#WritingWonders 18: Love interest?
Welcome to the minefield taking over the time travel plot!

Carrie is dating Chartreuse, her high school sweetheart; they're not at the same university. And now there's Peaches, a cute, friendly lesbian with a troubled past in Carrie's residence, who is ONLY not jumping Carrie's bones because she respects our MC is in a relationship.
Carrie is loyal, but desperately curious about other girls like Peaches. This was a whole #RomanceWonders thing back in February.

#WritingWonders 4.18 — Does your MC have a love interest? (#RomanceWonders special edition.)

In the story currently under revision: Two intimate. (Impending wedding, partly political, partly about sharing both, lots of confusion.) A third who had a crush on her, who declared unambiguously he's ready to play. But, because the MC's good friend needed it, she pushed him at her. What followed caused even more confusion. And a fourth, who was a nerdy childhood friend, a bff really, whom she thought had abandoned her but had been pushed away by her guardian. Her memory of him continually bothered her all these years as a fabulated paradigm of masculinity. Now that she's reconciled with him, she's definitely interested. Lots of longing.

So, yes. All this happening over a period of 72 hours, and a couple hours a week later.

What fun to write!

#fiction #fantasy #sf #sff #sciencefiction #writing #writer #writers #author #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon

#BoostingIsSharing
#CommentingIsCool

#RomanceWonders for February 19: Start with MC & design a partner or start with 2 and make them fall...

Start with a boy and a girl separated by events who will come together and defeat the 'bad guy'.

Then...write a scene where the boy shoots a tiger, and then a guy falls out of a tree and breaks his leg, and the boy magically fixes it, and suddenly they’re looking into each other’s eyes....oh, er, sorry kid, so *that's* your story?

Time to find the girl a different partner...

#pantser

#RomanceWonders for February 19: Start with a character & design a partner to fit, or start with two characters & figure out how to make them fall in love?

It depends on the book. In book 1, the two characters were crafted to fit a plot idea and each other, then the hero of book 2 existed from book 1 and I had to figure out who could love him and be what he needed. For my current WIP, book 3, both characters existed as best friends before I realized they belonged together.

#RockIconReady

#RomanceWonders Feb 18 HEA or what?

For both couples, it has to be heading for an HFN...if only because their mean ol' writer wants to do another book, but their soft-hearted ol' writer hates being sad. And the second book's usually riddled with more darkness, isn't it?

So, you can trust me to bring the pairs together and let them have some happy. They'll need it to have any chance of weathering the coming storm.

#RomanceWonders 19: Design partner or no?
I definitely start with two characters. But I don't so much figure out how they fall in love as figure out if they vibe, and if they don't, I back off. (I write urban fantasy more than romance.)
One COULD make the case that Peaches was crafted from/for Carrie (both blonde, busty, had single parents and are lesbian) but it was more as a friend/complication than as a serious contender, which is what that's become.

Small sample size, but it's good that those at #RomanceWonders didn't immediately see a runaway victory for anyone in the poll (and that two other people were curious enough to look). Had that happened, I'd have been worried I missed something. As to the final day...

#RomanceWonders D19 - Do you design your characters to make them fall in love? 
I usually start with characters and a concept I want to play with, like a romantic lead with social anxiety or an inverted power dynamic. Lately I’ve tried making my characters different from each other but still complementary; when I started out the couples were too alike. I’m a pantser so I never really design or plan anything; the characters basically lead me around and tell me what to do. They often surprise me!

#RomanceWonders D19 - Do you design your characters to make them fall in love?

I usually start with characters and a concept I want to play with, like a romantic lead with social anxiety or an inverted power dynamic. Lately I’ve tried making my characters different from each other but still complementary; when I started out the couples were too alike. I’m a pantser so I never really design or plan anything; the characters basically lead me around and tell me what to do. They often surprose me!

#RomanceWonders: Feb 18 — Do you start with one character and design a partner to fit, or start with two characters and then figure out how to make them fall in love?

Three characters... Impossble situations drive the best stories.

While she finds sex worthwhile, my MC didn't understand the concept of love or that she was capable of it at the end of the previous story. Fresh from saving the world, at least the bloody first half of the job when she was prevented from running away again, she is about to be given what she least wants: responsibility. She wants to be left alone with her magic books. During the ceremony to install her to power, she's snubbed by an arrogant fellow who doesn't even notice her.

I decided I wanted to write a claustrophobic story that takes place over three tense days of romance, intrigue, and threatening war. In it, my MC starts to learn that there really is a reason why she is hired for the jobs she does. She's good at them? Unlucky? Gets underestimated? Won't stop fighting even if it means being killed? (Nearly dying is one of her tragic motifs.) To make this story happen, I decided I needed someone who could be the target of an infiltration plot. Getting the MC romantically entangled with the arrogant fellow mentioned in passing in the last story seemed like the very worst possible thing that could happen to her, so I let that happen.

Besides really limp blond hair, all I started with was that he was single, a decade older, related to the ruler of the nation, arrogant around women, and a political power broker (suspected). It became apparent as I wrote why my MC and him were compatible: they're both brutish, know how not to be, and have virtuous reasons why they fight. He's not who makes her fall in love with him, though. There are too many spoilers to describe how the second love interest came to be, but it was the infiltrator that taught her to love and caused her to fall in love with both men. Sex and identity-misunderstandings ensue, ending with her jackknife in someone's heart and much healing magic.

You can't plot these things out, trust me. It's organic. Things become obvious, and you change what you wrote previously when the good ideas bubble up. You just have to be willing to go along for the ride.

#fantasy #fiction #WritingWonders #writing #writer #author #sex #love #marriage #endoftheworld

#RomanceWonders 2/2
And then there's Vers and Reev, the main characters from a NaNo a couple of years ago. I created them from a Story Engine set of cards, and then, Like Marcus and Blake, their own personalities moved in and took over the characters. The thing with pantsing for a short deadline is that both ended up with whole backstories I never anticipated or expected, it's fantastic. 😂

#RomanceWonders 19 1/2
It depends. Technically I created Milos for Alex, but he was supposed to be antagonistic and nothing like the way he ended up. His real personality turned up and overwrote what I'd intended.
But some characters evolved side by side and waited until I wrote them (Yve and Steffan) and others I created deliberately (pop singer and indie-esque songwriter), then their own personalities moved and decided they liked each other (and became Marcus and Blake).

#RomanceWonders 19
I am lucky as I don't necessarily have to have romance in my stories, therefore I can let my characters run free and fall in love or not, depending on how the story and the characters develop. But, being a insanely romantic person, romance inevitably happens. Just not always between the characters you would have expected.😂

#RomanceWonders Day 8: Do you start with one character and then design a partner, or start with two characters then figure out how to make them fall in love?

I'm trying to remember I knew if the two of em would end up in this love/friendship state. I think I knew they'd be friends, but maybe not this deeply. They also definitely both informed how the other person ended up--I had fuzzy shapes, but as I wrote the book, (cont)

#EmpathAndAugur #Comics #makingComics #amWriting

#RomanceWonders 18
Ending? Ah, come on, you know me by now. unlikely heroes, impossible pairings, and of course the boy gets the girl, the boy gets the boy, the girl gets the boy, the girl gets the girl, the non-binary gets the girl, the non-binary gets the non-binary, the ship gets the boy... Short: those who are meant to be together get each other.

At the end of "End of a Road Trip" they already dance together at Randall's and Lix's wedding. Foreshadowing, much?

Art
https://www.instagram.com/natendo_art/?hl=de

#RomanceWonders Feb 19: Start with one, or start with two?

Normally, I start with one character and design a partner to be with them, but with Giovanni and Kilala, it was starting with two separate characters and trying to figure out how to get them to fall in love with the other.

Which is a current predicament, because I've got a number of ideas for that, but need to get to the point where any of them will work.

#RomanceWonders 17
It is 1958 so they can't marry. It is so illegal that they haven't even thought about it.
There is, however, kind of an engagement scene when Jan at a dinner with his fellow colleagues from TV News #TheHour says how he feels about Harry and how he would like to handle his relationship, going forward.🥰

#RomanceWonders Feb 19: Do you start with one character and design a partner to fit, or start with two characters and then figure out how to make them fall in love?

For the MC it just comes to me, I don't design it. For secondary characters they fall in love or not on their own terms. I let the cards land where they will. Pantser.

#RomanceWonders 19:

I started with 2 characters and an idea of how they would meet plus the problems that brought with it.

Does it make sense to catch up with the #RomanceWonders and #WritingWonders prompts or do I just continue tomorrow. 🤔