Fellow Author Friday ~ Carmine Blanche

 It's time for another Fellow Author Friday! Please welcome Carmine Blanche to my blog.


1.    When and how did you decide to become a writer?
When I was young, I learned that I liked to tell stories.  Not the kind that kids usually tell to get out of a scrape, but real fiction.  I must have been about nine when the teacher asked me to write a story about mankind’s first encounter with aliens.  When I completed it, not only did she read it and loved it, I was beat up by a couple students for getting the best scores in the class on the assignment.  Somehow I accepted this as confirmation that I was on my way as a writer.  Simple stories and tales came forth after that and I would find myself writing about anything and everything.


2.    Where do you get inspiration for your stories?
Some of my early work, when I was not trying to publish, would come from things I saw around me.  Events that I would try to make into something more than they were.  I would watch a couple talking and think about what was being said by their actions, then create a story around it.  Sometimes it would be happy, sometimes sad or violent.  I used these as exercises to stimulate thought.

When I chose to start writing in the erotic and erotic romance genre, I drew from observation and from my own past.  I led a rather active sexual life in my youth, many of the things I have seen and done have fed into my fantasies and helped create some of the stories I have written and have yet to write.


3.    What makes you unique as a writer? What do you think sets you apart from other writers?
I cannot classify myself as “unique”.  I think that we are all unique by nature, but people who have the wrong expectations of us, as writers, cause us to conform and become less and less unique by requiring that we write within a certain “scope of work”.  Anyone that has had the unfortunate experience of having to deal with a commercial publisher has experienced the whole, “We want you to be different, but not too different, but more like this person" routine.

My biggest effort to be a little different than other men that write in this genre is that I try hard to write my female characters in a positive and respectable light.  I love women, not just in the physical sense.  Too many male written stories seem to cast the female as merely an object, a tool or an ends to a means.  I like to try to give them a mind, a story and even if they are the “slut” of the story, I want them to HAVE a story.


4.    Where can we learn more about you? (Share links to social media, books, etc!)
Well… I am here on Facebook and spend an unhealthy, some might say, amount of time here.  But if you want to follow more of my digital outings, then you can go here:
www.carminethegreat.com
http://twitter.com/CarmineTheGreat   Yes… I still use Twitter.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/CarmineB