4) favorite character you’ve written

Oooh~ For Silm fic, hard to say. Faron Mithmeren is the one I’ve written the most of, been longest in his head, so he is very easy for me.

8) favorite genre to write

Flashback arcs. 😛  Okay, okay. I like writing fun banter between characters that when using dramatic irony becomes as bittersweet and sad as hell or the opposite. Slowest of slow burn romances with mutual unaddressed pining would be the actual genre – I’m too much of a shipping sap to be a true gen writer.

12) your weaknesses as an author

Giving characters a distinct voice and personality. I feel I have a big problem with all my characters talking and sounding too alike.

I omit words in phrases and clauses I feel are superfluous and want to juggle syntax around for emphasis and speaker distance, wishing my word-flow to follow this very distinct but clear rhythm in my head- a long rolling wave to a pause, then rolling up that looping canter stride again. Of which I know I can blame a smidge of this tendency on the idiosyncrasies of Texan US English dialect, of which I am not a truly native speaker -and yet… 

I don’t write exactly how I speak, (I am terrible in-eloquent though just as rambling), but the distinction for my readers’ clarity is not as strong as it needs be. (ex: ‘needs be’ instead of ‘needs to be’ or ‘should be’. And it’s staying that way. Y’all are getting the accent typed out; have fun deciphering it. Sometime thse typos aren’t typos. Sometimes they are.)

16) are there any characters who haunt you?

Honestly, I’m not sure what sensation this question is really driving towards. Characters whose stories captured me when I read them and then wanted to write about them? Or characters who I want to but haven’t/can’t write for them yet?

Aegnor/Andreth at this intimate but very distant look at their tragedy fits both feelings- theirs are the stories I’m mulled over in my head the longest, and sit unfinished, and yet through the lens of outside characters like Angrod or Baragund I want to write about them.

20) do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

Both? I’ll write tiny spurts of only a sentence or two, or when I have a WIP go and add a few sentences and rearrange them. But then once it starts flowing, I’ll write most of a story, if not all if it’s a short one-shot, in one go.

24) have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

Expert, no. Casual research for more facts – all the time. For instance, despite taking several studio art classes in drawing and painting, and introductory printmaking, I never took any pottery classes. Which meant for the “Making Friends” Gaiden story for “Of Ingwë Ingweron”, I had to look up early pottery methods. 

I don’t go into extreme details with my stories, but for instance I knew enough vaguely about Ancient Roman mining thanks to reading Lindsey Davis’s first novel in the Falco Mysteries to know that a quick preview of ancient British-Roman mines would help me map out what the mines would be like and the tasks performed- thus the use of fire-setting.

“Brides of Death” I was pretty clear that the longest part of writing that fic was the Wikipedia trawl through ‘poisonous plants of Western Europe and the Near East’. But was I researching the actual medical effects of ingesting those plants for symptoms and the proper amount to cause death? No and thankfully I’ve yet to be called out for it.