Angel S. Adames Writes It

 When I first wrote "Geeky Turn On!" I had zero plans to make any sequels at all. When I finished editing the book and uploaded it to Inkitt, I sighed and said to myself "And that's the end of that." But the desire to see more stories with these characters kept growing and growing, and before I knew it, I HAD to write the sequel! Sadly, when I started putting pen to paper, I had NO IDEA what I was doing!

There was a time when I greatly admired JK Rowling; in fact, I'd wager to say that most every modern author under forty has admired her for a while now. These days, the admiration has died off, replaced with contempt for her views on gender and trans people. Today's blog entry is all about how much I admired (past tense) JK Rowling, and why that admiration is dead now.

 In one of my previous entries, I made a mention of an online novel I started back in 2015. That novel was originally named Alandra Whistle's Lessons in Magic , but I hated that name with a passion, so I changed it to Alandra Whistle: Witch In Training. Today, I want to talk about how "the tale grew with the telling" helped define, for better or worse, my debut as an online novelist.

When it comes to influences, it's the common thing to list off the positive influences; the works and the authors whose voice helped inspire you. But I also believe that learning from the mistakes of others is as important as learning from their successes. This is why I'm compiling this list: five works and three authors who taught me what NOT to do...

 If you've ever gone to the writer's side of social media (TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, etc) you may have come across more than one female writer laugh at the ways some men write women. You may have seen the screenshots of either classic or modern books where the male author spent a whole paragraph describing his female character's anatomy, especially her breasts, rear end, and whatever other body part one may find attractive. Suffice to say, this is not a particularly good way to write women, and it's a method I've been taught to avoid. So, what's a better way to write women?

 I've always been an avid reader, ever since I was a small child. I was lucky enough to have a family that had LOTS of books in the house, from picture books to textbooks. There was PLENTY to read; stories from around the world, Dr. Seuss books, science books, you name it! So of course I grew up to be an imaginative child who LOVED the written word.

The phrase "Geekyverse" is the term I use to describe the setting shared by five of my works: Geeky Turn On , A Tempted Geek , Geek on the Side , Love after Life , and How the Gatekeeper Met the Geek . It remains, so far, my most expansive setting yet. Today I want to talk more about it.

D The idea behind my first novel, Geeky Turn On , first came to me way back in the year 2017 as I was teaching in China. I imagined two teenage girls standing behind a gas station at night, Icees in hand, as they talked about the latest Marvel movies. These girls didn't have names yet, or defined features, but I imagined their personalities very vividly: they were PASSIONATE about movies, video games, Star Wars, superheroes, you name it!