O is for Open - Interview with Author, Kia Zi Shiru, Black Sheep 3 Blog Tour

Sometimes I think readers of my blog get bored with just my opinions and thoughts on stuff, so I open my blog to guest posts :). Today, I am pleased to be opening the doors to Kia Zi Shiru, a talented writer of Young Adult (YA) fiction, who is on a blog tour to promote the third book in her Black Sheep Trilogy, Fighting for a Future. More about the book later, but first, I asked Kia a few questions...

First, some sensible background questions:

How long have you been writing?

I started seriously writing when I was around 20, I had been working on Black Sheep for 2 or 3 years by then and decided that if I was ever going to be an author I should seriously finish it. Before that, I’ve got some things from back when I was 8 or 9 and then my huge epic SciFi story that I worked on during most of my early and mid teens. Although I outgrew the story and life got in the way. Though a lot of subjects that were visible in that story are also explored in Black Sheep and some of my other stories.

But seriously thinking about writing, being an author and publishing started when I was 20/21, about 4 years ago now.

What made you start writing YA?
I was in the age group for it. I was 17 or 18 when I started Black Sheep, basically because I was the same age as my characters. Also, most the stories I read on FictionPress were of that same age group and that was what I was used to.

How long did it take you to develop the ideas for The Black Sheep Trilogy?
Most of the ideas for the story came in just a few days/weeks though some things have changed over time and some only came to me as I was writing them (like why Vic was so withdrawn towards Jack in some places at the beginning of the story). Over all most of the ideas stayed the way they were from the start.

Is there one scene in any of the three books that you are particularly proud of?

Ehhhhmmmm, there is a scene in the second book where Vic is off his medication and you get a glimpse into his mind. It both scares me when I read it and it makes me feel so proud that I was able to grasp depression and mental illusions in a way that it is accessible.

But most of all, it scares me.

Now a few less formal questions ;):

Do your characters talk to you?

Yes, even though I haven’t been writing Black Sheep for over a year now they still pop up and I would go along with them when they explain something more about themselves.

Though these days I’m spending most my time with Evan and Thomas and a bit with Jacob and Joey, all characters of my new story.

If yes, do you talk back? ;P

I usually let another character talk back to them. I guide the other character as to ask certain questions even though it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I impose a question on the character and it will fight. It won’t ask the question I want, usually either because it would be out of character for them to do so or because the character doesn’t want to ask it (often when it’s a really emotional question).

And this happens any moment that I’m not busy using my brain for other stuff, so, you know, this is what is going on in my brain most of the day.

Do you have any odd writing habits?

I softly talk during writing. I usually try not to but I will move my mouth to pronounce all the things going on, especially dialogue.

This has been a habit since I was really young since my mother can remember me walking on my own (back from school or something) and I would talk to myself (without making a sound) but I would do arm movements, head movements and all the other things you do when talking.

It seems that people think it’s interesting to watch me walk on my own since this habit hasn’t stopped just yet.

If you had to describe yourself in one word, what would it be?

Crazy

If someone offered to employ you to write them a story to their specifications, would you do it and why?

I would be interested, I like a challenge. I think it would be interesting to see what I would be able to do with a world that wasn’t mine since I haven’t written fanfiction even though I read a lot of it.

Writer's block - in your opinion, is it real?

Yeah, though it mostly has to do with either doing something wrong in the work you’re doing or you really need a mental break. Sometimes your brain can have a cramp, you’ve gotta relax it before you can go on.

If you could invite one writer to tea, who would it be?

Only one? Okay, I think I would choose Edward van de Vendel.

Why?

He is a Dutch author and has written The Days of Bluegrass Love, a gay teen book that has immensely inspired my own writing. It was one of the few teen books that I read when I was a teen (aka between 12 and 17/18)  and I still re-read it almost each year.

Well, many thanks to Kia for giving a little insight into her mind :).

Author Info:

Kia Zi Shiru is a Dutch girl studying English and Creative Writing in the UK.

Amongst her interests she finds writing, reading, doing research and learning different languages (including but not limited to: English, Dutch, French, German, HTML, Java, PHP and Assembly). Her writing and reading habits include books with Young Adults, gay themes, strong female or minority characters and fantasy elements (more often than not all at the same time).

You can find Kia:

• Website www.5timeschaos.com
• Twitter http://twitter.com/kiazishiru
• Facebook http://www.facebook.com/KiaShiru

And if you want to keep up to date with Kia's activities you can sign up for my newsletter here:

• http://eepurl.com/vvShb

Black Sheep #3: Fighting for a Future

Jack is dead, Adam is back in the hospital in the worst condition he's ever been and Vic believes it's all his fault. That he's the reason everyone's hurting and that there's only one way to end it - to end his own life.

Then the doctor bears bad news, Vic’s own condition has worsened and his days are numbered.

This is the wake-up call Vic needs. Maybe he can, for once, make people happy before he hurts them in the worst way possible. He hides his condition from everyone, not wanting anyone to worry while he's trying to make them happy.

But time is running out. Will Vic see his wish fulfilled before the end comes?


Buy links:

Smashwords: http://bit.ly/Z7Bmk4
AmazonUS: http://amzn.to/Z3vqCK
AmazonUK: http://amzn.to/16ygRw2

Webpage: http://5timeschaos.com/blacksheep3

Black Sheep Trilogy (Collection)

Black Sheep follows Vic, his sister Anne, his best friend Adam and his new boyfriend Jack as they are

learning to deal with Vic’s past and illness while at the same time dealing with their own lives.

Black Sheep: Letting go of the Past
Vic is struggling to begin a relationship with Jack while at the same time he is is trying to overcome the trauma of the year before. Jack knows something is wrong but can’t get Vic to open up about what happened, no matter how hard he tries.

Black Sheep: Loving in the Present
Vic seems to be overcoming another bout of depression but as he seems to be getting better the lives of the people around him are turning worse. After a clash with Adam Vic seeks help in a place he shouldn’t, unknowingly putting Jack at risk.

Black Sheep: Fighting for a Future
Vic’s bad streak doesn’t seem to be ending soon and everybody has to deal with losses of their own. Until the doctor gives Vic the worst news of all, he is dying. This finally jars Vic into action, he wants to make all his loved ones happy before that happens.

But time is running out quickly and he isn’t sure he will be able to reach his goal.

Buy links:

Smashwords: http://bit.ly/ZBdoqd
AmazonUS: http://amzn.to/YxvM87
AmazonUK: http://amzn.to/ZbNws7

Webpage: http://5timeschaos.com/blacksheepcollection

~

P.S. Check out other folk doing the A to Z April Challenge.

N is for Niggles

So today I'm going to write about niggles. I'm not talking huge great injustices here, but the illogical things that irritate me, that nobody else cares about, but that drive me insane :). They don't make sense, they are often unfair, but I just can't help it, they irritate me! :P

Hiccups (both in myself and in other people) - now these are a totally involuntary reaction, a spasm of the diaphragm, and hence, if I think about it in a sensible way, there is really absolutely nothing to get annoyed about. Being irked about hiccups is like being irked about breathing, but I have no control over this reaction. Sit me in a room with someone who has hiccups for more than 30s, or indeed, leave me with my own involuntary reaction for the same amount of time and I will want to scratch that person's eyes out (and yes, that includes my own eyes o.O). I try very, very hard to ignore hiccups, it's better for my blood pressure that way, but there is something about the squeaky little noise that grates right into my brain and...oof!

While we're on the subject of bodily reactions - sneezing - not the little atchoos into a handkerchief, those
are fine, but loud, obnoxious booms that cut right through my head. Sneeze more quietly! If the rest of us can manage to be quiet, there is no need for a sonorous foghorn sound, especially if you're going to do it more than once! So there! :P

Okay, let's move swiftly on from bodily functions before I burst a blood vessel! ;P

I borrowed this from
http://daveberta.ca,
because it is so appropriate :)

Rudeness, more specifically, people who flout social rules, really, really wind me up. I'm a Brit, we queue as a matter of habit, in the supermarket, to get on the bus, to get into the cinema. We are orderly and polite (generally) and everything happens nice and smoothly. So when someone decides that queuing isn't for them, by golly is there some stony glaring going on from those of us obeying the rules. The only problem is, being Britishly polite, it takes an awful lot for one of us to speak up and tell the person they're doing it wrong. The most they'll normally get is a polite cough. BUT, by golly, when that convention-flouter is gone, the entire queue will be sharing their disdain with each other - there's nothing like snubbing etiquette to get a bunch of British strangers talking like old friends! ;)

Pigeons - yes, you heard me, those stupid birds that wander around parks a lot ::grinds teeth:: I'm not scared of them and they're rather tasty in game pie, but alive they are just the densest and most annoying birds around. I like birds. I find crows and jackdaws remarkably intelligent and fun to watch when they're in the garden. I also love sparrows and have a soft spot for black birds. But the coo-cooing and the tiny head on such a large body of pigeons and their cousins the doves of all types just make me want to learn to shoot and not clay pigeons.

::Takes a breath.::

I think maybe I'll stop there. I said my niggles were illogical, didn't I? So, do you have any odd niggles that just don't make sense?


P.S. Check out other folk doing the A to Z April Challenge.

M is for Music

I don't know about you, but when I write, I sometimes like a bit of a soundtrack to go with it. However, it has to be the right soundtrack ;).

When I write, I am standing in a my study, a small room about 6ft by 10ft, mostly desk and shelves, but I do have a rather ancient pair of speakers attached to my computer and they are the best speakers I've ever had for any PC. The speakers sit on the windowsill behind my desk and blast out whatever I want to hear.

Actually, blast, is a bit of an exaggeration, because I don't like the music to actually hurt when I'm listening to it. I have no idea how those people in cars that want to share their beats with the entire road, even when their windows are closed, can actually bear to be in the car with music that loud. Anyway, you get the idea, loud, but not too loud ;)

So, back to my soundtrack. Depending on what I am writing, I like different types of music.

Thanks, I think, to my days watching Highlander (The Series) and writing fanfic for it, plus inspiration from brilliant 80's soundtracks like The Lost Boys, I like my fights scenes (hand to hand combat, fire fights, clashes between supernatural creatures) accompanied by strong beats such as rock:
Bon Jovi, Queen, Tokio Hotel, Elliot Minor, Adam Lambert, Within Temptation (although sometimes WT are a bit too dramatic for me to write to).

The scenes then play out in my head a bit like those 80's style music videos that told a story and the action flows really quickly from my brain, through my fingers onto the page. It's amazing how quickly a vampire fight can hit the page when each strike goes to the beat of a drum - I wrote the final fight scene in Death In The Family to Adam Lambert :).

Sometimes, for other types of action scenes, if there's a lot of technology involved, I tend more to electro pop tunes to write those sequences. Fast paced and, again, with a driving beat that pushes on the pace of the scene. Aqua, Affirmation by Savage Garden, Duran Duran has some excellent tracks as well, Tatu also and Adam Ant.

At the other end of the spectrum, for a scene with a slow pace, my music has to match. Clannad, Libera, The Alan Parsons Project, gentle music that becomes part of the background. I still like music there, moving me along, but my brain takes longer to work over scenes where there is subtle emotion and more personal/mental interaction, less umph, more metaphysical, as it were. Hence, I need to be able to ignore the music at times and at others let it still pull me along.

So that's what I like to listen to when I'm writing, but there are two exclusions, one in music, one in scenes that I cannot mix:

Firstly, the type of music I can never have playing when I'm writing is songs from the musicals. I'm a singer, I love singing and if you play me a song from a musical, I will start singing along and thus, typing those words into my scene - not good if I'm in the middle of a serious conversation about rescuing kidnapped children and start typing 'small and white, Edelweiss' now is it? ;P





And the one type of scene I cannot write with any music playing, or any distractions for that matter, is a sex scene. I have to agree with my sister on this one, a/ I need to be in the right mood exactly to write them and b/ I have to be totally focused on what I'm writing. It's not so much making sure the complexities of sexual interaction are correct, that, in many ways, is exactly the same challenge as in a fight scene - making sure someone doesn't accidentally chop their own arm off is very similar to making sure I keep track of where my pair, or sometimes more, of lovers' hands etc are wandering. No, it's making sure of the emotional response of the characters in a sex scene: I just have never found any type of music that fits with writing that aspect of sex.

So, there you have it, my soundtracks to writing. Do you have any particular albums/songs that are favourites when you're writing, or painting or generally creating?

P.S. Check out other folk doing the A to Z April Challenge.

L is for Launch

So, what does it take to launch your imagination?

For me, it can be absolutely anything, but then I am a bit of a Dilly Daydream ;).

Boredom: well, actually, boredom is a bit of a misnomer for me, because I have never really been bored in my life, because, if I have a lull in life where I have to sit around and I don't have anything to distract me, like my Kindle, then my brain flicks into gear and takes me off somewhere that is definitely not boring. It can be into the current scene of a story I'm working on, or back over the plot of a TV show I watched the night before, usually with an added fanfiction twist where I play with the plot and do it the way I would have liked it to pan out.

I've done this ever since I was a child, and not always when I was bored - hands up who has ever had the moment when someone looks at you expectantly and you know they said something, or asked you a question, but you have no clue what they just said, because you were off somewhere casting magic spells, or defeating evil wizards? :).

Inspiration: sparks for my imagination can come from many different places.

Music, which I'll be talking about next, so I won't go into much detail here, is a fantastic source of emotion and that can throw me into all sorts of scenes from the drama of heavy beats to the delicate beauty of gentle classics.

Also, when I'm watching TV, a line, an action, a plot point can all strike a chord in me and can do one of two things, make me want to write fanfic for a show, or give me ideas of my own launched from that minutia. This works especially well when the chord resonates with something I'm already working on and a light bulb goes off giving me a direction for that piece. I'm not lifting the ideas directly from the TV in these situations, that would be boring and no use to my imagination at all, but seeing how another writer has approached an idea sometimes really helps kick my own thoughts into gear.

A view sometimes makes me want to write as well. I have been lucky enough

to go on holiday to some beautiful places and a misty morning, or a sweeping valley have more than once inspired me to pick up my keyboard. My favourite scene, though, is water, and anyone looking through my photographs, would see a lot of shots of water, from cascading waterfalls to close up trickles of streams reflecting the light. I find flowing water majestic, and dangerous and beautiful, and it carries my thoughts away with it. Many an epic journey, or a heated battle has been crafted when I have been close to cascades. :)

Deliberation: since I want to make a living at this writing thing, sometimes, even if I don't feel like it, I have to damn well knuckle down and kick my imagination into gear, and, like any physical muscle, with persistence, my imagination has grown stronger and more reactive. I've already written about writer's block in B is Barren, so, I won't go into more detail here, but practice is a great boon to not only a writer's craft, but to their productivity as well, I find.

So, when I do daydream, or, as I prefer to call it, invest in my writing future, ;P, it comes to me like a film strip. I suppose since I grew up with TV and film, this is how my imagination works, which is great for visual descriptions, and okay for emotional response as well, but one sense I have to remember to engage in writing is the sense of smell. Words, unlike TV, can encompass all the senses, and I think that is why any writer has to go out and experience bits of the world. I don't mean they have to go and stand in a milk factory so they can set a scene in one, but they can use the experience of having mistakenly opened a bottle of off milk to remember that rancid smell of the not-so-fresh dairy produce. Without those little moments of memory, writing would be flat and grey and it is everything we have experienced that feeds our imaginations.

They say, write what you know, which, taken literally would also be very boring, since I don't think people want to know all about writing project plans and timetables for students, which is my current job, but knowing can be adapted and used to spark much more imaginative things. I may not be writing about a project manager any time soon in my stories, but I write about leaders and organisers all the time, and one of the skills I've had to learn as a PM is persuasion, something a writer has to also use both in beguiling their readers and in any scene involving negotiation. So, even the mundane can be the spring board for inspiration. :)

Do you have anything that particularly inspires you?

P.S. Check out other folk doing the A to Z April Challenge.

K is for Knowing

Today on the A to Z Blogging Challenge, my offering is a short piece of fiction.








Author's Note

I've been mulling over this Young Adult universe, The Hidden War, since I first adapted a Harry/Draco fanfic story premise for use in The Wittegen Press Giveaway Games. I found myself writing two stories in The Hidden War series when I'd only planned one, and then I found myself writing a drabble, It Takes Two, for FB3X Drabble Cascades as well and I finally decided that this universe is worth expanding into more stories. So, I have decided to begin serialising the next story, A Fork In The Road, here on my blog.

The stories are based in a Great Britain where, unknown to us ordinary folk, there is a war raging, The Hidden War. The stories follow two young men thrust into the war by birth, on opposite sides: Damon Wulfres, son of one of the most powerful and ruthless demon raisers in the land; Zac Kithrall, a demon-seer and would-be slave to any raiser who can take him.

The other stories are called, The End Of The Journey and A New Path, and are available in the Giveaway Games Anthologies, and The End Of The Journey is now available standalone, A New Path will be released soon.

Suitable for a General Audience

A Fork In The Road

(The Hidden War #3 - Part 1)

by

Sophie Duncan

J is for Job

Until June 2012, writing was, for me, a hobby that I was trying to make a little money at. My full time job was as a project manager. However, then redundancy loomed and, for me, it was a time to take stock and decide if I wanted to change direction in my career: it was. I calculated from the redundancy payout that I had up to a year to concentrate on increasing my writing portfolio and begin to generate a readership for my books before I had to start looking for a new job.

Thus, from that June until Feb 2013, I put my head down and began working as a writer, publisher, publicist and anything else I needed to be to raise my writing profile. My efforts have been moderately successful and continue, but in late Feb, an opportunity arose which offered me half-time work as a project manager, a guaranteed income, and, being of a practical nature, I decided that splitting my time between a salaried job and writing was a fair compromise to allow me to continue pursuing my dream long term.

So, it's a win/win situation and, before I go on, I want to say that I feel extremely lucky that this opportunity came along.

However, since announcing this to friends and family, I have been irked by a certain response which, although not universal when it did arise, made me want to throw things. Some of my friends congratulated me on getting a proper job and that attitude got to me. I have been working incredibly hard, sometimes upwards of 15 hours a day to write, edit, format, publish, publicise and network my books and I consider myself a writing professional with two years of experience running my own publishing company. Just because the returns are modest in monetary terms and I cannot yet earn a living wage with my writing does not mean it is any less a career and worthy of being called a proper job.

I am proud of the skills I have developed as a project manager. Even if I say so myself, I'm good at it and I can put some of those skills to use in the writing business as well as IT. Those skills also, at the moment, bring in my major income. However, that does not mean I see them as better, or more important than the skills I have and will always continue to develop as a writer. I do not assess my success by how much money  each set of skills is worth.

As far as I am concerned, I have two jobs that demand equal time and effort from me regardless of which one pays the most, because that is what I have committed to. One is a long term goal, the other is short term practicality, but each is as valid as the other.

Money is not everything and I think we should stop judging worthiness by how much income something can generate.

P.S. Check out other folk doing the A to Z April Challenge.

I is for Idol

I'm borrowing the adult warning label from Fantasy Boys XXX, because today, I promised some folks that I'd write the next few scenes to a drabble from the FB3X Drabblerotic series and they're going to be distinctly adult in nature. The original drabble was written under E is for Egyptology and I have a plan for a full short story, to go up on FB3X, but for now, to keep my promise, here, brought to you by the letter I, for Idol, is the rest of the scene that follows directly on from the drabble. :)

This content is suitable
only for an Adult
Audience