Story title: "Rotting Away."
1. How did you hear about the Blood Is Thicker anthology, and what convinced you to spend days (weeks? months?) crafting a story about the attempted murder of a character by a member of their family on leap day?
Guelph has a genre writers’ get together every few months, and there was one at the end of January. I got talking to someone I hadn’t met before, and he told me about this anthology he’d been published in a few years back with Iguana Books, and that they were running that same contest again this year. I went online that afternoon to look into it.
The first line we were given was both so specific and vague that I was captivated. I immediately started brainstorming what ‘family’ could mean, and plotting out reasons why someone would be trying to kill the protagonist. I’ve always adored stories with interesting characters and fast-paced plots, and with an opening line like that, I was hooked right away.
2. What was the writing process like? Did your story come out with a bang, or did you struggle to make something of the premise?
February was a crazy month for me, personally. I was a bridesmaid in my brother’s wedding, then I was house/dog sitting for them, then we had family staying with us from out of country. I had come up with the concept within a few days of hearing about the anthology, but wound up writing the ending the last day of the contest.
The premise came pretty quickly, but I had the same struggles I always do with a short story; namely the short part. The more I thought about my idea, the more I began to build up the world and the history and the characters, and the real struggle became what should actually be included. I ended up taking out a fair bit later in edits.
3. How long have you been writing, and what are some of your writing goals and/or successes so far?
Like most authors, I’ve been writing since I was a kid.
I graduated university with my Bachelor of Science in Wildlife Biology and a minor in English, but I knew around my third year that once I finished my degree I didn’t want to do anything but write. So I’ve made writing my priority for about five years now, getting certificates of Creative Writing from both the University of Guelph and Conestoga College. I wrote for the online University of Guelph paper The Cannon for a bit, and I’ve been published in The Waterloo Record. My biggest accomplishment so far, besides being published in this anthology, was making it to the fourth and final round of the NYC Midnight Challenge flash fiction competition in 2015. I placed in the top 40 of over 2,500 people worldwide.
My main focus right now though is to edit and publish my debut novel Dragon Kin.
4. What’s your favourite line or passage in your submission, and why?
Derek tossed his head back. “Look, I know you know how this normally goes. One of us tries to kill you, you’re somehow unaffected, you wander off, and then we go back and explain it to everyone and wait until the next leap year to try again. I’m starting to feel like Wile E. Coyote at the Olympics or something. But I’m not here for that now.”
I just always liked the contrast of this daunting task of trying to kill one of their own every leap year being compared to some cartoon coyote whose plans always blow up in his face. I thought that it really summed up Derek’s character too, the way he’s always trying to downplay everything, especially when things start getting too serious.
5. What’s your writing routine?
On weekdays I try to update my blog or social media first thing in the morning, maybe answer some emails, then I write for about an hour. After lunch I write a few more hours, and if needed, I try to do any reading or research in the late afternoon. Before bed I pace around the house for hours, talking to myself and scribbling in my journal or on the windows, working out characters and plots and world building, usually focusing on the scenes I’ll be working on the next morning. I do have window markers by the way, if that makes me sound any less insane.
On the weekend, I work a bit on any contests or short story submissions that I have coming up. I usually try to enter a few competitions a year.
6. What do you do for a living (or if you’re retired, what did you do), and what do you do for fun?
I write the majority of my day, but I make enough to get by on odd jobs, like a bit of before/after school childcare, and participating in food studies.
For fun I love to go to the movie theatre, read and hangout with friends. I sometimes practice a bit of guitar or keyboard. I’ve been trying to branch out some more, so I’ve been learning calligraphy and origami, and take whatever workshops or online classes I can for writing, editing, publishing or any other topic that interests me. Right now I’m following a free online lecture series on Introduction to Psychology to get inside my characters’ heads a little better.
7. If you could have a lunch date with any person living or dead, who would it be and why?
In the past, I would have said Nikola Tesla. I would love to talk to him about his plan for free energy or the death ray design he’d made, but now I would have to say my dad. A lot has changed with the whole family in the three years since he’s passed, and to just get a few hours to talk would mean everything to me. I would love to show him pictures of my brother’s wedding or my sister’s daughter born just a few months ago, or to share the story I’m about to publish. He had always been more of an analytical and linearly thinking person, but both my parents have always supported my writing. In fact after he passed, my mom was going through some of his boxes and found a story I had written when I was three or four years old. It was before I could spell, so the only way to tell what it was about was by looking at the drawings I’d put with it. I think it must have been one of, if not the, first story I ever wrote.
8. What’s a favourite book that you’ve read in the past five years? Notice we didn’t ask you to name your ultimate favourite. We’re not monsters!
That’s still a very hard question to answer, so I’ll just go by the last book I read that I really enjoyed, which was Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I love those stories that just pull you into another world of high action and quirky characters.
Although my favourite books are still the Harry Potter series. I refuse to pick one of them. The Chamber of Secrets was the first more adult-length book I’d ever read. My mom read The Philosopher’s Stone to me, but got so engrossed in the series that she read ahead and I had to muddle through the second one on my own. We started lining up for them at midnight from The Goblet of Fire onwards, but my mom would always let me read the book first since I would finish it in a few days. I would only leave the house during that time when absolutely necessary. And even then I would be sneaking paragraphs under desks and walking down the street.
9. What else should readers know about you?
I’m working on the rewrites of my first novel Dragon Kin right now, a new adult epic fantasy with two stories interwoven. The first about a young man fleeing his cult-like village, and searching for help to free his family from the control of the very man that ordered his death, only to discover the outside world of rebel attacks, dragon oaths, and corrupt peace keeping-armies turned slavers might be a lot darker and crueler than anything he’d endured before. The other story is about a not-quite human character who is abandoned in the Mountains as a child, and who is now struggling to find a cure for a mysterious creature’s bite that is slowly stealing the only thing she’s ever been able to rely on: her superhuman strength and endurance.
You can follow my blog at kaelra.wordpress.com for updates on my book’s progress, and for my musings on what I’ve been learning about the writing and rewriting process as I go along!