This was written for the semi-final round of Adam’s contest. This was the prompt:

Object Perspective
Your assignment for this round is to write a story or poem from the perspective of a kitchen sponge, broom, towel or fork. Yup, that’s what I said. Have fun. 

I hated this prompt. I hated it so much. I don’t particularly like writing anthropomorphism, and I’ve grown to dislike reading it, too. I read Silverwing and loved it and thought it was amazing, and I watched parts of the Redwall series as a kid. I read Animorphs and The Ship Who Sang and more werewolf stories than you can shake a stick at, so I was familiar with the more direct way of applying human characteristics to non-human things, too. But at some point I stopped liking it when human characteristics are applied to inhuman things. I like when the alien is alien and written as such. I like well-done xenobiology and earnest tries at xenopsychology and machine intelligences that are machine and uninterested in becoming human.

A lot of times, anthropomorphic objects are presented that way in children’s literature. In children’s literature, it can be a way to raise awareness of consideration for objects or the environment, or a way to present values in a way that is stripped of a lot of other societal constructs (the Little Engine That Could didn’t have to deal with systemic oppression or privilege, just trying his hardest).

But part of all writing is writing to your audience, and Adam is the audience for this contest, and he is not a child. Writing it as a children’s story wouldn’t have worked, either for him as the audience or for me as a writer.

Honestly I think I spent nearly as much time complaining about this as writing it.

That is not to imply that it was rushed, but that I complained a lot and have several people I should apologize to.

What I hate most about the prompt is that I really like the story and have no real problems with it or areas I think definitely need improvement.

In a piece of irony, I put a silver plate in the dishwasher very late one night after working on this.

This was written for Adam’s contest, with the prompt of spending a day in your favourite cartoon. The cartoon is The Vision of Escaflowne.

Adam called me out on the transition to the world of the cartoon, and that’s something I’m probably going to fix in edits, though the story probably won’t live anywhere but here. That’s because, as fanfiction, I can’t publish it without checking with the IP reps for Escaflowne. It’s also because, as self-insert drivel based around one of the most facepalm-inducing tropes in fanfic, I am not going to clutter up my account on Archive of Our Own with it.

Unsure what a facepalm is?

Image from  http://picardfacepalm.com/

It is when Picard cannot bear to look at you and slaps a hand over in exasperation because he’s read six different fanfics this week where people who suspiciously resemble the author appear from nowhere and become his love interest. Three of them weren’t even spellchecked.

As one may have gathered, I wasn’t super-enthusiastic about the prompt. But I love Escaflowne, and it was great to revisit the world, and I watched a bunch of episodes of the series to refresh myself and also because it is still entertaining.

So if I were to edit it, I think I’d change the transition to the cartoon world into picking up a white feather, because that’s imagery that occurs in the series and it gives me-as-character an active role in stepping into the cartoon.

Some of the starting part is based on a story I read years ago called How To Be Fantastic, which is a multiple-choice path to survival if you happen to find yourself trapped in someone else’s fantasy.

The bit about dancing was because Escaflowne is noted for having an amazing soundtrack, and there’s an episode which relies fairly heavily on singing a folk song; similarly, the tarot reading was included as a nod to canon, as was the bag that contains everything (though that was also based somewhat on real life: my messenger bag is capacious and packed full of interesting things).

The persistent subtle-and-not-so-subtle threats of violence (the falling a lot, the attempted kidnapping, the mole-man groping me-as-character) are based on canon, but more broadly: there’s a war on in the series, and it has a lot of the pushy courtship nonsense common to a lot of anime.

In the writing itself, I could probably emphasize more that everything hurts a lot and me-as-character is a badass and ignoring the pain on purpose and not just magically unhurt. I’m quite happy with the way I filled the single day I had in the cartoon: I got a lot of stuff in without it being super-crowded or rushed.

Final verdict: needs more editing, not going to get it.

This was written for a contest, under deadline. There is not nearly the usual level of context, subtext, and pop culture reference because of this. Basically I wanted to write silly fluff with the subversion that not all drunken escapades end in sex or jail.

Of course, in my head they go on to fall in love and produce ridiculously successful projects together, the latter being more important than the former.

Oh! Just noticing: male romantic lead was given a Hispanic-sounding last name because I wanted to write non-white characters because it had occurred to me that I used a lot of WASP-sounding names even when I had no particular idea of race when writing characters.

It’s poetry time again, which pretty much translates to spot-the-reference time. This was written for a writing contest in the summer of 2010, and was my first sestina ever. I think it was the first time I thought of form poetry as akin to Scrabble: you have a set of parameters and a set of tools, and you put together the tools you have according to the parameters, individuality dictating that everyone puts them together differently.

I cheated a bit – ‘this’ is quite simple, and I used ‘more’ once instead of ‘oar’ and ‘see’ once instead of ‘sea.’ The part I’m quite proud of, though, is my use of ‘amber’: it means three different things at different places in the poem. I felt quite smug in that, even though only one of the judges caught the reference to Roger Zelazny’s fantasy realm, and wasn’t entirely sure that it was a reference I’d meant to make.

The metaphor about escape to a more enlightened/licentious place is semi-coherent at best, except for the first stanza, where we have some requisite rejection of Catholicism in favour of Druidic tradition. In the fifth stanza that gets rejected, too, because what’s a traditional poetry form without explicit rejection of most forms of tradition?

I got an itch to write, but didn’t want to work on any extant projects: I was too restless to refer to an outline, and couldn’t think of anything in particular I wanted to write about. So, as usual, I badgered the first friend I talked to for a prompt.

He told me violence, or violins, or violence with violins.

We know each other from the Homestuck fandom on Tumblr, and then through talking on Skype. In Homestuck, the character Rose plays the violin, and the character Dave is associated with swords and is the ‘Knight’ class in the game they play, meaning that to me he is associated with violence. He also has time-travel powers and deejays, to explain some of the other references.

Rose is a passive class in the game they play, which is why I left her up on the tower. She is also associated with light, and with communing with things that live beyond the stars, which is how that symbolism sneaked in there.

The story itself takes place between events shown in the comic, and is meant to be one of the possibilities that could fill that gap.

The whole tone is somewhat ethereal, which was what I felt compelled to write at the time, but might not be the tone I’d use if I were to make it longer. The tone fits well with Rose, except that her writing is a lot more verbose. The exception is the metaphor about drunk surfers, which is more in Dave’s voice. He’s fairly verbose, too, though.

I think I caught the tone I wanted, even though it wouldn’t be quite the same tone as the comic. It got the writing bug out for the evening, and my friend enjoyed it.

I probably could have done more in depth characterization, but that’s one of the joys of fanfiction: Homestuck fans would already immediately recognize them.