HUSTLE. READ MORE. WRITE BETTER.

Find me on Twitter! You can read my tweets! They're not the best tweets, but they're unlikely to offend you. And now there's a Tumblr! Which I am making zero guarantees of updating. (However, you can find five Twilight drabbles. Here, here, here, here and here.)

Hi! I'm Sookie Starchild. I picked out my pen name when I was channel surfing and talking about David Bowie at the same time. I'm in my early twenties and I write copy for a living. This is my hobby, but I do it to practice for a dream career, so I LOVE getting feedback. I currently live in the frozen Canadian territories and am cold all of the time. All of the time. So very, very cold.

I write for multiple fandoms. There's no pattern or set of rules. I just write whatever I want whenever I feel like it, so if you put me on Author Alert, you're agreeing to a mystery bag of oneshots with no particular schedule. And while it's very flattering to get requests to continue things I've marked complete, I'm totally not going to. It's because I figure out the plot and the pacing and the length in a pretty fixed way for myself, and there isn't room to continue in my head. I think it's a defense mechanism my brain uses in order to stop me from going totally insane from having eighteen million stories going on forever. It might also be laziness. (It's totally just laziness...)

I also appear to go months at a time where RL gets in the way of posting, and I'm starting to sell original short fiction to magazines that will pay me. Sadly, this makes me about as reliable as a very unreliable thing.

Here are some inspiring quotes. Everybody else has quotes on their profile and I thought: "Why not me?"

What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal? [Emma Coats]

Looking back over a lifetime, you see that Love was the answer to everything. [Ray Bradbury]

The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. [Randy Pausch]

Grit is learned behaviour. To increase it - and to use it to propel you forward - all you have to do is try, try, try, try, try, try again. [Leigh Newman]

We have to change the negative things into positive. In today’s Japanese film industry we always say we don’t have enough budget, that people don’t go see the films. But we can’t think of it in a positive way, meaning that if audiences don’t go to the cinema we can make any movie we want. After all, no matter what kind of movie you make it’s never a hit, so we can make a really bold, daring movie. There are many talented actors and crew, but many Japanese movies aren’t interesting. Many films are made with the image of what a Japanese film should be like. Some films venture outside those expectations a little bit, but I feel we should break them. [Takashi Miike]

The way to get ideas as a writer is to steal everything in sight. There is no such thing as inspiration. [Lester Dent]

To be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before. [Charles Eames]

You are a mash-up of what you let into your life. [Austin Kleon]

And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning. [Anthony Burgess]

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. [David Oglivy]

You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. [Anne Lamott]

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around. [Stephen King]

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. [E.B. White]

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. [Raymond Chandler]