Love Bytes: Are you a plotter or a pantster?
J.Scott Coatsworth: I used to be a total pantser. I’d sit down and just start writing, and plow through three or four pages before I hit a brick wall. I have a file folder full of what I euphemistically call “story starters.” Now I’m more of a hybrid – I have a sketch of an outline, and generally know where the story will go, but I leave myself some wiggle room for course changes, which also helps keep the writing fresh for me.
LB: Where do you like to write?
JSC: Usually in the kitchen. I use an older laptop and Apple Pages in the cloud – the laptop has no social media logins, no email, very few things I can use to distract myself while I write. Last year, before it got cold, I had the romantic idea of writing outside under a big redwood tree. That lasted about ten minutes until the spiders started crawling all over me. Now I am perfectly happy at our kitchen table.
LB: How do you approach covers for your indie stories?
JSC: I spend a ton of time going through stock photo sites, checking a few keywords. When I find something close, I check the “images like this” search and go down another three or four rabbit holes. It’s not uncommon to have twn tabs open and have looked at 500 pages of images before I find the one I want. Then I work in Photoshop to edit the image, add the text and make it just what I want (and sometimes call in the big guns for a little help).
LB: What food(s) fuel your writing?
JSC: Trader Joe’s dark chocolate. I get the two bar pack, and break a quarter of one bar into24 little pieces. Then I have one per page (generally). I have been known to eat the whole thing in the first five minutes, on occasion. 😉
LB: What are you working on now?
JSC: I’m publishing the first book in a new trilogy – “Dropnauts” – that’s loosely connected to my Ariadne Cycle series, on May 10th. I’ve also written the first two books in another trilogy, The Tharassan Cycle: “The Dragon Eater,” “The Gauntlet Runner” and “The Hencha Queen.” It’s a sci-fantasy YA trilogy that I’ll be shopping on the agent circuit shortly. Next up, the sequel to “Dropnauts” – “Corediver.”
J. Scott Coatsworth’s MM “elf-meets-trans-man in post-climate-change San Francisco” book Cailleadhama is now out in audiobook format. And there’s a giveaway!
Colton is a trans man living in a climate-changed world. He plies the canals that used to be city streets, earning a living taking tourists on illicit journeys through San Francisco’s flooded edges beneath the imposing bulk of the Wall.
Tris is an elf who comes through the veil to the City by the Bay – the Caille – on a coming of age pilgrimage called the Cailleadhama. He is searching for his brother Laris, who went missing after crossing through the Caille years before.
The two men find they have common cause, and together they set off to find Laris in a world transformed by the twin forces of greed and climate change. And in the end, they find out more than they ever expected, both about the warming world and their own selves.
Audible Audiobook | Amazon Kindle EBook Amazon Paperback
Scott is giving away your choice of a $20 Amazon Gift Certificate or a signed first edition of the Liminal Sky: Ariadne Cycle Trilogy (USA only). Enter via Rafflecopter:
Audio Excerpt:
Colton sat at the old, salvaged mirror in his wreck of an apartment, high above the Main Street Canal on San Francisco’s drowned waterfront. Not that San Francisco didn’t have its pride. As the Capital of Pacifica, she was still a center of commerce and politics.
But canal rats like Colton didn’t matter much anymore.
The bed behind him, salvaged from another abandoned apartment, was a mess of sheets, a reminder of the trick he’d brought home the night before, someone who’d been paid enough to overlook Colton’s shortcomings.
Colton took out a vial of testosterone—his last one, bought at a dear price from the Pharmacist. He pulled out a clean syringe and took off the plastic top, pulling out the stopper to 5 milliliters. He inserted the needle into the bottle, and pushed the air in, an act familiar to him from long practice. Then he pulled out the last of the drug, flicking the syringe twice and pushing out all the air bubbles.
He replaced the needle with a smaller gauge, dumping the larger one into an old caramel corn can he kept for his medical waste.
He used a piece of cotton and a bottle of cheap liquor to wipe down the injection site on his thigh, sterilizing it as best he could. Once it was dry, he took a deep breath, pinching his muscle and pulling his skin to the side. He inserted the needle into his leg, drawing the syringe back a bit to make sure there was no blood. He had to be careful to avoid injecting the hormone directly into his bloodstream.
It hurt a little, but he was used to it.
He dumped the used syringe and the empty vial into the can. He had friends who weren’t so careful to use clean needles, for their hormones or recreational drugs. Some of those friends were now dead, or worse.
Next, he took the medical bandages that he carefully washed every day, and wrapped them around his chest, binding his breasts tightly.
He didn’t look at them. He hated those reminders of his female body—he’d been running from that accident of birth for years.
He wrapped the bandages around himself three or four times, holding in his breath. Once he had his breasts secured, he adjusted them to the side to make his chest as flat as possible.
He looked at the results in the mirror. It would have to do.
He wished he could afford to be re-sequenced. To truly make his body match his gender, to not feel counterfeit in his own form.
Colton glanced out through the broken window. The lights of the City were starting to come on over there as dusk approached. He lived in a no man’s land, the part of the City where the water encroaching from the Bay had reached the old first and second floors. Toward the heart of the City, on the other side of the Wall, the rich still carried on as if nothing had changed.
Those with money called the drowned parts of the city the Canal District. It ran from the old Levis Plaza down to China Basin along the City’s Bay side. There were a number of tony restaurants on the roofs and higher floors of the City behind the Wall that offered views of this supposedly “romantic” neighborhood. For a fee, you could even take a ride through the ruins on a gondola.
That was Colton’s “day job”. It brought in enough money to afford food, hormones, and little else, at least, when he was able to pay Mason his overdue boat storage fees.
So at night, he haunted the drowned streets, looking for those he could help, or sometimes relieve of their excess cash.
Scott lives with his husband Mark in a yellow bungalow in Sacramento. He was indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine. He devoured her library, but as he grew up, he wondered where all the people like him were.
He decided that if there weren’t queer characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.
A Rainbow Award winning author, he runs Queer Sci Fi, QueeRomance Ink, and Other Worlds Ink with Mark, sites that celebrate fiction reflecting queer reality, and is a full member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).
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Author Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/J.-Scott-Coatsworth/e/B011AFO4OQ