1. Tell us about your most recent project (written or published). What inspired it?
My most recent project has been weeding the garden. Aside from that, I have been writing a lot of short stories. I was really excited my story, “Day of the Nuptial Flight” came out in the July/August Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, a story someone called “alien, insect erotica.” I recently sold a series of 7 stories/paranormal love advice columns to Daily Science Fiction. Imagine Dear Abby meets the bogeyman.
The project I know I should be working on is Shadows and Starlight, the sequel to Silent Moon. The first book in the series came out with Soul Mate Publishing this year as an e-book and will be coming out as a print book on Amazon next month. The first book is a gothic mystery with werewolves and a Jane Eyre feel to it. The sequel will focus on one of the “wolfmen” in the first book and his relationship with a shapeshifter who resembles shadows and starlight in her true form. It has been really hard to find the time to finish editing it when I have been successfully writing and selling short fiction. It’s all a balancing act on the tightrope of time management!
2. What’s your writing process like? Are you a “pantser,” an outliner, or something in between?
I think I am something in between. I really like writing character and dialogue, possibly influenced by early play writing classes in college, but I know if I don’t make a plan, my characters will and that might not make the best story. Outlining means less cutting later, but it also takes away from the joy of spontaneity. It is a difficult balance. More tightrope walking.
3. What’s your favorite kind of story to write?
I love to write about magic and I like to write about relationships. I heard a writer once say that all romance is a kind of magic and that might be why many of my stories lean toward romance.
4. Which character from your work do you most identify with, and why?
Arg, that is so hard. I went to art school to be an illustrator and one of my teachers once said all portraits are self-portraits and all paintings are of yourself—whether you intend it or not. I think I put something of myself in every character and the ones I don’t are the flattest and least alive. Usually when I write about school teachers those are the characters that are the most authentically myself because I am putting direct experiences into my writing. The characters that are aliens or outcasts or monsters that I write about feel symbolic of my experiences living overseas because I was an alien in those circumstances.
When a friend and I were discussing my beauty and the beast obsession, most recently seen in “A Monster and a Gentleman” which came out in Hot Dish this year with my pseudonym, I wondered what that meant about my mindset and mentality toward men and women and gender roles. My friend said that actually she thought I thought I was the monster, not the beauty. That gave me a different perspective. I think this really came out in Cassia in Silent Moon. I identified with the struggle for acceptance and self-acceptance of being a monster/flawed/an outcast.
Furry Writers’ Guild 