Interview with Ariel Tachna

Today we’re interviewing Ariel Tachna who is a prolific author and also the Social Networking Coordinator for Dreamspinner Press.

Hello Ariel and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed on the site. My first question is what’s a French teacher doing writing M/M romances?

Hi, Wave, and thank you so much for inviting me. I’m a regular reader of your blog (even if I’m a terrible commenter) so it’s a thrill to be here. To answer your question, that French teacher fell in love with writing the same year she fell in love with French, and sixteen years ago, it was easier to get a job teaching French than it was to make a go of it as an author. The M/M part of it came about through The Lord of the Rings. I discovered fanfic about the time The Return of the King was released and found my introduction to all things m/m through Aragorn and Legolas. I wrote a very long, very angsty piece of fanfic and then realized I wanted to write more, except my stories didn’t fit in Tolkien’s world, so I just kept writing, but in my own worlds.

You have probably answered this question many times before, but since this is your first interview here could you tell the readers a bit about Ariel the writer and the real person? Is there a difference?  🙂

Sometimes I think Ariel the writer is the real person and the face everyone else sees is the construct, although that’s hardly fair to my friends and family or even to my former students and colleagues. The best answer is that each segment of my life gets the portion of me that best suits them. When I was in the classroom, my students got my love of France and all things French. They got my passion for social justice, but the only part of my m/m world they got was my refusal to let them use derogatory terms based on sexuality (or race or anything else, since respect was the one thing I demanded they bring into the classroom). My children get my love of French (I’ve never spoken English to them – the rest of the world does enough of that), my insistence on equality (my six-year old daughter asked me the other day if two girls could love each other – I told her absolutely) and all my maternal instincts. At three and six, they don’t need the rest. But all of it goes into my stories at times. Her Two Dads was inspired in part by my daughter. Partnership in Blood was certainly sparked by my love of France. And I wouldn’t write m/m romances if I didn’t believe deeply in the right of all people to love regardless of gender.

What does a Social Networking Coordinator for Dreamspinner do?

I have a variety of responsibilities under the networking umbrella. First, as you know, I handle the distribution of all the review copies of our books. We have about 40 review sites on our auto-send list, but we’re always looking for new ones as well. I handle all of the social media sites for Dreamspinner as well: Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Library Thing, the Yahoo! group, and Dreamspinner’s blog. I handle bookstore contacts and working with our distributors to get our books into as many bookstores as possible. Most importantly, though, I try to act as a resource for our authors in terms of their own publicity. I keep lists of blogs that accept guest spots. I arrange Meet the Author events on Facebook and Goodreads. I help set up release parties and book signings for our authors. And I attend about fifteen conventions a year representing the press.

You have amassed a lot of books in the short time since you were first published. How do you find the time? Is there a genii at home who doles out extra time just for you?

No extra time, I’m afraid, just a backlog of things I’d written since 2004 that I’m still polishing up and submitting and a muse that won’t leave me alone. I’m fortunate to have a generally cooperative muse and fast fingers. I average 50,000 words a month, and on a good month I can double or even triple that. Overdrive, my most recent release, took longer for a variety of reasons, but The Inventor’s Companion, which came out in March¸ took me about five weeks to write, and I wrote over half of it in 16 days.

You have published almost 40 books since 2007, some written with your writing partners Nicki Bennett or Madeleine Urban, and some on your own.

Sometimes you co-author, sometimes not.  Laura, a blogger, wants to know:

How do you decide which stories, who with, and how to break up the work?

The real answer to that question is that there wouldn’t be any books at all if it weren’t for Nicki because I’d never get anything written if she weren’t there holding my hand, acting as my sounding board, pointing out plot holes, and generally making sure I do my job right. That said, we have actually co-written some books as opposed to her holding my hand on the others. Part of the answer to your question lies in when the stories came about. I’d started writing Partnership in Blood when we were still newly acquainted and before we started working together. In fact, the first time we met face to face, I had the first chapter of Alliance in Blood written out by hand in a notebook. As integral as she has been to my writing in that series, the actual writing has been mine. The first time we co-wrote something, it was a scene in a short story that was giving me fits. She looked at it, wrote the next paragraph, and that got me going again. So when I finished that story, I asked if she’d be interested in trying something together. She said yes, and here we are. In terms of deciding which stories we write together, it tends to be the ones I wouldn’t dare take on by myself. Like Exploring Limits. It was my idea, but I never would have tackled it alone.

In the case of my collaborations with Madeleine (yes, that’s plural. We have two projects we’re working on getting into a publishable state right now), it worked a little differently. We decided we wanted to work together and so started casting around for something we could agree on to write instead of one of us having the idea and approaching the other with it the way Nicki and I do.

In both cases, we write together in real time, each of us responsible for a character or characters. We may discuss a scene ahead of time in general terms, but I don’t know what her characters are going to say until the words appear on the page any more than my character knows, and so I (and my character) have to react to that in real time. I think it makes for very honest dialogue rather than a more contrived situation where I control everything.

What do you feel are your greatest rewards as an author other than the fans and what are the challenges?

The greatest reward (other than the fans and their reaction) is most definitely holding the book in my hands. When Alliance in Blood came out, we were at Conglomeration, the first convention Dreamspinner attended. Elizabeth North, Executive Director of Dreamspinner, put the book in my hand and I’m not sure I put it down for the rest of the weekend, much to the amusement of the others who were there. The two greatest challenges for me are keeping the stories fresh and juggling the demands of promotion (both mine and Dreamspinner’s) with my desire to write.

I’m aware that you spent 16 years teaching French and that you adore anything to do with France. Why is that? Did you spend part of your formative years in France? You should visit the Province of Quebec here in Canada that’s almost totally French and is a lot closer than France. 🙂

Place_Francois_Rude_Dijon

I actually have been to Quebec. We spent a week in Montreal last April and loved it. I’m just waiting for another vacation so we can go back.

Now to the real question… I grew up hearing we were a French family. I’m thirteenth generation born in the United States, but if you trace my father’s family back to 1643, they came from La Rochelle, fleeing the persecution of the Huguenots and their supporters. When I was twelve, I had the choice between French and Spanish as a foreign language, and I chose French without thinking twice about it. I fell in love with the language almost immediately. It took me all of about three weeks to decide that whatever I did with my life, I would speak this language.

When I was twenty, I went to France for the first time, fell as much in love with the country as I was with the language, and met my husband. (He’s from India, but that’s another story for another interview. *wink*) Je suis américaine par naissance mais mon cœur est dijonais. I’m American by birth, but my heart is Dijonais. I returned to Dijon the year after I graduated from college to teach English in a French high school for a year before beginning my teaching career back in the US, with the stated goal of never again being told I spoke French well for an American. The people who said it always intended it as a compliment, but if they thought to say it, I’d done something wrong. I’ve returned to France as often as possible since then, visiting the families I lived with, attending the weddings of my French sisters, introducing my students to France, and most recently taking my children to meet my friends.

All of that adds up to a lifelong love affair with the language, the culture, and the country. And like all things important to me, that carries over into my writing.

You write quite a few series and I have asked this question of other authors who have many series books to their credit. What’s the attraction to you, as an author, of a series? Is it having a built-in fan base? Is it because you want to see the characters evolve to the extent that’s not possible in a single novel? Did writing some of your series catch you unaware i.e. you never set out to write a series but some of the characters wanted more face time? All or none of the above?

My first series, Partnership in Blood, didn’t start as a series. In my head, those first four books are one story. Unfortunately it didn’t fit in one book. And then, when I sent the manuscript of Reparation in Blood to Elizabeth, she e-mailed back to tell me I hadn’t finished yet, that she wanted the rest of Raymond and Jean’s story. Since my muses are her slaves, that became Perilous Partnership. I’m now about a third of the way into the sixth book in the series, and last month, Nicki fed me an idea for a seventh book. The individual stories are complete, but the overarching universe has stories still to share.

In the case of my other series, it was more a question of secondary characters having a story of their own to tell. Sasha and Harry from Hot Cargo, Aristide from Checkmate (and yes, Nicki and I are working on Raúl’s story now), and maybe even Evan from Out of the Fire. (No promises on that one but the idea is rumbling around in my head.)

Of all your books which one was the most challenging to write? Why?

Out of the Fire is without a doubt the most challenging book I’ve written to date. The story deals with abuse, recovering from abuse, and a much more lifestyle kind of BDSM than anything I’ve written elsewhere. Yes, I’d written some role-playing in the Games Lovers Play stories, and Nicki and I wrote characters exploring kinky sex in Exploring Limits, but what Takoda endured and then later what he wanted from Rhys went way beyond kinky sex to a kind of submission and dominance I had never explored before.
It’s easy to research physical positions and toys and series of actions. It’s a lot harder to get into a mindset that was totally foreign to me. Fortunately I had a couple of friends who were willing to help me get in Evan’s head in the narration and make Rhys’s and Takoda’s words and behavior believable.

One of the things I admire about you is that you write just about any theme in the M/M subgenre while most authors stick to one or two. Why is that? Don’t you find that you spend an inordinate time in researching your plots and characters because your plots are so wide ranging? Also how would you categorize your writing, other than M/M romance?

I’m a multi-genre reader and always have been so it makes sense that I’d be a multi-genre (or at least subgenre) writer. Certainly some of my stories do require a lot of research. I won’t even try to count the hours I spent researching pirates for The Matelot, but because I’m a multi-genre reader, I know the kinds of things I need to research for different stories, so that helps. In other cases, I’ve drawn from real experiences. I don’t have to look things up when I’m writing about France, or if I do, I already have all the web sites bookmarked from teaching. I didn’t have to research camping things for Seducing C.C. because I spent every summer from the age of 8 to the age of 23 at a camp very much like the one in the story, and everything except the romantic relationship happened to me or around me. I competed in dressage and show jumping in high school and college and taught horseback riding in the summers when I lived in Houston, so writing the horseback riding lessons in Sutcliffe Cove was second nature. You get the idea.

As for how I would categorize my writing, I generally don’t. I’ll categorize a story or a series, but if people ask me what I write, I answer m/m romance in a variety of subgenres. If they ask for a little more information, I start listing the subgenres by book.

When you’re writing with a partner do you have a specific plan regarding who does what e.g. are you better at conceptualizing and your writing partner loves the detail? Do you each write different characters?

Nicki and I (and I’m going to talk mostly about my collaboration with her because Madeleine and I have fun together, but Nicki and I are a team) share a brain. People laugh when I tell them that until they see us together. We finish each other’s sentences; we type the exact same words into chat at the exact same time; when we’re working a table at a convention or pride festival, I hand her what she’s about to ask for before she can ask for it and vice versa. The result is that writing together is a collaborative, synergistic process. We always have a plan (not that we follow it, but that’s a different discussion entirely) and a goal when we sit down to write. We establish who will write which characters. And then we start writing and see what happens. The result is occasionally humorous (Perrin and Léandre’s conversations in All for One), occasionally poignant (Christian’s speech when he tries to convince a wounded Teo of what he brings to their relationship), hopefully hot (Peter and Blaise anyone?), but always, always heartfelt. If we’ve done our jobs right, I fall in love with her character as mine does and vice versa.

To what extent does real life influence your writing? Are some of your characters drawn from people you know, or is everything strictly based on your imagination?

I answered this to some extent earlier when I talked about the camping and the horseback riding and even France, but that’s life experience, not characters. If you start breaking characters down into their traits, I think all of them tie into someone I’ve known. I had more than one student with Blaise’s cockiness, for example. I knew tons of guys in college with C.C.’s carefree attitude toward sex. My best friend since seventh grade has Kit’s cocky-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside personality, but those are traits we could all probably find in people we know. To me, that’s what makes them powerful characters. They resonate with us or with people of our acquaintance and so they feel real. None of my characters is based entirely on a real person because by the time their stories have been told, they are themselves, no matter who they may have started out being in my head.

Tell us the genesis of your latest book – Overdrive – about French race car driver Daniel Leroux and his partner Frank Dufour.

I have a friend in North Carolina, Ryu, who totally loves rally racing. About a year ago, maybe a little less, he was teasing me about my books and asked why I hadn’t written something he’d read, so I asked him what I could write that he would read. (He’s not a big reader to begin with and definitely not a romance reader.) He sent me a link to the World Rally Championship web site and told me if I wrote something about that, he’d read it. I knew nothing about racing. Nothing. But I find it very hard to back down from a challenge, so I told him I’d do it on one condition. He had to help me get the details right. He agreed on one condition. When I sent him the chapters to read, I had to highlight the sex parts so he could skip them. I figured that was a fair exchange since I didn’t need help writing the sex parts anyway.

So Ryu started sending me video links and web page links and more research than I could possibly digest (as I was in the middle of writing Perilous Partnership and Exploring Limits) and I kept bookmarking them and looking at them when I needed a break. Little by little I got a feeling for the sport, and with Ryu holding my hand, I started writing. I’m not an expert by any means and probably won’t be because I’ve finished their tale and am on to the next, but I certainly know a whole lot more about cars now than I did before!

You’re such a prolific writer I probably have an idea of the answer to this next question. How many and what books do you have planned for release in the next 3 – 6 months?

I have a Daydream called Highland Lover coming out May 11 inspired by a picture my friend Alix sent me of a man in a tux standing next to a man in a kilt, very obviously a couple. In June, there’s Crossroads in Blood as part of the First Time for Everything Daily Dose. In July, I have another novel, Once in a Lifetime, which I’ve very, very excited about. It’s a departure for me in several ways. First of all, it’s written in first person, which I don’t do. I don’t even read it unless Nicki wrote it or I have no other choice. Secondly, it’s more of a coming-of-age/coming-out story than it is a romance. Not that there isn’t romance in it because part of Shane’s journey to being comfortable with himself as a gay man is falling in love, but it’s more about how he got to that stage than it is the actual romance. Most importantly, though, the story is told entirely through Shane’s journal. I hadn’t planned to do it that way. I’d planned to alternate journal entries with chapters of third-person narration, but Shane had other plans, and I’m really thrilled with the way it’s turned out.

Nicki and I have a novel coming out this fall, Under the Skin, which deals with a Chicago police detective and a Russian mobster. It’s a contemporary suspense novel. I don’t want to call it a mystery because the body they have to deal with is secondary to the plot, but there’s definitely plenty of suspense.

I’m hoping to get the sixth volume of the Partnership in Blood series finished in time for a fall publication as well.

And then there’s the spin-off to The Inventor’s Companion which will be another first for me because it will have to go to a publisher other than Dreamspinner. We’ll have to see if I can find someone interested.

What does Ariel do for fun in her spare time if there’s such a thing?

There isn’t much of that these days, in part because writing was always my hobby and so it’s hard now that it’s my job to remember to do something else for fun. Actually, once we move this summer, I’m hoping to find time to start riding again. With little children and a full-time job, I had to let it slide the last six years, but my daughter will be in first grade and my son will be in preschool next year so I should be able to find an hour a week to run to the local stables (where I know people since we’re actually moving back to the city we lived in before).

What’s next for you?

I answered that question to some extent in talking about what I have coming out over the next few months, but beyond that, I got quite a few ideas for interesting pairings when I did a Meet the Author event a couple of months ago. I had a contest where people had to guess the professions of my next couple. They didn’t have to be right. They just had to guess. I got some great suggestions, so I’ll be going back to those the next time I’m ready to consider a new idea. Of course I have a folder on my computer full of stories I’ve started and set aside because something else demanded my attention first. A medieval troubadour with an eye that wanders as much as his feet, Australian sheepherders, professional ice skaters, High Mountain Rangers, Scottish warriors… my mind is a strange and wondrous place, and I never know what will spring out next. The trick is in listening to what it’s telling me instead of what I think I want it to say.

Thank you for your time Ariel.

Thank you for having me, and thank you in advance to all the readers who comment. I’ll be around to answer any other questions or comments if anyone has them.

I’d also love to offer commenter’s choice from my backlist (or upcoming titles, if you want to wait) to one lucky commenter drawn at random at the end of the day tomorrow.

Ariel’s Contact Information

email:  arieltachna@gmail.com
Web site: http://www.arieltachna.com
Blog: http://arieltachna.livejournal.com
Facebook: http://tiny.cc/29npd
Twitter: @arieltachna