Top 5 Writer Big Sister Moments

So, as a few of you know from references in previous posts, I am the oldest child in a rather large family.

Not always taken to be the oldest, but I am.

I have seven younger siblings who are all really awesome and fun in their own ways with totally different personalities. They are my best friends, my cheer squad, my schoolmates, my test audience and overall a very interesting and diverse group of people.

Being a writer has made for some interesting situations with all the people constantly around. I’m currently writing this to the sounds of a very aggressive tag game, a new instrument just invented out of a cardboard tube and the beginning strains of Ant Man.

Yep. Always an adventure.

So, the new posts I said I’d be putting up in my new years’ post? That would be some big sister/family writer funny stuff. 

To start, I’m doing one that’s a mix between both.

Presenting, my top five big sister writer moments, representing the writer impact I’ve had on my siblings. 🙂

Enjoy!

Moment #1

Fairly recently, actually. But this one made me very proud.

We were marathon watching all the Back To The Future movies the other weekend and it was extremely entertaining keeping one eye on Peter (my 8-year-old, INTP brother who has fully earned himself the title of “mad scientist”.) He, of course, was in absolute awe and admiration of Doc Brown through the whole thing.

We’d just reached a very triumphant moment in the first one when I heard his delighted chortle from on the floor in front of me. He sat there, grinning happily as he commented under his breath: “This is a good plotline!”

I exchanged a look with my dad, put on a touched face and whispered: “I’m so proud.”

 

Moment #2

I told you all that I slept outside on our porch for Succot earlier this year. Most of the time it was with Daniel and John, my 14 and 10 year old brothers.

I don’t even know how we got on the topic, but we got talking about good romantic subplots versus bad ones and what distinguished them from each other.

It was really an intellectually stimulating and interesting conversation that almost became a blog post.

But what really surprised me after the fact was that they’d picked up enough plotting know-how and writer lingo to analyze it so closely.

I mean, Daniel is the kid who, when told to write a short story writes one sentence about a house blowing up.

Many similar conversations have followed over the past few months, once again being amazingly deep.

 

Moment #3

My first book, Odd Team Out, was read aloud in episodes to my siblings as I was writing it, causing quite a fanbase to develop in the living room. There were a lot of fun moments following the end of Odd Team Out, including character doodles, a Lego chess set starring my characters as the game pieces and enthusiastic quotations of my lines. The one that flattered me most at the time was that they all got together and decided to play a game with themselves being my characters.

I had to break up a fight among my brothers of who got to be Cobalt.

 

Moment #4

Amazing Honesty went over with people a lot better than I thought it would, considering how much of a frantic sprint I was at towards the end of writing it. Squink read it first. Of her own accord, too. I was so tired of the story for a while after I’d finished that I was not forcing it on anyone. But, she blasted through in a day, loved it and passed it on to Daniel, the ultra slow reader, with heaps of praise accompanying it.

Surprisingly, he got through it in a couple days and liked it as well. It was his handoff of the book that I liked best, though.

Daniel: Here you go, *hands me the book*

Me: Did you like it?

Daniel: Well, actually I just skipped the whole middle so the ending didn’t really . . .

Me: *stares at him*

Daniel: *laughs* No, it was great. Good job.

 

Moment #5

My longest lasting enthusiastic fan from Odd Team Out was undoubtedly John. And you can imagine his enthusiasm at the prospect of a second one being written in a month.

I ran my whole outline past him and he helped me solve pretty much all of my plot weak spots. He was my cheer squad through the whole month of November (constantly asking what part I was at, especially) and went totally crazy with joy when I came downstairs on December 1st with the news that I had finished the book.

Of course everyone else did, too, to an extent. But not quite as off-the-walls jumpy as John managed. 🙂

 

Hope you enjoyed hearing about the sibs!

Please comment and like if you’d like to see more posts like this!

~writefury

53 thoughts on “Top 5 Writer Big Sister Moments”

    1. I’m glad you liked it! 😀 Yeah, Daniel and I sort of have a thing going were we good naturedly push each other’s buttons about stuff. I could give a million examples… XP

        1. Let’s see… so an example of him getting me: we do a lot of huge 1,000 piece puzzles as a family and so everyone was doing this one really hard Thomas Kinkade one. And whenever a piece wouldn’t fit where they thought it would, people kept saying “Oh… so close.” and I took issue with that, explaining that either it fits or it doesn’t fit. There’s no “So close”. it just doesn’t work that way. And Daniel proceeded to, every time a piece of his didn’t fit, proclaim loudly “Oooh… SOOO close…”
          And me pushing his buttons would be, asking if he put salt in the oatmeal (he always does, but everyone always asks because it doesn’t taste like it) and pointing out the new restaurant going in nearby in surprise every time we drive by.
          “Oh, wow! Look, they’re putting in a Cafe Neo!” I’ve done it like 13 times now and he’s not sure he even likes that place anymore. XD
          Of course there’s the height thing as well. He teases me for being short. I tease him for being tall (though don’t get much of a response.) The nose-to-chin staredown in this is literally something he and I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dEsaYj1JFk
          Well, that was long. But you asked for stories. XP

          1. X-D
            When I was little our family had another family where we were all best friends–there was one girl my age, another exactly my brother’s, and then one exactly my sister’s and two younger ones. I used to baby sit for the youngest two. So we (the oldest ones) would go out on field trips and race the boys, while they were always racing ahead. So they’d call us the long-legged stork walkers and they were the short-legged egret walkers. X-D

          2. Haha, love it! XD All the family terms that no one else would understand without a reference are so great. We have a lot too. Like Pity Cheese. And The Staring Brothers (they’re actually maracas with googley eyes). And the Archie Phone (the phone with a crazy ringer so it would have these random phone seizures in the middle of the night and wake everyone up if you used it too much).

          4. We have a version of that. “My dinner basket is full, but my dessert basket is empty.” A good excuse for little boys who go straight from saying they’re full to asking for candy. XD

          5. OH MY GOODNESS. X-D
            I want to hang out with you IRL so bad. Like, we could dress up as Hornblower or HTTYD or as Oliver and the Doctor and wander around and go get ice cream and see how many people would do double takes and we could build blanket forts BECAUSE X-D

          6. That would be so fun… *wistful face* someday… there will be some writers’ conference at a middle ground or something. Or I’ll happen to go on a road trip past you. I don’t know. 🙂
            The whole Oliver/Doctor height thing would get totally messed up, though. XP

          7. YES! X-D Or some kind of fun thing fan gathering whatever “conventions” is 😛
            That’s true. 😛 But then, I’m actually taller than Paul McGann anyway, so… 😛
            I think it might be fun to try to choreograph some dances just for fun… 😉 Also, Oliver and the Doctor would ABSOLUTELY dance together in the TARDIS to whatever records they could find, and the Doctor might put on a frilly hat and dance the girl’s part. 😛

          8. It’s only happened like once that I’ve met someone online first, but one of the most fun parts is hearing them talk after just reading their writing. IT’S AMAZING HOW SIMILAR THEY ARE, SERIOUSLY! XD

          10. It’s pretty weird. 😛
            But yes, sometime after a midpoint meeting, I have to show you Washington and all my favorite picture spots. We can climb on trees and driftwood and see the tulips and things. 🙂

          12. OH! I love secret hideouts. I’d have to show you mine as well. It’s in the pine trees by our house, so it smells really good. 😉
            It’s actually partly featured in my next picture post. 😛

          14. Yes! Hiking is awesome! And hiking to forts is even better. 😀 I’ve hiked up a mountain near Leavenworth once. Inadvertently. I thought I was taking the 30 minute trail. Turns out it was the 3 hours each way trail. Great view, though. And my uncle kept showing us mentos commercials when we’d take breaks. I should take you. XP

          16. With all the mountains around here, hiking is sort of the thing that’s always there to do. If you don’t mind the rain. XP
            Yeah, Mentos commercials. The cheesy ones from the 80s or 90s that make it look like your life will be perfect if you eat a mento. And then there was the parody… XD

          18. Same! how cold it out is pretty much my only coat-wearing-determiner. 😉
            Mountains are awesome to have around. If it makes you feel any better, Nebraska was a lot less flat than I thought it would be driving through on our road trip. 😛

          20. Good grief! Eight’s outfit is making me so upset right now. It’s a double-breasted coat (which he never closes–see Ten for similar use/abuse of a coat) which looks sort of Victorian but it ONLY makes sense if you take into account that it was a HALLOWEEN COSTUME. The writers of the TV movie are not winning any points here. What did they do, literally walk out to a costume shop and pick one up and say “yup, this one will do, and he only has to wear it for an hour and a half so it won’t matter if he rips it”?! Grrr. I have SO MANY problems with this outfit. So many. Houston, we have a problem.
            I guess if you’re an alien time traveler it doesn’t matter to you if your clothes are historically accurate and okay, your dress sense IS sort of cute, but it makes no sense to the costumer in me. For instance, the costume is supposed to be “Wild Bill Hickok” and okay, there was a gun belt (which the Doctor discarded with barely a look), but if it’s a Wild West costume is velvet and silk really a good idea? And the back of the coat doesn’t have the “vent” a man who likes riding horses would be looking for. THIS COSTUME MAKES NO SENSE!!! gahhhh!!!

          24. Actually, it looks nice and it works, aesthetically and it has some nice swish and texture to it. It just doesn’t make sense from a historical standpoint.
            (Also, ironically, something Very Drastic happens at one point in the official audio dramas and Eight cuts his hair very short (Bush would approve) and ditches the Victorian costume in favor of a leather jacket–not unlike the Ninth Doctor’s, in fact. I haven’t gotten to that point yet but HONESTLY Paul McGann has an incredible cadence. His performance is absolutely entrancing and riveting. And sometimes he does this *thing* where he says something and it sounds sort of like it’s supposed to be ironic but is it or isn’t it and it’s impossible to figure out which.
            (I think I might actually do the same thing to people in real life… when I’m stressed I tend to get snarky and take it out in humor and people laugh like they don’t realize I’m really mad enough to spit nails. They don’t seem to recognize it when I’m being sarcastic. This doesn’t help me in my people skills, as I need to STOP being sarcastic, not hone it into an art form. Seriously, the fact that I am smart enough to make people believe that I’m perfectly all right when I’m really fuming is not helping me be a nicer person.)

          25. I know what you’re talking about with Paul McGann. And I’ve only seen Bush. 😛 Does the Doctor get any opportunities to yell “FIRE”? 😉
            That actually sounds like mom. Maybe it’s an INFJ thing? I usually talk her down from it pretty well. Finding the humor in the situation is one of my hobbies. 😛

          26. Maybe if something was ON fire… X-D He does shout in the audio dramas and once in the movie. You kind of get used to his softer cadence and then get startled. 😛
            Maybe… I don’t know. I’m somewhat more passive-aggressive than most INFJs I know of. Almost closer to an INTJ sometimes.

  2. Oh wow. I remember the first time I was remarking on my worldbuilding to my brother. he got very into it and I ended up giving him the entire plot to do whatever he liked with. He forgot about it rather quickly and I stole it back, kneaded it, let it rise, punched it down, and baked it in the oven for 4 hours on low heat.
    I then proceeded to simmer it in chicken broth and it’s been waiting on the back burner until I can come back to it again. 😛

    1. I mostly go to Daniel for villain plots. He pretty much was my villainous mastermind for OTO 1. 😛 I’m not sure if I told you, but certain cyborgs are modeled after my sibs. Daniel is Comet (seriously, he’s crazy fast), John is Frost and Jazz is loosely based on Squink. 😉

        1. I shall hug them for you. 😉
          IKR? It’s so fun to pull in real life things! 😀 Sometime I want to make my dad some action hero in a story. Really, my dad reminds me of all the good action heroes. 🙂

          6. Oh, I hate it when people try and ship people who are already with someone else. *cough* Hiccup and Merida. *cough* I just don’t like that one at all.

          7. Oh, yes. Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons is overrated. I want a crossover between HTTYD and Big Hero Six.
            I don’t particularly care for non-canon ships either. I’m also a sucker for the “happily-married-ordinary-couple” ones. LAURA AND CLINT IS MY OTP.

  4. Yep. This is too great. I know what this is like too. I’m not a writer; Kate’s the only one of those currently. But I know the stuff, and all the same kinds of discussions go on and are taught as a way of life to these kiddos by their two crazy story sisters. (And I have a 10 year old INTP brother and know exactly what it’s like. XD)
    *happy sigh* I know this post is from awhile ago, but…I’d love to see more like this and the big family one. 😀 They’re so great.

    I originally got on your blog this afternoon to read the HH fanfic ’cause I’ve never yet read it. But I’ve been too distracted looking around on the other interesting tags, and haven’t even gotten around to it yet in the half hour I’ve been on here. I love your corner of the Internet.

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