By now the original chat transcript--if it existed-- can't be found. There is a snippet of a later conversation though, when we were discussing where to post. Knowing her, the freewrites were her idea. Knowing me, posting online was my idea.
I distinctly remember fussing over what to call the blog.
Don't ask me how we came up with 500. 500 isn't even my luckiest three-digit number (It's 782). But 500 it became.
This is important. Meticulousness played as great a role as spontaneity in the creation of Drawn in Words.
I promised not to thank anyone in this “reflection”, for if I did, the list would stretch from here to Epsilon Aurigae and back. Not to mention I would probably miss someone and feel utterly wretched for doing so.
Now what? I’m barely at 140 words and I have nothing to say already? I’ll start at the beginning and analyze every darn post! No. I’m not going to do that. I have homework to do as well. Not to mention other writings. And stuff.
I’ll start from the beginning though, and try to capture the main timelines: "Leth" was the start of my romance-writing. The characters were ripped off Star Wars. Completely. Moving on.
Dawn Eternia no-last-name was created for a roleplay, but her background story was based off nothing but spontaneity. After her little arch, I thought the character-background idea was good, and tried it again with Vera. After that, I just got bored.
I’m stopping here to mention White Scarlet and Shadow Within (W.S. And S.W., yes. This irony was purely coincidental), two novel-attempts I’d started a while back before DiW was born. And both had romance. So I guess I lied—Leth wasn’t my first romance-writing. It was my first completed romance writing.
But honestly, writing romance is tiring, strange, and demands great concentration for me. The idea of the sexual predator (I felt I had to explain the reason for those characters) came from my indignation at knowing such people existed. I was trying to understand these people—not sympathize, just understand—when I first created them…but that turned out to be an awful failure as everyone knows; they’re still flat and dumb, and all villains.
Enough on that.
NaNoWriMo. What do I say? I started planning for National Novel Writing Month (50K words of a novel in 30 days) in the summer, and probably before that. I plowed through a bunch of ideas, and the major ideas are now summarized in the Story Briefs page. I planned for it….and then changed my mind two days before NaNo started. I might as well have not prepared at all. At least I have a bunch of stuff on top of the bunches of stuff on top of the bunches of other stuff that I want to write.
But in the end, I wrote, and just about finished Dreamweaver, which will never be edited. Maybe rewritten, if I feel like it.
With the end of NaNo though, I returned to the roleplaying scene, where I realized that my characters shared something in common with Twilight fangirls and haters: there were too many, and all seemed the same. Either this or that. No middle. No detail.
I realized this when I was roleplaying with Violet Kyson, and decided to a little project in which I would write only with three characters, who were chosen to be Violet, Auris Wyn, and Alina Zephyr. Then I spread Auris’s bubble to include Ever Blaize, because, as I justified to myself, “she’s like half his life”. And slowly the limitation became “anyone, so long as they are somehow directly related to one of the Chosen Three’s life.” The plan was to write to all of Gail Carson Levine’s prompts in Writing Magic with these “Chosen Three”.
Which brings us up to now. I’m still plodding, despairingly slowly, through the Writing Magic prompts, probably because I have a story I’m finishing and another one I want to write (no details on purpose, hehe!). That, and I’ve broken the rule in using non-related characters in the roleplays. But that’s all fine. Let that be. It was meant as a conclusion to a year in writing, but it has served its purpose well enough already.
This first anniversary of DIW marks enough progress for me, I think, and I hope. At the very least, I know now that the very ink of imagination that runs through our vessels is the blood of writing, of stories. Of the written art. For Silverpaw, also known as SilverInk, this first year of drawing words has been content.
WC: 782
Postscript:
This is like an artist's note on a really long artist's note.
First, I don't like this post too much. It was supposed to be really awesome, but I never really got around to editing it to my satisfaction. This is the last day in February so I thought I had to post it or else it'd be out of place.
That brings us to point number 2: yay new year in writing! This year I'm going to keep a notepad with me to jot down whatever randomness I want. Hopefully that will help my writing some.
Third, I'll try to get to organizing the labels.....sometime eventually.
Fourth, the story briefs...are they really necessary? Or are they just a waste of blogspace?
Fifth: Back to writing-related. I hope to get back to actual 500+ word freewrites instead of deliberate stories. Sorry if you'd prefer reading fully planned, long stories, but it'll be more variety, I think. Hopefully. Until my writing improves. Maybe a few chapter-excerpts from stories or another insanely long songfiction to finish off that arch with Elias and Aura, but don't expect it to be a weekly thing from me anymore! hehe!
Sixth: Feburary is over! The DiW anniversary celebration is at its close, which means the brilliant unveiling of the theme...that was probably guessed a long time ago. If you didn't already read the four posts correlating to the them (I think Lewis's post counts, whatever she says XP) PLEASE read and comment on those first! And THEN you can come highlight the below:
To quote Bye Bye Birdie, "It is with much pride and prejudice as well as the usual pomp and circumstance that I present to you"....the theme of the first DIW anniversary celebration:
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Romance. Anything to do with romance or love. It was chosen because of the obvious Valentine's spirit, but more so because the first post on the site was a romance short story and we thought that the first anniversary of the site could echo that. :) Hope you enjoyed it!
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And...that's all for this time! See you next week!
~Silverpaw
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