PaintedSky:

Three things you love besides writing/reading?
1) Drawing boys with ridiculously complicated hair. Seriously, if it doesn’t have at least 20 plaits, wiggles, spikes, and stupid, gravity-defying flicky bits, I am not satisfied. I could give Yu-gi-oh! characters a run for their money (yeah, it’s that bad).
2) Food - self-explanatory.
3) Binge-watching bad TV shows. The more cheesy and cringe-worthy they are the better.

Three things you hate?
1) People harming - emotionally or physically – other people (without proper consent). Just…. No. Stahp.
2) Other than that, not much really.
3) Maybe empty biscuit tins (damn heartbreakers).

Why do you write?
It’s fun. Sorry to fail to be poetic, but it is. I also like being able to read back over my old stuff.. Sure it’s a hot mess and headache-inducing, but it’s kind of nice to see how my writing’s changed, and also to remember those amazing Mary-sues and Marty-Stus of the past. It’s like keeping a diary, but with more zombie apocalypses and terrible romance storylines thrown in.

How do you create your characters?
*laughs* Ah, you think I create them. Yeah, no. They just rock up at 1 am in the morning, start asking for playgrounds to go be characters in, and before I have a chance to stop them they’ve got five books planned in my head, where all of the side characters’ side characters have backstories. Don’t be fooled by their dorkiness; my characters are merciless dictators.

Out of your characters, which one are you the most like?
I possess the bad parts of Ash and Andrew; Ash’s supreme social awkwardness, and Andrew’s foul-mouth. Pretty much all my characters share my lame sense of humour, because I have yet to work out how to actually be witty. I can’t even tell knock knock jokes right.

What do you do when you have writer’s block?
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m now going to demonstrate said lame sense of humour by using the Kübler-Ross model for this.

Stage one, Denial: Stare at screen for two hours and write three sentences that physically hurt my inner writer (which is impressive, considering how they do not exist on a physical plane)
Stage two, Anger: Delete the products of stage one and vow never to write again.
Stage three, Bargaining: Try and bribe myself to write with food and empty promises.
Stage four, Depression: Curl up into the foetal position on bed and cry.
Stage five, Acceptance: write something that is going to change human society forever, or something that will even be that great, but hey, at least if I write it, I have something, which is more than I had at the start. Cliché speeches about practice making perfect and all that jazz tend to come into play here. I then remove the cat from the keyboard, sit down, and write.

How do you plan out your stories?
With most stories (the ones that don’t get written) I plan them out in my head at night for a year or so, try to write them, and then get intimated by how much there is because I have over-planned, and subsequently it comes out all squiffy. For ‘Superheroes’, I stumbled out of bed one morning, mumbled ‘crime-solving gay boys’ to my toothbrush (the only one who listens), and then wrote the first chapter.