Continuing with the open question thread. Head over there if you want to add anything to the list.

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teleidoplex asked, If somebody were to ship your characters, what would be the _most wrong of all wronginess_ ship you could possibly imagine, and why?

A corollary to this: if someone were to write a crossover between the Onyx Court books and another series, what cross would you most want to see, and what cross would make your soul shrivel and die in your body?

Oh good lord.

Okay, crossover first. I actually discussed at one point with matociquala, but never followed through on, the two of us running a joint fanfic contest for her Blood and Iron/Ink and Steel and my Midnight Never Come. Because they are Elizabethan faerie fantasies that almost but not quite step on each other’s narrative toes, and it just sort of seems natural to see what might happen when you overlay one on the other.

What would make my soul shrivel and die? I dunno, really. Possibly my brain is protecting me against the answers, because I can’t think of anything that seems suitably awful. But then, I’m not very good at the crossover thing to begin with: either my brain mugs me with the perfect idea (e.g. Hogfather/Nightmare Before Christmas) or it turns up a total blank. I’d probably vote for some really bad Elizabethan faerie fantasy, but I try to avoid reading those, so I can’t name one suitably awful. Maybe a time-traveling crossover with, like, Mercedes Lackey’s modern-day elf-punk urban fantasies, just for the tonal disconnect.

Most wrong of all wronginess ship . . . well, let’s avoid things that are wrong in the “that person is underage, yo” way (not that there are a lot of kids in my stories) and try for brain-melty wrongness instead. Leaving short stories out of it — because I’m too lazy to think through them all — let’s go with Nadrett (from With Fate Conspire) and the Goodemeades (from any point in the series timeline). Because, just, what? No. (I was going to pair them with Invidiana, but really, if you tilt your head at the right angle and squint, that one could maybe make sense. Nadrett, on the other hand — no. Just no.)

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tooth_and_claw asked, Are you coming to visit Bloomington anytime soon? 😉

Bloomington, probably not. GenCon, possibly, as it would be a much more effective bang for my plane-ticket buck. A lot will depend on how next summer shapes up.

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sandmantv asked, What is a villain?

I’ve talked about this issue before, but that was mostly from the angle of “why I prefer to write antagonists instead of villains.” For me, I think the break point has to do with whether the character in question believes they’re acting for the greater good, or knows they’re acting selfishly and doesn’t care. The nobleman who thinks sheep need a shepherd can be an antagonist, even if he’s horribly mistreating his peasants. The nobleman next door who truly only cares about his own pleasure can be a villain, even if his peasants are actually better-off than his neighbor’s.

I don’t know if that makes any sense or not outside of my own head, but in here, it works.