Ask the Author: Penelope Flynn
Answered Questions (7)
Penelope Flynn
Regarding Koescu is my most recent novel and the first of the Chronicles of Renfields. For anyone who has read Dracula they know that Renfield was a sort of herald of Dracula who was made promises in return for doing his bidding. Renfield was a patient in an asylum and presumed bat$hit crazy. But, I posited... what if Renfield was really crazy, but an outlier of the "vampire"/human hybrid family of Renfields whose job it was to maintain the vampire population? It all rose from there... their hierarchical structure, their religion, their entire worldview. Koescu is a Revenant/vampire who is served by a staff of Renfields. But he and his brethren realize that times have changed and that the servant may soon become the master. Add to that their uneasy alliances with the humans (Paradoxans) who are always a presumed threat to both camps, and other supernatural beings who vie for wealth and territory.
Penelope Flynn
I am currently working on the next book in the Chronicles of Renfields, due out in March 2020, and I am publishing and contributing to an erotica anthology due out in February 2020!
Penelope Flynn
I presume that you have a vision, a story that only you can tell, so grab all the technical skills you can to tell it. Watch webinars at lunchtime or after everyone in the house has gone to bed. Buy grammar books or editing software not necessarily to edit but to give you style cues that you will take into your projects. Be your own best critic and best cheerleader. You may not get either of those from anyone else as you work on weaving your world. Never ever listen to anyone who tells you that you aren't a writer or aren't an author because the work is not finished. Steal moments when you can to get that work out, even if it takes a lifetime. Your voice is precious and unique. Don't stop. And as my husband admonishes me, "Perfect is the Enemy of Good, and Good is the Enemy of Good Enough." Push the work out. Correct it when it's done.
Penelope Flynn
The best thing about writing is creating a story people can relate to. The characters may be from a fantastical background but what they feel is essentially human. Everyone doesn't feel the same about everything, nor in the same measure but we all have aspirations and desires even if the desire is to be left alone. (Please don't get me started on "Bartleby the Scrivener"!).
Penelope Flynn
Most of the time I am blocked I find its because of a cognitive dissonance. I am asking my characters to do something that I have hard baked in them the propensity NOT to do. So, I back up to discover how it is that I can make sense of something that my character logically would not do, i.e., a woman who is a stoic breaks down and cries in front of a man she is attracted to. She would NEVER do this. However if I have created a backstory establishing that she ALWAYS cries when she hears Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker Suite and that's what is playing in the background when she and this man engage, there is an ambiguity regarding the reason for the tears. I do this exercise with regard to people, places and plot lines.
Penelope Flynn
As Amanda's mother wept at the doorway of their apartment hearing the police officer detail the grisly details of her grandmother's murder, Amanda reached into her mother's handbag to retrieve a handkerchief. She found one wrapped around an exquisite pair of diamond and baroque pearl earrings, the pair her grandmother swore could only be taken over her dead body... still exquisite, even encrusted with blood.
Penelope Flynn
I should have answered before summer was over. But I didn't do much reading this summer as I completed pushing my book out but this fall I did get to read Seaman McGuire's Down Among the Sticks and Bones, which I found to be very evocative and cunningly cruel.
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