Ask the Author: Bryn Greenwood
Answered Questions (51)
Bryn Greenwood
Always. I'm working on a couple books. I currently have a book on submission to editors. It's just a matter of waiting to see who's interested in publishing it.
Bryn Greenwood
Nope. Never. I had plenty of time in the writing and revising of the book to decide how I felt about that age gap, and to decide how I felt about potential readers' reactions to it. I could have changed it then if I wanted to.
Bryn Greenwood
I can only speak for myself, but I hate the word vagina. The word comes from Latin and means "sheath" or "scabbard." That's because the Romans viewed the vagina as a sheath for a sword (the penis.) In short vagina defines that part of a woman's body only in relationship to its function for men. I think that's gross. I think a woman's body parts should be defined in relationship to themselves. Women don't exist for men alone, why should women's bodies be described in terms of some potential relationship to a man's body?
Bryn Greenwood
Well, until Zee retrieves the sword, the last time we see it is when Gentry's mother Charlene removes it from his room, remarking that she didn't know what she'd do with it, but it wasn't going to stay in her house. So from there we extrapolate that throwing the sword into the pond at Gentry's castle must have been Charlene's solution to her feelings of anger and sadness about Gentry going to prison.
Bryn Greenwood
I believe I was 38 when I wrote the first draft.
Bryn Greenwood
The answer depends on where you are. If you're outside North America, looking for the ebook, you're currently out of luck. There's no publisher for world English rights and my Australian publisher hasn't released an ebook. I'm told there are "work arounds" for changing your country designation so you can download the North American ebook, but I don't know that works.
Bryn Greenwood
I was going to ask which book, but it doesn't matter. LOL. At this time, there are no plans to turn any of my books into movies. Maybe someday Hollywood will be interested.
Bryn Greenwood
I would say backstory is hugely important for you as a writer. You need to know intimately how your characters got to where they are and why they became the people they did. As for what you share with readers within the frame of the story, that varies wildly. I frequently withhold key backstory elements until later in the story, because I want to give readers a chance to evaluate their gut reactions and their biases. I don't think characters who do bad things should be given a pass just because they have painful things in their past, but I do sometimes like to offer a few details to ask the reader to weigh that in the balance.
Bryn Greenwood
There are so many things I hope people will think about (and discuss) in this book. Maybe above all, I want people to spend time analyzing how we deal with issues of consent in American culture. A lot of people focus only on the question of Wavy's ability to consent to sexual contact with Kellen, but completely gloss over the variety of non-consensual physical contact with others, and also the ways in which she fails to get consent for some of own actions. These things are all interconnected, but woefully under-discussed in our culture.
Bryn Greenwood
All of the characters I write feel like real people to me, so I write them with as much compassion as I would hope be able to give real people. That means that unless a character is a truly terrible person, I'm always trying to redeem them. I think my desire to redeem people comes through in my writing and reveals the humanity, even of characters you might not like as people. Once you acknowledge someone's humanity, it's hard not to want things to turn out for them.
Bryn Greenwood
Soooo much fun. I've been obsessed with medieval literature since I was a teenager, and in college I studied Middle & Old English, as well as Old French. When I started out, I was writing Gentry's POV exactly as I heard it in my head, in actual Middle English. After about two chapters of that, I acknowledged that the vast majority of readers would not follow me that far, so I dialed it back a lot. I modernized all the spelling, a big chunk of vocabulary, while trying to keep a lot of the syntax. At that point, I finally felt comfortable that his POV would be accessible to most readers, but that it would still *feel* like Gentry to me. The thing I love about Middle English, and what I had a lot of fun with in writing, is that there are layers of intimacy that we don't have in modern English. Thee/thou is just one example, but my favorite is that in Middle English "kiss" is still a self-reflexive verb. So just as we now say, "he kissed her," or "I kissed them," in Middle English, Gentry says, "we kissed us," instead of "we kissed each other." I think that's incredibly intimate.
Bryn Greenwood
Sadly, most of the inspiration for Zee's mother and her hoarding comes from my own experiences. Like a variety of other mental health issues, hoarding seems to be a bit hereditary, and I come from a long line of hoarders. I've watched various relatives of mine fill their lives and their houses with stuff. I've witnessed the way it takes over and the way it creates barriers between people. I work really hard to not follow in the footsteps of my mother, aunts, and grandmother. So many hoarders start down that road because of trauma, like Dottie's, where the loss of her husband made her turn to "collecting." Zee ends up homeless and reliant on friends and even strangers as a result of her mother's hoarding. She leaves home as a teenager, because the stuff has taken over her bedroom. No surprise, that has a profound effect on how she views her place in the world and how she values herself. Being pushed out her childhood home by stuff has made her feel worthless and she tends to let that drive her life choices.
Bryn Greenwood
I've been reading romances my whole life, and I don't consider The Reckless Oath We Made a romance, because it doesn't respect most of the genre elements that define a romance novel. Plus, I don't think Zee is even a little bit romantic. ;)
(Now, in a medieval sense, it's definitely a Romance: a quest story featuring a brave knight of mysterious origins, coming to the aid of a lady in distress.)
(Now, in a medieval sense, it's definitely a Romance: a quest story featuring a brave knight of mysterious origins, coming to the aid of a lady in distress.)
Bryn Greenwood
If you are not in North America, there isn't a Kindle edition. For whatever reason, no international publisher purchased world English rights, so there's no ebook available for sale outside North America.
Bryn Greenwood
Although they're certain to have complicated lives, because Wavy still has serious mental health issues & Kellen is convicted felon & a registered sex offender, there's nothing stopping them from having children. Considering their backgrounds, I think they would be thoughtful, careful parents.
Bryn Greenwood
The usual things that drug addicts in messy relationships fight about: drugs & jealousy.
Bryn Greenwood
It's unlikely. Sequels are notoriously hard to sell, outside of certain genres. If you're interested in a little of their future, you can sign up for my newsletter to get bonus scenes: http://eepurl.com/bNx2Rz
Bryn Greenwood
I'm working on several new things! Of course, my editor has to sign off on one of them & I don't know when that will happen.
Bryn Greenwood
Thank you so much for reading! Those items from my acknowledgements are writing groups that I belong to. I can't easily explain them, because they're inside jokes among the members of the groups.
Bryn Greenwood
At present there is no international publisher for the book. Until a publisher acquires world English rights, the Kindle is only available in North America.
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