crystal and sweet violin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thelinesoflearning) wrote2013-08-21 09:59 pm
thelinesoflearning) wrote2013-08-21 09:59 pm
Meme all the memes. Divert all the brainpower.
Brief update: Mother is still in the hospital. Still no idea what's going on and it's starting to look like she'll be there over the weekend more likely than not. I go to get my pills from the psych doctors tomorrow morning. Which is good, because I'm kind of hovering on the edge of a crash and trying to hold it back so that my brothers don't see. I really appreciate all the comments and good thoughts.
In the spirit of Not Thinking About It, have an epic memepost. Tonight I am going to bed in the next half-hour or so, but I will be coming back and forth to this for the next couple of days, so spam me as much as you wish with requests.
1. Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 600 words) from anything I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
2. Comment with a story I've written, and I will tell you one thing I knew, learned, or wondered about while writing the story that didn't make it onto the page.
3. Name any story I've written, and any character in them, canon or OC. I'll tell you three things about that character which I didn't put in the story.
4. Tell me a character, I'll tell you three things from my personal canon about them.
5. Give me the title of a story I've never written and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.
6. Pick a trope from the list below and provide a fandom/pairing and I'll tell you something about the story I'd write for that combination (i.e. write a snippet from the story or write not!fic or tell you the title and summary for the story I would write)
1. genderswap
2. bodyswap
3. drunk!fic
4. huddling for warmth
5. pretending to be married
6. secretly a virgin
7. amnesia
8. cross-dressing
9. forced to share a bed
10. truth or dare
11. historical AU
12. accidental-baby-acquisition
13. apocalypse fic
14. telepathy
15. High School / College
7. Give me a topic, any topic, and I will ramble about it at you.
For the writing ones: my Ao3 for fic, my rainbowfic tag for originals, and my rp list for ideas on characters.
In the spirit of Not Thinking About It, have an epic memepost. Tonight I am going to bed in the next half-hour or so, but I will be coming back and forth to this for the next couple of days, so spam me as much as you wish with requests.
1. Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 600 words) from anything I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.
2. Comment with a story I've written, and I will tell you one thing I knew, learned, or wondered about while writing the story that didn't make it onto the page.
3. Name any story I've written, and any character in them, canon or OC. I'll tell you three things about that character which I didn't put in the story.
4. Tell me a character, I'll tell you three things from my personal canon about them.
5. Give me the title of a story I've never written and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.
6. Pick a trope from the list below and provide a fandom/pairing and I'll tell you something about the story I'd write for that combination (i.e. write a snippet from the story or write not!fic or tell you the title and summary for the story I would write)
1. genderswap
2. bodyswap
3. drunk!fic
4. huddling for warmth
5. pretending to be married
6. secretly a virgin
7. amnesia
8. cross-dressing
9. forced to share a bed
10. truth or dare
11. historical AU
12. accidental-baby-acquisition
13. apocalypse fic
14. telepathy
15. High School / College
7. Give me a topic, any topic, and I will ramble about it at you.
For the writing ones: my Ao3 for fic, my rainbowfic tag for originals, and my rp list for ideas on characters.
no subject
2. I want to know what you learned with this story!
3. That last story, and Anya.
5. The story where Dave gets an order of like fifteen dozen cupcakes for tomorrow. It was hilarious.
7. Writing!
I ended up rambling like mad on #1 and it's 4:30. So I will do the rest tomorrow night.
So I don't usually write personal stories. I mean, obviously what I write resonates with me on some level, because I'm pretty sure there's a lot of things that get reused if someone really looked across the various universe ideas of have. But so far as drawing directly and purposefully from my own experience to write something, that's... not something I do very often. Partly because about 90% of what I write is some kind of non-Earth-standard world. Partly because I don't think I've had many experiences to write about.
...And then there's this story.
I grew up poor. Not as bad off as the boys in this story, at least most of the time, but there have been rocky months where it was up in the air whether or not we'd be able to keep the apartment. When I was, I think, 18, we had to ask people on a local message board -- either Craigslist or Freecycle, I think it's the latter -- if they could spare some canned food because we really, truly, honestly could not afford to pay for all our necessities that month. It hit on a whole new level that time, because it was the first time I was one of the adult members of the house and knew what was happening as it happened, rather than only finding out the full details later.
When I was around 17 or 18, my mother once admitted to me that we'd been so poor once that she had to actually, seriously contemplate stealing food so that me and my brothers could eat. Not even the whole family, and not more than one meal. We were incredibly lucky -- we had much better-off family members who bought us groceries just in time -- but I think hearing that story, a few years after it happened, is when I realized just how close to rock-bottom my family had been in the past. Not just poor, but so poor that most people would consider us a charity case. Because when I was younger, even if I knew we were poor, even if I knew my mother got upset over money, even if I knew there were always things we couldn't buy and some of them were even important, I didn't get it. I couldn't. We were just well enough off that I was spared ever having to really let it sink in. We had a roof over our heads, food every night even if half the time it wasn't something particularly thrilling, and we could even afford the splurge now and again. And I still have trouble reconciling so poor we almost had to steal a can of tuna to eat with those facts, even though I logically know they had to be at different times, because we may have occasionally been so damn fed up with being poor that we splurged when maybe we shouldn't have, but we weren't completely stupid.
And that's where this story came from. It's incredibly personal in a very roundabout way, because this is still something that gives me a headache when I try to piece those two things together.
They didn't have much, but they didn't starve. He got his medicine, even if sometimes it was tough.
One day I will go more into Dave as a tiny thing but basically, he was very sick, very often. Not life-threatening I'm-gonna-die sick generally, but lots of little sicknesses, both brief and not-so-brief. And he still isn't in GREAT health, but he's not as bad as he was as a kid anymore.
Fun fact that hasn't come up yet in stories, he's actually pretty seriously claustrophobic, too.
They had a roof over their head. That's not poor, right? You've got shelter and food on your plate; be grateful for what you've got.
I'm weirdly proud of the structure of that sentence because I can hear family members saying it in my head in their very very thick New York accent. Something about it, I don't know. It also reminds me of a quote in Books of Fell: You got your health. You got your family. You got Brooklyn. What more do you need? (... I'm paraphrasing but I think that's basically it.) I don't think I did that on purpose but it's what I think of on the occasion I reread. Which is rare, I don't reread my stories often.
That's not poor, that's getting by.
Was using poor in this paragraph three times overkill? On the one hand I think it might have been. On the other, I feel like it's needed. It feels like almost self-delusion this way. And I think it is, in a way, it's just... not one done on purpose.