Soul Mate Authors' Summer Blog Hop

Several of us Soul Mate Publishing authors are hippity-hopping all over the Interwebs in a delicious blog hop. I would like to say I participate in these because I think they help expose me (hee hee) and snag me more reader minions, but we all know it’s because the word “hop” makes me think of froggies. Or maybe bunnies.

Whee!

First of all, my thanks to Alina K. Field for inviting me to participate in this blog hop. 

All right, now I’m going to dazzle you by answering some questions about me. After your pulse returns to normal, please read below about a couple more Soul Mate authors. I urge you to visit their sites, too, and shamelessly lavish them with attention and love.

So, hop on, my friends!

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1. What are you working on right now?

On August 20, a mere four days ago, Soul Mate Publishing released my latest novel, The Tithe. This 94,000-word, post-apocalyptic, “utopian” novel focuses on the plight of seventy townspeople with disabilities after their ten desert towns sacrifice them to their wrathful god, Elovah. I’m currently trying to promote it, something that feels like a full-time job in addition to my, you know, paying full-time job.

Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve also been working on a paranormal romance novel that echoes my own life a little more, including mimicking a road trip my partner and I made when moving my partner from Florida to South Dakota, where we now live. It’s also super animal-centric. Woot!


2. How does your work differ from others in the genre?

I don’t think I follow any of the genre rules. As a feminist, I make sure my sheroes rescue themselves; heck, sometimes they rescue the hero, too. My heroes are never alpha, although sometimes they’re laconic and occasionally a touch surly. My sheroes never, ever stumble and fall into strong arms or have to rely on the grace of an arrogant blackguard or pretend not to feel sexual desire when they really do. Blech.

My characters also look and act like people. My main characters can be fat, have disabilities, be mixed race, and/or not embody traits we think of as conventionally attractive. I refuse to make main characters blond. Lesbian and gay characters permeate my books.

In my latest novel, The Tithe, all of the main characters have disabilities. It was a treat to write a book in which characters with differing physical and mental capacities aren’t either ignored or relegated to the very, very background.


3. Why do you write?

I’m inspired by a need to imagine worlds whose characteristics I tweak and spin, to make order from conceptual chaos, and to capture my versions of reality using the artistic medium of words.


4. What is your writing process?
Sometimes I don my thinking cap.

I start off with a spark, maybe a fully developed, climactic scene. Then, I take myself out to lunch and sit with paper and pen, jotting notes as the overall plot unravels before me. My initial outline is usually two-to-three pages long, and then I write those scenes. Then, when I reach the end, I scribble another two-to-three-page outline and then pen those scenes. I have a vision of these starts and stops as vertebrae, a bunch of discrete hinges that join together to make a flexible whole.

Also, I tend to stop writing for the day in the middle of an exciting scene. It’s super tough to do, but it’s also a great way to pick up the next day. 


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Here are two Soul Mate authors whose blogs you should totally check out. 


Madelyn Hill (no relation, although I would be in good company if so).

 Bio: I'm a mom, wife, and writer just living life to the fullest. A Michigan native, I've moved from one Rochester to another Rochester to marry the love of my life. Life is exciting, exhausting, chaotic, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

 Blog link



Alina K. Field, who inducted me into this blog hop


Bio: Award-winning author Alina K. Field earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English and German literature, but she found her true passion in reading and writing romance. Though her roots are in the Midwest, after six very, very, very cold years in Chicago, she moved to Southern California and hasn’t looked back. She shares a midcentury home with her husband and a blue-eyed cat who conned his way in for dinner one day and decided the food was too good to leave.

 Blog link

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