I develop the characters and let the plot come to me, which may explain why I do the trait-lifting thing more easily. ^^
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Date: 2004-07-22 03:33 pm (UTC)Hrrrrm. I still don't quite get lyricposts, I think. I've never done it myself, but I suspect that if I were, I'd do some kind of "songfic" formatted entry, where I'd have lyrics, write something, lyrics, write something. And it would probably be hideously disjointed and stream-of-consciousness, because I don't make sense to myself when I'm especially tired/unhappy. XD;;;
See, the thing with original characters for me is that I have to believe in them as real people; I've got to be able to say yes, this could be a real personality, even if the character is some kind of demon, or alien, or some otherwise not-quite-human character. The easiest way for me to do that is to lift traits/quirks from myself and my friends -- I have an original character with a particular speech tic that I used to use a lot during middle school, and I know my friend Sharky has at least two characters quasi-based on me, in the sense that they're cheerful, loud, and spazzy -- that's not really all of me, but she can still take some cues in how I react to figure out how the character might react, and then let them develop.
And, see, I work in a different method than you do -- when it comes to original fiction, I tend to imagine the characters first; I doodle someone idly in classnotes that I like the look of, and expand upon him/her, start sketching out people who're related to this character somehow, and then, eventually, an idea coalsces out of what I'm doing. The novel I'm working on right now started with me going back over the old folkstories about foxes I read as a kid, vague dissatisfaction with the youko/kitsune craze some anime fans have, and this one sketch I have of a lady with really bizarre tattoos on her back. XD So really, I develop the characters and let the plot come to me, which may explain why I do the trait-lifting thing more easily. ^^