My deepest thanks to Yesha for such a lovely review of my novel FALLEN PRINCEBORN: CHOSEN! Yesha reads a wonderful variety of authors and stories for her blog “Books, Teacups, and Reviews,” so I hope you all can stop by her site and say hello. Read on, share on, and write on, my friends! Cheers -JL
Hello once again, my fellow creatives! While Wisconsin shivers beneath the hoarfrost, let’s travel over to the United Kingdom to meet a wonderful indie author who manages to balance writing and parenting on her own terms. She was very kind to host me on her blog last fall when I released my new novel, and now I’m excited to host her here. Please welcome Claire Buss!
Your bibliography shows you love crafting a wide variety of poetry and prose. For instance, your series The Gaia Collection explores what happens when the global environment is completely under commercial control. Can you describe your writing process for creating this dystopian setting?
The Gaia Effect, the first book in the series, was an idea I had for a long time just sort of kicking about in my head. I don’t know why it went the way it did, I’m a discovery writer not a planner and I literally had no idea what was going to happen next when I was writing. I just followed the characters. I realise authors aren’t supposed to admit that they don’t know what they’re doing lol. With each subsequent novel I write, I tend to plan a little bit more but then I have had two kids since I started writing so I find it harder to remember everything now.
After being an author for over five years, what would you say are common traps for aspiring writers?
Thinking that they know everything, I don’t think you ever stop learning about the craft of writing and storytelling. And also, not being able to take critique – figuring out that it’s different from criticism and that other people (writers and readers) can see things that you don’t. I do find it difficult to put that first draft out there and I often get highly defensive at feedback but that’s usually because they’re right and I just don’t want to admit I need to make the changes lol.
Ha! I get pretty defensive about my own writing, too, but you’re right–that feedback is crucial in ensuring a plot line, a character arc, or whatever else actually makes sense. Would you consider this to be the most difficult part of your artistic process, or would you consider that to be something else?
Not being able to find enough time to work on my writing. At the moment, I have to squeeze things in between being a stay-at-home mum and oftentimes I am super tired in the evenings so trying to be creative can be tough. Also, my kids get up at 5am so trying to join in the 5am writers club is difficult as well. But you know, if you love doing something, you find the time for it.
OH MY GOSH I KNOW JUST WHAT YOU MEAN. Seriously, I totally do. I started blogging in 2015 when my kids were teeny. That was likely a crazy thing to do, but blogging helped me preserve what little sanity I had left, and eventually helped me re-ignite my creativity. Even though my kids are older now (well, still 10 and under, but still), they are my writing Kryptonite just as much as they are my writing inspiration. What is your writing Kryptonite?
Ironically, procrastination! I am an excellent procrastinator. I have even cleaned the oven instead of sitting down to write. But then at other times I’m in the writing zone and nothing can stop me.
I have a feeling you and I would be friends, because that’s just what I do on some days, too. Suddenly the floor absolutely must be cleaned that day because in my imagination, I just haven’t worked out a plot kink yet and it’s easier to clean than to sit and stare at my notes about fantastical elsewheres. I noticed that you enjoy writing all sorts of fantastical stories like Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, but you also enjoy exploring the “commonplace” kind of life. Now most people–me included–write to escape this sort of place, but you found so much inspiration you created a collection called Tales From Surburbia. Can you share that particular inspiration with us?
I had released my first book The Gaia Effect and although I thought there might be another book in the series, I didn’t feel ready to write it straight away but I wanted to maintain the momentum I felt I’d created by publishing a book. I decided to look back over short stories, plays and blog posts that I’d written previously and grouped together those that had a similar theme. I wrote a couple of new pieces and voila! I had a shorts collection on the theme of humorous observation of life in the suburbs. All of it is inspired in some way by real events that happened to me or happened where I lived at the time.
Life in the suburbs certainly has its own wacky misadventures, like when toddler Biff decided to just join our new neighbors housewarming party and started tooting through their toddler’s toys. Heavens, that was so mortifying! The most common thread of the misadventures around our neighborhood, however, would have to be the animals. There’s a fox that occasionally wanders through our backyard; I like to imagine where he comes from and what brings him hunting about our yard. As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?
My writer mascot? Hmm… that’s a good question. I have absolutely no idea. Maybe a dragon, which is probably a little cliché. I’d actually love a dog
Ah, there is a history of beloved dogs among amazing writers! I’ll always remember my favoritest of favorite writers, Diana Wynne Jones, writing an entire fantasy novel inspired by her own dog. When we have the right inspiration, we cannot help but tell stories, you know? Does writing energize or exhaust you?
It depends – when the muse is with me, the words seem to run out of my fingertips into my keyboard and dance across my computer screen. Those are the days when I can write 2000 words in less than an hour and get to the end of the writing session feeling happy but wiped. Other days it’s a struggle and it feels like I’m pulling the words out. Those days are exhausting and filled with doubt. I think if writing doesn’t energise and exhaust you then you’re just not doing it right.
I completely agree, Claire. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, your stories, and your life with us! My friends, you can learn more about Claire and her work via the various social media links below.
~STAY TUNED!~
Let’s explore some worldbuilding in the mystery genre, written by an author who embodied a time, a mindset, a world that feels long ago, but for some of us is not so long ago at all.
Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!
Good morning to you, one and all, on this Happy New Year’s Day!
After spending most of December digging my way out of a mountain of grading (finishing Christmas Eve of all days), I awarded myself a chance to visit your online studios to balance with the lack of physical travel here. Everyone chose to come to our house for Christmas instead–in spurts–which meant my three young Bs reveled in FIVE Christmases. Bo did his darndest to keep the house clean while I did my darndest not to give everyone food poisoning for the holidays. (Thank God for slow cookers.)
We. Are. Tired.
But we are also healthy, warm, and safe, all blessings to be thankful for.
With the departure of Christmases and the arrival of snow, I returned to my writing goals from this past summer with fresh perspective. With better understanding of the time involved for both the boys’ schooling as well as my own, I brainstormed a writing to-do list for the next five months of 2021.
If 2020 taught us anything–apart from WASH YOUR F’ING HANDS–it’s that we must be flexible to survive. Sure, thriving would be great, but let’s just work on surviving right now. I sound like a broken record, I’m sure, speaking of goals so often and surviving the writing life. But adapting to an ever-changing environment–especially one with a pandemic involved–requires a fluidity that stubborn minds like mine struggle to keep. Writing it out helps me find hope in the plan, and so perhaps reading this helps inspire you be okay with trading the grandiose plans for small-scale goals like these.
It also helps to work with old stories, plots the imagination has walked many times and won’t stumble upon too often when drafting time appears. Starting a new story with all-new worldbuilding, characters, and so on would be certain overload at this point. I suppose that’s one reason I have the Grandmother novella on the to-do list–it’s a one-off I’d like to see done so my imagination can stamp FINISHED on it and re-distribute those energies elsewhere. If you have any tips on keeping old stories fresh until you can return to them, I’d love to hear it in the comments below! Or, you’ve perhaps talked about this already on your own sites. If so, please share the links with me so I can check them out. Many thanks!
As I spent Christmas weekend reading your poems, stories, analyses, and updates, a anxious niggle started to grow in my mind. What if my next term of 150 students would drive me into another hiatus? I’d hate to get lost in yet another realm of static and monotony without connection to the kindred spirits who bring creative joy to my life. Such connections are what keep us alight and alive, are they not?
I was reminded of this, all too deeply, just before Christmas.
The phone rang in the morning just as Biff and Bash were logging onto their chrome books for lessons. I hate answering the phone. I hate trying to keep the boys in line while talking on the phone, my attention always split and missing important points and then feeling a fool for having to ask those points be repeated, thus prolonging the phone call and keeping the boys in line and sounding like a witch when a child inevitably brings a cup of juice/cocoa/water too close to the computer and practically spills it everywhere while the speaker on the phone must rehash the call’s purpose AGAIN thus prolonging the bloody phone call more and the vicious cycle goes on and JUST DON’T CALL ME IN THE MORNING EVER.
The area code for the phone number, though…it looked old and familiar. This person did not live around here, or in Wisconsin at all. Yet I…I knew there was something familiar, something homey about it…but what?
I answered. “Hello?”
“Jean?” The voice creaked with age. “It’s Ed. Ed Smith, your neighbor from Escanaba.”
Recognition shocked me. Ed and his wife had looked 100 when Bo and I lived in a remodeled (and possibly haunted) bakery up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan ten years ago. “Ed! Hello, my goodness, it’s lovely to hear from you!” My mouth was full of bubbly incoherent greetings. Heaven knows what Ed made of them.
“I wanted to call and say thank you for the Christmas card. Gosh, your kids are looking so big. Quite a handful, I bet.”
Biff and Bash’s fight over who got the Snoopy Halloween pencil for the math lesson was loud enough to be heard across the street, let alone the phone, so I just laughed and said, “Every day is an adventure. How’s Molly?”
“Oh. Well…” Papers shuffled near him. He grunted–I imagined he had found a place to sit in their little living room of green chairs and giant crocheted doilies. “Well she still has Alzheimer’s pretty bad. She lives in the nursing home, you know the one down T__ Street. Been there three years now.”
“Mom, Bash won’t give me the pencil!”
“Biff is teasing me!”
I held the phone away from my face long enough to give a low, heavily enunciated command: “Work it out. NOW.” I went to my room and closed the door, mentally running through Christmas cards of the past. Did they ever mention Molly having Alzheimer’s? Did they ever send one to mention it? I couldn’t remember, damn my memory…I said something about proximity, that it was good he was still nearby to see her.
“Oh yes. Harder now, though, with the snow.” A faint tapping on his end–drumming his fingers, perhaps. “Still can’t go in, so I stand by her window. Plows don’t always get the sidewalks, and my cane, can’t always navigate.
“Calling gets, oh, a few minutes talking. She’ll remember enough to chide me for somethin’,” he said with a chuckle. “But she can’t grip the phone much, see, so most of the time I’m just sayin’ her name while she tries to pick it up. Nurse usually comes in around then and we can’t talk much longer.”
Memories of my own grandmother and her last year of life plagued by severe dementia fogged this avenue of talk. I couldn’t go down this way. I would only cry, and this man did not need to hear more sorrow. So I asked about their children and grandchildren, and he explained how they visit once a week to help around the house and visit.
Not that he wanted the help, mind. “I’m doin’ just fine, I tell them, but they keep coming in and muddlin’ up my order of things.” He sighed. “Nice, though, having the company.” He grunted again–standing up?–and I heard more paper rustling. “Yup, I was reading through all the cards, and saw your kids growin’ so old. I can’t write that good, see, but thought hey, maybe those numbers in Molly’s book are still good. And here we are!” He chuckled again, though I wouldn’t say for good humor. No, this felt more like his way of sharing relief. “Got, let’s see…Bo’s number here, and this other one. Bo’s dad, I think. They still good, too?”
He read them to me. I concurred about Bo, and explained Bo’s father passing some time ago. It was not something Bo wanted to write in that year’s Christmas card.
“Well, I best not be keepin’ you. You’ve got your hands full.”
I could not bear for this conversation to end on death. “We’re doing our best with what we can. Just like you and Molly, right? Any special Christmas plans?”
“That’s right.” A little clanging–coat hangers. “All this talk on vaccines for the nursing homes, sure hope they get it here soon. It’d be nice starting the new year holding Moll’s hand again. I,” he paused, “I haven’t been able to hold her hand since March.”
I was a mess again of garbled encouragements and holiday wishes until he clicked off. And I cried.
Such a little thing, holding another’s hand. Yet not a little thing.
Not at all.
Our old friends, our old loved ones–they need to know they have not been shut away no matter what restrictions the world places upon us. Let this New Year be a time to re-connect with those you’ve not spoken to in a year or ten. Let them know they matter in your world.
Just as you, each and every one of you, matter in mine.
Read on, share on, and write on, my friends. Here’s to a promising New Year of hope and light for us all.
If music be the food of love, play on✨
Author and Freelance Writer
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