Jones & Bennett

18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?

YAY SO GLAD YOU ASKED THIS because it hadn’t been asked already! 

Jaida: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie; Kokoro, Natsume Soseki; more recently, the Land Fit For Heroes series by Richard K. Morgan; pretty much everything by Mary Renault; pretty much everything by Tamora Pierce; Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner; the Poldark series, weirdly, although I don’t know if that’s a good thing; this one amazing anime fanfic I read when I was 13 years old and it changed the way I thought about writing forever

Danielle: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones gave me my love of lush descriptions, overcrowded settings and insufferable male protagonists. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami gave me a love for the places where magic and the real world intersect and taught me to redefine those boundaries for myself. Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce started me down the dangerous road of loving odd pairings with awkward age differences, people who will break rules and do anything for each other no matter what the cost. And Neil Gaiman’s American Gods taught me that magic and horror are two sides of the same coin, that the prickling you feel at the back of your neck is awe is fear are the same thing and neither can be untangled from the other.

3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

As mentioned before, we start at the very beginning and power through to the end, then realize what the story actually is, at which point we start from the beginning again and fix all the problems.

There are always a lot of problems. 

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing

Havemercy’s magician/creator! We knew we wanted it to be a woman, but we were super torn on what she should be like, so we ended up basing her off Jaida’s amazing great-aunt, who was a force of nature. Inappropriate, crass, rude, never realizing how beautiful she was, fucked up from a rough childhood, and magical in so many ways. She also loved making rice pudding and kept her recipes secret to the grave. It seemed right somehow that she should be behind a dragon because she was a dragon, basically.

15) why did you start writing?

Loneliness; not good at acting; frustration with lack of dragons in day-to-day life.

10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?

Recently we went on a writing retreat with a group of friends and thought it would likely result in no writing being done, but it was actually awesome to have people around, all of us suffering together, acknowledging how much we hate writing but also love it at the same time!

20) do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

It used to be long sit-down sessions but now that we are old and need to eat early and go to bed early, we like to be done by about 6pm, so we sort of toss the document back and forth to one another throughout the earlier part of the day, usually in an attempt to reach somewhere between 1500 - 2100 words. When we get to that point, we are free, and we play video games. 

8) favorite genre to write

Dirty, smelly, ugly fantasy with fucked up cities and lots of cursing.

10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?

Danielle listens to music. I, Jaida, cannot be distracted by music, because I will start singing along, and then I will not be writing. However, I am able to write with literally every other distraction under the sun, whereas Danielle needs the music to block out the world!

11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

Plotting, I think, as when we began, we did not really even know what a plot was, but now, we are somewhat acquainted with the concept and occasionally manage to create half of one. 

14) do you make playlists for your current wips?

Yes but as mentioned earlier, we are shy, and also, have trouble making 8tracks work, so these playlists are secret and hidden. One thing that we do have that isn’t, hopefully, too embarrassing, is our Pinterests for WIPs, which can be found here: https://www.pinterest.com/ladyjaida/ !

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing

Another answer to this is Alcibiades! Oh, Al. We’re super obsessed with the real and historical Alcibiades but all stories of him are so completely different from the Al who took that guy’s namesake, which was super unexpected. 

14) do you make playlists for your current wips?

YES and then we don’t share them because we’re shy. 

15) why did you start writing?

Jaida here as…before…Danielle has no idea that I have overtaken our tumblr and am, probably, ruining it! 

But I have an answer for this! I have this intense memory from fourth grade, after I watched the fantasy movie Willow and became obsessed with these two pixie characters whose names I didn’t even know. This was before “just look it up on the internet” was a thing (I’m old) so I made up new names for them and wrote a terrible story that was, I realize now, self-insert fanfiction. This was for an English class creative writing assignment, and after I handed it in to the teacher, she read it out loud to the class a few days later. There were a couple of kids in that class (oh, who am I kidding, I had one friend and was a complete social outcast) who were usually super mean to me and bullied the fuck out of me normally, but I remember them telling me after the teacher read the story out loud, “That was really good! You should be a writer,” and I was like, that’s the first nice thing these jerks have ever said to me, words are MAGIC. So that’s why I started writing more and more. The end. 

17) if you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

“You’re too young for this and you will lose your shit completely.” Also, “Therapy will really help you, you should get on that sooner.” 

1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

Let’s answer this two ways. 

First way, aka Volstovic-style: the early days of the Dragon Corps as a Young Adult series!

Second way, aka not-related-to-Volstov-at-all: We have this idea for something that’s kind of like if in Oliver Twist, Oliver is a trans girl and the group of rag-tag urchins led by the Artful Dodger are part of an illegal Tarot-creating underground, but we don’t have a plot for it, so it’s not getting written yet! 

23) any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

Jaida again and I’ll answer this one in a new and revealing and personal way, but I am asexual which has helped in writing asexual characters ooor at least in terms of wanting to have some kind of asexual rep in whatever I’m creating! I’m also non-binary, like, pretty damn genderqueer, so that has always worked its way into my characters… Yeah! Personal sharing time!

1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

As mentioned in a previous answer, the next story in the Volstovic Cycle was going to have Balfour, Antoinette, and th’Esarina as POV characters, and deal with new dragons and rebuilding the Corps and all kinds of STUFF that just…never made it into the world. (Yet?) Who knows. MAYBE SOME DAY…!

3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

We start at the beginning and go to the end and then, when we reach the end, we realize how much the beginning sucks, so we start all over again and rewrite everything. We don’t use outlines, but chronological is a must, if you count “getting to the end in order to figure out what the beginning should be” as chronological!

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing

Adamo! We’d always had this feeling that Royston had a huge crush on Adamo back in their ‘Versity days, and probably meant to sneak more of that in there than we did, but then some other things happened, and mostly Adamo just completely surprised us from start to finish by not doing anything we wanted him to. And also, having a regular ol’ heterosexual relationship, which is unusual for us. 

6) something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late/complicated to change now

Probably have Thom really lace into Rook for being basically horrible, sexist, and cruel (while simultaneously being charismatic, but that’s no excuse)? 

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

From one of the stories that was started then abruptly halted:

When I die, my shadow will be released into the world, free of its anchor—my body—like the unspooling of a wicked skein of spider silk. Its power will be incalculable; its morals, nonexistent. The Shade will eat and eat but never satisfy its hunger. It will rage and ravage and reap.

But that won’t happen for at least another five hundred years. 

Time for sleepies but more questions will be answered tomorrow! Thanks so much and keep ‘em coming if you want!! Thanks for putting up with this and asking things!

1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

Jaida again, sorry in advance. OKAY well funny story, maybe not funny, but over the past 6 or so months, I have forced Danielle to begin 3 separate stories, two of which I then forced her to stop writing in order to start writing the next one, because I was ~~~~~inspired. We ended up finishing the third one and I really want to go back to the first one, but it seems I’ve forgotten how to write the characters, so that’s definitely a work in progress. 

Another thing we’ve wanted to do but held off on writing it because, well, there was no place for it in this world as yet, was Antoinette and th’Esarina’s story, which was to come next. It’s there. Bubbling, and brewing, but sadly not yet cooked. 

11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

NOTHING!!! Haha… No seriously every time we begin a new project I’m like, this time. THIS TIME. This time it won’t need 100 revisions! This time the plot will be clear and the character motivations equally so in the first go round. THIS TIME the pacing will NOT be horrendous! And every time it is a fucking lie. So I think the thing that’s improved is my attitude about it…not beating myself up quite as much when it’s clear it’s time for a seventy-round editing battle.

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

From our Current Project ™:

Nica raked the hair out of his eyes, sparrow-skull necklace thumping his chest when it swung on the leather cord looped through its gilded eyes. “Most mothers,” he’d told his mother once, “knit their boys handkerchiefs with their initials sewn in or buy them wallets.” It wasn’t an accusation. Nica knew the worth of the gift. The skull had belonged to his mother’s favorite songbird, which died of old age after years of scavenging lost trinkets on the streets, picking up rings winking between cobblestones, gold teeth knocked out of bone jaws, fake jewels, and house keys. As a child, he’d delighted in going through its stash. Now that behavior felt beneath him.

23) any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

Jaida once more, as I have taken over our tumblr in a fit of inspired typingness, only to occasionally shriek questions across the bed at Danielle, who just wanted to play the Witcher 3 tonight, and didn’t anticipate this happening and probably never deserved it…

Anyway! At the strange, peculiar, kinda super bizarro job where I had sensitivity training (the sensitivity training that inspired Havemercy’s humble and awkward beginnings) I was basically a copy-editor but also called upon to frequently write articles about stuff I literally had NO authority on or clues about. Like, how to decorate your home with cool antique/yard sale finds or seashell themes for cottage decor. Hammocks: the next big trend. Fill a bucket with old gardening tools or something because DECOR!!! I had to fill a certain number of pages with a tight deadline and it allowed me to at least pretend I knew what the hell I was talking about. Which has come in handy for writing about magic and dragons and other such things that don’t so much require research but COMMITMENT! 

Yeah, see, I don’t have awesome obscure life experiences like Danielle, so I just have to go on “that time I wrote about doilies professionally despite not being a doily professional” I’m so sorry