Kimbar: I came in pretty late to Mariel Cove, so I wasn't involved in the planning, but I'd love to maybe start out with knowing how it was for everyone to get to sit down with these characters you'd all spent however long creating, and finally get to start writing them.
Noel: The concept of the series was really intriguing.
Noel: A novel written by a team of writers like a television show.
Noel: I can't speak for the other authors but I didn't have much "say" into my characters.
Noel: I came in to write two characters that were already pretty fleshed out by Jennifer, the series creator.
Noel: What I brought to the characters was more [nuisance...checking with Noel to see if this was supposed to be nuance] and realism because I share background elements with Arianna and Celeste.
Kimbar: I was very similar, Noel - I don't know who created my character, but I was approached at the end. It was fun getting to know the character I was handed, though, and getting to figure out how to write her in a way that was true to her, to the series, and to me.
Noel: I agree, Kimbar. It was an exciting process.
Rowan: I enjoyed the process of "building" the island's community.
Skye: I was given a survey...
Kimbar: What sort of a survey, Skye?
Rowan: I also got a survey.
Neale: I got the survey, too.
Skye: I was given a survey with a bunch of questions about the types of characters I might want to write...
Neale: Asking what kind of characters I would be comfortable writing realistically.
Skye: It was basically broken down by profession...
Rowan: Nationality...
Rowan: Race...
Neale: What types of sex we would be comfortable writing ;)
Rowan: And whether we wanted to write a couple. Which I did.
Rowan: I think I was the only one who said yes to that one.
Neale: It was fun to fill out, for me at least =)
Rowan: I agree, Neale.
Skye: I filled it out and wrote back that I wanted a villain. I wasn't surprised that I was handed a lawyer, LOL!
Rowan: LOL.
Kimbar: Haha.
Kimbar: I love Kennedy's character, by the way, Skye - you definitely get to see the villain side of her in this episode, but she's complex, too.
Neale: Love to hate her.
Rowan: Yep. Love to hate hate hate her.
Rowan: But you're right, she is complex.
Skye: She is complex and I loved developing her throughout the season. In my head I always describe her as just a hot, hot mess.
Neale: Definitely. She certainly is a hot mess.
Kimbar: I love to love her, but then, I'm writing for her girlfriend so I had to view her from a different perspective than the other characters.
Rowan: I like how we really get a very clear sense of who she is right from the start.
Rowan: In the details like the remotes.
Noel: I think Episode 1 does that really well over all.
Noel: Gives a clear sense of characters and location.
Rowan: I agree.
Rowan: Location, especially. I really liked the description of getting to the Cove.
Rowan: It puts the reader there in a very concrete way.
Kimbar: Absolutely. I was rereading the scene where Arianna is first coming into the Cove too and it was just a refreshing and really good view into the world.
Skye: Definitely. Noel, I think that's majorly because of you. You have an amazing ability to vividly create a sense of place in very few words.
Kimbar: I feel like I could move there.
Noel: I want to move there, Kimbar!
Neale: The first scene really started the series off beautifully.
Noel: Was anyone else surprised when Arianna and Aidan have sex within 24 hours of meeting?
Rowan: No!
Neale: No, not really =)
Rowan: Not surprised at all.
Kimbar: It was surprising, but it was written so well that I just accepted it as, "Well, of course that has to happen!"
Noel: Thank you, everyone =)
Rowan: There's heat in that first meeting.
Neale: Fiction is supposed to take us away from our everyday lives.
Skye: This is a queer girl series. We all know it happens in real life, LOL!
Neale: I would never sleep with someone the first day I met them.
Neale: But reading about it is hot =D
Rowan: LOL.
Rowan: I agree. But that's what makes it so much fun to write and read.
Rowan: I love the "this is not me" aspect of this.
Noel: I was a little startled when the plot called for that... development... but it certainly did seem natural for the scene.
Skye: It gives a sense of character to both women, though. Both that they would have such a sudden affair but also why they had the affair and how they react later.
Noel: The author of the Twilight books was quoted once saying it was harder for her to give Bella's soul away than for Bella to give her soul away.
Noel: That's how I often felt about Arianna.
Kimbar: That makes a lot of sense.
Noel: It would have been harder for me to make many of the choices that Arianna makes throughout the series.
Skye: Especially since we learn later how important that moment was to Arianna. (Shh... not giving spoilers!)
Noel: LOL!
Neale: I felt that way with Tal and Aidan.
Neale: Sometimes they make choices that I would never make.
Noel: One of my favorite aspects of Episode 1 is how we see ASL being used by three characters. The community is diverse in so many ways.
Rowan: I think that's the beauty of fiction, Neale. We can explore the range of human choices and their consequences but we don't have to live it ourselves.
Kimbar: I just want to say that I love Tal's personality - she's got a perfect amount of humor to her dialogue that just makes her so easy to read.
Neale: Thanks, Kimbar =)
Neale: She's the easiest for me to write.
Neale: I feel like I can just fall into her personal world, effortlessly.
Kimbar: So, for those of us who didn't write for our characters in this episode, or whose characters first appeared in scenes written by other authors, how was that experience?
Rowan: I liked, it personally.
Neale: I think that Aidan was handled very nicely.
Neale: I believe that it was Noel who introduced her, from Arianna's perspective.
Rowan: I was nervous because it was the first episode and I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was very pleased with the result.
Rowan: I think there is a lot of respect among the authors for each person's words and craft and that made it easy to trust.
Kimbar: I know that I was writing my scene for Kitty while Skye was writing an earlier scene with Kitty, and I definitely felt that respect and that trust.
Noel: Neale and Rowan, do you want to talk about how that part of the process worked? Like, with approval and stuff?
Rowan: Sure. I got the scene from Noel and read it over.
Rowan: I made sure that the Tidewater was described as how I'd envisioned it and that Roisin was on the mark.
Rowan: I didn't want to do any "line editing"...
Rowan: If there was an issue, I just sent a note.
Rowan: I really enjoyed seeing Noel's take on Roisin and the cafe. And it was perfect.
Noel: I don't think I realized I was introducing Roisin and Aidan. I would have been far more nervous!
Neale: Noel sent the scene with Aidan in it, defending her mom (Roisin).
Neale: It's the first time Aidan is introduced.
Neale: I absolutely loved it.
Neale: And it actually inspired me to give Aidan a little bit of an "anger management" problem.
Neale: An impulsiveness.
Neale: Which made its way into her character arc.
Rowan: She gets that from her mother, Neale =)
Skye: That's one thing I really loved about writing as a team. Very often someone else would give my character a quirk or fact that I'd never thought of on my own and it became an important part of her personality later.
Kimbar: I know that I didn't make many changes when Skye sent me her scenes for my approval, and Skye would usually return the scenes that I had written and sent to her without more than a small handful of fixes - did other authors find that they were doing a lot of correcting or very little correcting for their characters when their characters were written into someone else's scene?
Rowan: I can tell you a funny story about that...
Rowan: I corrected ... Noel I think it was you... on something. And it turns out that I was actually mistaken.
Noel: Oh! Rowan! I remember that now.
Noel: It was a date.
Noel: There is a private writers' forum for the series where we post details about our characters.
Noel: I wrote that two characters moved to the Cove on the date that Rowan posted on the forum.
Rowan: And you were so gracious about it. I didn't feel so embarrassed.
Noel: It was fine!
Neale: My changes to other author's scenes were very small. Slightly tweaking the dialogue.
Neale: And the changes I received from other authors, on my scenes, were small if there were any at all.
Rowan: Overall, that was my experience as well. I think because we were all reading the episodes as they were compiled and posted before writing the next episode helped a lot.
Rowan: Yes. When Tatiana and Ghiera first met.
Neale: Communication was the key, for me. It seemed like, with my characters and the characters they interacted with, everything was very clear and so it was easy to write their characters.
Noel: Other authors were mostly correctly my typos ;)
Noel: LOL!
Noel: *correcting!
Rowan: LOL Noel.
Neale:
=DSkye: Can I ask a question of the group? I know we're nearly done, but I'm dying to know: How did each of you come up with the personality of your characters/make them your own (when the characters came to you already mapped out.)
Rowan: That's a great question.
Neale: I created the characters that I've always wanted to write.
Skye:
=) Love that, Neale. Neale: I don't want to give anything away, but I've always been fascinated with the issues that Aidan deals with.
Neale: Some of them are ones that have touched me, personally.
Neale: Some of them are ones that have touched people close to me.
Neale: With Tal, I could take my favorite aspect of Shane from "The L Word"... that idea that relationships don't work.
Neale: I could explore that in my own way.
Neale: With a character dealing with very different things than the things that Shane dealt with.
Rowan: Tatiana was created from a combination of a friend of mine and a wonderful book I'd just read called The Madonnas of Leningrad. Gheira is based on that my friends's lover. So they are a couple in real life, who live in Armenia.
Neale: What about you, Skye?
Rowan: Roisin was, as Neale said, someone I had always wanted to write, someone whose age is close to mine and whose experiences are similar. Caitlin was originally really an extra, but I became very fond of her, as did others (not saying who, of course). She's based on my own experiences in the food industry.
Skye: Hmm...
Skye: Well, Rei is a mix of family members who live in Japan, a dear friend of mine and is basically the woman I want to grow up to be/expect I'll become. I wanted a peaceful counterpoint to Kennedy who still had her own brand of fire and justice.
Kimbar: I was handed a character that was very meek, so for me the biggest thing was making sure that she was a strong individual in and of herself. I feel like she could have been written as very one dimensional if I wasn't careful, so I asked for and agreed to take on extra scenes so I had space to give her the personality she deserved to have. I didn't it to seem like she was only staying with Kennedy because she was afraid to leave Kennedy - that's unfair to her and unfair to Kennedy - so my main goal with Kitty was to mix what I was given for her with how I felt she deserved to be written. It got a little complicated in some places, but after numerous conversations with Skye and with our fantastic editor, I was able to get Kitty to where I really wanted her to be. I really hope her humor comes across - that's one of the things I wanted to give her...a light-hearted, good-natured view of the world and a good sense of humor.
Neale: I think you did that very nicely, Kimbar.
Rowan: I agree. Kitty really came alive over the course of the first season.
Skye: When I was assigned Emery all I was told was she owns a bookstore and I was given a paragraph about Madison, LOL! I based her off a young, fiery feminist friend of mine with my own experiences as a writer/web video creator and a little Laci Green mixed in. =)
Noel: I really threw myself into the backgrounds of Arianna and Celeste. I thought a lot about where they had come from, their careers, and their life choices. That shaped their personalities for me. (Probably because I have always been very career-oriented.)
Skye: Kennedy... Oh, you ready for this story? Because it begins with "So a friend took me to a sex party in Washington DC..."
Kimbar: Haha! That sounds like a fantastic story!
Rowan: Go on, Skye
=)Skye:
;) So a friend took me to a sex party in Washington DC. She's very into the kink community and I was curious so I tagged along. She's a dom, so a snuggled up against her so I could watch what was going on without being hit on (because I was "claimed.")... Neale:
=DSkye: While chatting, this gorgeous blonde woman started hitting on my friend and I. She wasn't aggressive, but had sharp eyes and whenever she spoke, the words cut through everyone else's voices. She used words sparingly but always got her point across.
Noel: Talk about taking your research seriously!
Skye: Later that night she told me she was pre-law. Even later that night I saw her straddle a newcomer and consensually slap the s*** out of him for kicks.
Skye: When I was handed my basic description for Kennedy, which included the fact that she was a drug addict, I immediately thought of this woman and thought "What would happen to this woman if she was on uppers?"
Skye: Thus, Kennedy was born.
Noel: Hi there, Kennedy! LOL!
Rowan: Wow. That's a great story.
Kimbar: That's awesome - I love stories like that.
Skye: I thought so, too
=DKimbar: So, we're about done with our time here. Is there anything anybody would like to say last-minute in closing?
Noel: Can't wait for Episode 2 ;)
Rowan: It was lovely to see all of you again.
Skye: I'm so excited for the other eps to be released. This series is totally epic.
No comments:
Post a Comment