My Coworkers And I Have Been Making Silly Ornaments Between Calls, To Try To Be Festive...and One Woman's

My coworkers and I have been making silly ornaments between calls, to try to be festive...and one woman's cubicle wall became our ornament wall, like we're a bunch of proud grade schoolers showing off our handy-work with glue guns and popsicle sticks and paint. We seriously have a table at the front of our office covered in all manner of craft stuff--glue gun sticks, pompoms, felt, markers and paints, pipe cleaners...and we've been having a blast even though the phones have been blowing up.

OK GUYS LISTEN UP

I BARELY EVER ASK Y’ALL FOR ANYTHING BUT JUST THIS ONCE

PLEASE COULD YOU WATCH THE HELL OUT OF THIS VIDEO

IT’S A CUTE TORTOISE BUT THAT’S NOT ALL 

EVERY PENNY OF VIEWING REVENUE WILL GO TO CHARITIES SUPPORTING SYRIAN REFUGEES IN EUROPE

IT WAS MY FRIEND’S IDEA AND SHE GOT ALAN RICKMAN (no I’m not kidding) TO DO THE VOICEOVER

SO PLEASE

WATCH IT

SHARE IT

LITERALLY REBLOG TO SAVE A LIFE

things i wish for you in 2016:

to do one thing that’s been scaring you all of 2015

to find happiness and peace with your looks

financial luck and prosperity

confidence in what you like to do

to meet wonderful people

to get to know your friends even better

to fall in love with something you never knew existed

for the strength to put all the crap behind you

to make more room for yourself

a fresh start, if you need it

a good life

Hey...I have some OCs over here who would be glad to kiss some of yours. I suck at kissy sketches, but what better way to practice? (Or hell, I could write something, even.)

Kinda wish I could do something for OC kiss week

@becausedragonage’s OC Kiss Week is such a cute, fun idea, but it takes me like FOREVER to draw anything (longer than a week) and I don’t even know how to go about asking people about their OCs or how to share mine.

(I’m really really shy about my OCs sometimes, because it’s like I love my fictional babies but I don’t really think anybody else would?)

Anyway, I am enjoying seeing everyone else’s contributions and your own adorable OCs! :)

C, J, Q, W, for the writing meme!

C: Who is your favorite character of your own? Who is your favorite character created by somebody else? Why?

This is surprisingly hard to answer...I’m torn between one of my newest characters and one from an earlier series of novels written out between three NaNoWriMos. The older one (Kin), was actually only meant to be in one novel, but wormed her way into the other two as a rather important side character, and she saw a lot of really good growth during that time. She completely lacked any sort of leadership skills or self-confidence and was pretty childish and short-sighted in the first novel (though I didn’t see all of that at the time); by the end of the third one, she was a lot more confident and mature, and had gained some leadership skills, but still had a lot of growing to do. She wasn’t at all what I’d meant for her to be and she was honestly a lot better for it. I’ll probably never do anything with that series, but I think I’d really like to use Kin in some way for another project in the future.

The other character is Cyrena, the main character of my current project. She is a mess. She tries so hard, but I keep throwing her into bad situations, and she keeps making terrible decisions for all the right (to her) reasons. At least one of those decisions has led to the death of someone she cared about. Cyrena does share a couple of Kin’s earlier traits (short-sighted and no real leadership skills, which is a really bad combination for her position), and she’s stubborn as hell and bad at asking for help. I still have a long way to go with her, but she’s been really fun to write so far.

As for my favorite character that someone else created, that would be Deryn Sharp from Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy. She wanted to join the military, but because girls weren’t allowed to join she disguised herself as a boy and enlisted. Between a war and having to prove herself, and keeping her gender a secret, she also winds up helping an prince on the run from people who want him dead so he can’t take the throne. Deryn shows a lot of bravery and cunning (especially for a teenager), and she’s still so easy to relate to. 

J: What does writing mean to you?

Personally, its a way for me to clear my head. I have all these thoughts and ideas bouncing around, and the only way to get them out is through writing. It lets me work out my thoughts and emotions and puzzle out things I’m going through. The creative process is kind of a way to de-stress, too; writing is something I’ve done for so long that its become almost as necessary as sleeping and eating, if sometimes extremely frustrating.

Q: How do you get through writer’s block?

That depends on what’s causing it. If it’s just sheer lack of motivation, the only thing that will get me passed that is by forcing myself to start writing. It doesn’t always help--sometimes my motivation is just gone and no amount of forcing it is going to make it come back until it’s damned well ready to--but at least I’ll have gotten something done.

If it’s that the story has stalled, bouncing ideas off of people tends to help the most. I’ll write myself into a corner, and I’ll know it, but I’m so close to the story that it can be really hard to fix it. A new set of eyes--or ears, as the case usually is--tends to make all the difference. Just throwing the ideas at someone can get the creative juices going again, and then I’ll be fine.

W: What’s your biggest pet peeve in writing?

That’s a toss up between “perfect” characters and anything that will jolt me out of the story (choppy prose, inconsistent characterization or world building, or unnecessarily big words, though “perfect” characters can definitely fall into this, as well).

I have a really hard time with stories where the main characters are your stereotypical Mary Sue--beautiful, perfect, and talented, whose only flaws are that they are tragically misunderstood for being so beautiful, perfect, and talented, or they’re given some throw away flaw that doesn’t even have an effect unless its convenient (like they’re “clumsy”; I’m looking at you, Bella Swan).

I want believable, realistic characters that I can relate to. Honey Wheeler from the Trixie Belden series comes to mind. On the surface, she wasn’t the kind of character I could relate to: she was pretty, rich, and intelligent. But she was also flawed; she didn’t have the confidence, fortitude, or street-smarts that Trixie did. Those were things I could relate to, just as there were things about the other characters that I just got. They felt like real people.

Perfect characters don’t feel real and because they’re “perfect” there’s no growth. When the characters are stagnant, so is the story.

The other thing is: I don’t like being reminded that I’m reading. If the prose is jerking me out of the story because it’s choppy or badly worded, or I’m finding myself thinking, “Wait...they said this was true just two paragraphs ago, but now they’re saying this other thing is true, even though it’s contradictory...“ or, “hold on a minute. That isn’t possible.” I will put the book down, and I won’t pick it back up.

I can handle some suspension of disbelief, but I can’t handle inconsistencies, especially glaring ones. And I really can’t stand it when the author was clearly pulling something out of their ass that would have taken very little effort for them to research (or plan). And if I end up wondering, “how the hell did this make it past an editor?”, well...

When I was younger, I wish someone had told me straight-up that not all adults experience “a calling”. That many of them never find particular purpose in a career. That sometimes, their job is just what pays the bills and they have to seek satisfaction and fulfillment elsewhere. 

Because as an adult, this pervasive notion that there exists a perfect path for everyone, that people should love what they do, and that work is meant to function as a vehicle for fulfilling a person’s grand life destiny is not only inaccurate for many of us, it can be toxic.

The ideal is so ingrained that I have to remind myself constantly I’m not a failure because I don’t adore my job, and because I’m not rocking the world with my work. That is okay. 

Sometimes, work is just work. There isn’t always a perfect career path, magically waiting to be discovered. There might not be this THING you were born to do. Sometimes, you discover that what you really want to be when you grow up is “paid”.