My good friend, Colette Black, tagged me as part of The Writing Process blog tour. She’s a talented writer with her first novel The Noble Ark recently released, plus a collection of short stories called The Black Side.
So, here are the questions, and my answers:
1. What are you working on?
I’m working on a science fiction-noir novel best described as Gladiator meets Pro Wrestling. It’s an expansion of a short story called “The Hammer”, which I wrote at the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009, and which was subsequently published in OG’s Speculative Fiction. I had been itching to take the main character and give him a novel, so that’s what I decided to do for NaNoWriMo last year. And now, the first draft is almost finished.
2. How does your work differ from others in its genre?
That’s hard to say. I’ve never heard of a mash-up of this particular type before. As the book has progressed, I realize that it’s getting at some things relevant right now, which I suppose is what all the best SF does.
And thus far, I have yet to settle on a particular genre. I have a historical fantasy series, a swashbuckling adventure novel, a YA supernatural thriller, and short stories and screenplays all over the genre map.
3. Why do you write what you write?
I get an idea. I get a lot of ideas. Some of them I write down for later. Some of them stick in my brain with little barbs like fish hooks that won’t let me forget them until they’re written. That idea that just. won’t. go. away. is the book that gets written next.
Another way to answer this is that I want to tell stories that I enjoy, books I would want to read, and once I get going on something, I often don’t know how it will end until I write it. Apparently my subconscious likes to explore dark corners, with larger-than-life characters and lots of action and romance along the way.
I suppose it’s plausible that I’ll someday write a story filled with rainbows, puppies, and unicorns, but the puppies might be rabid, the leprechauns hiding under the rainbow are nasty little buggers, and the unicorns, well, they do have that horn as a weapon.
4. What is your writing process?
It varies, it seems, with whatever I’m working on. Ideally, I shoot for about 1,500-2,000 words a day, and then each day I will go back and revise and edit what I wrote the day before, as a way to get started. So it’s a recursive process. I also occasionally have ideas pop into my head like popcorn, with things to add on my work-in-progress, and I’ll go back and add those in. If I don’t grab them immediately, they fall through the floor drain, never to be heard from again.
So, in turn, I now tag four more writers whose work is worthy of your attention.
Quincy Allen is a self-proclaimed cross-genre author. What that really means is that he’s got enough ADHD to not stick with any single genre and, like his cooking, prefers to mix and match to suit his tastes of the day. He has been published in multiple anthologies, online and print magazines. He’s written for Internet radio and his novel Chemical Burn—a finalist in the Rocky Mountain Writers Association Colorado Gold Writing Contest—was is due out in 2014 in a newly revamped edition from Word Fire Press. His new novel Jake Lasater: Blood Curse, is also due out this year as well as a military sci-fi novel from Twisted Core Press. He works part-time as a tech-writer to pay his bills, does book design and eBook conversions for Word Fire Press by night, and lives in a lovely house that he considers his very own sanctuary.
Betsy Dornbusch is the author of a dozen short stories, three novellas, and three novels. In addition to speaking at numerous conventions every year, she also is an editor with the speculative fiction magazine Electric Spec and the longtime proprietress of Sex Scenes at Starbucks. She splits her time between Boulder and Grand Lake, Colorado.
Susan Ee is the bestselling author of the Penryn & the End of Days series which takes place in the San Francisco bay area. The first book, ANGELFALL, is being translated into 20
languages around the world. The second book, WORLD AFTER, was recently released in Nov. 2013 to international acclaim. The film rights to the series have been optioned by Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, and Good Universe. Susan used to be a lawyer but loves being a writer because it allows her imagination to bust out and go feral.
Patrick Hester is an author, blogger and a 2013 Hugo Award Winner. He writes science fiction and fantasy (mostly), and his Functional Nerds and SF Signal weekly podcasts have both been nominated for Parsec awards and the SFSignal podcast was nominated in 2012, 2013 and 2014 for Hugo Awards. Patrick also produces ‘I Should Be Writing‘, the podcast for wannabe fiction writers created/hosted by 2013 Campbell Award Winner Mur Lafferty. He writes for his website, All Things from My Brain, SFSignal.com, FunctionalNerds.com and KirkusReviews.com. His fiction appears in the various anthologies and eBooks available via Amazon.com