Writing About Writing, Day One

Before I start, I do want to point out that I still have that contest going on. I had intended for it to end with June, but time kind of got away from me and there have only been two entries, so I'm going to extend it until July 11th.

Sometimes I miss making posts on this blog because I don't actually have a topic handy. To help with this, or at least I'm guessing that was her intention, my friend Kate recently sent me a list of 30 writing-related topics, with the idea of posting one each day. I'm notoriously bad at keeping up on this kind of thing, but I thought I might give it a shot.

Where this list originated, I don't know. Kate got it from a guy called Kieran Roy, who got it from someone else, et cetera.

1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with and why.

Well, I'm assuming this is all supposed to be about my original writing and not about fanfiction. Which is a shame, because I do love me some fanfiction.

I don't have a lot in the way of original fiction floating around, that's the main problem. I have multiple worlds that I've created, but they mostly exist on my hard drive and in thought. My more realistic attempts at fiction have all taken place in a little town called Ironboro, which is basically an expy (for lack of a better term) for my own hometown.

Ironboro's probably my favorite world to play in, just because it's the easiest. I know it, intimately. It's not precisely like my own hometown; it's more of an idealized version, what I would make the town if I could. In appearance it's very much the same, to the point where an observant reader could recognize it in my descriptions. My upcoming novel is set there, if only because the novel was tricky enough to write without the added difficulty of creating a location.

That said, I do enjoy world-building. I'm hoping, sometime in the next few weeks, to launch a second blog which consists of serial fiction. I'm still fleshing out the world in which that takes place. It's a darker location than I normally write, kind of steampunkish but with magic going on. I like it a lot; unfortunately, it still doesn't have a name. The best I've come up with for it is Arcadia, which I don't want to use since it was essentially cribbed from the old Legend of Zelda cartoon (no, really), but it's serving as a placeholder until I come up with something more original.