February 2019: Hardest Character
~ Elizabeth Coldwell ~
CTR asked:
Who was your hardest character to write? And why?
Elizabeth Coldwell said:
Annie Harrison, the heroine of my erotic sci-fi body swap novel, Someone Else’s Skin. In the storyline, Annie is a journalist who is hypnotised for a story she’s writing. She goes to a practitioner in ‘future life progression’, who’s able to make her see not who she was in a previous life but who she’ll be in the future. In this case, her future self, Jai, is male, so I was effectively writing two characters in one, and looking at events from the point of view of someone of one gender who’s living and reacting as someone of another gender.
When Annie goes into the future, she not only has to deal with life in a society where the atmosphere has been all but destroyed and everyone lives in an artificial environment, she has to get used to being in a male body, with all that entails. Meanwhile, in her ‘normal life’, she’s in a relationship with a cute musician which also involves having three-ways with one of the other members of his band. So as you can imagine, there’s a lot going on here, and the challenge of writing the book was to balance Annie’s everyday home life with her increasingly perilous adventures in the future, even while everything threatens to spiral out of her control.
Part of the enjoyment of being an author is putting yourself into different mindsets and wondering how you’d react in certain situations, but I know I’d never find myself in a situation quite like Annie’s (even though I have been hypnotised in the past, which was the original inspiration for the story). This made writing the character more demanding, but never to the point where I wanted to give up and rework the book. I think the most difficult characters to write can be those where you don’t have any kind of personal experience to draw on, but those can often be the most fulfilling, and this was certainly the case here.
– Website – http://elizabethcoldwell.wordpress.com
Someone Else’s Skin
[SciFi Bodyswap Romance BDSM MF/MFM]
When Annie Harrison is hypnotised for an article she’s writing, she finds herself in the body of Jai Galloway, a 23rd-century eco activist who plans to go back in time and save the earth’s atmosphere from being destroyed. Loving what her new body can do, Annie is soon living two existences – one with her kinky musician boyfriend and one in the future, where she learns all the tricks of sex as a man. But the more time she spends in Jai’s body, the more threat she faces of being trapped there forever…
Available in Ebook:
More Authors Dish about their hardest characters to write.
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