Writers' Salon!

[isana]

All right, guys, let's get this started.

This is a post for members to post their burning questions to each other. They can be simple, like "when is Character X's birthday," or not so simple "how would you define the relationship between Character X and Character Y?" If there's a story you want that author to talk about, throw in the title (and some points you'd like covered!) and if said author's willing, they can write their answer in a separate post, since I have no idea what the comment word limits are.

Here's how it'll work: an author who's up for answering questions/writing commentaries about stories will leave their name in a comment. Readers who want to ask questions or request stories reply to that comment, and hopefully we'll have some good conversations going!

If you guys request stories, it may be best if you limit them to rainbowfic for the time being, unless the story you've got archived outside the comm is in a public entry.

EDIT: If it's not already obvious, you can ask authors more than one question in however many comments you like. The point is to have a discussion, and it wouldn't be very lively if it stopped at one question per author! Just give the author a chance to finish answering your previous questions, of course.

Comments

[sarcasticsra]

I'm really curious about the development of Unusual Florida. Was it always supposed to have a fantasy element, or did that develop in time? Or vice versa--was it supposed to be more heavily fantastical than it ended up being?

[kay_brooke]

It definitely did not have a fantastical element in the beginning. In the very very very first version, which I wrote years ago (the story is really just a complete retool of an idea I had a long time ago that I never finished), it was a YA piece about a family reunion in Florida, where the kids had adventures and got up to general mischief. When I went back to the story originally, I added the Breakers, who were refugees from a different story that never went anywhere (I do that a lot, scavenge characters I like from failed stories). The Breaker kids had weird abilities--like James reading minds--and that stayed. So the story became a YA with a whiff of fantasy.

My problem was I really had no plot. So I turned it into a mystery, with one of the kids being kidnapped and the others saving her. Still not enough. It needed to be weirder. So I started getting into some darker stuff with it, to the point where I was uncomfortable with thinking of it as YA and having teenagers as my main characters. So I set the original mystery in the past, aged them all up, and then had the (unsolved--in this version the girl is never found and is presumed dead) mystery come back to haunt them.

The pieces I've posted here, I think, have actually wandered into too heavily fantastical at points. I think I got too caught up in the weird stuff, which is ultimately not what the story is about. I'm still trying to find the right balance there.

(I'm writing a streamlined version of the story--with most of the subplots cut out--for an original fiction big bang. Many of the fantastical elements have been cut from this version. The full version may be heavier on them, or maybe even have fewer, depending on how the current version turns out.)