momebie

You're almost there, writer. Can you taste it? The salt on your lips! The wind in your hair! The tentacle in your-- Wait a minute, that's not right. That's not how this story was supposed to go at all! But that's just the way, isn't it? Don't give up. You've got two days to push through, and two days is nothing compared to the 28 that came before. I'd get out my pom poms, but well, they just attract the wrong sort of cephalopod.

I feel like my story, much like my life, has utterly and completely left me behind. I don't know that I'm ever going to catch it.

How are you doing? There yet? A little ways back? Lost entirely?

This church is see through. It's a Belgian art work, which you can read a little more about here, but I'd like to think of it as being used as an actual church. I imagine sitting on the floor and looking through the cracks and just being allowed to contemplate the world rather than any specific iconography. After all, it's the physical realm that affects the most. Or is it?

When was the last time your character felt they could really, truly trust the world around them?



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We rely heavily on the eyes of others. We believe they can tell us if the other person is alert, interested, cagey, lying, and a hundred other gut reactions we form about people before even opening our mouths or giving them a chance to speak for themselves. When we can't see a person's eyes we react to them differently. Sometimes it's a person we trust, like a priest or a superhero and it's a relief to us that we can't see them calculating our sins and misgivings. Other times it's a person we don't trust, like a bank robber or a dementor, and it's all the more frightening for us. In those instances we take other cues and form a decision about whether or not we can be okay with the fact that we can't see the eyes that see us. But even in entirely mundane instances, we take the lack of eyes as a vague threat. It makes us uneasy.

How would your character react to an entity whose eyes they can't see? Is that entity likely to be another person, or something else entirely?



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I'm kind of impressed that I got over halfway through the month before I let this slip. I apologize, too, because I've been having great fun reading what you guys put up, even as I haven't replied to them all yet, and now we'll never know what I could have read for yesterday. But well, accidents do happen, and yesterday I accidentally Hogsmeade, so. This picture is for seratonation, who pinged me over twitter about what a forgetful sod I was. The colors in this piece are lovely, and I find them to be almost more interesting than the subject matter.

If you could paint the sky any color, what would you paint it?


[Credit.]

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Look guys, sometimes you just need to cut the problem off at the source.


[Credit.]

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Today's prompt doesn't have anything insightful to say. He just wants to remind you that if you're ever feeling blue and you don't know where to go to, that you should go to where fashion sits. And also that sometimes changing your outlook is as simple as changing your look period. As an experiment to this end, today I'm wearing shiny new red shoes (new to me, the Yulee Goodwill is amazing). I'll let you know how things work out.



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I like it when people swap genders for dress. I don't really know why, but it draws me in. Even when it's not really merely androgynous. When Scott Westerfeld gave his talk at LeakyCon this year someone asked him why Deryn dressed as a boy and he said that it was simply because he'd always wanted to write a character who did that. I can relate. In the original outlines of the Steampunk Amelia sometimes dresses as a boy. In my head she still does, but I don't think that it'll end up on the page, given the time period we're working with. Maybe for book two.

Is there a time when your character has been found out for being someone everyone else thought they weren't?

I write a lot of stories about boys. I do this for a myriad of reasons, but the one that's the most problematic is that I am hyper aware of the fact that there is a way to Write Women Wrong, and if I do it someone is going to call me out on it. On one hand, I am all for challenging societal expectations and progressing towards a more accepting and balanced world. On the other though, I think characters should be whole people, and some people are just terrible people, regardless of gender. The thing that makes me the most nervous about the almost violent backlash to what people perceive as Wrong is that, by identifying certain traits and weaknesses as Issues, we are telling people who identify with or are in possession of those traits and weaknesses that they are also wrong. Not to mention the fact that womanhood, like art, is open to some amount of interpretation about what it consists of these days. In the Locke Lamora fandom, for instance, there are people who complain because Lynch's female characters are too kick ass. This seems like a rather backwards complaint to me as someone who spends a lot of time side eyeing comics fandom for how they react to what they feel are regressions in female character development. Who doesn't want a world populated by kick ass women who hold their own? Even when you do it 'right', it seems, you can't make everyone happy.

One of my favorite animes is Black Lagoon. That story is full of women who kick ass and take names, but it's also full of women who are just people and who have pasts and weaknesses. It won't stop them from shooting you in the face, but they're not ignored entirely, either. It's how I'd like to write all of the women I tell stories about, but that type of woman doesn't fit in all stories. Sometimes you need someone who's passive or still learning or willing to use her body to get what she wants. It's a fine balance, writing believable women. Of course, I usually feel like it's a fine balance writing any believable character, and I should worry about gender a lot less.

All that said, I feel like this woman probably kicks some serious ass. Tell me about her, would you?


[This is my new favorite Tumlblr.]

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Max Ernst was a surrealist painter and a member of the Dada movement, but I know him best for his collage, which tends to find me no matter where I am on the internet. The image below is taken (I believe) from Une semaine de bonté, a surrealist graphic novel that is made up of 182 images he created by cutting up and reorganizing Victorian encyclopedias. For those of you familiar with Wondermark!, it's kind of like that. I wish I could say something intelligent, like how Ernst's work holds more interepidation and danger than that of the other artists who also use this technique, but I just haven't read enough yet to be sure. (I wonder if I can order that off Amazon...)

The key to collage is, much like writing, knowing what you want to represent and pulling together the pieces that you think will get you there. Which part of this image are you going to pluck away and make something new with?



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