Q. What’s your best advice to other writers for overcoming procrastination?
MJ. Know your tendencies, identify why you gravitate toward those things, be fully aware of what you are doing and when you are doing it, let yourself do these things for a set amount of time, and then push all that crap aside and simply let yourself write.
Personally, I need to procrastinate. It’s during those times when I’m scrubbing the toilet or baking a bunch of muffins that my mind does its best work regarding plotting and discovering things about my characters, their problems and the world they live in. If I don’t let myself get distracted by the mundane, I’m not productive 😉
Q. Where/when do you first discover your characters?
MJ. My characters are born from plot ideas. I say to myself, “Who might this happen to?” or “Who does the conflict revolve around?” and then my imagination takes flight. Unintentionally, each of my main characters is a reflection of some aspect of my life. It might be something I always wished I could be/do or it might be some unresolved aspect of my past (or present!) that seeps its way into the story to inform the core nature of these characters.
Q. What inspired your story/stories?
MJ. Often dreams; although recently they have manifested from conversations I’ve had. The plot for my SFF quartet The Chronicles of Xannia stemmed from not understanding why my now-husband-then-boyfriend was so troubled by the plausibility of Y2K. It was after a particularly emotional reveal on his part that I began wondering about the idea of ‘those who believe’ and ‘those who don’t’ and my wilily and tenacious character Taya Fyce was born. For my unpublished urban fantasy quartet The White Raven, it was me fooling around with a book title generator on a fellow authors’ website and following the prompt she left: write out the title and develop a blurb for the book as if it were real. I got ‘The Hollow Kiss’ for a crime/thriller and since I write speculative fiction I also had to add a fantasy flair for my own sanity. I whipped something up in a matter of minutes, commented as requested, and then had to live with my brain chasing down this idea for the next week without respite! My lead character, who becomes The White Raven, was born of that conjecture.
Q. Do you ‘get lost’ in your writing?
MJ. I can, and yes it does happen often, but being a planner keeps me always on the periphery where I can orchestrate and oversee. But that doesn’t mean I never surprise myself or that my character always listen to what I envision for them 😉 I tend to ‘get lost’ most often in the intense moments as I live them right along with the characters.
Q. Who or what is your “Muse” at the moment?
MJ. I adore YA and certain types of NA or Adult fantasy that willingly take me on a journey. I have long admired the writings of Maria V. Snyder but as of this past month I have found a new, local author – Karina Sumner-Smith, whose books (characters and writing style) have lifted my heart and push me to better my writing so that I might affect my readers in a similar way.
Q. When did you begin to write seriously?
MJ. I first started looking for an agent for Time’s Tempest, book 1 in The Chronicles of Xannia, when I finished university and had time in my then job (as an executive assistant) to polish this manuscript I’d been working on sporadically for the past 5 years. However, I got several rejection slips and decided to focus on other avenues of interest.
Did you miss Part I? Click here
The Conclusion to this fascinating Interview with MJ : January 9th
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