#in literature / YA / scifi / poetry etc.

[not-poignant]

hi Pia, hope you're having a beautiful day! can I ask how you got into writing? sorry if it's already been asked/answered, but did you start it as a hobby? when did you realise that was something you wanted to dedicate yourself to? did you get swept up in it or did you slowly reach the point where it was like 'huh, this is something that's happening'? Pia/Writing is my fave pairing, please tell us more

I mostly got into writing as a form of childhood escapism - and that started through ‘reading as a form of childhood escapism.’ :D

I had devoured most of the books in our primary school library early, which also left me out of stories until I discovered the public library, so making up stories, and writing them down, seemed a pretty natural step?

I flipped back and forth between wanting to be a writer, an artist, a scientist, etc. I didn’t pursue writing seriously at all though in highschool. I focused on art. In my spare time I sometimes wrote things. I don’t think I thought much of having a 60,000 word science fiction story by the age of about 13 (just as my Mum didn’t think much of throwing it away, which was the only copy I had, lol). I just liked to ramble a lot. As...everyone knows. e.e

I don’t think I really started to get serious about writing until university, where I started taking Creative Writing electives (and was publishing very tame Harry Potter fanfiction on the side, at sites like Schnoogle) at university, and then Scriptwriting electives when I seemed to do well at the Creative Writing stuff. Tbh even at university, I was more serious about poetry and scriptwriting, than I was about creative writing like short story or novels. I didn’t really think it was a future, like ‘oh that’s nice but no one makes any money off that unless you’re a complete outlier.’

Idk why I was being so judgemental given my main degree was Media Studies and Mass Communications and boyo let me tell you that there is SHIT money in that, unless you teach it or go work on a censorship board, lol. Wtf was I thinking, for reals.

Also my first writing group was me, a surfer dude who was unexpectedly ripped and really quite nice to look at, and an ultra-Christian Mormon, and another person who never turned up. We all rocked up at the Brass Monkey (a well-known pub in Northbridge, near our city), we got our respective drinks (back then I used to drink, and so I used to mainly drink Guinness) and nachos or chips, and then we kicked back and read the most pretentious poetry on the planet to each other.

It was kickass.

No, Elliott’s backstory in The Wind that Cuts the Night is not remotely autobiographical I have no idea where you got that idea...

And even then I still didn’t really pay much attention to it. I wrote a novel called Every Day Awake (which I need to edit but may actually publish one day, it’s a queer literature love story and one of the characters is demisexual before I knew that existed as a term, the other character was sex addicted, but my sad gay/bi boys got a happy ending) and I wrote one Misfits fanfic and one Mysterious Skin fanfic, and a bunch of really bad Glee fanfics... (*hangs head*) but I still didn’t really take it seriously until I got majorly burned out on my professional art career, quit unexpectedly, took two months off where I thought ‘my life is stupid what am I going to do,’ and then unexpectedly (really fucking unexpectedly) poured all of that bullshit into a fanfic called From the Darkness We Rise.

After that, I’ve been taking it really seriously. :D Though I didn’t start thinking ‘huh this is something that’s happening’ until people actually really seemed to like my writing, because that was weird. Game Theory was probably the first time I ever thought I could do something with my writing. Before that, I’d won a few short story / poetry awards, but a person cannot live off poetry and short story awards.

(Also, reading and writing are still my two favourite forms of escapism, lol).

[degenerate-perturbation]

this isn't on the list, but i need to know how you arrange your books.

Well get ready for almost certainly much more information about my organizational system than you wanted.

Clockwise, starting from the door: On the southern wall I have all my nonfiction arranged by approximate hardness of subject, so math->physics->chemistry->life sciences->neurology->psychology->sociology, then several shelves of history, followed by philosophy.

The next case contains all my texts on mythology and folklore, as well as a dedicated shelf for Arthurian literature and related analysis, with religion and poetry occupying the bottom two shelves. Next case contains literature, arranged chronologically and by original language.

The western wall contains the top register holds horror and fantasy, with more contemporary/urban fantasy being clustered further to the right and traditional high fantasy occupying the middle. 

The bottom register has: one shelf of classic and/or nostalgic to me personally children’s lit, and two cases of young adult and middle grade books (these are arranged on the shelves by genre: a shelf for historical fiction, fairy tale books, scifi, dystopia etc) 

The northern wall top register holds all my science fiction and alternate histories. These are a little harder to arrange because I got a ton of paperbacks from my grandpa but I’d eventually like to arrange them by era and original language. 

The bottom register is YA and middle grade books that are series, not standalones, with one case being reserved for the ones that I think are bad, one for the ones that I think are good, and one for mostly lighthearted middle grade books that I’m still fond of despite 

The northeastern corner has all my graphic novels, comics, magazines, humor titles, and lowbrow short story collections.

And the eastern wall has all the Russian-language books that have yet to be cataloged and arranged because I type very slowly in Cyrillic.

I also have books on travel, music, art, and language, but I consolidated those with my mom’s collections because it was easier to keep track of them that way.

[vampire-himbos-of-santa-perdita]

22-28 for the writer asks!

22.) Has your own writing ever made you cry?

Yes! So there’s a traumatizing death that happens either at the end of Undone Part 1/beginning of Part 2 that took me a good 3 months to recover from. I’m not looking forward to rewriting it, because it was literally a case of tearing it off like a bandaid, I dreaded it so much. I do have a very different relationship with the character now, so it may not have the same impact as it once did, but it’s an integral loss for the Marsette family and it really hurts them in very different, individual ways.

There’s also a reunion scene early on in Regardless that gets me every time, even though I know it won’t mean the same to readers who have only just met those characters...

23.) Are you proud or anxious to show off your writing?

Proud! Very proud! Considering I used to go out of my way to cover up my writing whenever I wrote in public, it took me a long time to get to a place where I was excited to share my work. I don’t even think I fully embraced it until Moonage received such an instantaneous and loyal following that it did. That’s when I realized I could share literally anything after that, and it feels good.

24.) When did you start considering yourself a writer?

I was 9 and I’d started dabbling in poetry, and my 4th grade teacher saw the potential in me and convinced me to enter an essay writing contest, which I won. I then woke up one day and decided to try my hand at writing a short story, which accidentally became a 75 page novella, like 3 months later! 

25.) What books are must-reads in your genre?

For books that really speak to key themes/style for my novels:

Time travel:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

A Wrinkle in Time

The Time Traveller’s Wife

Circus:

The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern)

Nights at the Circus (Angela Carter)

Gender fucks:

Orlando (Virginia Woolf)

The Passion of New Eve (Angela Carter)

The Passion (Jeanette Winterson)

Rogues and Thieves:

A Darker Shade of Magic (V.E. Schwab)

The Mime Order (Samantha Shannon)

Fingersmith (Sarah Waters)

Six of Crows (Leigh Bardugo)

Ethereal Magic:

Stardust (Neil Gaiman)

The Dream Thieves (Maggie Stiefvater)

Victorian Gothics:

Wuthering Heights

Dracula

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Frankenstein

26.) What would you like to see more of in your genre?

I want more totally wild, completely surreal mind fuck time travel, where writers take more risks with throwing space/time continuum rules out the window. I want time travel with real, intense consequences.

I want scary, campy supernatural horror. Where we bring back genuinely scary vampires and werewolves etc, with fresh new twists on terror. 

I want more gritty Victorian dramas, where we see the fucked up side of history, where people weren’t prim and proper and had to do horrible things just to survive. I really really want more gritty Victorian fantasy/scifi (even though I know it’s having a bit of a moment right now... but I want more!)

I want more female protagonists who are morally grey and just ready to fuck shit up. Girls who take on that bad boy persona instead of all the broody male love interests. These really flawed, unapologetically mean, angry girls. But also girls who support each other, and mothers who are gentle, and kind, and will give you what for when you do something stupid.

27.) Where do you get inspiration from?

Just reading a ton! I read so much classic literature, and YA scifi/fantasy. I unconsciously pull bits and pieces from every author I really connect with as a reader. But I also get about  85% of my motivation to write from readers, so the more they get excited about my characters, the more I get excited to write about them, and the cycle continues. Excited readers beget excited writers beget fully realized characters begets excited readers again! 

But I’ve always been really fascinated with darker concepts. I love when a story has really dark and twisted elements that surprise me. I wanna be able to replicate that. That’s why you will always find strong hints of Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare in all my writing. I’m just extremely excited by pieces of history that are just so morally grey, or corrupt. I was obsessed with Sweeney Todd as a teen and that got me into Victorian crime. Seeing that era’s seedy underbelly has always been so fascinating to me.

28.) On a scale of 1-10, how much do you stress about choosing character names?

Like a 2. At this point, they just name themselves, and I’m like “oh, that’s your name? I’ve never heard of that before! Cool! Welcome to the family! Here’s a cookie. Go hang out and wait for me to torture you later!” Naming characters is fun for me. It’s a joy to collaborate with them on things like that. It’s like that first glimpse of who they are as a person and it’s exciting every time they divulge that first crucial part of themselves.