#anyway. what I meant is some kind of rewrite where I’d get to explore themes that interest me more

[malachitezmeyka]

Honestly I’d really like to make some kind of MLP AU or redesign/rewrite or whatever else of the sort because MLP was essentially my first fandom and it’s extremely nostalgic to me, but I’ve seen so many people do it already and have found myself physically incapable of producing something that isn’t blatantly copying what other people have done :/

[beyondthetemples-ooc]

Man, I wish I could write stories with foreshadowing as brilliant as Steven Universe.

tl;dr I like foreshadowing. The payoff in Steven Universe was absolutely fucking INCREDIBLE and I really envy their masterful storycrafting, but I’m not sure how to foreshadow so subtly at all actually. Or drop Big Hints without Backstory and Directly Revealing It. I’m comparing my very lore-heavy stories with SU’s Background Presence of worldbuilding, considering how that impacts my ability to Ease It In There Naturally, adn focus on character developement.... Basically, I want to do more to tie all my stories together. Continuity is sacred to me, it always has been, but I want some mystery with it-- “So THAT’S what that was about” is a feeling I really delight in, and would like to learn how to build more artfully.

The times I’ve tried, intentionally, come off as either way too silly, or, let’s be real, a little heavy-handed. Imean, my stories certainly don’t lack Plot Twists and Shocking Reveals. But a lot of the moments in my stories come as complete surprises to the CHARACTERS. So, the way I narrate, the only way I’m COMFORTABLE narrating, it feels like it’s gotta be Surprise via Narration Too. (I don’t narrate through events. I narrate through the characters.)

Unforeseen and Unforesaken has: ~ Everyone noticing Dove wearing a cloak that’s kinda like Raven’s, with some other vague resemblances. ~ Raven side-eying Dove’s powers being unleashed by emotion. And Dove knowing her name. ~ Starfire commenting on Dove being From Azarath, Like Raven.

And that’s all just in, like, the first chapter. (I mean, I wanted to Kick the Mystery of Dove’s Heritage off strong.)

But the Entire Subject of “why is Dove like this, Who Is She” kinda gets... left at the door through the rest of the story, UNTIL the Actual Reveal of “she’s Trigon’s daughter! She’s Raven’s SISTER!”

In the rewrite, I’m going to explore the fallout of that revelation a LOT more intimately.

So I have the cooldown well placed.

But I’m struggling to give it more Warm Up beforehand.

(I’m thinking, the parts where Raven is able to sympathize with her, kind of illustrates that mystery a little? Draws a connection between them?)

But then again, maybe exploring who Dove is as an INDIVIDUAL is more important than her relationship to Raven, too...

Mmmmaybe in the Grand Tour scene, Starfire comments on Dove’s cloak looking like something Raven might wear, if it wasn’t so bright? (Because it’s Hella Canon, Starfire tries to connect with her and open her up so she can relax and find comfort in her new home.) But Dove kind of hesitantly dismisses it as being “just Azarath”, they like hoods and cloaks, she guesses?

So there’s another Parallel, but Dove actively avoids making it into a “””parallel”””... (Because, I mean, she hardcore doesn’t WANT anyone to know who her father is.)

There WAS the (definitely comic-book cheesy [but i love it that way]) chapter-end of DDD that went something like:

She finally felt like everything was going right again.

The only problem being: she was wrong.

To that effect, anyways. I like it~ (Especially since everything starts going wrong for her in that story.... ;; )

But, like. Foreshadowing in Soul Sickness (pre-revamp title: Mystery Sickness) would be really neat? If I could pull it off. Like, I know there’s a scene I need to add to the Very, Very Beginning where the team takes on Mumbo again, because they’re convinced his magic is the reason that Raven fell ill. (Which is never supposed to happen; she absolutely cannot get sick from pathogenic infections. That’s hardcore, blatantly-stated comic canon!)

Anyways, point is, I don’t know if that’s the kind of foreshadowing I’m looking for? Because it’s magical malady for sure. And it’s not until the end that they figure it out, and only because they’re investigating the phenomenon where Raven gets worse when Dove’s near for a few hours, and without explanation, seems to heal quite well when Dove vanishes into the night.

And then, after ruling out anything they can think of, they uncover the CAUSE of it being Alerina’s spells, not Mumbo’s.

I mean, it’s definitely a plot twist of sorts. Nobody expected Dove’s mother’s magic to have that kind of effect on her.

But I wish I knew how to foreshadow that more... 

~ There’s the Mysterious Force that Raven feels when she first empathically connects to Dove, and subsequently feels again any time after. That’s in Dove’s debut, and the prequel to Soul Sickness...

~ I mean, the title itself is going to be “Soul” Sickness, which basically already reveals that it’s not a physical sickness.

I like that. Little tiny tidbits like Those.

But, like...

...I kinda want to foreshadow something brilliantly, the way they’ve done in Steven Universe. Even just one or two times, I’d really like to give someone that moment of, “!! Ohhey, that makes SENSE now!” Or “I can’t believe that was actually what THAT meant, 47 pages ago.”

And Srentha’s survival. That deserves foreshadowing. (During Nothing Good Lasts Forever, when Raven takes Dove to Azarath to reconcile what happened in her vision, and to get closure and finally be able to find peace with it: I want to add a blurb about “On the other side of the monolith, someone notices the flickers of energy, and thinks he hears voices, but after the stir of magics [of Raven's teleportation] was raised, trying to follow them led him to nothing but ash swirling in the fading wind.”

Something like that.

(There are like 5 years of stories between “Nothing” and Srentha’s debut, though. {lD I wonder how many readers will remember? Or even, care enough about The Mysterious Person Mentioned Once on Azarath. Let alone, theorize...)

Well, my stories certainly aren’t as cute, blatantly emotional, or quickly-formatted as Steven Universe. Not as immediately interest-catching. (There’s enough passion, heart, and soul in them. Definitely as much angst and comfort.)

But I can’t help wondering if anyone will care half so much as I do about my characters, and their stories, when I start using little tricks like that? I wonder if anyone else will be left wondering? Caring? 

...Ultimately, I really don’t care. I’m going to try my best, and write my stories anyways. Probably never publish them, until I get rich enough to self-publish. Too much else in my life for that.

But it would be nice.

Point is, it would be a really cool trick of story-crafting to learn how to use, wouldn’t it?

The breadcrumb trails and build-up and Mystery Developements was my favorite part of Steven Universe. That build-up, theorizing, and finally REVELATION catapulted it to tie with Teen Titans for me. The incredible PAYOFF. I know what THEY did. I just... don’t, really really DON’T, know how to use such brilliant, subtle gestures to foreshadow and hint at my own stories....

...but, coming to think of it, another huge gap (besides Storytelling Format) exists between mine and theirs: Steven Universe focuses on a magical family viewing mundane emotional humanity through the lens of fantasy. Their lore-dropping is few and far between, because that’s not the focus.

Oh, my stories very much ARE focused on the lore. You can’t really be subtle about The Actual Point And Theme And Setting And Entirely-Relevant-to-Character-Developement Lore. At least not when it’s Literally The Cause, Journey, Hinderance, Help, and Solution in my characters’ lives.

I think I’ve gotten quite good at working the lore into the natural flow of the story~ Perhaps not as lengthily paced, but I like to think it’s as In-World-Naturally as SU typically managed. Casual fact-drops. Settings. Background info that’s not the main focus of the scene. Integrating the lore-drop in with the innate mindset, history, and relationships of the characters.

I mean, frick guys, if it wasn’t for Azarath and Trigon and Azar’s Crystals and the Fauni separation and Dove having great power inside her, and Raven having mastered such power, and mindscapes manifested, and metahuman shennigans... I wouldn’t have any stories to write, guys. These things are SO integral and important to my stories! (Mundane drama human stuff? It’s cute in SU, but I, personally, do not enjoy dedicating hours to capturing that in a story. I don’t, personally, want to explore people and leave out the Wild Fun Mind-Bending and Stimulating Soulful Magic Stuff. The stuff I’m passionate about exploring! The stuff that’s not just rewarding in the end, but ALSO fun and exciting to GET through, UNTIL the personal developement is proven!)

The perspective of my stories is an unwilling mage going through things both fantastical and mundane to learn about herself, learn about the world, and most importantly, learn to have a PLACE in the world. Learning to accept her heritage. Learning to accept her limits with magic her mother treasured, so she treasured too. Learning how to control her own mind and heart and navigating a new reality, and a new morality, amidst it all.

The person is absolutely a Top Tier Important element in my storytelling. Dove’s growth and developement is the reason I love her as my protagonist. But I can’t write her story without the magic stuff.

My stories are narrated with far more focus on the wild stuff than SU’s crew chose for their story.

But I like my humans meta and their problems magical honestly, I think it’s just a lot more fun. ;P (Definitely written with equal doses of Heart. But magic is a lot more insistent in Dove’s life, and a lot less of The Internal Struggle, really... mostly just a side-effect.)

...gosh, this got rambly.

But I guess my point is, because it’ll be fun to figure out how to Artfully Foreshadow Shit, I’m definitely going to try.

[sanguinarysanguinity]

rabbit & like a bat family, for the ask meme, whichever questions you feel comfortable answering

(Questions)

Like a Bat-Family

(Elementary; Martha & Kitty & Joan & Sherlock; part of Rolling Remix)

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

I received my copy of “Like Family” for remixing and groused and whined and cursed its author, because like hell did I see a way into it. The obvious thing would have been to flip the pov to Kitty, but “Like Family” might already have been a pov-flip from whatever came before it and I didn’t want to risk just flipping it back again.

I finally decided on a slumber-party-like variation of the mutual nail-painting, probably featuring Martha. Then once I had Martha and Kitty in the same mental premise, I realized they had probably built some kind of relationship during their mutual time in the brownstone, and thus that Martha should be added to the list of people cheated of a proper good-bye with her. (And not just cheated of a good-bye, but of the entire history of their relationship!) So this became a reunion/closure story for not only Joan-and-Kitty, but also Martha-and-Kitty.

I set it during New Year’s at the brownstone mostly out of cussedness. I’d already remixed a story for the exchange, which meant I knew there was a cluster of NYE stories at the beginning of the chain. I thought it’d be hilarious to re-introduce the New Year’s theme at the tail end of the chain, too, in the hopes that it would mess up some of the guessers.

2: What scene did you first put down?

A scene that no longer exists: Joan on the roof New Year’s morning, ostensibly cleaning up after the party but mostly staring at the river, and being surprised by Kitty’s entrance. The energy was never quite right, somehow, and the whole story stalled there until I switched povs and began over with Martha. However, the scene still indirectly exists in the current version of the story, and the original image of Kitty appearing from nowhere like Batman was the genesis of the Bat-Family motif.

The only part of that now-deleted scene that I was really sad to lose was the color scheme:

[Joan stood at the roof edge, looking out at] the desaturated, wintry grays of the city, contemplating the rough slate of the East River and how it reflected back the platinum sky above.

Happily, I was able to salvage the bones of that description for Nostoi:

Beyond that streak of white, there was nothing but grey all around us: sky and rain and sea-water; iron and silver and slate.

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

Joan and Sherlock argued silently with each other, a flurry of mulish mouths, jutted jaws, and raised eyebrows.

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“Alfred,” she whispered, and all three of them cracked up into giggles.

5: What part was hardest to write?

Ugh, gah, cramming in the backstory and off-screen bits. Backstory and flashbacks are always a struggle to incorporate smoothly without overexplaining or messing up the narrative flow, and this story was written so quickly, with so little opportunity for editing… Meh.

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

My first and only story from the pov of a trans character? More unusually, I didn’t have the time to ask someone who is trans to look it over – that’s usually something that I take care to do when writing a marginalized identity outside of my own experience. But once again, the turn around time was so fast… I hope I did no harm, and I own it if I did.

9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?

I was going to bring back Joan’s accordion from the first two stories, which – when joined with Kitty’s clarinet and Sherlock’s violin – would be the foundations of a Klezmer band. (Martha would be on drums, because.) When I later saw that someone in the exchange had written a Band AU I kicked myself so hard that I hadn’t done it.

Rabbit

(TSCC; Jesse Flores; 5+1)

1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

The Terminator franchise centers itself so strongly on Southern California and the Connors, I craved to know what that franchise looks like if you don’t presuppose John Connor as the center of the universe. Further, I am fascinated with the way the timelines fold back on themselves in that franchise, the way Judgement Day is forever shifting, the way futures keep reaching back to rewrite the past-to-be based on whatever has been going on in the current timeline.

A 5+1 seemed a convenient way to explore what successive futures might look like when one is half a world away from the causes, experiencing only the after-effects; it also allowed me to build an argument that John Connor may not always be the single most important person in the future. That is, that there might be futures where other people become more strategically significant.

I also had the very misguided idea that a 5+1 would be a short, simple, and easy structure, and would get me out of having to build and plot a full-blown story. Ha fucking hah.

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

There are a ton of narrative lines I love, mostly in the final section. But have this one out of the fifth section:

Jesse stared at the farmboy, her gaze flicking to where the dolphins should have been on his chest. Jesus Fucking Christ. A whole crew of nubs. They were running a deathtrap.

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“You are not a god, Derek. You made choices, I made choices, John Connor made choices. We all made choices. Hell, there’s a twelve-year-old Jesse out there somewhere, making choices. Whether to swim at the leisure centre or swim at the beach. For all you know, the war hinges on the choice she made today.”

Tied with:

“What do you want me to say, that it could have been anyone? That the only reason Skynet went after you—the only reason your family died—is because Goodnow tells a good story and Skynet fell for it?”

Because I have opinions about the Terminator franchise, and how everyone is running around making choices based on stories they were told. Skynet, the Connors, everyone from the future who gets their hands on a time machine, everyone they meet in the past: everyone has heard a story, and now they’re all making choices, and the entire future history of the world is gonna hinge on those choices. Talk about a universe that runs on fucking hearsay and gossip.

But mostly my favorite line is this:

“I’m Jesse!” she screamed at it, to make herself breathe. “I’m Jesse fucking Flores!”

Because Jesse fucking Flores. :-D

5: What part was hardest to write?

All the Australia bits. :-P

@lastwingedthing put in a good chunk of work on this story, correcting language and helping me with geographically appropriate choices for stuff. (That olive tree in the first section began life as a prickly pear, which is invasive in Australia – I wanted an invasive plant for thematic reasons – but it’s invasive in a different part of Australia.) However, the challenge with writing something that will later be Ozpicked (or Britpicked, or whatever) is that it’s not enough to eschew Americanisms in your draft, you have to put in geographically specific stuff, too, otherwise you’ll end up with a bland and non-specific story. And while a generous Ozpicker can and will help with that, you can’t expect them to do the bulk of that work for you.

For an example of what I’m talking about, consider my own The Case of the Six Marmalades against @scfrankles’ The Case of the Deceased Marmalade Thief: they’re nicely matched in terms of fandom, genre, and topic, and I consider Frankles a peer in terms of our respective skill. But notice that Frankles’ use of idiom in her dialog is much, much richer than my own (in part because she really is just that good with voices), but also in part because she’s English, and has a much larger mental catalog of appropriate idiom to select from. In contrast, I’m forever rejecting language as “too American” and then finding I have nothing interesting to replace it with. Consequently, my dialog has a linguistic blandness to it that hers doesn’t. This is the kind of thing I see a lot with American vs. British authors in British fandoms: the British authors have a vibrancy to them that American authors seldom manage to attain.

And this isn’t to run myself down, or to suggest that Six Marmalades is a failure of a story. (It’s not.) It’s simply an illustration of how it is with stories written by outsiders: even if they manage to eschew errors and stereotypes, they often end up with a generic, non-specific blandness that’s difficult to overcome. *shrug emoji* Either you never write outside your own specific cultural context, or you accept that you won’t manage the vibrancy that your story deserves. Choose your poison.

Anyway, back to Rabbit: I had to come up with Australia-specific stuff to put in, but I was starting from near zero. I watched all the Australian post-apoc films I could stomach; I played Australian talk and comedy shows in the background while I did chores; I listened to a series of Australian podcasts for English-language-learners during my commutes; I spent a fuckton of time browsing anAustralian slang dictionary (where I learned more usage via the crowdsourced definitions than in the nominal terms being defined)… Just, trying to pick up idioms and usage and rhythms and words, both to reduce the load on my very generous Ozpicker, but also trying to make sure that when she was done removing my Americanisms, my language didn’t end up blandly generic nowhere. (If nothing else, I could give her possibly-wrong Australian slang that she could correct to something more appropriate, yeah? And she did a bit of that: “yobbos” became “sad bastards,” for example.) So the language was a fair amount of up front work, even with her polishing and fine-tuning it for me.

And getting the Australian bits right was more than just language, of course; there was the usual ton of googling random shit. Who runs public swimming pools, the history and composition of the Australian submarine service, what plants are invasive, imports/exports from Perth… Again, she corrected and fine-tuned a bunch of stuff (and sometimes pointed out issues that I hadn’t thought to question), but there was still a chunk of work involved in giving her something that could be corrected and fine-tuned.

I wanted to set Rabbit in Australia, a place that is distinct from America, and that ultimately was the hardest part of writing the story.

6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

At the time, it was my only fic set in Australia, my only go at action/suspense, my only 5+1, my only “heroine against the world, framedaround a strong central metaphor, ending when the showdown begins in earnest” kind of story structure. I’ve since repeated all of those things, because I wrote this a long time ago, and I’m as repetitive as fuck.

As to what makes it still unique among my stories…

Um…

It’s the only one with submarines in?

8: Did any real people or events inspire any part of it?

I grew up in a Navy town, outside a nuclear submarine base, and one of the members in my origfic writing group served on a submarine, back in the day. So all the submarine stuff is strongly influenced by my hometown, the kids whose parents were in the Navy, my own dad who worked for the Navy, my schoolmates who went into the Navy themselves, the submariner who I dated when I was faaaaar too young for him (and the shit my dad pulled to scare him off), the tours I’ve taken on out-of-service submarines, the time I’ve spent fucking around in boats while sharing the same waters as submarines, plus all the time I’ve spent editing my friend’s submarine novels based on his own service.

None of which is actually the same as actually serving on a submarine myself, of course, but there are a number of submarine details that were inspired by spending a chunk of my life submarine-adjacent.

(Navy showers! My father enforced Navy showers on us when we were kids. Although not the same way that they’re enforced in the actual Navy, because that would have been child abuse. But you know. You run across random shit in your life, and it eventually ends up in a fic.)

[aion-rsa]

The Tenth Girl Exclusive Trailer Reveal & Author Interview

https://ift.tt/2Zv6bD8

Get a sneak peek at The Tenth Girl, a gothic psychological horror debut teeming with originality.

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Out on September 24th, The Tenth Girl is the perfect read for the fall season and beyond. The story follows Mavi, an Argentine teen who flees 1970s Buenos Aires and the military regime that took her mother for a remote girls boarding school located on a remote cliff in Patagonia, at the very southern tip of South America where she has been hired to teach English to the school's elite pupils.

Spooky context? Vaccaro School is haunted, supposedly cursed by the indigenous people whose land the European colonizers stole and built the school on. When Mavi realizes one of her students, the tenth girl, is missing, and students and staff begin to behave like they are possessed, Mavi must solve the mystery of what's happening at Vaccaro before it is too late.

The Tenth Girl is one part Jane Eyre, one part The Haunting of Hill House, and all parts original, with a twist that you will not see coming. It is deeply inspired by Gothic horror fiction that has come before and by debut author Sara Faring's own family history, but is something entirely new. We are so pleased to be able to debut exclusively the trailer for The Tenth Girl, which hopefully gives you an idea of just how perfect this book is for the upcoming Halloween season...

Den of Geek also had the chance to talk to Faring about creating this vivid, immersive, and utterly original world for The Tenth Girl. Here's what she told us...

There are so many vividly-realized elements to this book. I'm curious if there was a very clear place where it started, for example a character, setting, or idea?

You know, actually I, this book sort of came to me when I was on a trip with all of the female relatives in my family on the Argentine side. We went to Paris of all places to celebrate my grandmother's 85th birthday. One of my cousins is a psychotherapist, which is, in Argentina it's the country with the most psychotherapists per capita. Anyway, fun fact!

And so, one night, she led us in this hypnotherapy group session, which sounds so strange and it was, kind of. It felt like a seance. And we started to share stories from our families' spoken history, I guess you'd say. And I started to hear about the stories I'd never heard from Argentina in the 70s and the era of the military regime there. And, after that, I became obsessed with learning everything I could about this time period, about my family's experience in Argentina for the past century or so. And this book blossomed out of that.

How long ago was that?

It was five years ago because this October we're celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday.

Oh, that's so cool.

She's one of those people who, even though she's turning 90, will dance until 6:00 am and get angry at anyone who doesn't. 

Wow. She sounds amazing.

Yeah, she's pretty incredible.

So besides that, I did have an idea of the twists in my head when I started writing. So I wanted to explore what it meant to be human, which sounds really over the top, but the reason I love speculative books is because I love books that help me view life with a fresh astonishment, you know? That will make me re-examine the human experience with mind-bending thoughts. I think writing is a great way for me to honor my family history in Argentina and also explore these themes that I love reading about and watching [in TV shows].

This is a YA book, but I feel like it is on the cusp of it being an adult book. I'm curious why you wanted to make it a YA book or where that decision came from.

Yeah, no, good question. I do think that when I was writing this book, I gave some thought to why I wanted to write in general and, when I was younger, books just, they, it sounds cheesy and it is, but they completely changed my life. They were my best friends. They were a way for me to explore my place in the world, to learn, to discover new corners inside myself.

So I knew that I wanted to have a younger protagonist, a teenage protagonist who was coming to terms with who she was and what it meant to be an independent person now that she's no longer with her mother and is kind of going off into the world on her own. That's always just been a really compelling stage for me and I'm sure as I get older that'll change.

But I love exploring that, the mindset of someone who is 17, 18 and I loved reading about that when I was even younger than 17, 18. I think, even when I was like 14, I loved reading about protagonists who were kind of on that cusp, you know, that stage of their life. For me, books made me feel like I wasn't alone when I was teenager. And I just knew I wanted to write for people that age.

And I do think you're right, this book hopefully will appeal to younger people and older people, but I couldn't be happier that it's coming out as a young adult book for many reasons. I'm sure you also know just how passionate and engaged YA readers are which is just unbelievable. I mean it's extraordinary. Yesterday, a blogger posted a photo of how she'd painted my cover on her leg. It was beautiful. It was more beautiful than my cover. 

You have two main perspective characters in this book and I'm curious if one of them came first and why you felt it was important to have both Mavi and Angel's points of view and telling this story?

Yeah, so I would say I knew I always needed to have both because, frankly, when I read books, I love for there to be reveals happening throughout. I love to feel like I'm being led into some secret, and I wanted there to be this tension between the two points of view and the information we're getting from each side. And I also just always thought it would be a lot of fun to see Vaccaro School from both perspectives: the perspective of a teacher who's brand new and views it as one thing and the perspective of a... I don't even know how to speak about Angel in an interview. It gets juicy really fast. From the perspective of someone who is working through pain with humor and is using the house in a very different way, I would say.

And it, to be honest, it was also really fun to write a book in two very different voices. And I know I always wanted Mavi's to feel like a nod to the traditional Gothic works of fiction and then we could have Angel's voice—which would be completely disorienting—have these bits of dark humor and pop culture references and feel sometimes goofy and bizarre.

For me, when you're exploring dark themes, it is just such a breath of fresh air to have injections of humor throughout. So, yeah, they both came about at the same time. I did rewrite Angel's part many times because I wanted to get the tone right because it was easy to fall into a sort of melancholy spiral, if you will, [with that character].

Well you did such a good job distinguishing their voices. I definitely got the Gothic themes from Mavi. From the very beginning, I was like, 'This reminds me of Jane Eyre and other classics,' and then to also have Angel just like dropping like Harry Potter references... They felt very distinct and that is so important I think especially when you see the same events more than once from different perspectives. It can be very hard to do in a way that doesn't feel redundant, but you do a really good job of making that interesting.

Oh my gosh, I am so delighted to hear that, I'm so thrilled. Yeah. I ... because that's something I kind of privately nerd out over, you know, the multi-perspective. But you're right, it can, it can drag, so, you never know.

Obviously, this book was so inspired by your mother's side of the family and you've mentioned also that your grandmother is still alive and very engaged with things. I'm curious if they've had a chance to read the book and also if they gave you specific like feedback or details on, you know, the 1970s Argentinian setting because  they were there so that's obviously a great resource.

No, it's funny you say that because, so almost all of them read an early draft and I was getting feedback from my grandmother and from my mother saying, 'Oh, you know, actually like this one sensory detail of this one story you inserted, that to anyone else would have been like...' OK, we don't need to get in the weeds on that. They were like, no, this is wrong. Like the pavement smelled like this...

Anyway, so I received a lot of that or like the detail of... there's a story in the book, an anecdote about a young man who has a molar filled with poison that he bites down on and that's a real story of a family friend. So I wanted to make sure that, even though the context is fictional, it honored their memory of the situation.

And, beyond that, I'm very proud to report that... Even though, especially with the twist, it was not necessarily all of my family members ideal genre if that makes sense—not that I like to ascribe genre labels to anything, but I think with the twist, you know, you, it definitely appeals to a certain kind of reader and may be slightly jarring, hopefully in an interesting way to another type of reader—they loved it.

But they also saw how much I layered in from all of our lives. It's actually kind of funny when family members read books. I did get a few reactions where they're like, 'Oh, you're just this character, right?' And I'm like, no, that's not how it works.

So you do such a wonderful job constructing the setting of the school. And I'm curious if there were either real world buildings and or fictional buildings that served as inspiration for the school?

There is a building in Buenos Aires, in Recoleta, which is like this posh neighborhood, and it is an abandoned mansion. It's just... it's ridiculous. This building is amazing and there's just nothing being done with it and it's falling into disrepair and it's totally derelict. And it's on a really busy, posh street. So that did inspire some of the aesthetic.

But I just love building Gothic atmosphere. It's one of my favorite things in anything I write: the gloomy, the spooky, the grand, the forgotten, the abandoned. I love that. So that was always sort of simmering in my brain and my imagination for years. But, in Patagonia, I'll be honest, I haven't found a building like Vaccaro School.

Yet.

Yet. Yeah, I went last October again, looked for one, couldn't find one, but I'm going to try again. I'm going to try again this year, so...

And you'll have lots of readers to help out soon.

Yeah, I hope so. Right? I've already gotten some cool photos that people have sent me. Like, 'Oh, is this like Vaccaro School in this country?' Including a cliff mansion in Slovenia, which was pretty amazing.

Do you think about how readers in Argentina will respond to this book perhaps differently from readers in other places who don't know as much about the setting and the time period? 

Well, I didn't grow up in Argentina. I went very often, my family, you know, half my family lives there. But, while I was writing this, I was very aware of the fact that not only did I not grow up there, but I didn't live through this time period. So I'm relying on my family members' very specific perspective on it. And I tried to deepen that and also to explore other perspectives on it by interviewing other people down there, doing a lot of research.

But, ultimately, I wasn't looking to obviously create any kind of, I'm not going to say exhaustive, but any detailed reflection of what that time period was like. I really just wanted to draw, especially for young adults, younger American audiences' attention to this period of time there, especially because with so much going on now, we can forget history, especially outside of the States. And there are many interesting parallels, at least to me, in what's happened in Argentina and other parts of the world and what's happening right now.

Without going further down that path, I just really wanted to draw attention to this time period, which even as someone growing up in California with Argentine parents and family, I knew not enough about. And it's been really exciting for me to see this book go out into the world and also to see other books of friends, especially other Latinx authors, who are putting out books about periods of history in their countries and their family's country that younger readers don't necessarily know that much about.

So I think it's a good way to, through an ideally compulsively-readable plot and characters you're invested in, pique interest in a time period that's not touched on very much in curriculums.

Yeah, well I definitely learned a lot and had a lot of fun, like stopping and Googling things to learn more about them.

Yay! Oh my gosh.

Yeah. So it's definitely not just a young person thing, obviously.

We've alluded to the big twist in this book, but there's a certain degree of mystery throughout. How did you decide on the pacing for when you would reveal certain things, especially the big plot twist?

Yes. Well, for me, it came down to rhythm and while, at first, I tried to use a more traditional structure, like a three-act structure. I tried at first to kind of loosely follow those kinds of structures, but I realized I had so much information and so many twists to handle because that's just how I like to read. So I wanted to write something that followed the same constant reveal structure. I went by rhythm, just intuitively.

Obviously, with a book of this length [editor's note: the book is 464 pages], you want to have enough [to keep people reading]. I think, even within the book, there are different kinds of twists and different kinds of reveals. So I had to be aware of the fact that what a kind of twist that was compelling for one reader, it might not for another and kind of lay them out so that there would be enough for each kind of reader. Because when you have something that, in my mind, does genre bend, you want to make sure that there's enough to appeal to different kinds of readers.

Yeah, definitely. And I think you're right with the length. I think you have to get a little bit more creative in terms of structure or like at least not following that traditional three act structure, which people like, you know, use and don't use in different ways.

Yeah. And it's almost fun to know how the structure works and then tried to subvert it. But it's funny because people, readers grow to expect those beats sometimes. And, yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about because, for the most part, I'm writing just what I enjoy to write, which was a privilege to do and have it still sell, but I feel like, on some level, it's also interesting to be conscious of reader expectations when it comes to hitting beats when readers expect them. It's something I'm still thinking about. I do it in my second book. 

And I think you're right about, you know, reader expectation. I think story consumers today are more literate than ever in storytelling. So that is something to think about, definitely.

Also, I've been interested recently in how, as TV becomes, I mean I guess it's cheesy, but like golden age of TV and as people are watching such incredible television, which has a very different structure in my mind over the course of a season to films or to books, how you can kind of use that as an author. And, sometimes, I feel like I'm writing books more as someone who loves TV than someone who loves movies, if that makes sense?

Yeah. I think I read books like that so I totally understand. Because I also think that this golden age of television is marked by a break in structure and a creativity in structure. So that is a cool inspiration to take from that medium and bring into another.

Yeah, I think that some of the books I'm most excited about now do that as well. So yeah, I think we're on the cusp of something special or maybe we're well in it and I'm just not, you know, well read.

Yeah. It's hard to tell from the inside.

Yeah, exactly.

This book is such a good fall release. And was that like a discussion with your publisher and figuring out when the best release date would be for The Tenth Girl?

Yeah, it's funny because my editor knew immediately. Let me figure out when we like had our handshake deal... it was two years ago, basically. So she knew this was going to be the season, this is going to be the year. She immediately thought like the atmosphere is just the perfect thing for someone to curl up with on a stormy fall night. And I'm inclined to agree.

It's funny because the advance copies of this book had been going out over the summer and occasionally people will ask, 'Oh, you know, I received it. Should I read it on my beach vacation?' I'm like, 'Absolutely! Read it whenever you can.' But is it more fun to read on a stormy night? Yes. But, hopefully—I don't know where you're based—but, when it's a day like today, and it is so hot that you wish you could peel off your skin, it might be nice to retreat into a book where there's fog and storms and chills in the air.

I always like to ask people what stories they're really into right now, whether it's a book, a TV show, a movie, a comic book, whatever. What stories are you excited about as a fan?

I just blew through Euphoria on HBO. Which was really interesting to me and I'm still kind of working out my feelings about it, but I thought it was really kind of spectacular.

I haven't watched it yet, but it's definitely on my list.

It's, I'd be so curious. I'm curious to hear everyone's reaction to it, because. Let's see what else. Yeah, the structure is interesting how at the beginning of each episode it kind of gives you a little short and sweet or not sweet, I should say, but backstory on each of the characters you've been following and then it goes back into the kind of main narrative, which is interesting.

Besides that, I'm reading this book called The Need by Helen Philips. It's very difficult to describe. Basically it opens on this, on this mother who, I don't know if that's a spoiler or not, on this mother who like sees an intruder in her house and the intruder ends up being her. But from a different universe, kind of. And then at the same time, she's a paleobotanist. And she finds a Bible with she as the God pronoun, yeah. Anyway. Clearly it's almost impossible to describe, but it's very bizarre and unsettling and different and we'll see where it goes. 

And then beside that a book I love, which you might've had on your list, but I don't know, is The Grief Keeper by Alexandra Villasante. It's A YA book, basically about if human beings can physically take on another's grief, it's so much more than that. That's just like the speculative hook, I guess. And it packs a punch.

Yeah. That's pretty much what I have going. Besides that, I watch a disgusting amount of reality TV right now because I'm trying to get my brain off of everything.

Yeah, I do that too. I'm just like, I can't write about this for work, so I'm just going to watch this thing.

Exactly.

Well thank you so much for chatting with me today. This was so much fun.

Thank you. This was such a treat. 

The Tenth Girl will be published on September 24th and is now available to pre-order via Macmillan. You can follow Sara Faring on Instagram and Twitter.

Kayti Burt is a staff editor covering books, TV, movies, and fan culture at Den of Geek. Read more of her work here or follow her on Twitter @kaytiburt.

Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Interview Kayti Burt

Aug 26, 2019

Horror

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