Off the Beaten Path: Monica La Porta

Today's guest is Monica La Porta, author of Priest, the first book in The Ginecean Chronicles. She contributed Home Wet Home for Off the Beaten Path. Before we get to her inspiration for that, let's start with Monica’s Bio.

Monica La Porta

Monica La Porta is an Italian who landed in Seattle several years ago. Despite popular feelings about the Northwest weather, she finds the mist and the rain the perfect conditions to write. Being a strong advocate of universal acceptance and against violence in any form and shape, she is also glad to have landed precisely in Washington State. She is the author of The Ginecean Chronicles, a dystopian/science fiction series set on the planet Ginecea where women rule over a race of enslaved men and heterosexual love is considered a sin. She has published the first three books in the series, The Priest, Pax in the Land of Women, and Prince at War. She also wrote and illustrated a children’s book about the power of imagination, The Prince’s Day Out. Her latest published short, Linda of the Night, is a fairytale love story celebrating inner beauty. In her free time, she likes to build miniatures, sculpting, and painting. She also likes to go walking with her beloved beagle, Nero.

The Ginecean Chronicles is a very interesting series. Here's a more in depth blurb on Priest.

Mauricio is a slave. Like any man born on Ginecea, he is but a number to the pure breed women who rule over him with cruel hands. Imprisoned inside the Temple since birth, Mauricio has never been outside, never felt the warmth of the sun on his skin. He lives a life devoid of hopes and desires. Then one day, he hears Rosie sing. He risks everything for one look at her and his life is changed forever. An impossible friendship blossoms into affection deemed sinful and perverted in a society where the only rightful union is between women. Love is born where only hate has roots and leads Mauricio to uncover a truth that could destroy Ginecea.

Monica has some more intriguing stories on the table. Here's a little taste of those. For more updates, you'll have to follow her blog here.

I am writing Notturno, a fantasy novel set in a world where people are divided between nocturnals and diurnals. At the same time, I am also working with my two editors on three different projects. Two are companion books about the story of Gaia & Elios, a girl and an alien thrown together by fate and Etruscan findings. The third is Marie’s Journey, the final installment in The Ginecean Chronicles.

Here, Monica talks a little bit about how Home Wet Home came about, her short story featured in Off the Beaten Path.

The inspiration for Home Wet Home came from my fascination for anything aquatic. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours reading about the lost city of Atlantis, and I tried, without much success, to establish a colony of sea monkeys in a jar.

We all have those fun little stories of how our writing comes about. Here's one of Monica's from when she was writing Priest.

In 2010, while I was writing Pax in the Land of Women, two characters, Rosie and Mauricio, came to life. I fell in love with them and thought their story deserved to be told, but Pax was already on its way to completion, and there wasn't any space left in it for them. November came along and with it Nanowrimo, the one month extravaganza where authors pledge to the insanity of writing until they drop. It was perfect timing and I immediately jumped at the opportunity to write 50,000 words around the slave and the President’s daughter.  During those thirty days, my husband and I settled on a nice routine, where he played Red Dead Redemption and I sat by him on the couch and wrote The Priest. To this day, I can’t read a word from The Priest without humming the songs from RDR’s soundtrack.

And now we'll finish up with all of Monica's contact info.

Blog: www.monicalaporta.com
Twitter: @momilp
Facebook: www.facebook.com/ginecea
Amazon Author page
Goodreads

Mailing list: http://bit.ly/worldsinwords

Well I hope everyone enjoyed the blog tour and all the featured post! I know I enjoyed working with all these talented authors on the Off the Beaten Path anthology. It has been a blast and a learning experience! I'm so glad I was able to participate and make some new friends along the way.

I'll be taking a brief break from blogging, so there will not be a Tuesday post this week. I will be back Thursday with the news I knew everyone has been waiting for.

Have a wonderful week!