Alphabet Blogging: Y and Z

I’m totally cheating, but Forged Steel releases next week (eeeeep!), so…yeah. This whole blog is going to be chock full of cheats, since these happen to be the two hardest letters of the alphabet to work with.

So, here goes.
Y is for Why I write. (See, told you I was cheating.) I’m sure I’ve written about this before, multiple times. The thing is, it changes from book to book, year to year, and sometimes I just have to write about it to remind myself why I do this thing that has induced more frustration and tears in my life than almost anything else.

I think one of the primary reasons I write is to fulfill my passion for a well-told story.That may sound overly simplistic, but it’s the reason I come back to again and again. It’s the reason I began writing–as a preteen, I couldn’t find Christian YA fantasy. There WAS no Christian YA fantasy at that time, unless you counted Lewis, Tolkien, and George MacDonald. Even though I’ve moved away from writing Christian YA fantasy to general market/crossover fantasy, it’s still because I’m not finding exactly what I want to read.

Another would be that I’m fascinated by characters who are imperfect and dark, yet still try to be heroic and bring about hope and light. That thread runs through many of my stories.

Sometimes I wish my stories had a deep thought to chew on, or a good takeaway, or something profoundly theological. But when I specifically try to write like that, it becomes preachy, which I very much dislike.

Forged Steel doesn’t really have a specific reason I wrote it, other than I wanted to write an urban fantasy, although the thread of imperfect characters still comes up, and I definitely hope to expand and explore other themes as the series continues–if my story takes me in that direction. As my primary passion is to write good stories and not to teach people through my fiction, then I’ll only go there if the story takes me there. In the meantime, I hope I tell an engaging, enjoyable story.

And for the Z part of this post…well…after I finally get everything formatted, prepped, and scheduled for the release of Forged Steel (July 17th is coming up quickly!!), I’m going to collapse and throw up a lot of Zzzzzzs.

(*ahem* didn’t I tell you I was going to cheat on this post? 😉 )

(And by the way, I have a flash fiction piece up at the Splickety Lightning Blog today. Enjoy!)