I hate to disappoint any of you, but this site hasn't had many iFAQ's come in. Is there something tragically wrong with my site? Any ideas for improving it? Did you like the stories?
Write me. My e-mail address is [email protected].
| HISTORY-TELLING |
[Taranis:]
I just read your story "Love at Second Sight" and particularly enjoyed it. In the story you write about the feeling that you are reliving some of the more mundane details of your life, which seems like an unusual description. I was wondering if this is an example of the `adapted' autobiographical details or if this really happens to you. I would be interested in hearing which parts of the story you wrote as fiction, if that's okay.
The whole story happened just the way that I told it, trailers and all. I wrote it as the events I was writing about happened, which is why I didn't know it wasn't going to go anywhere, and why it ended so abruptly. The trailers are rare, but I've heard of at least one other person who has something similar to them.
The `adaptation' I spoke of was my early thought of salvaging this story by fictionalizing it, by getting "me" and "Robert" together when he and I didn't see each other again in ReaLifeTM. In the end, I didn't make any of the story fiction. I know. I find my life pretty hard to believe sometimes myself.
[Brasn:]
I do have a fantastic imagination though. [...] So how do you find the time to actually write so much?
Personally I wish I have the ability to writer stories and sit down for
hours typing away in some dark dingy dungeon... umm, I mean study room
where I slave away at the keyboard typing out pages and pages of wonderful
creative stories. Of course to be honest here, I lack the motivation or
drive or the competency to write well.
I dunno. The competency thing I'm not so sure about. You write fairly well. Most readers will stick with you if you can spell and punctuate. Unreadable stuff gets ignored because it's too much effort. If you can participate in an RPG, you certainly have to be creative. That's most of it. [Aside: I know Brasn from a play-by-e-mail role-playing game we were both participating in. Like most of 'em, it lasted a couple of weeks, then died.)
I don't sit there for a whole night and just churn out prose. I do it an hour here, an hour there, and I can usually do a page or two in that time. (I write in longhand on paper - call me old-fashioned.) As a point of reference, tK&tT part 1 goes up to the 16th sheet of paper, first side, so 31 pages total. Assume an average of 1.5 pages per hour and, at a rough guess, it took me about 21 hours of writing time. It was finished a few months after I started writing.
You just take a bit of time whenever you can. Long times, a couple of days between writing, helps me to develop ideas of how the story will go, what scenes will come up, what I can add to it later and allude to now, that sort of thing. Just keep developing the idea, and you'll be astonished how much you get done.
| FATHOM AND MADOC |
[Anonymous#1:]
The reason being, pairing Lennox with Bastian but `reworking' an established concept that practitioner
of magic have to remain celibate.
Was the role of Bastian as a `mage'/warlock concieved during the writing of The Knight and the
Thief?
I get the ideas for future stories I write from the previous parts. I have six stories in the series in mind, Knight and the Thief being the first, and Knights of the Road being the second. There's another two that are floating in my brain, and will probably solidify as I come up with more bits to flesh it out. Then there's the story that features Bastian and Lennox in their own story, without Thom and Madoc, and there are a couple of other characters I could spin off.
Despite all this pre-planning, much of what I write is "ad-libbed". I make it up as I go.
For example, there's the scene when Thom is defending his former job to Madoc, and he describes a theft he committed against a man who sold his son into slavery. Thom stole a necklace (which he has also stolen twice more from two other people) and used the proceeds to buy the son, now an adult, out of slavery. I wrote all of that without having anything in mind beforehand. I just decided I needed an anecdote at that point so Thom could make his case. That alone sparked three story ideas: 1) You know that necklace is going to come back into Thom's life. 2) It would be nice to meet the son who owes his life to Thom. 3) There is an active slave trade in or near Aragonia.
So, at some point, and I can no longer say when, I thought of Thom, Madoc, and Lennox meeting the Marauders again (but not necessarily so soon). Another time I thought it would be nice to have a magic-user along, and later thought he might be a love interest for Lennox. That meant finding some other way of allowing them to have sex (this is erotica, after all), and the differences between the two schools of magic. Then I thought of adding a nasty little rivalry between the wizards and mages.... but we'll get there when we get there. :)
| INVISIBILITY |
This is my reaction to a letter I got recently. It doesn't ask a question, but it deserves an answer. Okay, okay, I'll stop being so obscure. Just read it.
| HEART SHOW |
[Chris "the Insanely Curious" Y.:]
Last time I checked, it said in your log that you met Spider Robinson! And
you blew his what?...oh, his mind. Come on, now not only am I jonesing for
another chapter of Aragonia or RFB, now I'm also dying of curiosity! I love
Spider Robinson's writing, I love your writing...so what happened when you guys
met?
Matter-antimatter explosion? N-n-n-no.
He was doing a book reading (and singing along to tracks from his new album - do you remember the video game based on the Callahan's novels? Did you even hear about it? The game features four songs, performed by him, and backed by a guitarist who made Spider drool over the chance of playing with him. He now has a CD with everything in the songs except his vocals. So he got to play with himself-- er, no. He got to play guitar along to his own music and a band he carries around in his pocket. He called it, not karaoke, but folkie-oke.). During the festivities, my boyfriend quietly went over to Jeanne Robinson and said, "This young man would like to meet him, and he has something to give him." I showed her the ambigrams I made of his first and last name.
Ambigrams? Did you see the graphic you had to click on to get into my website? It says "entrance" (with stress on the first or second syllable, you decide) and looks the same when you turn it upside-down. I managed to do the same thing with "spider" and "ROBINSON".
I was the first person that evening to talk to Spider and shake his hand, and presented him with the artwork. And blew his mind. He plans to put them on his website at some point. They got passed around, and a few further minds were blown. I held up the line. My friends say I was the perfect counterpoint to the reading and music, but my boyfriend says I upstaged him. I'd hate to think he was right.
One of those friends told me I needed to make photocopies of them before I gave the originals away, and Spider signed them. (One of them he signed twice, once right-side up and once left-side up.)
We didn't talk about writing, at least not mine, since I was taking forever as it was, and the Robinsons needed to get to their ferry home after talking to fans and friends in Vancouver, but I had a lot of fun.
| ORPFAN SPEAKS HIS MIND |
Family has weighed heavily on my mind recently, and when that sort of thing happens, something is bound to get squeezed out.
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