So, the tables turn and the interviewer becomes the interviewee! This month the Discussion day is coming a bit early, but that's so Dark can do a live chat! Make sure you come back for the live chat at noon, Alaska time. Just cause that's not the usual zones, so that will be: Pacific 1 PM, Mountain is 2 PM, Central is 3 PM, and Eastern is 4 PM hours. On to the interview!!
Single people work more. Are you single? Yup. Been single since 2008.
Who do you like best, Jerry or Tom? That takes me back. I always rooted for the cat.
Do you eat your fruits and vegetables? Being in a rural Alaskan village, fruits and vegies are a delicacy, so, yes, as much as I can get and as often as my mom sends them.
What are you wearing (and no fibbing!)? Jeans and a t-shirt, normally, unless it’s during school hours, in which case it’s business casual.
Are you a person who makes their bed in the morning, or do you not see much point? Most of the time I make my bed. I trace that back to my first cat, who would burrow beneath the blankets if the bed was left unmade. He also had a penchant for eating shoelaces, so I learned to put my shoes away, too.
Chocolate or Vanilla? Definitely chocolate, the darker the better.
What brought you to the site? I followed a writer to her blog and she had a list of favorite stories, among them DomLuka’s Desert Dropping.
Do your characters try to make like bunnies and create ever more convoluted plots for you? Or do you have to coax them out of your characters? I’ve had characters do both. Ben and Rick from The One I Want just would not leave me alone for the longest time. They still pop back into my head off and on, harping about the ending to their story (they don’t think it’s done). Then there’s Mordred from The Return, who still takes a lot of coaxing. He doesn’t like being the main character. It’s maddening.
Name one entity that you feel supported you in your writing endeavors outside of family members. I’d say the biggest supporter I’ve had in regards to writing is the woman who became my best friend. We first met on writing.com as part of a round-robin type of writing venture. We wrote together for years and it was only in 2009 (?) that I found out she was almost ten years my junior. I was a bit unnerved. Still, we got over that and she’s been my chief cheerleader ever since. Plus, she’s one of the few people brave enough to say “this sucks” when I write crap. Can’t beat that kind of feedback, lol.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing? I find action scenes the hardest to write because words rarely seem like enough after watching the scenes in my head. It’s a repeated criticism I continue to struggle with, that the action gets confusing, that readers have a hard time figuring out who’s doing what in a scene.
When did you first consider yourself a writer? I can remember writing my first stories about my GI Joes and my sister’s Barbies back in 5th grade. That’s also the year I wrote some role-plays with my best friend at school (though I didn’t have words for what we were doing then). I used to dream about being a writer. I would fall asleep at night to the stories in my head. Some of them are still clear even after all this time. I played around with role-plays and short stories (though again without really knowing what I was doing) through high school and wrote one novel in college. But in college I discovered Dungeons and Dragons and writing.com, which switched the vast majority of my writing to role-plays because I felt that I was missing some key element in my writing and besides, writing was just a hobby – engineering and the Air Force was my future. Eventually, I told myself, I would grow up and leave it behind. I didn’t, but my family thought I kicked the habit after that one novel I wrote (no, I never submitted it to a publisher). Sometime in 2007-2008, I got back into writing more seriously, found y-gallery, and wrote The One I Want, the first novel that I seriously considered getting published. It won a writing contest on that site (that was back when it was a series of novellas, one of which was titled TOIW). I think looking at the message from the contest moderators was the moment when I first truly considered myself a writer.
How did you come up with the title for The Phantom? This was a story whose name was actually easy to decide on. The whole story revolves around Mark’s interactions with the entity he names the Phantom. It seemed obvious to me.
Did the characters or the plot come to you first? For almost every story I’ve written, the characters came first. My inspiration was a picture and the characters just popped into my head. I asked the owner of the picture and the author of the characters for permission, and The Phantom began. Now the lead-up to that point is rather convoluted, so I’m going to try and make it understandable.
First, there was y-gallery, a website designed for sharing pictures (as in what folks drew on paper or computer tablet) for the M/M genre. Pretty soon people figured out how to add fiction to the site. I was getting into online comics at the time and followed a link to a fansite (or “club” as they’re called on Ygal) for the comic I was reading and slowly started exploring the rest of the site.
One of the clubs I discovered was for the old comic Spy vs. Spy. I started following an artist who drew fan-art, which she posted into the fan-club. At first, it was the old, original characters, then they evolved to be more human/realistic, and eventually the artist started adding original characters to the mix.
Then the club exploded … with her art and with people clamoring to know more about this world she was building (that was based on the old Spy vs. Spy comic). It got to such a point that she formed her own club and moved all her comics there as she started adding fiction to the mix and inviting others to join in.
Next thing I knew, there were alternate reality fan-clubs for these characters in different settings. “Bruce” is the spy name for Mark in the origina club, so named from the shark in Finding Nemo. How that came about is something I don’t remember anymore.
I enjoyed all the nonsense as it was a break from the very long days I was putting in working full time and going to school part-time. I was taking 9 credit hours at the time, plus my volunteer hours. I spent a lot of time on the train, which left plenty of opportunities in my day to read.
So, one day I saw a new club (spin-off of the new original club, do you follow me?) based around this superhero theme. One of the pictures posted was of Bruce and Sheila, intrepid reporters. I was hooked and just had to write a fanfiction to go with the fanart of the original characters that were themselves born from fanart of the original comic. Capiche?
If The Phantom were made into a movie, who do you picture playing each characters part? I could see Taye Diggs as Bruce, perhaps. He has just the right blend of comedic and seriousness for the part (not to mention being really handsome). He might be too short, though. The guy who played the Hulk has the right look for Sheila, as I envision him, anyway. He was a villain on the latest Star Trek film, one of the Romulans.
What sort of coffee would your characters order? Simple coffee, complicated soy-non-fat-extra-espresso-half-caff-nightmare? I think Bruce only drinks coffee thick enough for a spoon to stand upright, but Sheila probably drinks his blond (with cream). They both drink too much of it to worry about the fru-fru stuff. In fact, I find it difficult to envision Sheila waiting in line for one.
What was your favorite part of the story? My favorite part of the story was finding ways to incorporate as many different references to the fan-clubs and various sci-fi films as I could. That and using the old text-speak. I know, I date myself, but it was fun trying to stump my readers, knowing that they also followed the same artists and infinity-loop of fan-clubs. There are hidden gems in there for the loyal readers, like a scavenger hunt, not like I do that with any of my other work at all….
What are your future projects? Currently, finishing The Return is my top priority. Next to that, I have waiting a story about teenaged ninjas in an alternate, future Earth, and a space opera featuring a sentient A.I., dragons, and time-travel.
Some great answers! Thank you, Dark! Okay, don't forget to leave your questions for Dark or come back for the live interview.
I had a falling out with my best friend once. We didn't talk for a long, long time. It was ugly. But if you care about him and he cares about you, it might work out in the long run. Your feelings are another story, though. Gay for you is a trope that I find in many eBooks, and unfortunately, you can't change him any more than he can change you. It sucks to hear that, and I'm sorry, but if he was attracted to you, you'd know. It might hurt, but eventually you are going to have to deal with that.
