Are you still playing games alone for fun?
I haven’t, in recent years. That side of my brain – I’ve always been a must have something like that. I am very fascinated. So I spent years doing jigsaw puzzles, hundreds of them. I’ve always been an addict of crosswords and solitaire, and my thing now is that I’m quilting, which is actually a lot like, you take things apart and put them together in a different way. It’s very schema-focused. But I mean, basically, I’ve been a gamer all my life. Just not so much lately. That very detailed widget in my brain, it just loves that kind of stuff.
Have you ever thought about intersecting your love work with your love work, like a gay love visual novel?
If there is a good chance I will. A few years ago, an interactive fiction company contacted me and I did something for them. They are a new startup. I wrote a story, but they have a very weird system. They try to sell coins with different emotions. They have all these strict rules on how you write it, so people have to buy sentiment coins. Then, when they go public, they end up being user-created content.
So I’ve seen some of them, and they’re very popular with the new generation on iPads and stuff, these interactive fiction games with very cartoony graphics. I really like trying new things, so I’m always willing to do something new if given the chance. But I haven’t really researched it, mostly because I’ve been publishing my books fast. It takes up a lot of my energy.
How about the intersection in your audience – do your fans follow both your games and your romance work?
Few, not many, but I occasionally come across people who say they found me Gabrielle Knightfound my romance Gabrielle Knight.
I feel like there’s always this quasi-romantic inclination in Gabriel’s stories. Is this what drove you into romance?
I do not think so. It just reflects who I am as a writer.My two loves are horror and romance, which sounds really psychopathic, but I read romance growing up, I read a lot of horror growing up, and there’s a clue to both Gabrielle Knight. Gabriel is definitely a classic gangster character, a bad boy you can’t help but fall in love with and be drawn to.
I felt quite right when I found your Eli Easton work because inner beast There’s this incredible gay tension.
Yes, it’s interesting that it came out at that time. I think I obviously never wrote a gay romance at the time. But I was really influenced by Anne Rice, who always had a lot of gay tension in her stories, and sometimes more than that. cry to heaven is one of my favorite Anne Rice books. It’s about a eunuch who is in a long-term relationship with another man, and that’s only in that book. But the interest has always been there and has been more fully expressed recently.
