What inspired you to write Cavernous? Was it a "why does nobody write X" moment? A character idea that wouldn't leave you alone? World building that finally found a story to go with it?
Thanks sm for the question!! <3
Cavernous was my covid project - I was struggling to work on anything creative during this time and really needed something light and fun to work on without too much pressure. This was right around that time was when Ruby Dixon's barbarian series was getting really popular, and I loved the self-indulgent silliness of this creative prompt which involved putting mostly ordinary, contemporary characters in an outlandish situation and figuring out how on earth they're going to turn the situation sexual. A friend at work and I were chatting about this, and she asked me where I would set a goofy romance novel if I wrote one, and I said "a cave" as mostly a joke. But, by the end of the workday I had rough-outlined pretty much the whole book.
At the time, my friends and I had been discussing the bachelor/bachelorette franchise and watching a lot of reality tv trash, so elements of that got thrown in. My own more general love for ambitious women scientist characters (Susan Calvin, Ellie Sattler, Jo Harding, etc) drove the character development. The cultural setting was mostly ancillary to the fact that the deepest caves in the world are in fact actually in Georgia, so I ran with the Eastern European influences from there.
Blocking out the concept and plot came first, then the characters, and then last came the sense that this could actually be something real, as opposed to a just-for-fun writing exercise to get me out of my pandemic depression funk. And now it's this! My first book! Whoda thunk ¯_(ツ)_/¯
