Interview with Zoe X. Rider
Today I’m hosting author Zoe X. Rider as part
of the 2014 Absolutely Erotic Blog Hop. Be sure to leave a comment and your email
address for a chance to win an eBook copy of Leashed, my latest release from Siren Publishing.
Zoe, I hear a lot of authors talk
about the inspiration they get from music. Do you listen to music when you
write? If so, what kind?
I love music. I love going to concerts. I’m
one of those annoying hipster types who buys all the new albums on vinyl and
won’t have anything to do with CDs. A lot of the characters I write are
musicians, because I just love that whole lifestyle: creating, going on the
road, the close friendships (and animosity) that form when you’re stuck in what
amounts to a sexless marriage with your bandmates. However, a lot of the time
I’m either too easily distracted to have music on when I write, or I’m too
in-the-zone to remember to put it on. I’ve more than once realized that I’ve had
headphone on for two hours, because I meant
to listen to music while I wrote, but I forgot to push play. When I do
successfully manage to listen to music when I write, I wind up listening to the
same album over and over, because it’s easier than stopping to pick a new one,
or—if I’m listening to vinyl instead of MP3s—I hear one side of an album and
then nothing but silence because I can’t interrupt myself long enough to flip
it over.
When I was
writing Games Boys Play, the 85,000-word
m/m bondagefest that Loose Id put out earlier this year, I must have played
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Baby 81
a hundred times, because the first song on the album—“Took Out a Loan”—was a
great way to get me into the rhythm of writing, and then, like I said, I’d just
repeat the album rather than interrupt my flow to poke around for something
else.
I do often
listen to music when I’m thinking
about a story. Driving is great for working through stories, and driving is
also great for playing music. Sometimes I’ll put an album on in my office,
slump down on the loveseat, and just work through story stuff while music fills
the room. I listen to a lot of garage bands, current-day psychedelic rock, and
old blues, which fits well with what I write a lot of the time.
Do any of your manuscripts have a
soundtrack?
Like I said,
a lot of my stories have musicians in them, and the novel-length stories tend
to have enough room for these musicians have music they’re interested in, so
for Games Boys Play and the new adult
novel I recently finished, you could probably put together soundtracks of the
music those characters are into. In Games
Boys Play, for instance, you find out what bands Brian likes when he starts
listing their discographies in his head as a way to distract himself when he finds
himself turned on but can’t act on it. (It’s the musician’s version of thinking
about baseball!) In the new adult novel I recently finished, Shane listens to
“new music that sounds old,” and his DIY bondage gear roommate, Derek, listens
to classic rock. At one point, Shane gives Derek a mix tape of music he thinks
Derek might like—I might make a soundtrack out of that when the book comes out.
As for music
that fits the mood of the story as it goes along, I don’t do that so much,
though I was haunted by a cover of an old Rosie and the Originals song, “Angel
Baby,” as I was heading toward the ending of the new adult novel. There was a
Spiritualized song stuck in my head around that too, though I don’t recall
which now. Probably something off their Songs
in A&E album.
As you said, Games Boys Play has a lot of bondage, as do a number of your
shorter stories. How do you feel about fetishes?
I love that
sexual desire is so varied and intricate and personal. Even taking a common
fetish—being dominated, say—there’s so
much variation from person to person about what “dominate me” means to
them, how it has to play out in order to hit their uniquely individual buttons.
When I find stories that make the fetishes personal to the characters, I don’t
even care when fetishes they are, I’m into the stories. Something that reads
like a step-by-step BDSM template, though, doesn’t do much for me, because
people are just more varied and clever and interesting than that. I’m looking
to be surprised and delighted, which doesn’t mean a story has to go
over-the-top into finding newer and more extreme ways to get off. It just means
I want to have a sense that there are real people with real needs in these
characters, that they’re not just working their way through a BDSM (or
whatever) Scene Checklist.
My husband recently
asked me, when I told him about a puppy play story I had an idea for, “How can
you write about something you’re not into?” I told him I don’t have to be into
it. The characters do. I’m into the
characters: they have needs and desires and fears and, ultimately, courage, and
that’s what it’s all about for me. The particulars of thing that sates their
desires become interesting to me because it’s interesting to them. And hopefully that makes it
interesting to readers too.
Is there anything that makes you
nervous about readers?
Oh geez. What
doesn’t make me nervous about readers? I’m nervous that readers who aren’t
familiar with my writing won’t like it. I’m nervous that readers who like the
stuff I’ve already done won’t like what I do next. Whenever I read a review
where someone was disappointed with the story, I feel terrible. Intellectually
I know you can’t please everyone, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling like I
let someone down. Who likes letting people down?
But of course
you can get paralyzed by that. Either it can shut down your writing, or you can
find yourself trying to write to please everyone, which never works out. So I
don’t dwell on it. I give myself a moment of wishing I had written what that
particular person was hoping to get out of a story, and then I go back to doing
what I do, which is writing stories that appeal to me and hoping that they’ll
wind up in front of other people who are looking for those kinds of stories.
Thanks for
hosting me on your blog, Scarlet!
My pleasure, Zoe! Thanks for stopping by!
Zoe X. Rider
writes m/m erotica and erotic romance. Her debut novel, Games Boys Play, is available from Loose Id.
See the post
below for the full schedule and details of the 2014 Absolutely Erotic Blog Hop!
