Our New Interview With Best-Selling Author Cait Marie Is Now Live!

ntroduction: In Our April Edition Of The Many Faces Of The Abled the E-zine. We chat with Author Cait Marie. We talk about everything from books, characters, movies, music, and the unique challenges she might face being an accomplished writer/editor/graphic designer. Question One: Hello, Cait. Welcome to the magazine! Please introduce yourself to our readers. Hello! First thing you should know is I’m awful at introductions. I never know what to include. I’m a multi-genre author, editor, book blogger, and more. The book community has been my home for the past few years, and I absolutely love it. Stories have always been an important part of my life, but I actually hated writing until about five years ago when I started a fiction book out of boredom. I have a BA in Forensic Psychology and am currently working toward an MFA in Creative Writing. I live in Indiana and work from home, writing and offering a variety of author services. I own and manage the website Functionally Fictional, and I am the Indie Co-Manager and a staff reviewer for YA Books Central. Sleep is not a frequent occurrence in my life but books are! Question Two: Is there one thing that particularly inspires your overall creativity? Is it movies? Music? Books? A combination? Or is it completely random? It’s a combination of all the above. Music, however, is one of the more significant inspirations. I cannot write without it, and sometimes, I will listen to the same song on repeat for hours while trying to get a certain scene or chapter right. Question Three: What was the biggest inspiration that you drew from for your book The Lost Legends? The Lost Legends was actually a dream. It consisted of sailing with pirates to find cursed immortals called the Nihryst. The dream itself was influenced by a mixture of A Court of Mist and Fury, These Rebel Waves, the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and of course, Robin Hood and Tangled. Question Four: Are any of the characters, main or not, based on actual people in your life? Not intentionally. Though, it was recently pointed out that Shane is basically me, which makes a lot of sense. Question Five: The lost Legends is a retelling of the Disney movie Tangled. Can you explain to our readers what the difference is between the two is? The Lost Legends started off as a Robin Hood-inspired story, but after I finished the first draft and was watching Tangled one day, I started seeing similarities and the potential to make it a retelling series. The first book only has hints of references to the movie, most of which are only caught by those who’ve seen it a lot. It isn’t until the second book that the retelling really comes through. They are searching for the healing flower and there is a story of a lost prince, both of which came from Tangled. The third book features a hidden tower as well. Those are the major similarities, but there are a lot of subtle references throughout. The differences are plentiful—it’s a lost prince instead of princess, he wasn’t kidnapped and locked in the tower growing up, etc. Question Six: What were your top 3 most difficult scenes to write, and what were your top 3 easiest ones to write for The Lost Legends? The three most difficult scenes to write… Most of Shane’s chapters were difficult to write because they weren’t supposed to exist. It was initially just Ada’s story. But when I got to the end, I realized I needed to know what happened in her kingdom while she was gone. The most difficult part of this book wasn’t a specific scene but the time-line in general. I could NOT get things to line up right. Two character become reunited in the middle of the book, but one leaves days after the other, so I had to figure out how it was possible for them to arrive at the same place roughly at the same time. I ended up having to add in a random stop for Ada and the pirates to prolong their journey. The three easiest scenes to write… When they arrive in Tugora and are playing cards with the other pirates and when they *SPOILER* go to Cyfrin were the two easiest because they were the first scenes I had in mind. The rest of the book was kind of built around the idea of those two parts. The third was the scene with the storm and birthday, which is my personal favorite. I wrote most of that in one day, which was 10,000 words. It’s still my record. I was just so excited and into it that I couldn’t stop. Question Seven: You have several plot twists within the story? What was your favorite one to write and why? *SPOILERS* My favorite should probably be when she discovers Lee is Loxley. It’s such an emotional, magical moment. It’s what she’s been waiting for her whole life. But, in reality, I think when she finds out he’s a pirate is my favorite because it cracked me up while writing it and the reactions of them both pretty much define their entire relationship. *MORE SPOILERS* One that I don’t talk about enough is Phillip working with the king. It was added last minute because certain things weren’t adding up, but it ended up being one of the more emotional parts for me. It’s what really brought Phillip to life, and now, he’s my favorite. Question Eight: If you could place yourself as an immortal inside the story, what one would you pick to be, and why? They all have such heartbreaking stories! I can’t fully answer this without spoiling the end of book two, but just based on book one, I would say Brienne because she’s fierce and awesome. Question Nine: Like myself, you have a physical disability—you use a wheelchair to get around. Would you mind sharing what your disability is? I have Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Essentially, because my muscles don’t work, they’re decaying. I was born with it and have never been able to stand or walk. I couldn’t even crawl as a baby. Question Ten: There has been a lot of emphasis on the importance of representation for the differently-abled community to been as more mainstream. Would you like to see the publishing world follow and recognize and accept differently-abled professionals into the publishing industry more often? Absolutely. I don’t know as much about people with disabilities working in the publishing industry, but I would really love to see more in books themselves, especially with physical disabilities. I know of one young adult fantasy series (Cursebreakers by Brigid Kemmerer) with a main character born with a physical disability, which was done beautifully! I cannot praise it enough. Even in contemporary books, it is rarely seen, and almost never with a main character. Those few that do have one also tend to focus on it. I want books where the character just happens to be in a wheelchair, not books solely about them overcoming disabilities. There needs to be more that show that a disability is not all the person is. Question Eleven: You keep a full schedule. How do you balance everything? Do you find that having such a full plate can affect you more because of your disability? I make a lot of to-do lists and spreadsheets. Until a few weeks ago, I was actually not balancing it well, and it’s something I am still working at. I work all day every day; I am on my laptop from the time I get up to the time I go to bed. Having a full plate does not have more of an effect on me because of my SMA other than my arms get very tired after typing all day. My disability, on the other hand, does impact my full plate because I rely on people to get in and out of bed. So, on the days I have a particularly long to-do list, I cannot just get up earlier or stay up later to keep working. If I need to, the only other option I have is to stay up all night in my wheelchair, which is rough on my back. Question Twelve: I notice aside from your love of writing and reading books, you also love bullet journaling and cover design. When did that passion for that part of creating start? I started looking at bullet journal designs and watching videos back in 2018 (I think), and I started my own in January 2019. I had played with designs and practiced just on scrap pieces of paper before then, making my to-do list more functional. Then, I decided to really do one. As for cover designs, that’s something I am still working on, but I really started practicing more when I got comfortable with Photoshop in 2020. Creating in a more artsy manner has always been a love of mine. Even as a young child I loved to paint and color. When I was around 11, I decided I wanted to be a fashion designer, so for the next decade or so, I mostly drew clothing designs. In my early 20s, I began doing hand-drawn quotes. I was even hired to make custom signs for a wedding at one point. So, the lettering and quotes found in my bullet journal stem from that background. Question Thirteen: If you had the opportunity to host a lavish dinner party, and you could only invite three characters from any book or movie, who would it be and why? Ohhh this is hard!!! Okay, not including any of my characters… Magnus Bane from all of the different Shadowhunter series because he’s my favorite character ever, and he would make the party fun. Kenji Kishimoto from the Shatter Me series because I’m 100% certain we’d be best friends if he were real, and we could share our love of Tangled. Elizabeth Swann from Pirates of the Caribbean because she’s Elizabeth Swann and she’s everything, and because there needs to be at least one pirate there. Question Fourteen: I like to end an interview by making the last two questions fun. I noticed you love music and that you give your characters their playlists. If you turned yourself into the main character for one of your books, what top three songs will be on there, and why did you choose those three songs? I love this! Where We Come Alive by Ruelle. It is my favorite and holds so much meaning. The lyrics feel very relevant to my journey of finding my way not only in this profession but through the depression that controlled my life for much of my late teens and early 20s. I want a tattoo of the lyrics, “out of the shadows, and into the light.” This is Me from The Greatest Showman. This feels a little cliché, but it’s true. It’s so relatable that when I went to the Hugh Jackman concert back in 2019 and he brought out Keala Settle (the actress from the movie) as a surprise to sing it, I bawled hysterically. New Romantics by Taylor Swift. I had to include at least one TSwift song! “I could build a castle out of all the bricks they through at me” is one of my favorite lyrics of all time. Question Fifteen: What are you currently working on now? And where can we find you online? I’m currently self-editing The Lost Alliance (The Nihryst Book 3), which goes to the editor as soon as I’m done, and I’m writing the first in my next college romance series, which is tentatively planned to rapid release this summer. You can find me just about anywhere! Here’s a list of links: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cait.marie.h/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/caits.inner.circle/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/c8_marie Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/c8_marie/ Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cait_marie_h Newsletter Sign-Up: https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/v1d5i1 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Cait-Marie/e/B083W2CG3Z Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19751293.Cait_Marie Website: https://caitmarieh.com/ Functionally Fictional: https://functionallyfictional.com/ Outro: I would like to personally thank Cait for being our very first feature for our e-zine. Thank you so much, Cait. This interview was a lot of fun for me, and I hope it was a lot of fun for our readers to enjoy as well! Welcome to the abler family!