Interview Meme

[persephone_kore]

Questions courtesy of isiscolo



1. Why bees?

Oh, this one's fun. Does anybody remember the How and Why Wonder Books? There was one with several of the social insects -- ants, bees, wasps, and termites. I probably shouldn't admit to this one very detailed (if rather inaccurate) imagining of the daily life of a termite. (You didn't think there could be insect Mary Sues, did you? Well, now you know. Little worker did EVERYTHING. Including soldiering. A-hem. Anyway.)

Er, yes. Anyhow, bees -- seeming most wholesome, least annoying, and most easily observable -- particularly caught my attention. My brother and I used to spend hours down in a part of the yard with a lot of wildflowers (also known as weeds -- it was mostly clover, dandelions, and probably ragweed) and would crouch and watch the bees forage. It's really neat; you can spot the little pollen baskets on their hind legs and sometimes see their little tongues (I'm too lazy to look up the plural of proboscis) going into the flower.)

A digression: there are some of the really big solitary bees that I've watched crawl around on flowers and poke holes in the petals from outside to get at the nectar. It's a little freaky. One of my pet peeves is having people claim that a bee bit them (the stinger is on the other end, doggone it!), but I don't think I'd care to have one of those lick me.

So the fascination was put aside eventually, but never quite faded, and when I had the spare course hours my senior year of college I jumped on the beekeeping sequence. The first semester was a lecture course with a few demonstrations; the second was hands-on -- and all kinds of fun. The top handful of students were awarded a beehive of their own -- basically a starter hive (brood chamber, one super, top, bottom, etc., some drawn comb and a package of bees).

I didn't get around to claiming mine until last summer, and lost them to drought and an attack of wax moths -- wasn't paying enough attention, I guess. This year's attempt is... apparently not thrilled with me, though as I've been feeding them and gave them plenty of room I'm not sure WHY they have apparently decided to send out multiple swarms. Wah.

I can't check on them tomorrow, either, it's supposed to pour rain all day. Hmph.

Um. Short answer is, because they're really, really cool.

They're soft when they walk on you, and a healthy hive is probably about the best smelling pet ever. (Seriously. Warm wax and honey... I loved the family dog, but that beats her scent any day.)

2. Why Spanish?

I won't be as long-winded on this one. Because I liked taking French in high school, liked the one year of Latin I also got to take (another senior-year-with-spare-class-periods thing, yay), and have a certain fondness for beginner-level classes. It's fun to start out knowing next to nothing about a topic, take what's often (not in all areas!) one of the easier courses in it, and come out automatically knowing significantly more because, well, I started at nothing.

So I wanted to try out another language, and Spanish had the advantages of being popular (and thus easy to schedule), closely related to the other languages I've studied, and generally considered locally useful (which is probably part of why it's popular) given the growing Hispanic population in the area. Not that I'm anywhere close to fluent enough to carry on a conversation in Spanish with anyone who is not both determined and very patient.

3. How do you collaborate, when you write your stories with Alan? Do you think you are a better team or individual writer?

The usual method is to get together in a chat window and exchange paragraphs. This is also the venue for actually planning out scenes and/or plots; some scenes start with a general idea of where they're going, and some do not. The latter have been known to spawn stories or get fit into them later, I think.

The paragraph-exchange works best for dialogue scenes, for obvious reasons; it's also very nice sometimes in that if you get stuck in the middle of narration you can stop and beg for help. ;) Scenes that are already laid out fairly clearly in one of our heads, especially narration-heavy ones, might be written elsewhere and sent over whole, or at least started primarily as a monologue by one or the other of us.

There's a lot of "Now wouldn't it be neat if..." that goes on.

As to whether I'm a better individual or team writer... well, that probably depends on the team, but then, that's probably a given. I think I do very well on my own at times -- but fanfiction is largely a social activity for me, however silly this may sound. I never intended to write any until after I'd spent a while chatting with people who did and an idea for a Proteus story jumped my brain. I spam people -- uh, not in a bad way -- for those who aren't familiar with this usage, I'm referring to throwing bits of story at people in chat who have consented to having it flung at them. I enjoy writing at people. I don't really freak out if nobody writes or posts to me about something I've posted, but in a lot of cases I might not bother if I didn't also have somebody to talk to about the story who was already interested.

It also seems that my longer stories/series and those I'm more persistent with are almost all cowrites. I pretty definitely wouldn't have carried Time's Riddle into being, well, Time's Riddle instead of just "Who We Are" if Alan and I hadn't ended up talking about how exactly sticking Tom into Ginny's classes might work, and how to fix it so it wasn't a total disaster.

A mildly alarming number of my X-fics are also either cowritten or part of someone else's timeline. Or both.

So... yeah. Probably better as a team writer, overall, with a sufficiently congenial team. Though I think a few of the ones I'm fondest of are one-shots with nobody else in on them.

For some reason this stings my ego a bit. Oh well. The team stuff is usually more fun anyway.

4. If you could have a superpower, what would you choose?

Hmm. Telekinesis, please. Ideally enough to lift and carry maybe a few hundred pounds without getting a headache (at least if I exercised my brain regularly), and nothing that would wind up causing hemorraghing or result in atomic (worse yet subatomic) scrambling or any urge to eat stars. Also, no unintentional activation!

5. If you could visit anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Why is this so much harder than the superpower one? ...I don't know. Italy?

Comments

[sevenall.livejournal.com]

I think your bees are so cool; I've even considered taking a course and starting up a hive myself. Until then, I enjoy reading what you post about them.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :) And if you decide to, I hope you have better luck than I seem to be. I have no idea why they're swarming this year.

The hive is apparently still full, though....

[dreagoddess.livejournal.com]

As it happens, your teams think it's much more fun to write with you than without too. ;) Or at least the ones I can speak for do.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Yay. :)

[rexlapinii.livejournal.com]

Seconded. :)

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Aww. Thanks. :)