Angela Fiddler wrote her first erotic novel as a birthday present to a friend who had requested kneeling and vampires. While the vampires come and go in the story, the kneeling remains. Angela likes smut, dark humor and stories that mix erotica with raw emotion. She talks about writing and her characters at www.angelafiddler.com.
Her latest book is the paranormal erotica, The Care and Feeding of Sex Demons.
Thanks for letting
us interrogate interview you! Can you give us a
go-for-the-gut answer as to why you wanted to be an author?
I wrote my first
novel at eleven and honestly could not imagine any other career path. I decided
over a decade ago that any other job I did would just be as a life-support
system for my writing and luckily I have a very understanding spouse.
Tell us (we won’t
tell promise!) is it all it’s cracked up to be?
I mean what are the perks and what are the demands?
I think in order to
get over that hump between I have a story
I want to tell and I have a story I
want to tell with enough of an emotional payoff for the reader to want to read,
an author has to be internally motivated. So many people line up to tell you
that they don’t want to hear what you have to say. To make it through the
gauntlet, you have to have another reward pushing you to get better. Writing
contracts and huge royalties are awesome goals, but they are at the end of the
race, not at the beginning. The contracts may trickle in here and there, but
the huge royalties aren’t going to come without hard work. I figured out a long
time ago that an audience is not a natural part of learning how to write. And
thank god for that.
Which route did you
take – traditional or self-published – and can you give us the nitty gritty low
down on what’s that like?
I’m a die hard
traditional-publishist…Is that a word? I think too many people focus on getting
their stuff out there and not enough on whether readers want to read it. I
think that if you tell a story that just clicks and are people are willing to
put aside all other distractions to get through it from start to finish, it
doesn’t matter what path you take to get it in their hands. I think the
self-published authors out there that are succeeding are the ones who have been
writing long enough to know how to put a story together. My heart breaks when I
hear a first time author talking about self-publishing. Yes, there is a very
small chance they will make it, but they may win the lottery just by buying a
ticket, but success doesn’t come by chance to a book that does not appeal to a
very large audience’s needs, and that doesn’t happen by chance. The authors
that make it are the ones that keep writing past their third book.
What’s the
snarkiest thing you can say about the publishing industry (e.g. rejections, the
long wait, etc.)
When you’re just
starting out, don’t spend your royalty check in your head until you get one.
Don’t even think about the money. I have a formula in my head where the more
things cost, the cooler it has to be and there is an awful lot of free or
already paid for entertainment like cable or internet out there already that
you have to directly compete with.
Tell us for real
what your family feels about you spending so much time getting your book
written, polished, edited, formatted, published, what have you?
My wife is
incredibly supportive. I took some time off from writing for a while. Then in
2012, I told her I was going to quit my job and write full time after not
writing anything for three years. I try to write for one reason, and that is to
make her smile. That’s incredibly stupid, but when I see her grinning down at
the screen, I know I nailed what I was trying to say. She accepts that endless
edits are going to make me cranky, but she’s has a regular schedule that I try
to keep to it as best as I can or I’d be up all hours of the night puttering on
something.
When I was eleven,
I gave my parents the book I wrote. My dad said, in total, “it’s a bit purple”
and my mother said, “you know you still have to get a real job, right?” They
never asked to read anything else and I never shared anything else I wrote
until I was an adult. It gave me a lot of time to master my own voice without
the influence of others. Learning how to develop a unique voice is most of the
challenge of writing.
What was the
craziest or insane thing that happened to you in the book publishing process?
I was in Boston in 2005 for the Worldcon. I had a novel
that was almost-not-quite-but-nearly-there (you know that book?) it was my penultimate
book, the last book I wrote before I started selling. I was in Salem, Massachusetts and I had to get my tarot cards read. The
reading itself was absolutely fabulous. I was going to be a huge success and
have all the support I needed. My head was huge. The reader said I could ask
one question and of course I asked if my book was going to sell. He studied the
cards and said no. I was shocked. The book was almost nearly there! He looked
down again and said “You won’t sell it unless you massacre it.” On the plane
ride home I reread the draft and saw exactly what he’d somehow saw. It was a
good book but the execution was flawed. I did massacre it last year in my year
off, but I haven’t done anything with it yet.
How about the
social networks? Which ones do you
believe help and which ones do you wish you could avoid?
I think everyone
needs a blog somewhere on one of the big platforms and a facebook for their
networking, but I don’t like twitter any more than a late night update. I think
all networking sites need to be avoided until the writing is done, though.
They’re such massive timesucks.
Book sales. Don’t you just love them (or lack of?)? How are you making the sales happen for you?
In 2006, I went in
publishing my first book Castoffs, book one of Master of the Lines thinking m/m
bdsm erotica wasn’t going to fly off the shelf and I was truly shocked by how
well it actually did. The only way to make it is to consistently tell stories
that are interesting and engaging and grind away at it until one book takes off
and then you’ll have a pretty decent backlist.
What is one thing
you’d like to jump on the rooftop and scream about?
Oh, my god. Filter
every sentence through your point of view character. If you want description
that absolutely nails what something looks like, read Madame Bovary until your eyes can’t focus. Then go back to how your
character FEELS about what is happening around him rather than trying to
transcribe it as objectively as possible. Objectivity is boring.
Okay, too much
sugar for you today! Here’s a nice cup
of Chamomile tea and come on over and sit under the cabana and watch the waves
roll in. Now…can you tell us what you
love about being a published author and how all those things above doesn’t
matter because it’s all part of the whole scheme of things and you wouldn’t
have it any other way?
I figured out
during my hiatus that writing stories are more than just having interesting
things happening to characters. You still need to say something about the human
condition as entertainingly as possible. I wrote The Care and Feeding of Sex Demons as a response to all the stories
I’d growing up from the Xanth books onwards that talk about having a sexual
companion who can’t say no as the ultimate fantasy. It might be a nice fantasy,
but the reality is, we already have words for people who are unable to refuse
sexual contact. No magic is involved.
The book is a sexy romp
about the hijinx a man and his best friend gets into while trying to save the
world and maintain his relationship at the same time, but it still speaks to
sex trafficking and the fact that gay relationships are no easier in their maintenance
as a straight one.
I love being able
to say things. I may not like the four or five passes to take out all the words
that detract from the important words, but the final result is always worth it.
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