Guest: Interview with E. E. Ottoman.
Today I have the lovely and talented E. E. Ottoman answering the fifteen questions of doom! Take it away!
1. So what are you working on at the moment?
Right now I'm trying to finish up editing my story, 'The Memory of Blood and Lotuses', for Less Than Three Press' Proud To Be a Vampire submission call. It's set in sort of an alternative ancient Egypt. The research has been lots of fun and I always enjoy putting my own spin on a vampire character. I've also gotten to write the ancient Egyptian god Set as a character which has been awesome!
2. We both share a love of Byzantine Empire history, what other eras are you interested in?
Well I'm in graduate school for history right now and I focus on the history of race, gender and sexuality in America. Mostly I focus on the 20th century although my most recent research has been late 19th early 20th. I'm fascinated by all sorts of time periods though. As a young child I loved ancient Egypt and I still find Egyptology fascinating. I love medieval China I've enjoyed taking classes in Chinese history, which inspired me to write both 'Zi Yong and the Collector of Secrets' and 'Song of the Spring Moon Waning'. I've been obsessed with Richard III since I was in high school so the recent finding of his body was a big deal for me. I love reading about Viking age Iceland and Scandinavia. Which I got hooked on while writing 'Heart of Water and Stone' and 'The Kraken Lord and the Eater of the Sun' both of which are based on Norse mythology and culture. I'm hard pressed to think of a kind of history I don't like actually.
3. Who has been the biggest influence on your writing? What lessons did that person teach you?
I don't think I can pinpoint who's had the biggest influence. I think lots of writers that I love have influenced what I do in different ways. Lloyd Alexander was one of my very favorite authors as a child and the thing I loved about his work then and still love about it now is how he based fantasy so heavy on mythology. Often too he'd write books based on non-Western mythology. So his books really taught me to ground my fantasy in mythology and that fantasy doesn't have to be western-centric. Diana Wynne Jones's books have taught me that there is really no limit to how creative, weird, and complex you can be. Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels wrote some of the first romance mysteries and romance horror stories I ever read. I think that her books really taught me that the main protagonist of romance novels doesn't have to be an every-girl or every-boy for the reader to project themselves onto but can be a quirky well rounded character in their own right.
Lois McMaster Bujold, who is a goddess of science fiction, once said in an interview something along the lines of how she imagined her every-reader to be a hospice nurse at a children's hospital, someone who didn't need a novel to preach at them, they just needed a way to unwind when they got home from work. I try to keep that in mind when I get too caught up in a deeper meaning to my story or trying to have my story make some kind of larger point. Your first priority should always be to write something which is fun to read.
Neil Gaiman says often, sometimes using different words, to write and keep writing until you're finished. In my experience that's about the best writing advice you're going to get.
4. What are you proudest of in your writing?
Sometimes I'll be sitting at my desk and I'll get an idea and think "no I can't write that, that's just a little too out there. No one will want to read a romance novel like that." But then I write it anyway. I am really proud that I've never let my fear of the story being too different or too weird stop me. That and I love my characters to death, even the evil ones.
5. How would you like to be remembered?
As a person as someone who was kind. As a writer and a scholar as someone not afraid to do something different.
6. How would you describe yourself?
I've very quiet in person very serious and introspective. My mother says I live mostly in my head which I think is true, I tend to over analyze things a lot. I talk very openly about sex and sexuality often and sometimes forget that not everyone does. Asides from that I am physically on the small side being not quite five foot. A chronic university student, a huge Sherlock Holmes fan since I was seven, queer identified, masculine of center, and a huge fan of sweater vests.
7. Tell me about how you got into being an author.
For as long as I can remember I've made up stories and since I was in middle school I've also wrote them down. Most of my life though I was told over and over again how hard it was to be a published writer, how many brilliant people didn't make it, how many rejection letters you needed to expect to get before someone agreed to take a look at your stuff. The writing narrative I was told again and again was that you slaved away writing a story for years and then revised it for a few more years and then spend even more years trying to get someone to look at it. If you didn't spend literally years of blood sweat and tears on your manuscript no one would touch it with a ten foot pole. If you were very, very lucky (win the lottery kind of lucky), a publisher might agree to take it. When that happened they would inevitably then tell you to rewriter it from the ground up, and you would basically have to scrap the entire story and rewrite a new one to their specifications. I'm not even sure now where this narrative was coming from but I have to say I heard differ versions of it pretty much my entire life.
It just seems like such a hard and long process and I've always been really serious about academia and so figured I would never have the energy, physically or emotionally, to go through that on top of being a full time student. I've always wanted to be a published writer and I've always written but given the dominant narrative I'd been hearing about how you got to be a writer I put that dream aside and figure it would just never happen. I wrote and kept it to myself or wrote and posted it for free on the internet.
Summer of 2011 I was no longer in school and about to finish up a job I'd been doing for two years. I had the house to myself for a couple weeks while my housemates were away. I saw an advertisement for Less Than Three Press and randomly clicked on it, and they were looking for submissions for Private Dicks: Undercovers and I thought why not try and write something for it, it could be fun. So I sat down and wrote what ended up being 'Regarding the Detectives Companion' in like a week. When I submitted it I thought, worst case scenario they don't accept it and I'm no worse off than I was. They did accept it though and suddenly I was a published author and it wasn't nearly as traumatic a process as everyone kept telling me it would be.
8. What did you think you were going to be when you grew up?
Well I'm going to be super boring and say an academic and a writer. My mom had me when she was still in college so for the first four to five years of my life I spent most of my time on college campuses surrounded by students and professors and so I decided from a young age that what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a full time student or a professor. Of course back then I was in it mainly for the blueberry muffins and orange juice they sold at the student cafe. I've wanted to be a writer since I figured out every book was actually written by someone somewhere. I mean how great is it to get paid for writing books? The fact that this is a real job still boggles my mind.
9. Do you believe in love at first sight?
No I don't think I do. I believe in lust at first sight. I mean I think two people can have mad, mad chemistry sexually speaking after only having known each other a few minutes. That attraction may or may not lead to a deeper, or longer lasting relationship but the attraction itself is not love. Not that I think lust at first sight is bad. In fact I think the romance genre gives lust at first sight short shrift often by insisting what, in some cases, is obviously lust is something deeper. I think love is something that happens after you've known someone for a while and learned to respect, value and trust them as a person, the bad stuff, the good stuff and everything else in between. That may come with romantic/sexual feeling or may not but either way it's not instantaneous.
10. If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in any of your books?
Well I think there are a few rough spots especially in 'Heart of Water and Stone' I might want to go back and clear up. I'm not sure if I were to write 'Regarding the Detective's Companion' again now, I would write it in present tense. Over all though I don't think I would do anything major differently. All my books ended up being the way they are for a reason and they're not going to be for everyone but I didn't expect they would be.
11. Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?
Oh God, I don't think I can come up with just one favorite writer. All the authors I mentioned in who's influenced me I of course adore. I'm also a huge fan of Lovecraft and his work, I think the way he builds suspense is amazing he's a master at making the whole world seems scary. I love Isaac Asimov I've read I, Robot close to a dozen times at this point and it never ceases to amazing me how Asimov can write satisfying stories based on an idea or a concept instead of a character or a world. I love Neil Gaiman I think Neverwhere is my favorite of his books, I think it's the best example of what urban fantasy should be. David Eddings, Michael Moorcock, Patricia A. McKillip, and Susan Cooper have all created some of my absolutely favorite fantasy worlds or characters ever.
12. Did you always want to be an author?
Yep at some point when I was fairly young I realize people actually wrote books and then at some point a little after that I started thinking that I could write a pretty good book. For most of my life though I didn't actually think I'd ever be a published author, just someone who wrote a lot.
13. How do you deal with writer's block?
Mostly I just try to push through it. Sometimes I put down a story, if I don't have an immediate deadline and give it a little time to sit, but mostly I just try to keep on going. Truthfully though writers block don't happen to me a lot. I paint myself into corners with my plots and then don't know how to fix them or start a story and then realize the original idea is actually not story length after all. Very, very rarely though do I have true writers block, where I can't write anything, I'm always writing something.
14. What genre would you like to try writing that you haven't yet?
Science fiction, I love the genre so much and I have a couple science fiction stories in the works but nothing I'm even close to considering publishing yet. I'd like to right a nice fun, not too complicated space opera at some point though.
Maybe, maybe I'll write a historical fiction story at some point too. Historical Fiction scares me though, I have this terrible feeling that I'd just obsess on the research so much the story itself would get lost. I mean now when I write historical based fantasy I can always step back and say "well it's fantasy it doesn't have to be historically correct in some regards" and you can't say that with historical fiction. That seems like a really slippery slope to me.
15. Finally, the question I ask everyone I interview - if you were a plant in the next life, what would you be, and why?
I hope I'm a tomato plant or eggplant plant, something sturdy, that's not just there for decoration or beatification but is also nice to look at, smells great and tastes great too.
Find E. E. Ottoman's books here at Less Than Three Press. Her blog is here and you can find her on Twitter and Facebook.
1. So what are you working on at the moment?
Right now I'm trying to finish up editing my story, 'The Memory of Blood and Lotuses', for Less Than Three Press' Proud To Be a Vampire submission call. It's set in sort of an alternative ancient Egypt. The research has been lots of fun and I always enjoy putting my own spin on a vampire character. I've also gotten to write the ancient Egyptian god Set as a character which has been awesome!
2. We both share a love of Byzantine Empire history, what other eras are you interested in?
Well I'm in graduate school for history right now and I focus on the history of race, gender and sexuality in America. Mostly I focus on the 20th century although my most recent research has been late 19th early 20th. I'm fascinated by all sorts of time periods though. As a young child I loved ancient Egypt and I still find Egyptology fascinating. I love medieval China I've enjoyed taking classes in Chinese history, which inspired me to write both 'Zi Yong and the Collector of Secrets' and 'Song of the Spring Moon Waning'. I've been obsessed with Richard III since I was in high school so the recent finding of his body was a big deal for me. I love reading about Viking age Iceland and Scandinavia. Which I got hooked on while writing 'Heart of Water and Stone' and 'The Kraken Lord and the Eater of the Sun' both of which are based on Norse mythology and culture. I'm hard pressed to think of a kind of history I don't like actually.
3. Who has been the biggest influence on your writing? What lessons did that person teach you?
I don't think I can pinpoint who's had the biggest influence. I think lots of writers that I love have influenced what I do in different ways. Lloyd Alexander was one of my very favorite authors as a child and the thing I loved about his work then and still love about it now is how he based fantasy so heavy on mythology. Often too he'd write books based on non-Western mythology. So his books really taught me to ground my fantasy in mythology and that fantasy doesn't have to be western-centric. Diana Wynne Jones's books have taught me that there is really no limit to how creative, weird, and complex you can be. Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels wrote some of the first romance mysteries and romance horror stories I ever read. I think that her books really taught me that the main protagonist of romance novels doesn't have to be an every-girl or every-boy for the reader to project themselves onto but can be a quirky well rounded character in their own right.
Lois McMaster Bujold, who is a goddess of science fiction, once said in an interview something along the lines of how she imagined her every-reader to be a hospice nurse at a children's hospital, someone who didn't need a novel to preach at them, they just needed a way to unwind when they got home from work. I try to keep that in mind when I get too caught up in a deeper meaning to my story or trying to have my story make some kind of larger point. Your first priority should always be to write something which is fun to read.
Neil Gaiman says often, sometimes using different words, to write and keep writing until you're finished. In my experience that's about the best writing advice you're going to get.
4. What are you proudest of in your writing?
Sometimes I'll be sitting at my desk and I'll get an idea and think "no I can't write that, that's just a little too out there. No one will want to read a romance novel like that." But then I write it anyway. I am really proud that I've never let my fear of the story being too different or too weird stop me. That and I love my characters to death, even the evil ones.
5. How would you like to be remembered?
As a person as someone who was kind. As a writer and a scholar as someone not afraid to do something different.
6. How would you describe yourself?
I've very quiet in person very serious and introspective. My mother says I live mostly in my head which I think is true, I tend to over analyze things a lot. I talk very openly about sex and sexuality often and sometimes forget that not everyone does. Asides from that I am physically on the small side being not quite five foot. A chronic university student, a huge Sherlock Holmes fan since I was seven, queer identified, masculine of center, and a huge fan of sweater vests.
7. Tell me about how you got into being an author.
For as long as I can remember I've made up stories and since I was in middle school I've also wrote them down. Most of my life though I was told over and over again how hard it was to be a published writer, how many brilliant people didn't make it, how many rejection letters you needed to expect to get before someone agreed to take a look at your stuff. The writing narrative I was told again and again was that you slaved away writing a story for years and then revised it for a few more years and then spend even more years trying to get someone to look at it. If you didn't spend literally years of blood sweat and tears on your manuscript no one would touch it with a ten foot pole. If you were very, very lucky (win the lottery kind of lucky), a publisher might agree to take it. When that happened they would inevitably then tell you to rewriter it from the ground up, and you would basically have to scrap the entire story and rewrite a new one to their specifications. I'm not even sure now where this narrative was coming from but I have to say I heard differ versions of it pretty much my entire life.
It just seems like such a hard and long process and I've always been really serious about academia and so figured I would never have the energy, physically or emotionally, to go through that on top of being a full time student. I've always wanted to be a published writer and I've always written but given the dominant narrative I'd been hearing about how you got to be a writer I put that dream aside and figure it would just never happen. I wrote and kept it to myself or wrote and posted it for free on the internet.
Summer of 2011 I was no longer in school and about to finish up a job I'd been doing for two years. I had the house to myself for a couple weeks while my housemates were away. I saw an advertisement for Less Than Three Press and randomly clicked on it, and they were looking for submissions for Private Dicks: Undercovers and I thought why not try and write something for it, it could be fun. So I sat down and wrote what ended up being 'Regarding the Detectives Companion' in like a week. When I submitted it I thought, worst case scenario they don't accept it and I'm no worse off than I was. They did accept it though and suddenly I was a published author and it wasn't nearly as traumatic a process as everyone kept telling me it would be.
8. What did you think you were going to be when you grew up?
Well I'm going to be super boring and say an academic and a writer. My mom had me when she was still in college so for the first four to five years of my life I spent most of my time on college campuses surrounded by students and professors and so I decided from a young age that what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a full time student or a professor. Of course back then I was in it mainly for the blueberry muffins and orange juice they sold at the student cafe. I've wanted to be a writer since I figured out every book was actually written by someone somewhere. I mean how great is it to get paid for writing books? The fact that this is a real job still boggles my mind.
9. Do you believe in love at first sight?
No I don't think I do. I believe in lust at first sight. I mean I think two people can have mad, mad chemistry sexually speaking after only having known each other a few minutes. That attraction may or may not lead to a deeper, or longer lasting relationship but the attraction itself is not love. Not that I think lust at first sight is bad. In fact I think the romance genre gives lust at first sight short shrift often by insisting what, in some cases, is obviously lust is something deeper. I think love is something that happens after you've known someone for a while and learned to respect, value and trust them as a person, the bad stuff, the good stuff and everything else in between. That may come with romantic/sexual feeling or may not but either way it's not instantaneous.
10. If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in any of your books?
Well I think there are a few rough spots especially in 'Heart of Water and Stone' I might want to go back and clear up. I'm not sure if I were to write 'Regarding the Detective's Companion' again now, I would write it in present tense. Over all though I don't think I would do anything major differently. All my books ended up being the way they are for a reason and they're not going to be for everyone but I didn't expect they would be.
11. Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?
Oh God, I don't think I can come up with just one favorite writer. All the authors I mentioned in who's influenced me I of course adore. I'm also a huge fan of Lovecraft and his work, I think the way he builds suspense is amazing he's a master at making the whole world seems scary. I love Isaac Asimov I've read I, Robot close to a dozen times at this point and it never ceases to amazing me how Asimov can write satisfying stories based on an idea or a concept instead of a character or a world. I love Neil Gaiman I think Neverwhere is my favorite of his books, I think it's the best example of what urban fantasy should be. David Eddings, Michael Moorcock, Patricia A. McKillip, and Susan Cooper have all created some of my absolutely favorite fantasy worlds or characters ever.
12. Did you always want to be an author?
Yep at some point when I was fairly young I realize people actually wrote books and then at some point a little after that I started thinking that I could write a pretty good book. For most of my life though I didn't actually think I'd ever be a published author, just someone who wrote a lot.
13. How do you deal with writer's block?
Mostly I just try to push through it. Sometimes I put down a story, if I don't have an immediate deadline and give it a little time to sit, but mostly I just try to keep on going. Truthfully though writers block don't happen to me a lot. I paint myself into corners with my plots and then don't know how to fix them or start a story and then realize the original idea is actually not story length after all. Very, very rarely though do I have true writers block, where I can't write anything, I'm always writing something.
14. What genre would you like to try writing that you haven't yet?
Science fiction, I love the genre so much and I have a couple science fiction stories in the works but nothing I'm even close to considering publishing yet. I'd like to right a nice fun, not too complicated space opera at some point though.
Maybe, maybe I'll write a historical fiction story at some point too. Historical Fiction scares me though, I have this terrible feeling that I'd just obsess on the research so much the story itself would get lost. I mean now when I write historical based fantasy I can always step back and say "well it's fantasy it doesn't have to be historically correct in some regards" and you can't say that with historical fiction. That seems like a really slippery slope to me.
15. Finally, the question I ask everyone I interview - if you were a plant in the next life, what would you be, and why?
I hope I'm a tomato plant or eggplant plant, something sturdy, that's not just there for decoration or beatification but is also nice to look at, smells great and tastes great too.
Find E. E. Ottoman's books here at Less Than Three Press. Her blog is here and you can find her on Twitter and Facebook.