Q&A Bonus Round!

It has been brought to my wandering attention that I missed a question in my author Q&A. It’s a good one too and it seems a real shame to let it slide, so I’m going to take a crack at it here.

Q: “Who is your favorite and least favorite characters and why excluding the main hero/heroines/villians?”

Wow!

I have this feeling that writers probably aren’t supposed to admit that they have favorite characters, sort of like the way parents aren’t supposed to have favorites among their own children (even though we all know they totally do.) But I’m nothing if not a rebel.

So, obviously my main characters are my favorites, or else someone else would be the main characters. You want to know who else, though? Unapologetically, I am a big fan of one Neldorí Chalaqar, my favorite shitlord. He’s a terrible, terrible person who is so much fun to write. For real, I often find myself grinning as I write Neldorí scenes because he’s just so in love with himself, so brazen, so smooth, so amoral, and so pleased to be exactly who and what he is. He has, like, whatever the exact opposite of Imposter Syndrome is. If he were a real person, he would be insufferable and I would hate every second of having to deal with him. As a fictional character, he’s a damn delight.

My least favorite character? Would it surprise you to hear that if you’d asked this question a couple decades ago, I might have considered Lyn in this category? I used to have a fiercely difficult time understanding and writing her. Just in general, I don’t understand optimism and I sometimes find myself annoyed by it. As I’ve gotten older, though, and as I’ve made deliberate choices to lean into my own softness and my wonder at the world, Lyn and I have started to see things more like each other. I realize that I wasn’t being fair to her (or optimists) back in the day and I like her a lot better now.

Today I’d probably say my least favorite character is Qroíllenas Qaí. It’s not his fault that he really has no redeeming qualities — he’s just doing what he was written to do. But yeah. He really has no redeeming qualities. In the same way that writing Neldorí gives me joy, writing Qroíllen always sucks it out of me.

So there you go, question-asker! Sorry this answer didn’t make it into the Q&A video, but you got your very own blog post, so that’s something.

The Beginning: a Very Good Place to Start

I’ve had enough questions – or big enough questions, at least – that I’ve decided to give myself the space of more than one post to tackle them. (This might also be a move calculated to give me time to think about some of the more complicated or more philosophical ones. I’m not an expert, here. I’m just some goob who has been trying since first grade to write things other people might like to read.) It seems only fitting that we begin with beginnings, and it’s also the question that prompted this series of posts. What is the best way to start off a novel? The first page is always the hardest because you have to set everything up while still being interesting and unique. I’ve never really been very good at attention getters.

Got writing questions?

I’ve been asked a few times how I handle various writing difficulties. While I put very little stock in my authority to speak about writing in a way that would benefit anyone else’s process, I’m not so sure of my rightness that I’m unwilling to be a bro.

Because I do better on topics like this when I’m addressing specific questions, this is an open call. I will already be talking about how I deal with difficulty starting things. I’ll consolidate any questions I get here and do a single post. Got any other writing woes you could stand to hear a fellow struggling writer weigh in on?