Today’s interview is with Rosalie Stanton, author of Moving Target and Firsts, who shares with us her insight on bad boys, character interviews and her early endeavors with fan fiction.

LUX ZAKARI: Can you tell readers a little bit about your latest work?

ROSALIE STANTON: My most recent publication was Moving Target, and it was a response to a prompt on a writer forum. The story is dedicated to the ladies who run that particular forum, as I had no ambitions of publishing it. Yet as characters are prone to do, Wolf and Anna hijacked where I intended to go, and upon completion I thought I’d shop it around and see if it had an audience.

It is a much shorter story than the sort I’m likely to pen. I usually don’t do anything below 25,000 words, and the projects I most enjoy tackling are longer still. Moving Target is at a place where I know I could revisit the characters and the premise somewhere down the road, and the more I consider it, the more appealing the idea becomes. We’ll just see what happens.

LZ: According to your Lyrical Press bio, you enjoy writing about “alpha males, from badass bikers to scruffy-looking Nerf herders” — what is the reason?

RS: I have no idea, to be honest. I’ve always had a bad-boy complex, which used to really concern my mother. My favorite character growing up was Han Solo, not Luke, and it spiraled from there. A man who comes across as witty, rude, dark, damaged, etc., who also falls completely in love with someone he views as his equal, or even his opposite, is the sort for which I’m likely to swoon. I also have a thing for unrequited love. You can blame that on Frasier’s Niles and Daphne.

LZ: How did you get your start writing erotica?

RS: It was a slow process. As a teenager, I discovered fan-fiction, which completely baffled me but lured me in all the same. I found myself drawn into stories I would never have considered—most of which were raunchy as hell. I had a fairly puritanical upbringing, so my relationship with erotica went from, “I won’t read it,” to “OK—I’ll read it. I just won’t write it,” to “When can I start writing it?” I was a very romantic teen, but didn’t date much; my relationships were with characters. It was the best sex-education I received. It also made me incredibly picky when I decided to date. That’s how I ended up with my husband, who still occasionally makes me doubt he’s real and not an elaborate creation of my romantic head.

LZ: What have you written — published or not — that you are most proud of?

RS: My writing journey has certainly taken me places I hadn’t imagined. I’ve always been a writer, and I’ve written on every sort of computer imaginable. During my angsty pre-teen years, I penned a novella set in Natchez, Mississippi, that I routinely rewrote every time I visited the town. I also wrote stories about a monster that inhabits the girls’ lavatory restroom as an explanation as to why girls always travel in packs to public restrooms. From the horrific to the ridiculous, however, writing has always been very personal for me…to the point where I’d have an anxiety attack if anyone—friends, family, whoever—knew which words were mine. This changed when I was a freshman in high school. As I mentioned, I discovered fan-fiction as a teen and, for several years, utilized it as a way to anonymously improve my writing. It wasn’t a matter of shame, by any means, rather just symptomatic of being an overly self-conscious child who didn’t want to be judged based on my character or odd imagination. In this way, fan-fiction helped me branch out, find a critical audience and build myself as a writer who constantly received feedback, good and sometimes downright nasty.

That being said, since I started telling my own stories with my own characters, my participation in fan-fiction has dwindled considerably. I still rely on the friends I made—the ones I really, really trust—as critics for the early drafts of what I’m writing, but over the last three years I’ve started shifting focus. My last completed “fan-fiction” project is, to date, what I’m proudest of. I worked on it for three years altogether, and it was very emotional for three reasons. 1: It was about a journey through Hell. 2: It followed me through one of the largest transitions in my personal life. 3: It really was my goodbye to the form of writing that kept me company through my youth.

That’s not to say I’m not proud of my original work —I am very proud. The transition hasn’t been easy, but rewarding. I love writing my own characters and developing my own stories. There have been notable “Easter eggs” in pretty much everything I’ve published to date, but a part of maturing into adulthood has been saying goodbye to things that will always be with me, even if I’m not always with them. I know I’ve been quiet about this subject in past interviews, but I’m not ashamed of my writing, regardless of what it is or where it’s posted. Rather, I’m excited about moving forward and rediscovering myself, even if it is one major writing project at a time.

LZ: Also according to your site, you like challenging yourself with “projects that seem, at first glance, too large to conquer.” What is an example of this?

RS: The WIP I’ve been working on since the beginning of this year is an example. It’s a paranormal romance, but it likewise involves a character who has appeared in my early, early writings—one I fell in love with years ago. I’ve already told and completed his story once, so it’s really back to the beginning with him. The WIP in which he currently appears won’t even be his story; it’s a set up for what I have planned for him in a subsequent project.

The WIP itself involves government experiments, ancient blood feuds, a proud, self-involved hero who doesn’t let women get close to him and a damaged, independent heroine who isn’t interested in love at all. I’m a perfectionist, so it’s a long, grueling process of fighting with myself and my tendency to self-edit. In the meantime, I’ve started working on two or three other WIPs that will be much shorter, and hopefully ensure readers don’t forget me as I work on the larger projects.

LZ: You have done “interviews” with your characters — can you tell readers more about them? How do you come up with questions to ask?

RS: I had never conducted character interviews prior to this last week at Melodee Aaron’s group. I thought it’d be a nice way for readers to get to know my characters prior to making a purchasing decision. It was a process I perfected the more interviews I did. The first interview with Thorn was pretty cut-and-dry. I Googled character interviews and came up with a standard set of questions a writer would theoretically ask a character prior to putting him/her on paper. Since my interview took place after the fact, I improvised and substituted a few questions for my own. This didn’t exactly provide an enthralling interview (at least, for me), so I changed it up a bit when I interviewed Savannah.

Throughout the week, I eventually dropped the “formal” interview and just let the characters run loose. The interviews with Wolf and Anna of Moving Target and Raven, Nicholas and Dexter of Ripples Through Time were just a back-and-forth between the characters and myself, which was a lot of fun. I’d start writing dialogue and forget that I was supposed to ask them questions. It gave me the opportunity to reconnect with my characters. It was like visiting with old friends.

LZ: What can readers expect next from you?

RS: As I mentioned, I have three WIPs in the works now. Two are progressing quite well, and I’m not sure which one will be finished first. The contemporary romance will likely be 25,000-40,000 words long, and the other, a paranormal romance, will likely be 35,000-50,000 words. The larger WIP, the paranormal with my returning character, will likely be 50,000-100,000 words, and with only 13,000 words completed, it’ll be a while before that one is sent to my editor.

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To purchase Moving Target from its publisher, Lyrical Press, visit www.lyricalpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_12&products_id=268.

To purchase Firsts from its publisher, Loose Id, visit www.loose-id.com/Firsts.aspx.

To learn more about Rosalie Stanton, visit rosalie-stanton.com, twitter.com/rosaliestanton and rosaliestanton.blogspot.com.