Bookcrossing - live to share, share to live

Talk about your favourite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

Where to start? Let's start with swashbuckling. That's a nice easy one. Really, I think my fannish id was formed by The Prisoner of Zenda at an early age (I am still very fond of The Prisoner of Zenda).

See also: Ruritania. I love a good fictional society, and the deeper we go into the government departments and the transport infrastructure, the happier I am.

And love and duty. I don't necessarily mind which triumphs, so long as both are taken seriously. I also love it when one of the arts - or sports, or whatever - is the third party in a relationship, particularly when the partners are both very enthusiastic about that. Not to mention the creator. (This was why I enjoyed Yuri!!! on Ice so much: it was very much about the skating.)

I like relationships between women, romantic or otherwise. And friendships between men and women where it's never going to become romantic.

And then I always enjoy a good description:
Food. Chalet School breakfasts. The Marseille chapter in Madam Will You Talk.
Clothes. Annoyingly, I can't think of a good example at this moment. Probably Eva Ibbotson.
Landscape. A John Buchan evening. Can't beat an apple-green twilight.

Finally, something that I write more often than I read is the situation where you will never be able either to clean up Dodge or to get out of Dodge, you have to live in Dodge, but nevertheless you can find a way to carve out a happy and/or meaningful life there. And maybe you find you've made it slightly less grubby.

Talk about your creative process.

Five years ago I'd have talked about volcanic islands rising out of the sea, and building causeways between them. A good premise or prompt would spark a snappy exchange between two characters, or a vivid little snapshot of background, or a moment of insight. I'd write them down as soon as I could.

Then I'd build on them, adding the line that followed on naturally, the reply that the other character would have to make, setting up the scene so that this moment could happen. And then I'd work out how they all related to each other, what order they came in. I'd consider what needed to have happened by the end of the story in order to make it satisfying, and I'd add a bit here and a bit there until my lonely archipelago had a fully functional infrastructure.

I am still trying to do this, but it's not working as well as it used to. A toddler who just doesn't go to sleep, a commute (once my best writing time) that's down to one day a week, and a dying laptop have all made writing hard, and frankly I'm just too tired a lot of the time.

But I am exploring other creative realms, and the one that's currently interesting me most - knitting - is about as different as you can get. You have to do that in the right order.

At the moment I'm trying to design my first pattern: a slipover. It's going to have to be a slipover because I only have five balls of this yarn. I bought it in a charity shop and the Internet has nothing to say about it. I am having to plan: to measure, to practise, to calculate. I can't just make it up as I go along. It is an alien process to me, but, rather to my surprise, I'm enjoying it. The secret is, I think, being just good enough to be able to do things that make all that interesting rather than tedious. By which I mean, cables. I really like cables. I'm even enjoying the tension square.