Antha Ann Adkins

Goldfish Grimm: If we could peek into your office (coffee shop, kitchen table, wherever you write), what would your writing process look like?

Antha Ann Adkins: I write at home on a laptop, migrating between the chaise lounge, recliner, sofa, and bed. I am lying down in all these cases, so if I go into deep thought mode about some aspect of a story, I can take a nap. So my writing process either looks like typing madly or sleeping on the job.

GFG: What is it actually like?

AAA: When I start a new project, I start a document I call the project “journal”. I use this document to discovery-write various aspects of the story: the plot outline, character names, the world I’m writing about, etc. I write the story itself in a different file. Once I hit “the end”, I still have a checklist I follow to edit the story. Once I’m sure there’s nothing I can improve, I send it to my critique group (critters.org, which I have gotten a lot of mileage out of) so I can learn that there is, in fact, a lot I can improve. I wait until I’ve gotten all their comments, make a list of my responses to their comments, and implement my list. Then it’s a last pass with my editing checklist, and I’m ready to start submitting. Through all of this, I keep a log of how much time I’ve spent writing and how many words I’ve written per day, so I can tell you that this story took 8.1 hours to write, 1 hour to edit, and 6.1 hours to revise.

GFG: Was there anything in particular that inspired “Have You Looked in a Mirror Lately?”?

AAA: I was on a driving tour of Yorkshire that stopped at Whitby, where I saw the view of Whitby Abbey (a stunning ruined abbey on a cliff over the North Sea) that Bram Stoker looked at as he wrote Dracula. That got me thinking about vampires, particularly about my contention that the word for a 200-year-old-man pursuing a 15-year-old girl is not “romantic” (in case you’re wondering, the word is “predatory”). If a 200-year-old man wanted companionship, wouldn’t he rather have someone closer to his own age? A story was born, and I wrote a good chunk in the shower the next morning.

GFG: This piece is on the lighter side of vampire stories. Do you usually write pieces in the (pun intended) same vein?

AAA: Yes, even when I attempt to write about serious topics, my stories come out light. I’m working on learning how to write humor, and I’m learning that writing funny is hard work!

GFG: Do you have anything you’d like to plug or promote?

AAA: Links to my other published stories as well as my musings on space and aliens, my favorite things to write about, can be found on my blog, acubedsf.com.