Thanks Amelia, and good to meet you properly! Books and the people around them is always a great corner to spend your time in. :D and apologies for the long spam ahead.
Let's see...Perpetūra came first, and it started with a feeling rather than a character. Not love exactly, not grief, not longing either, though it borrows the shape of all three.
Something with no name, arriving from nowhere the woman can see. Then I handed that same feeling to five women in five different centuries, a court woman in Joseon Korea, a performer in Belle Époque Paris, a blade for hire on the Tang roads and two more, and watched what each of them did with it.
I wanted every story stands completely on its own. However, they are also not separate, and Book Two is where that stops being a suspicion. I will not say more than that :P, except that people do not tend to see it coming, and that things you were handed early turn out to have been doing something the whole time.
I design games for a living as well, so an interactive form was where my head went first, an interactive fiction to be exact. Choosing a route means finding the pieces in your own order, and that suited a story meant to be assembled rather than explained. The two volumes came later, for people who would rather have it as one flow from beginning to end, with everything settling into place as they read on. I think that it is also a great way to share my stories with others who may enjoy them more as a novel!
And for my newest work, Pantheon actually started life as a game too, and lasted five days xD. I began it in July as branching interactive fiction, and five days in I shelved the branching and started again as a novel. Not because branching is hard. It is that the book is about a woman who cannot afford to be seen, and it needs a reader who cannot look away and cannot pick an easier path through her. A branch is a mercy, and that book should not offer one imo.
Both of them landed in the same territory, and it is in my pen name. Lacunae are the gaps in a record: the missing pages, the years nobody wrote down. Perpetūra is about lives the record did not keep. Pantheon is about a woman who made herself into a gap on purpose and gets read anyway.
And I am excited to see how far I can take these core ideas, and what kinds of stories I can build with them. It is a bit like creating your own universe with characters you love, and then watching them come alive and live their lives, and seeing what the world you made has to offer them.
Let's see...Perpetūra came first, and it started with a feeling rather than a character. Not love exactly, not grief, not longing either, though it borrows the shape of all three.
Something with no name, arriving from nowhere the woman can see. Then I handed that same feeling to five women in five different centuries, a court woman in
Joseon Korea, a performer in Belle Époque Paris, a blade for hire on the Tang roads and two more, and watched what each of them did with it.
I wanted every story stands completely on its own. However, they are also not separate, and Book Two is where that stops being a suspicion. I will not say more than that :P, except that people do not tend to see it coming, and that things you were handed early turn out to have been doing something the whole time.
I design games for a living as well, so an interactive form was where my head went first, an interactive fiction to be exact. Choosing a route means finding the pieces in your own order, and that suited a story meant to be assembled rather than explained. The two volumes came later, for people who would rather have it as one flow from beginning to end, with everything settling into place as they read on. I think that it is also a great way to share my stories with others who may enjoy them more as a novel!
And for my newest work, Pantheon actually started life as a game too, and lasted five days xD. I began it in July as branching interactive fiction, and five days in I shelved the branching and started again as a novel. Not because branching is hard. It is that the book is about a woman who cannot afford to be seen, and it needs a reader who cannot look away and cannot pick an easier path through her. A branch is a mercy, and that book should not offer one imo.
Both of them landed in the same territory, and it is in my pen name. Lacunae are the gaps in a record: the missing pages, the years nobody wrote down. Perpetūra is about lives the record did not keep. Pantheon is about a woman who made herself into a gap on purpose and gets read anyway.
And I am excited to see how far I can take these core ideas, and what kinds of stories I can build with them. It is a bit like creating your own universe with characters you love, and then watching them come alive and live their lives, and seeing what the world you made has to offer them.