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.

I don't delete anything, especially after losing a nearly finished draft of a story. I save save save save save. I have tons of drafts.

Sometimes it's hard for me to start writing out my ideas in front of the computer so I'll start them long hand and move to the computer, it may just be a few paragraphs long hand before I swith over.

Also sometimes I'll either print out what I'm working on and write stuff out long hand or just start writing an idea for the same story in a notebook but away from the computer to get a better perspective.

When I'm writing on the computer and I get stuck I usually space down until I can't see what I was writing and start over from the beginning (well not the beginning of the story, but of the scene) until the point I got stuck, and if I don't get unstuck then I'll start again like that. If I can't get unstuck I'll skip past where I'm blocked and write what goes next so I have a hole in the story. And then later I'll read the mulitple versions of scenes and rework it into one.

I get a lot of story ideas when I'm driving and then I lose them by the time I get someplace where I can write them down.

Hec is so cool.

Hec is so cool.

If I was really cool I would've found an independent coffee shop. But expedience was the key - the Starbucks was two minutes away, had nice tables in the window, and I needed the whole lunch hour to write.

! Would you like to see the fifty LJ icons I made this week instead of writing my poem for my workshop?

My pantry full of marmalade? My crazy-quilt pillow top? Helllooooo to the avoidance.

Oh, my inner softy isn't going anywhere quick. The novel-in-process is a romance, and not a particularly angsty one as such things go. And I haven't plotted it all out yet, but I'm pretty sure my fantasy's heroine will live to find redemption, forgive herself, and make her world a more peaceful and just place. I'm all about the happy ending, 99% of the time. The WWJD is to keep me from writing happy little stories about nice people who are always nice to each other.

It worked. That's the bottom line. I wrote out the first draft of the scene, then I typed it, and all of a sudden the magic was with me.

Sssh. Don't let out the purple smoke.

My pantry full of marmalade?

Yeah, but that's blood orange mamalade - a thing of beauty and wonder.