Brenna speaking at EPICon
This week we interview the non-stop Brenna Lyons, prolific writer, promoter, and wearer of many hats, sometimes all on the same day. Brenna is the current, third-time, president of EPIC, author of more than 60 published works, columnist, special needs teacher, wife, mother… Moreover, she’s a member in good standing of ERWA, WRW, TELL, IWOFA, WPM, MWW and Broad Universe. In her first five years published in novel-length, she’s finaled for 6 EPPIES (in five different categories), 3 PEARLS (including one Honorable Mention, second to Angela Knight), 2 CAPAS and a Dream Realm Award. She’s also taken Spinetingler’s Book of the Year for 2007. Brenna writes milieu-heavy dark fiction, mainly science fiction, fantasy and horror, straight genre, romance and erotic crosses, poetry, articles and essays. She teaches classes in everything from POV studies to advanced editing, networking to marketing.
LL: How/when did you decide to become a writer?
BL: This question always makes me pause, because my gut response is, “People choose to become writers?” The old joke about the writer who dies and gets to visit heaven and hell is fairly accurate. Whether I’m publishing or not, the muse is whipping me into gear and keeping me moving. There’s not a choice in writing. The muse won’t stand for anything less.
So, when did the muse hit me full steam? For poetry, when I was seven. I still have an early dated poem from that time period. I started writing articles and poetry for the school newspaper at 10.
In the meantime, I started competing in writing contests, at the suggestion of my English teachers. At 11, I became the youngest winner of Taproot (a YA poetry contest) of my time. At 13, I became one of the first girls to win a place in the Boy Scout Explorer’s program for journalism and was published in a local newspaper. At 15, I won a place in the Young Poet’s Symposium at the University of Pittsburgh. At 17, I won a four-year scholarship in a timed essay contest. When I have time for SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), I still compete in poetry contests, and I have a resume of professional contest wins now that amazes me.
I was convinced, in college, that I had no talent whatsoever for novel writing and playwriting. I woke up on April Fools Day 2001 (no kidding) with the idea for what I thought would be a short story. Two months later, I came up for air with nearly 100K of PROPHECY and realized two things: I hadn’t started at the beginning, and I hadn’t reached the end. I started working both ends at once, and less than two months later, I came up for air with the full 214K of the original serial draft. Two months after that, I came up for air with the full 165K draft of FAIRY DREAMS. After that, I started writing them in packs of four or more books at a time (the first three books of Night Warriors series and TYGERS together on the next shot). Oh…and I’m working on screenplays for a couple of my novels now. I seem to just grow into writing forms, when I’m ready to embrace them.
In just over 8 years, I’ve written 15 novels, 15 novellas, 27 novelettes, 14 short stories, a dozen flash fiction pieces, 2 poetry books, a children’s book, and countless articles. At the moment, I have more than 55 works in progress, 25 of them novels. I write in 19 series worlds, three of them overlapping and crossing over into each other.
LL: Describe your experience getting published for the first time. Would you have done anything differently?
BL: I tried the agent route, but agents didn’t know what to do with a first-time novelist with a serial novel…and the second book coming in at 165K…and the third at 145K. I racked up about 80 agent rejections, before I exhausted my search for an agent. I did manage to get a couple of partial reads, a full read from one agent, and was a biscuit from an agent contract, when she had a family emergency and stopped taking new clients. That’s the closest to an agent I’ve come yet, and I’m still amazed I made it that far with what I was offering, knowing the market as I now do.
At the time, green as I was, I didn’t know that you could approach publishers in NY directly, but with what I was offering, I probably wouldn’t have fared any better with NY editors than I had with NY agents.
I was on a bunch of lists for writers and readers, and one of them had a call for a poem, to be used in the release of Jacqueline Elliot’s FULL MOON INHERITANCE. I won her contest and got my poem in there. While talking to Jacquie, she suggested her indie publisher for my work, and the first two mega books signed within a few months. After that, indie editors found me…or I found them. I’ve met a lot of them through EPIC (The Electronically Published Internet Connection).
What would I do differently? When I was starting out, I didn’t know what to do or where to go. Few authors do. I don’t think the types of information I’ve since made available for aspiring and new authors was available then. If I had to do it over, I’d start with the advantages authors today have…the information on vetting publishers, risk management, marketing options, etc. I had to learn it all by trial and error and take my lumps. Today, authors can shortcut the lumps and learn from those who’ve already taken them.
LL: Do you preview your work to reader groups or fans?
BL: There is precisely one person who gets to read all of my work before it publishes (my best friend, Lisa). She’s my gut reader…the one who tells me if I fall short on the emotional and intellectual punch my books usually deliver. Other readers may get connected free reads and excerpts/sneak peeks. The full novels/stories only go to Lisa and the publishers they are contracted to.
LL: What is one of the nicest things a critic or fan has said about your work?
BL: Oh, that’s hard to choose. The most striking was when a fan said she was so freaked out by TYGERS that she threw away her son’s stuffed tigers. The second to that was when a reviewer said she wanted to kill me for creating another great world she’d have to beg and plead to get more of. One reviewer comment I’ll never forget was that one of my books had her crying at the drop of a hat for the last three weeks. I was horrified! I was about to apologize when she said: “I’ve read it four times in the last three weeks. It’s just that good. I can’t put it down.”
LL: What is your philosophy on writing?
Write the story that is.
I have a character-driven process, so very little happens without the character saying it’s so, and the story is as long as the characters say it has to be to tell it. If I try to change the character to fit the “plot,” the story stops flowing. The story turns the way the characters say it will. The only control I have over the whole process of writing a story is in setting the world rules, outside influences (roadblocks thrown at the characters that they don’t control), and the physical consequences to the choices they make, as determined by the world I’m creating around them.
Seriously, while you’re in the writing process, don’t concern yourself with what subgenre you’re going to market it as or what warning labels the book will have to carry or which publisher is going to be the best fit. Those are concerns for later, when the story is finished, and you have the specs in front of you. Even if you start out writing a story for a particular market, there is rarely only one right market for a book. If it grows out of the box for A, redirect it at B. If it fails at B, submit it to C.
LL: What makes your writing different from your peers? What kind of reading experience can you give your audience?
BL: The cross-genre markets are a balance beam, with books that are primarily romance with elements of sci fi/fantasy/paranormal/horror in them on one side and speculative fiction books with romance elements on the other…and the entire spectrum of true co-genre books in the middle. The co-genre books written by authors who are (first and foremost) romance authors and speculative fiction authors secondarily are more common than what I do.
I’m primarily a spec fic author and secondarily a romance author. That means I’m not afraid to let the ending fit the characters and story, even if it’s not traditional…and not happy. I’ll warn the readers that it’s not a HEA/HFN, but I won’t change an unhappy ending to a HEA, just to fit the ideal of the genre romance market. One of my books ends with every main character dead, but it’s the “happiest” ending they could have had.
It also means I’m not afraid to write dark, milieu-heavy, very realistic conflict. I’m not afraid of the hard choices. I’m not afraid to delve into the whole of human experience: laughter and tears alike. I’m not afraid to grind up a character and spit her out, because in my worlds, characters who are too stupid to live learn painful lessons…and sometimes die.
A lot of people really don’t get what I do, and that’s fine. I once had an editor reject one of my more popular books, because she didn’t understand what I meant when I said my writing was “dark” until she had my first horror erotic romance in hand and freaked. The editor who signed it said, “It starts out Stephen King dark and goes darker. I like Stephen King.” That’s my audience. People who enjoy David and Leigh Eddings are my audience. People who enjoy Sherrilyn Kenyon are my audience. My books appeal to both men and women, and they appeal to readers of urban fantasy and dark fantasy/horror.
LL: Does your writing turn you on?
BL: Absolutely! If it doesn’t turn me on, why would I expect it to turn anyone else on? Now, not everything I write turns me on. Some things are to the tastes of the characters and not me personally, but I get a sort of vicarious thrill from them off of it. Some things make me squirm personally, because they really aren’t my thing.
Then again, a good example of that is reading KISS THE GIRLS. Everyone I know who has read it will remember the milk snake scene for the rest of their lives. It isn’t so much “appealing” to them, but it’s erotic, in some indefinable way.
LL: How do you create your “world?”
BL: As I said, I have a character-driven process. I may start with a vague idea of a scene or a paragraph worth of idea of what the story encompasses, but I start with a character or two and work my way out from there. At times, I do character questioning/interview. Why would he/she do that? Ah, because the law says… That’s how I start building my world. Some pieces just arrive on the page, fleshed out and without plan. At some point, I may take a break and start collecting the “world information” into a single place…and fleshing it out further from there.
What’s amusing to me is that I’m a complete pantser/organic writer. I don’t write linear. I don’t write on one project at a time. I don’t know what’s coming next. It just appears on the page. So, sometimes…odd times… I will suddenly have something happen in a book that I realize later was set up three books earlier, and even I didn’t see it coming. Or…I go back to weave something in only to find I’ve already written the scene that weaves it in and didn’t remember the scene was there.
LL: Where did the idea for the Kielan series come from?
BL: One of my most popular and awarded series is Kegin series. In that series, I mention the Council of Worlds, and I mention that there are three humanoid races on the Council. In book six of Kegin, readers will meet the Kielan and the Wolkin, the other two races.
Ever since Lisa and her husband (Sean) started with Kegin and Renegades series, asking me: “But what’s next?”, I’ve had this nasty habit of writing series, instead of stand-alones. Even things intended as stand-alones often turn into series later, like the PROPHECY serial has turned into a series. (Picture me rolling my eyes that I’m writing a sequel to my first book, eight years after the serial was done.)
So, I started writing CUBED (Kielan series). That one is actually straight-genre science fantasy and isn’t complete yet, but other portions of the series are much further along. The first of the erotic pieces, THE LADY’S LOWBORN LOVER, is available from Logical-Lust, and there are more coming from the series: ANOTHER MAN’S MATE, MIGHT HAVE BEENS, and CROSS-CUBE. As an aside, I’m also working on a novel from the Wolkin world. That’s the way my worlds grow.
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