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7 Questions from the Serrulata Saga Desk: Gabriel Hargrave

1/9/2024

Welcome to 7 Questions from the Serrulata Saga Desk, my new feature that boosts fellow indie authors! This week, we chat with Gabriel Hargrave, one of my fantastic editors - and an all around awesome person.

Pen Name: Gabriel Hargrave (will also eventually be releasing less spicy novels under Gabriel Crawford)
Pronouns: he/him
Book Series/Latest Book Published: Orchid and the Lion (OatL) series/The Lion and the Dahlia

Introduce your current favorite character – who are they and why do you prefer them above all others at the moment?

If we’re talking about my characters, I’m going to say a) what a cruel question to ask because they’re all my favorite and b) the current reigning champion is Sebastian, a.k.a. Bazzy. I’m in the process of drafting the first book I’m ever going to query, and Bas is the delightful main character. He’s got bubblegum pink hair and wears these wacky suits, and he’s just genuinely funny and a lot healthier and less of a mess than some of the other characters I’ve created. He stumbles into being the nanny for three kids, and watching him settle more and more into a parental role while falling for their father was a lot of fun, especially since the book has such a cute, cozy vibe.

If we’re talking about other author’s characters, I’m going to shout out Juniper Lake Fitzgerald. I’m a huge fan of messy disaster queers, and Calysto and Python from The Modern Mythos Anomaly are two of my faves.

Who is harder to write – an interesting hero or an interesting villain?

Oddly enough, an interesting love interest. Which is bad news for me since I write romance and sci-fi with a romance co-plot. LOL! My first draft love interests tend to be wooden and boring and just kind of blah. I tend to use them as a way of first figuring out and fleshing out my main character and then I go back and rework that first draft so that the love interest can really shine.

My critique partner and I like to joke that my love interests suffer from “Laith syndrome” because that particular character was nothing like he wound up being in the final version of The Orchid and the Lion. He was just sort of…there? There were pieces of him in place, things that I could latch onto when I went back and fixed him up, but for the most part, he was just responding to Dorian and helping me get to know that character. Sabri in The Lion and the Dahlia was a similar story. She’s one of the most dynamic and beloved characters I’ve ever created now, but in the first draft, she was flat and didn’t stand on her own outside of Laith being attracted to her.

I think the biggest issue is that I pants my stories, so the love interest is a tool in the first draft rather than a full-on character in their own right. It helps make the main character and the story interesting, but it means having to put in extra work on subsequent drafts so that the reader will love the LI as much as the main character and I do.

You’re trapped in an elevator with your main character. What are you discussing?

I’ll go with Dorian for this one because in addition to writing the third draft of Nanny Bazzy, I’m also working on the first draft of The Dahlia and the Knight, the third book of the OatL series, so I’m in that character’s head a lot now.

Dorian and I are both bookworms, so I think that would be the majority of what we talk about. The OatL series takes place about 150 years in the future, so Dor would have read dozens and dozens of books that aren’t even written yet and could tell me about them. But depending on how long we’re trapped, I assume we’d eventually get into things like our shared traumas, our weakness for a dry red wine, and our experiences as kinky queer people. I’ll probably also get yelled at a lot for what I put Dorian through. LOL!

What is the most challenging aspect of writing for you? How do you conquer it?

Wildly enough, storytelling is hard for me. My characters are fun and dynamic and realistic enough that you feel like you could reach out and slap them when they do something ridiculous. But it’s hard for me to figure out what the plot of a particular book should be. It takes so many drafts—both finished and unfinished—and a lot of discussions with my critique partner, alphas, and betas to nail down the tale I’m trying to tell.

Some of that is that I’m a fan of really complex narratives, BIG stories that are often too big and need to be shrunk down a bit. Some of that is that I pants, so I initially have no more than a vague idea of what I’m doing until I’ve finished the first draft and can start weeding out the stuff that doesn’t work and zeroing in on what does. And some of that is that most of my work is genre-blending, so I’m juggling a lot of things all at once. I’d love to be able to publish more than one novel a year, but my writing process is big and chaotic and messy and takes time. And the majority of that is because characters and dialogue and sex scenes are all easy, but plot is hard.

I’m working on that, though, getting better at plot structure and attempting to plan things out a bit more as I write. One of my own personal “rules” as a writer is that I want the next book to be better than the last, and I never want to stop learning and improving my craft.

If you could write a cross-over with another book/series, what would it be and why? (Or, if cross-overs don’t interest you, why?)

I think it’s cheating if I say my critique partner Lor’s stuff since it’s not out yet, so I’ll go with K.D. Edward’s Tarot Sequence series. I had already written the first draft of The Orchid and the Lion when I read the first book of that series, and I was delighted to find characters that felt like they’d get along with my own. Ciaran and Dorian would be fun to watch interact because I think they’d be best frenemies, Sabri and Brand would get along like a house on fire (especially since they both deeply care about reckless grown ass men), and Laith and Rune would have a great time getting into messes together. Plus, Dorian being able to use magic would be the most fun and the most terrifying thing in the world.

In your opinion, what is the purpose of storytelling?

I think it’s different for every writer. Some people do it because they want to tell stories that will live forever, etch their name into the fabric of history, and be remembered for doing something great. Others do it because they have to, because they have words in their head or their heart that need to get out, and they’re going to make it everyone else’s problem. LOL! Some just like telling a good tale; others are working through stuff and using story to do it.

I do it for a combination of reasons. I really enjoy sharing my work with people, getting to make them feel something, seeing how much they love my characters and the worlds I build around them. It’s also just really cathartic. I tend to give my characters struggles of my own, though I don’t realize I’m doing it until after I already have. My characters and I sort of therapize each other in the early drafts of a book, and we come to an understanding of, like, this is the story we want to tell, the one that expresses the things we need to get out into the world.

As a queer author, though, there’s another equally important point to storytelling. Like other marginalized groups, LGBTQ+ authors are told that our stories aren’t important or that they need to be sanitized or silenced or a million other terrible things. Writing the kinds of books that I do—whether the raunchiest, most explicit erotica or the coziest, low-to-medium heat romance—is a declaration that I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m not going to shrink myself or let the attempts at “purifying” our culture go unnoticed or unchallenged. The queer writers that I know are putting their hearts and souls into challenging, beautiful, horrifying, heart-warming stories and releasing them into the world so that these stories can be told, can be heard, can be bulwarks against the tide of bigotry and nonsense being lobbed at queer people. And so that people like us—people who need those stories—can find them and take comfort in them and strength from them.

Ok, last but not least… Tell us a bit about what made you want to become a writer and why you write what you write.

I’ve been writing since I was a really little kid. I remember “writing” a book in kindergarten (I stapled construction paper together and scribbled on it and drew some bad pictures of dinosaurs in it), and I just sort of never stopped. It was something I felt called to do, and I’m so lucky that I’m at a place in life where I can do it.

I talked in the last question about why I do what I do on a broader level, but the reason I write the kinds of books I write is because I want to read them. I love coming up with characters, figuring out who they are and what they want and what they become. And even though I told myself I wasn’t going to write erotic fiction, I found that it’s where I feel most at home. Not all of what I have brewing to publish is like the OatL series (the Nanny Bazzy novel is the first in what I’m hoping will be a series of low-to-medium heat contemporary queer romances set in Rochester, NY), but I adore books where sex and sexuality are treated as just normal parts of life, where the characters do things (fall in love, save the world, etc.) but they also do each other. I’m a huge proponent of the idea that you can weave together rich narratives, three-dimensional characters, and burn-your-face-off spicy scenes without sacrificing the quality or importance of your work, and I aim to be among those who prove that to readers.

Here's where to find Gabe:

Website: gabrielhargrave.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gabrielhargravewrites
Twitter: GHargraveWrites
Instagram: gabrielhargravewrites
TikTok: gabrielhargravewrites
Spotify: Gabriel Hargrave
BlueSky: ghargravewrites.bsky.social

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