AMA Time!

Hi all!

First off: THANK YOU so much to everyone who has picked up GRAND THEFT SORCERY! And a double thank you to everyone who wrote a review! Even one or two sentences is a huge help to the book.

This month's spoiler/preview tier post is an AMA with questions sourced earlier in October. I'm opening this one to all tiers as a thank you for all the support, particularly with the release of GTS. I didn't expect so many questions when I proposed an AMA, but I'm happy to have gotten them! I think I hit everything that was asked.

As a minor, don't-know-if-it's-a-bonus thing: one of these questions asked about my alt Literotica account that spawned Great Power and No Responsibilities. I haven't posted anything there in a few years, but I have a couple of small series posts in the sci-fi/fantasy section. With GTS done, I took a couple days off to finish some drafts on one of those stories just for fun (and also to hopefully point readers to the books). Divine Job Benefits has a new chapter up today and another one should drop tomorrow, maybe?

It's not up to the polish or ambition of my novels or my stories here for the Patreon. My Lit stories only have enough plot to support the smutty fantasy premise, and that's kind of the point. It's meant to be low-effort fun. I've had comments say they feel like those stories are comfort reads (the trashy kind, obvs), which is really validating because that's all I'm reaching for. If you're up for that, you can hunt down wastelandwriter on Literotica (no, I'm not gonna link)... and don't judge me. :)

Anyway, on to the AMA! These questions are only slightly edited for clarity and simplicity. I may have gotten a little chatty with the responses. The new Dragon Age dropped yesterday so my wife had dibs on the PlayStation all day. :)

Starting off with a banger:

Did Amber being fired come from the same feelings that led you to have Kasumi quit the police in the initial writing of Alien vacation? I remember when you posted that chapter the first time, she quit due to things that has happened in the real world.

So I’ve always had a critical eye toward police in America. I think it’s there in my earlier work. I’m not really a fan of “ACAB,” because I think it’s too simple and reductive, but I get where it comes from. It’s not ABOUT individuals; it’s about the system and culture. The longer I looked at both the system and my fictional world(s), I felt like those characters being in law enforcement was a problem.

Even if you make clear in your fiction that the system is problematic but these specific characters run against a messy culture, you’re still kind of perpetuating the One Good Cop myth. When most cops in media are the One Good Cop, it’s still kind of propaganda. I don’t know how to untangle that, and I don’t want it to be my focus.

This became even more of an issue for me as the Good Intentions world grew. Amber is connected to too many people with super good reasons not to trust the establishment, both from real world history and the fiction of my setting. It just didn’t work, and it didn’t seem right for her anymore. Sure, Amber knows right from wrong, but she’s endlessly compromised by a system that subordinates her (and all the secrets she learns) to leaders who don’t share her priorities. I thought it was time to confront that.

As a note about Kasumi in GPNR, here’s the wild thing about memory: I remember deciding to have Kasumi leave the force when I first started writing her. The whole story was about saying “screw it” to your day job. I’m not saying you remember it wrong (hell, you’re probably right), but wow. Memory is wild.

How much fun do you have with the warning pages of your books?

An average of 2.2 megawatts. It’s one of the best parts of writing the books… probably because I do it at the end, so it means I’m almost finished. :)

How different does each protagonist of a series feel to you, from smut books like Alex in GI and recently Kyle in Great Power and No Responsibilities to Tanner for example. Do you try and keep certain personality traits across characters, or do you actively differentiate?

The short answer is that I don’t try deliberately for similarities or differences, but when I see them becoming too similar, I try to pay some attention to that and adjust. I don’t want everyone reading the same protagonist over and over.

They’re all pretty different in my head, though I could understand a reader seeing them as super similar. I’ve got some obvious patterns. My POV protagonists are mostly straight white guys, because that’s my identity. There’s a lot of debate about writing outside your experience vs staying in your lane. Nobody has all the answers to that. I tend to write in the college age range, because I like to write characters starting out. It’s a “level one” thing, so to speak. Obviously I have exceptions to all that.

There are also common threads to make them sympathetic to me: feminism, humility, critical thinking, communication, etc. I also have some "don'ts," like how I cannot take the "alpha male" thing seriously. The biggets common thread for me is that most of my central protagonists are people whose first dreams didn’t work out. That’s true for nearly all of them. The only exception I can think of right now is Lynette from PMF. She followed the career path she set out all along, but even that had a lot of bumps and turns along the way. We meet most of my protagonists at rock bottom.

I think they differ in circumstance and through experience, though, and that dictates big differences in personality and choices. Alex has a generally good life and a strong support structure. Tanner is holding together by magnetic tape and spite. Evan has been deep in survival mode since forever, and even when things turn good, he’ll still be there for a while.

The GI series takes place during one year. Is there a particular reason you decided to do that? Have you run into any difficulties (dated references, character aging, etc)?

Good Intentions takes Alex through a bunch of revelations and changes, from existential stuff to his romantic and sex life. I didn’t set out to keep the books all in one year, but I also didn’t want to hit fast-forward on who he’ll be with all those changes. I feel it’s important to watch those changes happen. Also, on a simpler note, I wanted to at least engage in each season.

The difficulties are there as things get dated. (Wade in Afghanistan, the chicken pox story from book one, some political references.) But none of it has felt like a BIG problem yet, and I think readers are generally okay with the series taking place in a slightly nebulous “Now-ish.” People can speak up on that if they want. :)

A bigger time skip may happen someday, but the next book is set in the summer following Past Due.

Have you considered going the traditional publishing route with a future book/series?

If trad publishing knocked on my door, I would hear them out, but I’m not making any effort on my end. Trad pub only seems helpful to me if the publisher is gonna make a real effort on your behalf; most trad authors don't really get the support they should. In staying indie, though I wish “going wide” was more viable for me than being exclusive with Amazon, but I think I’d lose half or more of my audience if I made such a switch.

In terms of your literotica work, I really enjoyed “Divine Job Benefits.” you mentioned when GPNO came out that you were hoping to continue the story, is that still the case?

I want to continue almost everything I’ve written. :) This is mostly addressed at the top before the questions. I’ve been chipping away a couple DJB chapters for a very long time and figured I’d just take a couple days to push through and give that Lit account a boost of visibility.

I don't see any of the stuff on Lit becoming novels, though. They just aren't written with the kind of idea and plot to support that.

Who is your favorite Baldur’s Gate III companion?

Oh god, obviously Karlach. She’s amazing. Favorite by miles. I’ve tried replaying to see Shadowheart’s romance, too, but like… Karlach is RIGHT THERE.

I also absolutely adore Jaheira. Once she’s a companion option, she’s literally always in my group.

Are we going to meet any vampires that aren't complete tools / other long-lived entities?

While it’s a “never say never” sort of premise, signs point to no. :) We’re much more likely to see more sympathetic demons than vampires.

Will we be seeing Lorelei’s rival from book 1 again?  Her shackle is gone and she swiped a crown.  Will we be seeing more from Rachel’s loser ex who set up that shackle?

We’ll see both of them sooner or later! Vincent feels appropriate to the next book. Lydia could work, but I don’t want to rush her.

When writing love scenes or editing them, do you deliberately exclude certain terms or imagery? Do you have a level of explicitness that you don't exceed?

I’m not interested in writing degradation or humiliation. (I think a lot of people who dislike Lorelei hooking up with other guys infer that, no matter what happens or is said on the page.) The line between “explicit” and “too explicit/too much” for my books is fuzzy, but I can identify some points—like, details about body fluids, I guess. I write a little pornier on Literotica, because I feel like that’s the expectation on the platform and for the audience, but it’s probably not a huge difference.

None of that is a value judgment or a marketing thing, or any censorship rules on Amazon. It’s just personal taste.

I also don’t write any sexual scenes for characters under the age of 18. Yes, minors engage in sex and that’s not weird or shameful. It’s a fact of life. But I feel like it’s a thing that should be presented seriously and not for leering and thrills. Plus I don’t write minors in general.

Will Butler have to face the friend group he fears?

Maybe! I feel like he’s Evan & Sunday’s problem, though.

Will we see Wade’s old unit again?

Also a maybe, but I have no current plans.

Will we see more of Alex’s past lives?  Anything about what happened to Siobhan, for instance

We might not get into more/deeper flashbacks of the lives we’ve seen, but we’ll probably see more past lives.

Does Rachel have a stance on gods?

Yes, and she doesn’t want to talk about it.

For Tanner, will we be seeing more of the species Tanner helped save and establish contact with?  Will the kids on his floor be a part of any of his bigger adventures?

Yes to both, which is currently my vague plans for his next book. I’m not entirely sure how I make both of those things work together while feeling natural, but I’m working on it. Next book will probably lean much harder on the dorm goblins as a supporting cast than all the faces from the Navy & Lynette’s crew.

Any plans for definitively exterminating the Queen of Mean?

Who, Amara? Why would you want that? She’s so friendly and reasonable!

The trick here is that I think that by now Amara has learned not to put herself in the line of fire.

Any plans to show us more of the Hard Restart universe?  Is there more fully aware artificial life somewhere?  Will the crew of the special ship have the chance to Lone Ranger or Robin Hood through the galaxy?

I really want to write more with Hot Restart! Unfortunately, I feel like the last few years have shown that many of my readers only want me to continue my main series (PMF and GI) and aren’t interested in other things. That means branching out more has to be carefully timed.

I don’t know about more-developed AI, but yes, the crew has more adventures ahead.

Life in Shadows has an audiobook. Any chance of your other collected shorts (Small Victories or Habitual Heroes) getting the audio treatment?

Oh man, I hope/wish. Audible has officially passed on the collections. Smaller publishers haven’t responded. I hope to get Tess to record them someday, but I’ll need to fund that myself. IDK if my readership is interested enough to crowdfund it. (Thoughts, people? Anyone immediately want to jump on that?)

Tanner's pissed off a lot of rich and powerful people.  But now you would think that he has a lot of rich and powerful people in his corner who didn't know much about him and his circumstances but are now likely motivated to find out.  Is that going to play out in future stories?

I don’t think he really does have many rich & powerful in his corner. Prince Khalil of Hashem is on his side, but he’s got his own problems. I think the vast majority of the rich & wealthy barely think about Tanner at all. At best, a few might go so far as to throw him a random comment of appreciation. Tanner clearly has no respect for anyone’s investments or profits or shareholders. Rich people with any real feelings about him probably wish he’d go away.

Do you use a writing program to organize your work, or just a word processor?

Plain old vanilla Word works for me, at whichever iteration is current. The Notes app on my phone gets a lot of use when I have ideas away from my desk. I use Vellum to put together my ebook and paperback files, which means I’m on a Mac. But that’s about it. I tend to write each chapter as its own document and then I start compiling them into a single document once I feel the need to see some progress.

There was a controversy some years ago about Good Intentions not being a harem novel and not being beholden to the norms of that genre, but Hard Reset and especially Great Power and No Responsibility resemble the genre even more than GI. Is that intentional?

Not exactly. With HR in particular, I feel like we see more of Selene’s interest & activity with other men than we get of Lorelei (at least, book for book). HR shows how Selene compartmentalizes and how there are different points of emotional engagement. GPNR dials back on the “other guys” factor (which was brief but explicit on the Literotica original) both because I felt like it wasn’t necessary and, yes, I didn’t really want to fuss with reader reaction over it. But I also felt like even there, I signaled that nobody was expected to be strictly exclusive in general or on principle.

I don’t have a problem with harem (or reverse harem) as long as there’s a real measure of respect and equality going on. Establishing a strict rule of “one person can do anyone they want, everyone else has restrictions” doesn’t seem to fit that for me. (I might write a reverse-harem-ish someday, too. I’ve scratched at this with a couple shorter stories and I think it’s fine, just not where my POV protagonist thoughts usually go.)

Between Good Intentions, Days of High Adventure, and Grand Theft Sorcery, you're starting to build out your own little universe. Do you expect to loop GPNR into this universe, too? Any plans to add more titles?

More titles, possibly, but I’m busy enough right now with GI and whenever I can do a GTS sequel. (I still have no inspiration for a return to Days, sorry.) I don’t plan to loop GPNR into it, though. That one feels like its own little world and tone. Plus, I’m not ready to confront the tangle of space aliens and magic and divine/demonic worldbuilding. :)

The Poor Man's Fight series is one I've been able to spread to lots of people, men and women. It's probably your most widely appealing work (not that I don't love everything). Have you considered putting more of a push to advertise it? Perhaps with an omnibus? And can we expect more spin-off novels starring other characters like No Medals For Secrets?

Thank you! An omnibus isn’t likely, because Amazon Publishing long ago bought books 1 and 2 for their in-house imprints, and then passed on book 3 so I returned to self-pub. That makes any kind of package effort like discounts tricky, too. Advertising has never been my strong suit, but if I saw a good plan, I might try it.

As for spin-offs... maybe? I feel like Lynette & her crew deserve their own book. Just a question of when I could write it. Again, I think I need to concentrate on main series lines for a bit.

Any thoughts about branching out into more sci-fi genres? I've been knee-deep in cyberpunk lately and I think you could have a lot of fun there.

Mmmmaybe? It’s possible. Something more mainstream high fantasy than Wandering Monsters is a much more likely genre turn for me.

Any thoughts on writing more books with female protagonists, or non-straight male protagonists?

Always possible. The high fantasy possibility mentioned above is probably a female protagonist. I have nothing particularly against writing a queer male protagonist, but it feels like the sort of thing I’d need a really strong idea & desire for if I’m gonna do it right. That hasn’t popped into my head, and I’m not gonna go that far out of my lane just to check a box or try a challenge. That’s how you get a bad book and do a disservice to people who actually live that POV.

How do you define "consensual sexual misconduct" from your warnings?

Sex in public/inappropriate places. Hookups in violation of an organizational flowchart. Dirty fingernails (assuming both parties are aware). 

What Bruce Lee number does Drew have?

Sorry, I don’t recognize the reference. Tried an online search, still not getting it.

Any particular favourite writers? And writers who have influenced you?

Important to note that I haven’t read anyone exhaustively:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide books by Douglas Adams are still some of my all-time favorites. I really love some books by Guy Gavriel Kay (no relation). I’m kind of in awe of G Willow Wilson for a whole bucket of aspects of her writing, both in prose and comics. Same goes for Ta-Nehisi Coates, for comics and nonfiction. Earlier this year I read Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree and Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher and they were both great.

I’ve said this before, but comics were a huge influence for me, particularly Larry Hama’s run on the GI Joe comics of the 1980s. (Night & day different from the cartoon most people know; I could rant about this.) Recently, I’ve seen a couple interviews he did about how he works as a comic writer and how that influenced the series, and like… I’m STUNNED at how similar his style & habits felt to mine. I kept blurting out loud, “I do that, too!”

(Fun fact: the entire reason Snake-Eyes wore all black & a mask was because painting his action figure monochrome made him 50% cheaper to produce. That's it. Just a toy production decision, so Hama came up with his whole story based on that.)

The cosmology of the Good intentions stories has expanded a lot since the first book. How do you go about this expansion and evolution?

Bit by bit, and as-needed. I talked about this privately with someone asking about world building. GI didn’t come fully-formed, and it’s still forming. When I come to a new element, or want to introduce one, I sit with it for a bit to work out how it fits in with the rest… and then I write it, and then I inevitably see other issues and revise it. At this point I’m convinced that most if not all complex plots and world-building comes out of revisions. I don’t think anyone gets it all down in the prewriting or the first draft without having to change stuff later.

Are we likely to see the characters from Grand Theft Sorcery in the Good Intentions books?

Anything’s possible, but I don’t have a vision for a direct meet-up. I think Evan & Sunday are living separate lives from Alex, Rachel, and Lorelei. They obviously have a bunch of crossover, but part of the idea there is just how events in one place ripple into another without direct interaction. That said, they have lots of crossover, so who knows?

This may be a silly question. Is Tanner a serial monogamist? That would make him unique among your protagonists.

Don’t hold me to it, but signs point to yes. Lynette and Tanner have very explicitly left the door open for each other, particularly because they’re long distance. She’s had a few dates, and Tanner has at least thought about it, but so far it hasn’t felt right for either of them. In part this is because yes, I want some differences among my protagonists and not everyone would or should be poly/open.

This is a little frustrating because I think Tanner would be perfect for a riff on a common romance novel archetype that I would LOVE to write, but that would mean either splitting him off from Lynette or making them poly… which, as you say, I already have in most books.

That said: Evan and Sunday are the monogamous type (maybe not strictly/religiously, but it’s their general mindset). I think all of the Wandering Monsters crew would tend toward monogamy, too, though there hasn’t been much romance there yet.

Whew! Long post! Let me know if you have follow-ups or commentary!

This month's story post for the Patron tier will be Chapter One of the next Good Intentions!