The Horrifying Tag Thing from Mr Wolfe

OK, I always squirm when I get tagged for something, but Mr. Wolfe just tagged me. And he has been so patient and understanding with me. You know, like letting Agi Nizer come over to do nude cameos in some of my so-called art and things like that. He's a nice guy, so what the heck. Squirming is free.

Actually, I don't like writing or talking about my own work, and I usually don't recommend that people read my books. Sorry, they're probably not your kind of thing. If you stumble over one of them and can't avoid reading it, fine. But I don't usually talk plots, technique, etc. I'm not very good at talking them up or selling them, and I avoid having to hear about them. None has ever been reviewed, for example, and I would hate to hear about it.

Now. To understand some of what I'll talk about below, you might need to check this link: smashed-rat-on-press.com/ Most of what you'll read below has never before been revealed. It's for your eyes only, and this journal will self-destruct in 30 days. Isn't that exciting?

1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with and why.

I'd have to say the "Martian Women" series is a fave, since I've spent so much time on it. Seven novels so far, plus a small language grammar and dictionary (Ancient Memnonian), some phonological sketches, writing systems, bits of history, fortune-telling cards, a map of the world, and a sort of slim guide-book draft that helps me keep things straight.

I've enjoyed the process of writing the stories, making up the fictional world, and populating it with aliens that are pretty much like humans in most ways, except they come in exotic colors, have big libidos, and sometimes a few quirky physical attributes. The whole world is fundamentally my psycho-erotic anthropological-day-dream "up-chuck" response to our sick modern material-industrial culture and messianic religious nut-cases, all of which make me ever more nauseated and pessimistic about humans and their societies. So I need an escape. The people in the fictional world have problems, of course. They do good things and bad things. They just don't have a lot of dorky, childish hang-ups about certain parts of life, like sex and religion. (Yes, they have religions, but they're not psychotic and nightmarish and don't make their followers exterminate non-believers.) And the aliens don't tend to do despicable things to their ecology or "develop" their world with an over-abundance of industrial waste. They live with about a 17th century European level of technology, minus the guns, and they've been pretty much that way for at least a thousand years or so. The place is also littered with animal species from Earthly mythologies, while avoiding over-used beasts like unicorns and dragons. And I generally treat them a bit tongue-in-cheek.

2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

How many? Well. Hmmm. Any novel of several hundred pages usually has a fair sized cast, so we're talking lots of characters. Of my two latest books, one has a cast of 30 named characters; the other has 22. The total of all books combined is a couple hundred, probably. Egads, that sounds like a lot. I like to work mostly with female protagonists, but there has to be a mix of sexes, because that's how worlds are. I'm not interested in sports, war, political struggle, macho chest-thumping, monsters, and that sort of thing. So I tend to write about people who are somewhat distanced from the "big events" of their day; and I concentrate on the intimate relationships and domestic problems they have.

3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you’re writing about fictional places)?

They come to me in dreams and visions. With my first novel, I started tongue-in-cheek, making up laughable names that sound sort of Italian because it was a swash-buckler. But as I branched out to other countries and languages, the patterns shifted radically. Now I need to make up whole phonologies and naming-theories to go along with names for people from different countries who speak different languages.

4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!

We'll skip the Prehistory phase, like grammar school, high-school, and even post college. I started my adult-stage work with fairy tales like this: vanilla-vanilla.deviantart.com… (And yes, boys and girls, I am in the market for a new cover design, so get out your pens and paints.)

5. By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest?

Hmmm. Leaving aside my Prehistory phase again, during which I wrote the usual number of really daft pieces about angst-filled teen-age protagonists living in America... The above-mentioned world takes much longer to orbit the sun, etc, so my youngest "main" character was age 9 at the start of the book, which comes out to about 18 Earth years old. The oldest characters are real oldsters on the order of 160-180 Earth years or there abouts. This is aside from mythological and religious figures.

6. Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol’ pen and paper?

I usually write at the computer, at night when it's quiet. (Like I'm doing now.) I cannot write anything coherent in long-hand, so I always type. Very quickly. I sometimes type short notes to myself in the morning before work, then fill things in later at night.

7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?

Nope. I usually want complete silence, darkness, and no distractions. I turn the lights down low to help keep my eyes focused on the document, not on the room. When I really want music, I write my own. Between times, I like most "classical" forms from around the world. Composers like Prokofiev, Beethoven, and Muthuswamy Dikshitar, for example. Or gamelan. And singers like Shruti Sadolikar and Barbara Hendricks.

8. What’s your favorite genre to write? To read?

To write? Hmm, everyone has expectations no matter what you say, and they want to fit you into a "genre". Well, most of my stuff isn't one of those pre-fab genres. There's "general fiction" for books and stories that take place more-or-less in the real world that we all know. Some of those are listed on the above-mentioned web page. "Diane at Fifteen" is an example. Then there's the mass of other stuff, which I tend to call "xenopornology". There ya go, first public occurrence of my coined genre word.

And to read? I used to read a lot of sci-fi, but very little "fantasy". These days I read lots of YA fiction as well as mysteries. E.g., Laura Joh Rowland, Elizabeth Peters, Lindsey Davis, etc.

9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.

They come to me in dreams and visions. I carve them little by little as I work on a draft. I sometimes get "germs" -- ideas for characters and stories -- from reading folk tales and that sort of thing. And once these germs have incubated long enough to be really volatile and infectious, they come "sneezing" out through my fingers onto the page as new stories and novels.

10. What are some really weird situations your characters have been in? Everything from serious canon scenes to meme questions counts!

Uh, well. You name it. I tend not to write a lot of violence and blood-shed, so most situations involve relationships or "life circumstances" that are (mildly speaking) sub-optimal. The characters move through these situations and change in response to them; or they make their circumstances change by being strong, good, and sexy.

11. Who is your favorite character to write? Least favorite?

Oh, that's a hard one, because there are so many characters. I often have fun with minor characters, like quirky government officials or shop-keepers. Sometimes a minor character that I liked writing about in one book becomes the main character in another book. I usually really like the protagonist of the current work-in-progress, whatever it may be. (I mean, if I didn't, then why write it, right?) And I dislike writing villains, so you don't see lots of villains in my books. Villains often appear only briefly; or they do their nefarious business off the pages, out of view of the reader, and we only see or discover their awful effects later. My least favorite character would have to be Tortuze; see below.

12. In what story did you feel you did the best job of world building?

The whole "Martian Women" series I have rather a soft-spot for, because it's fairly coherent, and (I believe) internally consistent across a number of books. The books are independent, but there is kind of an arc, so far, to the whole set.

13. What’s your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?

Hmmm, there are a number of cultures which, for various reasons such as greater land-mass with smaller seas than Earth, have had long interactions, so they do have some widespread common traits. I've had a lot of fun with one jungle culture that has a rather sexy mythology. (Which, by the way, is in dire need of at least 15-20 pen/ink illustrations.) I like Aerian and Thaumasian women, and I've developed a bit of a thing for Daedalians, believe it or not. Oh, wait, you don't know what I'm talking about yet, do you? I guess you'll have to read about them.

14. How do you map out locations, if needed? Do you have any to show us?

Well... I made a poster-sized full-color map of the entire Martian globe in Adobe Illustrator. It's 26 inches wide and shows major climate areas, mountain ranges, oceans, etc. When I need details of a country or area, I take a snippet from that, blow it up, and work out rivers, roads, and so forth as needed. Not in a whole lot of detail, but in enough detail, to scale, so I can measure distances. That way I know with some accuracy how many days it takes to ride a hippogryph from one city to another, and that sort of thing. (I also sometimes have to calculate orbits of Phobos and Deimos so I know where they are on a given day during the story, so I wrote a computer program to do that, but it's only marginally accurate.) Besides me, there are only 2 people in the world who have seen the whole map. So it's fairly secret. But if you go here: smashed-rat-on-press.com/ and scroll to the bottom, you can see coastal areas of Daedalia and Memnonia bordering on Mare Sirenum. The whole map is based loosely on "old" Mars maps, such as this one: history.nasa.gov/SP-4212/p6.jp… (which you have to rotate 180 degrees to get north at the top). You get the idea.

15. Mid way question! Tell us about a writer you admire, whether professional or not!

There are very many, of course. Who doesn't admire good writers? In modern "genre" writers I like especially Elizabeth Peters, I.J. Parker, ERB, and sci-fi people like Clifford Simak. I like Anais Nin and Richard Brautigan. My highest object of literary worship may be Elizabeth von Arnim. I'm a devotee of the haiku poet Basho, whose travel books influenced me greatly. And then there's James Joyce, "Finnegan's Wake".

16. Do you write romantic relationships? How do you do with those, and how "far" are you willing to go in your writing?

Yes, of course I write romantic relationships. I love Love. As I've written before, the only thing more important than Art is Love: vanilla-vanilla.deviantart.com… How "far" am I willing to go? Oh my... Yes, there's a reason I call this stuff xenopornology.

17. Favorite protagonist and why!

Of what? My own work? That would probably be Ichresta. It's on the page, and you can find it. If we're talking about other peoples' protagonists, that might be Sherlock Holmes or Amelia Peabody.

18. Favorite antagonist and why!

Oh, gawd, that would have to be Tortuze. A really bad character, rotten to the core, who was murdered in a shocking, violent manner that I can't describe here. You'd have to read the book where it's described in morbid detail. I don't write books where bad guys rule.

19. Favorite minor that decided to shove their self into the spotlight and why!

Haha. You mean minor character? That would be Chei-Rar, the demure Thaumasian slave girl in "A Dancer of Argyre" who comes back as the protagnoist in "Revolution in Noachis". There's also Tezmitsu, whom I liked so much in "Two Princes of Mars" that I had to write her whole back-story.

20. What are your favorite character interactions to write?

Ha ha ha. Heh heh heh. If you still need to ask, you haven't been paying attention so far, and probably didn't go look at the web page.

21. Do any of your characters have children? How well do you write them?

Oh, yes, of course. Many of them have children. I write the kids well enough, I suppose; as well as other characters. But I don't write a lot about them. They appear occasionally in some scenes. Sometimes the parents of other characters appear, in the story, too.

22. How long does it usually take you to complete an entire story--from planning to writing to posting (if you post your work)?

It used to take about 30-40 days to write the first draft of a novel, including a week or so writing the first version of the "synopsis" from which I work, and some other preparations. Now it seems to take more like 90 days, because I have more distractions in my life. I'm a geek so I work in plain text using EMACS. I don't usually format or typeset a book until the 4th or 5th draft. So it can take many months, up to a year from inception to the time it comes out with a "white cover" and I do a formal proof-reading on paper. Then, to get a really nice cover, like the three Christine Larsen covers you've seen because you looked at the web page, can take a really long time because really good artists are really busy people.

23. How willing are you to kill your characters if the plot so demands it? What’s the most interesting way you’ve killed someone?

People die all the time in my stories. Even "major" characters. It's part of life, so in a sweeping epic, someone usually doesn't make it to the end. In an epic war story, like Ichresta, lots of people don't make it to the end. The most interesting way of killing off a character? Well, it was violent and unpleasant, and you can read about it.

24. Do any of your characters have pets? Tell us about them.

In some books and short-stories, yes, but I'm not an avid pet person myself. In the "Martian Women" novels, they generally don't keep pets in their houses. But there are animals all over the place.

25. Let’s talk art! Do you draw your characters? Do others draw them? Pick one of your OCs and post your favorite picture of him!

I almost never draw any of my characters because I'm not an artist and every attempt I make is more hideous than the last. Want to see one? Well, trot on out to the above-mentioned web page and scroll to the bottom looking for the final white-cover for "Two Princes of Mars". You can see one of my really awful full-color drawings of three characters. But if you want to see some, you're probably better off looking at Christine Larsen's renderings which you can see, on that web page I keep talking about, or even on her DA page: liliesformary.deviantart.com/a… liliesformary.deviantart.com/a… The most recent picture of an "OC" is the beautiful "half-shell" one Erosarts did for me: erosarts.deviantart.com/art/Ma…

26. Along similar lines, do appearances play a big role in your stories? Tell us about them, or if not, how you go about designing your characters.

Appearances can play a big role at times: beautiful harlots, handsome captains, rugged bandits, voluptuous fortune-tellers, tattooed jungle maidens, gap-toothed crones, plump maids and pleasant governesses. At other times, like in the book about Tezmitsu, beauty is shown to be very much relative to one's race and culture, and it doesn't necessarily translate very well to a new country.

27. Have you ever written a character with physical or mental disabilities? Describe them, and if there’s nothing major to speak of, tell us a few smaller ones.

Mmm, yes, once in a while. A character with a dis-figurement or old wound; or one with low intelligence. They don't figure prominently, though. I don't usually write about people with major psychological problems or severe handicaps. I'm not against such protagonists, but none have yet appeared in a dream or a vision and really made me sit down to write about them. In the series that I keep harping on, life is just harsh enough that children born with severe handicaps don't usually make it to adult-hood, and that's just a fact of life.

28. Final question! Tag someone! And tell us what you like about that person as a writer and/or about one of his/her characters!

Haha. Yeah right. I got tagged, but I'm not quite ready to tag someone else at this time. It was painful enough getting this far. And I've stayed up way too late doing it. Good night.