Ask the Author: Lucy Blue
Answered Questions (6)
Lucy Blue
I really wanted to do more of those books after Dark Angel and wrote a proposal for a second trilogy. But for whatever reason, my publisher wasn't interested. I still really love that story world; I'd love to go back to it someday. I've considered writing the sequels and publishing them through Little Red Hen Romance, my own micro-press. Think I should?
Lucy Blue
1)Don't stop writing. 2)Don't let anyone else's advice paralyze you or make you doubt yourself; nobody is so brilliant that they know every possible path into writing or publishing a story, particularly yours. 3)Grow a thick skin, a healthy ego, and a sense of humor. 4)Never expect it to be easy, and don't beat yourself up if it doesn't happen for you as quickly as you think it should. Everybody fails, even--especially--those who eventually succeed.
Lucy Blue
I go back and forth between two things. One is the act of writing itself, particularly when I first start a story. For example, this week I've just started writing a new novel, and before I put pen to paper, I knew who the protagonists were and had a good idea how they would meet and what problems they would face. But once I started writing the first scene, I discovered all kinds of stuff about them and the story that hadn't occurred to me beforehand. It's another richer, more intimate version of the same joy of discovery I feel reading a great book someone else has written, that feeling that you're finding a whole new world.
The other "best thing" is hearing about someone else's experience of reading something I've written, particularly if they've enjoyed it. The idea that I've been able to take someone else out of their life and into a world I made up makes me crazy happy.
The other "best thing" is hearing about someone else's experience of reading something I've written, particularly if they've enjoyed it. The idea that I've been able to take someone else out of their life and into a world I made up makes me crazy happy.
Lucy Blue
That's a good question, but I'm not sure I can answer it. I'll never have the experience of reading the story as someone who didn't identify so strongly with Scout, so I don't know. I think I would have liked it just as well; I think Harper Lee made the story vivid enough that anyone could get lost in it and feel for the characters the way I did. But I can't be sure.
Lucy Blue
Keep writing down words, even if I know they stink. I figure all of that stuff has to come out, that writing through the stuff I'm going to end up throwing away is part of the process. Reading back through story that doesn't work is what jogs my brain back on track to make story that does. Not the most fun part of being a writer, though. And if I'm really, really, really not feeling like a writer, I'll watch a movie or read somebody else's book, and that usually recharges my batteries.
Lucy Blue
Alpha Romeo is very different from the rest of my books. I usually write historicals and/or paranormals, but the fantasy setting of this book is contemporary Hollywood, and the fiends are all human, for better and worse. I first got the idea on a beach trip where it rained for three days. I finished all my books and was reduced to reading a stack of tabloids some other renter had left in our house, all of which were about a very public and obviously very painful love triangle between three celebrities. It occurred to me that while we were being told all these gruesome details, the writers had no insight whatsoever into the inner life of these people, what they were thinking as all this stuff was going on. From that, I got the idea of writing a first person memoir of a woman whose life has been part of pop culture since birth but who is a very different and much more complex person than anybody realizes.
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