Hello, my dear! Tell everyone
about yourself.
Okay,
let’s see, I’m the wife of one, the mom of four skin kids (who are all dang near
grown) and the caretaker of one really old, smelly dog and one little black
lunatic of a cat. I believe wearing your “weird” on your sleeve is what brings
happiness so I fly my freak flag high and proud. I love zombies, science
fiction and tacos. I haven’t seen my natural hair color in many, many moons and
I’m quite alright with that. I laugh a LOT, mostly at myself because I also
believe that laughter frees the mind and heals the soul.
And now I want tacos. Thanks for that, haha.
What are your
favorite and least favorite parts about being a writer?
My
favorite part is getting all the people running around in my head out of my
head and onto the page so I don’t go completely bonkers. My least favorite part
is trying to translate what they are saying inside my head into words that
other people with understand. Does that make sense? I mean, I love writing, but
if I could just plug my brain into my laptop and download all the crap in there
it would be so much easier.
Oh, you have no idea how much I agree with you about all of that. We need to invent the brain-to-computer tool for writers ASAP.
What’s one piece
of advice you’d give to other writers?
Have
a thick skin. Like seriously, rhinoceros skin. Not everyone is going to love
your work and that’s okay, not everyone HAS to love it. Some people say that
you shouldn’t look at reviews, especially the bad ones. I say look at the bad
review and see if there is anything you can learn from it, but don’t take what
they say personally.
Do you prefer
silence or to have music on when you’re writing? What kind?
That
really all depends on what I’m writing. If I’m writing something serious I like
to have silence, which is hard in my house. But if I’m writing a fight scene I
like to have some really rocking music. 2Cellos are my “go-to” for fight
scenes, they rock but I don’t have the distraction of lyrics because sometimes
I find the lyrics of a song can take me out of the scene. However, writing the
third book in the Divinity series, I listened almost exclusively to the Black
Veil Brides album, Wretched and Divine. I found their lyrics to really match
the tone of what I was writing and it really spoke to me in a way that it
almost felt like that album was written as a soundtrack for the book.
How’d you get
the idea for Divinity (Divinity
series, Book 1)? How about for the series as a whole?
I
know it sounds certifiable, but it all started as voices in my head. Not voices
in the literal sense, but that’s the best way to describe it. Evie, the main
character in Divinity, started niggling at me, poking my brain and demanding to
be heard. That’s how my ideas start. There are always ideas rolling around in
my head about one character or another and then one of them gets really loud
and I have to, for lack of a better term, let them out. Evie started as a short
story, just a little chapter to get her out, sometimes that’s all it takes to
purge the “voice” from my head. But she wasn’t having that, she wouldn’t stop
poking and prodding until I gave her a book of her own.
Characters love to do that!
Will there be
more books in the Divinity series?
There
is a second book, Entity, which is
out now and I’m working on the third and final book, Fidelity. Oh wow, I don’t think I’ve ever shared the title of that
one yet.
Yay! I'm honored you shared that! Super excited!
And what are you
working on right now?
Right
now I’m working on Fidelity. I’ve
written the bulk of it but I was going about it in a completely different way
that I had with the other two. I didn’t have a formal outline this time, I just
sort of sat down and wrote what came to me. It was quite freeing actually.
What genres do
you write in? What have your experiences been like?
I’ve
written in both historical romance with Cat
O’ Nine Tails and in the urban fantasy/paranormal romance/new adult with
the Divinity Series. The big difference, at least for me, is that Cat O’ Nine Tails is written in third
person narrative where as the Divinity Series is written in first person. It’s
a different mindset to write in third person than in first person. Naturally,
you have a broader spectrum in the third person because you have an overview of
everything that’s happening and that can be a smoother writing experience.
First person can be challenging because you are only looking through one set of
eyes, if something is happening and that person isn’t seeing it, you can’t use
it so that can be tough. I’m not going to lie, there were times, especially
when writing the second and third books in the Divinity Series that I thought
to myself, why oh why did I start writing this in first person?
What was your
favorite scene to write?
I
absolutely love, love, LOVE writing a fight scene! There is something so
cathartic about vanquishing a bad guy or just beating the crap out of them.
What scene gave
you the most trouble?
Oh
goodness, I think that would be one a scene in Entity, near the end that I can’t talk about because, you know,
spoilers and stuff. I will say that I struggled like crazy trying to get that
part out and I have no idea why, I just couldn’t get into the right mindset for
it, not matter what I did. Then one night, I had taken my son to school across
town and on the way home a song came on the radio and the scene came to me in a
flood of emotion and imagery that I couldn’t get home fast enough to get it down.
The emotion was so strong that I can’t even listen to that song anymore without
bursting into tears like a weirdo.
That's awesome, though! Sometimes the best stuff comes out of the blue like that.
Where can we
find you on the interwebs?
You
can find me on the Facebooks in two places:
Author
page: https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaLeever
Personal
page: https://www.facebook.com/patty.leever
I’m
on the Instagrams: https://instagram.com/pattyleever/
The
Tweets: https://twitter.com/Patricia_Leever
And
my website: http://patricialeever.com/
Where can we
find your books?
Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Patricia-Leever/e/B00AR0V0V6/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1433873277&sr=8-1
Simon
and Schuster: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Patricia-Leever/508720756
Barnes
and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/patricia-leever
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