Writing roommates

Taking a break to blog about something other than traveling. 

As I've mentioned before, Kate and I are both writers.  We met because we were writers and we regularly give each other challenges with the stakes being gelato in Milan or making her watch a game of the World Series.

Most of the time, this is a very delightful thing.  In November, a friend of ours asked her for "writing inspiration" and she and I responded by coming up with 54 writing prompts that Kate made into a deck of cards.  We recently broke out that deck for a girls' night in and Kate had to write a job recommendation for a fictional character, which led to me having a fanfic written for my work for the first time ever!  It was a huge deal for me.  I got the "make your villain a victim" and "retell the fairy tale from the perspective of the parents" cards and wrote the affidavit of Rapunzel's adopted mother.

Kate is also the one who asked one night if Aislin ever got stranded without clothes at sunset and you will someday see that this is where the Prologue of Wingspan comes from.

On Friday, we were hanging out on the couch and watching the Sochi 2014 opening ceremonies.  We're both musicians as well--she plays violin and I play, well, a variety of instruments, ranging from viola to organ--so we were critiquing the music.  I whistled Shostakovich's 9th Symphony over the unsatisfactory music used for the World War II overview of Russian history.  She recognized Stravinsky's Firebird before I did.  During the "dove of peace," where dancers wearing what looked alternately like jellyfish and wings formed a gigantic dove, they played music from Swan Lake. 

And then Kate turned to me and said, "I still say you should do a Wicked treatment of Odile."  I froze in mid-thought and started shouting, "NO, NO, NO, YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO DO THAT, NO, NO, BAD KATE!"  Two days later, I'm still trying to decide the particulars of the plot.  I have told her that if she helps me work out characterization, I will stop hating her for giving me plot bunny #35.  She just laughed.