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BlogAccountant by day, writer by night. Technology fascinates me, but I primarily write YA Romance and Epic Fantasy.
The pack element of Torn is one of the most important aspects. Did you do any research on pack behavior within the wild?
Really quickly before I respond, I’d just like to take a moment and thank all three of you for inviting me here to talk about Torn. I very much appreciate you taking the time to read Torn and share your thoughts with everyone who follows Mission to Read.
On to your question, I’m not a big researcher generally speaking, which is one of the reasons I’ve ended up writing paranormal fantasy rather than historical romances or something else that tends to be more research heavy. That being said, I’ve spend quite a bit of time over the last few years reading various fictional accounts of wolves & werewolves, so I’ve tried to stay generally true to the rough feel of what people are prepared to accept when it comes to werewolf life. Hopefully it’s got enough of a different twist on things to keep it interesting without getting so far out into uncharted territory that it requires too much of a suspension of disbelief.
Are you a panster (no outline) or are you plotter?
I’ve bounced back and forth a bit over the last few years between the two. My first novel or two were written pretty much by the seat of my pants, and there’s definitely a bit of excitement to just jumping into a story with only the vaguest of ideas how you’re going to get to your intended end point. Unfortunately, that tripped me up a couple of times, and I wrote myself into a corner a couple of times and had to axe pretty good blocks of work. Frozen Prospects and Thawed Fortunes were much more structured, and I started from much stronger outlines in both cases, which was refreshing to the extent that I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to get where I wanted to get, I just needed to concentrate on the actual execution.
With Broken (the companion story to Torn-due Dec 2011) I realized for the first time that outline as you may, there comes a time when you just have to take a deep breath and jump in. I guess I’d say that I’d gone if anything too far down the road of trying to nail down every little detail before I started, and took a step back more to the center as it were.
Torn was interesting in that it’s the same rough story as Broken, just told from Alec’s point of view rather than Adri’s point of view. That meant I started from a fairly structured sequence of events-more so than normal, and then got to fill in all of the stuff that Adri didn’t get to see. It was surprisingly liberating to see what kind of craziness I could fit into the storyline while still keeping everything such that the two points of view matched up.
How did you find the design process of your cover?
The design process was pretty fun this time around. My main criteria was that there needed to be some definite points of congruence between the cover for Torn and the cover for Broken. It ended up being easiest to just do the two covers in parallel. My wife, Katie has done covers for nearly all of my books (Frozen Prospects being the exception), and it was great to see all of the creative refinements she put on my original idea.
What is your current WIP (Work in Progress)? Can you tell me a little about it?
Most of my efforts right now revolve around getting up the backlist of work that I’ve written over the last few years. As things stand right now we have ten titles up including Torn, and are just waiting on feedback from some advance readers before putting up Broken. I’m excited about Broken and Torn separately, but I’m even more excited about the thought of them as a package. I tried very hard to craft them such that regardless of which story you started with, there were still some questions that would make you want to pick up the other story to get answers to.
Apart from Broken, we’re also just about to enter the final edits on Splintered, which picks up with the story where Broken and Torn left of. I’d have to say that of everything I’ve written so far, Splintered is my current favorite. It dives right into some of the pieces of Alec’s world that I was careful to keep Adri away from in Broken and Torn. That gives it a bit more tension, and ultimately I think the ending there is the most powerful I’ve managed yet.
The other WIP currently in motion is what I call my “Dark Reflections” stories. I’m taking all of my favorite characters (good and bad) from Adri’s and Alec’s world, and telling an alternate timeline. I can’t get into too much detail right now about where the two timelines diverged, but the changes mean that there are some pretty different circumstances in Dark Reflections as compared to the world Adri and Alec currently know. I’m especially excited about the potential of this series of stories because it lets me explore certain characters in much greater detail than I’d ever manage otherwise, and it even lets me put certain characters together that would never really have that opportunity outside of a Dark Reflections story. Ultimately part of what I’m hoping to spark in the reader is a bit of “There but for the grace of God” feeling. Sometimes a “bad” character really just had the wrong set of breaks in life, and sometimes a “good” character is only good because of a couple of key decisions that really could have easily gone the other way.
Sorry, that was probably a longer answer than you were after, but as you can tell, I’m pretty excited with all of the things I’m going to get to share with my readers in the next few months.
Do you have a favorite place to sit and write? Where is your favorite place to read?
I’m finding that the most important thing for me is consistency. I wrote nearly all of Torn at my local bookstore. It was nice to sit down, surrounded by books, and lose myself in my own little world, but still have people around such that I didn’t end the day feeling like I’d spent it in a cave somewhere completely isolated from human interaction.
Splintered on the other hand was mostly written later at night with my daughter asleep on my chest. She has generally been a pretty good sleeper, but there was a spot in there where she didn’t seem to want to sleep in the bassinet. I’d send my wife to bed, and then I’d lie down on the couch, put Sage on my chest and let her fall asleep to the sound of me typing. It wasn’t the fastest I’ve ever put a book down on ‘paper’, but I’ve got some really fond memories to show for the time J.
As far as when I read, my favorite place to read is on the couch. Preferably wrapped up in a blanket.
As a reader do you read in the same genre as you write? What is your current paranormal obsession?
I generally gravitate to sci-fi, epic fantasy, urban fantasy and paranormal, which kind of works because that’s the stuff I also tend to write. Ultimately when I sit down to write a story, I’m trying to write something that is the kind of thing I’d enjoy reading.
I’ve got a lot of obsessions, but some of them are getting a bit dated at this point J. I think I’ll probably have a life-long obsession with Twilight. That’s partly because of the way that Stephenie sucked me into Bella’s world, but also partly because learning about how Twilight went from a fragment of a dream to the sensation it is today, got me writing again.
Apart from Twilight, I really enjoyed the first three books of the Mortal Instruments series, and I’m currently captivated by the Vampire Diaries (more the TV show than the books unfortunately, but that’s probably due to my not having given the books a fair shake yet).
Amazon
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Barnes and NobleShape shifter Alec Graves has spent nearly a decade trying to keep his family from being drawn into open warfare with a larger pack. The new girl at school shouldn't matter, but the more he gets to know her, the more mysterious she becomes. Worse, she seems to know things she shouldn't about his shadowy world.
Is she an unfortunate victim or bait designed to draw him into a fatal misstep? If she's a victim, then he's running out of time to save her. If she's bait, then his attraction to her will pull him into a fight that'll cost him everything.
