Thank you, Elizabeth, for agreeing to answer my questions.
Your website, "Memoirs of an Imp of the Perverse," has quite a Bibliography but let's go back to the start. Where you always a writer and a storyteller?
Pretty much always, yes. I wrote terrible fanfiction in grade school, slightly better fanfiction and some really derivative original stuff in high school. I stopped writing for a while because everyone told me
that I'd never make it as a writer, then picked it up again years later with a play-by-email role playing game based on the Jacqueline Carey Kushiel books. I relearned how much I enjoyed writing, and I finally got brave enough to try and sell something. That first sale was a short story, to Circlet Press. Then they bought my second story. And my third.
I just recently had the chance to tell Jacqueline that it's all her
fault. And I still write fanfiction.
My sisters both had the same reaction: "I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! Where's my copy?"
Very few authors can make a good living with only their income from their books. Very few authors can simply write all of the day, day after day. What else is going on in your life that either challenges your ability to write or offers you balance?
I'm a stay-at-home mom, and we homeschool. My son is twice exceptional
-- he's gifted and he is ADHD, and he has a vision defect that effects (sic)
his motor skills. He'd be in fourth grade this year, but he's reading
on a seventh grade level, doing fifth grade math and writing his own
computer code. He also started out the year with the handwriting of a
first grader, and his executive skills are not there, so organizing
his thoughts and keeping on task are harder for him. This means that
one-size-fits-all public school doesn't work for him at all. We made
the decision to pull him and homeschool, which I think was the best
decision we have ever made. I get a lot of writing done during
various therapy sessions and in the evenings.
I learn a lot along with him, now. We're raising monarch butterflies
right now, for a 4H project. I had no idea how big the caterpillars
get! We had a lot of jokes about kaiju and Mothra. And the chrysalises
are so pretty! They're pearly green, with metallic gold flecks, and
you can see the markings of the wings as they form.
It's a juggling act, really. A friend of mine is a homeschooling mom
of three, and a full-time writer for Harlequin. She told me that in
the homeschooling house, you have a list: clean house, dinner on the
table, homeschool work done. Pick two.
Jacqueline Carey. It's all her fault. If it hadn't been for that role playing game, I'd never have started writing again.
How would you compare your work today to those who inspired you?
That's a loaded question, because when I compare my work to Jacqueline's or to Laura Antoniou's or to Cecelia Tan's, it's me saying "When I grow up, I want to be like HER!" In my own mind, I'm never going to be in the same league. It still tickles me when other people say I'm that good, because I keep wondering if they're really talking about me!
Your website describes you as a "pervy fetish writer." That could mean different things to different people. What do you mean by it?
Initially, it was a joke, a play on the Cassandra Clare fanfiction "The Very Secret Diaries" and her description of Aragorn as a pervy hobbit fancier. Since then, it's become a tagline, a sort of way to identify my own writing -- you can't really pin me down by genre or even sub genre. I'm not a romance writer, like Nora Roberts. I'm not an erotica writer, like Sylvia Day. So what am I? I'm a pervy fetish writer. Like Tigger, I'm the only one!
My opinion on genre is that genre is an artificial construct. I'm paraphrasing Neil Gaiman there, I think -- I think it was he that said that when Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, no one even blinked. No one gave him grief about this respected writer having written a fantasy ghost story. He had just written another novel. Genre distinctions came about with the advent of the mass-market paperback, and bookstores had to find a way to organize their stock.
Personally, most of my writing doesn't pigeonhole at all! It's all cross-genre -- science fiction erotic romance or steampunk erotic romance or historical fantasy erotic romance. About the only thing that's constant about my writing is that most of it contains the required relationship growth and happily ever after ending that define romance, and the explicit sex that defines erotica. Other than that, I write what I would want to read.
Is there a genre or setting that you haven't written in that you'd like to tackle?
I have a YA outline on my to-do list. I'll try it eventually, but I think that will be hard for me. Okay, Liz. Write this entire book and have no explicit sex!
All of them. I've explored all the orientations. I've written straight characters, gay characters, bisexual characters, pansexual characters, and I've just written a demiromantic asexual. That last one was a surprise -- in the outline for Counsel of the Wicked, Matthias was gay. When the character revealed it (it was totally his idea!), there was a lot of stop-drop-and-research. And I had several ace
beta-readers to make sure I hadn't screwed it up!
I haven't done much with gender identity yet, because I haven't had time to do the research to do it right. I want to, though. It's on the list of projects that I'll get to eventually. I have an idea for a transgender superhero story. It's important to get it right, though. So I need to do the research.
Our work is also often categorized by the sexual activities or dynamics we cover. You have touched upon once taboo topics of rape, bisexuality, and religion just to name a few. Are there subjects that you do not see yourself tackling? Why?
I can't see myself writing incest or anything involving harm to a child.
For our final question, next week I'll be reviewing book 1 of the Rebel Mage
series from Forbidden Fiction. Where did the idea for this series begin?
It's all my sister's fault. She got the flu, badly enough to end up in the hospital. I flew up to North Carolina to help take care of my nieces. Part of this involved driving them to church. This being December, that meant three trips in one day -- once for Mass, once for rehearsals for the Christmas play for the younger niece, and once for religion classes for the older niece. So six times in one day, I drove past the ruins of the Stonewall Jackson School for Boys -- a reform
school with a very lurid history. The last trip, it was raining and there was a heavy fog, and all you could really see from the road was this two-story stone gazebo, looking very dark and Gothic and creepy. That gazebo became the Well-house and that reform school became The School.
Thank you, Elizabeth A. Schechter, for talking with me today. Next Friday I'll review book 1 of the Rebel Mage series.
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