Meme, Day 12 & 13

Question 12: What's inside your fridge?

Hmmm, I'm not actually home, so let's see how far I can get with this from memory!

Red Brita pitcher, probably with about an inch of water in it.
Diet Coke!
The last of the batch of (incredibly Americanized blue-collar family recipe) pasta fagioli I made last week.
Parmesan cheese.
Half a jar of gravy.
Butter, cream cheese spread, grape jam, probably some other condiments.
A lot of food that belongs to my roommate.
Possibly some limp celery and ancient apples in the crisper drawer.
There are also some frozen pizzas in the freezer that are mine, does that count?

I'm leaving this weekend to spend a week in Michigan for Christmas and tomorrow would otherwise have been grocery shopping day, so this isn't quite as sad and dire as it sounds.

Question 13. What is your earliest memory?

Huh, I don't know exactly. My family moved at Christmastime a couple of months after I turned four, so I have this handy demarcation in my memories: anything I remember at the old house is a memory from when I was three or four years old. So I have this clutch of memories that are all quite early, though they are becoming mostly memories of memories--things I am accustomed to knowing that I remember.

Possibly one of the earliest--because it must have been in the summer, so I have to have been three and a half--is the memory of being deeply outraged that my dad was taking my older brothers (who would have been then six and eight) to a Tigers game without me.

In retrospect I would not have wanted to take very small me to a sporting event either, but at the time it seemed like a grossly unjust thing that boys got to do and girls did not, and I felt terribly betrayed by it.

Processfest! Day 5

processfest Day 5: Collaborators

Tell us about your go-to creative buddies. You don't have to name names, but this is the place to talk about what your collaborator brings to your creative process, how the two-or-three-or-many of you work together, how you figured out how to work together, and why it works. None of us create entirely alone, so who gives you a hand when you stumble? Who helps you get unstuck? Who is that person who always understands what you were trying to do and helps you make it happen?

iulia is, of course, the person who always understands what I was trying to do (no matter how often I stomp away from her beta comments insisting that she Doesn't Understand My Art: she does, sometimes better than I do, since she also understands the part where it needs to be intelligible to readers).

I'm too much of a control-freak about my writing to co-write with anyone; I can't even do chatfic in the round-robin passing-the-thread-back-and-forth way I see other people doing it, unless I don't care about the story at all. If I care enough about the story to actually write it, it has to be mine alone while I do so.

But Iulia, and other betas and audiencers and so on, are an intrinsic part of my writing process; I can't write a story that I can't first tell to someone and convince them of. And I need betas at every other stage of the game, too, because in addition to rampantly abusing commas and sentence structure I tend to go off the rails in really weird ways sometimes.

One of my favorite stories to tell about this is the time missmollyetc saved me from having Charlie Eppes hit himself in the head with a rock. It was somewhere in the depths of Missing Persons, well over a year into the writing of it, long after the story had gotten altogether too far into my head, and it seemed like such a good idea at the time, and I think I had even run that sequence by other people and not been dissuaded from it, and then Molly came along and said, "Really? A rock? That's what you're going with?" and I said "...No. Wow. No. Sorry."

So, thank you Molly! And thank you Iulia! And thank you every single other person in the last eleven years who has attempted to keep me pointing in the direction of writing better fiction. I could not do it without you. ♥