Today’s interview was a real pleasure for us to conduct & hopefully, you will be able to feel that while reading! It also focuses a lot on the beauty and importance of the LGBT community, which is to say focuses on something Charlotte & me both wish we could talk about all the time. It’s always incredible to chat with authors who share our exact feelings.
Read on to find out more about that but also, among other things, music and road trips!
Hi Maria, thank you so much again for agreeing to talk with us!
Hi!! You’re very welcome.
Let’s start at the beginning. How did you first get into writing?
I’ve been writing stories since I was about ten. I often wrote them in my school notebooks when I was supposed to be studying. In college, I studied English with a concentration on creative writing (poetry.) During college and in my 20s, I wrote for fun, but didn’t consider doing anything serious. It wasn’t until my early 30s that I started focusing on drafting novels in earnest. My career has always involved quite a bit of writing, and that can lead to a lot of burnout! Now that I’m in a more strategic role (and not just pumping content out as fast as I can), it gives me a lot more bandwidth to focus on creative endeavours.
Oh that makes total sense. We’re definitely glad you have more energy to let out the creativity through novels now.
I’m so glad too. Writing is very therapeutic for me when it’s not being incredibly stressful.
Well then, do you have favourite genres to read and write?
Fantasy is by far my favourite genre to read. I have so much admiration for the world building that goes into a fantasy. I love a little romance in my fantasies, too. I tend to bring elements of fantasy into my writing regardless of the setting.
It’s just very freeing, isn’t it? And are there any genres or tropes you wouldn’t write?
I probably wouldn’t write hard science fiction or high fantasy. When it comes to tropes, nothing sticks out to me as something I wouldn’t write. Some are problematic, but I believe you can get creative with subverting problematic tropes.
A lot of people seem very wary of writing science fiction, which I totally get. It’s a difficult thing to get right!
Fragile Remedy is light science fiction/dystopian. That’s a space I’m much more comfortable playing in. I love space operas as well!
We need more of space operas, to be honest. How do you get inspiration for your books?
Music is a HUGE inspiration to me. When I was a little girl, I’d sit in the back seat making up music videos to the songs on the radio. The way that certain songs make me feel become a huge part of my writing process. I make playlists for each project and play them almost exclusively while drafting and revising. The movies and books I loved as a kid were very formative to who I am now as an author. I love high stakes, I love emotional vulnerability in my main characters. I attribute this to the types of stories and characters I fell in love with when I was young.
Related: Listen to Maria’s playlist for Fragile Remedy here.
My next question was going to be about weather or not you have writing playlists… But also, can I just say, I love the idea of making up music videos on road trips, it’s absolutely adorable.
Fragile Remedy began as a fragment of an idea while listening to Some Nights by fun. Which is how my MC ended up named Nate. The song and story have nothing in common — but it comes down to how a song made me feel at a specific moment. (Honestly, usually when I’m driving.) I’m working on a draft right now that came to life while listening to Elton John’s Burn Down the Mission.
Really, art is out there to make us Feel Things so it’s only logical one form of it would inspire you to create another. What’s your writing process itself, though? At what point do you let other people read your drafts and who are they?
I LOVE having a zero draft reader. When I first drafted Fragile Remedy, I emailed my progress every night to a couple of close friends. Right now, I’m drafting in more of a vacuum and I really need to line up a victim or two so I can share progress. That being said, I think I’ve matured as a writer to be able to carry on without constant feedback. Typically I draft for 3-5 months and then revise before it’s ready for a serious read from a CP, editor, or my agent. I try to hit 500 words a day about 5 days a week if I’m in drafting mode. On good days, that’s often closer to 2000 words a day, but it’s rarely every day of the week. I work full time at a pretty demanding job, and I’m a single mom. I always write in the evenings.
Oh my god, how do you find time to write AT ALL??? I love the idea of a constant feedback, it takes you back to the time of writing fanfiction as a kid and getting comments on every chapter you posted. Great times.
Yes! I wrote a LOT of fanfiction as I was developing my writing skills. Constant feedback is very motivating, but it can be a huge issue if you’re used to relying on it and you need to train yourself to be productive without being encouraged. Plus, revisions aren’t the same for fanfic. It’s usually “are there any grievous errors?” (At least for me. I know there are many fandom authors who take revisions VERY seriously. I usually used a couple of CPs for spell checking and basic content edits.)
Especially if your story is in chapters and you put them out there one by one, right? It’s not like you can just randomly start rewriting the whole thing as people are reading it. Books are definitely better for the authors in that way.
As an unrepentant pantser, I would really struggle with releasing content chapter by chapter. My revisions are typically massive rewrites.
Summarise your upcoming book in up to 5 words and a meme.
Amazing.
Man those five words are hard.
We know, sorry.
Survival means learning to trust.
Oh man. Oh boy. You already mentioned the media you’ve consumed as a child influencing your work. So which three authors would you say shaped your writing the most?
Ellen Kushner, Anne McCaffrey and Naomi Novik. I loved Marion Zimmer Bradley’s work very much as a young girl but I don’t feel comfortable promoting her writing.
Oh god, yes, learning about her was a huge disappointment. So on a lighter note: if (when!) your books were to be made into movies, who would you like to direct them?
Patty Jenkins or the Wachowskis.
Those are some great choices and I love how they already say a lot about the vibe of your story! And for something that is also very important to us & what we put a lot of emphasis on when blogging. What does ownvoices LGBT representation mean to you?
First of all, it’s an important distinction to me that Fragile Remedy‘s primary relationship is between two cis young men. As a queer woman, I wouldn’t call that ownvoices.
Yeah, we definitely agree on that.
Ownvoices LGBT rep is both about giving kids rep and giving marginalized authors opportunities. It’s very important to me to amplify and prioritize authors who share a marginalisation with their characters. There are some amazing ownvoices books coming out next year from authors like Adam Sass and Phil Stamper. I had a small group of queer friends in high school but we didn’t talk about it. We gravitated toward each other, though. It was important to me to show that it isn’t UNUSUAL for most of the people in a friend group (or in this case a gang of scrappy scavengers) to be queer. I’ve always hated seeing criticism of LGBTQ+ books in terms of “it doesn’t make sense that so many characters are gay.”
Related: we interviewed Phil Stamper.
The “why is everyone gay” take is such a ridiculous one, isn’t it! Like you say, we flock together! Even if we don’t really know our friends are LGBT, we just end up being friends anyway, since our shared experiences make sense to us.
Absolutely. Writing queer YA has been a healing process for me in some ways, because I felt very lonely and isolated as a teen when it came to my sexuality. I have an ownvoices book on submission right now and I dearly hope it finds a home. My MC is bisexual and anxious and I adore her and want to share her with the world.
Fingers crossed!
Romance is present in Fragile Remedy, but the book is more about relationships than romance. The relationships we develop with friends, with mentors… and with ourselves. Nate has very toxic relationships — especially when it comes to his self worth.
I feel like this is also something a lot of LGBT books share – that sense of community, the found families. Which makes sense, given how often we have to rely on them ourselves.
Absolutely. Nate has a complicated relationship with his family of origin, and I think readers will relate to that tension even if they can’t relate to being created by scientists. 😉
What’s one piece of advice you would like to give your younger self?
The same advice I give young people when I give talks at schools: every bit of writing you do matters. There’s no special official way to practice being a writer. So start with what you enjoy and grow from there.
That’s a great advice, especially when so many older generation authors still seem to think fanfiction, for example, isn’t real writing. And one last question: if you could have dinner with one member of the LGBT community, dead or alive, who would it be?
I would love to have dinner with Tessa Thompson.
Who of us wouldn’t…. Actually, wait. I forgot to ask the most important question! And you even already mentioned some debut authors… Rec us some great LGBT books you’ve read recently!
We Set the Dark on Fire, Sorcery of Thorns, and I’m very excited for Reverie today!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Ingrande Mora is the Content Director at award-winning digital marketing agency Big Sea. Maria lives in Florida with her two dogs, two cats, and two children, and is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She can often be found writing at her stand-up desk, surrounded by house plants.
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