Month: December 2007

Welcome to the second installment of the Regal Crest Authors’ Blog Tour! The interviews of Paula Offutt, Jane Vollbrecht, and Renee Bess continues here on Thought Patterns for this round. This is the schedule for the entire tour:

http://www.sandrabarret.com/tour.html held the first part of the interviews

https://paulaoffutt.com/blog/ – 12/3/2007
http://www.janevollbrecht.com – 12/17/2007
http://www.myspace.com/fiestaroad – 12/31/2007
http://www.reneebess.com – 1/14/2008

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Any real-life situations in your story that you’d care to admit to?

Paula Offutt (Butch Girls Can Fix Anything) – The way Kelly comes up with a temporary fix for the leaky ceiling in Grace’s house? That’s in my own kitchen. It was there before I wrote the book and still is. We really need a new roof.

Jane Vollbrecht (Close Enough) – There are often seemingly mundane situations that crop up in every day life that then wend their way into a plot line. While the story itself is total fiction, there are vignettes that came from actual experiences. For example, the scene with the two women on the hiking trail in the later stages of Part II of Close Enough actually happened to someone I know — but I’ll never reveal her true identity.

Renee Bess (Breaking Jaie) – I’ll admit only that I fantasize a heck of a lot.

What’s your writing routine?

Paula Offutt (Butch Girls Can Fix Anything) – There isn’t one. Not really. I have a set of writing music on my mp3 player. I have a writing hat somewhere. But it’s black and seems to attract critter fur with far too much gusto.

Jane Vollbrecht (Close Enough) – Ha! As if I have one. As is true for so many people, real life keeps getting in the way. I’ve found, though, that when I’m truly ready to tell a story, everything else that previously seemed like constant distraction fades into the background until I’ve got at least the first draft captured. For me, writing isn’t just putting the words down on a page, it’s also doing things like feeling the storyline germinate in my mind, hearing the characters grow into their voices and sensing them beginning their arcs, seeing the settings, and doing whatever relevant research is necessary to make the details of the plot authentic. Knowing that I’m taking the actions that support the actual writing keeps me from feeling like a “failure” if I don’t produce X amount of words on any given day.

Renee Bess (Breaking Jaie) – It varies, so I suppose that means that I don’t have a routine. I try to write every day. Sometimes I write all day and into the night. Other times I write for a short spurt only.

Where did you get the idea for your story?

Paula Offutt (Butch Girls Can Fix Anything) – When we (my partner and I) did something we thought impossible, we had a little song and dance (a very tame Chubby Checker Twist). The words are “Butch girls can do anything”. I took those words and built a story to fit it (later the one word was changed). In 2004, I participated in my first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo takes place each November) and chose that idea as my project. At the end of November, I set it aside a few months. I began editing it in January, 2005 and sold it a year later.

Jane Vollbrecht (Close Enough) – One of the common experiences that we all seem to have is meeting a person for the first time and thinking, “She reminds me of someone. . .but I can’t quite place who it is.” A number of years ago, I accompanied a friend while she visited her elderly aunt – a woman I’d never met before.
As we chatted with the aunt, I was increasingly struck by how much her physical characteristics (height, build, eye color, and so forth) and her mannerisms (expressions of speech, gestures, sense of humor, etc.) brought to a mind a friend I’d known for many years. This friend was adopted, and knew nothing whatsoever about her birth mother or the circumstances surrounding her conception and adoption; she had often commented on how she wished she might someday learn at least some of the details of her arrival on the planet.
At first I was amused by the strong resemblances that I saw between this newly-met older woman and my friend of long standing. Then, as I reflected on their respective ages, a “what if” chain of events began to form in my mind. What if this woman (the aunt) had become pregnant out of wedlock in the early 1940’s, around the time of the outbreak of World War II? What if she chose to surrender her baby for adoption? What if the situation surrounding that child’s birth was something no one else in the family knew about? How did the mother cope? What happened to her child? What do their lives look like today?
After that visit with the elderly aunt, I went home and started writing the story that evolved into Close Enough. While it’s not remotely likely that my friend and this woman whom I met only once and very briefly are truly connected to one another in any way, in my imagination (and now in my novel), they are eternally linked. In constructing the framework for the story, I frequently found myself asking two questions: “What makes a family?” and, “Which matters more: how we’re alike, or how we differ?”
In writing Close Enough, I tried to approach the concept of “family” from the perspective of all of the links, both known and unknown, that bind us to others, and how sometimes, just drawing near to knowing what we seek brings us close enough.

Renee Bess (Breaking Jaie) – I couldn’t avoid writing Breaking Jaie. The characters and the plot came tumbling out before I could stop them. I find myself needing to write stories about racially diverse characters, because that type of diversity is a large part of my life, and because the Jaie Baxters and Terez Overtons of the world need their stories to be told. Over the course of my teaching career I listened carefully to my students whenever they wanted to share bits and pieces of their lives with me. During the last fifteen years or so, the LGBT kids became more visible and more vocal. Some of their stories remained with me, but they are incomplete adventures. I wanted to craft a novel exploring the adult version of some of those young people. What happens to the socio-economically disenfranchised young black lesbian who has to overcome the uber-homophobia of her parent and the low expectations of society? Does she use her maturity to confront the world or to blend in; to exploit women or to love one woman in particular; to continue the generations-old class system among African Americans or to walk over that bridge that joins all women of color?