Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

I went on an eBay binge last night, again. It was semi-scheduled; I actually wasn't going to do it until tomorrow night or Saturday night, but since I work this weekend and an eBay binge is best done last at night while you sit hunched with your knees pulled to your chest as you scroll through sketchy-looking Guns'n'Roses Live at the Ritz DVDs from Brazil, I decided to push it back a few days so that I could do it late at night. It didn't feel like an eBay binge, though, until I thought I was done, closed out of eBay and started balancing my checkbook (because I've got bids out, sure--but there were, uh, enough buy-it-nows) and then remembered that there were a couple other things I like, really wanted and had been gearing up for, so then I went back and bid on a fuckton of other things . Now it's a true eBay binge. This did help me, by the way, because Amazon sent me some honestly really fucking good book suggestions to buy and it wasn't the 911 unread ...

When I was a freshman in college, I did the same thing that so many young people did before me. I discovered Nirvana. Like, to the point where someone gave me a framed picture of Kurt Cobain for Christmas. I had dozens of Nirvana t-shirts. Dozens. And, naturally, I got wrapped up in the GNR/Nirvana feud of the early 90s. I refused to like anything that had to do with Guns'n'Roses. It doesn't help that my mother (who graduated high school in 1996 and is the reason I have my Docs [because she bought them in 92] and my denim vest [cut up from the denim jacket she bought at kmart in 92]) also hated Guns'n'Roses. I knew nothing about Guns'n'Roses except the chorus of "Welcome to the Jungle." Sorry, freshman year of college Aurora, you have Appetite for Destruction on cassette... and... the special fancy 30-year-edition-special vinyl. You have two little posters liberated from lyric sheets on your bedroom wall. Steven Adler circa 1988 is ...

The other day I was on Twitter, as you do, and the question got brought up on one of my writer friends ( SH Marr , if you're wondering) thinking about authors, and how they tend to gravitate towards ideas. Whether it happens to be age range, or genre, or whatever. And I thought about it for a second. I didn't respond to the tweet because I didn't really have an answer. I write a lot of male POVs, that's a definite similarity between a helluva lot of my projects. I also tend to set my works very solidly in a recent-past kind of situation; think sixties through early aughts, though that's more of a recent thing. My current first draft is set in like, 1983. My rewrites are 1991, 2011, 1982. And I let you fuckin know.  I guess I also do gravitate towards horror, but I don't write only horror, you know? The project that I'm currently querying is a YA contemporary. Set in 2004, of course, but it's not a horror novel. Does have a male protagonist, though. A...