Kate McIntyre's Blog, page 4

Backstage Character Pass — Rachel Albany

[This Backstage Character Pass contains some very minor SPOILERS for The Deathsniffer’s Assistant! Read at your own risk.]

No character deviated more from their original plan than Rachel Albany.

I’ve written about how The Deathsniffer’s Assistant originally started as a NaNoWriMo side project without an outline that I later realized had some potential. What I haven’t talked about is how much of the book changed between those mile markers. While I picked it back up and continued writing more o...

Outside My Comfort Zone — An Interview with Author Tegan Wren

One of the reasons I chose Curiosity Quills over other publishers was the promise of a close community of writers. And I’ve found that in spades. There are so many great people who share the imprint and I’m honoured to know all of them. One of the writers I connected most strongly with was Tegan Wren, whose tweets about the guilty pleasure of Captain Crunch spoke to me on a deep and hungry level.

Tegan’s greatness as a person lead me to seek out her book. I was surprised when it was a contemp...

Getting Out of the NaNoWriByrinth — Five Lesson I Learned While Writing a Novel in November

It’s that time of year.

Aspirational writers, hobby writers, published writers, and fanfiction writers all come together for the month of November. We descend like a horde of locusts upon the internet, taking over social media with our hashtags, word count widgets, and blog posts. ‘Tis the season for commiseration, advice and encouragement.

November is National Novel Writing Month, when writers of all kinds and types try to write a novel in thirty days! Or… to write 50 000 words in thirty day...

Backstage Character Pass — Rosemary Buckley

Ah, Rosemary.

All my characters seem to be polarizing except for her. Depending on who is talking, Olivia can an empowering riot or an unreadable monster. Chris can be a well written beta male or a grating self-congratulatory dandy. Rosemary, though? There is a very clear consensus on Rosemary.

She’s a spoiled brat.

rosemary’s aesthetic was inspired greatly by victorian porcelain dolls.

Some hate Chris for being a terrible parental figure and letting her get to this point. Some skip right ove...

Backstage Character Pass — Maris Dawson

Chris and Olivia are the only two characters who were both planned to be in the book and came out the way they were initially planned. Everyone else either joined the cast later on, or deviated wildly from their original concept.

Officer Maris Dawson is one of the former.

There’s exactly one reason that Maris broke into the book. While finishing up my outline and making sure it was going to work – this was once I already had over ten thousand words written! – I came to an unfortunate realizat...

Backstage Character Pass — Olivia Faraday

Beyond any doubt, my most polarizing character has been the eccentric Deathsniffer, Olivia Faraday. Some of my readers seem entirely focused on her to the exclusion of everything else. Some go so far as to say that she single-handedly ruined the book for them. All other reactions lay somewhere on that spectrum. The one thing I’ve heard absolutely nobody say is nothing at all. For better or for worse, Olivia Faraday gets a reaction.

I’m not the sort of person to dismiss reader feedback. I full...

Backstage Character Pass — Christopher Buckley

Welcome to the first in my series exploring the characters of The Faraday Files! To start, here’s a little backstory and trivia about my narrator and arguable protagonist, Christopher Buckley.

The Deathsniffer’s Assistant has been compared a lot to Sherlock Holmes — both favourably and unfavourably. I’m a Holmes fan, myself. The books, the Guy Ritchie movies, the modern adaptation on BBC… it’s easy to think that the concept for the book came from those places. But in a case of truth being str...

Tentatively Calling This One a Success

With thirty ratings on Amazon and fifty on Goodreads, it looks like a consensus is officially emerging on the topic of my debut novel. And that consensus, to my enormous pleasure and glee and pride, is that it’s pretty damn good.

The Deathsniffer’s Assistant has a 4.22 average on the very specific Goodreads, and a 4.5 on the considerably less precise Amazon. I told myself if I could get into the 3.9-4.1 range, I’d consider the novel a resounding success, but it looks like I sold myself short....

New Experiences

As a resident of the far east coast, I’ve seen a lot of things that most people haven’t. The wild, grey Atlantic ocean. The Fundy Bay tides. Forests covering absolutely everything. The glory of that in the autumn.

Of course, there are a lot of things I haven’t seen. Like, for example, a mountain.

a whole new world

I spent my vacation this year on the southwest coast. We touched down in Ontario, California and walked out into the world and I couldn’t believe my eyes. The horizon was completely...

In Defense of the “Weak” Male Lead

There are certain traits that we, as a society, tend to value in a male lead. Stoicism. Wordliness. Confidence. Physicality. Adventurousness. Fortitude. Courage. There’s a certain image that is conjured to mind when you think of a “hero,” and he’s probably every single one of those. His flaws usually involve overconfidence, insensitivity, or inflexibility — when they’re even portrayed as flaws. He’s James T. Kirk, Indiana Jones, Nathan Drake, Commander Shepard, and Owen Grady. And he is absol...