Ask the Author: Phoebe Darqueling
Answered Questions (4)
Phoebe Darqueling
No Rest for the Wicked and the whole Mistress of None series was inspired by time spent as a tour guide in historic Sacramento. I had to create a character and theme for my tour and chose to be a con woman posing as a medium with a tour focused on "Gamblers, Grifters, and Thieves." Though the job itself was short-lived because it didn't offer enough hours, the resources I got, the history I learned, and the character I created all came together to give me Viola Thorne, a conwoman who actually can talk to ghosts but wishes she couldn't.
Phoebe Darqueling
Figure out why you want to write early on because it will change how you should go about basically every aspect of the process. If you want to write in order to work through something vs. writing as "art" and a means of expression vs. as a career vs. "to get famous" (you won't) should color your approach to setting goals, interpreting feedback, and how much energy outside of the creative process itself you need to commit. Know thyself, or at least your endgame, from the start.
Phoebe Darqueling
I read a great book by Roseanne Bane called "Around Writer's Block" that gave me a lot of insights into the neuroscience of the different types of "writer's resistance." In brief, writer's block occurs because our fight or flight response is being triggered in some way. Most of the time for me, if I have trouble writing it is because there are tough questions about the story I haven't committed to answering yet. I hate the idea of not being efficient and having to go back and change things I already wrote (perfectionism), so I take too long making decisions or put off making them in order to avoid a mistake. The solution is to embrace the amazing, messy process that is writing a book and assume I will have to rewrite no matter what.
Phoebe Darqueling
I'm writing a gaslamp fantasy series about a con woman who is forced out of retirement in 1871 after her past comes back to haunt her... literally.
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