Writers' Salon!

[isana]

All right, guys, let's get this started.

This is a post for members to post their burning questions to each other. They can be simple, like "when is Character X's birthday," or not so simple "how would you define the relationship between Character X and Character Y?" If there's a story you want that author to talk about, throw in the title (and some points you'd like covered!) and if said author's willing, they can write their answer in a separate post, since I have no idea what the comment word limits are.

Here's how it'll work: an author who's up for answering questions/writing commentaries about stories will leave their name in a comment. Readers who want to ask questions or request stories reply to that comment, and hopefully we'll have some good conversations going!

If you guys request stories, it may be best if you limit them to rainbowfic for the time being, unless the story you've got archived outside the comm is in a public entry.

EDIT: If it's not already obvious, you can ask authors more than one question in however many comments you like. The point is to have a discussion, and it wouldn't be very lively if it stopped at one question per author! Just give the author a chance to finish answering your previous questions, of course.

Comments

[bookblather]

How did the various kids come into being? I'm going to ask Sara this identical question so feel free to ignore hers. :D

[subluxate]

Talk about a complicated question!

Johnny is answered in my reply to SWL. Basically because a former friend wanted a boyfriend for her character, aka Michael 1.0. We don't talk about Michael 1.0.

Before Johnny, there was Eva. I think she was before Adamo, making her the very first kid. Eva came about kind of hilariously. I have the quote somewhere in the fic this is based on, but okay. Basically. Sara and I were talking about if Wilson (of House fame) and "Stephen" Colbert (so the character) were to get married, how the name thing would work. (This is the same RP from whence sprang Johnny, much like Athena, pounding his way out of my skull.) I said something about Stephen taking Wilson's name, Sara said she didn't think that would happen, and without thinking, I said something along the lines of, "Unless Stephen got pregnant." Sara went, "NO DON'T," but too late, the fic had to happen. And it's quite possibly the best mpreg I've read, not that that's saying a lot, lol. So Eva came to be because I knocked up "Stephen" Colbert with James Wilson's child.

And I am completely serious about that, if grinning at the memory.

Sara is addressing Adamo, who was somewhere in there since he was around the same time as Johnny and Eva.

The rest didn't really come into being, as I recall (and I could be mistaken, since this was ohgod five years ago), until we decided Johnny, Eva, and Adamo should be related in the non-crack version, given Johnny being Italian and Eva and Adamo being adopted and having Italian names. It was in an RP thread in which Johnny and Adamo figured out they were related and Adamo asked about the siblings that I really did it. Johnny outlined for Adamo all the siblings except himself, Eva, Adamo, Gina Sophia (as she was not yet a sibling), and Torey (as he was dead). It was just sketches, really, basics like, "Romeo's a math teacher, his wife and baby died, he has two living kids." (Yes, Penny and Victoria have been dead since Romeo's inception.) That was when the mothers were named, too.

The characters were not completely as they are now (Teresa, for instance, was quite different. So was Nicoletta, and Isabella was a history professor at Stanford), but that's how they first came to be. And then they evolved. A lot. The RP did it some, but it's when Torey came to be as more than a kid who died as a toddler (which I forgot to tell the rest of our crack contingent for, oh, a year-plus) and we started writing it more and really, really hashing it out, and then RATS, that we got the sibs figured out for real. And sometimes, they still surprise us a bit.

[bookblather]

XD NO DON'T

If somebody is saying NO DON'T around you I think it's already too late. And also, I'm kind of glad it happened? Because that is a HILARIOUS backstory but also kind of adorable in a hilarious way.

Who do you think has the biggest difference between Character 1.0 and the current version?

[subluxate]

My first instinct was Michael. But in reality, I think it's David. David is not nice, us. David does not like his kids, or his [first] wife. (Fun fact: Angela has always been consistent, even when David's wife's name kept changing because we couldn't be bothered to remember.) David does not wear a wedding ring the first time he's married. David would never let Teresa move to Chicago on her own--he'd uproot his life and move with her if she really, really wanted to go.

At least we got David's relationships with Johnny and Martina right.

(Michael is, to me, a close second.)