Welcome back to Writer Wednesday! It’s so good to see you all again. You’ve no idea how I treasure our Wednesday meetings, especially when I can bring you someone like Tamara Shoemaker!
Tamara and I are good friends in real life, which is awesome because she’s pretty darn cool – and it shows how writing brings people together, since we met in our local critique group. Wahoo!
Tamara’s got not one, but TWO YA fantasy series she’s penning. Today she’s here to tell us a bit about her and about The Guardian of the Vale, the third book in her Guardian of the Vale series – the series I’ve called The Last Airbender meets Harry Potter. Take it away, Tamara!
Typically, in a romance (or in your case, a romantic fantasy), halfway through the story, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who is “supposed” to end up together. You buck this tradition for your Guardian of the Vale trilogy. Why?
Good question. If it helps, I’ll say it’s not my fault. 😉
When I wrote the outline for Mark of Four (the first book in the trilogy), the romantic leads were who I intended to put together by the end of book three. However, as the story progressed, so did the characters.
By the time I wrote Guardian of the Vale, I had created a monster–that is to say: this character that I had created was so very strong, he wouldn’t let me pigeonhole him into the nice, neat portion of the story I had intended for him, and he insisted on becoming the romantic lead.
As much as it messed up my outlines and plans, I kind of liked it. It’s so much easier to write a character who takes the initiative than one who melts like so much flaccid ink onto a page with nary a struggle to be seen. Such a character may moldable, but there’s no depth there.
What type of romance do you love most and why?
I feel very … torn about this question.
Undoubtedly, the type I love the most is the happily-ever-after type where character A meets character B, and, after finally conquering the “problem” that keeps A from B and B from A, they finally declare undying love for one another, and voila, kiss, wedding, the pitter-patter of tiny feet, followed by “The End.”
On the other hand, while I love those, the stories I remember the most–the ones that never leave my head and usually burrow deep into my heart are the ones that are bittersweet, where something of great importance is lost in the struggle for great gain:
- Gone with the Wind (don’t get me started on how much I dislike the main female lead; why, oh why, do I remember this one so well?)
- Jane Eyre (sure, they lived happily-ever-after, but only after he was blinded and maimed, and they spent a year and more apart while they learned equal shares of pain)
- Redeeming Love (a husband who loves his wife even through adultery and prostitution and any number of times she tries to leave him, and yet. And yet. Oh, that book makes me bawl my eyes out.)
I don’t know if there’s a way to say I love one kind of romance more than the other kind. They both affect me differently, though no less powerfully, I suppose, for those differences.
Wahoo! We’ve got Young Adult Fantasy author 
The most challenging part of avoiding that middle book syndrome is finding a good balance for your overall story. You have to carry a storyline that keeps flowing, doesn’t grow stagnant, maintains and builds the plot threads and the romantic chemistry and the character development and the rising action and the tone and the voice and the structure… all without tipping over the precipice into the land of “resolved” yet, because hey… there’s still another book to be written, and you have to save something for then. 😉
I enjoy the wide variety of the cast; there are so many and varied tastes and textures. It’s like an artist’s palette, and I get to choose a brush and make a stroke along a canvas whenever I break out into some of the descriptions.
It starts with a seed (what if I wrote a list of all the fantastical creatures I’ve ever found in stories, and then included them all in one book?) that I faithfully water every day (and then what if I made a world where all of these creatures were separated into Clans by a tyrannical king who used them for his own ends?), and then it eventually sprouts into a full-blown tree complete with twigs, blossoms, and leaves (and then what if there’s an epic struggle between the king and the rightful heir to the throne, and the eternal poser of Might Is Right comes into heavy play throughout the entire trilogy? How epic would that be?).
Haha!! I can only imagine. Shall I analyze why I think they like what they like? Here we go:
Yes to both. I always proofread my books after I finish writing them—multiple times—and it never fails but that I find the wrong character show up in a book.
Hahahahahaha! Take a break, she says. 😉 I’ve learned never to lay out solid plans too far in advance, because there’s too much of a risk of breaking those plans. I hope to keep writing YA fantasy for years, but at the moment, I’m concentrating on just getting these two trilogies done.
To hone a skill, you have to practice… and practice and practice and practice, right? I practice writing all the time, as well as editing my own work all the time. But I have one basic style, and freelance editing opens up a world of other styles to me. It’s wonderful; I get to do what I love best (read and write) while helping other authors do what they love best (write), and it also helps me hone and sharpen my skills. It’s a win/win situation.
Three words: 