Friday, February 13, 2015

Friday with Joan Donaldson Yarmey - Talking About Heroes, Heroines and Villains #BooksWeLove #MFRWauthor

1. Do you write a single genre or do your fingers flow over the keys creating tales in many forms? Does your reading choices reflect your writing choices? Are there genres you wouldn’t attempt?
I began my writing career as a travel writer. I drove and camped throughout British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon, and Alaska learning about what there is to see and do along all their roads. But I love reading a good mystery novel and some of them I didn't think were very good, especially when some clues were so obvious that I could guess who had done it and why quite early in the book. I decided to try my hand at mystery writing. I have written three amateur sleuth novels with the main character being a travel writer. Collectively, they are called The Travelling Detective Series and they were published by Books We Love Ltd and are sold in a boxed set. My latest novel is a slight departure in that it is a mystery/romance combination. I have written manuscripts in different genres but I have never had the urge to write a western, historical or erotica.

2. Heroes, Heroines, Villains. Which are your favorite to write? Does one of these come easy and why?
Heroes and heroines come easiest for me to write and they are my favourites. I like to think I am a normal, polite, nice person who could never scam, beat, or kill another human being, therefore it is harder for me to get inside a villain's head to write about him or her. Therefore, I do a lot of true crime reading to get in a murderous frame of mind.

3. Heroes. How do you find them? Do pictures, real life or plain imagination create the man you want every reader to love? Do they come before the plot or after you have the idea for the story?
In my mystery novels my heroes have been an older man and a young men in a wheel chair. In my mystery/romance the hero is a mountain man/gold prospector. Once I have the plot and the hero's character decided then I begin to built his body. Sometimes, though, they tell me who they really are as the story develops. I do have pictures of movie stars and regular people from the newspapers on a wall so I can use certain looks, like hair styles or clothes.

4. Heroines. How do you find them? Do pictures, real life or imagination create the woman you want the reader to root for? Do they appear before the plot or after you have the idea for the story?
In my Travelling Detective Series, the main character is a woman who has several of my traits. (I'm mentioning this because I've had friends tell me, after reading the book, "I could hear you saying that" or "That's something you would do.") In my mystery/romance my heroine is nothing like me but is loosely based on someone I know. Like my heroes, my heroines sometimes change character traits as I get into the story. I also have pictures of women on my wall for the same reason as I have pictures of men.

5. Villains or villainesses or an antagonist, since they don’t always have to be the bad guy or girl. They can be a person opposed to the hero’s or heroine’s obtaining their goal. How do you choose one? How do you make them human?
The villain's job is to cause all the turmoil in a novel. Some villains are good at it, some are not. But since their true nature isn't revealed until the end it is necessary to seed a few instances where the person does unusual things so that when he or she is revealed, the reader isn't going "How could she have suddenly changed like that?" Instead, the reader should be saying, "I should have guessed it was him."

6. What is your latest release? Who is the hero, heroine and or the villain?
My latest release is Gold Fever also through Books We Love Ltd. The heroine is a city girl who is camping for a week with her mother and she hates it. The hero/villian is a mountain man/gold prospector who takes it upon himself to show her around the countryside. She is not impressed. The villain could be the mountain man/gold prospector or any one of four other gold prospectors.

7. What are you working on now?
I have two projects on the go. One is non-fiction about four cats in a motorhome for a ten week sightseeing trip and the other is a Christmas romance.

8. How can people find you?
            Blogs I contribute to:
http://bookswelove.net/
http://thetravellingdetectiveseries.blogspot.com/

            Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/writingsbyjoan


No comments: