Process Questions Relay
I was tagged for this by the talented Matt Cresswell, editor of Glitterwolf Magazine!
What am I working on?
I’m about two-thirds of the way through The Incoming Tide, a sequel to Extraction. Tide expands the narrative scope laid out in Extraction—more characters, more locations and bigger political and emotional stakes.
How does my work differ from others in its genre?
What I write, I think, falls largely under the high fantasy umbrella— there is magic in Tide, there are elves, it’s set in a time and place that vaguely resembles pre-industrial revolution Europe. My elves, I think, are more foul-mouthed than most. They are not delicate Tolkienesque creatures. High fantasy tends to hew closely to the chosen-one-hero’s-journey-big-world-changing-event type of narrative, but I tend to draw a much narrower focus. The big world events are only interesting for me to write about insofar as they push characters forward.
Every writer has distinguishing features. My are not necessarily unique themselves, but presumably the particular constellation of my writing quirks is unique to me, yes? I am a very earnest writer—I can’t do satire or irony for shit. I’m also a very frank writer; subtlety is not a tool I use often. I think I have an ear for colloquial dialogue.
Why do I write what I do?
I write speculative fiction (mostly fantasy, but some science fiction and paranormal stuff, too) because I love the flexibility created worlds and futures hold. I love the way speculative fiction can push the envelope of what is considered normal or acceptable by existing societal standards. I love playing ‘what if’.
I am deeply interested in understanding why and how institutionalized oppression exists and I’m even more interested in how those oppressive structures can be torn apart. Speculative fiction can be a place to explore that. I want to read speculative fiction books that present a different view of reality, that make radical shifts, books that put people in power who, in the real world, have had power historically stripped from them. So, I write the kinds of books I want to read.
How does my writing process work?
There’s no magic to it, nothing glamorous. I’m a workhorse writer. I write most days like clockwork, usually on my bus commute to work. I write first drafts with very little planning, quite fast, and then I tear it all down and write the second draft with a clear structure in mind. I am not a perfectionist. I am willing to breeze past an awkward sentence in the first draft knowing it’ll probably fall by the wayside in the second draft.
I work in Scrivener. I write in a very linear way—typically just start to finish, no scenes out of order—but I really love that in Scrivener each scene can be its own document in the binder. I don’t move scenes around much, but it is extremely helpful for me to jump around and reread as I write the book. For something like Tide, which has multiple narrators, I color-code the scenes according to the POV character. Doing that helps me keep track and space out the narrative voices so they don’t clump up too badly.
