NECROCITY TIMES - Issue #2 - VALENTINE'S SPECIAL

Deadly Kisses Interview: Waterbearer

Greetings, @_Waterbearer!
Firstly, we'd like to extend a huge congratulations for being our grand winner of #DeadlyKisses! You won a well-deserved place closing the anthology, but tell us, what inspired your winning entry?

​I actually contemplated zombies for a bit, because I was fixated on the absence of sensation—I was walking home in the cold after work and my face was raw because it's chilly in NY right now! I don't always notice little things like that, but if they were suddenly gone, I thought, would I notice? Would it bother me? I couldn't quite come up with a more fleshed out idea for that premise, but I was still left with the idea of sensation, or lack thereof—and I made the jump to have a protagonist who is isolated from sensation, in this case human touch.

That's certainly one of the more unusual prompts I've heard! But the mind of a creative is often a... difficult place to understand at the best of times. Speaking of other geniuses, have you read any stories that have stuck with you?

​Since this was for a paranormal romance anthology, I'll to answer with paranormal romance! I highly recommend Nalini Singh's Guild Hunter series and Zoe Archer's Blades of the Rose series for anyone interested in PNR or urban fantasy—side note, they're rated M, most definitely. Also, R. Lee Smith's The Last Hour of Gann is scifi with a side of romance and honestly one of the most interesting books I've read! Its got lizardpeople (my favorite) and asks deep questions about religion and it's truly amazing. She writes great fantastical horror with the occasional romance thrown in, and I recommend her work to everyone (who is ready for M.)

Yes, I definitely recommend checking those out! So tell us, what have you edited out of your Deadly Kisses story?

​Well, I had this, like, really sweet scene in my head, with my protagonists gently kissing in a glowing field, because somewhere in the back of my head I vaguely remembered potatoes conduct electricity—flash forward through several hours of research, I remembered that potatoes conduct the electricity to the lightbulb, they don't light up! DUH! So unless some character took the time to screw a bunch of lightbulbs and stick wires into unharvested potatoes, that scene was going nowhere fast. I also left out all the hackneyed pseudoscience I used to make the "girl-conducts-electricity" thing work.

That's something of a shame -- I do prefer potatoes instead of light bulbs myself. Since you're now a Deadly Kisses celebrated writer, what would you say is the easiest part for you about writing? What's the most challenging part (besides potato physics)?

​I could probably give you like ten stories I'd like to write off the top of my head at any given time—I come up with ideas really, really easily. I rarely do anything with them—this makes me exceedingly normal, I understand. My imagination whacks me in the face with a particularly interesting scene, one in which the character(s) experience(s) some sort of intense emotion. The hard part is taking that one shot and moving forward with it, deciding on all the little things and figuring out how to create a bigger plot. Sometimes I'm overwhelmed by all the worlds and words swimming in my head, but I like to think I'm getting better at focusing on one thing at a time, and being decisive.

Tell us a little about your development as an author, and how did it all start?

​Well, like many others I'm sure, I have about 100 different notebooks scattered around my childhood home with half-baked ideas for stories in them. Often I'd write one or two scenes, or the idea for a plot, and then do *nothing* with it. And this is going back to elementary school. I have a hard time completing stories and I spend so much time reading other peoples' work, I guess I naturally slack off. But recently I've become sort of committed to the idea of writing in a way I haven't before—I just finished college and I have free time for once!

Here at Paranormal Romance we are supporters of LGBTQ inclusion in fiction. What inspired you to include LGBTQ characters in Closed Circuit?

​I want queer people to get happily ever afters! With the current political climate in my country, it's more important than ever to share happy LGBTQIA stories, in my view. The radical politics of love and care and all that. I'm aro-ace and most of my friends are queer as well, so part of it is reflecting what I see/experience. Also, I just love women and femininity so I wrote about two femmes falling in love!

And I totally back that! LGBTQ inclusion in romance is something we also feel strongly about, and not "inclusion" for the sake of reads, or for pure fancy. We were moved by your characters as a result. Do you have any other hidden talents?

​I can always find something to trip over, no matter how desolate the landscape—I don't recommend walking directly next to me.

Then lucky for you you don't trip up on words too! Paranormal and Romance seem to be a trending mix recently, nonetheless was it easy for you to write a story mixing both genres, or something of a hurdle?

​I read a lot of romance novels, usually around two hundred a year, and I have since I was sixteen. I definitely approached this from the perspective a romance—therefore, every word and scene had to serve the development of the relationship between the two main characters. Going off of that, I just sort of wrote out the shared history of the protagonists and ruthlessly scrapped unnecessary things. I kept the worldbuilding to the point, and focused on what the reader had to know to believe in my story, not the cool things that might find interesting. I spent most of my time making sure the story had a wistful, hazy tone throughout, to serve the ambiance of the supernatural. I think the short story length was actually the most challenging part, in the end!

Ah, yes, word limits can be pesky for sure. What are your Wattpad writing goals? Do have any plans to try something new?

​I really want to be productive and make sure I actually finish my projects—no one wants to be left hanging at the end of a story! I have a M rated contemporary het romantic comedy that's basically on hiatus until I figure out the rest of my plotting. I do want to branch away from romance though. I'm kind of in love with the short story format, and I really want to do a collection of stories following various characters in the same world, I'm a sucker for works like that! First and foremost I'm a historian by training, so I want to explore the dilemmas of keeping and evaluating history in a work soon. There's more than that coming but that's a short list!

We're happy to hear you're going to continue moving on and up! We hope that making it as our grand prize winner and being interviewed for Necrocity Times will make you even more proud. Thank you for joining us today, Waterbearer, and best of luck for all your future projects!

Xx thank you so much for having me! I'm definitely super delighted to be a part of this community, and it's so cool to be featured with so many other talented folks!