Read a 100-word story I wrote here.
I'm also a guest poster today at the Novelists, Inc. Blog on "Real Writers Have Business Cards?" Please drop by and check it out!
Now please welcome my guest, Voirey Linger, as she chats about the paranormal element of her new novella, Risking Eternity.
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Information for an erotic romance can come from funny places. Sometimes you find exactly the little bit you need in a place you never expect.
My world building is usually pretty basic. I like to set things in a contemporary setting, a city that can be just about anywhere. I set up the characters in a world I already know. When writing angels, this took me back to my roots as a pastor's kid.
I grew up in a home that was an odd balance of Christian Fundamentalist and Liberal Christianity. Creation and science were balanced on a fine edge and there was a constant pull between staying rooted in Biblical beliefs and living in a modern world.
When the idea of the angel books came to me, it made perfect sense to throw that same tug-of-war between the conservative values and modern life into the mix.
As part of this balance, I needed to cement the world of an angel, make it as simple and natural as the human world. I dug up all kinds of internet information and read multiple books on secular Angelology, but nothing seemed to fit the natural order of how things worked in my head.
When researching paranormal elements, there are many myths, legends and traditions to draw on for world building. The information I found on angels was vast, varied and often contradictory. On one hand it left me very confused in terms of what was 'right' but on the other it gave me the freedom to simply create what I wanted without worrying about being correct.
So I went back to my roots, where I first learned about angels. I went to Christian tradition and the Bible.
Yes, the Bible as research for an erotic romance.
There are areas where I wander a bit, filled in my own imaginings, other places I had to choose between Bible scholars deductions and some of the old traditional beliefs, but that's to be expected in writing fiction.
In the end I simply chose information fit my storyline as long as I could find something in the Jewish-Christian tradition that supported it. This tradition is wide-spread and at least partially familiar in much of the English-speaking world today. With Risking Eternity, I tried to tap into these deep-seated roots.
My hope is that the result is easy for a reader to assimilate and accept. I want to push a but, suspend disbelief, and never hit a point where the reader has to stop and choose to accept a detail.
Did I succeed? I don't know. That's up to the reader to determine.
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Thanks, Voirey!
V, I always find this fascinating that authors are able to twist stuff like this into their stories.
ReplyDeleteI dont' know how yall do it.
-keri ford