Tara Maya's Tales

About Rayne Hall Rayne Hall  has published more than forty books under different pen names with different publishers in different genres, mostly fantasy, horror and non-fiction. Recent books include  Storm Dancer  (dark epic fantasy novel),  13 British Horror Stories ,  Six Scary Tales Vol 1, 2, 3, 4  (creepy horror stories),  Six Historical Tales  (short stories),  Six Quirky Tales  (humorous fantasy stories),  Writing Fight Scenes ,  The World-Loss Diet ,  Writing About Villains ,  Writing About Magic  and  Writing Scary Scenes  (instructions for authors). She holds a college degree in publishing management and a masters degree in creative writing. Currently, she edits the  Ten Tales  series of multi-author short story anthologies:  Bites: Ten Tales of Vampires, Haunted: Ten Tales of Ghosts, Scared: Ten Tales of Horror, Cutlass: Ten Tales of Pirates, Beltane: Ten Tales of Witchc...

This interview with Arthur Golden, the author of Memoirs of a Geisha is ten years old, but new to me. A friend in a writing group passed the link to me, and I pass it on to you, with these thoughts: 1. This" overnight night success" took fifteen years to research, write, rewrite and sell. 2. Golden wrote a complete draft before he was able to interview a real geisha. "But I wrote a draft based on a lot of book-learning. And I thought I had a pretty good idea of what the world of a geisha was like, and wrote a draft. Then a chance came along to meet a geisha, which, of course, I couldn't turn down. And she was so helpful to me that I realized I'd gotten everything wrong, and I ended up throwing out that entire first draft and doing the whole thing over again." 3. He then rewrote the entire book again, this time changing from third person to first person. And I also found this insight to the point: O'BRIEN: What's it like, sitting there at the comput...

Research -- and its counterpart, worldbuilding -- used to be my greatest joy in writing. Recently, I often feel so pressured to add beans to the wordcount, I don't feel I can afford to luxuriate in research as I used to. The project I'm working on now is research-intensive. I thought I'd done most of the research already, working on a non-fiction piece. However, as I've  started working on a detailed outline, I've realized the needs of non-fiction and fiction diverge greatly. For non-fiction, I mostly needed to know when , where and who . With those facts, I can speculate on why . For fiction I need to answer much more about how . How did it smell? How did it look? How did it taste? Only then can I speculate on how it felt. My outline/draft so far is peppered with notes to myself: [NEED: description of a fishing ship ] All of these notes are promises to myself to do research.  Characters require research too. Names must fit the culture and period. Every character, ...

We have out-of-town guests staying with us this week, and they're sleeping in the room which normally serves as my home office. For that reason, I will probably not get much writing done, and may find it hard to blog as well. However, I can't complain. At least my house was not flooded! I'm not sure what this will do to my writing schedule for Book 2. I fear I was only able to join Sam's Virtual Write-In for about 2 hours. (I only wrote 500 words, but it was on a scene I had been struggling just to start.) I'm trying to use the time productively by doing research for a character and storyline which has been giving me trouble. As I mentioned, one of my subplots is a rip of Dangerous Liaisons ; a female character challenges a male character to seduce the heroine. I want to write some of the seduction scenes from the seducer's PoV. Even more fundamental, I wanted the lines he uses on her to be true to the kinds of lines players use. Being a big nerd, I don't ha...