M. Ainihi

That’s a tough question! Most of my favorite childhood memories involve camping with my family. Generally, we stayed in upstate Ny on these excursions, most likely because traveling for more than a few hours with five anxious kids in the car was no easy feat for my parents. However, there was one occasion, when they were feeling brave…

Armed with a tent and pulling a popup camper, we set off for the new England coast on a ten-day adventure. At one of the parks we stayed in, directly below our site was a cliff with a wooden staircase that led right to the shore and the best part was that an unmanned dock was in plain sight out in the middle of the water.

It took a bit of convincing for me and my older sister to get my parents to agree that we could swim out to it without them. But eventually after promising that we would stay within view of the site and reminding them that we had both gone through several years of swimming lessons, they agreed.

After we swam out to that dock and climbed up onto it, we stayed there for what seemed like hours, just being silly kids. We had never visited the ocean before and out on that dock, it felt to us like we were on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere. The only problem was, we didn’t notice that the tide was going out and by the time our parents started calling to us to return to camp, there was no water around the dock at all.

Now it’s important for you to know, that this was not a sandy beach. The shoreline below the cliff that those stairs led too, consisted of several feet of what seemed to be solid dark earth and of course being 9 and 12 and not having experience with such things, we believed that the dark substance that now surrounded us would be the same. In other words, we jumped off assuming we would land on nice hard ground. Instead we sank to our knees in the thickest mud we had ever encountered.

After we managed to pull our legs out, we found that if we walked on two feet, the mud would quickly envelop them and make a sick slurping noise when we tried to lift them back up to take the next step. Well of course this caused us to laugh hysterically all the way back to shore as we joked that the mud wanted to swallow us whole… and we got in trouble for taking entirely too long to return, but it was worth it. - A day or two later we would go back to the shore when the tide was out on purpose to hunt for clams and end up mourning the loss of our favorite jelly sandals as they were sucked off our feet by that insatiable mud, never to be found again.

My family is very supportive of my writing and publishing goals, so that always helps to make my objectives more attainable. Life sometimes changes course unexpectedly and as you know things pop up that effect goals as situations evolve, so I try to keep my goals and expectations at what I feel is a moderate pace. Since I really enjoy hiring and collaborating with editors and also with illustrators and book cover designers, I need to maintain a certain amount of flexibility. When working with others on a project, I try to be respectful of their schedules and goals as well and this can sometimes lead to changes in my timeframes.

I have loved reading for as long as I can remember, and I believe many authors inspire me in different ways. Unfortunaly I can’t recall the first book I ever read. However, I do remember the first horror-dark fantasy book. I was about twelve at the time and seeing how much I enjoyed reading, my aunt insisted on me borrowing her copy of “The Stand” by Stephen King. I fell in love with the genre from that day on and although I read many types of books, I would say horror is probably my favorite.

In general, I don’t need to know how the story will end before I begin. Although, as far as The Blood Inheritance Series goes, I knew how it would conclude since before I started expanding the first book. How my characters get there is another story all together. I tend to let them take the lead and evolve in a way that I hope feels most natural. I guess that makes me neither a plotter nor a panster. I fall somewhere in between.

I don’t think that any one-person inspired Amanda’s character. Mainly, I wanted Amanda’s reactions to remain believable throughout the story. Amanda is considerate, caring, and a bit naive at the start of her journey. But as she is thrust into more and more difficult situations, outwardly she becomes increasingly cold, stubborn, and sometimes jumps to conclusions without seeking hard evidence. As her shadow magic becomes stronger, this attitude puts everyone around her in danger. When she questions her own actions, especially after she learns certain details about herself, I want the reader to remember that Amanda does the best she can with the information she is given.

When I write, and the words seem to flow off the page it is very satisfying. I tend to rewrite a lot and edit a ton of things out of my writing. For example, I know that I removed more than 60,000 words from Lost before it went to the developmental editor. Originally, I wrote out all three POV characters stories’ separately and I loved every scene. The heroines in the series are very different young woman and I believe it was helpful for their character development overall, but when I combined the experiences, I had to remove a lot of information and many scenes that would have felt repetitive or unnecessary. Sometimes my notes and removed excerpts end up longer than the story itself.

I have enjoyed writing for almost as long as I have been able to string words on a page into a sentence and although I do not recall exactly what inspired the blood Inheritance quartet, it was probably about eight years ago that I received a paperback of Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar by Robert Lebling. Shortly after that, I began developing stories around the fictitious world of Sumir, in which the Blood inheritance quartet takes place. Like many legends, I find the mythology pertaining to Jinn fascinating and when creating the unique mythology for the world of Sumir, these magical beings were the main focus to start with. Even though the world of Sumir is my own design, I knew that I wanted the Jinn in my stories to be less like the Disney idea and somewhat more like the ones in ancient legends.

The best thing about being a fantasy book author is that you get to build entire worlds. Finding the right words to describe the images in your head and make them seem real can be exhilarating. It is definitely a therapeutic experience for me and I usually feel an energized excitement when I finish what I am working on for the day.

At this time, I feel it’s better for me to have daily time spent writing goals. I think that it helps me divide my attentions more equally between writing, updating content, formatting, working with illustrators, cover designers, and editors. I also generally post one new article on my website per month, alternating between subjects on creativity and mythology. Writing is a lot of fun for me but there is a certain amount of juggling involved no matter how well organized you believe you are. I think every author has to find their own routine that works for them and be prepared to evolve as the situation evolves. In my earlier writing I would have a word count goal for each day. I often knocked out whole chapters before looking them back over. The further along I get in the blood inheritance series, the more necessary it becomes to take it slower and think things out with more finality earlier on. Otherwise I take a chance that small details may not match up just the way they need to from book to book and POV to POV.

I’m not sure if it counts exactly, but the first time I began a collaboration with a professional editor, he reached out to me when he finished reading the initial manuscript and told me I was an emotional writer. I took this as a big compliment, and although I can’t recite the exact words I used to respond from memory, I can tell you that since then, we have worked together on all three of my published books in some editorial capacity or other. It’s important to me that my characters convey the right emotions and if I fail to express them properly, they could end up turning out flat and boring or unbelievable.

Why do I often write about learning new things on my website- Always be willing to learn is a motto I repeat rather frequently. On my website, I often write about learning new things since it’s my personal belief that I should always be working on expanding my knowledgebase. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something big, like learning a new language or figuring out how to use a 3D printer or even something that I end up being particularly good at. In my opinion I think even finding a short article on a culture or subject you didn’t know about is good for you in more ways than one. As a bonus, I often find that learning new things helps spark my imagination and boost my creativity.

I have two books in the works. A dark fantasy short story collection to be titled, “The Warning Signs” and the fourth volume in my epic fantasy series The Blood Inheritance Quartet, “Resist”.

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