About Me
Hi. 🙂
I’m writing this to you in early July 2019, when I asked some of the people on my Facebook page what they wanted to know about me. Here are the answers to their questions, in no particular order…
Where my writing style comes from
I owe a lot of my ability to write halfway competently to my college advisor, Dr. George Gopen, who remains a professor at Duke University nearly 20 years after I finished my English degree there. The most important thing I learned from my time with Dr. Gopen is that the way we structure writing must be intentional and self-aware — or, more specifically, writing must be reader-aware. I still write with Dr. Gopen’s voice in the back of my head, reminding me to always check to see what cues I am giving to (or am failing to give to) the reader.
In many ways, I am still Dr. Gopen’s apprentice, constantly trying to improve on the implementation of what he taught me so many years ago. Which brings me to…
I hope I’m still getting better
I think we have this myth in our culture that the ability to create good art is a talent, not a skill. I disagree with this entirely. Writing a novel — a decent one, anyway — is not something you just sit down and do, nor is it something that you are immediately “good” at. It’s easy enough to bang out a novel, but anyone who wants to be a good writer *must* be dedicated to learning the craft, and be honest enough to know that the learning process is never over.
To get better, I like to…
- Read about writing continuously
- Refine my process continuously
- Surround myself with as much good prose as I can
What I don’t like to read
I know it’s ironic and maybe even bad, but I don’t read lesbian fiction. I read *one* novel-length lesbian fan fic that I loved, and that was enough to get me started writing in this genre, but I still resist reading lesfic.
I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the idea of being called an “author of lesbian novels,” anymore than I think someone like Toni Morrison would be entirely comfortable being called an “author of black novels.” I just want to be an author of novels, period.
What I do like to read
I admit that I don’t read as much as I probably should, but when I do, I read mostly fantasy. I love Patrick Rothfuss’s two Name of the Wind books, and I love even more Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. I loved all the Game of Thrones books, of course; I’ve read many of the Harry Potter books twice; and I read The Lord of the Rings twice as well — once in elementary school, once as an adult.
I also went through a phase where I was reading a lot of young adult; my favorite series is Marie Lu’s overlooked Legend books. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is awesome, and The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey is absolutely stunning.
I watch a lot of television these days, mainly because TV has gotten better
Stranger Things, Game of Thrones (seasons 1 – 7), Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead (and Fear), Legion — these are my favorites. I mention television because it’s actually become a big influence in my writing. You can draw a pretty straight line, for example, from The 100 to my first lesfic novel, and another straight line from Game of Thrones to Princess of Dorsa. The whole reason I wrote Princess was because I wanted more gay characters whose storylines actually went somewhere in Game of Thrones!
Random Personal Details…
Midwestern-Southern hybrid — childhood in St. Louis, adolescence in the boondocks outside Atlanta, college in North Carolina, most of my career in Atlanta and South Carolina…
But I live in SoCal.
Buddhist. Almost-daily meditator.
Fitness nut. Almost-daily exerciser. (Is “exerciser” a word?) Certified personal trainer with a “day job” at a commercial gym for a hot minute there.
And graduate student, soon to be a high school English teacher.
The Real Eliza Andrews
I knew I needed a new pen name to focus on LGBTQ fiction, because my YA audience is mostly straight women living in small town USA. I pondered a name for a while, and finally decided on “Eliza Andrews,” per the suggestion of my mom (such a rebel, that one).
The original Eliza Andrews is my ancestor — my great, great, great (+great?) aunt. In fact, my grandmother knew her as a child and used to refer to her as “Aunt Fanny.” Eliza / Aunt Fanny was quite a lady. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about her:
Eliza Frances Andrews (August 10, 1840 – January 21, 1931) was a popular Southern writer of the Gilded Age. Her works were published in popular magazines and papers, including the New York World and Godey’s Lady’s Book.[1] Her longer works included The War-Time Journal of a Georgian Girl (1908) and two botany textbooks.[2]
Eliza Frances Andrews gained fame in three fields: authorship, education, and science. Her passion was writing and she had success both as an essayist and a novelist.[3] Financial troubles forced her to take a teaching career after the deaths of her parents, though she continued to be published. In her retirement she combined two of her interests by writing two textbooks on botany entitled Botany All the Year Round and Practical Botany,[3] the latter of which became popular in Europe and was translated for schools in France.[4] Andrews’s published works, notably her Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl along with her novels and numerous articles, give a glimpse into bitterness, dissatisfaction, and confusion in the post-Civil War South.
Aunt Fanny was a novelist and an essayist… but she was also a die-hard racist and an upper-class elitist. Despite her father’s wishes, she and her siblings supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Although she seems progressive and independent for a woman of her era — a self-supporting woman of some prominence — the truth is that she had to support herself financially because she wasn’t happy with the marriage proposals she got. The Civil War essentially bankrupted my family, which meant that Aunt Fanny wasn’t getting the “quality” of men seeking her hand that she’d hoped for. She only started working because she refused “to marry below her station” (according to my grandmother).
So anyway. Appropriating Aunt Fanny’s name to write lesbian fiction… ha! It’s just my little bit of civil disobedience and my way of saying that I will rewrite (literally!) my family’s classist heritage of privilege and abusing others.