Interview Roulette: Aidee Ladnier

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Aidee Ladnier spins the wheel today!

  1. One of your characters has a guilty favorite TV show. Tell us about it.
    One of the villains in a story I collaborated on, LAWRENCE FRIGHTENGALE CHECKS IN, used to watch an old 1960’s sitcom called The Family Carr. In it a Hollywood couple made their home in the backseat of a gigantic Oldsmobile along with the husband’s grandfather who lived in the trunk.
  2. Describe a traumatic weather-related experience you’ve had. If you’ve never had any, make one up.
    When I was a pre-teen I lived through Hurricane Eloise. I remember my parents worrying that the trailer we lived in wouldn’t be sturdy enough to withstand the storm and so we drove to my grandmother’s house. The sky darkened over the day until it was almost like nighttime. And by then the rain had started. Hard rain. Rain that slammed against the windows and you could feel the vibration of it if you put your hand to the glass. The thunder was right over our heads. Booming so deep it sank into your bones and shook the ground under your feet. Right outside the back door of my grandmother’s house, was a huge pecan tree that my late grandfather had planted the day my mother was born. The trunk was so large that two full grown men would have had to stretch their arms to encircle it. The wind shook that tree and we could hear branches snapping off the top and thudding around it. One of my grandmother’s friends was with us and had his car parked under that tree. She urged him to move it so the falling branches wouldn’t damage it. He dashed into the storm to park it under the shed instead. We watched from the kitchen door as he started his car, the tree swaying above him. The car slid in the mud of the drive but the wheels finally caught just as a tremendous crack rent the air. The entire tree began to fall as if in slow motion toward his car. We could hear the roar as her friend floored the accelerator and the car scooted backwards just as the tree’s roots broke and it bounced onto its side. The car hood got scraped by branches but her friend survived. He drove it under the shed while we waited out the rest of the storm. The pecan tree had been uprooted by the water and the wind. On its side, it stretched the length of the house.
  3. Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever written?
    In a room full of simulated vaginas. Okay, to understand that statement, you have to realize where I work. My non-profit developed simulators to help train reproductive endocrinologists on how to successfully transfer in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos into women who want to have babies. And the simulators only need the parts that represent female reproductive organs. So it’s a room full of fake women from stomach to mid thigh. And their legs are spread. But it’s quiet and nobody else goes there at lunchtime, so it’s the perfect place to write.
  4. Describe one of your characters’ deepest regrets.
    In my story, THE MOONLIGHT MARKET, the protagonist Cory Long wishes that he’d gone with his parents to celebrate his mother’s promotion at work. He had a date and remained on campus to hang with his friends. He regrets not talking his dad out of driving. Or thinks that maybe he would have seen the drunk driver swerving into their lane and alerted his dad. Or gotten his sister Poe out of the car before the fire burned her.
  5. What is your most dreaded household chore? Your favorite?
    Ugh, dishes. I love to cook but unfortunately, I’m a follower of mise en place. So I fill up lots of bowls with ingredients and then cook once everything is ready. It makes a lot of dirty dishes. Lots of dirty dishes. Like a dishwasher full of dishes every time I make dinner.
    But I like doing laundry. There’s something wonderful about pulling clean clothes from the dryer all warm and squashy and sweet smelling. I don’t even mind putting them away.
  6. One of your characters writes a poem to his beloved.
    Of course, I had to choose Jimenez to write a poem to his tentacled lover Teo:

Small words
Unrhymed

Half-formed thoughts

Unable to describe
How the heat of your arms enfolds me

Soothes me

Seeps in
Lulling me
Until all words fail
Safe, comforted and entwined with you

 

  1. What is the oddest thing on your music playlist?
    I’ve got fairly eclectic tastes, so I have lots of odd things on my playlists. One of my favorites is by Penn Masala. It’s an a capella song that combines the Hindi song “Jashn-e-Bahara” from Jodhaa Akbar with “Viva la Vida” by Coldplay. Another favorite is the English version of “Vater Unser” by the German group E Nomine. That is seriously the scariest most danceable version of a prayer I have ever heard in my life, complete with tolling bells and wolf howls. I love it. And one last one I’ll list, “Matador” by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. I double-dog-dare you to crank it up on a long stretch of highway with the windows down. Excellent car music.
  2. Which Disney character most closely resembles you?
    Unfortunately, I think I’m Marie, one of the kittens from the Aristocats. Because I desperately want to be a lady but end up just being bossy instead. However, Marie had one kick-ass quote that I love: “Ladies do not start fights but they can finish them.”
  3. What’s your writing style—slow and steady or full speed ahead?
    Spurts and fits. I like to have a finished linear story but I do not write that way. I often write my favorite scenes first and then when I have to write my unfavorite scenes, I spend some time making those into favorite scenes so that they have something in them that resonates, intrigues me, or makes me laugh. I want all the my scenes in my books to be my favorite scenes.
  4. You’re walking down the street when a spaceship lands in front of you and a half dozen aliens pile out. What do you do?

Is it little green men aliens or Earth Girls Are Easy aliens? If it’s Earth Girls Are Easy aliens, definitely take them to the hairdresser to get the extra fur clipped off and then home with me. Funny, charming aliens are my favorite kind.

 

Book blurb:

Tom Davidson ran away from family obligations to be a Broadway star. If he could make it there, he could make it anywhere…but he didn’t. Trudging back home to Waycroft Falls, he finds his sister Annie and her hometown bookstore in danger of folding. Her solution, open the upstairs of the historic building as a performance venue. Putting on a play should be a piece of cake for her famous New York actor brother.

Frank Braden lost the genetic lottery and got the family werewolf curse. Kicked out of his home for the triple threat of being gay, a werewolf, and a drain on his widowed father’s new family, he settled in Waycroft Falls to make as inconspicuous a life as possible working in Annie’s bookstore. Until her gorgeous younger brother comes to town and literally needs a beast for his play.

Tom breaks out the charm to convince Frank he’s key to the success of the bookshop’s theatrical version of Beauty and the Beast. Frank loves the bookstore, is hotter than sin, and has the perfect solution to Tom’s stage makeup conundrum. Who better to play the Beast than a guy who can turn into one?

 

Book buy links:

Loose Id – http://www.loose-id.com/wolf-around-the-corner.html
Amazon – http://amzn.to/2zEdHy5
Kobo – https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/wolf-around-the-corner
iTunes – https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/wolf-around-the-corner/id1313328918?mt=11
Barnes and Noble – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wolf-around-the-corner-aidee-ladnier/1127471582?ean=9781682524374
Google Play – https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Aidee_Ladnier_Wolf_Around_the_Corner?id=a44-DwAAQBAJ

 

Author bio:

Aidee Ladnier, an award-winning author of speculative fiction, began writing at twelve years old but took a hiatus to be a magician’s assistant, ride in hot air balloons, produce independent movies, collect interesting shoes, fold origami, and send ping pong balls into space. A lover of genre fiction, it has been a lifelong dream of Aidee’s to write both romance and erotica with a little science fiction, fantasy, mystery, or the paranormal thrown in to add a zing.

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