I'm fried from housework today, and am going to see Reggie Gibson read poetry tonight, so I'm going to be burning midnight oil on the writing front. That's OK. I write best at night, anyway.

That's a whole 'nother thing, isn't it? When people prefer to write?

Victor, from about 1986 until last year, I used to do all, and I do mean all, my writing between 6 and 9 am (yes, morning person, that's life). I literally couldn't write any other time: phones ringing/real world during the day, too fried at night.

Now? Pretty much any time.

Age, it has its consolations....

I'm another early morning writer. Evening is when I tend to go back and tinker with what I've written, but sometimes I'll get into first-draft mode shortly before sleep claims me, and I can add a page or so to my total.

It's fascinating to read how other people work. I'm still trying to finish my first novel, and learning as I go along. So far, I've concluded that I hate outlining, though I keep a running name list and character bible. Also, I write out of order. I'll plug away at a key part of the midsection for weeks, then get bored or blocked and have a go at the epilogue for awhile.

And I'm starting to adopt "What Would Joss Do?" as a writing mantra, because I'm always tempted to be too nice to my characters. For instance, I knew my hero and heroine needed to have a confrontation about the fact that when she married him, she was in love with someone else. Originally, I was going to have this come a few weeks after the wedding, after they've had some good sex and interesting conversations and she's actually realized the other guy was just a silly schoolgirl crush of hers. But then I thought "WWJD" and changed the fight to the day before the wedding, just to make the stakes a little higher for our sweet little virginal heroine.

It's still basically a sunshiny romantic comedy, and that's exactly what I want it to be, but upping the conflict definitely improves it. But then I told some of my writing group classmates about the heroine of the fantasy novel that's on my mind's backburner. She's a murderer. She feels guilty about it, but it was a sacrifice she had to make lest her magical gifts fall under the power of her family's enemies. When I told the tale, with a little more elaboration on how and why she went about the crime, one of the listeners said, "That's so TWISTED." I smiled and thought, "Joss would be so proud."

Twisted. It's a good thing.

But I can't write creatively in longhand. That much energy and attention on the physical aspect of getting what I'm doing down? Never happen. Also, I lose things whe I have write longhand. I wrote about thirty words a minute longhand, I type about 150 words a minute on a keyboard.

Huge old wrod.

I type-- I'm not sure how quickly, but I type slightly more slowly than I hear words in my head. There's only that tiny bit of delay. I'm spoiled by computers; I can throw down onto the page what I'm thinking nearly instantly. With longhand, I end up scrawling because I'm so impatient.

And I write differently when I'm using a pencil. When I write poetry longhand, it's only because I'm stuck somewhere away from my computer, and my drafts therefore are all very neat and precise and redrawn over and over, in an effort to mimic the neat lines of a computer page. Prose? Forget it. I write badly in longhand. My phrases are more boring, my sense of paragraph is shot. And worse I think it's all marvelous until I transcribe it and it's shit. It's an unpleasant awakening. So. I don't do that any more.

I get writer's block, but it's always related to depression. Which, it seems, I get a lot. So I go and play with Photoshop instead. Whee! Would you like to see the fifty LJ icons I made this week instead of writing my poem for my workshop?

& I like writing at night, but it's just because that's when nobody's around and I can stay for three straight hours at the computer if I want to.

Which, again, is wonderful if I'm working on my story. Nsm if I'm doing stuff in Photoshop....

I wouuld write at night, but Hubby complains that he can't sleep if I'm not there. Then when I try to use a laptop or my palm and keyboard in bed, he complains about the keyboard noise. I think he's jealous.

I like twisted. I especially like the kind of twisted that comes from having a character choose to do something wrong or otherwise 'not good' that has lasting consequences. In the Buffyverse, we had Willow deliberately mind-wipe Tara. Xander left Anya at the altar. Giles went through with the Cruciamentum. Wesley chose not to tell anyone of the prophecy about Connor. Angel locked Darla and Dru in the cellar with the lawyers and a bunch of innocent waitstaff whose mommies were waiting at home for them. Faith tried to frame Buffy for murder. Buffy ran away at the end of S2 without telling a soul.

I much prefer that than having all of a character's dilemmas coming from sources outside of him or herself.

And I'm starting to adopt "What Would Joss Do?" as a writing mantra, because I'm always tempted to be too nice to my characters.

Eh, sometimes softening a bit can be nice, too. In Nihilist Chic, I had a character whom I put through Hell, and by the end, the only reasonable thing to do was kill her. And I couldn't do it. Story worked just fine if I did, but I'd just grown too attached. So it forced me to come up with a twist ending that fulfilled the sort of nihilistic world view, and then allowed her to discard it and move on.

So, sometimes being an old softy can just make you work a bit harder.

When I wrote my first, not-juvenalia short story I was temping at a data entry job. I had one open text field and I'd sit there futzing around with the paragraph until I got it right, then I'd copy it down on the back of an envelope. I wrote that whole story longhand on yellow legal pads. Rewrote it by hand at least 5 times (it was 20 pages long) and could recite it by the time I was done with it. Typed it up on a friend's computer on Easter 1988.

I wrote most of the book in a Starbuck's near my job during lunchtime. I'd take a legal pad with me, get a salad, put on my headphones and try to get something down. I'd type it up at night, edit on my computer and do all the other scut work (editing other people's articles, indexing - guh) after Emmett went to bed.

Now I tend to write on the computer, though.