Bryn: What brought you to loveyoudivine?

Lara: I am one half of the editing/conception team that developed the “To Love and To Cherish” project. Beth Wylde is my partner in this. We brainstormed that we wanted to do something to support the marriage equality fight after the devastating passage of Prop 8 in California. We wanted to raise money. We came up with the idea of writing stories that celebrated women loving women and putting it together in a collection to sell and raise the money. We needed a publisher.

Beth had just worked with Claudia at loveyoudivine on a story in the new FemErotica division and so approached her on lyd’s possible interest in publishing the eventual collection. Claudia loved the idea and so To Love and To Cherish was born, and that’s how I came to loveyoudivine. Previously I’ve been published by PD Publishing, Torquere Press, and Logical Lust Publications.

I’ve done a lot of the promo copy for To Love and To Cherish including the back cover blurb, and the cover art is my art. I also did all the final edit checks on all the stories before they went to Claudia for typsetting/formatting.

I am a writer first and foremost so I do have a story titled “Traditional Values” in the collection, which will be in the very first e-book mini-collection “Volume 1: On Bended Knee” being released Jan. 29, 2010. And, though it wasn’t planned this way, it will lead off the entire collection. It’s a “sweet romance” level featuring a long-term dating couple. One asks the other the marriage question on Valentine’s Day.

Bryn: Do you write contemporary settings, or do you like to wander into other places?

Lara: My published work is all contemporary settings. I have several historicals set in other times that I haven’t quite finished yet. I really enjoy historicals as a reader and writing them too, but the contemporary setting stories seem to finish up a bit quicker. LOL.

Bryn: There’s a distinct advantage to not needing to do so much research! Do you have any preferred approaches for that with the historical stuff? Do you read around and write what you find, or think of situations and then hunt down the details?

Lara: I don’t mind research. I enjoy much of it. What tends to happen that siderails a project is that I lose the character “voice”; they stop “talking” to me, or their voice begins to sound too “modern” and I know it’s wrong, but I can’t focus right then — something in real life is usually a distraction — and I am delayed getting back to it, so finding the voice again becomes increasingly harder.

One of my favorite methods of research though is newspapers, movies, and books published in the time period in question. There’s nothing better at getting accurate “voice” than that, also there’s the esoteric setting things that are different from today’s world.

Bryn: How do you feel about trying to capture accents (thinking of voices)? Does that work for you on paper or would you rather just hear it in your head?

Lara: I try to stay away from extended dialect in my dialogue. Yes, dialect is dropping h’s, and g’s and contracting words, but something I learned in language classes. People with different backgrounds linguistically (parentage; region) actually construct their sentences differently. That conveys dialect very effectively without the constant need for my apostrophe key. I wish more writers were aware of that actually. Most I read have a poor grasp of how people really speak, or they all sound the same — like lazy speech overexcited 17 year olds, something I hear quite a lot every day as a substitute teacher.

Bryn: I agree wholeheartedly with that! Dialect words and phrasing are for more important, and a lot more readable. There’s also the issue of what constitutes ‘normal’ as well – that can get very politically charged.

Lara: Politically charged yes, but also misinterpreted. When you want to have a character with a particular mien, it’s an important thing to think about readers’ natural inclinations of classifying people by speech, income, etc. They do the same to characters, and it is always shaded by the readers’ personal experiences, which can be unknown, but which can be utilized to aid in giving characters depth if you can trigger the right impressions/reactions.

Bryn: So, what are you working on at the moment? Anything in the pipeline?

Lara: I was just invited to submit another short story to a publication planned for late 2010. I have a couple other short stories roughly drafted in the bisexual/lesbian romance and erotica categories.

The launch of To Love and To Cherish and the release of Turn for Home are keeping the editor/promoter side of me really busy, as is keeping up with scheduling guests and topics for my radio show Readings in Lesbian & Bisexual Women’s Fiction.

But I have found time to work on another novel. This time it’s more of a mystery with romantic tension than a purer romance plot. And while there’s a sexuality bent to my characters, it’s not about sexuality or sexual attraction. Deputy Kennedy McMasters (my heroine) isn’t interested in falling in love. She’s interested in finding the killer of her father’s best friend.

She’s a Sheriff’s Deputy in a rural Florida community (like the place where I grew up) and the case is complicated by the entanglements of a community that close-knit… where some people think they can be a law unto themselves.

I’ve had Kennedy’s story percolating in my mind for the last couple of years. Within the last few months though I’ve been getting the scenes onto the page, and have about 30,000 words of what eventually should be a novel of 80-90K words.

Real Life being the interfering thing that it can be at times for a writer, I’m going through a sort of rough patch right now. I do keep aiming to finish my draft by the end of March 2010. Then the really good work begins: editing. A half a dozen passes later, probably somewhere in late 2010, I hope to be sending it to publishers.

Bryn: Where else can readers find you online?

Lara: hank you for letting me share my thoughts! My website is http://www.lzfiction.net

My blog is linked from there, or direct at http://lzstuff.blogspot.com

Friend/Follow me on Facebook or Twitter (search “larazielinsky” on all three)

Add me on MySpace (larazielinsky) And subscribe via RSS or iTunes to my bi-weekly radio show: “Readings in Lesbian & Bisexual Women’s Fiction” http://blogtalkradio.com/Lara-Zielinsky

Tags: bisexual women, lesbian fiction, loveyoudivine, To Love and To Cherish

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 10:43 am and is filed under Bryn Colvin, Femerotica, From the Publisher, Interviews, Lara Zielinsky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.