For authors and aspiring authors of fantasy and science fiction.
I have more conversation starters!
So the last series of four questions turned out pretty great, actually, and so I thought of another set of four questions that will hopefully get people talking!
- What are you currently working on?
- Who is your most fascinating character in that project?
- Tell me about one cool thing in your story.
- How did the first idea for this story come about? Does it still exist, or did you move past it?
I look forward to chatting with you!




The setting is a country at high northern latitude with a technology level roughly equivalent to the 1920s. There's electricity, radio, telephones - and this technology is way ahead of any other country on the planet. They're more post industrial revolution/on the border of the steam age.
And I find that extremely interesting, because Fiona Grace was originally Finlay Gordon. Then I realized i had a total sausage party on my hands,so Finn became Grace - and all I changed was her name, her pronouns, and a feminine physical appearance. I gave the story over to beta readers, and everybody had strong feelings about her.
So people ride bikes everywhere, every day, all year round.
This sounds awesome on all counts. I love those kinds of women.
Okay, so I have more time and wanted to say, I love the bicycles! And the fact that its story/plot relevant is kind of exciting and interesting and you sure you can't tell with a spoiler cut? :bats eyelashes:
I tend to love characters where they just flip genders like that. Because people are people, regardless of their gender, and that's a good thing. I wish more people would treat writing women as writing people rather than women.
I honestly want to know every single thing about this parade and those shadows and if that were a summary, I'd grab the book.
well the bicycle just makes sense. it's an excellent form of transportation. Automobiles run on Aether, which is a wondrous invention, but the energy needs to run along copper wires to work, and large quantities of copper bothers mages. it's like licking a 9 volt battery and the worst case of tinnitus you've ever had and your skin won't stop crawling, all at the same time.
The scene with the soldiers actually happens in the book! Right smack dab in the middle of it!
Where is this book? First readers required? Already published maybe?
:makes grabby hands:
I have an agent, and the book is with her. I'm preparing to do revisions on the book based on feedback, but I don't know when I'll get that feedback - maybe in a couple of months? So for now I'm writing about my worldbuilding to get a fuller idea of what I'm dealing with, and trying not to think too much about the possibility of a sequel but TOO LATE I have already started thinking and writing about what happens next.
I'm also developing my characters some more--which means I have to take a serious look at Miles's love interest. He kind of hit the page like a hurricane and I never had trouble writing him, but he's holding out on me like whoa.
I have a character like that, but in the end, she gave me a good story and finally let me in her head a little more. But gah, she held out sooooo long. It's worth it to get in there when they do it. It really is.
I have to figure out how to crack the shell. and I'm wondering if the backstory i did get is something I need to reveal or not... because the sequel isn't really about Miles and Tristan. It's about Grace and her problems. Miles and Tristan have problems too but I haven't even given them a minute when I think about the sequel. it's all Grace all the time.
But I have an an opportunity to make the character deeper and more complex with the revision, so spending time getting Tristan to tell me his backstory will help me with characterization.
As a rule. But sometimes it's what occupies their present. My holdout character is standoffish by nature (with a pretty biting tongue to go with it), but she's quick on her feet, quick to respond, so on the surface it looked like I had her written fine. When I had to dig in and revise the story (and it really needed it), I ended up cracking her shell by getting under the reason she put the wall up. Basically I had to get in her head and experience the story through her body not just her perspective.
This girl was in visceral, made my readers go ouch the entire time pain and she was constantly taking in a stream of information through a sense I don't share (more special humans), so her view of the world was filtered by that, but she just naturally omitted it on the first seven or so drafts.
Which is a long way of saying, I found it helpful to actually mentally feel myself in her body through every single paragraph of an entire scene I had already written. I took all the external details and stuff she was reacting to and then dug in to figure out why she was reacting that way. That way I could just focus on her internal world. I got backstory, relationship stuff, a web of complicated emotions about several topics, and sensory overload. The story that came out afterward was lightyears from the one I started with.
Just an exercise that can sometimes help.
yes. I think that will help. I went through scenes with grace this way, and I discovered so many things. Doing it with Tristan feels really daunting. I think that means I should do it.
Definitely! I can hardly wait to read this thing. (This is why I want everyone to indie publish. So I don't have to wait to read their work. :sigh: )
This sounds like such a fun setting! Also yay bikes. Sorry, too tired for intelligent questions.
Nice of you to get convos going here :)
Poly romance? :perks up:
It's always good when you're equally drawn in by all your mains, I think. It makes it easier to not play favorites.
It should be a bigger genre. It really should.
Oh, I like your twists idea!
Yes, a poly romance! The tentative titles is "and baby makes four". It's my first attempt at both pure romance and a story that's poly focues, even if a bit of poly (and a lot of love drama) tends to creep into most my stories. Thanks for commenting!
Cute title. :thumbs up:
I have a similar tendency. I actually don't usually care for romance genre novels too often, at least not category and every story in life has a romance, but I can't seem to take my shipping goggles off when I write either. I have platonic relationships and character studies and in pops the love interest. On the bright side, I do have a few stalwart holdouts who refuse to get involved romantically. But yeah. Romance creeps in so easily everywhere.
Hah yes, I sometimes have to stop myself and go "hey, do they need to date?". Usually I answer myself yes. It's just how I roll, hah.
I often don't care for romance either, but I've come to realize that's largely because of how common certain tropes are. Unhealthy ideals, celebration of jealousy etc. A lot of the things I dislike about monogamy (as an ideal, I mean, not as a practice) are so common in romance.
I think the biggest thing for me is I want an actual relationship, regardless of whether it's romantic or not, so most of the fictional romances that are pasted on, because they want to have one to check off that story tickybox, don't work for me. And category romance rarely feel realistic. They're a bit overwrought and invent weird drama that sometimes isn't as bad as the story makes out just to have that reconciliation arc thing, and yeah. It just doesn't work for me. If the relationship feels earned, I'm all over it. But I admit I don't know how well I earn them in my fiction either. I've written so much shippy fanfiction that skips stuff, that I'm regaining my ability to not skip things.
I know the feeling! It's gonna be an interesting challenge to have sufficient amounts of angst and drama in my poly romance without relying on any silly door-slamming or "I misunderstood a thing and didn't bring it up for 14 chapters"-type things.
Parenting is one of the big three though to reveal differences of opinion that make a relationship tense. You've got a great premise for it.
True, that's a good point. I have mostly been pondering the issues of "baby - yes or no" and how it would affect relationship dynamics and NRE etc too, but parenting styles/ideas is definitely fertile ground for conflict.
I like when there is an ensemble cast of characters and you can see them doing life together. It's the growing together into a unit that I love, though, not gonna lie, I love romance too.
The doing life together is one of the things that I appreciate about writing a series. I get to keep coming back to the same group, with a different protag each time, and see how the group is growing and shifting as people come into their circle.
what do you think makes it horror over dark fantasy? I'm always wondering where the border is between those territories...
Reader reactions, tbh. My crit group was all like "this is really well-done horror" and "I shouldn't have read this when I was home alone", so I'm just trying to maintain that feeling, haha. I don't think there's a huge difference. I didn't even really think about it as dark fantasy when I drafted, just fantasy/paranormal that happened to take place during an apocalypse of sorts.
So you're keeping that atmospheric feeling of dread? oo. It's been a long time since I read a horror novel, but that creepy feeling was always part of the experience!
Yes. Well, I am trying very hard to, haha! It's odd too because I hardly ever read horror so I'm surprised I'm managing as well as I am.
what's it about?
It's about a group of teens/young adults who are at a retreat/camp type thing off in a house in the woods, and suddenly these creatures come and take over the place, locking them in the attic. People start being taken down into the basement where the monsters live during the day, and they don't come back up again, etc.
But I start it about ten days into this occupation, just when the captives are about to try to make a daring escape.
oh that sounds like horror to me, definitely. cramped and dreadful.
Yeah, I feel like I have two major fear factors in it. The first is that the monsters are not something that's known in the world, and the "kids" don't know much about them so even when they try to do stuff there's a big "unknown" factor of whether it'll work. And the second fear factor is the setting: it's winter, in the north, the days are short, they're in a remote location etc.
Oh yeah. You have nailed your genre.
Thank you! blushes
Too many things! Okay, the one that keeps happening when I'm supposed to be working on other things is about a superhuman post-military operative and... I'm all over her timeline, what am I saying? It's a bit literary and character-oriented, but she's also embroiled in a mess of active stuff so I might manage a plot trying to tell her story of figuring out how she fits into a world after where she came from.
Skylight is the character and is fascinating to me, which is how I got into the mess of writing this unnecessary story instead of something else already started in the world. (Okay, so the world is bigger than the project and I've been embroiled in it for years now.) I like her because she's stoic but not actually that quiet and she's a total goner on a quiet guy who's sentimental and she loves it. She's dominant and "punches holes in the world" and doesn't like to touch people because she could make them vanish permanently if she's not careful and works too hard and is harsh and ruthless and not all that merciful, but she's loyal, loyal, loyal and she cares more than she knows how to let on.
One cool thing... The things I find cool aren't usually what anyone else does. I think the coolest thing in this world, Kingdoms and Thorn, is probably the teams and how they operate. They're half family, half professional and they have their own culture and subcultures that I can't seem to get enough of exploring. It's kind of a half and half world, because I started it set in the real world and decided that was a powderkeg and demanded too much research, so I made it its own world, and the worldbuilding after that decision has all these new cultures and languages interacting, but the worldbuilding before is more like ours with higher tech. The way the teams are insular and use foreign languages as private languages between themselves and fit into multiple cultures but have their own and are loyal to each other more than to anyone else, including their birth families once they meet them again is just super fun to work with and create.
The first idea is both preserved and moved past because basically, I split it. The original idea was twelve kids get genetically modified by the military, break out, and start their own culture/society in a jungle. Came a long way from there. The culture that developed out of that initial story (when I was what? eight years old ish) became a secondary world SFF, Vardin. The variation where they stayed military until they were teenagers and eventually destroyed the military program that had made them grew into Kingdoms and Thorn and changed a whole ton of a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. I originally wasn't going to write both worlds, just stick with Vardin so there wouldn't be duplication of characters/powers, but then someone prompted a tiny ficlet and went, OMG, I love it, and next thing I know I've written more for Kingdoms and Thorn than anything else ever.
That sounds like such an interesting project. Your MC sounds very interesting, and your worldbuilding sounds fun too. I do find group dynamics that exist inbetween the professional and the familial to be really interesting and also very dynamic groups for interpersonal plots.
Indeed! The best stories come when professional and personal collide. Okay, maybe not the best, but it's an area rife with potential. I'm glad she sounds interesting to anyone but me! It's probably the most self-indulgent thing I've embarked on, her story in particular in the world, but I can't seem to stop myself.
What is Skylight's central internal conflict? (this is a mean question, I always struggle with my character's internal conflicts)
I've been pondering this since it popped up as I was heading into bed. I don't think in terms of conflict, being rather fond of characters as people with very complex lives and relationships, and not being much of a plotter. By which I mean, I generally commit fic with the intention of reaching a particular emotional moment and commit short stories by deciding the beginning and ending emotional states of the characters. Which is story and a plot by some definitions, but definitely is interesting when thinking of central or external conflicts.
Which is to say, Skylight has struggles, plenty of them, but she's largely resigned to or at peace with herself and who she is, so I'm not sure if she's at conflict with herself, but I don't know. I haven't used that term in so long, I'm not sure I'm defining it right.
Her primary struggles are with fitting and belonging I think. In specific, the opening of her story always comes to me as the moment Math told her she punched holes in the world and that was her special ability. Realizing that she was that dangerous was something she did not really make peace with. Part of her training so hard and so long and sometimes almost too much is an attempt to master herself to the level that she won't hurt the people she loves.
Her leader made her practice her ability on people and had to pull rank to do it. That had a pretty dramatic effect on Skylight in that her belonging to Wolf and her team is associated with her choice to follow Wolf. Because she belongs there, she adheres to their rank and obeys Wolf. At the same time, I'm not sure how conscious it is that obedience equals belonging, more a case of she is absolutely loyal to her team and will not even allow Wolf to push aside rank in favor of the personal when it comes to making big decisions. Wolf's decisions go. That's how Skylight lives.
Then her roommate, Arc, is one of the very few team operatives who remembers her family. Being able to remember put it more strongly in Skylight that she wanted to know her own family. Skylight was one of the majority though, in that she does not remember and also that she was an orphan in the first place. When she finds out later, after the Rebellion, that she was midadoption process when she was taken and does have family, even if surrogate, she wants very strongly to find her place with them. Balancing her closeness with her team and her closeness with her family though is sometimes difficult, and I'd say her biggest struggle is that, figuring out how to have both and find a life that works for her in keeping both and near her if possible.
She constantly worries at the front of her relationship with Math if she's giving enough to it or expressing care/love enough since she's stoic, harsh, merciless, ruthless, and works waaaaaaay too long and hard and has insomnia so does not even choose to share rooms with him even after she marries him. She spends time in his room and has him in hers enough, but she doesn't usually sleep with him, and in their team work, she outranks him and keeps the personal personal and the professional professional.
So in short, she struggles with balance and is aware of her struggle with it. And it shows up strongest in wanting her relationships to be strong and to care for people, but not knowing how to show it. They are pretty strong though anyway, but they probably wouldn't be if the people she cares about weren't as understanding in general or of her in particular. She had to work very hard to earn a relationship with any but two members of her adopted family because she's stoic, she's reserved, and she doesn't really know how to, or even think to try to, make people trust her.
That's a pretty long answer, and I'm not 100% sure if I hit what you were really asking, but I hope I came close.
It sounds like Skylight has a lot of opposing feelings and urges. I like it! Is she on active duty or is she "retired?"
Immediately following the Rebellion, she definitely "retires", but she misses her team and ends up rejoining Wolf in quite a bit of active duty after she'd basically gone active on her own on behalf of her adopted mother (long story), but then comes back to "retired" for a while afterward. I think she'll always been in and out as long as there are people who can call her in when they need her. She's not the kind of person to stay inactive and when she's out, she's basically training other specials in how to control/use their abilities.
ooh, so this is a story from the Mentor's POV? perks
I don't even know. The problem with Skylight is I'm all over her timeline. I've seen her as student, as mentor, as leader, as follower, as lover, as killer, as friend, as sister, as enemy, as daughter. Not mother. She doesn't want kids and Math agrees with her (they don't want to pass on their genes, but Skylight admits she doesn't really know that'd she want them even if it weren't an issue). I don't know how to fit all the pieces together yet into her story, but she's a team person. I have characters that operate on their own but she doesn't and doesn't care to.
I am new here and these questions seem like a good way to start out and say howdy. :)
1) I am currently working on the fourth book in a historical fantasy series, Turning Creek. It takes place in Colorado in 1863 (the historical) and many of the main characters are descendants of Greek myths (the fantasy). The books focus mostly on a set of three harpies.
2) I love them all, but Marina, one of the harpies and the protagonist of the second book, is my favorite. She is violent, loves pointy things, drinking whisky at all hours of the day and night, being snarky, and still manages to be loyal and loving to those she thinks deserve it.
3) The series is about finding your place in the world and it takes characters to whom history was not always kind to and gives them a chance to be something more. Plus, it takes place in the mountains of Colorado which almost becomes a character in itself.
4) I was watching something on Greek mythology and I wandered if any fiction books had been written about the harpies. I found out there were not and I wanted desperately to redeem them. The story idea does still exist. I am finishing up the fourth book, to be published early next year, and I will complete the series with a fifth book in about a year. (depending on how fast I write)
How exciting! I love getting to see other fantastical creatures that don't get much love. (And The Last Unicorn always made me want to see the sympathetic side for the harpy.) Plus, I live in Colorado, so I'd love to see what you do with the mountains.
Descriptions and links are on my site here: http://wanderingeyre.com/books/turning-creek-series/
I wish I lived in Colorado. Along with Wyoming, it's one of my favorite places.
My current WiP is a dark dystopia set 200 years in the future. I follow two MCs as they navigate a world with declining population, forced military service, and severe population decline due to the over weighted male/female ratio.
My most fascinating character is a side character. He's building the revolution and my two MCs are along for the ride.
It's modeled after the Underground Railroad.
My first idea is still the key idea since it is the opening scene of the story and plays heavily into the themes I touch on.
(Bonus because I'm excited about it) The story is told in three parts, each part is 250k+ words long, and I'm within 25k of finishing part 2. I've been writing it for 3 years and I'm glad to see the end of part 2 is in sight.