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An Interview with Posy Roberts

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  Posted by Christoarpher , 18 November 2013 · 1,336 views

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First of all, I’d like to welcome Posy Roberts here today to share news of her latest release, Fusion, the eagerly awaited sequel Posted Imageto Spark. Fusion releases today, and I’m very excited to host her on release day. Usually we climb up high into our crazy trees on release day, high high up into the branches and chuck pinecones down onto people’s heads. Seriously, it’s a nerve-wracking day.
Fusion
How do you tell your friends and family you’ve fallen in love with a man when they’ve only ever known you as straight? How do you explain to your kids that you loved their mother very much, but your new partner is your best friend from high school?
Kevin Magnus must figure it out while trying to build a relationship with Hugo Thorson, whose bigger than life, out-and-proud drag queen persona is simply too big to be contained in a closet—even for the time it takes Kevin to come up with an explanation for his kids and Erin, his soon-to-be ex-wife.
But Erin faces an even bigger obstacle—one that shakes the entire family to the core. When she unexpectedly turns to Hugo, they form a connection that forces Hugo to grow up and offers Kevin the chance to become the kind of father he wants to be. Despite the coming complications, they’ll all benefit from a fortunate side effect: it becomes clear that Hugo is very much a part of this unconventional family.
An Interview with Posy Roberts
Tell us a little about your story. Did you something specific inspire you to write it?
Posted ImageFusion is the second book in my North Star Trilogy. At the end of Spark, we left Hugo and Kevin realizing they wanted to give their relationship a real and solid chance. Fusion starts out very hopeful, but it doesn’t take long before Hugo and Kevin realize their relationship might not be able to move forward and that it could be dead in the water before it even had a chance.
A real life conversation inspired all of North Star, and especially this book. What would I do? was the question that kept popping up in my mind as I was told about an impossible situation a friend was facing. It inspired another dilemma to go through my mind and the story formed very quickly from there. I dove into the books and wrote them one right after the other before I edited a word.
Do you find you put a lot of yourself into your characters or is fiction just fiction?
I think it’s hard not to put parts of myself into some of my characters, but I could say the same thing about what I pull into my characters from my friends or people that drive me nuts. I write from my experience or from the experiences of people around me, and occasionally from overheard conversations, but everything is going to be filtered through my lens. Yet, at times I write a character based on some psychological issue or birth order or some other such thing.
Kevin in Fusion is not at all like me, but he is very affected by the emotional abuse his father dolled out over the years. I see some of myself in Hugo. He’s an ambivert who at times wants to be with people and at other times wants to hole up and left alone. But that’s a very small part of both of us.
How did you get started writing m/m romance? Did you always want to be a writer?
Ever since I was fourteen, I’ve wanted to write, but my heartsick poetry wasn’t what I’d had in mind. It only took until I was 37 for me to pursue writing more seriously. There were many years of college papers and what felt like ages of working on my thesis. After a time, writing simply had a bad connection in my head, or at the very least, a non-creative connotation.
It was the same with reading, because for many years I had to read 250-400 pages a night for classes. About the last thing I wanted to do was read more, even if it was for pleasure. Knitting and crocheting actually became my relaxation activity, along with watching sci-fi shows with my husband. I had to work past my learned hate of reading in order to even enjoy fiction again, let alone love it.
After a long enough time away from graduate school, I read something other than non-fiction for fun. I got started writing M/M romance after an extended illness where reading was about all I could manage. I wasn’t finding the stories I wanted to read, so I decided to take a stab at writing them.
What is the hardest part about writing for you? The benefits?
Finding long enough chunks of time to write is hard. I like to immerse myself in a story. Getting to that point when I have a child needing my attention, a job to go to, and pesky things such as the need to eat interrupting me makes my way of writing tough at times.
As for benefits, I find writing to be cathartic. I’m able to connect with my id and let loose on the page. Of course, my superego and ego do have to come out to regulate too or else I’d never do rewrites or edit my stories.
Do you have any writing quirks? (ie computer has to be facing a certain way, cup of coffee on the left, certain music playing, etc)
I need my coffee on my right, but my wine on the left (if that’s my beverage of choice that night). My music has to be lyric-less and not too stimulating. I prefer a heating pad to be on my lower back, and I always have my feet up on a stool in front of me with my feet crossed at the ankle (right over left). The best motivator in the world for me is to see a graph of my words added each day. I also need to be near a window so I can see outside while I write.
Do you have any writing or reading squicks? Things you don’t like to read and can’t see yourself ever writing?
I read fan fiction for so many years that I feel nearly squickless. Heck, I probably wrote most people’s squicks back when I was writing fan fiction. But I won’t read rape, molestation, and non-consensual acts meant to titillate.
It’s not a squick, but I don’t think I’ll ever write any hardcore BDSM. I don’t know anything about that world aside from what I’ve read, so I’d be too intimidated to even attempt it. I’d most certainly mess it up.
What’s next on your plate? What are you working on?
I have several things in the works, but I’ve been so busy this fall getting my novels and a short story ready for release in quick succession, I’ve had no time to write at all. I have several stories in mind. Over my winter break, I plan to dive in headfirst again.
Look forward to Feathers From the Sky released December 1st in Dreamspinner’s Advent Calendar. Hugo and Kevin’s teen story from Spark has been adapted and expanded for Harmony Ink. It’s called Private Display of Affection and is out December 12th. And book 3 of North Star, Flare will be released January 13th.
Posy’s short biography
Posy Roberts lives in the land of 10,000 lakes (plus a few thousand more). But even with more shoreline than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined, Minnesota has snow—lots of it—and the six months of winter makes us “hearty folk.” The rest of the year is heat and humidity with a little bit of cool weather we call spring and autumn, which lasts about a week.
She loves a clean house, even if she can’t keep up with her daughter’s messes, and prefers foods that are enriched with meat, noodles, and cheese, or as we call it in Minnesota, hotdish. She also loves people, even though she has to spend considerable amounts of time away from them after helping to solve their interpersonal problems at her day job.
Posy is married to a wonderful man who makes sure she eats while she documents the lives of her characters. She also has a remarkable daughter who helps her come up with character names. When she’s not writing, she enjoys karaoke, hiking, and singing spontaneously about the mundane, just to make normal seem more interesting.
Links:
Fusion (book 2)

Spark (book 1) 

North Star (series link) 

Posy Roberts’ page on Dreamspinner 

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