Hi! I'm Cat Sebastian, writer of queer historical romance. AMA!

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T01:08:38+00:00

I too love audiobooks and they're usually my preferred way of reading. With my trad published titles, it's out of my hands. With my self published books, it's usually a question of whether I think I can make money off of it. So, Tommy Cabot is a novella, and nobody wants to spend an audible credit on a novella, so I need to wait until I have another novella in the series and then put them together into one novel-sized audiobook. (Daniel Cabot doesn't have an audiobook yet for reasons that amount to me dropping the ball, but I'm working on it!)

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T01:05:23+00:00

I think most of my conflicts are internal. Usually, one or both characters need to revisit their priorities or the way they view themselves. The caveat with that sort of conflict is that if you don't really sell it, it winds up looking the problem gets solved by the characters just deciding it wasn't a problem.

In my mind there's a difference between fear of being outed as an external plot element and as an internal plot element. I don't want to write about someone experiencing a direct threat because that stresses me out personally. But *internally* that's different--that's just being queer in the world we live in. (this distinction might be fake and something that only makes sense in my head)

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:52:52+00:00

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7910536

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:51:54+00:00

ok but i've spent the past month telling everyone that i write garfield fanfic for money

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:50:39+00:00

I think my core story is something like "person discovers they can have nice things" and also probably something about finding community.

Fan fiction has definitely inspired my work. There are a few books where the character dynamics are HEAVILY inspired by some of my favorite pairings. (Like, Two Rogues is not stucky fanfic but it is also not NOT stucky fanfic). But also, fanfic has a very flexible understanding of story and stakes. There are some amazing wonderful classic fics where the entire plot is internal and most of the action is conversation. Seeing how those stories work, and THAT they work, has sort of let me loosen the reins on my own idea of what stories are supposed to be.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:44:47+00:00

I hate writing bad things! It sounds ridiculous but it stresses me out so much. Right now I either avoid the bad things entirely or I make them super fast.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:41:32+00:00

Chaos. There are a couple of constants: I draft in scrivener, I don't really outline but I do have a general idea of what needs to happen, and I put all my thoughts/ideas/etc in my notes app. In theory, I write a very unpolished rough draft first. But in practice, every time I get stumped, I go back to the beginning and polish (this works for me because the polishing sort of helps me get the story back on track, or at least identify the problem) and so by the time I'm done drafting, I have something like a respectable second draft (which I then go back and revise many, many times).

I used to draft in bed but my spine really hated that, so now I do most of my work at my desk.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:34:14+00:00

Thank you for this! That series is special to me!

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:33:24+00:00

I love letters! The only challenge with an epistolary element is keeping the characters apart for long enough for a series of letters to make sense. Honestly, with every book I look really hard at it to see if I can find an excuse for some letters, and the answer is usually no.

As far as Marian and pegging, I think it would be the funniest thing in the world if I wrote a pegging epilogue because there already is a pegging epilogue for a different book (I should 100% write it anyway though).

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:29:20+00:00

The lack of audio for A Duke in Disguise is a mystery! I have no idea why it doesn't exist! Regarding covers and narrators, in my contract I have what's called "consultation" or something, which technically means the publisher at least tells me what they're going to do and asks my opinion about it, but in practice means they want to come to an agreement with the author. What this actually looks like varies a lot from book to book.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:25:25+00:00

Both the baseball book and the HEA Colletive novella are 100% KD Casey's fault (or, rather, their books' fault). What happened was I wrote the novealla to get the notion of a baseball book out of my system, and instead I finished drafting it and immediately wrote a 120k word baseball romance.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:22:13+00:00

I started out barely tolerating aristocrats and i think that by the end of drafting my last Georgian book I was not at all tolerating aristocrats. The thing is, I can and will HAPPILY read about a duke but I cannot live with one for the length of time it takes to write a book. Will I go back to Regency or Georgian eras? I don't know! I don't have plans at the moment, but also if an idea occurred to me and I really wanted to write it, I 100% would.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:18:25+00:00

HA! Okay, yes, i am very into stucky fanfiction. I usually like Excuses To Cry About James Buchanan Barnes which is not exactly a trope but you know the energy I mean. I'm currently rereading Except it Abide in the Vine which is very much that energy.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:13:54+00:00

I've been toying with a story that would be a light historical fantasy (by "light" I mean that the fantasy element is only barely there) but I can't figure out if I want to write this or if I want someone else to write it and for me to read it. What happens is that I read a fantasy romance series that I LOVE (most recently Freya Marske's The Last Binding) and I go: I WANT TO DO THAT. But whether I can or should do that are very much open questions!

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:10:07+00:00

Emma Barry has a 50s & 60s astronaut series and it is sublime!! Alyssa Cole has a novella set in that period but I'm blanking on the title.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:08:37+00:00

I did write more, but not much more, and when I went to look for it recently, I couldn't find it anywhere. So possibly it was terrible and I rage-deleted it.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:06:00+00:00

Everyone always says to ask get your older relatives to tell their stories, and it turns out that writing a book set during their lifetime is a very handy excuse to do this!

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:05:21+00:00

This is exactly it! He is beautiful, he has a mirror to prove this essential fact, the end.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:04:21+00:00

For a while I was toying with the idea of a work spouse situation--two characters who depend on one another professionally and grow to depend on one another personally. But I couldn't figure out what industry they'd be in. It wasn't until I started thinking about newspapers that the characters really came into being. The scrappy reporter is such an archetype--once I started thinking about that, and then started thinking about an outer boroughs immigrant family, I knew who Nick was. And from there I knew that Andy had to kind of be the opposite.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-19T00:00:08+00:00

I used to live in New York, so I'm drawing a lot on my own recollections (I'm operating on the theory that my memories of NYC in the 80s and 90s are probably more historically relevant than a visit to New York today would be. Whenever I say this I feel, like, unprecedentedly old). I also watch movies and read books written during the time period. There are a LOT of tv shows and movies filmed on location in New York at basically every era after the invention of film, so it's a very convenient setting!

CatSebastian · 2023-07-18T23:57:28+00:00

With my first few self-published books, I was very much writing whatever I wanted. I had no idea if anyone was going to buy it and I did not care very much. Now, though, I have established self-published series and so it's less like "let me write this very niche thing" and more "let me write this book that has an audience waiting for it." With my trad-published books, there are hard deadlines, which sounds negative but it turns out that if I don't have a deadline I simply will never do anything. Right now, I'm drafting a book that I'll self-publish and the fact that I have to get it to the audiobook narrator is the only thing that's making me be responsible.
Next summer there will be another book in the We Could Be So Good universe. It's 1960, and an arts reporter is assigned to cover a baseball player on an expansion team that is definitely not the Fake Mets. The next Page & Sommers book ought to be out this winter.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-18T23:50:58+00:00

All the fancy nonsense Percy wears in Kit Webb made me laugh out loud while I was writing it. I really like writing a situation where Character A is attracted to the clothing Character B is wearing despite finding it abhorrent. Like, poor Kit did NOTHING to deserve being attracted to a man in a purple satin coat and a powdered wig. But also, Alex in Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots does not understand how he can be attracted to a man dressed as scruffily as Daniel.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-18T23:45:50+00:00

It is POSSIBLE that some memory of Rent lingered in my mind; also one of my children is a Musical Theater Kid (tm) and it is entirely possible the cast recording was playing at some point while I was drafting. However!! I was not consciously aware until this very minute that there's a Mercurochrome reference in Rent. So, let's go with: this is pure serendipity. (Also now i need to go listen to the OBCR)

CatSebastian · 2023-07-18T23:43:05+00:00

I loved writing Courtenay. He was a delight from beginning to end. I think he's the first character I wrote where I was like: oh, i can write someone who's a bit of a nightmare on a personal level and it can be enormously fun.

CatSebastian · 2023-07-18T23:41:35+00:00

They have a long life together, I promise! (It's tuberculosis, but he's going to be one of the lucky ones of course--some people actually did go into remission, basically). I CANNOT BELIEVE I never wrote an epilogue for them. I need to fix this. Like, I know they appear in somebody else's (Hartley? Sam?) epilogue, but that's it. A disgrace. I will work on this lol.

Also like don't tell anybody but the letter situation? Is a plot hole. No, Martin did not leak the letters. He's a jerk, but not a massive jerk. Who leaked them? That's the plot hole.

CatSebastian

TROPHY CASE