News from Squire's Isle

MY BLOG HOP IS LATE. Day late and a dollar short. I ought to donate a dollar somewhere as penance. I also didn’t get five people to tag. I am a LAME-O. Sigh. But better late than never. EDIT: Actually, not a day late at all. September 22 was the day I was supposed to post. Oh, well. This kind of panic is why I rarely miss deadlines. ::g::

What am I working on?
I just finished a novel called The Virtuous Feats of the Indomitable Miss Trafalgar and the Erudite Lady Boone (shortened to Trafalgar & Boone for obvious reasons) which is a 1920-era steampunk treasure hunting magical adventure story. It’s basically if Indiana Jones was replaced by Helena G Wells from Warehouse 13 and Helen Magnus from Sanctuary and they could both do magic. I have a few novels in the pipeline, including the fourth novel in the Underdogs series (“Red in Tooth and Claw”) and getting a few other novels I have in the pipeline ready for publication.

How does my work differ from others in the genre?
Variety, maybe? I don’t tend to stay in one particular genre. Western, romance, thriller, supernatural, steampunk. I write all kinds of things. The way my books differ from others in their niche is that I focus entirely on the female characters. There’s rarely a male hero swooping in to save the woman at the end. They can save themselves just fine, thank you. For instance, in my latest novel (Trafalgar & Boone) there is a male member of their team who gets left behind when they go off to face the Big Bad. He stays behind at home and basically does the sweeping up. The only damsels in my books save themselves or take turns saving each other.

Why do I write what I do?
Like I said in one of my bios: I write the books I want to read. There’s a boatload of novels out there with male heroes, or werewolf series that focus on the alpha and packs and mating. Seriously, it seems like every werewolf series out there, if it bothers to have a female werewolf at all, makes her main plot finding a mate. The idea of a woman who can change into a wolf is too great a concept to waste on a typical romance plot. So I stuck my foot in the door by giving Ariadne Willow a girlfriend in the first book, and the rest of the series is free to be about Ari as a person, not Ari as defined by who she’s in love with. I also try to keep it anchored in reality. Ari is a werewolf, but she exists in a Seattle that isn’t much different than the one we all know. Riley Parra is partners with her guardian angel against demonic beings, but the world is real. There are exceptions (in Trafalgar & Boone, World War I had quite a few alterations), but for the most part I try to keep everything – even/especially the most fantastic parts – as real as possible.

How does my writing process work?
On a wing and a prayer, mostly. I’ll get the thread of an idea – an image, a character, a line of dialogue – and I’ll build it up slowly while I’m working on other things. I build notes about the character’s name and biography until I have enough to create a story around them. Then it’s off to the races. For instance, my work-in-progress “Into the Fire” started with the image of a firefighter standing in the middle of a burning room staring at an empty chair. Her team was calling to her, but she was ignoring them and just looking at the chair. It took me a lot longer than usual to find out what her story was, but I finally got it.

Who’s next on the blog hop? (Tag 5 people)
Adrian Smith and Amy Mitchell and Del Dryden… a-and… um… I tried to find five people! I failed. Everyone I asked had already done it or been tagged! But if you haven’t done it yet, feel free and say you came from here. ;D