Borrowed from Writer Michelle Payne whom I think combined it with another tag from two other bloggers 🙂

What’s your current WIP about + what are you working on with it?

We’ll do my original story and not The Broken Rose even though I’m not technically working on it right now, but I hope to return to it soon.  The working title is The High Archon changed from The High Lord, though it could always change again.  It’s about a young woman who’s betrothed to the de facto ruler of the world in a sort of Belle Epoque/Golden Age era, though that doesn’t prevent something horrible from happening to her a year before she goes to fulfill the betrothal.  The act changes her entire life view and potential trajectory, and the novel is about the incongruence between how she thinks she’ll be treated and how she is.  It’s a…shakeup (I hope) to typical paradigms, though it has a lot of the things I love to both read and write about in stories.

Right now I have a little bit of the beginning written from last years NaNoWriMo, but that might be scrapped in its entirety so I can begin again.  I need to figure out how I can establish the world but jump right into the plot.  I’m not going to get rid of what I’ve already written (perish the thought!), but I may have to rearrange the order of things a little bit.  I hope to work on it before November this year if possible, but if not I’ll do what I did last year and take a blogging hiatus to work on it.

Show your WIP’s aesthetic in images or words (or both)!

She doesn’t have elven ears, but that’s almost exactly how I picture her face.

What is your favorite type of ~thing~ to write?

I thought I was exclusively a dark fantasy writer, but when I finished The Serpent’s Tale, one of my friends pointed out I could market it as a paranormal romance, which I never thought of before.  So I’d say I write dark fantasy/paranormal romance that’s almost exclusively about angels.

Are you a plotter or a pantser? 

100% a plotter.  It can take me years before I start writing a story.  The Serpent’s Tale was in my head for a decade before I put pen to paper.  Northern Lights might have been even longer since FFVII inspired The Serpent’s Tale, and I wanted to write a story with NL’s plot for about as long as I was obsessed with FFVII.  This isn’t to say I can’t and don’t change my mind, nor do I always know if a story is going to end up as I planned it, but I have to have some sort of outline.

Out of the characters you’ve written so far, who are your favorites?

I love my main characters Maya and Uriel, and I’ve been writing various stories about them for a long time.  This one is just another iteration.  There’s a character in The Serpent’s Tale named Marli whom I adore.  She’s had a rough life to say the least, and she kind of…lives inside of herself?  She was adopted by the innkeeper who was Uriel’s mother’s best friend.  Marli doesn’t say much, and it’s never explicitly stated, but she (platonically) adores Uriel for a very good reason.

There’s this other character in The Broken Rose, which I’m currently edited named Isadora.  She’s actually based on a cosplayer I’m friends with and whom I adore.  I wanted to figure out a way to put her into a story so I made her a model/clothing designer, which seemed fitting for someone who makes her own cosplay outfits.

What (or who) motivates you to write?

The fact that I want to read certain things.  The fact that some ideas won’t leave me alone.  They attach themselves to me and if I don’t write about them, if I don’t get them out, they’ll just stay on my brain.  It’s temporarily satisfied if I at least note them down, but my drive to get a story out there will push me to plan how I’ll make it happen.  I know it’s the trite answer that every writer gives, but there’s a reason for that.

What’s your writing routine, if any? (ie. snacks, music, time of day, location, etc.)

I try to schedule it.   Since I’m editing TBR right now, that’s on my to do list on the days I’ve planned.  I usually sit with my headphones on, a cup of coffee (if it’s not too late), some water, and usually a cat nearby.  I’ve both handwritten stories and used Word.  I wish I could still physically write out novels, but my arthritis is too bad in my fingers and wrists.  That’s why I failed NaNoWriMo last year.  I hate staring at a blank Word document, but since I have plenty of notes to go on (and some physical writing from before), I think I can just restart on the computer.

What genre will you never try, and why?

I don’t think I’d be much good at writing historical fiction.  It would be hard for me to stay within the constraints of that reality unless I greatly fantasized the situation.  I don’t like to say I won’t try a a genre, even ones I’m not all that fond of like urban fantasy.  I have ideas for those, too.  This is going to sound so snobbish, but often when I read books/genres I don’t like, I think about what I could do to make it something I would.  It’s why even if I’m reading something that’s problematic, it’s still valuable, because it makes me think of how I’d fix the issue.  I’m always in editing mode I suppose :p

What is your favorite genre to write?

I thought this was covered above…dark fantasy/paranormal romance.

What are some book ideas you want to write in the future?

Would you like the list lol?  I have a ton of ideas in OneNote (god bless that program) that include horror, sci-fi, parody/satire/comedy, mysteries, and post-apocalyptic.  There’s one I’ve been thinking about for years where cats are called back to their home planet, and they take a bunch of humans with them.  It’s a treatise on why you should always be good to cats.

Another is a horror satire called 7 Ways to End the World, which starts with a game of Call of Cthulhu where the main character and a bunch of her friends hide in the attic (because that’s the only way not to die or go insane) where they find and foolishly light the Doomsday Candle.  This sets into motion apocalyptic events that unfold in parodic vignettes.  I might be able to include some of my other shorts in with this.

The one I really want to start working on soon stars a private detective named Aurora Winters in a world where everyone has some random ability (some more useful than others).  Aurora can tell the relationships between people.

Since I’m in the midst of editing and planning novels right now, it might be a few years before I can start work on any of these.  A typical novel takes me about two years to write and edit, and I try to only work on one writing project at a time.  Sometimes I’ll sneak a short story in there, but some of these are more series than one short, or they have high potential to become longer.

What brings you the most satisfaction as a writer?

I was just talking about this on Twitter: finishing a story.  Mine are years long projects that can take up to a decade from inception to completion so when I write that final word, there’s such a feeling of relief that flutters through me (especially since I usually know what the last sentence of a story is going to be).  Even though I know I have the arduous task of editing ahead of me as well as the soul-crushing one of querying (unless it’s a fanfiction, which is all I’ve been writing for the past ten years), finishing a novel leaves me with the sense that I did it.  I had this idea and I brought it to fruition.  No matter what happens next, I still managed to write it, and no one can ever take that away.

What type of characters do you prefer writing? 

I like characters that play off of each other.  I really like the phrase “unity of opposites,” because that’s usually what mine are.  I suppose that’s more of an answer to the question, “What type of couples or relationships do you prefer writing?”  To answer the one at hand, I realized a few years ago that the characters I most related to were dead ringers for depression even though I never state they have depression, but it’s what comes out.  They’re burdened with a great deal of guilt (whether earned or not) and it makes it so they can never be  happy no matter what they’re doing to atone.  I just find it really easy to get into that head space.  They’re also mostly introverted lol.  I can have another character be extroverted as sort of a foil, but I’d find it hard to have a solo main extroverted character.

Which of your characters is based off you?

Ummm, definitely Uriel from The Serpent’s Tale.   Even when I write fanfiction, I usually write about characters I can relate to (it’s the whole reason I started writing FFVII fanfic…).  Aurora, the detective character I mentioned above, is kind of an Author Avatar in terms of how I pictured her, though now I have another mental image since I found Mermaid Queen, a YouTube blogger/vlogger who’d be PERFECT to play her.

Share a tiny (or large) snippet/excerpt of your writing, if you’re comfortable!

I was going to share one from The High Archon, but I haven’t even started that one yet so it’s just a ton of scattered pieces.  This is one of the lines from Northern Lights, which is my favorite of my stories.

“We spend most of our lives running from the past and running from ourselves.  I’m tired of running.  I’m tired of blindness, and I’ve dined too long on despair.”

Tag you’re it (if you want to be).