I’m not officially on social media, but I do peek at non-civilization-destroying venues from time to time. I see a lot of writer games, of which WordWeavers seems the most fun. Per the official Google Doc:
WordWeavers is a writing game on Mastodon created by Branwen OShea and Alina Leonova. The hosts post daily questions for each month.
Start anytime, answer any questions you want, skip as many as you feel like. Use the hashtag, talk to other writers and have fun!
The only rules: be respectful to others and use CWs (content warnings) for posts that might be triggering.
Everyone is welcome to participate 🧡
I can’t participate there, so I’m going to participate here!
Do your characters play any games?
They’re unwilling pawns in someone else’s game (which is in the series title!), but they’re quite short on leisurely pursuits during the course of the story.
Who is your favorite antagonist? Why?
My favorite antagonist that I wrote is hanging out in drafts. He shares a goal with The Good Guys, but they’re unwilling to do the deed necessary to seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve it. This guy is willing to live with the blood on his hands for the greater good. All they have to do is look the other way, but they won’t and so their goal becomes stopping him from pursuing the initial mutual goal. They would all be on the same side if not for the nature of the solution to their mutual problem. That’s amazing to me.
The most recent not-mine antagonist to catch a significant portion of my attention was Ravenna, the evil queen in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012; I watched it much more recently), played by Charlize Theron. In flashback, she’s shown being rescued from a prison cart by the warrior king who subsequently made her his bride. In the present, she bitterly remarks that men drain away a woman’s youth and beauty to feed their own power. Meanwhile, she’s literally draining women of their youth and beauty to feed her own power. She became her enemy, a concept infinitely more interesting to me than the movie they actually made. Her actions are no less horrible for the motivation of never being a victim again, but her experience and damage and fears make her a more interesting character than men who do the same out of violent, avaricious entitlement. (Please note the sequel made Ravenna one-dimensional evil to the core by nature since always, thus completing the circle of intolerable storytelling decisions.)
Generally speaking, I love characters who were once The Good Guys but got screwed over so badly they said “fuckity bye” to heroism. They know what the newly minted hero they’re up against is going to do because they were also wired for heroics and actively turned against it after betrayal. They have the potential to pose as allies who help in ways that ultimately hinder (e.g., wasting time with redirection, leveling up the heroes to be more useful pawns in the villainous pursuit, making the heroes dependent on them and then disappearing in a crisis). They’re more versatile in plot than baddies the heroes can only attack repeatedly in slightly different ways.
A lot of villainy is banal, and there is satisfaction in triumphing over villainy rooted in only violence, greed, and entitlement. A basic villain is just not the selling point of those stories.
Do films or theater play a role in your story?
Traveling theater troupes are a source of aid and Heroine had stage training early in life, but actual performances will have to wait for a future book.
What does your MC know that other people don’t?
Few people who’ve lived long enough to tell know about the fire-breathing void dragons.
MC POV: You can change one thing about your life. What will it be?
My life and I are well suited, and frankly, if I weren’t precisely as I am right now, a great many people would be doomed. Even the bounty on my head has had its uses, so let’s not meddle with the natural order.
Has another author ever inspired you to change anything about your writing?
If Stephen King can use parentheses with abandon, I can use them as often my inner copy editor deems them appropriate. (I was deep into the current revision pass when I had this revelation and haven’t yet applied it, but next go-round, some asides will get parenthetical hugs.)
Also, Ursula Vernon writes multiple genres under the T. Kingfisher name. I was encouraged/forced to adopt a new pseudonym every time I changed genre or failed to take off in one I was continuing in, and staying under one umbrella and relying on voice to get omnivorous readers to join me there and letting specialist readers sort out what they do and don’t want from me sounds great.
Do your characters eat any unusual food?
A 300-year-old cursed chicken?
When you’re drafting, do you consider comps and marketing?
I leave a mental channel open to receive signals from the universe, which sometimes points at something on the page as a potential marketing feature, but I don’t write any part of the story around a marketing strategy.
Secondary character POV: How would the story be better if you were the MC?
It would be ten times longer, but I’m certain my endless indecision would not be an improvement. It has been a great relief to me to place myself in the hands of a partner who assesses a situation and acts expeditiously. Surely only our enemies would prefer any other arrangement.
Do you make up words for your books? If so, any tricks you’d care to share?
Yes, unfortunately. My “best” trick is making a short list of characteristics of the to-be-named thing, feed those words one at a time into Google Translate, going through every language, and jotting down words I like the sound of. Then I grab a syllable from each list and bash them together until something “sounds right.” (And then I check that word to be sure it’s not a real-world word that will be unintentionally hilarious or offensive or otherwise regrettable.) (And also say it out loud because creative spelling can mask that the fearsome monster sounds an awful lot like “raccoon.”)
Sometimes, though, I just mash those characteristic words together in English. “Eashotin” came from eastern shore by the mountain. “Tangua” came from tiger, jaguar, and something else I’ve since forgotten.
“If a scene is boring, add dragons.” What do you do if a scene is boring?
Boredom is a structural problem. You’re not rewarding the reader for the time they’ve already invested. You have to give them that reward, not throw glitter on an empty scene and expect them not to notice their boredom.
If a scene is boring, I first question whether it’s necessary. Would anything of value be lost if the scene was cut? If there’s one plot-necessary element, can that be moved elsewhere and trash the rest of the boring scene? My first drafts contain a lot of boring transition scenes that served the purpose of getting me from A to B the first time through but are of little/no value to a reader and have to be scrapped for parts.
If too much of the scene is plot-necessary to trash it, changing the point of view character to one who feels more intensely about what’s happening or has more at stake may solve the problem.
Did any particular books, movies, or games influence your story?
The one-line pitch is “Sleeping Beauty wakes up early and blackmails John Wick into dealing with the curse that holds the rest of the kingdom in slumber,” but that came about after the fact. Media influences marketing more than writing.
At what point during the writing of your WIP do you know what the last line is going to be?
I’ve never had a zinger of a last line that was set in stone by anything other than sending the final draft off for publication.
The closest I’ve come is “Let’s go get some pancakes” at the end of a 1,500-word short, which survived from the planning stage when I had to figure out how that character would resolve a conflict with an eldritch horror.
Do you target your work to a specific audience?
At this point, I’m very much a write-what-I-want-to-read writer. I hate everything I’ve ever written to market or spec (or written otherwise and later edited into such), and that’s a terrible feeling. I’m too old to work so hard on anything I’m not proud of.
People who don’t write their own books pay me for market research, so I know what readers are buying. This book has too much romance for fantasy fans and not enough romance for romance fans, too much sex for sex-averse readers and not enough for sex-positive readers, not enough Hero’s POV for readers who “need” dual POV and too much of him for readers who don’t want Heroine to be interrupted. My efforts to revise it into something slightly more palatable to others made me like it less, so I’ve gone back to no compromise.
My niche is me.
If you could go back and change one thing about your writing in your earlier work, what would it be?
The genre, which I don’t mean as a slight against Romance as a genre. I just think I would have been better at writing other things and possibly would have gotten along better socially with a different writer peer group.
Also, one book a year with an advance suggesting the publisher had a modicum of respect for the labor involved would perhaps have been better for my mental health, creative development, and financial security than three or four books a year for 40% of minimum wage.
Of course, nothing is easier than imagining the path not taken led to a better destination. If one had it to do all over again, one might find “Wherever you go, there you are” is a curse.
