How much of me is in what I write? - the #evernighties

 Today's #evernighties blog prompt is "How much of me is in what I write".

All. Blood heart and soul. That’s the short answer.

The long answer is that I always pour a lot of my personal feeling and experience into my characters and stories. It would be hard to know where to start. My novel Spellbreakers (which is on sale at 0.99$ at the moment, just saying) is a long slow foot and horse trip across Europe, and large bits of that were inspired by my own 5000 km trek from Germany to Catalonia via Brittany in 2009/10.

Two of my characters (Ivory in Black Carnival and Gillian in The Nymph in the Stolen Garden) are apparently tame, shy plants-women with a wild side. I did work as a gardener, and like Ivory I did spend a preposterous amount of time making botanical illustrations and drawing up garden plans, when I would have much preferred to hire a model and draw nudes.

In Head Shy there is a traumatized mare that is slowly brought back to working condition and a more trusting frame of mind. Much of that comes from my experience with my own Haflinger mare, Kaylee.

But I certainly poured most of me in my more recent books especially in my loosely interconnected Transgender Trilogy. Nina from Woman as a Foreign Language is a strongly autobiographical character. Her traumatic past, her metal-work, her let us say, almost accidental gender-queerness, even her passion for myths and fairy tales, are all me.

In Spice & Vanilla there is a bit of me in Di, and a bit in Hugh. 

My passion for ancient sailing ships definitely shines through in In the Eye of the Wind (coming tomorrow!!)

And Nathaniel in A Muse to Live For (coming soon!), is definitely very much my alter ego in the way he feels about his art, his muse and inspiration. 

Perhaps it makes me a pathologically self-centered kind of person, but I find it very difficult to write characters that are entirely “other” from me. For example writing truly assertive, confident heroes is not something that comes at all natural to me, and I wonder how convincing they are when I actually do write them, although it is always fun to try.

There is a strong elemental streak in all my writings, earth and air and fire, light and darkness. In almost all my stories there tend to be an earthy, subfusc, usually short lover, and a taller, more luminous, airy-fiery one. 

Almost all the earth people in my books are me.