GUTGAA Meet and Greet

Hello! I'm excited to be part of Deana's GUTGAA Blogfest for the second year. I'm excited to meet everyone and I look forward to having fun. So here are my answers to the meet and greet questions: 
 

-Where do you write? Primarily on my couch in the living room with my feet up on the coffee table. Sometimes the television is on, but I have been known to find the strength to take it off.

-Quick. Go to your writing space, sit down and look to your left. What is the first thing you see? My pretty living room curtains.

-Favorite time to write? When I first started writing books I only wrote at night because I felt it best suited the mood of my books (oh angsty, teenage me), which were dark and full of vampires and whatnot. Nowadays I can write at any time of day. As soon as I wake up, I can sit down and write all day. I also tend to write into the wee hours of the morning, which messes up my sleeping pattern, but the story has to be written right?

-Drink of choice while writing? Nothing really exciting here, I have a bottle of water with me all the time.

-When writing , do you listen to music or do you need complete silence? I don't usually listen to music, but I don't need complete silence either. I actually don't like complete silence in general, so if I haven't turned the T.V. off I'm usually writing to whatever it's showing.

-What was your inspiration for your latest manuscript and where did you find it? For my latest MS, Affairs of the Dead, I remember having a random thought about "helping the dead"; I thought about ghosts sticking around because they had unfinished business, and the main character being one of those whose job it was to help them. It wasn't until someone mentioned it that I realized the idea was similar to the T.V. show Ghost Whisperer, but what Affairs grew into made me feel secure about it standing apart since it encompasses a lot of other unique elements.

-What's your most valuable writing tip? Make sure your story has a solid structure. It's one thing to have a fabulous idea, but it won't work well if you don't have a strong plot to center it around. For example, if your MC is a cursed vampire who will die if she drinks blood, that's great, but what is the story that revolves around the cursed MC? I think if you can pinpoint the beginning, middle, and end of your novel, you'll be in a good place. After I finish a book I always like to sit back and see if I can identify the climax of my novel because it's usually the pivotal point where something major happens that drives the story to it's conclusion.


(Other than blogging here, I can be found on Twitter, and on my other blog Requiem Words)