What’s Life Got to do with it? Lucienne Diver

Posted by Faith on Jun 28, 2012 in Events | 0 comments

Today I introduce Lucienne Diver, a pal of mine who writes snarky, sharp, quick-witted tales of urban fantasy. Take it away Lucienne! Tell us how you write and how you feel about writing. Is it your whole life?

What’s Life Got to do with it?

In my head I’m always writing.  Always, you ask?  What about while walking the dog, taking a pit stop, waiting in the doctor’s office? 

Always, says me.

It’s not necessarily what everyone would consider writing.  Heck, half the time I don’t even jot it down.  But I’m noting things—the snippets of conversation I overhear and can twist any way in the world (usually to a nefarious beat), the relationships, body language, clothing.  It all goes into the kaleidoscope.  Because, in a way, that’s what writing is.  When I sit down to figure out a scene or a story, figuratively I’ll cock my head this way and that.  I’ll know the elements I want to write about, pulled from this outing or that overheard snippet, maybe, but not how they fit together to form the big picture.  I’ll adjust my view until it’s breathtaking and then…stop.  Hammer Time.  Oh wait, wrong era.  That’s when the words begin to flow.  They gush out of me in a tsumani of productivity and then, suddenly, I’ve reached the end of that picture, that frame.  The story shifts.  It has to shift or it’s too linear, too stagnant.  I have to readjust the focus and let the pieces fall into a new pattern.  Not that one, no not quite.  Ah ha!  And then I write furiously again.  Readjust, refocus and repeat until everything that’s been building hits its crazy crescendo and then…peace.  Wrap up.  Reconcillation….

I’m overly simplifying, of course.  Sometimes the elements don’t work together and the picture is cacophonous.  It’s not just the focus that needs to be adjusted, but the moving parts themselves.  But once it’s all right, it just clicks along, frame after frame, and revision becomes smoothing out those transitions until it all flows seamlessly. 

I recently began the Latter-Day Olympians series, which started with BAD BLOOD and will continue with CRAZY IN THE BLOOD (digital August 2012, print July 2013). 

I threw in the elements of Greek culture and ancient lore I learned in my five years of taking Latin in junior high and high school, my love of mysteries and forensic shows, the snarkier side of me, the results of a fabulously funny road trip through LA I shared with a friend/client of mine, my insane family, and a certain fondness for blue-eyed men and mixed it all up into one crazy kaleidoscope. 

I love BAD BLOOD, I do, because it’s perhaps the most “me” book I’ve written thus far, but I think that the full flavor of all those ingredients simmering in book one come out in full force in the sequel.  Well, now I’m just mixing my metaphors.  Maybe it’s that the picture is that much more vivid and cohesive.

The long and short of this is all to say that nothing in life is ever wasted.  Not the smallest thing, like the coffee-stained snip of paper that missed the wastepaper basket, or the funniest, or the most painful.  It’s all fodder.  If you toss it in and tumble it up with other pretty and problematic pebbles you find, what you come up with will be truly unique. No two people will have the same life experience or observations, so no two people, even should they start at the same point, will come up with the same story.  Or tell it in the same way. 

Nothing new under the sun?  Balderdash.

Bio:
Lucienne Diver writes the Latter-Day Olympians urban fantasy series for Samhain, featuring a heroine who can, quite literally, stop men in their tracks.  Long and Short Reviews gave the first in the series her favorite pull-quote of all times, “Bad Blood is a delightful urban fantasy, a clever mix of Janet Evanovich and Rick Riordan.”  The sequel,Crazy in the Blood, comes out in digital in August 2012 and in print in July 2013.  She also writes the popularVamped young adult series (think Clueless meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and her short stories have been featured in theStrip-Mauled and Fangs for the Mammaries anthologies edited by Esther Friesner.  Her essay on abuse is included in theDear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories anthology from HarperTeen. 

Follow her on the web:

Author website: http://www.luciennediver.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lucienne-Diver/162714330443458

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/LucienneDiver