Australian science fiction writer AC Flory recently tagged me in a blog chain focusing on how writers write. Meeks, as her friends affectionately call her, is writing a series of books from an alien point of view, the first of which, Vokhtah, is out in e-book format. She has also collected her short-short stories into The Vintage Egg. You can find her on her website, Twitter, and Facebook.

So what about the writing process? Well, tagged authors are asked to answer 4 questions about their writing. Here are the questions, along with my answers: 

1) What am I working on?

That requires a two-part answer.

First, my current editing project is re-editing Daughters of Suralia for re-release by Sky Warrior Books. When I did the same for the re-release of The Marann, I didn’t do much more than chop off the first chapter, tighten up the writing, and add a few new scenes. This time around, my editor is asking for plot changes, because Daughters doesn’t have a single, overarching plot. I knew that going into this, but I couldn’t see a way to construct one from the threads of the current story. My editor made some fantastic suggestions that gelled everything together. I’m hoping what I’ve come up with will make it a much stronger story, but it does make major changes to the plot in the last quarter of the book. I hope my readers will bear with me on this one — I’m injecting significantly more space opera into the plot.

Second, my current writing project is Farryn’s War, which isn’t getting much love at the moment because of the Daughters deadline, but it’s never far from my mind. This is book 4 in the Tales of Tolari Space, and it’s not light and fluffy. We head into human space for this one, and with Earth’s oppressive government, you know that can’t be good. The going gets dark and gritty; I’m trying for SF romance noir.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
 I’d venture to say the worldbuilding I do. There’s SF romance as a subgenre of romance, and that’s distinct from SF romance as a subgenre of science fiction. I’m trying to write the latter. You could also call it space opera, or space opera romance, but what distinguishes it is the worldbuilding. I’m hoping to live up to the standard set by the likes of Bujold or Lee & Miller. 

3) Why do I write what I do?
The off-the-cuff answer to this is, Because I can’t stop. Seriously, though, if you mean, Why do I write SF romance, it’s probably because I spent my teen years reading every bit of science fiction I could find while also sneaking into my mother’s Harlequin romances. The two seem to be having love-children together deep in my subconscious.

Besides, making up my own world is a lot more fun than writing stories set in the real one, and fantasy as an alternative setting doesn’t come naturally to me. Astronomy began to fascinate me in second grade, when my mother bought a coffee table book with a stunning full-color image of the Orion Nebula on the cover; deep space is where my heart is. And I can pull elements from history, mix them up with speculative elements, and come up with the 26th century aristocracy’s obsession with all things Regency. It’s fun!

4) How does my writing process work?
I wrote The Marann entirely seat-of-the-pants. It actually began life as a story about Kyza, but the relationship between the Sural and Marianne soon took over. Daughters of Suralia, too, was a seat-of-the-pants project.

The Fall (book 3 — under contract, not yet published) started out seat-of-the-pants and stuttered. I did a silly thing and skipped over the middle because I had trouble with it. When I came back to it, I had to write out an outline of the plot as it stood, and worked in an outline of the middle. Then I found it necessary to rewrite the second half of the novel due to changes I made in that middle… and then I had to rewrite the first half due to changes I made in the second half… It’s tucked away right now, and I refuse to look at it until I’m done re-editing Daughters.

Book 4, Farryn’s War, is such a departure from the first 3 books, or anything else I’ve ever done for that matter, that it required detailed plotting before I attempted to write certain parts of the story. The final chapter is still a moving target — I don’t plot everything or I’ll lose interest in writing it — but I had to plot out the capers first.

Capers? Oh my, yes. What capers? Spoilers!