Superhero Muses

Do you find alcohol or other drugs enhance your creativity/writing ability, or detract from it? Why or why not?

I'll be honest here, I've never written anything when less than sober, mostly because I'm very rarely less than sober. Drug and alcohol use have always been a pretty major squick of mine, to the point where recently I've actually deliberately practiced drinking alcohol in relaxed, non-stressful situations in order to get past my irrational reaction to it. But drinking has always increased my self-consciousness really painfully (isn't it supposed to do the opposite?) and so I can't imagine writing when tipsy, I think I'd just start second-guessing everything. Bit of a TMI there, but I found the question interesting because it's a commonplace that many writers drink while writing. How does it work for you?

As for writing, I'm just reaching the climax of one story and doing a lot of middle-work in others. I want to write something short! But lately the ideas that inspire me are ones I want to dig into and take my time with, and I'm not going to argue with my inspiration...

Who is your favorite current writer--the one who, no matter what their new book (or comics title, or fanfiction) is, you'll read it--and why?

I'm going to give an odd answer here: there's a writer in the Sherlock fandom named Atlin Merrick who I'll read just about anything she posts, for a few reasons. One is that she has a gift with words and turning a beautiful phrase, a skill I admire greatly. Also, she's been writing all Johnlock and nothing but Johnlock for years now, and yet her stories are always fresh and surprising and touching. She has a gift for finding a new facet or angle to a very well-mined pairing that I (as a person writing the same pairing for nearly a decade now) admire a lot.

Also--and this is not a reason for reading her stuff, but it blows me away--she is the best responder to feedback I have ever seen. Her "thanks for reading this" messages (and she has to write a lot of them) never sound rote or routine, she always sounds freshly overjoyed that someone enjoyed her stories. I know as a writer that I always am freshly overjoyed that somebody enjoyed something I wrote, but sometimes I fear I don't express that clearly enough. I aspire to be as graceful at receiving kind feedback as she is. :)

(I really meant to talk about a published author, but no one leapt to mind immediately, so my mind jumped here instead!)

Writing time has been sparse but productive when I had it, which is good. Plot is moving along, AUs are AUing, I'm really wanting to write something set in canon next but gotta clear off the fun and distracting AUs first! How about you?

Poking around some writing resources pages, I came across this list of character secrets which I kind of liked!  I think it would be useful for background characters and OCs that I want to make sure are more than cutouts--pick a secret at random, the readers need never know that the supermodel Bruce Wayne is dating is also...um...a hacker, but that makes her possibly more than just a prop.

My canceled conference last weekend led to much writing and I was happy!  I'm sure everyone will be shocked--shocked-- to hear that my ridiculous id-fic Regency AU with smoldering looks and identity confusion and pining is going to be longer than expected...  *facepalm*  I hope your writing is bringing you joy!