15, 16 and 19 for the ask game?
Another ask that came in very fast! Most certainly—thank you so much for asking!
15. What physical quirks do your characters tend to have? Eyebrow raising, picking nails, biting lips, pacing, crossing arms, etc.
Eric can’t sit like a normal person, he always needs to have his feet up in some way—squatting on the chair, sitting cross-legged, putting them up on the desk, anything goes as long as he doesn’t have to keep his feet on the ground.
Ivy tends to lower her head when she’s shy and let her hair fall into her face, obscuring her eyes. She also has a general tendency to make herself smaller when sitting or standing and take up as little space as possible.
Elise sometimes moves her bottom jaw sideways to sort of link her teeth together where they’re uneven, especially when she’s thinking. She also shares Eric’s dislike for sitting normally.
Jen is physically incapable of sitting still at all; she’s always wiggling somehow. She is also very much a hand talker and tends to rub and scratch her arms while talking or else play around with something in her hands.
16. What motives do you give your original characters? What drives them? How much tragedy did you subject them to?
That honestly varies a lot. In general I tend to have a protagonist who doesn’t have too tragic a past and gets thrown into things involuntarily and tries to make the best out of them and accidentally does great things, though I’ve also written protags with a sadder past, like Cinder in Shut Up Cinderella. The desire for friends or a place to belong does tend to crop up a lot, but also curiosity.
With the rest of the cast…all bets are off. In general I like to subject characters to a realistic amount of Bad Stuff Happening in their backstory, but that basically only means I draw the line at complete sob stories. I think the saddest past I’ve ever written was Hecate Solstice in Twilit Mage, who was abused as a child, feared and bullied for her half-demon nature, and was abandoned by the first friend she ever made in favor of a man she could only be with in exile. That’s the utmost limit for me, though.
19. “For fans of ______!” What works would you say are similar to yours?
In general, I feel like my works have a bunch in common with Julie Kagawa, especially in the way I handle YA/fantasy tropes, characters and (in part) relationships. Book of Gold in particular has been greatly influenced by, and should appeal to fans of, Shadow of the Fox and Iron Fey.
As for the rest, it’s harder to say. Two Monsters in a Car is definitely strongly influenced by Good Omens, and the Colorless Winter trilogy is quite Tolkienesque but, like, diverse. But with my other stuff? The influences are so varied that it’s hard to draw any direct comparisons at this point, honestly.
Send me some unique writing asks, y’all!
