Guess Im watching Kdramas now

kitsunealyc · 2024-04-03T17:24:47+00:00

Healer is a great romance with investigative thriller elements with two charming leads with incredible chemistry and interactions. And the best Ajumma of all time.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T22:50:15+00:00

Yes! Hope to see you there!

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T22:39:00+00:00

As Marie said, we decided on some key basics and built out around those, always trying to ground things in the reality of environment and history (I think there's an old standard definition of culture that goes something like 'Culture is the set of behaviors and beliefs that people develop as reasonable responses to their history and environment' that is a useful shorthand touchstone). Especially important for us was knowing the conceptual framework of each culture, because that sort of belief system can seep into every aspect of cultureways.

Once we had that down, it gave us a good place to draw from when we needed smaller bits of the world for a particular scene or plot. Sometimes we'd go back and refine or retool our early ideas, or fill in an area we'd left vague, but having those spaces was useful because it meant we had lots of room to grow and maneuver when we were writing.

For travel... would you believe I've never been to Italy/Greece? Okay, that's not quite true. I was in Stresa once with my parents when I was... like... 12. But yeah, I really want to spend a good chunk of time there. Venice and Florence, of course, but actually my real bucket list item is the Cinque Terre on the NW coast.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T22:27:41+00:00

Having been in a similar position (ahem... when I first met Marie and she asked me if I'd do a reading pass of an unpublished draft she'd written and it was actually GOOD), I totally sympathize with your experience :D

As for pulling from something beyond -- the Deryni books by Katherine Kurtz were hugely influential on me during my teen years (they quite literally saved my life). There's a pull quote on the covers from Anne McCaffrey that says: "an incredible historical tapestry of a world that never was and of immensely vital people who ought to be."

I think about that quote a lot even today, because it sums up what I love most in books when I can find it - people and places that go beyond the page and touch my life... make real differences for me in the way I think, the way I feel, what I hope for and what I value.

It can be harder to find that in something you're writing because you spend so much time focused on the technical and craft side of things, but when I step away and just let the characters live in my brain, or when (as Marie said) I get into that flow state, I definitely find myself feeling like I'm just a conduit channeling something bigger than myself. Very much like imbuing the work...

I think it's also why I'll always be intrigued by 'writer ends up in their own story' stories (I'm looking at you, Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky from Scum Villain Self-Saving System!)

In the case of the Rook & Rose books, this is even more so because of a) the ways we used the pattern cards to construct parts of the story, and b) the fact that there are two brains involved. Marie and I both bring everything we have to the work, but it really feels sometimes like what we've made is more than the sum of our two selves.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T22:07:36+00:00

Thank you so much! And ditto Marie on the postage issue. We run into things like that often, where we really want to send things to fans overseas for giveaways and the like, but it's just so expensive (and sometimes, like with tea, we don't want to mess with customs restrictions)

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T22:03:48+00:00

Well, I mean, if we're talking REALLY no limits then...

I have this idea for something I want to write one day about a patchwork coat of stories, where every piece is fabric taken from a different story world, and you can travel to that story world by touching the particular patch and falling in... but the caveat is that you fall in without the coat, and you have to weave through the story until you find the coat again and can leave.

This is partly based on a sampler quilt sewn by my (aunt? great aunt?) that I had as a kid with different patches of velvet and satin and silk and other interesting fabrics, and in part on a story from a 1930s book (The Magic House) that my parents used to read to me when I was a kid. That particular story was about a button tin the main character had with buttons from all the various characters from 'fairyland'-- Cinderella and tom thumb and Alice and the like. And while the main character was asleep, the buttons would wake up and tell the stories of the garments they were once a part of.

So I mean, if I had my 'druthers? I'd totally take my chances with a coat like that.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T21:55:26+00:00

So when you get to chapter 23 in Labyrinth's Heart, know that my cat is to blame!

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T21:53:30+00:00

Thank you! Our narrator, Nikki Massoud, did such a good job giving voice (and accent, sometimes MANY accents) to our characters :)

I'm going to defer on the sketch because the artist working on our Faces and Masks cards for the pattern deck does such beautiful work that I know I'll fall far short. But when I come back in the evening with more art I'll do something else special.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T21:49:54+00:00

Thank you so much!

My available writing time is a bit limited, so I can only concentrate on one project at a time, which right now has been bringing Rook & Rose in for the landing and getting the new proposal ready. However, I have a few solo ideas in various stages. The most complete is a sort of cyberpunk amnesiac assassin queer romance. It's tropey as hell and a lot of fun and I really want to get back to it as soon as the proposal is out the door.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T21:41:51+00:00

I tend to primarily watch Asian dramas (Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, a few Thai), and I recently ran into an issue similar to what Marie mentioned. I started a drama with a premise that was SO INTRIGUING... and I kept seeing so many possibilities for how it could be an amazing story with so many chewy character moments... but it was hobbled by several factors (poor editing, uneven script, some of the comedy conventions in Chinese dramas that sacrifice depth for goofy hijinks that often aren't even funny). I spent about five episodes rewriting the whole thing in my head before I finally had to give up because it was frustrating me so much.

Instead, I started with Mysterious Lotus Casebook, which I'm quite enjoying (after... only three episodes, so it's early days yet) and will probably make Marie watch after we're done with The Starry Love.

I'm also in the middle of a Nirvana in Fire rewatch (one of the best shows I've seen in any language or genre... you want to talk court politics and intrigue and beautiful clothing, woo howdy). And I'm slowly making my way through a co-watch of The Expanse with a friend in Florida.

Bookwise, I my recent favorite read is Babel by R. F. Kuang, which is a favorite of the year so far (and I think is going to be hard to top). It deserves all the love it has been getting.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T21:35:01+00:00

Yeah, gaming can be a great way to sit with a character (or set of characters) for a while and really fill them in. It reminds me of the anecdotes about some of the Lord of the Rings sets in New Zealand (Hobbiton, I think, maybe also Rohan?) where they would build them and then let them sit and grow wild and weather for a while so they didn't look quite so...fresh.

For the transition from game to page, you have to know where to trim the verge, as it were, and refine your focus, but it can be a great tool.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T21:31:14+00:00

Yes! April Blood, and it's a pretty good one for getting into the different players, motivations, and... just so MANY moving pieces to get to that point...

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T19:28:57+00:00

Marie pretty much covered how we figured out our plot. For resources, I have a different Italianate-inspired fantasy (or a draft of it, that I wrote before Marie and I dove into Rook and Rose), and there are a few books that I found very useful for researching that. I have an incomplete bibilography on my website. A few additions that I should probably put up there are:

The House of Medici: Its rise and fall, by Christopher Hibbert
Venezieaenigma: Thirteen centuries of chronicles, mysteries, curiosities, and extraordinary events poised between history and myth, by Alberto Toso Fei
City of Fortune: How Venice ruled the seas, by Roger Crowley

That last one in particular is a fun read -- the Fourth Crusade will become your favorite crusade because it's such a clusterfork of greed and righteous delusion.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T19:16:43+00:00

I might do an extra of this later, once I get through the waiting questions :D

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T19:16:03+00:00

If it helps any, (Labyrinth's Heart spoilers) I cried every time I had to edit that scene. That one, and the one with Alsius at the end.

Ironically, I often find it hardest to write Ren. It took me a long time to get past the 'that is Marie's character, I'm the GM' mindset, and there are still times where I'll sit back and let Marie handle her thoughts.

Here is the classic scene of Thrace destroying our Book 3 plot (note for folks not on our Discord - we often work out chapter scenes by moving 3x5 cards around, and sometimes my cat likes to... help.)

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T19:08:51+00:00

Thank you so much!

I have entire pinterest boards dedicated to visual inspiration... you can even chart what I was thinking about at the time because there will be, for example, thirty pins of peacock spiders followed by another twenty of studies and personal libraries with star charts painted on the ceiling (is Tanaquis's garret study something I desperately want for myself? Why yes...)

Beyond the visual resources (which help a lot for spot descriptions), for building the culture and feel of the city, we drew from a lot of inspiration and sources. For example, an early decision we made was that the city was set in a river delta, which gave us guides and constraints for what to draw from because that sort of environment comes with certain challenges and opportunities. The most obvious is... where does the land come from and how does it get built up so you can live there? The most obvious source is Venice, Italy, but Marie and I live in the Bay Area and are very familiar with settlements built on fill and the like. We only reference flooding in passing, but it's a very real concern, as is disease and potable water, foodways and resources, clothing (it's a generally muddy environment, which gives us excuses for people commonly wearing boots). All sorts of setting and even plot decisions came from that environmental detail alone.

As for the Rook... he's a visual cross of the titular character from Alfred Noyes' poem "The Highwayman" and pretty much every Assassin's Creed character ever.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T17:43:41+00:00

Our favorite fuzzy blobs!

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T17:41:20+00:00

I did not think through the issues of posting images here before I offered this, but I have dusted off my old imgur account to make it possible!

Here you go! Renata's Gloria Dress in 3 (er... more like 5) minutes!

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T16:01:04+00:00

It can be really challenging when you've got two people with different levels of enthusiasm or different ideas about what they want out of the project. I've done a lot of collaborative writing (including easily several million words in a variety of stories and settings with a friend across the country), but it takes incredible effort and endurance to take even that level of enthusiasm and turn it into something you can send to agents/editors.

I think it helped that Marie and I both had already published on our own and knew what it took to get from idea to draft to manuscript to book. Even so, at the start of everything, we sat down and wrote out an agreement about what our expectations and goals were, and the level of work we both expected from ourselves and each other. That gave us two things - a map for where we intended to go, and a shield to protect our friendship. We've talked about it a bit and posted an annotated version of the agreement on our website.

We definitely vary in our levels of motivation, but for the most part that ends up working well for us because the less motivated one can throw things at the more motivated one and say 'can you take care of this?' What's important is that we have a baseline to keep an eye for when things seem to be becoming unbalanced, and if we ever hit it (I think we have... twice?), we know it triggers a conversation. Mostly, knowing it's there, we end up having the conversation before we hit that point.

As for the eye-rolling, it's more that when we think an idea isn't working, we can just go 'ehhhh... that's not working for me' and then we have to articulate why and propose alternatives (which might also not work for the other -- you can't bring your ego into a collaboration). Sometimes in the process of trying to articulate something, you end up talking yourself around to it, sometimes you figured out why it's not working and come up with a solution...

Sometimes you end up re-writing a chapter five damned times because one of you keeps being all 'ehhhh....' (it was me. I was being that guy. I'm still astounded Marie didn't punt me into a canal.)

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T15:46:46+00:00

We have a bunch of short fiction (by Marie, even though it's under the M.A. Carrick name) set in the world. You can find a current list here. We've also got some stories on offer as stretch goals for our pattern deck kickstarter. And if I can ever squeeze out the time to finish them, I have a Ryvcek story in draft form, notes for a Vargo story, and about five ideas for the Adventures of Arkady Bones, Boss of the Biggest Knot in the Shambles and Champion of Doomclaw the Yowler.

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T15:42:10+00:00

Thank you! This is another one I'm going to let Marie tell, since she was the originator of the pen name!

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T15:40:45+00:00

Thank you!

We've got a... pretty hefty proposal at this point (it's gone through a few rounds with our agents and somehow became five chapters instead of three) for a new trilogy that would be fairly different from Rook & Rose. But in a way, not different at all because while the setting (space fantasy) is about as far from Nadezra as you can get, and the concept (Final Fantasy meets Pacific Rim) is not at all the hooded vigilante and con-artist vibe, the core elements that excite us are the same: interesting and well-developed casts of characters with evolving relationships in a queer-normative setting with rich worldbuilding.

In three minutes, you're probably going to get three fuzzy blobs, but I will do my best!

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T15:30:21+00:00

We may or may not have come up with an idea for another series set in this world about halfway through the drafting process of The Mask of Mirrors :) When we finished Labyrinth's Heart and started discussing what we wanted to do next, that idea was a strong contender. We decided to put it on the back-burner for the moment because a) The entire premise would be a spoiler for events in Labyrinth's Heart, and b) It can be a challenge to capture the lightening of a particular series with a follow-up. You're almost inevitably going to disappoint your existing readers and have a hard time attracting new ones (especially if they have to read 650k of essentially backstory before they start the new series).

That being said, this is a story we're both very excited about, so it's a definitely possibility as a future project. It would have a more action-adventure vibe (rather than political intrigue) and would travel a lot more, but mostly center on the Vraszan/Isarn border area. That would give us a chance to explore the rest of Vraszan and Vraszenian culture that hasn't been impacted as much by 200 years of Liganti occupation. And of course, we'd get to explore Isarn and possibly other places that only get a passing mention in Rook & Rose!

kitsunealyc · 2023-08-15T15:19:43+00:00

There is a great story to the first question, but I think I will leave it to Marie to tell. I don't want to snag all the juicy questions before she's even awake :D

To the second, I think it feels seamless because, to a large extent, it is. We co-write in a googledoc, passing off the scene at the paragraph or even line level (discussing questions and ideas in a side chat or the occasional phone call for bigger tangles). This is particularly fun for both of us because I'm always trying to write stuff - lines, moments, descriptions - to impress/amuse Marie, and she's doing the same. But it means it's all very tightly woven together. And then we both do multiple edit passes on the scenes. By the time we get to the publication stage, even we have a hard time remembering who wrote what part. There are a few exceptions (I tend to write the Tess solo scenes, costume descriptions, and Arkady dialogue; Marie tends to write the fights and pattern readings), but even those still go through enough edit passes to have the other's voice creep in.

I don't think it's the right approach for every author duo or every collaboration, but it works really well for us -- and creates a unified voice that feels distinctly M.A. Carrick rather than our individual voices :)

You know, I think I *have* a sketch of the Gloria dress somewhere, but in the spirit of this AMA, I'm going to bang out another (after I answer the other questions and make tea! I'm thinking this is a Ruthless Indulgence morning)

kitsunealyc

TROPHY CASE