AMA - You Ask, Bethany Answers!

Hey, all! We’re back for another round of you asking me questions, and me trying to answer them as best I can. Do enjoy.

And if you have a question for me, drop it in HERE.

Onto the Q’s for the week.

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1. Do you have an plans for another interracial relationship for one of your characters?

I don’t “plan” this sort of thing, like it’s not a conscious decision I make for my characters to have a certain skin tone. My Italian women tend to be olive toned with heavy tan undertones, and so do my men unless they come directly from Italy, like in the case of Catrina, in which they are more tanned than olive. My Canadians are slightly more pale versions of my other Italians because … Canada has four seasons, and part of it is not warm, so no sun.

I see them as they are, and write them that way. However, over 2019, you’ll see two interracial relationships as that’s how the characters came to me. Chris and Valeria are one – she is Mexican, he is Italian-French Canadian. And Beni and August – she’s a biracial (her mother is from Nigeria, her father is half African American, half white Italian) black woman from Brooklyn, you met her in Effortless.

So, that’s all I know. But yes there are a couple coming in 2019, and we will see who shows up for 2020.

2. In the zombie apocalypse, what's your weapon of choice? (from London)

London gets a great kick out of putting these crazy questions in my box, and seeing what my answer will be, lol. Um, can I have two, or just one? If it’s two, I would have a bat wrapped in nails. And the standard handgun all policer officers use because while it is only one shot at a time, the gun can withstand a lot of abuse. It’s less likely to get jammed, there will be more ammo available for that size weapon than others people would want to use, like an AK or AR type weapon. Just makes sense.

If only one … then just the gun.

3. Saw in the last AMA someone asked about Cross and Dante, how come we don’t see any interaction with Dante and Cross kids’ from a grandparent point of view?

Because I don’t add useless scenes just for fluff into my books. At literally no point in any of their kids’ books were the grandparents needed to show up. And if they had, it would have been me forcing or fitting in a scene just to get more characters on the page. I don’t write that way, never have, and it’s the fastest way to clog up your writing and slow down the pace. I get you all are super attached to these characters, but that’s why I do things like my outtakes on Fridays. You want to see them again, then take five seconds on Fridays to drop your request for something like this into outtake form.

That’s all it takes. I will eventually get around to it at some point.

But no, I don’t just randomly add in scenes just because. I also write in TWO perspectives when I am writing a book, the hero and the heroine. I get some authors like to have a million different perspectives in their book, from anybody and everybody with a line of dialogue … but I do not. So, I’m also not going to add in grandparents’ povs into my books, either. This simply isn’t how I write, and if it’s what you would like to see, I write outtakes for that reason.

Hope this helps.

4. I’m so excited for Corrado, Les and Ginny’s story! What was your favorite part about writing them?

Hey there.

Um, definitely the complexity of a relationship like theirs. There are a lot of people who assume that a relationship of their spectrum is highly sexually motivated, and that’s not the case. That’s a part of it – we’re all humans who enjoy sex, so yeah, that’s certainly in there. But it is not the only thing that made them what they are, and the reasons for why they became a unit as a threesome.

So certainly, yes, my favorite part in any book is the one I find most challenging to accurately convey on paper, and in this case, it was just the complex nature of their relationship as a whole. Two men who fell in love as teenagers, who kind of constrained and suffocated their love with nonsense and rules and things unsaid for so many years, and the woman who came in to tear it all apart one man at a time, just so they could rebuild it into something bigger and better.

For my first MMF, it went smoother than I thought it was going to, but we’ll see when it comes to the next MMF I have planned to write for the Astor family. It’s entirely different, shifted on its head from Corrado, Les, and Ginevra.

Should be fun.

5. Will there be a book about Zeke's son???

LOL, hi there. I promise one question mark will do, but three definitely lets me know how excited you are/serious you are about this question.

My general answer for this question is never say never. Because I do get it a lot, right along with, “Will Zeke ever get a book?”

These characters just haven’t come out to speak to me … yet. It’s possible they will. Cory Rossi did, and I was pretty sure I would not be writing a book for him either, and yet now I have a whole plot ready for him, typed out chapter by chapter and ready to go.

Sometimes, these characters come out to me later and decide, yes, they want their story told. Sometimes it is at the worst possible times for me because I am busy working in something else, and have to put them to the side until I am done.

So, I don’t know.

Never say never.

But not right now.

Okay, loves. Until next week!