#OffTheIce by #AvonGale and #PiperVaughn I really liked this one. You have a pro hockey player getting his business degree and a sociology professor who is out, and proud of who he is. It’s good. And I liked the relationships in this one a lot, platonic and familial included. #queerbooks #mmbooks #lgbtqbooks #gaybooks
All I have to point out are these: •Gay •Gay Werewolf •Gay Hedgehog •Mystery •Soulmates That's it. That's all you need to know. Good book, good story, and might just start up the next book. Don't know yet, so we will just have to wait and see. #gay #audiobooks #werewolves #werehedgehog #pipervaughn #kenziecade #urbanfantasy #lgbt #pricklybusiness #review
Piper, YOU ARE SO NICE! Thank you for humoring me T_T (Also…. criminetly! Sorry, I didn’t mean to write the LONGEST THING EVER — but as usual, I did. sigh.)
(For anyone wondering, this is the 40 Questions - meme for fic writers. For some bizarre reason it seems to have switched to letters on my tumblr instead of numbers. If you see letters you can do those, too, or else use teromain’s version with numbers that I originally reblogged.)
6. Share one of your weaknesses
My writing is way too connected to my emotions. This makes me really ADHD about it; if I don’t write an idea I have exactly at the time I have it when I see it flow in my mind, I can literally go months or years without being inspired for the same story or scene. When I’m not inspired, it’s difficult for me to write something—not because I can’t get words to come, but because the entire flow is massively off. It feels stilted and clunky and I will always hate it, and all the atmosphere is lost from the scene. Which means I am less thrilled about writing that story because then even more than usual, I see only flaws. Which makes me eventually give up on it for a long time because I naturally already think everything I do is terrible anyway so why keep writing more crap I’ll have to delete or change later?
I’m this way about everything (like, if I get tired at night and don’t go to sleep literally within 3-5 minutes of feeling that way I will be unable to sleep for the next 3-5 hours, yet if I do sleep right at that second then I sleep well). But it’s particularly frustrating with writing because I have to constantly prep myself for writing in such a way that it’s a very delicate balance.
Sometimes it takes me weeks or months to get to the right mood, and one wrong day can fuck me up for just as long again… but when I’m in the zone I can write thousands and thousands of words no problem. I think sometimes people think I’m just being lazy or making excuses or something, but I’m not.
The problem is that I’m very into worlds/atmosphere/character psychology. So when I write, I immerse myself completely in the character/world so I know intuitively what they would/wouldn’t do but I don’t necessarily know why until later when these pieces all come together and I can better analyze them. (Or when people ask me “But why did ___?” and I start to analyze it)
I think it’s that empathy that makes it so I often write characters doing and saying things that just feels right to me and I know is what they would do, but it isn’t until much later that I start researching real world explanations when I realize that the character displayed all the signs of this or that psychological disorder that would have resulted from their life experiences, but I never looked up those symptoms or even knew of the disorder prior to writing them. I just wrote what felt right for them.
Or I know a character always has this quirk and as time goes on I build on it this or that way, but it isn’t until something occurs way later that I realize all along the character was doing it because of a specific reason that even they didn’t know, but once that piece is there everything falls into place. The same thing goes with world-building. I mean, I do a lot of research on stuff ahead of time too, but a lot of what I write is also very intuitive.
I feel like I’m explaining that oddly, plus I don’t want to make it sound like I’m some special snowflake because I’m sure what I’m talking about is probably a normal thing for all writers. But I don’t know how common my obnoxiously delicate personality is… for me, I’ve realized over the years that when it comes to writing, I really need to be able to become addicted to my own story to properly write it, and if things interfere with me getting the right balance of interest in the story without flipping over into obsession, then my timeline gets completely fucked up for months and years at a time. It’s really frustrating and annoys me because the slower I am at things, the worse I think I am at it. And I hate being below average at anything I actually care about; it makes me feel like a complete failure.
7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
I really had to think about this one, to be honest… I never keep track of things I like that I’ve written. In the end, I went with a particular scene from In the Company of Shadows, because I could easily answer the “why."
So there aren’t spoilers for anyone, I edited the below excerpt to take out key words and lines that gave too much context or huge clues. I won’t say what book or chapter this is from, or even which character this is or why he’s so upset, but anyone who’s read the whole series will probably know what this is about.
——
He stood abruptly and turned away, walking a few steps but having no destination. His fingers tangled in his hair and he tilted his head up, staring at the space where the wall met the ceiling. There were cracksin the plaster that spiderwebbed out. He wondered where they came from. Thethought was distant and unrelated to the rest of the world; unimportant andpassing through his stunned mind with as much context as caring about what theweather was like the day it happened. The day—
The cracks seemed to blur and it took him a moment torealize that it was his eyes that were blurry. He blinked and tried to hold inthe howling mess he could feel rising to the surface. His chest feltconstricted. He couldn’t breathe fully; his body felt too hot. His heartbeathurt his ribs, or maybe it was his heart itself that ached.
This didn’t make sense. This couldn’t actually behappening.
He couldn’t think.
His throat closed and he distantly noted that his scalphurt from the way his fingers were gripping the strands. His eyes burned andfor a moment he thought he wouldn’t be able to hold it together. That he wasgoing to break down right here and never get out of the office. Quaking,tenuous control was all he had. Pieces of string wrapped around his stubbornwill and it wasn’t going to hold for long, fraying strand by strand withshuddering leaps.
He would never ___ again.
The truth and weight of that simple sentence wasalmost too much.
How could it be true? How could—
This wasn’t really happening. This—
No, no, this wasn’t right but it was real—
He couldn’t speak. The words wouldn’t form in his mindand even if they had, he couldn’t have said them. Even air was stretched thinthrough the constriction of his throat. Words were too large, too meaningful tomake it past.
——
The reason I’m proud of that is my goal for that chapter (well, this whole part of the book) was to make the reader sad. I wanted them, for a second, to be pulled into that character’s thoughts and realize how he felt and to what extent, because that place of instability affected his reactions in a lot of the subsequent chapters. I was hoping I could get people to understand on some level, no matter how small.
What I’ve heard over and over is that people cry when reading this chapter/part of the series. Even some people who say they never cry at books or shows say they cried at this. Most people seem to feel that this chapter/part hits them really hard.
I know it might sound morbid to be glad I made people cry, but as I mentioned earlier what’s most important to me is immersing myself in a character’s psychology, so if readers were caught in the same torrent of emotion it means I wrote something well enough that they were caught up in it, too. It means that, even seeing things from the objective perspective of a reader holding a book that they know has a whole bunch of pages and chapters to come that will probably address this scene, for that moment they still feel pulled into that same hopelessness that the character felt there.
Also, I like the wording… actually, I’m sure eventually I’ll have to delete some of it but I liked both analogies so much (the fraying string of willpower, and words too large for a constricted throat) that I couldn’t decide which to remove in editing when we released the stories so I left them both in.
I like the wording in a lot of that whole chapter, to be honest. One of my favorite kinds of narration to write is when a character is unstable and stressed. It lets me vary the sentence length and word choices and descriptions and analogies based on how clearly, chaotically, or emotionally they are thinking. It also lets me play with thoughts crowding in on each other, shown by threads getting cut off with dashes. Sort of like a rubber band that keeps getting pulled taut and then snaps back in a flood of words.
I got to do a lot of that in that chapter so I really enjoyed that, too. You can probably see a little of what I mean even in the above no-spoilers-edited version; the contrast of paragraphs with a lot of words and emotions and sometimes run on sentences, broken up by short sentences on their own lines, sometimes cutting into each other in unfinished thoughts. It’s how I signify the difference between a character in their normal everyday narration compared to when their brain can’t process what’s happening around them.
16. If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?
Original collaborative work: I know Sonny won’t agree, but Hsin/Boyd from In the Company of Shadows. They have the opportunity for a wide range of stories that could still pull out facets of them both as individuals and as a couple. I feel like they’re two people who could always find a way to grow no matter the setting. They also would allow for all sorts of action if we ever got bored, and since they’re so in love a person could also get some intimate/sweet scenes in too.
Original work, just my characters: I actually have no idea right now… none of the stories I’m writing has anyone at a point of being a pairing so I don’t know yet who would be most interesting. Hmm. Right now, I’d have to say maybe Oz and Robin, from my story Dead Rain (that’s a m/m pairing btw). They both have such a tragic but interesting back story, and Oz has a lot going on with him, so it seems like that could be a good option. But if I went away from m/m, then a f/f option might be Sloane and Fawkes from my fantasy series… they aren’t really a pairing, per se, but on the other hand there’s a lot interesting about them, too.
Fanfic: Probably Remus/Sirius from Harry Potter (but only through book 5; I don’t like books 6 or 7 for them). I just love pre-R/T!Remus so much, you don’t understand T_T But if it’s R/T!Remus then I don’t know… I really felt like his character was skewed and ultimately fridged by that. R/S is the closest to an OTP I’ve had over the past several years (in that I keep randomly coming back to it) but I’m in it more for Remus than Sirius. So books 6/7 really messed with me and tbh I often just pretend they didn’t happen for R/S both. And honestly for Tonks’ sake too, because she HAD been my favorite female character through book 5, and then after 6/7 I almost couldn’t stand her. If I stop those three at book 5, I can still happily like all of them. Actually, that mental block is so complete that I often forget Remus was in books 6 or 7 at all lol
17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?
Mostly chronologically with a splash of out of order. It depends a little on if I was good enough to actually plot the thing out or not.
Since most of my stories start with a single mental image of a scene or an exchange of dialogue, a lot of times I start a story writing without anything fully plotted out and then I eventually get stuck and then go write an outline. In those cases sometimes I am totally chronological after that and other times I skip all around.
