Tag Archive | description

Character Development Meme (morning Warmup), Questions 7 and 8

As discussed here and on LJ, I’m going to do this meme for a few characters (I’m rotating seasonal sibs to not totally overwhelm myself).

Questions 5 & 4 are here and on LJ.

7.) Is there one event or happening your character would like to erase from their past? Why?

Spring (well, really, all 4 RoundTree Siblings): Their father’s death. Dad RoundTree died when Mom was pregnant with Spring, leaving Winter as parental figure for his three little sisters (Mom’s not all that good at the parenting thing). The three that remember him miss him horribly, and Spring has always felt his loss.

Conrad: I’d have to say that what happened to Kai with Anatoliy wins here. He’s had a pretty easy life, even up to his first year of Addergoole

Rin: Hrm. This one is harder. Rin’s seen a number of deaths she couldn’t prevent, and handled any number of really unpleasant situations. I don’t think any one of those stands out to her, however.

8.) Day of Favorites! What’s your character’s favorite ice cream flavor? Color? Song? Flower?

Spring: Rocky Road, Green, “Hate Me,” Orchid
Summer: Chocolate, Pink (yes, really), the soundtrack to Rent, roses
Autumn: Maple Walnut, Red, Something loud and full of fiddles, and irises.
Winter: Vanilla, White (or blue), Mozart, Crocuses.

Rin: they don’t have ice cream. Her favorite colors are green and blue. She likes the marching songs, although she’ll rarely admit it, and she loves the snowblossoms that grown on the cold sides of the mountains.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/183716.html. You can comment here or there.

Character Development Meme (morning Warmup), Questions 5 and 6

As discussed here and on LJ, I’m going to do this meme for a few characters (I’m rotating seasonal sibs to not totally overwhelm myself).

Questions 3 & 4 are here and on LJ.

Questions 7 & 8 are here and on LJ.

5.) What’s your character’s ranking on the KINSEY SCALE?

Spring: Varies depending on her mood
Summer: 3
Autumn: 2
Winter: 0

Conrad: I get the feeling about a low 1.

Rin: I’m really not certain. She’s not a very high sex-drive character any way you slice it, but probably about a 1-2.

6.) Describe your character’s happiest memory.

Winter: Winter being who he is, his happiest memory is one colored bittersweet. He was about five years old, sitting on the dock at the family cottage. The whole family was there: his parents, his mother’s mother, and his two little sisters. Autumn, about three then, was drawing pictures in the puddles of water on the dock. Summer was tiny, under a year old, and Winter was holding her in his arms, as he leaned against his father.

“Hold her carefully,” his dad murmured. “They’re a great responsibility, little sisters, and often great difficulty,” the latter as Summer tried to squirm out of his arms. “You have to know just how much to hold them, and when it’s time to let go.”

Conrad: (can I pick a memory in the future? No? Hrmm.) Everything right now for Conrad is covered by the bliss-bond of making his Keeper happy, but a memory from before the storyline…
… kicking a ball around the Village field with Cassidy and Vlad, the summer between years Four and Five. Just hanging out, not talking about anything all that important.

Rin: In a temple in an ocean-side city, her apprentice as a healer finished, she stood over her first solo patient, a woman of middling years who had injured her leg in a fishing accident. Slowly, patiently, Rin brought forth the energy, and coaxed the body to heal itself.

When she awoke, the grateful fisherwoman, generally an reserved type from an reserved group, hugged Rin tightly against her chest in thanks, and gifted her with a small, delicately-woven pendant of copper replicating a fishing net in miniature. She carries this pendant with her in her packs, only pulling it out for special occasions.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/182912.html. You can comment here or there.

Character Development Meme (morning Warmup), Questions 3 and 4

As discussed here and on LJ, I’m going to do this meme for a few characters (I’m rotating seasonal sibs to not totally overwhelm myself).

Feel free to suggest another character, and I’ll work through them in rotation.

Question 2 here and on LJ.

Questions 5 and 6 are here and here on LJ.

3.) Name one scar your character has, and tell us where it came from. If they don’t have any, is there a reason?

Summer: Summer had an active, wild childhood, and, as such, has more than a few of those childhood scraped-knee and cut-hand scars. More notable is one across her collarbone, gotten when a piece of a set fell on her, nail-side down.

Conrad: most noticeable on Conrad is his nose, which was broken and not healed properly in his teens (soccer accident). He’s gotten in a few training scrapes since coming to Addergoole, but those heal scarless.

Rin: Rin is a healer. She bears no scars on her skin because she’s healed them all.

4.) How vain is your character? Do they find themselves attractive?

Autumn: Autumn is not a narcissist, but she’s a flirt, in a profession that encourages flirtation, and in subcultures that really encourage flirtation. She knows what she’d got, and she likes showing it off; she dresses to that end most of the time. Although she will not sacrifice practicality for vanity, she also won’t sacrifice vanity for practicality.

Conrad isn’t particularly vain. He knows he’s decent-looking, but in Addergoole that’s mostly a function of not getting a bad Change. No-one there is all that unattractive on base.

He attributes his skill with girls – Kai is certainly not his first girlfriend – more to social finesse and less to his appearance.

Rin: Rin has her mother’s nose, her grandmother’s hair, and a family chin. She exemplifies the royal phenotype, looking like a Callanthe and a royal. On some level, she knows this makes her look attractive, especially to other Callanthe, and she’s spent enough time in Bithrain to know that, there, this makes her exotic.

She takes enough care of her appearance to not let down what people expect of her as a healer, as a member of the army, or as a princess, depending on what role she’s filling at the moment.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/182359.html. You can comment here or there.

Character Development Meme (morning Warmup), Question 2

As discussed here and on LJ, I’m going to do this meme for a few characters (I’m rotating seasonal sibs to not totally overwhelm myself).

Feel free to suggest another character, and I’ll work through them in rotation.

Question 1 here and on LJ.

Question 3 here and on LJ.

2.) What are your characters most prominent physical features?

The RoundTree Siblings:
They share a stubborn chin they inherited from their father and a strong nose they got from their mother, a build that is sturdy or athletic rather than willowy, and a medium height that is neither tiny not giant.

Winter’s hair went prematurely white (his sisters blame Spring); he wears it long and in a ponytail, and it’s arrow-straight.

Autumn’s hair is a curly mess of russet, which she wears mostly-loose.

Summer’s hair is golden blonde, and as straight as Winter’s. It spends much of its time in a ponytail.

Spring’s hair is dirty blonde, light brown, and worn feathered and, no surprise, a little chaotic.

Conrad: The tail is probably the most notable, and his oversized, extra-digits-and-knuckles hands and feet. With his Mask hiding those Changes, the hands and feet are still oversized, and his once-broken nose and blue, blue eyes stand out more strongly.

Rin: Rin is a model of her ethnicity, as is not all that surprising from a member of the royal family. Her long black hair and small mouth with its rather generous smile are most notable; her skin is a light mocha-tan in the cold season, but, after several seasons at war and on the road, is burnished to a dark very-slightly-olive tan.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/178529.html. You can comment here or there.

Character Development Meme (morning Warmup), Question 1

As discussed here and on LJ, I’m going to do this meme for a few characters (I’m rotating seasonal sibs to not totally overwhelm myself).

Feel free to suggest another character, and I’ll work through them in rotation.

Question 2 here and on LJ.

(1) Describe your character’s relationship with their mother or their father, or both. Was it good? Bad? Were they spoiled rotten, ignored? Do they still get along now, or no?

Spring: Spring never knew her father; he died when she was still in the womb. Her relationship with her mother is at times very wild – Mrs. RoundTree has distinct ideas about where her children’s lives should be going, and, as a tangler, especially, Spring is very good at countering that. She was a wild kid, who turned to her brother as a father figure, and in a pinch, she’s much more likely to go to Winter or Autumn than to Mom for help.

Conrad: He doesn’t know who his father is, although a year and a half at Addergoole has led him to assume it’s someone in Regine’s breeding program. His mother, Maria, did her best to raise him well, with the help of her older brother and her father. He has a distant-but-okay relationship with his mother, with some small amount of resentment that he keeps very very deeply buried for sending him to Addergoole; he gets along well with his grandfather, and his uncle taught him most of the “manly” skills that come in handy so rarely at Addergoole.

Rin: She’s the seventh daughter in a family of nine, not spoiled but not ignored either. Her mother is more or less professional royalty; she’s never left Lannamer and rarely leaves the palace complex. Her father is a bureaucrat and a businessman who manages portions of the royal finances and helps to keep the roads going and the weapons heading out. Neither are particularly strong in the faith/magic of that world, and neither are of a particularly military or scholarly bent. They approved of Rin’s time in university, but are a little lost by her decision to go military. She, in turn, thinks fondly of them, but with not a great deal of respect.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/175803.html. You can comment here or there.

My dreams are awfully derivative…

So that was a strange dream-fragment. Not a story option as presented, because it stole heavily from other things, including my own settings, Star Wars, Wen Spencer, and a Sherri Tepper book, but interesting.

Just a vignette. A tall white-skinned woman with a physical resemblance to Ventress,but with hair (more on that later) was walking with another person, mentioning that “I think, when I head home, we’ll just raid some men from another colony who might have some spine…”

Background “known” by the viewer:
* As in the Wen Spencer’s A Brother’s Price, there was a very high woman-to-man ratio; the dream said 12:1, and the “men” were, as in my Tir Na Cali and to paraphrase a David Brin novel pallid sires who father a pallid race. Pampered, spoiled pets.

I think that, as in Sherri Tepper’s Sideshow, the white-skinned women with their pampered bois lived in one settlement on a planet that had several different subspecies of humanity, and that they were going to raid men from one of those… not certain, though.

The hair thing was neat: the women had black head hair which grew in essentially giraffe spots; some women in their clan-sister arrangements shaved it short, to show the white lines between the black fuzz, while others grew it long and braided each spot individually in long thick braids. I don’t know if the men had spots.