3, 4, 5, 12
Thank you for asking these!
3 - Have you ever written a chapter/scene that made you cry? If so, which one(s)?
OH, YES. It’s actually interesting, because crying when I’m sad is one of the physical responses to emotion that my ASD sorta messed up. In most real life situations, I don’t cry when I’m sad. I only cry when I’m angry or embarrassed or overwhelmed. It’s why I often get angry at myself for being sad -- so that I can say I’m crying because I’m sad.
When I’m writing, though, it’s like all the wires in charge of my emotions are fitted into all the right places. I cry at sad scenes, I cry at scenes that are super happy, I cry at scenes that make me feel proud of my beleaguered little characters and how far they’ve come. I cry when people are “supposed” to cry, and I react appropriately elsewhere, too. I’ve only just recently been able to cry at movies, even, by thinking of the characters as my own. It’s... kinda weird, actually.
The most notable scene to make me cry in my recent writings is very near the beginning of my Stray Identities novel. I’m currently on my third attempt at writing a first draft, actually, and I’m kind of dreading how quickly this scene comes up. Not even three chapters in, I think, and I’m gonna have to have a box of tissues nearby to mop up all my tears when I have a toddler shot dead, his last wish for the main character to pretend to be him so his mother never has to be sad about his death -- and all for the sake of a plotline. I’ve written this scene twice already, in my first two attempts at finding the voice of the novel, and I cried both times. Had to make sure my family didn’t notice the redness of my eyes when I went downstairs, ‘cause I would’ve cried more if I’d started telling them about the scene. XD
4 - Which of your stories would you most like to see made into a movie?
I’d try to get away with the “all of them” answer, but I don’t think the question’s wording would let me do that. I guess I’ll just... pick... two? For now?
After all, I would love to see Ambassador’s Sanctuary as a movie; partially because I want to be able to put real life faces to these characters. Also, because this is a story with an asexual main character who’s searching for a lost member of his family and a place to belong, and his two best friends who are in a canon lesbian relationship. We need that kind of movie, I think. Granted, it would probably have to be animated because we don’t have the special effects to portray its setting(s) correctly, and that might take something away from the intensity of it, but... it’d still be cool.
The one I most want to see as a movie, however -- no matter how wildly impossible it’d be to make without animation and how difficult it would be to do right even with animation -- is the aforementioned Stray Identities. I’ve been literally obsessing over these characters for months, if not longer. They’d represent multiple groups that aren’t often represented (multiple black characters, a mentally disabled main character, a physically disabled character, a transgender character, multiple mogaii/queer characters, etc.), they’d tell a story I’ve loved for years, and they’d allow me to go into a theater full of people and witness them going through the pain and joy I’ve been putting myself through with each new attempt at writing this story. That last part sounds slightly sadistic, wanting to see people cry when Marco Treen and Jacob Hope and Riicii Liirahn all die, but in my defense, I’m the one who cried at their deaths first; before they were even written out, in fact. I don’t have confidence in either movie being made the way I want it, but I would love to at least try. I would love to one day finish these two novels and then see them on the big screen when they’re finished, in all their glory.
5 - Is there a character you find particularly difficult to write? Which one? On the flip-side, which character flows most easily for you when writing?
Identity is really, really important to me. As a result of that, I try my hardest to make sure every character’s voice is as distinct to them as I can POSSIBLY manage. Also as a result of that, however, I write a lot of stories that have to do with the confusion of and/or search for identity. Characters with split, shared, or confused identities in any respect are typically central to my writings, because they very clearly showcase the importance of finding and having one’s identity. Because of this awful, terrible, self-torturing dichotomy of reasoning, however, I end up causing myself some trouble. After all, how do you write the voice of a 400+ year old universe traveling shapeshifter pretending to be a 17 year old human kid in a small town in Waashington who sometimes forgets he is a 400+ year old universe traveling shapeshifter and other times flashes back to his past so far he forgets he was supposed to be pretending to be a 17 year old human kid in the first place. How do you capture that with any degree of consistency? It’s... challenging, at best. Which is to say that Stray/Marco of Stray Identities -- my apologies for staying so focused on this story -- is probably the hardest character for me to write. Hence my being on the third attempt writing his introduction and subsequent storyline(s). If he read this over my shoulder, though, I so definitively know that both the Marco part of him and Stray part of him would apologize so profusely that I’d start grinding my teeth too much to answer “it’s okay” for the millionth time. XD
Probably the easiest character to write, in contrast, is one from my story Defective Heroes. Shayn Falriiel is a character who has forgotten his identity altogether. He has no idea just how complex and dramatically depressing his life was before he lost his memories. He doesn’t know how he suffered before or after the death of his family, nor how his decisions lead his family to that death. He doesn’t know who he was, who his family was, what he did to lose his memory, any of it. He just knows who he purposefully made himself into after waking up with amnesia at six years old. He knows who he wants to be, and that makes his voice and his personality very, very easy to write. His dialogue and actions flow so quick, I’ll often look back up at the page and go “Wait. What? That’s how you’re doing things? Um... okay, then... I guess.” I just kinda have to follow his lead, more often than not. And if he knew I was writing this, he would be so very, very smug about it. He is The Great Thief Shayn Falriiel, after all... at least, as far as he’ll let you know.
Similarly, Maxine Rose from my latest story Rebirth is a character who is so incredibly voltatile that she’s very easy to write. She knows who she is and what she expects out of the world, and she’s fucking pissed (if you’ll pardon the language, I tend to slip into cursing a lot when I think about Max...) that the rest of the people around her can’t see that about her. She just wants her sister back, when everyone else in the whole goddamn fucking (sorry, Max again, not me) world has obviously given up on ever finding her. She has a clear purpose in her own mind, and a clear purpose in writing the chronicles of her life for her missing sister’s benefit, and that makes her very easy for me to write. She’d ignore that I’m saying this at all if she could read it over my shoulder, and she’d just start interrogating me about what happened to Abigail all those years ago. I wrote it, after all, I should know.
12 - Do you sneak personal references into any of your stories? Would you care to share some examples?
I try, but I’m often stopped from intentional reference-making by the paranoid thoughts that nobody will get it, that it will distract from the story, that it’s too personal to matter, etc, etc, etc.
Of course, writing is an extremely personal act by its very nature. You can’t help slipping in personal references, whether you’re aware of doing so or not. Most of my intentional references get exiled into a document called Excess Text, where I put the pieces I don’t want to keep but I also don’t want to permanently destroy. My unintentional ones, though... I’d probably be surprised by how many there are if I went through and re-read things.
Most often, my personal references are to the stories I wrote in elementary school. If you see a mention of anything being caramel-colored, it’s because that was always, unfailingly, how I described the fur of one of my first OCs back when I was, like, seven. If you read a line where a character says something is “as ridiculous as the idea of a dog turning into a pig” that’s a reference to a story I wrote involving a very frazzled pet-sitter. If someone ever says that “it’s not like I can just look into a book and know the future” that’s a reference to my Fairy Tail and The Book of Sam story, wherein Sam the land-friendly flying hippocamp (hey, I was in the 6-8 range you can’t expect logic in fiction from kids that young) discovered a Book of Sam that could answer questions he had about the near future. And yet it never told him Fido was a girl. Maybe it just wasn’t relevant until she had kittens?
Basically, if someone says or does something in one of my stories that seems just a little bit weirder than normal, it might just be a reference to the writings of a 7-year-old me.
This painfully long response is to this post, btw, for followers who may be confused. I’m still answering questions from it, and will be until I run out of numbers. Which might not take too long, by the looks of things. ^_^