Today on the blog I am pleased to introduce you to Emily Ryan-Davis! I took a peek at Emily’s official EC bio and the first line had me laughing.
“Emily Ryan-Davis lives in Maryland with her loving husband and hateful guinea pig.”
I want pictures of the guinea pig!!!
Welcome Emily!
What or who inspired you to first start writing?
As a kid I wanted to “be creative” – I didn’t want to be a teacher or a lawyer, I wanted to “be creative”. I tried to fake inspiration and would draw random shapes thinking if I drew enough randomness something artistic would emerge (it didn’t by the way). I was a reader, though, and I read a LOT from ages 9-17 (before I discovered online chat RPGs, where I could write with other people instead of reading by myself). Somewhere along the way I realized I couldn’t create anything that made me feel like I’d Made Something by drawing, but I could do that by writing. So I started writing. I was off and on for a long time and then I hit a stride and was just on. I don’t know that I can attribute the writing to a who or a what because when I was 13 and tried my first romance novel, I didn’t know any other writers, I just knew the books I read and I knew I wanted to “be creative”.
If you could go back in time and lay claim to any book written, which one would you want and why?
I’d like to lay claim to Orson Scott Card’s HART’S HOPE, which is one of few books I look at and think “beautiful”. The worldbuilding, the character journeys, the prose style, the language. I read HART’S HOPE and marvel at the beauty of it and wish I’d created something so lovely.
When you are writing and hit a stumbling block, what do you do to try and get over the hurdle? Depends on what my goals are at the time. If I’m nowhere close to the end of a project and don’t have deadlines of any sort, I sometimes just walk away and spend a month focusing on diet and exercise, or on reading through my library’s romance section, instead of writing.
If I’m focused on the end and I get stuck I find people who will read and brainstorm with me until I talk myself into a decision that needs to be made (my usual source of stumbling – I don’t like to commit when I know the decision I make won’t be reversible without undoing a lot of work).
What was the strangest thing that ever inspired a scene/book? What was the end result?
In 2002, I worked at a nonprofit music school. I was the daytime desk person and I was often there before students and teachers started arriving. I was usually the person available to unlock the doors and let piano movers or piano tuners inside when they needed to perform maintenance or move a piano upstairs for an upcoming recital. One such time, a team of piano movers showed up to haul a huge piano up into the gymnasium. They weren’t the regular guys. No, these guys were big, burly, tattood and a little foul-mouthed.
This happened at the end of October when I was frantically trying to find a premise for a NaNoWriMo project. The tattood foul-mouthed piano mover instantly settled in and demanded to be a character but all I could think about was him dropping his end of the piano and finding a fairy princess inside.
Even for me, that premise was a little outlandish. I couldn’t figure out how to make it work in terms of an adult relationship. I kept picturing the fairy princess as some young little girl and kept thinking of her as Thumbelina—but what the heck was Thumbelina doing inside a piano? I had no idea what to do. I put it all aside until four years later I named the foul-mouthed piano mover (Francis Ryan O’Grady, in case you’re wondering) and realized his initials spelled FROG. So…maybe I wasn’t so far off on the Thumbelina angle.
Anyway, to make a long story short (and it is short, coming in at about 6k), I wrote a paragraph of “Changing Thumbelina” and entered it in a Nathan Bransford blog contest. The paragraph won first place and a year later I got around to actually writing the whole short story – which is available at Freya’s Bower, by the way. So, that’s the end result.
If I had more time and “what’s the SECOND strangest thing” question, I’d tell you about the result of a hope chest, a licorice whip and a shapeshifter… but hopefully you’ll be able to read that result yourself later this year.
If you could have supper with any of your characters, which one would you choose and where would you take them?
I’d like to have supper with Rory, the hero in a gothic romance I’ve been playing with for YEARS now. I’d probably just take him to the nearest inn for dinner because restaurants weren’t quite the thing in his time period, and I’d spend my time staring at him and demanding to know why he picked me.
Is there a type of story you would like to write, but are terrified you wouldn’t do a proper job? What is it and why?
I’m…not really? I used to think I couldn’t write futuristic at all but I’m slowly learning I can. I’m up for a challenge when it comes to “type of story” and I get a small ego-kick out of being able to say “Hey, I can write gothic AND futuristic! Look how diverse I am!” I would like to write a steampunk romance and I might some day if the current batch coming out doesn’t turn out the way I want it to (lots of steampunky broody heroes, lots of hot steam-powered-toy friskiness), but I’m not going to anytime soon – not really out of fear but because I’ve decided I need a genre that I can just read to enjoy instead of reading to write.
If you could sit down with one author from any time in history, who would it be? What questions would you want to ask them?
I’m not sure. I don’t exactly identify with the author, I identify with the characters written by the author. Right now I’m completely hung up on the secondary characters in Elizabeth Hoyt’s latest release so I’d probably pick her and sit her down to grill her for answers about her heroine Temperance’s brothers (I sure hope they get books). Or maybe I’d glue myself to Carolyn Jewel and ask her to tell me more about Xia’s childhood. I love Xia.
If someone gave you a minion tomorrow, what would be the first task you’d ask them to complete?
I’d tell my minion to revise the three full-length novels I have growing mold out of neglect. I’m a very word-stingy writer who would rather throw it out and write something new than delete words already written and write them again on a very large scale. (The second task would probably involve cooking all my meals for me.)
E-books vs print books? E-readers vs. paper? Can’t we all just get along? What’s your preference?
I read both ebooks and print books and in some cases I read print books as digital files. I’m still on the fence about the usefulness of an e-reader to me because in general I don’t mind reading on the computer. I have a netbook so I can take files with me to bed as long as they’re PDF or HTML (my netbook is Linux and if any of you out there have the ear of digital reader software developers will you ask them to create a version of Adobe Digital Editions for Linux? Thanks).
I will be honest and say I buy fewer print books than I used to. This is primarily because I no longer want to keep every book I ever read (my tastes have refined a little in my old age) and an ebook I don’t want to keep or reread is much easier to store than a paper book. If I read an ebook I absolutely must own in print (BITING NIXIE by Mary Hughes, in case anybody wants a title of a recent read-in-e, bought-in-print). Aside from authors I know personally, I do most of my print-book reading via the library. I have an awesome library system.
If you were a superhero, what would your name be and what super powers would you possess? My name would be, um…Whimsical Writer Woman and my super powers would be creating a dirty story out of random blips of inspiration, like the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme.
What project are you working on next?
Next (and by “next” I’m talking at least another month from now because I have a few things going on in progress right now) I’m probably going to return to my sort-of futuristic working-titled “fauxgyptian”. Or I might let the m/f/m stepcest Marine story hold my attention after all.
How can readers find out more about you?
Hmm. Well, I’m not much of a blogger but I do like to e-mail. Readers can always just pull up an email message and write to say hey. Or they can poke around on the site I share with my friend, critique partner and sometimes-coauthor Elise Logan. That site is called Scorched Sheets and it’s at http://www.scorchedsheets.com. Probably the very best way to find out more about me is to read my stuff. I always tell people the excitement happens inside my head, not outside it, so I think the kinds of stories I write at any given time say more about me than just about anything besides sitting down and having a conversation with me. I’m all for having a conversation, though!
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