1. Are you a panster or a plotter or perhaps a bit of both?
I'm mostly a panster, despite many editors who try to turn me into a plotter. I have followed their advice twice, and never wrote the books! I just need to discover and be surprised along with my characters, I think. I've heard of novelists being called "A wrier's writer." Well, I think I'm a "reader's writer," because I love the act of reading to find out where this multi-draft writer has gone off the rails!
2. Which comes first - characters or plot for you?
Character and a little plot or a basic plot -- I need to know what kind of fix the character is in... like my code talkers being in the spying business where the job description is to lie when the core of their cultural belief is: 'lying is worse than dying', or a love between a Quaker woman for a young captive before she finds out he's the heir to a slave-holding plantation. How's THAT going to work??
3. What are you working on now? Is this a book in a current series or something totally new?
I'm working on rewrite of a Civil War novel about a cross dressing woman, and finishing a novel about a Civil war soldier who falls in love with his nurse before he realizes she's a nun (yes, of COURSE he's Catholic!). And I'm researching a new series set in the 1850s and about the Underground Railroad actives here in my new home state of Vermont, and I'm also researching my third Code Talker Chronicles novel.
4. Do you have some kind of object or place that figures in most of your books? I use gems a lot, hospitals and caves.
Wow, that's an interesting question, Janet. I think mine might be ghosts...they always seem to find a way to slip into my novels.
5. Do you write everyday or just when the spirit hits?
I write every day, because you know, I'm a panster, so I have to throw out a lot!
If I get going on my daily routine, I welcome the spirit in, and sometime she even pays me a visit!
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