Step into my parlour...

When maniacs go for a walk, they take the psycho path. I might set foot on it once in a while...

Anyway...

I'm Siana Blackwood – writer, web designer, web developer and student. I don't plan to talk about web design, web development or being a student unless it directly impacts on my writing, so that's all you're going to hear about any of that. Now on to more fun things.
I like cats, goats, heavy metal, chocolate, digital art, science fiction and cheap horror movies. I'll read pretty much any genre, although my favourites involve horror, science fiction, fantasy or a combination of all three.

I hate half-page descriptions that turn out to be one or two sentences and could be replaced with one or two lines. I also hate ugly cars, food colouring in soy sauce and Vegemite (surely they're brown enough already?) and food that has onions or garlic in it for no good reason.

When I write, I'm only happy if my characters feel real enough that I sit with my back to a wall so they can't come to life and murder me... or at least I'll see them coming if they do.

Yes, I'm kidding... kind of.

I always feel like I have an antagonistic relationship with my characters. After all, I'm the one who destroyed their lives, threw them into some kind of insane adventure and told them they have to be nice to the other characters. Sometimes I interview them to find out how they feel about it all. It's never pretty.

My past as a writer is littered with unfinished stories and characters who are forever frozen in dire jeopardy. Well, some of them are. The others are just sitting around tapping their fingers and wondering if I'll ever get back to them.

Okay, most of them are sitting around tapping their fingers.

At 28 years old I've finally decided it's time to do something about all those writing curses like writer's block, laziness, distractions... and anything else I might think of later.

I want to extract my characters from dire jeopardy – or (more frequently) finally get around to throwing them into it. I want to start finishing stories. After all, if my characters think they've got reasons to kill me now, just wait until they've been through the rest of their story.

My plans? Well, for starters I've signed up for NaNoWriMo. Yes, break out of a cycle of never finishing anything by creating an entirely new idea and trying to finish it really, really fast. It sounds crazy, but crazy ideas have a history of either working or failing to work in a really cool way.

I'm also going to start organising my writing in ways I always imagined would be irritating and creativity-stifling. Things like story plans, character overviews, progress charts... maybe even a project lifecycle model. Don't laugh too much – take a look at Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake.

Oh, and I'm also going to blog my progress. That way I'll have some degree of accountability as well as being able to share cool things I find, create or learn.

Anyway, this is my story. Enjoy!