Thursday, March 6, 2014

I've been tagged! #mywritingprocess

I've been tagged in the Twitter meme #mywritingprocess. Here's all the sense I could make of myself:

1. What am I working on now?
Nothing, actually. It's midterm season, so I'm on hiatus. But I've got edits for DOVE ARISING's sequel percolating in my brain. Also, I keep getting distracted by this idea for a fantasy series.... I love it so much that I wish I'd decided to write it first. Probably can't start drafting these books until after I graduate!

2. How does my work differ from others?
I write strange characters that are still somehow relatable (this is not unique to me). The narrator of DOVE ARISING is a selectively mute biology nerd who loves her family to death. At one point, another character calls her "emotionally constipated." 

And because I'm a science major (ecology stuff, specifically), stuff from physics, chem, or bio class ends up in my books. I grill myself really hard about scientific accuracy, and I love stretching the idea of what's biologically possible in both my science fiction and fantasy.

Lastly, I write about everyone and their mommies and daddies. The last thing you'll find in my work is absent-parent syndrome...my own parents mean so much to me, and I love exploring the dynamics of parent-child relationships.

3. Why do I write what I do?
Sci-fi/fantasy is not only fun, it helps me get a good distance from my life. I'm in college, which can be pretty dramatic -- but being in school gives me ideas in a pretty obtuse way. If I wrote contemporary fiction, all the characters would wind up being people I know, which is not cool at all. 

4. How does my writing process work?
Eh. Hell if I know.

Like many people out there, I start off with a concept -- like people living on the Moon! Then I start hearing a voice in my head (yeah, it gets weird here), and spit ideas onto my MS Word interface. Drafting begins immediately.

I tend to outline as I go. Drafting is punctuated with conversations between me and my editor. Because I don't outline and plan as much as I should, my first draft looks like a total mess and I have to go through several rounds of revision. DOVE ARISING went through at least 20 drafts -- thank God my agent and editor have copious amounts of patience and faith in me.

The caveat: college. The semesters are ROUGH. Once midterms hit, I stop writing. But it doesn't mean that I stop thinking. By the time breaks come around, I'm so infected with the writing bug that I can spit out entire revisions in mere weeks. Last summer, I drafted the sequel to DOVE ARISING. Balancing everything is really hard, and the school-writing-school-writing discontinuity sometimes leaves me winded. But at least I never get writers block.

If you've read this far -- thanks for stopping by! Check out the enlightening #mywritingprocess of Kelly Fiore, who tagged me in. Here it is.  Ryan Dalton and Melissa Lenhardt are fellow taggees.

Happy reading and writing, everyone!


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