It’s Friday folks and time for the very
first Candor Friday answering session!! I received four questions this week and
answered them a lot more in-depth than people probably wanted… oh, well. What
can I say? I like to talk…
But, I won’t bore you with introductions.
Let’s just get right to it:
Rodger Sauer asked: I hope a
“two-parter” is OK: As a person about to leave her teens (next
Tuesday… ), (a) what would you say is your best memory from your teen
years, and (b) what one piece of advice would you give a teen (boy or girl) who
is still working through their teen years?
A two-parter is fine.
Technically, I’m not about to leave my teen years, I left them this Tuesday,
but I suppose that’s what you meant.
And, to answer your
questions:
(a): There are so many
fond memories I could mention here. My teen years were good ones and I’m sure I
had it so much better than most. I don’t deserve all the wonderful blessings I
have received. But, after a lot of long, hard consideration, I finally settled
on the one that sticks hard in my mind as the best- the time my dad called me
while I was staying in Pennsylvania and sang the song he’d written over the
phone. Made all the more wonderful by the fact that I felt like the song pretty
much summed up everything I was feeling and going through in regard to growing
up. And, I’d been feeling really homesick at the time and it was just perfect.
Plus, what girl doesn’t want a guy to call her up and sing to her?
And, (b): If I had to
sum up my advice to those still working through their teen years, I would have
to say: enjoy it. Every stinkin’ second of it. Stop trying to rush to
adulthood, stop wishing things would change, stop trying to be more grown up or
less grown up or anything other than what you are. Because, let me tell you, it
doesn’t get easier. The carefreeness of being an adult is childhood’s greatest
lie. Trust me, if you’re a teenage living at home right now you’ve got it
better now than you ever have an ever will. You’re old enough to get to do new
things and experience more but young enough to not have all the stress and care
that comes with the responsibility of growing up. So, enjoy it while it lasts.
(Man, that sounds bleak… :P)
Lindsay Marie asked: Who is
the best villain you have ever read about, and what made them such a great
villain?
Okay, so this is a hard question, because when
villains are mentioned, the ones that come to mind first are from movies and TV
shows… But, I finally settled on a villain. But, ironically enough, he’s from
an unpublished novel written by an online friend. He’s the villain from Hosanna House by
Hannah Mills (https://plus.google.com/u/0/108129961349075440338/posts)
I had a really hard time pegging out why he was such a
great villain. Honestly, my reason for picking him is because he’s the only
villain I have ever wanted to climb into the book and strangle
personally. But, I didn’t know why. And
then I started reading Four: A Divergent Collection by Veronica Roth and Marcus Eaton helped me realize why.
I think the best villains are the ones who don’t know
they’re wrong. And, I don’t mean that they’re these wonderful people who have
the hero’s best intentions in mind but go about it the wrong way and don’t
realize it. I mean it on a darker level. In their twisted minds they think that
by hurting people they can help them. They think their evil actions are
justified by the fact that they’re “doing people good” (that’s what they think,
anyway…). They don’t realize just how evil they are. They think they’re the
good guys, that they’ve just been burdened with this hard task of riding the
world (or, sometimes just one person) of a certain evil. And, if they have to
use force or violence to obtain that end, so be it.
They make me sick. But, they’re also great from a writer’s
point of view because they’re more human than the stereotypical villain who
wants to take over the world and doesn’t care that he’s evil and hurting people
and all that jazz. The best villains are more complex than that.
Taylor asked: Do you have any other book
series that you would like to write and publish?
To answer you simply-
yes.
Less simply- if you’re
looking for titles, sorry, I can’t give those out. Because I have no clue which
ones I will actually get written. I have (and I am not exaggerating here) over
a hundred stories started. Some of those are part of the same series, but for
the most part they’re individual books. But, what generally happens is I get so
far into a story and then it turns into a series. I planned for Kit Parker to
get only one book and now she’s going to get six.
And, I can’t tell you
which ones I’m actually going to write because I just don’t know. I’d like to
say all of them. But, I tend to get a few new story ideas a week. Most get an
hour of my time tops before I toss them aside and forget them. But, a few stick
around. So, I’m constantly getting new ideas and working on old ones and
bouncing from idea to idea. I never know what I’m going to write next.
But, I can tell you
that if I finish it and people think it’s good, I’ll publish it. And, I plan to
keep writing and publishing until God clearly tells me that part of my life is
over. I’m hoping He never tells me that.
And,
cloudseeker7 asked: Where do your story ideas come from?
I get my ideas from a lot
of different places, but I think the best way to sum up where most of them come
from (for me) is to say I get my ideas from people. Mostly, fictitious ones,
but sometimes real people too.
I am a very character
driven person. I connect with characters even if I hate the story. Seriously.
Even books I absolutely hate have a character I love. So, usually what happens
is I connect with a character and I start playing around with creating a
character of my own that fits the archetype of the character I connected with.
Like, if I connect with a little orphan boy, I’ll start playing around with
little orphan boys in my head. From there, I’ll start creating a setting and
supporting cast.
The supporting cast usually
comes from other characters I have connected with, which can get fun because I
watch and read a lot of different genres all at the same time. So, I might
connect with a little orphan boy in a Dickens drama and a cyborg in a sci-fi
story and then I start to figure out how I can work them into the same story.
And then I might start reading a book about an Arabian princess and suddenly
little orphan boy and his cyborg sidekick are rescuing an Arabian princess from
gangsters (thanks to that Humphrey Bogart movie I watched) in a sci-fi/ fantasy
kingdom I created just to fit all the elements of my story into one world.
That’s a slight
exaggerations (although, now I’m getting ideas… like a need another story
idea!!) but that’s also basically how my train of thought works. And, sometimes
I keep the idea, sometimes I throw it out after an hour or two of mulling over
it.
And,
that’s it! Everyone above is entered into the giveaway. I’ll announce the
winner August 15th.
If
you would like a chance to win (or, are just wonder what this post is even
about) check out this page here: http://ivorypalace.blogspot.com/p/candor-fridays.html
I
look forward to hearing from you all this week! Can’t wait to see what
questions you come up with! :D :D
And,
in the meantime, I’ll see you all on Monday!!
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