Quirky Questions with Erato

I asked some quirky questions of Erato! But first the books: Erato books on Amazon

And some links:

The Regency Romantics Series

Erato books on Facebook

The Regency Romantics

Now to the questions!

Hello, Erato! In your opinion, what is the best Disney animated movie?

Oh man. I’m a big Disney animation fan — very influential even into my work, like the Regency Romantics series. I am partial to The Little Mermaid, but I think in terms of really the best, the old Oscar nominee Beauty and the Beast has to get it, even if they did knock off a lot from Jean Cocteau.

Ah, I do love The Little Mermaid! Now, what song are you listening to right now, or what song did you listen to last?

I think the last song I listened to might well have been Boney M’s “Rasputin.”

Very good! On a scale from 1-5, how afraid of the dark are you?

It might be as much as a 5. I actually tend to sleep with lights on, not exactly out of fear, but I seem to kind of halfway wake up a lot at night, and to do so doesn’t startle me so much if I can do that and see I’m still in my room and that everything is fine. I just go right back to sleep, like that; but if I wake up in the dark, I seem to need extra time to reorient myself, and that causes me to not sleep well since I didn’t fall back asleep right away. The last time I lived somewhere where I normally put the lights out, was my flat in Edinburgh, which had really large, tall, old-style windows that I guess let in enough light from the street that I did not need to keep lights on most of the time. (Plus I didn’t want to annoy the flatmates about the energy bill.)

That was enlightening! (Sorry) *clears throat* Tell us something you have never told anyone else.

I am really a man. (It’s not true, but I don’t think I’ve said it to anyone before.)

Mulan would have something to say about that, I’m sure. What was the last movie, TV show, or book that made you cry or tear up?

The Brave One. Not the Jodie Foster one, but the movie from the fifties with the Dalton Trumbo screenplay. It’s about this little Mexican kid with a pet bull, but there’s some kind of confusion about the ownership of the bull, and so he has to stop it from being sent off to the bull ring. (Bulls virtually never emerge alive from the bull ring.) It’s this really cheap movie, the acting is awful — but there I was, crying at the end, and I’m tearing up a little even now just remembering it. 

How sad! I hope that movie has a happy ending! Do you know what your name means? Or who were you named after?

Ah, well — my real name is after one of the nine muses of Greek mythology; and so, when I chose a pen name, I chose a different one of the muses. Erato was muse of love poetry and lyric poetry, and the name means approximately “Lovely” or “Charming.” Unfortunately, I find there are a lot of evidently dyslexic people who misread it as something like “Erotic” and immediately assume that I write porn. I think it’s made some problems for the YA friendly Regency Romantics series, since I have an impression that a lot of people who would like the sweet, often funny stories, have assumed (entirely off of misreading my name) that they’re not clean romances; and the people who did buy them often expected something more lurid, despite the candy-colored cover art.  

But a lovely name it is! Finally, is the glass half-empty or half-full?

I always have thought this really depends on the context of your glass. Did I go into the kitchen and half-fill a glass with water, or did I order a beverage at a Starbucks and get a cup that’s half air? You know?

Insightful! Thank you, Erato, for answering my questions! I’m heading to Starbucks, so you all follow and support Erato, and support more authors next Friday on a new Quirky Questions!

Happy reading! 🙂