notcryingtheyputtearsonmypillow asked:

Your mention of Joyce having Snkrs in her dorm got me thinking; are there any other plot ideas you had in mind but decided against implementing? If so, are there any you would be interested in talking about if they can't be used?

I envisioned a storyline where Joyce was kind of Roz-ish in her evangelism of, well, the opposite of what Roz evangelizes for.  Like, putting up posters promoting abstinence and such.  I think there was some really goofy slogan phrasing that I tweeted and “like”d myself so I could find it later, but that’s so so so very long ago, back before I actually used “like” the way it’s supposed to, i.e., every five minutes.  So that’s probably buried forever.  There are ways to dig up one’s first tweet, but not one’s earliest likes, far as I can tell.  I’m not scrolling down through 15.7K likes to find it.

This answer is now too much about Twitter.

Early on I had vague plans with Amazi-Girl that ended up going differently (but better, I feel).  Briefly, while musing that maybe I should kill a character off – because if I’m “redoing Roomies!,” it’s just the Done Thing – I figured maybe Danny would go, becoming Amazi-Girl’s Gwen Stacy, with a villain yet-to-be-determined.  I think it was vaguely set in, like, a giant construction site, and he fell in the middle of a battle, and superhero angst ensued, etc.  This never settled in my mind, and was only ever a quick muse, and it was kind of immediately jettisoned anyway once Blaine showed up and accelerated Amber’s story in a different direction.

I think very early I wanted to cast Mary as more of a direct foil to Joyce, rather than as a direct foil to … I dunno, everybody else.  And common decency.  Mary and Joyce don’t interact much.  I think I envisioned everyone as “milder” than they are now, but with such a large cast, sometimes you have to purposefully lean on certain traits just to have them stand out.

Like… I remember starting Dumbing of Age, and thinking, I’m so sad for Amber in Shortpacked!, so maybe her life is nicer here.  I took Blaine out of her life earlier, on purpose, for that reason.  I just wanted her to be happy.  And that didn’t survive, because it turns out Amber’s life has to be pretty crappy for her to be Amber in my mind.  She embodies so much of my own brain’s fears.  Those fears have to be put down on paper, or I don’t excise them, I don’t sort them out for myself.  

There.  Now less about Twitter.