The Cure, Q & A: Imaginary fan questions

I have written three fan letters in my time. One to Ann M. Martin, author of the Baby Sitter's Club books, J.K. Rowling, of well, you know who fame, and Stuart Mclean, the author/creator of the Vinyl Cafe stories. I think I know where the return letter from Stuart is stashed, unfortunately I don't think I have the others.

Of course, I'm not even remotely famous, and the last time I checked my sales, I'd made a whopping $14.00, so I don't expect to get my own fan mail anytime soon. However, I thought since not much has been happening around the Milne household over the last few weeks, I might answer some questions that I imagine might be asked in a letter or email.

Q: How long have your been writing stories?
Years. At least since I was ten, when I wrote my first one act Christmas play. I've always written short stories, and during my first year of university, I emailed a serial to my friends, about an alternate universe where everyone had peg-legs. I moved onto novels after I graduated from nursing.

Q: Did you take any special classes or courses to learn how to write?
Yes. After I finished with nursing, I spend three semesters at Seton Hill in their Writing Popular Fiction program. Unfortunately, I didn't graduate after loosing my focus in my fourth and final semester. Even though I didn't graduate from the program, it improved my writing skills considerably. Although I still feel that the ability to create a good story is largely innate, courses and classes in writing can definitely strength your skills.

Q: How many stories involving Nora do you have planned?
It will take three stories to complete Nora's tale and I don't have plans to do any more after that. I often lose interest in a series that goes on for longer, especially if the characters suffer what I think of as "the most unlucky person in the world" syndrome. Three stories will take Nora to the end of her journey, with most of her goals met, and a great deal of personal growth accomplished.

Q: Do you have any other stories you're working on, or have published?
Yes. I have an upper YA novel, title Cimwai's Bay, which I'm currently querying to agents. If, by the time I've released all of Nora's stories, I haven't managed to find someone to pick up the series, I'll also release it via self publishing. After all, the key to success with self-publishing is to have as many novels on the market as possible.

Q: What do you like best about writing?
I like to entertain people with stories. When I was younger, I told lots of jokes, and I've always liked to act and sing. Since I'm not an especially good actor or singer, writing is another avenue for entertaining. Plus, I tend to have no shortage of ideas to write about, although they don't always make it into a novel.

Q: What do you like the least about writing?
The amount of time you have to spend sitting at a desk with just a computer. I'm naturally an introvert, so it's not as huge a sacrifice as it might be for those of a more social nature. Also, I often feel guilty when I opt to watch a movie, or go out for an evening rather than write. It's one of those hard facts about being (or trying to be a writer), it takes a lot of time to craft a novel.

If you have any questions for me about writing, knitting, baking, or being an aerialist, feel free to post them (Note: I do moderate my comments, so it make take a while for them to appear).

Ciao,

Andrea

The Cure, Q&A: Meet Tomas Classen

Now it's time to meet Tomas Classen.

I can't recall if I've written this here before, but I'm an enormous figure skating fan (since the early 1990's, when Kurt Browning was competing) and I frequently have dreams involving figure skaters. Of course, these dreams rarely involve figure skating, the skaters who make appearances are usually just hanging out with me. At any rate, when I had my dream about living in the airplane hanger, it also involved a Canadian figure skater, one Jeffrey Buttle. He was one of the 'cool' kids, and I definitely was not, and he's the body model for Tomas.

Jeffrey Buttle, 2008 World Champion. I linked to this picture through Wikipedia, but I don't know where they scammed it from (hey, I'm a librarian, if I can't source something accurately, I can at least be honest about it).

Of course, I have no idea what Jeffrey is really like (I can only surmise from the interviews I've seen of him, that he's generally a friendly, charismatic type of person) so technically, Tomas is only based on him physically speaking. Therefore, Tomas isn't terribly tall, only five foot eight (the ideal height for most male figure skaters is in the five foot six to five foot eight range, it's a centre of gravity thing required for jumps and spins) and he's physically fit, very trim, but not beefy. His hair is multi-hued, but is predominantly a golden-blond colour, and his eyes are described as crystal blue. I definitely made Tomas something of a pretty-boy.

My brother, Matthew Thorne's, rendition of Tomas.

Personality wise, Tomas is meant to be very charming, open, and friendly towards everyone. He's the daydream of every girl in the compound, and he tries not to encourage anyone's hopes, but since he's a genuinely nice person, he has trouble discouraging the attention he doesn't want (hence why Ursula and Rose thinks he actually considers them as his close personal friends). He's also much better at keeping his temper under wraps than Nora, but that doesn't mean he never gets angry. Rather, when he gets mad, he gets really mad, and that most often happens when he feels he needs to defend Nora.

My own sketch of Tomas, working in the greenhouse.

Finally, we don't get to learn much of Tomas's aspiration in The Cure, (you don't even get to learn much about them in The Cause, either), but since it's really not a spoiler, I'll tell you. He'd like to go into records management (did I mention I'm a librarian?), which has a limited job field, especially in a small compound like Nu. That's about all I can say about that.

Again, let me know if you have questions! Feel free to post them to this blog, or to post them on Facebook if that's where your reading this from. I'd be happy to answer them.

Ciao,

Andrea

The Cure, Q&A: Meet Nora Watson

I don't have a consistent practice for how I develop characters. It all depends on what arises first, the idea for the story, or the idea for the character. Sometimes I'll have a particular person in mind as a body double, often I don't. What I intentionally do, is avoid giving a great deal of description to my main character so that my readers might reasonably imagine themselves as the protagonist. Although, since most of my lead characters are female, that might not work so well for any male readers, but maybe it doesn't matter so much. I don't know.

For Nora, I didn't have particular description in mind. I thought she was probably of average appearance, so pretty, but of course she wouldn't have acknowledged such a compliment if it was passed her way. She has long brown hair (it's way easier to just let your hair grow, then ever cut it or style it) that she generally ties back into a ponytail or messy bun, and she had brown eyes. She looks a lot like her mother. She's about five foot six, or 168 centimeters tall (or my height) and slender.

My brother, Matthew Thorne's rendition of Nora, created for when I posted the chapters here on this blog (sorry, no longer available).

Of course, there's a lot more to Nora than her appearance. As I was developing the story for The Cure I decided that there needed to be something unique about her. She couldn't just be some smart, average of appearance, teenage girl who was awkward with people. There had to be something else. There had to be a reason for why she had so few friends, why she was an outcast for more than just the purposes of my story. That's why I made her deaf.

I've been fascinated with the deaf culture since I was young...since I first saw The Miracle Worker, which is a movie (starring Anne Bancroft) about the early childhood of Helen Keller. I've always admired that she achieved so much considering she was both blind and deaf. I know some sign language (although not nearly enough to successfully communicate with a deaf person, I'm sure), and I volunteered at the Bob Rumbell Centre for the Deaf in Toronto for a short period during my undergrad. I also took several opportunities in my Masters to work on projects related to the Deaf culture.

I have one small regret around making Nora deaf, and that's that I made her deaf and not Deaf. That means she's physiologically deaf, but not culturally. The reason for this is that, she's the only deaf person in her compound. She had no one to learn from. This is why she speaks and reads lips, rather than uses ASL. I try to point out in a couple of places that lip reading isn't perfect, that she can't understand what people are saying when they don't look at her, and even then, she has to fill in bits as best she can. I also have people occasionally remark on her unusual 'accent,' to note that her speaking voice is differentl because she can't hear it herself.

 Small piece of back story that never comes out--Nora's mother was sick when she was pregnant (Rubella), which is why Nora is deaf.

My own depiction of Nora, created early this fall, because sometimes it's fun to draw.

Finally, I made Nora a huge science nerd. That's because I wanted to demonstrate that girls can be smart at science, too. I was kind of an all around student in elementary and high school. I was good at music and art, but I also achieved good grades in math and science. I did, after all, start out my university career in biology.

So, there's the background on Nora Watson, my heroine.

Feel free post questions if you want to know more about her, or my other characters (although there will be additional Q&A's on them to come).

Ciao,

Andrea

Where the *blog* are you? Lazy blogger habits of yours truly

Question: Where the *blog* are you? You haven't given up on blogging the scintillating details of your life yet, have you?

Answer: Well no, I haven't forgotten. I keep thinking, man I should write something for my blog. Then I think, crap I have a lot of assignments this semester. All my free time spent on homework = nothing interesting happening in my life. I had hoped to blog about the competition at the recent Canadian figure skating championships (since I attended them), but you dear reader, can see how well that went.

*le sigh*

At least I making slow progress on my MS.

Ciao,

Andrea