Please welcome the wonderful Anida Adler to the blog today!! She's been gracious enough to answer ten questions for me and share in a contest! Leave a comment and enter to win a chance to win the adorable bear pictured below! And be sure to follow her as she takes her virtual tour across the WWW!
Ten Questions
1. What is your favorite beverage when you write?
I love having a few glasses of sweet white wine when I'm writing. However, I write so much that if I were to quaff wine everytime I add a few chapters, I'd be in a semi-permanent drunken haze. I therefore settle for tea most of the time.
2. What is your favorite font to write in?
My first writing mentor insisted Courier New was the only acceptable font. Being somewhere in her seventies (with a mind like a razor), she was quite old school. It's true, though, that most publishers still insist on standard manuscript format. What's nice about writing for the electronic market is that you are able to use the font, spacing and much of the formatting that will be used in the final product. I'm getting used to writing in Times New Roman now.
3. What music do you listen to when you write (or do you prefer it quiet)?
Until recently, my writing desk was right beside the television, and the only way I could create a writing space in my mind was to play loud music over headphones to drown out the latest cartoon. Jason Mraz is my big favourite, especially songs like Details in the Fabric and Please Don't Tell Her. I have quite a variety on my iPod, including classical, but mostly it's ballads and soft rock.
4. When it comes to those all important jotted notes, which is it – composition pads or sticky notes?
Sticky notes. I also have bits of printed material with all sorts of very important information on, and always work with photos I found on the internet which most closely resemble the characters I'm working with. These get stuck on the wall beside the computer.
5. What’s your favorite snack when pounding away at the keyboard?
Lightly salted tortilla chips. Love them.
6. What inspires you when you write?
I have no idea. I find that I run dry in the creativity department when I allow my life to fall into a rut. Ideas seem to just bubble to the surface when I take care to go cycling once a week. Living in a spectacularly beautiful part of a truly beautiful island, my cycling trips are balm to the soul and always refresh me mentally as well as physically.
7. What do you turn to when you stumble across a road block in the creative process and need to regroup?
Again it would be cycling. You can see some photos of cycling trips at http://nadiacycles.blogspot.com/ - though I haven't updated the blog for a while. I keep forgetting to take the camera when I set off! Just this last Sunday, I cycled from our new house (we moved from one side of town to another at the beginning of August) to a place called Slieve Gullion Forest Park. It was thirty-six kilometres of pure loveliness. I'm very blessed to live here.
8. Where do the ideas and concepts for your work come from?
I read a lot, and I think a lot. I'll admit that a large part of a story is me trying to work something out in my head. The big questions need big answers, the kind that take three hundred pages to lay out. Yet undeniably my penchant for reading mythology, legends and fables has brought me much inspiration.
9. What do you wish there was more of in the market?
I wish there were more truly well written, properly edited e-books. As reviewer, I see an ocean of truly dire work being published online. This is a crying shame, because readers burn their fingers with a poor quality novel and turn away from the whole idea of e-books. I wish there was tighter quality control and higher standards.
10. Lastly, what advice would you give to an up and coming writer that hopes to submit their work and become published in the future?
There are a few different things I'd say, but one of them would be to read Stephen King's On Writing, the Turkey City Lexicon http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/ , Holt's Ten Mistakes http://www.holtuncensored.com/hu/the-ten-mistakes/ and all the wonderful blog posts Miss Snark gave the world before hanging up her stillettos http://misssnark.blogspot.com/ That's for starters. Join a crit group - that's essential. And write, write, write, write, write.
Tell us where we can find you on the web.
Anida Adler's website: http://www.anida-adler.net/
Her blog: http://anidaadler.wordpress.com/
Her alter ego's website: http://www.nadiawilliams.co.uk/
Her alter ego's blog: http://nadiawilliams.wordpress.com/
The Ancient Blurb:
What would you do if you fell in love with the goddess of death?
June 1945 - Tadhg Daniels sees a woman clad in strange clothes and a feathered cloak, but she’s invisible to everyone else. He’s convinced his mind has been unhinged by the horrors of the D-day landings four days before, but when she appears to him again, the woman proves she is real. She is Morrigan, goddess of death, come to warn him his life is about to end.
Morrigan is disturbed by the man she meets. He looks in her eyes unflinching, while all others avoid her gaze. She’s never found such a strong will to survive in any of her charges before. He refuses to accept he’s going to die.
There is a way for Tadhg to cheat death, a secret Morrigan has guarded for millennia. Morrigan can save him if she takes him as her lover, but sex with the goddess of death will change him. He needs time to decide if he’s prepared to give up his humanity in order to be with her forever.
But Tadhg is not the only one who knows Morrigan’s secret. Someone else wants to take by force the gift she can bestow. And he’ll stop at nothing to get it.
Excerpt 2:
“Look above you.” He searched the ceiling. “No, I mean at the bedstead.”
Tadhg shuffled his elbow under him and studied the ornate wrought-iron metalwork. For a moment, he didn’t know what she meant, then he saw the chains and blanched. He turned to Morrigán. “No. The shackles in that poem were a metaphor, Morrigán. I don’t do that sort of thing.” Except in his fantasies, but he’d die if she discovered that.
“I’m not asking you to. The shackles are not to bring pleasure to either of us, it is for my protection.”
He frowned and sat up. “Your protection? What the hell kind of man do you think I am?”
“I’m sure you’re very honourable. I told you, the change you’ll go through will be difficult. Just because I’m immortal doesn’t mean I can’t hurt and bleed.”
Tadhg felt cold dread trickle from his scalp down his neck and over his shoulders. What was he letting himself in for? He remembered the panicked feeling of his lungs filling with blood, the horror of his airway blocked. He lay back, stretched out his arms. Then he closed his eyes and slipped his wrists into the old-fashioned shackles hanging from chains on the bedstead. Every muscle in his body was tense as a bowstring.
He heard the rustle of fabric as she came closer, felt the dip of the mattress as she knelt beside him, making the sheet slide over his skin with a tantalising brush. For a moment, he wanted to snatch his arms from the shackles, but he forced himself to keep still as Morrigán closed first one, then the other bond, slipping the pins that held them fast.
The sound sent a rush of blood to his cock.
