Ask the Author: Lisa Harnish
Answered Questions (9)
Lisa Harnish
Summer of 2019 has been a difficult one, for reading. Since releasing my own novels, and working on writing more, reading other people's work has devolved into "competitive research". There's been a few good gems. I particularly enjoyed Kyla Stone's Nuclear Dawn series. But mostly, I find it distracting to read other work, while I'm working on my own stories. So, when I need to relax, I turn to TV (police procedurals are good for this - story is wrapped up in an hour, don't have to get emotionally invested in a long narrative)
Lisa Harnish
That's a difficult one. I read so many books about really bad situations, that it makes me want to NOT live there. I have to turn to some traditional space opera sci-fi to find a world fascinating enough to want to live there, but even then, there are some caveats. The world of Barryar, from the Vorkosigan Saga by Louis Bujold McMasters would be one possibility, although I'd have to work for social change and gender equality to make it doable. The Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh is another option.
Lisa Harnish
I can't do it in two sentences. It's either one sentence, or several thousand. One sentence: "Trump gets re-elected in 2020."
Lisa Harnish
A swift kick in the metaphorical butt is a good starting point. Proper frame of mind helps, too. I noodle on stories inside my head most of the time, but I use my early morning dog walks as the time to narrow the focus, plot out the scene or chapter. Then I can start typing it out when I get back home.
Lisa Harnish
I suppose I like the fact that I get to control what my characters do, the experiences they have. At first I thought, no, I can't make them do that, or let that happen to them, that's too crazy. Then I realized that it's my world, my story, and I can have them do whatever I want. So I did.
Lisa Harnish
I don't have any, yet. I'm still too new to writing, to be in any kind of position to offer advice. However, as a potter for more than 17 years, some lessons I've learned there apply here: "Everyone starts at the beginning." When making pottery, everyone produces really crappy pots. They get better with practice and experience. This probably applies to writing, too. Practice, practice, practice.
Lisa Harnish
I'm currently working on some tangent stories. Set in the "Consolidation" universe, I want to show the Superflu progression from another character's point of view. Set in a large city (instead of the suburbs), this character is uniquely positioned to witness how the leadership and social organizations around her will respond to the disaster.
Lisa Harnish
Its a struggle, sometimes. Way to easy to find excuses to avoid it. The best motivator, for me, to read someone else's stuff, until I get so annoyed, and think, "that's not what I want to read, I guess I'll have to write my own".
Lisa Harnish
Honestly, I was getting frustrated with a lot of the fiction in the Post Apocalypse genre; the ones with EMP scenarios or CMEs, or cyber attack, or pandemics. They all seemed to devolve into an excuse to setup a military exercise on a local target. None of them dealt with the what the rest of the normal people back in civilization had to do, when they had no where to bug out to. No one was writing the story that I wanted to read, so I had to write it myself.
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