erastes

What the hell is Taekwondo all about? It seems to consist of bouncing up and down on the spot followed by hugging.

Great News for fans of rwday - Lethe Press have offered to buy the rights for "A Strong & Sudden Thaw" and will be republishing it. This is wonderful news as rwday was royally shafted by Iris Press and the book deserves a second chance at being recognised, read and appreciated for the great read it is. Hopefully Lethe will decide to print the sequel too, which I know that a lot of readers are gagging for. Oh OMG have you got a treat in store with the sequel. OMG.

A meme! I was tagged by lee_rowan - i never get tagged!

1. What was the first fic you ever wrote?

It was in 2003, and is mainly buried. It has a terribly Mary-Sue in it - it's called Oroborous and was a challenge to write what Lucius Malfoy got up to in Order of the Phoenix when he wasn't on the page, whilst keeping it canonical. I liked the story a lot, but I didn't know about Mary-Sues back then, so committed a terrible offence. And yes, it was mainly het.

2. What's your most recent work?

Published, Hard & Fast - Regency novella, in the trilogy Speak Its Name.

3. What do you think you're best at (genre, style, theme)?

I don't know yet. I haven't really been writing long enough to experiment with all the things I want to do. I know that people like my Regencies but it's certainly not something I want to be typecast as doing - it's just that's what has mainly been published in longer form so far. I think I'm probably best at completely destroying my protagonists' lives.

4. What would you like to be better at?

Being more focussed and treating it as a job and not as a hobby. Writing wise I'd like to risk a little more, to write what I want to write and worry about selling it afterwards.

5. Which of your works do you think best represents you as a writer/artist?

Drug Colours - a short story about punks in the 1970s that was published in Where the Boys are by Cleis and in the forthcoming "Best Gay Stories 2008" by Lethe Press. I'm immensely proud of that piece as it is done in the kind of prose I'd like to write in more generally.

6. What's your favourite story you've ever written (picture you've ever drawn etc)?

I can't help but have a soft spot for Standish, I know there are newbie errors in it, POV switches etc but it has seemed to have touched people and I'm pleased with the story itself. However "favourite" is generally what I'm working on right now - but I'm not writing anything at the moment, I'm researching.

7. What's your favourite scene/chapter you've ever written?

I think the snarky scenes between poor helpless, incoherent Geoffrey and silver-tongued Adam in Hard & Fast. It was such fun to have Geoffrey go almost apoplectic with rage, being far more like his father than he'd ever like to admit.

8. What's your favourite passage or line you've ever written?

The love letter from Fleury to Ambrose. It made me cry like a baby while I was writing it.

I can't quote it here because it has too many spoilers in it.

9. Have you ever written something that you found really upsetting, that you almost couldn't bring yourself to write/draw?

Nope. There's a rape in Standish but I don't give any details, there's a torture scene in Transgressions (or there is right now, I don't know if the editor will want it watered down) - that WAS hard to write, but it was necessary. I don't think there's anything that a writer shouldn't write for example so I often challenge myself to say "can I write this?"

10. Which (if any) of your works represents a departure from your usual style, you taking a risk and trying something new? Do you think it worked?

Drug Colours was an example of how I used to write in fanfiction, and it was a risk - I thought no-one would want it. It worked - because it emphasised the era, the blues-induced violence that was rife in punk London at the time.

11. Who's your favourite character to write/draw? Who do you think you write/draw best?

Fleury without a doubt - so far anyway. He was only supposed to come in for 3 chapters and then die but he completely refused to, and dominated the second half of the book. I like the dicotomy of him - he's actually not a nice person at all, and if you watch the way that people know his dark side behave around him it's pretty scary, but he's also incredibly romantic, far more so than Ambrose in fact. I love his cheeky aspect - but I admit, I don't think I'd actually like to know him in RL, he's too unpredictable.

12. Name five things that typically characterize your work.

I don't think I can give you five. Religion tends to creep in somewhere. Like Graham Greene I'm tortured by a crazy mixed-up protestant/catholic upbringing.

13. List the projects you're working on right now or have coming up in the near future.

I'm researching three projects neither of which I can really talk about much. One is something Elizabethan, one's a possible new novella and the other is ... well, something else. It's not regency though, I've had enough of the Regency for now.

14. How do you think your writing/art has changed since you first started (in the fandom specifically, for those of you who do this for a living too)?

I've learned a lot - and I've learned things the hard way. When I started out I didn't know there were rules (which can be broken of course, but you need to be better than I am to do so). I think my dialogue has improved a lot though - there's very little dialogue in Standish and I worried about that but now my characters are a lot more chatty and I enjoy the challenge of conversations.

15. Describe yourself as a writer/artist in five words or less.

Lazy, procrastin... ooo shiny!

16. Links to any archives or websites where you have your work.

www.erastes.com and I'm a regular blogger at:
The Macaronis
Brit Writers
Lust Bites
Unusual Historicals