Please welcome to our blog author Marina Vivancos who is here to talk about new release “Night without Nights”.
Welcome Marina 🙂
Title: Nights Without Night
Series: Fox Lake Series #2
Author: Marina Vivancos
Publisher: Self-published
Release Date: 18th June 2018
Length: 60,000 words
Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Childhood Friends, Mental Health
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Synopsis
Isadoro and Iván have known each other since before memories were memories, when they were just the imprint of shape and sound pressed inside your head. They were raised together in La Portera, between the orange trees and water reservoirs, under an endless blue sky. Where they grew up is where Iván’s love for Isadoro grew, too. There, from the earth and the water, organic and helpless.
Iván had grown used to this love. He’d grown used to absence, too.
Isadoro left for the military when they were both eighteen and took a piece of Iván with him. It was as inevitable as the baking sun and sandy winds of those lands. Iván didn’t know how to fight it.
A thread between them remained. Phone calls, Skype sessions, rests between tours. But it was never quite enough.
After eight years, Isadoro comes back. At his core, he is the same man Iván has always known. But life has transformed them both from the malleable shapes of childhood and into the stiffer skin of adults. The situation is complicated further when they rekindle the ‘benefits’ portion of their friendship. The heat between them has always been undeniable, and now it scorches through them.
In the beginning, all seems well. But there are creatures under calm water. When they breach the surface, both Isadoro and Iván must learn how to help each other, but also to save themselves.
Please note: This story contains themes of affected mental health following the return from military combat. However, the ultimate focus of the story is on hope and recovery.
This story also contains very explicit scenes of a sexual nature.
On Developing Ideas
Everything starts with an idea. I think a lot of people may look at books they like and wonder, “how did they even come up with that?”, but a lot of the time there isn’t a great mystery. An idea is just a thought you feed in a certain way. You see or feel or experience something and there’s a natural spark of thought that everybody gets. Transforming it to something else simply takes 1) the curiosity to explore it internally and, 2) the impulse to use your voice to amplify whatever it is.
I find I have quite a mercenary brain when it comes to ideas. My first impulse is always “how can that be a story?” when I come across something interesting. For most things, it would be inappropriate to add my voice or perspective. For others, the thought just sizzles out. For some, though, they cling on and expand and reveal and take over until they have to get out.
My memory is exceptionally bad, so I write everything down. If I see something that interests me and I feel it has the potential to turn into something more, I go to a word document called “raw ideas” and jot it down.
Some of these get demoted to the document “rawer ideas”, which is where I keep ideas I quite like but feel like I probably won’t get around to writing (E.g. Fashion designer and hip hop artist music for runways, muse model curvy friend).
Others get put in the document _PANDORA, which contains single-line story summaries neatly divided into series. For example, the Fox Lake section looks like:
FOXLAKE SERIES
Budding BDSM Joaquin & Ezra – Sicken of the Calm
Artist & Past-military PTSD friends-to-lovers Iván & Isadoro – Nights Without Night
Finding yourself Iva & Sebastian – Fruit
I find that to develop ideas, I need to experience things either directly by going out into the world or indirectly by consuming media. By this I don’t even mean I have to have deep, meaningful experiences or read serious books. Just spending time doing something I enjoy inspires me. Something that bores me, no matter how intellectual, will not help me creatively at all.
Then, I have to give myself space to explore these thoughts. Taking walks helps me, not because I think about the stories while I walk, necessarily, but because it opens the windows of my head and lets some fresh air in for the ideas to breathe.
I currently have a folder filled with documents, each for a burgeoning story, where I will sloppily write lines/scene summaries/paragraphs if they pop into my head. E.g. some of the lines for Nights Without Night were:
Iván wondered which bonds were stronger; those forged in the fires of combat, or the ones eroded into shape by the waters of childhood
Callouses on the soul
Will you do me a favour? Come to my bed at night if you can’t sleep. You don’t have to, ok, if you don’t want to, but I would like it if you did.
It’s like I’m holding something in my hands that I’ve always wanted. Looks the same but hollow.
Some things only have to be experienced once to be caught in amber.
I’m not even sure if I used all of these, but they paint a picture of how I felt about the more serious parts of the story.
I also have a playlist on Spotify for ideas I might not even write where I add songs if I listen to one and think “oh, that would fit X story!” It helps get the feel of the story even if it doesn’t shed light on the details.
A lot of my headspace is dedicated to story ideas, but it’s not effortful. It’s only when I’m actively going to write that I sit down and figure out the details. Preceding this, however, is a period of co-existence with the idea in which we figure each other out and decide if we want to take it into the next level.
Existence.
The summer before Isadoro was finally deployed had run on borrowed time. I hadn’t applied to college but had gotten a summer job in La Portera while I figured out what to do with my life. After work, I would go to the beach with Isadoro, pretending this was any other summer and that adulthood wasn’t looming in September for both of us.
One night, we went down to the beach when it was late and dark. The sea was a pool of ink, the sound of it washing in and out a secret call. On Isadoro’s dare, we’d stripped our clothes and ran into the water, the coolness a relief from the thick summer air.
The half-moon had been a bowl of rice perched on the black. We’d swam around, free in the salt and the waves, pulling each other under in a familiar game. We’d been our child selves, free of the ties that tugged at us beyond the water.
When we tired and let ourselves drift, I remember Isadoro swimming close to me. Remember the moon in his eyes. The way his wet skin had felt against mine. It had almost been a kiss. Almost. But I couldn’t do that to myself. Not again. Not when he was leaving and he wasn’t in love with me back.
Who would have thought that I would be able to resist the pull of the moon at eighteen, and cave so many years later, caught completely in its tide.
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When Marina was a child she couldn’t sleep. Night after dissolving night she just couldn’t sleep. Nothing much worked – until she started making up stories in her head. Suddenly, the transition into unconsciousness was a smooth dive into calm waters.
Marina is currently in a period of sleepless upheaval, and she hopes writing down the stories in her head will cast the same spell it did decades ago.
Marina hopes to write in a variety of romance sub-genres, from contemporary to supernatural to sci-fi. Her style, however, tends to focus on character-centred stories that explore different facets of the human experience, such as mental health. She also enjoys writing explicit, drawn-out sex scenes, so expect those to be a prominent feature of her stories.
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