Thank you for joining us today, Lara. 
Everyone, let's give Lara a warm LJ welcome.

Moon: Who is Lara Zielinsky?

Lara: What surprises some (not all) of my new readers is that I am not a lesbian. I'm married, yes, to a man. I'm bisexual. I played ALL of the field growing up, having quite long relationships with several men and several women. I'm the mother of a teenage boy. I'm only slightly left of center politically. I'm Jewish. I even teach Sunday School. I am nearly deaf.
 
Moon: What can you tell the readers about your books and the genre you right in?

Lara: I've had two short stories published; only the one novel, "Turning Point"

Its listed genre is lesbian romance, although the story certainly came out bigger (in length) and deeper (in scope) than that suggests. All the stories that I really enjoy writing  are inner journeys, character pieces. Even if they contain adventurous action-packed plots, the real changes are going on inside the character. I've observed that many people have private selves and public selves, and often they aren't the same, for a variety of reasons. I love exploring that dichotomy and the journey of a character trying to reconcile her (or his) two sides.

Moon: Rumor has it you started in fanfic, how accurate is this statement and what can you tell use about that?

Lara: More like indisputable fact. While I have been writing forever, it was mostly directionless until into the 1990s when I became interested in posting online to share with others. I had belonged to a couple writing groups, writing these short little fantasy pieces, but I really started gaining fans when I got a little bugaboo idea and started writing in the Xenaverse beginning back in 1996-1997. My first few stories were always lighter character explorations, but the more I'd write, the deeper I'd go into the characters. My favorite XWP story of mine is "Xena's Choice", where Xena goes slightly -- well make that really bonkers after the events in "Sacrifice II". Exploring the world of the mind like a set of rooms with locked or blocked doors was a really neat writing challenge. After a troubled parting of the ways with the Xena series, I found my way to Voyager with a song-fic challenge.

What I got from writing fanfic was a lot of challenges, an already structured universe and way to work on the building blocks of better fiction. Fanfic gave me character frames to work with, and I really developed my storytelling style by being able to write nearly constantly. As I began to unlock the nuances of character building, and writing something that would mean I'd have to think about what happened to Xena or Janeway or Seven, as a child, or in some off-screen, un-canon event, I started working more with the archetypes -- moving to uber. When I got to my second Jan/Mel novel -- "Home Front" -- I had created the settings and done research far beyond the scope of two erstwhile Xena-descendant adventurers. I was building a university community in the 1940s, with all the attendant array of unique characters. I realized I was writing original characters in all but name. So I started working on completely original ideas, making the final transition, to original fiction in 2001. I still write fanfic from time to time, for the change-up, like a writing exercise to get muscles doing reps again.
 
Moon: What do you do when you are not writing?

Lara: When I am not writing, I'm a 40-hour per week office grunt probably like most people. Since I started writing though I've learned to accept that I want to write. I need to write. So I've dropped some really hefty time-consuming jobs to cut back to find more substantial and regular time to write, but I still have to bring in some sort of income to my family.
 
Moon: How does being a mother affect your work as a writer?

Lara: How doesn't it would be a shorter list. However, parenting affects everything from issues like finding time to write while my son was younger, to having a head swimming with parenting problems, to having to learn to divorce myself from reality in short bursts in order to successfully write now that I have more access to time (with my son now 14, there's still issues, but they have changed in tenor and scope).

Topic-wise, I also think a lot about mothers and children, and personal, professional, and role model fulfillment. Issues that I *know* creep into my fiction. I used to write lots of "loner" characters when I was younger. Now I write characters surrounded by people, children, dozens of relationships and interactions, and try to sort out priorities. While the problems my characters face aren't ones I often have, the discombobulation caused by the struggle is a favorite character trait I like to help characters iron out. Probably because I sense I haven't figured them all out myself. Writing it into characters is a real cheap form of self-help therapy, I suppose.
 
Moon: What sorts of things inspire you?

Small things inspire and affect me. My mother rates movies to me in "tissues"; how many will I need to have to stem the flow of tears and sniffles. (I'm one of those people who cry at both sad and revelatory happy moments.) I do think a lot of life's real meaning comes in the small moments. Why do any of us do the things we do, the way we do them? Because of hundreds of little moments, little things that over time have built neuron responses that no matter we're 60, we're still going to react that way, even if it's only for the first seconds before we bite our tongue and the maturity kicks in to cover the base reaction. I also believe revelation comes in these same small moments. There's no waking up one morning and it's all perfectly understood, but growth comes from 'lucid living' (a new personal phrase), which means careful focusing on an experience moment by moment, as you are in it, in order to capture the meaning and essence of it. The process called 'lucid dreaming' helps a person recall dreams for later examination and self-revelation with sharp detail.
 
Moon: What do you like to read? Who are your favorite authors? And what books growing up influenced you most?

Lara: My most recent acquisitions are eclectic to say the least: Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda's Book of Prayers for Jewish Women, translated by Dinah Berland; Come Be My Light, the letters of Mother Theresa; Miss McGhee, by Bett Norris; 18th & Castro, by Karin Kallmaker; and On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. I don't know that I can discern a pattern of likes from that.

I like stories where the characters are drawn such that they feel like they lived before the opening page of the book, and live on after the last page. I prefer character pieces to action. I'm not much of a mystery fan, probably because I'm not much of a fan of first person, which mysteries have a high tendency to be. I don't like substituting ascerbic wit for substance in characterization. I was never a fan of the smartass growing up, and don't like them much in what I choose to read. I adored Anne Azel's Gold Mountain, and I want to see more of some characters from 18th & Castro.

I tend to read romance now, since that's what I also enjoy writing presently. I like reading about established couples too. KG MacGregor's Mulligan series is enjoyable for that reason.

Growing up I read a lot of horse stories, having been more than a little horse-mad. Black Beauty, The Black Stallion (every series book), Misty of Chincoteague. I also loved Count of Monte Cristo, Three Musketeers, Twain's writings, the stories of Washington Irving, Austen and Tolstoy. I also read Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys. Wasn't as much a fan of the Bobsey Twins. I also read Science Fiction and Fantasy authors: Tolkien, McCaffrey, Clarke, Duane, Terry Brooks, best of collections.

My tastes have never really been predictable, even to me. I'm one of the few people I know who loved Jude the Obscure, and Silas Marner, but hated Wuthering Heights. Go figure.

It’s Hollywood. Actresses hate getting passed over. Cold shoulders are common. Petty sniping is part of the fabric of the place, but it takes two to fight.

Cassidy Hyland’s birthday party for her son is about to spark much more than a truce with Brenna Lanigan, her cold costar on the television sci-fi series Time Trails.

It becomes the first step in a journey neither woman ever imagined her heart could take: to love another woman.

Turning Point explores the journey of these two women surrounded by a mix of supportive and unsupportive cast, from colleagues, to children, parents and spouses, both current and former.


Excerpt for your reading pleasure