Absolute Chaos Discussion Boards
Fic Talk => General Discussion => Topic started by: Sakabelle on June 09, 2012, 06:07:30 PM
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This is sort of a weird question, but it's something I've always wondered. Do you have a stamp that you put on all or most of your stories? Just a little thing that you might include consistently in every world that you create? I guess sort of along the lines of how Josh Schwartz always has his characters eating yams and marshmallows at thanksgiving or JJ Abrams and his slusho, lol.
I know that I always personally have my characters stay in hotel room number 1508 - especially is some kind of drama is going to take place in the room. I also realized that I always unintentionall y have had major events take place in Boston.
Or am I the only one who does this? lol
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It was brought to my attention that my characters quite often have scenes where they escape to or hide away in a bathroom lol
I do like alluding to things from my older stories in my newer ones. I took that from Stephen King lol
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Oh wow, I've never thought about this. I don't know if I do!
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Hm... I don't do anything that intentional, like the hotel room 1508. Now I wish I did!
I do know that a lot of my stories contain references to Titanic, which is my favorite movie. I tend to refer to movies a lot in my writing.
I also like to include inside jokes and name minor characters after people, usually friends or readers. With all the medical drama I write, I hate having to come up with random names for medical personnel, so in Broken and BMS, I named most of the doctors and nurses after people who gave me feedback. I started Curtain Call in the middle of my Double Rainbow phase and named the first six nurses Dora (for double or double rainbow), Reyna (rain), Bo (bow), Allie (all), Thea (the), and Wei (way). In Secrets of the Heart, most of them are Beatles references.
My favorite form of passive aggressive revenge is to base characters on people who piss me off (usually in the fandom, but not on AC) and put them in unflattering roles. Broken and BMS, Curtain Call, and 00Carter all have some of those.
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I love your inside jokes, Julie! Also, you Double Rainbow reference in Curtain Call is awesome. I love putting little themes like that in my writing. I'm trying to do more of that in my newer fics.
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Writing quirks? Well whenever I write Kevin he is always a jerk. No matter what the story, I make him mean. I don't know why.
I also have Star Wars references sometimes as well. Haven't thought about this so I might have more lol
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I love your inside jokes, Julie! Also, you Double Rainbow reference in Curtain Call is awesome. I love putting little themes like that in my writing. I'm trying to do more of that in my newer fics.
Thanks! It's fun, especially when you forget you've done it and come across things like that when you go back to reread parts.
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I also realized that I always unintentionall y have had major events take place in Boston.
LOL I always associate Philadelphia with bad things happening to Backstreet Boys because of Mare's stories. I used Philadelphia in Guilty Roads, I think because of its proximity to Amish country, but I was probably just paying homage to Mare's suspense fics!
Any reason you tend to use Boston, or is it just something random you noticed?
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I also noticed I like to have things happen in New Jersey, NYC or Florida. Only in one story does it take place in Oklahoma. (Forces Of Nature)
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It's just something random I noticed. I don't even know why Boston ended up being the place, as I'd never been there before February and it's not close to me or anything! The only story it actually needed to be in was Running Up That Hill for AJ's intervention.
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LOL I always associate Philadelphia with bad things happening to Backstreet Boys because of Mare's stories. I used Philadelphia in Guilty Roads, I think because of its proximity to Amish country, but I was probably just paying homage to Mare's suspense fics!
Any reason you tend to use Boston, or is it just something random you noticed?
Thanks, Julie! I detest Philly so I guess I tend to make awful things happen there. Although I think I only ever based It Stays there but honestly I don't remember lol
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They were heading to Philly in Whatever the Night May Bring too; those were the two I was thinking of. Seems natural to use places you're familiar with (even if you hate them) whenever possible, like Tracy and New Jersey. That said, I don't seem to use Chicago much - that would be the major city I'm most familiar with. Most of mine take place in Florida or Cali or wherever the Boys are touring.
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I tend to have a set of twins somewhere in the story LOL. It used to be that it was the main characters, but after I got out of that phase, I thought I stopped. But even now, I tend to include them if only as minor characters in the background. Undead - Brian has twin daughters, RMTW - AJ has twin daughters lol. So even in more recent stories, I still tend to do it.
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^ You probably have a parasitic twin you never knew about that's lurking inside you, haunting you...
Or maybe you were a twin in another life...
Or maybe you're just fascinated by twins. :)
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Personally, I like the parasitic twin theory LMAO.
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Me too! Since your name is Rose, can we name it Petunia - Petunia the Parasitic Twin?
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LMFAO that sounds like a twisted sitcom title.
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The kind of twisted sitcom we'd write. :biggrin:
I picture Petunia looking like Baby Voldemort. Let me know if you find a face growing out the back of your head or something.
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Speaking of parasitic twins and writing quirks, my characters always seem to have babies at some point in most of my stories. I like babies.
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I also noticed that I make jokes about Howie's hair or him using hair products quite a bit...or he just isn't in the story at all. Poor Howard.
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They were heading to Philly in Whatever the Night May Bring too; those were the two I was thinking of. Seems natural to use places you're familiar with (even if you hate them) whenever possible, like Tracy and New Jersey. That said, I don't seem to use Chicago much - that would be the major city I'm most familiar with. Most of mine take place in Florida or Cali or wherever the Boys are touring.
Oh lol I forgot they were in Philly in Whatever the Night. The funniest part of that is I can use one hand with the number of times I've been to Philly lol I'm much more familiar with NJ, Boston or Nashville. I don't know why I've not used those places.
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I really don't know if I do anything like that with my stories. I can't really add places I'm familiar with unless I have them stranded in South Wales or north east England, lol.
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I'm sure that makes it harder! I mean, I'm used to writing about places in the U.S. I've never been, but at least it's still the same country. I think it would be hard to write a story set completely in a different country, unless it was a place I'd been or a culture I knew a lot about. But the internet does make it a lot easier to research nowadays, if you're anal about making things sound realistic.
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I'm pretty sure my settings don't sound realistic, LOL. In the one I'm writing now, it's been slightly easier as some of it is set in England, but it's 1940's England which is about as foreign to me as the US.
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LOL True! I think historical fiction would be hard for the same reason. Any time you're writing about a world that's different from your own, it's more difficult.
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I tend to have someone end up pregnant at the end oft stories!
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I can't really use settings that I'm familiar with, unless the boys want to hang out in Winnipeg, haha. I did have part of In Pieces take place in Minneapolis, which is basically the USA version of Winnipeg :P
Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever taken the boys out of the states in my stories. (Except for my teeny fics in which Nick and all the other BSB moved onto my street after Nick fell in love with me in Florida.)
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Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever taken the boys out of the states in my stories. (Except for my teeny fics in which Nick and all the other BSB moved onto my street after Nick fell in love with me in Florida.)
LOL!!
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(Except for my teeny fics in which Nick and all the other BSB moved onto my street after Nick fell in love with me in Florida.)
:biggrin:
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Well it would have been ridiculous for me and my friends to move to Florida :P
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The only quirk I can think of that I have is that every story written after Room 438 that has a hotel or apartment ... the number is 438...
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I have Nick getting shy when someone compliments him, he's always blushing or feeling self conscious in my stories!
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(Except for my teeny fics in which Nick and all the other BSB moved onto my street after Nick fell in love with me in Florida.)
Is that before or after your destination wedding? :)
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I seem to have people die a lot... and have people picking up pieces behind them. I'm literally incapable of telling a story that somebody doesn't die in... Even when I was a kid, Barbie always bit the dust in my games. She'd drive her Dream Car down the stairs and or meet her demise camping as a bear ate Ken's leg off and return to a feiry inferno of Dream House. Seriously, I was really evil to my Barbies. I've been pretty evil to my FF characters too. LOL
All of my stories have soundtracks too. When I start writing a story, it starts with one song that I play on a loop while I write until I think of another one that fits the situation and add that, then those two play on a loop and so forth until I have multiple songs for each story. Usually, the songs aren't even BSB songs. For instance, my Something Beautiful playlist has 13 songs on it and only one of them is by BSB... and technically it's Brian solo so not really Backstreet Boys at all... and was added as an afterthought because Brian sang it in the end of the story, not even used in the writing process at all. But really if you're gonna have a sound track and Brian sings "I'm Alive" in the story, "I'm Alive" should probably be on the sound track. Right?
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LOL Oh Barbies... I LOVED Barbies! Before I started writing for fun, that was one of the ways I got my "stories" out - either by playing them out with Barbies or acting them out with the neighbor kids. I loved drama then just as much as I do now!
I do the soundtrack thing too, for certain stories.
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I used to RPG too, when I was little. My friends and I always acted out stories we made up using characters from all our favorite TV shows, books, and movies. It was crazy.
A couple days ago, I read a study about kids that play alternate universe role play games (like "house" or acting out stories) and they said that by polling creatives that have won MacArthur Grants, something like 60% of them played alternate universe RPGS when they were children... I thought that was kind of neat. The study went on to say that RPGs actually stimulate the creative mechanisms in a kid's brain and create a lifelong tendency to be more creative than kids that played more "traditional games".
I know I sound like Sheldon Cooper right now. :-X
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That doesn't surprise me much, it actually makes a lot of sense. I've seen a few studies on children like that too. I know as a kid, I used to have my barbies. The ones my brother ripped the heads off of, ended up as zombie monsters that attacked my other barbies, or ended up as slaves to the witch barbie...
I was always an odd child lmfao. No romance or normal house games, instead it was always witches, monsters, and zombies with my barbies :D.
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That makes sense, although I don't know of many (if any?) young kids who DON'T play some version of house/school/war/whatever. Little kids are naturally creative, but something causes some people to retain that creativity and others to lose it. It definitely could be the difference between continuing to roleplay by acting things out in real life or with toys vs. relying on TV and video games for entertainment. One requires imagination; the other does not.
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That doesn't surprise me much, it actually makes a lot of sense. I've seen a few studies on children like that too. I know as a kid, I used to have my barbies. The ones my brother ripped the heads off of, ended up as zombie monsters that attacked my other barbies, or ended up as slaves to the witch barbie...
I was always an odd child lmfao. No romance or normal house games, instead it was always witches, monsters, and zombies with my barbies :D.
I was an odd child like that too LOL. I loved to pretend, but never enjoyed playing straight-forward "house." I was a tomboy, and most of my friends were boys, so "house" turned into X-Men house, army house, pioneers and Indians house, etc. I had more fun making bows and arrows out of sticks than playing house LOL. My little sister and her girl friends liked playing house, but when I played with them, I was always a killer gorilla that would attack the house or a homeless person that would bother them. The only "normal" pretending games I remember playing were school and restaurant LOL.
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I was an odd child like that too LOL. I loved to pretend, but never enjoyed playing straight-forward "house." I was a tomboy, and most of my friends were boys, so "house" turned into X-Men house, army house, pioneers and Indians house, etc. I had more fun making bows and arrows out of sticks than playing house LOL. My little sister and her girl friends liked playing house, but when I played with them, I was always a killer gorilla that would attack the house or a homeless person that would bother them. The only "normal" pretending games I remember playing were school and restaurant LOL.
LMAO I loved playing X-Men house, I always wanted to be Storm. That, and Power Ranger house, and I think the girliest I got was wanting to be the Pink Ranger :P.
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When I was a kid I was a tomboy. I played barbies but I always was the boy. We didn't do normal romance type stuff, wed act out movies or make up our own scenes with tornadoes hitting or earthquakes. I loved natural disasters.
I played power rangers as well, I was always the blue ranger and my friend would be the green ranger, my sister was the pink one. LOL we also used to take sheets and make tents like we were camping.
As for Mare's questions, titles are hard for me but most of the time I don't think about it and let it come to me, or I use a song title or play on words.
Dialogue is sometimes hard, my friend and I act out scenes over yahoo messenger and I write the story using what we come up with in brainstorming.
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The second part of my post was meant for the other thread. Oops.
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LMAO I loved playing X-Men house, I always wanted to be Storm. That, and Power Ranger house, and I think the girliest I got was wanting to be the Pink Ranger :P.
I was always Storm too!
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When I was little I used to sing into doorknobs and play with my grandmas girdle for hours. I had Barbies but rarely played with them. I was too busy trying to get ceramic clowns to talk lol
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LOL I was a weird kid too! I recently found a bag full of my old school books, going back to when I was 7. I couldn't believe the stuff I wrote. I was either being transported to the future, living in haunted houses or meeting famous pop stars :)
As for games I played, I was quite a tom boy at times but also used to love my Barbies. I used to have them living in a mythical land with dragons and unicorns though :)
I also used to think my toys came to life at night when I was asleep :D
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I have my notebooks from when I wrote fanfic in high school. I have so many stories that I haven't used yet but don't plan to. I also have a notebook from when I was in elementary school, short stories. I wrote one about a "magical mermaid" and another about a kid adopted from a third world country.
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LOL I found a magical mermaid story in one of my books too!
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That's funny. See as a kid I was fascinated with mermaids and mythical creatures, I actually wanted to be a mermaid.
I just remembered that was where I found the early notes for Figured You Out....I had come up with the idea while in high school. It changed a lot when I decided to bring it to AC, the original was very different.
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I was always Storm too!
I was Rogue... sure her power sucked (literally) but I kind of had a thing for Gambit *coughs*
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I was a big time tomboy who actually loved playing barbies! They were always in love. When we played house I always wanted to be the daddy and I always fought the boys for the cars and guns. lol.
I was about eight when I learned about zombies and I stayed awake that whole night waiting for my little brother to become one. Eeek! From then on when the kids wanted to play zombie nation I'd run home terrified. :'(
When I wasn't playing I was a nerd winning awards and goodies for reading and writing. The local paper in my hometown published three of my stories when I was ten. lol. If only that could happen now.
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I never wrote for fun until I started writing fanfic, but I did always participate in my district's Young Authors competition when I was in grade school. I won for my class every year from 4th grade on, but I never placed in the top 3 until 8th grade, when I got smart and realized from reading previous winners' stories that tackling serious issues helps you win. So I went for the drama with my 8th grade story, and it won first place! My first major writing award. ;) Ha! What's hilarious is how similar this story is to certain fanfics I would write in the future...
I typed it up for kicks; it's only ten pages long, instead of 200 chapters LOL. I did not scan the illustrations, because those are even more embarrassing than the story. http://www.dreamers-sanctuary.com/seasonofmiracles.html
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Awww, I enjoyed your very first award-winning story, Julie! Definitely reminiscent of Broken. It's interesting learning about people's roots as writers!
I know that I was always telling stories and making up stories as a kid. I was always writing short stories and reading them out to my friends in Elementary School, and when I became a fan of BSB Nick just naturally got inserted into them. I still wrote a lot of original stuff especially in Junior High. We did have a school wide writing competition and club but I never bothered with either of them. Not really sure why, I guess I just liked to keep my stuff to myself. I didn't really start sharing my "serious" writing until I was able to do so online.
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I used to write stories all the time too when I was a kid. We never had writing contests though. We used to have to memorize and then recite a book word for word in our IG classes. And with my memory and how shy I was, I never did well. Lol
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Thanks, Steph! My favorite author back then was Lurlene McDaniel, and even though I've long since outgrown her books, the influence she's had on my writing is still apparent now, thinking of Curtain Call. But it was blatantly obvious back then! LOL That story was basically a fanfic in its own right because the guy was based on my huge junior high crush, Josh. The doctor is a combination of another guy I liked named Ben and Leonardo DiCaprio. And the basketball coach is named after Brian LOL. Is it sad that my tastes haven't changed much since the age of 13? There's even a mention of Titanic in there LOL. At least my writing's improved.
I would have been like you; I never liked to share my writing either. The Young Authors thing only came about because it was required in the younger grades, and I found that I enjoyed it, so I kept participating in that even when it wasn't mandatory anymore. I never wanted anyone else to actually read my stories, though, even if they won LOL.
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My first official fanfic that I wrote was back in high school when I didn't know what fanfic was. It was called "lost in the jungle". The plot was that Brian's plane had crashed and Nick went to go find him with AJ tagging along. I still have the handwritten copy. This was when I carried notebooks and wrote during class. I had poetry featured in the school magazine but I was more of an artist, I was in a few art shows in town and had a showcase for a week in the school lobby. My writing didn't get serious until I began posting at AC.
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Sounds a little like Save a Prayer! I love stories like that LOL.
So you could actually do a good job illustrating your stories!
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Yeah I probably could :) I used to paint and draw all the time, took lots of classes for art.
Now that I think about it, that does sound like Save a Prayer, minus the bot flies lol. It did have Brian in a loincloth swinging on vines like Tarzan, if I remember correctly ;)
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^ LMAO!!!
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My first writing endeavor was a children's story called Kate the Cat in which a cat named Kate and a dog named Jack get lost and meet a rabbit named Bunny who helps them find their way back to the farm. It's really awkward writing but the story itself isn't completely terrible for a seven year old... (kinda reminiscent of Twilight that way...) Anyways, my sister's boyfriend was an illustrator and he hijacked a copy of my story and illustrated it for me for my birthday. I still have a copy of it somewhere. It was originally intended to be a series but by the time I finished the first one, I'd started writing other storylines. So typical of me, to start a story and never completely finish it. LOL
My writing ADD started early on. :-[
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LOL I still have my first story. In second grade I discovered my love of writing. It was for some assignment I guess, and for my age I did really well on it. My elementary school had a publishing program where if teachers saw promising writers, they submitted the story. And then you got to publish your book, pick the paper, draw the pictures and they made it into something that lasted lol. So mine was about a talking fox named "Foxy Fox", who wandered off into the woods and ran into a hunter who killed her lmao. Yeah, second grade and I'm already killing off main characters. Go me!
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We didn't have writing competitions or anything like that when I was in school, and I would've been too shy to take part even if we had.
Julie, I'm going to read that story :)
LMAO at Rose killing off the characters even as a child!
When I was in school I loved to write, but when I left school I didn't write another story until I discovered fanfics in 2007.
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Aw Julie, I just read it, it was very much like Broken. Cute story!
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LOL Steph, it's good to start young right? I was looking through my old stuff, and I found the one I "published" in third grade too lmfao. Twin sisters (typical), who have evil grandparents who were witches. They ran away, and one ends up killed by the witches before their parents find them. I'm cracking up. I was an evil writer even as a child.
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Thanks Steph! LOL
My third grade Young Authors story was about three kids whose parents get eaten by a grizzly bear while they're camping and leave them lost in the woods with the man-eating grizzly bears. That one didn't win. It was a pretty epic survival story (LOL), but my third grade teacher probably thought it was too violent or something. I hated my third grade teacher. Still, I think you've got me beat, Rose!
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I was reading another of my old school books last night and found a story where I had my characters in a cannibal infested jungle and they had to escape! One got eaten, lol.
I had a horrible teacher when I was about 10. She was such an old fashioned old hag and used to tell me off for writing left handed! There are also comments she's written in my books to say I had a strange imagination, hehehe.
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Yay cannibalism!!
That's exactly how my teacher was, although she didn't tell me off for writing left-handed. Are you a leftie, too?! I should have known - creative people tend to be left-handed. ;) LOL
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Hey, now...as weird as my mind is... I'm a right-y LOL.
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Excuse me, are you implying that we left handed people are weird? Me and my water bottle drinking cat want to know!
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I am a righty so that disproves the theory. Me and my army of Nick clones disagree.
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Yes, all you lefties are weird! LMAO. Ignoring the fact I'm a zombie-lover who makes very inappropriate jokes about angsty subjects :P
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We're not weird; we're gifted! ;)
Though I did read that lefties also have a higher incidence of schizophrenia LOL. So maybe we're a little crazy too!
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Yes, I'm left handed too! I can handle being weird lol
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Yay to us lefties! :)
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I'm ambidextrous, so what does that mean for my personality? lol
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I actually am ambidextrrous too lol but I tend to use my left hand to write mostly.
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I actually am ambidextrrous too lol but I tend to use my left hand to write mostly.
Weird! What are the chances we both would be?
I've gotten to the point where I am so lazy I will write with whatever hand is closest to the pen lol I generally use my right more though
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I know, that is strange, isn't it? I freak my kids out in school because I write with my left hand but when I write on the board I always use my right hand so they're always like, "Wait, I thought you were a leftie?" All confused lol
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^ That's so odd, but convenient! Being a left-handed teacher means I live with a perpetual smear of marker/ink/graphite down the side of my left hand from writing. It's gotten better since I got a SMART board in my classroom and got rid of my overhead, because overhead markers are the worst!! I would love to be able to use markers right-handed, but my writing looks like a preschooler's. I am extremely left-dominant LOL.
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Lol I know! Those smart boards are great for lefties! I love those things! lol
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Yes, they're amazing!!
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In relation to Mare's question in the other thread, in addition to always making Nick's mom a bitch....I remembered in two stories I've written so far, she always wants Nick to die so she can collect the insurance money. Twisted.
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I do a lot of things with my right hand too, like ironing, my mouse in work I use with my right hand, my watch is on my right hand, and I can also write with my right hand but it's not as good as my left hand.