Alastair Rosie's Blog - Posts Tagged "ruby-curse"

A Conversation With... Makayla Yokley

Tell us a bit more about yourself.
There’s not much to say, really. I’m a twenty-two year old writer who lives in the Midwest with my demonic cat named Cujo (aptly named, if you knew him!).

What do you do with your leisure time?
When I’m not writing I like to knit. I used to do it in high school for a craft class I took and I wasn’t very good at it, but for some reason I wanted to get back into it, and now that I have I’m enjoying it a lot more than I did the first time. I also like to play video games (such as Sims, The Walking Dead, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, etc.) and have just started a Sims 3 legacy blog following a family I built which I’m using as both an example of my writing and a way to stretch my creative muscles. Sometimes I even enjoy drawing/painting, although I’m not too good at it. But hey, the point is to have fun right? (that’s what I keep telling myself anyway!)

How long have you been writing and what was your first published piece?
I’ve been writing since I can remember, probably even further back than that. The earliest incident I can remember with writing is carrying a plastic loose leaf folder with me everywhere I went in fifth grade and having to be told repeatedly by my teacher to put it away and do my work. Apparently this was a sign of things to come, because even when I was taking college classes I carried notebooks around with me with my projects in them!
As for my first published piece, it was a horror story I wrote when I was a freshman in high school and self-published. I can barely remember what it was about now but it was eighty pages of laughable junk that I’m glad got lost somewhere on the internet. That sounds bad but really, it was awful.

What inspires you as a writer?
Lately? Folklore, Fairytales, and writing prompts. The first two give you a glimpse into the society in which they were written, which is awesome for when you’re building a whole new world (or adding aspects of the ancient world into the more modern one, such as in urban fantasy) and the latter is a great way to generate ideas when it feels like you don’t have any. Which would probably explain why my hard drive is full of half-finished W.I.Ps.

Are you a panster or a plotter?
Both, actually. During the first draft I am a total panster. I write as things come to mind and worry about fixing them later. After that, I’m a plotter. It helps me organize the stream of thought from the first draft into something halfway coherent. When I get to the plotting part of the process, I like to follow the helpful advice given in Kirt Hickman’s book Revising Fiction which is full of helpful hints and ideas to try once you get to the organizing part. He even has a couple chapters on what to look for when you get to the “read it through” stage.

Have your writing habits and methods changed from when you were starting out?
Oh definitely. When I first started out I had it in my head that I could do a first draft and have it sparkle like a final draft. That was back when I was young, naive, and idealistic. Truth is, the first draft will never (and I repeat: N-E-V-E-R) be as good as the final draft. I remember reading a quote somewhere, but now I can’t remember who said it, saying that, in terms of sculpting, the first draft is seeing the angel in the sculpture. Revisions help you set him free. Of course that’s a massive paraphrase.
So, in short, I’ve learned that you can’t...and shouldn’t...do it in one draft and that revisions are what make the books what they are.

What inspired you to write the Violet Chronicles?
Fairytales. More specifically Little Red Riding Hood. I was getting into a fairy tale kick when I started writing the Violet Chronicles and had also recently heard the phrase “steampunk” for the first time. After a lot of research I realized it was something I loved, so I started thinking up ways to combine my love of fairytales with this “steampunk” concept. Of course a lot of ideas got rejected, and the one that stuck was actually a reimagining of an old project that started out very Tolkienesque. I recycled that idea, tweaked it to fit, and ran with it. Actually, Ethan and Aurora are the only characters to make it out of the original idea intact. Everyone else got reimagined and redesigned to work with the new world. Not including Violet, who was never in the old idea. I came up with her after doing a few character sketches to get an idea of what I even wanted to do.

What are you working on now?
Alongside working on the edits for the third book, Briar Light, I am working on other projects including a romance and a paranormal thriller. I’m not exactly someone who can stick to just one project. My fiance says it’s because I have the attention span of a goldfish, but I like letting my mind spread out over different concepts and playing in different worlds.
A random prompt generator I found online inspired the romance, which is actually pretty funny because I never actually intended to start a project. I was just curious what it would come up with, and wouldn’t you know it? I loved the first prompt it threw out. My favorite character in this project is definitely the hero, Connor. He’s delightfully nerdy and very sweet.
It took one month to write the first draft for the romance, and now I’m getting some distance from it before going into the second draft. Every once in a while I would look down at my word counter and realize that I got another huge chunk out of the way. I was churning out at least 5k a day with this project, which I thought was absolutely amazing. That was the first time I was able to just let the words fly like that.
My other idea is one that I’ve continually tried to do over and over again since I was a sophomore in high school (about seven years ago? Seven? Really? Damn I’m old). It follows a vampire hunter named Alice as she and her new partner as they try to solve murders in modern day New York City that they think are committed by vampires. This one was inspired by playing Tomb Raider: Legend when I was younger and thinking, idly, that one of the characters looked like a vampire. A couple of years before that I had an idea for a vampire hunter story that was dead before it even started and was locked away in the junk drawer of my mind until I had that random thought. After that it was an explosion of an idea that I really enjoyed working on. But back then, I was still under the impression that you could do it in one draft, which was why no agents accepted it and I got frustrated.
As it turned out, though, this turned out to be a good thing. It was by no means ready, and if it had gotten accepted I would’ve been dreadfully ashamed of it. I fully believe that if writing something isn’t working out, maybe you’re not the person you need to be to write it yet. I was definitely not the person I needed to be for this. Considering how well it’s going now, I’d say I’ve finally grown up enough to be able to write this the way it needs to be.

What else do you have planned for 2014?
One of my biggest plans for 2014 is to find an agent with one of the new projects I’ve been working on. I’ve already got a few in mind that I’m excited to query to!

Who are your favorite writers?
Laurell K. Hamilton
Jim Butcher
Nicholas Sparks
Arthur Goldman
Lisa See
Marissa Meyer
I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, but those are my big ones!

What is something you do that people find odd or even weird?
My fiance told me I’ve got this weird habit of having half a conversation in my head, then the other half out loud. I’m not sure how to explain what I mean because I’m not even aware of it when I do it, but he tells me it’s hard to keep up with me in a conversation sometimes because of this. I think what he means is that I’ll have both halves of the conversation (mine and his) in my head, then out loud I’ll start with my side of it and he won’t even know what I’m talking about. That’s as close as I can get to describing what I mean.

What is the funniest thing to happen to you in the last twelve months?
Last August; my best friend had a baby.
In two weeks.
Now I know how this might sound, but it happened in two weeks because she didn’t tell anyone until the last two weeks of her nine month pregnancy. She called me and told me that she was, officially, with child. Though she didn’t say how far along she was, so I was thinking that there would be a while in between when she told me and when she actually gave birth.
Roughly two weeks later...while I was lazing around playing The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct her boyfriend sent me a text message telling me that she went into labor and she was on such-and-such floor in such-and-such room if I wanted to come see her. Shocked that it happened so suddenly, I went downstairs to leave for the hospital. My mom was in the living room watching television, minding her own business, when I went downstairs and told her that my best friend since sixth grade was giving birth. Right Now.
The look on her face was absolutely priceless! She got this wide-eyed “what the hell?” kind of look and repeatedly asked if it was THAT friend. THAT friend? Really? Little that friend? And no matter how many times I said yes, that friend, she still couldn’t wrap her mind around it. My friend and I still laugh about it to this day, almost six or seven months later.

What advice would you give new writers just starting out?
Learn everything you can about the craft. Read as much as possible because reading improves your skill even when you don’t think it is. Also, don’t be afraid of revision. I was terrified of it when I first started out and my writing suffered because of it. After I learned that revision is an absolutely necessary part of what we do, my writing got so much better so much more quickly.

Where would you like to be in five years time?
In five years, I’d like to be married to my fiance, which isn’t so much a “I would like to be” sort of thing, more like an “I WILL be” sort of thing. We plan to get married after he gets out of school and lands his first game design job and hopefully living somewhere rainy like Maine. I hope to be getting some good buzz going about my novels and I HOPE I can write full time in five years. That would be ideal for me.