So… this is a blog hop. I answer questions about writing, then pass them on to three other authors. Thank you Leah Ness (http://leahnessransomed.wordpress.com/) for inviting to to participate in this!

 

What am I working on?
Well, I’m working on three different books at the same time! *bows* The one I hope to finish first is The Viking Captive (I’ve posted some of it on here). It’s about an Irish girl named Riley O’Mally and her dog Madigan who get captured by Vikings and sold in to slavery. Riley escapes and the rest of the story follows them outwitting Vikings, trying to get home and (through one good viking woman) finding out about God. (Riley O’Mally was my alter-ego for quite a while when I was littler)

The second one is a sequel to my first book that I finished, “Odd Team Out”. You can get that here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/writefury
It’s about a girl named Maple who was put in an upgraded metal suit with a lot of cool gadgets, but didn’t want to be a lab rat for the rest of her life, so she ran away. Enter our heroes. While Jean has her doubts about how heroic this mission is, She, Cobalt and Gilligan are assigned to track Maple down and bring her back. But the stakes are raised when they find out that someone else is also after Maple and has the intention of using her as a weapon for his own evil purposes.

And the third is actually a bedtime story, “Just a Sidekick”, that I’ve been telling my six-year-old brother in installments. So start with the premise that there’s this town and it has so many superheros that they made a school for them to learn how to use their abilities correctly. The main character is Dallas Knight, who can teleport short-range, but can’t control when it happens and does it when he’s nervous. But, despite his strange power, he’s the Sidekick of the town’s celebrated superhero “Amazing Man” and assists him in fighting off the mysterious, masked villain: Dark. But then Dark demands the next great superhero of the generation be handed over to him and a contest is held to see who it is. Dallas enters… and wins. When good and evil start an all out battle over him, and Dallas finds out more about his previously unclear past he starts to wonder if he’s really more than just a Sidekick.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

For one, christian sci-fis are pretty rare and that’s just what Odd Team Out is. And when I write a christian story, the character doesn’t start out christian. Most of the time I have them start out not knowing anything on the subject, then they run into someone who tells them about God and that changes their life and the course of the story. And on the sci-fi front, I mostly put in inventions that I can explain. Like: “Here’s a cyborg suit. It runs on coke, has a few gadgets bolted on and is basically just a cool metal jumpsuit”. Not: “Here’s this super-cool gun that can shoot ice and flames at the same time and it mind controls whoever you shoot it at. Don’t ask me how it works, I have no idea.”

Why do I write what I do?

With each book, It’s different. Riley O’Mally was a story I acted out with my sister in a big empty room. Madigan and Magnus are my stuffed animal dogs. I just thought the story was really good and wanted to write it down. With Odd Team Out, I got a necklace and started thinking “What if the necklace was a very valuable treasure and right at this very moment a bad guy is looking through the entire world, trying to find this very thing?” Then, I made up a story, acted it out with my sister, and wrote it down. So, most of the time, it’s a story that goes with a game.

How does my writing process work?

1. Come up with a plot line.

2. Draw pictures of the characters.

3. Start writing.

4. Kind of peter out on the rush of coming up with the story.

5. Come up with a chapter outline.

6. Keep writing.

7. Get distracted with another book I want to write.

8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for a while.

9. Finish book.

 

And now… I will pass this on to three other blogger/writers.

1. Rivkah Muckingham of the Fruitful Vine Wife blog that you can see here: http://fruitfulvinewife.wordpress.com/

2. Elisabeth Tenbrink and Catsi Eccer of the Windows to the Soul blog that you can see here: http://windowtothesoulcontests.blogspot.com/

3. Josephine Paige of the Paperclips and Pencils blog that you can see here: http://paperclipandpencil.blogspot.com/
(Josie did the cover art for my book “Odd Team Out”.)

Good luck, guys!

~writefury