A little while ago I was tagged by the best-selling author Lilliana Anderson, who writes wonderful New Adult Romance stories. Her compelling biographical series, the Confidante Trilogy is a must read. I have completed the interview questions posed in this blog post hop, and tagged another intriguing author whom I have recently discovered to keep the post hopping.

You can find out all about Lilliana by reading her blog hop post HERE.

These are my answers to the interview questions:

 1. What are you working on right now?

Yes, I am working on my original story again. I was recently mortified to discover that I made a mistake in the ebook-production process at some point, probably when I created the Kindle edition. Somehow my draft-version control slipped and I uploaded an un-edited draft full of grammatical and typographical errors. I only discovered this dreadful situation when I started preparing for a paperback edition. I have now spent the last month re-editing and revising The Laundromat so that it will soon be better than ever. Until then, don’t buy it.

2. How does it differ from other works in its genre?

I always wanted to deal with some serious themes in The Laundromat. My aim was to produce literary erotica with some reflections on some important social and philosophical issues. Most of all I wanted to explore themes relating to surrender, and the voluntary relinquishment of autonomy and control. These are central themes in BDSM which have been explored by many authors. I am not really widely read in the erotica genre so I can’t be certain if I am that different to other’s work, but I did try and give The Laundromat a distinctive cosmic edge. I did this by bringing in some of the possibilities of tantric sex in addition to modern life dilemmas relating to identity, monogamy and the social regulation of sexuality. I hope it succeeds as a kind of kinky erotica story with a different form of happy ending to most romance stories.

3. Why do you write what you do?

I was inspired to write erotica by listening to erotica writers talk about their craft at a Pleasure Forum Australia event a little while back. I was studying writing and editing at the time and I thought this would be a really cool way of writing something quite different to my more academic pursuits. I was also researching and writing a PhD thesis at the time. Now I like the whole deal of being an erotica writer and having a semi-secret alter ego. It also combines writing with one of my main interests, sex.

It was interesting to be told by my early readers that I should write love stories, and now it seems me that my characters are interested in finding love just as much as they are interested in having lots of great and varied sex. For me, that issue gets back to having main characters who speak their own truth, even though they are only living in a world formed from a few ideas of my own that I have flung together. They have to seem real to me, they can’t be just one-dimensional objects that I pick up and move about on a whim. The main characters do become very real to me during the writing process, and they largely seem to dictate what occurs within the basic framework and ideas that I have decided upon. This does mean that I stick with some unconventional or unpopular plot developments, because the characters are driving the story as much as I am.

4. How does your writing process work?

I do some writing away from my lap top, usually while I am riding my bike. The characters motives, drives and voices sort of run around in my head, nothing too specific, but they kind of tell me who they are. When I am sitting at my laptop the story usually writes itself on the page, with me just putting the words and sentences down with as much coherency and flow as I can muster. I will have a narrative structure in mind, and a bit of a chapter outline and some notes, but the latter are usually partially forgotten or revised as I go along. I do try and keep to the structure though.

I can write a lot fairly quickly, but I have limited time for writing as I work full time and have family responsibilities too. I mostly write fairly obsessively and incrementally with a steadily expanding word count and constant revision and editing. Good advice says keep writing and editing as separate and distinct activities. I tend to follow that approach only after I have got a long way into the story.

At the beginning I always start by editing my previous days writing to help me get into the swing of the story. I am basically learning the story I am going to write in this early mixed writing and editing stage. As it gets closer towards the desired length it becomes more like just writing the story down, as it is now fairly clearly formed in my mind. This can be quite exhilarating as you see the story appear in front of you as text straight from what you have been thinking about for so long. If I lose the flow then I go back into my mixed editing and writing, otherwise the revising and editing drops off significantly until the full draft is finished, then it is edit, edit, edit.

Thank you for the tag, Lilliana! Good luck with  Phoenix: The Beauty in Between

I am tagging author Anna Bayes. Be sure to check out her blog post next Monday!

Anna Bayes – http://annabayes.wordpress.com