Ask An Author: Quote Me.

(Image: Alice, making the face of joy she always made when I stroked her head while she was resting in my lap.)

Welcome to our $3 reward level, where people ask me questions, mostly about the business, craft, and process of writing, and I answer them as best I can.  Reasons this is a good idea:

* I am an internationally published author
* I release an average of four books a year
* I have won multiple major awards
* I actually make my living doing this

Reasons this is a terrible idea:

* Have you met me
* Like, ever
* I should not give advice to anyone

Now it's time to ask me literally anything, and watch as I flail around in an attempt to provide a coherent answer.  Please feel free to discuss in the comments, and to submit new questions either here or by emailing me through my website contact form.  As a reminder, this reward tier only works if we have questions: please, please feel free to share yours.  If you want to ask anonymously, just send your question in via my website, and say that you'd like me to leave your name off when I answer.  If you do not ask me to redact your name, it will be included, if only because it's fun to see your name in print sometimes.

This month's question comes from Alec, who asks: "The quotes at the beginning of each InCryptid chapter are a fun part for the series. Would you be willing to go into the hows and whys of those quotes a bit?  (Were the quotes always part of your vision for the books? Do you write the quotes as you write the book, or do you have a file of quotes that you add to as they pop in your head, and you just pull from it when you need one? So far, I don't believe we've actually seen the origin of any of the quotes appear on page, is this intentional to have those be 'off screen' moments for those characters?)"

This is one of those questions that's actually several questions in a trench coat, which is good, since any one of them alone would be insufficient to fill a full installment, while all of them together is hopefully sufficient.  So let's talk about epigrams, and why they're an integral part of the InCryptid series, which is, after all, a family affair.

I knew when I started writing InCryptid that it wasn't going to be like Toby, in the sense of having one ongoing narrator who somehow managed to stay standing through all the horrible things I threw at them.  Toby is supernaturally sturdy: it's her primary asset as a narrator, really.  I didn't want to do that again.  It felt boring to repeat myself.  So instead, I wanted to have relatively normal people, endurance-wise, who were going to be rotating.

It's a pretty common structure in the romance world, where dynastic romances tend to do the same "it's a family, and we watch them each take their turn in the spotlight" dance.  It has been used to excellent effect by Kelley Armstrong, in her Women of the Otherworld series, which was a partial inspiration for InCryptid--not structurally, but in the "oh you can have multiple narrators, it's not cheating, it's okay" sense.

So I knew from page one, paragraph one, that this was going to be a story about a family, and not just a story about whoever floated to the front of the queue.  And that meant imbuing the narrative with the presence of the rest of the family, making sure that they were included, without trying to shoehorn the entire list into every chapter.  How to do that?  How to...

Oh, right.  Epigrams.

The epigrams--the quotes--at the front of the chapters not only tell you something about what's coming, but they give you names to hang ideas on, and people to wonder about.  They "introduce" characters we haven't always seen yet, or may never see.  And they let me keep the whole family present, even in the books where they're not all included.  I write the quotes as I write the book, to be sure they suit the situation, and if they turn out not to work, I pull them and put them into a file to use later, but nine times out of ten, the quote I initially write for a chapter will turn out to be the right one.

Every character has their own list of people whose quotes they get.  It's partially gender-linked; Alex gets all the family men, for example, while Alice gets Mary and Laura in addition to family members we've seen before.  When you see Mary, next year, she has pretty much all the dead people, plus Apple.  It's very character-by-character, and the list has naturally grown as the series has gone on and we've met more of the cast.

Sometimes people will kvetch at me about the "generic" quotes, like what makes Alice saying "damn" notable enough to be a chapter header?  Lots of people have said damn.  And the answer is that crediting it to Alice in the context of the story makes it clear that something's about to happen that would make Alice say "damn."  They're not meant to be the deepest, most profound thoughts ever--even setting out to do that would be the kind of arrogant that gives me pause--but just contextual information about this family.

Finally, "So far, I don't believe we've actually seen the origin of any of the quotes appear on page, is this intentional to have those be 'off screen' moments for those characters?"  You may eventually see some of the quotes pop up in short stories and the like, but I don't want to force the narrative to fit in things that can just as easily have happened off-screen.  So while the on-screen/off-screen isn't a factor for me, most are likely to stay off-screen.

So that's that.  Like all of us, I'm stressed and sad and cabin fever-y from COVID, but please, please, ask me questions for December!  I don't want to have to start taking questions from Elsie, it would not end well!  Remember that I'll take questions about anything, and that if it can be answered with "yes" or "no," it's not a great question for this format; also if it's something I can't flog for paragraphs, like "how often do you brush your cats."  If you're tired of this reward and want to suggest a replacement, drop those here too.

Meanwhile, if you want your question to be kept for future use, emailing is better than commenting, if only so I've got a long term copy in my inbox.  But I do see all the questions, and try to remember to copy and keep the really interesting ones.

As a final note, please do not submit questions through Patreon.  Either leave them here to hopefully be answered for this reward level, or email me.  Thank you.