A: The Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
FAQ
Q: Choose one author, living or dead, that you would like to have dinner with.
A: Only one? How about one each instead? Living – J. K. Rowling. Dead – Jane Austen.
Q: What’s your biggest pet peeve at the moment?
A: Watching HGTV shows and seeing beige and subway tiles used in design. I can’t stand either one. I can’t stand beige because it’s so bland that there is nothing inspiring about it. Beige (and denim blue carpet) reads government building to me. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have worked and gone to school in beige environments. I don’t want it at home. Give me gray as a neutral any day of the week. I think it’s prettier. I loathe subway tiles because they are the exact same material as the tiles being replaced (because they feel old and outdated… so why get the same look again?) The only difference I can see is shape and color – from square to rectangle, from beige to white. Both trends read old and dirty to me… and government building. Don’t deny it. Now that I’ve pointed it out you feel the same, right?
Q: Where did you experience writer’s block in your book?
A: Probably wherever the story gets really clever. For instance, two moments that stick out to me in book one are when Zaria and her friends are imprisoned in Trolgar and what happens when Zaria, Olaf, and the Wild Hunt are on the scene for the delivery of the quest object. In the first, I had to answer how do they escape? It came by realizing how the room was already described. The solution was right there! For the second moment, I always knew there had to be a reason the mountain-trolls and the river-troll didn’t get along but would keep their distance. It couldn’t be just magic. I was reading the news when the idea of politics came to me as the solution. Sometimes the answer is in your face, you simply must step back and give your work a little space. Writer’s block to me is the inability to see the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest. Some space and a fresh look can make the big and small pictures appear.
Q: How do you stay organized?
A: For Zaria Fierce and the Secret of Gloomwood Forest I was about halfway through the first draft when it became clear to me I needed to utilize a timeline. I stopped writing immediately and opened a new document and then I read from the beginning. I sorted out the days and events I had already done and then kept the document handy for future events. That time I hadn’t made a mistake, but I could have, and it became a real time-saver later.
Q: Do you have any tricks for staying focused?
A: Yes, give yourself a deadline or end goal. You’re going to want to meet it and possibly exceed it. There’s lots of wonderful stories about writers who have finished a book in mere days, or completed massive amounts of prose for the annual National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.) What works for you?
