Playing with Dolls

I think everyone has their favorite online places. The ones where you go to distract yourself from all the annoyance of . . . well, of all the other online places you go. The interwebz can be very emotionally tasking for people and everyone finds those moments when they need an escape.

I play with dolls.

See, honestly, if my life was as I want it to be, I would just play with dolls all day long and get paid for it. This is, truly, what I want to do for a living. I just haven't quite figured out a way to accomplish this. Hopefully I will.

Until then, I have Doll Divine. This is my absolute favorite website. I go here every day and play dress up. I put clothes on dandies or may my own Sailor Moon characters or whatever I happen to want to play with that day. It is completely relaxing to me and helps me cope with the levels of agitation I get from Facebook and forums.

Doll creator sites are also good for writers. You can use them to get a basic working concept of your character, in terms of how their personality shines through when you change the genre of their look.

For instance, my bff and I are working on character concepts for our second book. As I flesh out characters in my head, I go to various dollmakers and see how the character would translate. A lot of the time when you're working on book characters (or a character of any medium, really), you have to accept that aspects of their personality will be conveyed in how they appear. Tics, mode of dress, favored colors, even hair styles will become associated with this character. Really refining down what is most important where these physical aspects are concerned is helpful in knowing how to describe them.

So yes,  dollmakers can have both pleasurable and practical applications . . . which, in my opinion, translates to mostly just practical applications, as anything that brings pleasure to your life has some degree of practicality to it.