The Write Stuff – Monday, January 2 – Interview With Anthony Dobranski

January 2, 2017January 3, 2017 raymondbolton Leave a comment

I am so glad to start off 2017 by getting to know WordFire Press author Anthony Dobranski, who is currently writing a historical thriller based on real people and real events. Apparently, there are no bounds to what this talented writer can do. A native of Washington DC, he lives there now. Anthony studied English at Yale and made his first career at AOL working in Europe and Asia-Pacific. WordFire published his debut novel, The Demon in Business Class, on October 26, 2016. He describes his book this way:

An international modern day fantasy —

A demon-possessed spy trying to start the next global war falls in love with a psychic trying to stop it.

A shady powerbroker forces Zarabeth Battrie into a secret plan to start the next global war, giving her a demon that lets her speak all languages. But the people now trying to kill Zarabeth might know more about her job than she does.

When hallucinations drive Gabriel Archer to violence, a steely investigator shows Gabriel his repressed psychic powers. Recruited to help a visionary corporate leader turn others from evil, Gabriel struggles to master his own senses, and his doubts.

When Zarabeth and Gabriel meet by chance in Scotland, their brief passion becomes a fragile, troubling love, until the demon’s betrayal drives Gabriel away. Before Zarabeth’s cruel vengeance can destroy the visionary’s plans, Gabriel must stop her — but for both to survive, neither can win.

With witches, gangsters, prophets, cultists, and two angry angels, The Demon in Business Class is an edgy modern-day fantasy set around the world, on the uneasy ground where the worldly meets the divine.

Tell us about your most recent release.

The Demon in Business Class is an international modern-day fantasy, about a demon-possessed spy trying to start the next global war, who falls in love with the psychic trying to stop it. It’s a hybrid-genre book, with corporate thriller elements, a central star-crossed romance, and stylized language. It’s my first novel.

Who or what was the inspiration behind it?

My career before writing was at the internet service AOL, during its heyday, going overseas for months at a time to help launch editions in Europe and Asia-Pacific. I got to see the world, and to see how it is changing in our globalized era. Cultures rub against each other uncomfortably, in multiple dimensions, of nationhood and class and wealth, old and new. Societies on both sides of both oceans have been destabilized, some by new poverty, others by sudden and unequal wealth. People fear loss, fear the other, crave older certainties.

Fantasy cuts to the heart of culture, highlighting its hidden assumptions. I wanted to write a book that did that for our time, the way Jekyll and Hyde does for Victorian England or The Master and Margarita does for Stalin’s Soviet Union.

How I achieved this was its own, different inspiration, or at least a powerful motivation. Writing about our time is different from writing a book set in our time before escaping it, like Lev Grossman or J. K. Rowling. I also didn’t want to just bring a modern sensibility to a traditional fantasy world like A Song of Ice and Fire. I wanted a fantasy that came out of 21^st century Earth, and I had the fervor of a convert, taking a great gleeful joy in bending and reworking as many genre norms as I could. Neil Gaiman blazed the trail I walked, for sure, but I walked a lot of it with Chuck Palahniuk.

What was the biggest challenge you faced writing this book and how did you overcome it?

The biggest was the style. I needed to evoke the crisp and often acid language of businesspeople, which is a kind of armor, yet still have it express doubt and fear and desperation, without ever sounding highfaluting. It’s a tall order, and I had to let go a lot of my “literary” airs – these are not people who drop allusions to Austen, or who really spend a lot of time expressing their interiority.

I did it by writing and throwing out writing, mostly. I tossed my first 400 pages and started over, wrote a thousand pages and cut half of that. I constantly read my work aloud – I built myself a standing desk so it was easier to breathe and talk! Always looking for leaner rhythms and tighter phrasing. Oh, the flocks of darlings I killed. When my editor told me I had to add a chapter, I have to tell you, it was quite the strange moment.

Hah! That would have thrown me for a loop as well. What else are you working on?

My novel-in-progress is a post-climate-change sci-fi tale set in a war-ravaged Budapest, working title The Cooperative Spiders. It was my NaNoWriMo winner in 2015, based on a short story I wrote, based on a dream. It’s gender-bending yet oddly genteel and Old World — think of it as Wes Anderson loosely adapting a Samuel R. Delany novel. Compared to Demon — which is rooted in real-world places and secret histories — Spiders is a freeing experience, since all that seems to stick to it is craziness.

What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?

10a-12p, 2p-5p, weekdays. I have a family and I do cons, so weekends are basically out.

Tell us about your path to publication.

It’s not one any sensible person would follow, and I only discuss it to give hope to those like me who feel they’ve painted themselves in corners. I did everything wrong. I dove straight into a passion project with almost no understanding of the industry or market. I had no smaller works published. I sent out blind queries to both literary and fantasy agents and got form letters in return. I felt like I was living on crumbs. I woke up New Year’s Day 2015 crying. My resolution was, in one year I would feel more like a writer than I did that moment, whatever it took.

My writing-group colleague Wayland Smith had been to Superstars Writing Seminars, a business-focused seminar in Colorado Springs, and spoke well of it. Actually, he gushed, and Wayland doesn’t gush. So, I signed up. One morning at the seminar I met a writer and editor named Vivian Caethe. Demon intrigued her! She brought me to Peter J. Wacks of WordFire Press. I didn’t get the feeling it intrigued him at all, and when he asked me for ten pages I figured it was his favor to Vivian. Seven months later, Kevin J. Anderson, who owns WordFire Press, sent me a Facebook message inviting me to submit the whole manuscript.

Kevin also asked for a marketing plan — and it was clear he was throwing down a gauntlet.

Let me circle back and say that, other than my brief bright moment with Vivian, I first found Superstars incredibly depressing. It’s a professional seminar, so it skews to people with an obvious shot at making money, to series writers, to genre-mainstreams. They might as well have started every lecture saying, “Hey Tony, this one doesn’t really apply to you either.” By the time of the celebratory dinner, I was very low in spirit, really ready to chuck the whole enterprise. James Artimus Owen gets an acknowledgement in my book solely for the hours he spent talking me off the ledge of my discouragement, in deep, personal terms.

The techniques, though, are still applicable, and by the time Kevin wrote me, I had given them some months of thought. I had also read a great book about business called Mission in a Bottle, by the founders of Honest Tea — it’s a comic book, so it’s wonderfully accessible. Bringing an unsweetened high-end iced tea to market in a Snapple and Lipton world was akin to my taking my older-but-newer kind of fantasy to the mainstream fantasy market. I didn’t need to pretend to mass appeal; I needed to appeal to people left behind by all the other writers seeking mass appeal. Time and time again, Honest Tea made their difficulties into strengths, their bugs into features that other manufacturers couldn’t copy without violating their brands. I would do the same.

I gave Kevin eight single-spaced pages of multi-year marketing plan: about the market, about hybrid genres, about the slow building of literary cred, about modern bookbuying, about WordFire’s current stable and how I fit in it – which was to say, as an outlier, and how that meant a new audience WordFire didn’t really have. I even had the synopsis of Spiders – not a sequel, but enough to show I had more for Demon’s audience, maybe enough to build a tiny, quirky brand.

I got a contract.

My entrée to WordFire was equally circuitous, so it’s clear that they recognize talented odd-balls! Why do you write?

It’s not simply that I’m a highly verbal person, and a hugely analogical thinker. I suspect it’s something deep and simple involving how I understand the world. When I go to other countries, I buy local fiction. One of the few “eureka” moments I’ve had involving writing was Samuel R. Delany’s note in Dangerous Visions about how science fiction let him unite “the disparate and technical with the desperate and human.” I read that in eighth grade and it still rings true now.

I grew up with an inadvertently secret history. My parents came to America from Poland in 1961, having survived WWII and Soviet domination well enough to escape them. After they did, they didn’t really talk about their pasts, didn’t really want to. They couldn’t know this gave me a great discomfort, a sense of unrootedness and not belonging in America, in ways I was too young to understand or express, save in my love for Mr. Spock.

I think Edith Hamilton’s Mythology was the first time I had both a complete cultural history and an understanding you could discuss the world in real ways through the manifestly unreal and impossible. Now they’re tied together in my head. Perhaps if my parents had told me about their lives sooner, I would have been a historian.

Would you care to share something about your home life?

Because of my traveling AOL career, I really only started having a home life rather late in life. I married in my early forties. My wife and I met at the dog park, so animals are a big part of our lives, and my wife is on the board of our local shelter. I’ve always loved live theater, and we try to get out to new plays as often as we can. Washington is a huge theater town, with dozens of companies, from scrappy to plush. I served on the boards of two DC theater companies for many years, and as a volunteer script reader for one, until children and novels overwhelmed my volunteer time. Reading twenty scripts a year is fantastic dialogue training, by the way!

“Winter is coming” holds no menace to this avid skier, only joy.

How do you pick yourself up in the face of adversity?

Sourly, then wryly. As Samuel Beckett wrote, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” But failing better is different from failing bigger. I try to look at what went wrong and see if it ever could have gone right. Sometimes, it couldn’t have, and my eager ignorance baked in the failure I should have avoided.

Do you have any pet projects?

I have a small side-project, derailed by Demon’s launch, which I plan to pick up next spring after the next draft of Spiders. It’s a serial thriller novella called The Scientists and The Spy, about the secret WWII military work done in my own Washington DC neighborhood by the scientists at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology). It’s very different from my usual – all-ages audience, historical fiction – but it turns out evoking the past is worldbuilding too. Plus, the research is a hoot!

Thank you, Tony, for taking the time to share with us. Before I present our visitors an excerpt from Demon, I’d like to finish with my customary Lightning Round. In as few words as possible, please complete the following:

My best friend would tell you I’m… not nearly as good a drinker as I like to believe.

The one thing I cannot do without is… a myth that I had to stop indulging long ago.

The one thing I would change about my life is… to worry even less about what I’m “supposed” to do.

For those of you who’ve been waiting, here is an excerpt from The Demon in Business Class:

In the fake-oak-paneled conference room, Zarabeth Battrie found a dozen others standing. All looked wilted and worn, with bunched shirts and bowing ankles. The plastic tables were gone, the plastic chairs stacked in the corner. More people arrived but no one unstacked the chairs. A herd instinct, Zarabeth decided, to keep a clear path for fleeing.

A natty beige man in a crisp blue plaid suit came in, pushing a low gray plastic cart with stacks of documents. If the standing people surprised him, he didn’t show it. With practiced ease he lowered the room’s screen, plugged in his power strip. Someone passed the documents around but no one spoke. In the silence, Zarabeth felt anxieties around her, about money, status, children, groping her like fevered predictable hands. Too intimate, these people’s worries in her skin when she didn’t know their names, or want to. She shook them off, pushed through to the front so as not to stare at men’s backs all meeting.

Projector light bleached the natty man while he talked through slides of sunsets and bullet points, with the real news a seeming afterthought. Her office and two others were merging with Optimized Deployments, in Boston. A great move. Efficiency for all. The animated org-chart realigned over and over, three squares gone and Optimized’s no bigger. Reorganized like a stomach does food.

People asked tired questions, their hot worry now clammy hope. The natty man smiled no matter what he said. Yes, redundancies. Jobs would move, details to work out. All would be well and better.

He left to spread his joy. The room lights rose.

Zarabeth’s boss, Aleksei Medev, slouched in the corner like someone had whacked his head with lumber. His unshaven olive skin hung gray and limp. With all eyes on him, he straightened.

“A very challenging time,” he said. “We’re sending reports to justify—to guide the transition. Client work is secondary.”

Zarabeth was in no hurry to fill out Aleksei’s useless reports. Nothing she had done in the last two months justified keeping her employed, she knew that. She went out the broken fire exit to a stand of pine trees behind the parking lot. She lit a cigarette, paced in the shade.

Once, Zarabeth Battrie had traveled the country as an Inspiration Manager, connecting the best people at Straightforward Consulting to an in-house knowledge network. She had good instincts which managers to flatter, which to cow, which to sneak past. It surprised her how much she understood when she finally got her quarry to talk their special arcana, over morning jogs, lobster lunches, steak dinners, midnight hookahs with shots of tequila. Later, on airplanes, she’d think of those and other conversations, watching the pieces fit together in this strange unity and balloon, her world growing with a drug-like jolt. To let her do that, week in, week out—taking off, landing, on the move, on her feet—had been the greatest praise.

On Valentine’s Day, it had evaporated without explanation. Zarabeth had been reassigned from downtown Washington to Reston, in the Virginia suburbs, to do public-relations grunt-work for industry trade groups. Aleksei Medev, still shiny then, had put his feet on her new desk and spun a great tale, core knowledge toward a turnkey marketing solution, select team deep study. At least she got an office with a door.

Zarabeth had visited Boston twice in her old job. Optimized had smart people and kept them by being greedy. They would suck the money from her division like marrow from bone. Everyone fired, no matter how they danced.

Doubt ate through her like some parasite come to lay its eggs. She pinched the cigarette’s cherry to burn it off with pain. Six years at this firm would not end this week.

You may follow Tony on FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram as ADobranski.

His website is: www.anthonydobranski.com

You can purchase The Demon in Business Class ebook at: https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Business-Class-Anthony-Dobranski-ebook/dp/B01MFG0ARS/

If you are interested in following his progress on his historical thriller, The Scientists and the Spy, you may do so here: http://www.foresthillsconnection.com/category/style/sci-spy/

The Write Stuff – Monday, August 29 – Interview With Ramón Terrell

August 29, 2016August 30, 2016 raymondbolton Leave a comment

It was my good fortune to run into Ramón Terrell at Sasquan—WorldCon’s 2015 incarnation—last August at the WordFire Press book launch party for Mike Resnick. A genial and easygoing man, I warmed to him immediately. I’ve been trying to feature him ever since, but one thing or another always got in the way. He is a prolific author with a rich imagination and always seems to have multiple irons in the fire.

Tell us about your most recent release.

I actually have two books releasing at the same time, this year. One, Hunter’s Moon, with Wordfire Press, the other, Out of Ordure, from Tal Publishing, my own label.

Hunter’s is the direct sequel to Running from the Night, and is the second book in the Hunter’s Moon series that take place in Vancouver BC. Without giving too much away for those who haven’t read the first book, let’s just say things are out of control. After the events of Running from the Night, it’s a miracle that Jelani and his friends are still alive. The Eldest Hunter, Yako, is under pressure due to the interference of a certain powerful woman, which has complicated his life in the vampire world. Top that off with random vampires in the street who can smell Saaya’s halfblood scent all over him, and Jelani’s life continues to plummet. Lots of action, sprinkles of humor, and camaraderie and loyalty of two best friends. Jelani’s steadfast devotion to protecting his friends, even if it means the forfeit of his own life, may just be the one thing keeping himself and his friends alive.

In Out of Ordure, we follow the adventures of Ordure Engineer Fairy, Fecanya, and her three coworkers, a Bloom Fairy, a Garbage Fairy, and the every bubbly Sugar Fairy. Fecanya hates her job (can you blame her?) and would like nothing better than to go on vacation. Permanently. This is one sassy fairy, and I think you’ll find her sarcasm and antics to be quite a riot. Her uptight satyr therapist, however, begs to differ.

Who or what was the inspiration behind it?

For Hunter’s Moon, I would have to take it back to the first book. Running from the Night was a relentless story demanding to be told. I had no intention of writing a vampire story because they were everywhere at the time. But the story became so insistent, I practically had to promise it that I would write it once I was done with the project I was working on.

Out of Ordure came about from a day in the woods. I was out hiking with my wife and her friend, and we came across dog… “leavings”, and I went into a rant about people not cleaning up after themselves or their pets. Then I mentioned the *insert expletive that rhymes with hit* Fairy must have been working overtime. We laughed, and I just kept going. Eventually both of them said I should write a story about it. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because I’d never written humor and wasn’t sure I could. After a couple of months of my wife rather insistently asking if I’d started the fairy book yet, I finally did. This little novella was a blast to write, and I think readers will find it quite funny.

What was the biggest challenge you faced writing this book and how did you overcome it?

My biggest challenge with Out of Ordure was confidence. I’d never written humor and was unsure I could. Comedy/humor is not only subjective, but also a little more technical in some ways. It’s quite easy to fall flat on your face. In the end, I just sat down and wrote a page, passed it to a few author friends to see if this would work. The end result became Out of Ordure, and I’m quite enamored of my sassy little Ordure Engineer Fairy friend.

What other novels have you written?

There are two more books that follow Echoes of a Shattered Age: Legends of a Shattered Age, and Heroes of a Broken Age. This is the Legend of Takashaniel Trilogy. My vampire series, Hunter’s Moon, begins with Running from the night, and is followed by Hunter’s Moon, Darkness of Day, and Revenire. Wordfire Press is currently re-publishing these five books. Lastly is Unleashed, the first book in the Saga of Ruination.

Have there been any awards, productions, videos or anything else of interest associated with your work?

The Hunter’s Moon series is currently in early works for a television series. Although I can’t say much about it at this time, the process is ongoing. I hope to be able to speak more about it in the coming months. Sadly, that’s all I can say about it.

Most authors dream about something like this, but few ever see their dream materialize. You’re one of the fortunate ones. What else are you working on?

I am coauthoring a new set of books with amazing author Peter J. Wacks, and also will begin work on a YA series set in the same world as the Takashaniel books. You can look for that one to appear some time this year.

What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?

I go to the coffee shop in the morning around 8:30 a.m., write until 12:30 p.m., then meet my wife for lunch. I then return to the coffee shop an hour later to write until about 5:30 p.m.. I sometimes work at home afterwards, but only if I’m really pushing for a deadline.

Do you create an outline before you write?

I do now. For Echoes I did not, because I didn’t know how. I would have gotten that book done much quicker had I employed an outline to stay on track. Now, I outline every book, beginning to end. The story and characters evolve and things change and go in different directions, because it is a living thing, but the outline is the guide to keep things on track and for readily available details.

Why do you write?

Same reason why I breathe. Well, maybe not quite so essential for sustaining life, but it’s a close second. I write because I can’t not write. When I’m not writing, I get antsy. I can’t rest. I already have more story ideas than I could write in a few lifetimes, and they’re only getting more crowded. The stories and characters have lives that must be recorded. Writing is a creative love that is shared only with acting. I write because I love it, and because I must.

Is there anything you want to make sure potential readers know?

If you like fun and adventure, camaraderie, and sweeping tales of diverse characters, enter my sandbox. I’d love for us to play together.

Do you have another job outside of writing?

Yes. I’m also an actor, and have appeared on Arrow, Supernatural, iZombie, Minority Report, and I am one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men in the show Once Upon a Time. I’m also in the hilarious hit web series Single and Dating in Vancouver.

Would you care to share something about your home life?

I have the most supportive and loving wife a guy could dream of, and two awesome cats that occasionally drive me nuts. To have a warm, dry, comfortable home to share with my amazing wife and two awesome cats is a blessing bigger than anything I could have hoped for.

How do you pick yourself up in the face of adversity?

I ask my self one question: Would I be happy doing something else if I gave up today. The answer is unthinkable. You pick yourself back up and keep going. You learn your craft. You do the work. You do lots of the work, and I mean a LOT of the work. This is my career, my job. There is no such thing as giving up because I’ve failed. Failure is a verb, not a noun. I learn from failure, cast it aside, and succeed.

What has been your greatest success in life?

Deciding after years of telling myself I couldn’t do it, and that it was too late to pursue my dreams. Deciding that I didn’t want to just “settle”, and that it was okay to achieve more, and that I deserved more, as long as I was willing to work for it.

Who has been your greatest inspiration?

My parents and my brother are my biggest inspirations. My mother was the most loving mother a son could have. She worked hard, tolerated no excuses, and “co-ruled” the house with a firm and loving hand. My father was a big gentle soul yet as strong as a mountain. He also took no excuses, worked hard, and taught us to be hardworking men that do what we must to get the job done and see our responsibilities met. My brother was my closest and best friend before I had any true friends. He was the person I looked up to, and still do. Childhood social life wasn’t much fun for me, and my brother was always there, occasionally letting his much younger brother hang out with him and his friends. I’m forever grateful to them all.

Thank you so much for taking time away from your busy schedule to join us, Ramón. For those of you who have dropped in to acquaint yourselves with this fine, emerging author, here is an excerpt from Hunter’s Moon, after which you will find links that will help you connect with Ramón online, as well where you may buy both of his new releases and others he has written.

Hunter’s Moon

Humans. An oblivious species. So caught up in their daily lives, and working so hard to dull their senses to everything around them, that they almost always failed to intuit danger when it was right in front of them. Animals were different. The lower on the food chain an animal lives, the more wary they are. But even predators gave Remy a wide berth. Not humans.

Humans.

So fragile, so clueless. So easy. Not all, though. No. He had walked through crowds of people, even receiving the occasional flirtatious grin from a passing female. Remy had always thought it rather humorous; like a deer smiling at a passing lion. Some few actually shied away from him. On rare occasions, a human would glance at him with nervous eyes, knowing he was trouble but not really knowing how or why.

And then there were his current targets. Despite his firm belief that Yako’s skills were lacking, evidenced by his failing to dispatch two humans, Remy still had to grudgingly admit that these two were more careful and more alert than most. Remy had always enjoyed toying with his prey. Oftentimes he would walk right by them, making kindly eye contact. Then he would walk by them again, on another street, then another, causing his target to become disconcerted, then panicked. The increased rush of blood flow gave it a more tangy, sweet taste.

The one named Jelani and his friend, Daniel, were somewhat…different. Remy had thought to play his game with them, and walk by on the street. Maybe he would even wink at them. Despite the fact that they were more wary, knowing someone was after them, they had reacted unexpectedly. One of them, Daniel, had noticed Remy as soon as he was within ten feet of them, and alerted the other. They both had stolen several glances at him and moved to the other side of the sidewalk, all the time keeping an eye on him.

Remy had to admit he was at least a little impressed. In the middle of a crowd of people walking on that sidewalk, they had felt something out of place about him and moved to avoid contact. The Hunter had chosen to continue on and not give any show of recognition. There would be time enough for a little reunion.

He lifted his head and licked the blood from his lips. In his iron-like grip, a woman twitched uncontrollably. He glanced down at her with pale red glowing eyes. With a mind infinitely more focused than that of a frazzled human psyche, he managed to glean valuable information in bits, piecing them together into something resembling coherency. To be fair, he couldn’t imagine anyone maintaining any kind of order to their thoughts and memories when being unexpectedly attacked.

“And what shall I do with you?” he hissed, though he knew she was beyond hearing. He had studied every person who worked in the department with one of his targets. There were twenty two in total. This woman -Claire, her name was- had unfortunately been quite taken with the one named Daniel for over three years. After half a year of dating, they had mutually agreed to remain friends. Lovely Claire, here, had never quite gotten over her attraction to him. Apparently, Daniel loved the snow, hated the rain, enjoyed video games and watching movies at the theater, as well as going for walks with his fiancée, Wen.

Remy smirked at her. Through the memories embedded in the cells in her blood -blood he now had in his body- he could feel the envy toward the other woman as if it was his own. Remy never understood how humans could become so devastatingly taken with one another to the point of depression when things didn’t work out. There were over a billion of them walking the earth. Vampires accounted for a very small part of that population. Perhaps a shaquora could relate. Being a pureblood, Remy had no understanding of this aside from whatever information he gleaned from his occasional feedings.

“And what do I do with you?” he repeated, playfully tapping the poor woman on the nose with a finger. He had brought her to the crossroad, as vampires called it. He hadn’t drained her to the point of death, but had not fully injected the vampiric essence that would seek to re-create her.

Remy rarely re-created a human, having no love for the hated turned vampires who had little, or no control over the thirst, and reveled in their newfound abilities. Shaquora were the primary reason Hunters were necessary. The woman convulsed, and Remy gently stroked her sandy brown hair.

To connect with Ramón online, go to:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ramon.terrell

Twitter: @Ramon__Terrell

To purchase Out of Ordure, Hunter’s Moon or Ramón’s other books:

https://www.amazon.com/Out-Ordure-Fairies-Ramon-Terrell-ebook/dp/B01JVGB084/

https://www.amazon.com/Hunters-Moon-Ramon-Terrell-ebook/dp/B01JWZ1AKM/

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Ramón+Terrell

The Write Stuff – Monday, August 15 – Interview With Emma Newman

August 15, 2016August 18, 2016 raymondbolton Leave a comment

Award-winning paranormal urban fantasy author, Laura Resnick, my guest on February 29^th of this year, introduced me to this week’s featured author and I couldn’t be happier. Emma Newman is a masterful story-teller, every bit on a par with such greats as Nancy Kress and Mary Doria Russell. She writes dark short stories and science fiction and urban fantasy novels. She won the British Fantasy Society Best Short Story Award 2015 and Between Two Thorns, the first book in Emma’s Split Worlds urban fantasy series, was shortlisted for the BFS Best Novel and Best Newcomer 2014 awards. Her first science-fiction novel, Planetfall, was published by Roc in 2015. Emma is an audiobook narrator and also co-writes and hosts the Hugo-nominated podcast “Tea and Jeopardy” which involves tea, cake, mild peril and singing chickens. Her hobbies include dressmaking and playing RPGs. She blogs at www.enewman.co.uk and can be found as @emapocalyptic on Twitter.

Her latest book, entitled A Little Knowledge, was released on August 2^nd of this year. (Visitors please note: You will find Emma’s book buy and social links at the bottom of this interview.) It is the long-awaited return to Emma Newman’s popular Split Worlds series in which dynastic families feud across the ages, furthering the agendas of their supernatural patrons. Innocents are protected by monsters and the beautiful ones are not what they seem. The Split Worlds is an urban fantasy setting with a dash of noir, fantastical magic, evil faeries, and people just trying to drink their tea in peace.

I initially read her short story, “The Unkindest Cut”, which is a part of the anthology Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales From Shakespeare’s Fantasy World. It left me so impressed that I immediately dove into Planetfall, an unusual and highly-compelling tale about a colony of terrestrials who have settled on another world.

Your readers were undoubtedly on tenterhooks as they awaited A Little Knowledge’s release. Will you kindly provide as much about it as you can?

A Little Knowledge is the fourth in the Split Worlds series and readers have had to wait a while for it as the series changed publisher. The Split Worlds series really has to be read in order, starting with Between Two Thorns, so I can’t say too much about the fourth book without risking horrible spoilers. The series as a whole is quirky British urban fantasy involving evil Fae, mad sorcerers, feminism and lots of tea and cake.

This is a chicken/egg question and requires some preface:

I am fascinated by how flawed many of Planetfall’s characters are. It certainly makes them more human. Ren/Renata in particular is a counterpoint of strength versus weakness, certainly one of the more emotionally fragile and vulnerable characters I’ve encountered in a science fiction novel. Did you set out to portray her as such before you began, or did her particular condition evolve as the story progressed? This is also to ask if you are a plotter or a pantser. That is to say, do you outline before you begin, or do you fly by the seat of your pants?

I see this as two very separate questions, because having an idea of who your character is before writing a novel could apply to both plotters and pantsers.

So, about Ren. The entirety of the novel was built around her, which is very unusual for me. Usually there’s a question I want to answer, or a world that grows in my mind and few characters maybe, all growing together. With Planetfall, my drive was to sensitively and hopefully accurately portray the experience of a particular mental illness (which I won’t name because it’s a huge spoiler). Thoughts about the disorder and how to portray it led to critical decisions about the setting and then when I read an article about using 3-D printing to build a moon base, it all suddenly clicked into place. Not only did I just know, instantly, that Ren should be a 3-D engineer, I knew the book had to be set on a colony on a distant planet. Then lots of other things I’ve been wanting to explore for years (such as the intersection between religious faith and science) folded into it all nicely.

As for whether I am a plotter or pantser, I am a combination of the two. I usually have a good sense of the beginning, middle and end, critical plot points and some character and story arcs when I start to write a book. I then plan about five chapters or so ahead, just with bullet points and then write those scenes. If things change as I write, that’s fine. At the end of that planned section, I evaluate where things are going in line with the broader ideas of the book and then plan the next chunk in more detail. This technique is very similar to something called the “agile method” of coding big projects like complex websites. The idea is that as you can never accurately predict every single factor at the start of the project, it doesn’t make sense to make a comprehensive plan at the start and try to stick to it no matter what. Instead you do it in phases and adapt to any changes as you go along. When it comes to writing a character driven novel, I can try my best to predict what will happen, but sometimes when I get to a particular point that assumption just doesn’t feel right anymore, I adjust and carry on, like an “agile” coder. I feel I get the best of both worlds; the planning aspect enables me to minimise the need for major re-writes and allows me to manage multiple interwoven threads like in the Split Worlds. The “seat of my pants” aspect keeps the story details fresh for me – if I knew every single thing that happened in a book before I wrote it I would get bored. Sometimes writing a book is as much about finding out how it all works out in the end, as it is about completing the project.

That makes a great deal of sense, and it also validates many of the techniques I employ as I assemble my own work. Returning to Planetfall, the virtual software interface you employ throughout the book makes me wonder at your non-writing background. Do you write code or are you a gamer?

Both! Well, I used to code (I am horribly rusty now but I used to be pretty comfortable around html, MySQL and PHP) and my first proper job out of university was in information architecture and user interface design for websites. So yeah, experience in that field was definitely mulched down and grew into some aspects of the user interface in Planetfall. I am also a keen gamer—not just tabletop and live action roleplaying but also console games. I think it was my professional experience that was a greater influence of the two, that and my degree in Psychology.

That helps explain Planetfall’s protagonist. That said, no one writes characters as complex as yours without considerable life experience and a long reading list. Would you care to touch on some of the events and/or books that helped shape your work?

I think all life experiences, all books read, all films watched—everything—gets chucked in the mental compost heap and then characters, plots and settings grow up like mushrooms from it.

For some characters, I can still detect a hint of what was rotted down to make them. Cathy in the Split Worlds series does draw a lot from my own rage, but she and I are very different in personality. As for Ren in Planetfall, there is an overlap between her mental illness and the generalised anxiety disorder that I live with that I could base an aspect of her behaviour on, but again, we are more different than similar. Readers have said that the descriptions of her anxiety and a scene involving a panic attack were hard to read because they rang so true. There was a reason for that!

I am impressed by the way you reach out to aspiring authors, especially the Resources page of your website. Was someone equally kind to you while you were still in the initial stages of your journey, or have you done so because of an early absence of help?

Neither! I just like to help people. I didn’t really have a mentor when I was an aspiring writer and in some ways I think that was a good thing. It forced me to find my own way, which is what I think every single writer has to do. However, once I became published I kept hearing the same questions and the same incorrect assumptions. The Writer’s Rutter on my website shares some of the things I’ve learned, but very much with the caveat that what works for me might not work for anyone else.

That’s very much the reason why I run my workshop on overcoming the psychological barriers to writing. I got so fed up with reading interviews with writers who’d say that being a successful writer was all about sitting down and writing. For some people (I suspect most actually), there are all sorts of reasons why that might be very difficult. Being able to help people work through that is something I find very rewarding.

You are a contributor to Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales From Shakespeare’s Fantasy World. Regarding your story, “The Unkindest Cut”, who approached you to participate and what made you decide to expand on the Prospero theme?

David Moore, the editor of the anthology, mentioned he was thinking about putting it together at a convention years ago. I enthused about the concept and he remembered that, getting in touch once the project was underway. I was so thrilled to be asked, as it was a challenging brief. Not only did we have to riff off Shakespeare’s world and characters, we also had to interlink the stories.

The Tempest was one of the first plays that came to mind because I saw an amazing performance of it at the RSC when I was a student. I thought that Prospero was such a memorable figure that it would be fun to play with him and one that readers would enjoy too.

I wish I could attend this year’s LARP. Alas, not enough notice and too far away. I’m sure that by the time you can respond to this, it will have transpired. When did you start holding them and will you please share a bit about this one?

This question implies it’s a regular thing! The Split Worlds Masked Ball LARP was a one off event and it was a huge success, I’m very relieved to report. Readers can find pictures from the event on my website.

I’ve been a keen role-player and GM for many, many years and planned to run it with my best friend. Sadly she passed away and I thought I’d never be able to do it. Then a wonderful person called Katie Logan got in touch, asking if she could run a LARP in the Split Worlds universe and it took off from there. The ball was set between books three and four, with forty of the players playing characters from the novels and the short stories, and thirty-six more created for the event. It was held in the Guildhall in Bath. Everyone really went to town on their costumes and it looked amazing. I NPCed one of the characters from the books, as did my husband, and whilst it was incredibly stressful, time consuming and highly pressured, I am so very glad we did it.

I want to thank you so much, Emma, for taking time to share with us. Readers should know that, with her extremely busy schedule, we’ve been jostling for months to get this out to you while she’s been working hard to get A Little Knowledge published. Knowing, from personal experience how much of one’s time this kind of endeavor requires, I remain eternally grateful that she got back to me so soon after publication date.

For those of you who have enjoyed meeting Emma—and I have to ask, how could anyone not?—here are the links I promised earlier:

Website: www.enewman.co.uk

Twitter: @emapocalyptic

Other: www.splitworlds.com

www.teandjeopardy.com

Book Buy Links:

Kindle (Amazon.co.uk): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Knowledge-Split-Worlds-Book-ebook/dp/B01F7TCBLO

Kindle US (Amazon.com)https://www.amazon.com/Little-Knowledge-Split-Worlds-Book-ebook/dp/B01F7TCBLO/

Paperback (Amazon.co.uk): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Knowledge-Split-Worlds-Book/dp/1682302911

Paperback USs (Amazon.com): https://www.amazon.com/Little-Knowledge-Split-Worlds-Book/dp/1682302911/

Book depository: http://www.bookdepository.com/Little-Knowledge-Emm-Newman/9781682302910

The Write Stuff – Monday, August 1 – Interview With Mercedes M Yardley

August 1, 2016August 1, 2016 raymondbolton Leave a comment

An earlier guest, Horror Grand Master Michael R. Collings, introduced me to Bram Stoker award winning author, Mercedes M. Yardley. Her writing displays an interesting mix of timing and suspense. Her prose is crisp, clean and offers tantalizing hints at what is to come pages after. And while each page propels the reader forward, nothing about the writing seems forced. There’s almost a nonchalance in her style that I admire. This is how she describes herself:

Mercedes M. Yardley is a dark fantasist who wears red lipstick and poisonous flowers in her hair. She was a contributing editor for Shock Totem and currently works with Gamut, a groundbreaking new neo-noir magazine. Mercedes is the author of many diverse works, including Beautiful Sorrows, Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love, Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Tale of Murder and Whimsy, and the Bone Angel Trilogy. She recently won the Bram Stoker Award for her story Little Dead Red. Mercedes lives and works in Las Vegas, and you can reach her at www.abrokenlaptop.com.

Tell us about your most recent release.

My most recent release is a novella titled “Little Dead Red.” It’s a modern retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, and it’s exceptionally dark. It’s something that could actually happen. It’s about predators and prey, about little girls who are stolen and the guilt and grief of their mothers. I do believe it’s the darkest thing I’ve ever written.

The Wolf is roaming the city in this Bram Stoker award winning tale, and he must be stopped.

Grim Marie knows far too much about the wolves of the world, a world where little girls go missing. After all, she had married one before she/he showed his claws, and what that wolf did to her little girl was unforgiveable. Grim Marie isn’t certain if she can ever forgive herself for putting her Little Aleta in harm’s way.

When Grandmother becomes ill, Aleta offers to take the bus through the concrete forest to Grandmother’s house to bring her some goodies. She knows the way. What could possibly go wrong?

In this modern day retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf takes to the city streets to capture his prey, but the hunter is close behind him. With Grim Marie on the prowl, the hunter becomes the hunted.

Wolves pad through the darkest kind of fairytale: one that can come true.

What was the biggest challenge you faced writing this book and how did you overcome it?

My biggest challenge with LDR was the subject matter. It has to do with sexual abuse and the fallout from that. So not only was I dealing with the loss of a child, but I was dealing with the loss of a broken, abused child. I wanted to treat it as respectfully as I could without shying away from it. It was a balancing act. Too often abuse and the aftermath are used as plot devices without giving the situations any real weight. I wanted to avoid that.

Many choose avoid the tougher elements, but doing so can be interpreted as invalidating the victims’ experiences, be they parent or child. I’m glad you chose not to. Have you written any novels?

I wrote a dark fairytale with a high body count called Pretty Little Dead Girls. It’s very whimsical and dear and quite deadly. It’s my favorite thing I’ve written because it was just so much fun. I also wrote a novella titled Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love. Think streetwise Romeo and Juliet meets Stephen King’s Firestarter. It’s the most explosive love story. My debut novel was an urban fantasy titled Nameless: The Darkness Comes. It’s about a girl who sees demons but everybody simply assumes she’s crazy. It deals with themes of mental illness and suicide while also being snarky and humorous. It’s the first book in the BONE ANGEL trilogy.

Have there been any awards, productions, videos or anything else of interest associated with your work?

“Little Dead Red” won the Bram Stoker Award in May for long fiction, and that was absolutely thrilling. Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu won the Reddit Stabby Award, which was super cool. The award is a long, medieval type of dagger. Reddit seldom agrees on anything but I was so pleased they agreed on this.

What else are you working on?

Right now I’m finishing up book 2 of the BONE ANGEL trilogy. After that, I dive directly into book 3. I’m also working on three separate novellas, and only one can officially be announced. That novella is titled Skin of the Bear, Bone of the Witch and it goes along with the Heroes of Red Hook anthology which is being put out by Golden Goblin Press. I’m really looking forward to it. I also have six short stories in the works, so I’m staying busy.

Boy! I’ll say. What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?

Writing is very much a part of my everyday schedule, which means that it’s as haphazard as everything else. I wake up, get the kids ready for the day, play with the stray cat outside, and then write for 15 minutes. I clean. I write for 15 minutes. I check emails. I write for 15 minutes. If writing is going well, I’ll reset my alarm and write for another 15 minutes. That seems to be about the time span I get before the kids fall apart/the house starts on fire/my mind wanders/Demogorgons attack. It also helps me focus. If my alarm is set, I know I have a set amount of time to write and I know not to waste it. In fact, I’m doing this interview with the use of a timer. When my 15 minutes is up (I have about 40 seconds left), it’s time to switch laundry and make breakfast for the kiddos.

Tell us about your path to publication.

I sold my first short story for twelve dollars in 2008. I started with short stories instead of novels, and that was a good choice for me. I learned how to query and submit. I learned markets. I learned to follow guidelines, act professional, and clean up my work. After a bit, I joined Shock Totem Magazine, and that was such a valuable experience. Sitting on the other side of the desk helped me thicken my skin and see that rejections weren’t personal. I put out my first collection of short stories, and then a novella. Then suddenly two novels back-to-back, which I wouldn’t suggest. It’s important to give yourself time between each release to breathe. I was exhausted by promotion and it affected my writing. I eventually left my publishing company and joined another company that was a better fit. I signed a five book contract with them, and I have two books left to complete my contract. I couldn’t be happier. Things have changed so much in eight years!

Why do you write?

I write because I don’t have a choice. I tried to not write, and it withered my soul. Writing is how I process things. It’s thinking with my fingers. As a person, I tend to be quite scattered and distracted. It’s like chasing a roomful of light. Writing helps me condense and define everything around me so I can experience it better.

How do you think you’ve evolved creatively?

I’ve learned how to get out of my own way. That’s my evolution.

Would you care to share something about your home life?

My home life is insane. There are five of us in a teeny, tiny house. We have backyard chickens. We have two rabbits. We have a turtle that violently hates all humankind. We now have a gorgeous stray cat who would live inside our home if my husband wasn’t deathly allergic. My home is full of movement and laughter and frustration and love. There are always toys out. There’s always something delicious baking in the oven. I think it’s a happy place.

What motivates or inspires you?

I’m inspired by hope. I see the one dandelion struggling to push itself through the cracks in the concrete and I identify with it. I see people with nothing left in their souls or gas tanks, but they manage to put one foot in front of the other. They even manage to make beautiful things. It makes me want to grab their hand and walk with them. We’ll keep each other moving. There will be something stunning and worthwhile at the end of the journey.

How do you pick yourself up in the face of adversity?

You just do it. You just stare at the ground and keep going. My mother told me once that our family isn’t smart enough to know when to fall to the ground and give up. We keep getting up and taking that beating. I think it’s one of our best traits.

What has been your greatest success in life?

My children are kind. They impact the world in a positive way. I couldn’t ask for more success than that.

Before I give you a peek at “Little Dead Red,” Meredith has consented to finishing our interview with a Lightning Round, just for fun.

My best friend would tell you I’m a …

Spaz.

The one thing I cannot do without is:

Coke Zero.

The one thing I would change about my life:

Eliminate depression.

My biggest peeve is:

Use of the word “retard.”

The person/thing I’m most satisfied with is:

David Bowie. Mmm.

Mercedes, I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that you joined us. After the prologue from “Little Dead Red,” which follows immediately, those of you who’d like to learn more about this wonderful author, or purchase her books, can do so with the links at the bottom of this post.

Little Dead Red

Prologue

Once upon a time, long long ago, somewhere before her second divorce, Marie had smiled. She had simply been Marie then, and occasionally even Happy Marie, and that was a kind and gracious thing. Marie knew of the dangers of the world, but Marie also knew of love and laughter. Marie knew of her tiny little girl, Aleta, who used to hop around on one foot to see if she could keep her balance, and stuck her naughty fingers into Marie’s jam, and would ask for a bedtime story even when it was nowhere near bedtime.

“It doesn’t have to be a bedtime story, dear,” Marie would say, and her eyes would twinkle. Smiling Marie. Happy Marie. “A story told at any other time is simply a story.”

Aleta, who had dark eyes like her mother, and dark hair like her mother, and it refused to be tamed and combed, also like her mother’s, would say, “But bedtime stories are the best. Won’t you please tell me one, Mama?”

Marie often had things to do. There were dishes to be put away and dinner to be cooked and text messages to send to her husband, who seldom came home anymore. There were bags to be packed and an escape to be planned, but this made her smile, too. In fact, it made her nearly happier than anything else ever had, except for her sweet daughter.

“Of course we’ll read. Which one would you like?”

Aleta usually wanted stories about brave soldiers and clever girls and terrible, terrible monsters. Marie made her voice deep and heavy for the monsters, scary and dark, and Aleta snuggled next to her in horrified delight.

“I’m going to EAT YOU,” she cried as a troll or a wizard or a wolf.

“Don’t eat me all up!” Aleta would shriek.

“Yes, I’m going to eat you all up!” Marie would scream, and then she’d chase her daughter around the house, kicking over her husband’s ash trays and piles of unpaid bills and pieces of her broken dreams. Then they tumbled to the floor together and Happy Marie would smile and whisper that good always won, and clever children outwitted monsters and witches, and she would never, ever, ever let Aleta be eaten all up.

Until, of course, the day Marie discovered monsters were not only real, but had been feeding on her little Aleta without her knowing. Aleta had been eaten all up, for years now, and Marie was never Happy Marie again.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mercedes.murdockyardley

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mercedesmy

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/mercedesmy/

Book buy link: http://tinyurl.com/hc9uutk

The Write Stuff – Monday, July 4 – Interview With Jody Lynn Nye

July 4, 2016July 4, 2016 raymondbolton Leave a comment

It seems that the list of quality sci-fi and fantasy authors is endless and I know I can never read all of them, but when a name starts cropping up at every turn, it eventually grabs my attention and makes me take a more serious look. That’s how I discovered this week’s guest, Jody Lynn Nye. Not only is Jody one of the marvelous authors WordFire Press publishes, but because of the genre I read, Amazon keeps recommending her. Lacking the time to actually pore through a book, I downloaded an audio copy of Advanced Mythology and found myself caught up in the story almost at once. What’s more, since many of the authors I know speak highly about Jody as a person, I was especially glad when she consented to an interview. We’ll begin by getting to know her. Then, at the end, we’ll take a peek at two of her works.

Before breaking away from gainful employment to write full time, Jody worked as a file clerk, book-keeper at a small publishing house, freelance journalist and photographer, accounting assistant and costume maker. For four years, she was on the technical operations staff of a local Chicago television station, WFBN (WGBO), serving the last year as Technical Operations Manager.

Since 1987 she has published over 45 books, some in collaboration with top talents in science fiction, including Robert Asprin, Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony and John Ringo. She has also published more than 150 short stories, many with a humorous bent. Since Asprin’s passing, she has continued two of his series, Dragons and the Myth-Adventures. Her newest series is the Lord Thomas Kinago books (Baen Books), humorous SF space opera. The most recent is Rhythm of the Imperium.

Over the last twenty or so years, Jody has taught in numerous writing workshops and participated on hundreds of panels covering the subjects of writing and being published at science-fiction conventions. She has also spoken in schools and libraries around the north and northwest suburbs. In 2007 she taught fantasy writing at Columbia College Chicago. She also runs the two-day writers workshop at DragonCon, an annual convention held every Labor Day weekend in Atlanta. She and her husband, Bill Fawcett, are the fiction reviewers for Galaxy’s Edge Magazine.

I really enjoyed Advanced Mythology. What inspired you to write about computer-literate elves attending a modern day university?

It came from an instance at my university library. In the carrels in the stacks, you could hear whispering voices even when the levels were empty, in the late hours of the evening. I know that they came from the librarians talking near one of the intakes for the air ducts, but it was such a mysterious sound. With writers, all manner of curiosities become “What ifs?” The whispers made me think, “What if someone was living in the basement of the library?” Then I wondered who it could be, what were they doing there, and why didn’t anyone else know about them? Since my mind often turns to fantasy, the source of the whispers became little people, and they live in a library because they prize literacy and culture, and the building is very much underused and underpopulated even during the busiest study seasons. It wouldn’t be that difficult for them to take over a section that had fallen out of memory and set up a home.

It is a joy to find a book about elves and magic interwoven with so much of the real world. You appear to have an insider’s knowledge of the workings of an advertising agency and are obviously well-versed in computer technology. You also are somewhat acquainted with the philosophers Nietzsche, Hegel, Aristotle and Socrates. That’s an interesting combination. Would you care to fill us in on your background?

I love learning, books, and libraries. I read endlessly. I enjoyed the philosophy courses I took in college, but I’ve always been an autodidact. If a subject interests me, I’ll research it. I also pick up bits and pieces of information like an intellectual magpie. My collection is eclectic. I ask questions of people with interesting jobs and hobbies. You never know when a fact or an experience will come in handy. Really, everything will be of use sooner or later.

As for the advertising agency, I took an advertising course in college, and my mother had a close friend who worked for one of the major agencies. When I needed to know the ins and outs of how one operated, I reached out to her. She put me in touch with a friend at an agency, who let me hang around for a few days. Several of the people in Advanced Mythology are real employees of that agency. The same goes for computer technology. I know a little, but I also know friends who design computers and computer games, repair or build computers, and toy around with technology in all forms. If I don’t know something, I ask. I don’t mind saying that I don’t know something.

How much of your experience with the gaming company your husband, Bill Fawcett, owned comes into play?

Plenty. I saw the way the Mayfair employees interacted, how they begin the design of a new game, how they work out the rules and interactive gameplay until they have a winning product, how they support a product line, how they interact with customers and players. I wrote role-play game materials for Mayfair in the mid-80s. My experience with game mechanics led to me being chosen as a writer of Pern and Xanth game fiction on the Crossroads choose-your-own-adventure project that Bill brought to TOR Books. I had the fun of explaining to Anne McCaffrey how a probability tree worked, and giving her a short but humorous mini-adventure using one of her characters to illustrate. She loved it.

What spawned the name Uhuru Enterprises? (For those who haven’t yet read Advanced Mythology, this is the name of a business in the book.) This isn’t the Star Trek spelling, but rather the Swahili one. Does it have something to do with Keith’s roommate, Doug’s, African heritage?

“Uhuru” means peace in Swahili. Yes, Doug’s heritage was the reason that they (or rather, I) chose the word. It’s also one that a reader might have encountered before, and if they haven’t, they should have.

Advanced Mythology is a fun book for the reader, but I’m wondering what about it makes you want to get up each day and add to the story? In other words—I know the things that drive me to write—what’s in it for you as an author?

Stories tend to kick me out of bed in the morning. If I wake up thinking about the plot and where I have to go from where I left off, I know it’s working. When I’m deep into a book, I really don’t stop. I just sleep long enough for the toxins to leach out, then get up and go back to it. I love the way it feels when a story is going together well. I would (and do) write even when a story is not yet commissioned because I have to. The plots are too compelling not to get down on paper, or in a computer file. I have a note app on my iPhone where I type in ideas that come to me late at night and a recording app that I can speak into if I get ideas in the car. Writers have to write. I’ll always have more ideas than I will have time to write, and more written work than I’ll ever have time to publish.

I also love my characters. Keith Doyle is an immensely positive person. He is outgoing in a way I wish I was. He loves to get involved in a project, and he cares deeply for people. He’s braver than he thinks he is, and more talented in magic than he ever dreamed. Shona Taylor (Taylor’s Ark series, soon to be reissued by WordFire Press) is resilient and intelligent, good at her job, deeply in love with her husband, loyal to her friends, and curious about what’s out there in the universe. Lord Thomas Kinago (the Imperium series published by Baen Books) is absurdly overprivileged, but he has a good heart and is eager to take his friends and relatives along for the ride on each new adventure. I love world-building. I do just marginally less work on creating my characters’ environments for a short story as I do for a novel. I find myself thinking what other stories could be taking place in those universes, away from my main story lines.

Myth-Fits, the latest in the series your friend, the late Robert Asprin began, just came out and it’s already earning five star reviews. How many more have you planned? And for your impatient readers, when is the next likely to appear?

I’m very happy with the response Myth-Fits is getting. I could tell by the faces of the people coming by the WordFire Press table at Phoenix Comic Con at the beginning of June that they remembered the series with great affection. I’ve been told so many times that the Myth-Adventures books came along when people needed them. They’re so positive and funny that they take the sting out of bad times. I’ve always said I intend to be the anodyne to the evening news. My own work also tends to be on the humorous side. There will always be books of Significance and Angst in plenty, but they aren’t the ones a reader turns to when they’re feeling down. There’s a saying that if the book you want to read doesn’t exist, maybe you had better write it yourself. I’m doing that. At the moment, I don’t know when more Myth will appear. I’ve got two plotted out ready to go, as well as another in Bob’s Dragons series that has also been left in my care. (And, sorry, Phule-fans, there are no more Phule’s Company books planned at this time.)

Have you found it difficult to work on such a long-established series?

Not really. I was a fan of the books long before I met Bob. He was one of my husband’s best friends, and became one of mine long before we thought of working together. I respect the series, and I adore the characters. Bob’s world-building for the first book in the series, Another Fine Myth, was so comprehensive that neither of us have ever fully plumbed its depths. At the head of chapters in which Skeeve is present (a bit of trivia) are quotes that purport to be by famous people. The characters are all “demons,” which is just short for “dimensional travelers.” The magik system is well-thought out, relying upon force lines in each of the dimensions. Where force lines are scant or absent, the denizens rely upon technology instead. Aahz’s dimension, Perv, has a reputation for questionable behavior and bad tempered inhabitants. It’s also one of the few that use both magic and technology. Even after having written several books in the series, I enjoy rereading the earlier ones. The stories are episodic in that what has come before does affect the subsequent tales, but the gang returns, like Sherlock Holmes to Baker Street, to its intradimensional tent in the Bazaar at Deva (where Deveels come from, you know). What Myth fans respond to is the humor, the painful puns, and the unbreakable friendship between the characters.

Myth-Fits is the 20^th novel and 21^st book in the Myth-Adventures series. In it, Skeeve, Aahz and the others are on a mission to retrieve a mystical object called the Loving Cup from a fabulous resort dimension called Winslow (the name is not a reference to the Eagles’ song “Take It Easy,” but to the stuffed toy dinosaur that belongs to the artist most associated with the Myth-Adventures, Phil Foglio). The job is not as easy as they were told, and other magicians seem to be on the cup’s trail. I also bring in the conclusion to an ongoing story arc that has been building for several books.

What else is on the horizon?

I’m working on a new SF series. It’s still very much in the planning stages, so I won’t go into too much detail now. Alongside that, I’m working on a YA science fiction series with Travis S. Taylor. We just turned in the first one to Baen Books. I’m having fun working with Travis. Both of us have done numerous solo books and collaborations with other people, but we’ve never had a chance to work together or to write YA before. I’m also hoping to go back and add to some of my other series, in all my copious spare time.

Would you care to share a bit about your “other” life?

My husband and I just celebrated our 29^th wedding anniversary. We have a cat and many nephews, nieces, godchildren and unofficial godchildren whom we like to spoil. We enjoy travel, good food, SF movies and television, and both of us read endlessly. Our house is furnished in Early Book. Every room but the laundry room has bookshelves or magazine holders at hand. I’m a keen cook and baker. I make specialty cakes, and I tend to cater my book signings and writing workshops with lots of homemade goodies. Some of my other hobbies are calligraphy and illumination, photography, medieval and Renaissance history, beginning knitting, intermediate crochet, freelance research, and nipping in and out of social media. I thought I’d hate Facebook, but it’s like a back fence to lean over in the morning to share a cup of gossip with a friend.

For readers who are wishing to obtain autographed copies, or who would simply like to exchange a few words, what Cons or other events are on your agenda over the months ahead?

I keep a calendar on my website, http://www.jodylynnnye.com. I’m on Facebook as Jody Lynn Nye, and tweet @JodyLynnNye. Here are my scheduled events before the end of the year:

LibertyCon 29, July 7-9, 2016

Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hotel, Past GoH

Chattanooga, TN

For more information, visit the website at http://www.libertycon.org

℘

Gen-Con Writer’s Symposium, August 4-7, 2016

Indiana Convention Center

100 S. Capitol Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46225

For more information, visit the website at http://www.gencon.com/

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DragonCon, September 2-5, 2016

(Also DragonCon Writers Workshop, Sept. 1 &2)

Peachtree Hyatt

Atlanta, GA

For more information, visit the website at DragonCon

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New York Comic Con, Oct 6-9, 2016

Javits Center, WordFire Press booth

New York, NY

For more information, visit the website at http://www.newyorkcomiccon.com/

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ConStellation 34, Oct 14-16, 2016, Guest of Honor

Four Points by Sheraton

Huntsville, AL

For more information, visit the website at http://www.con-stellation.org/constell/wiki/index.php?title=Con%E2%80%A0Stellation_Main_Page

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WindyCon, Nov 11-13, 2016

Westin Lombard

Lombard, IL

For more information, visit the website at http://www.windycon.org

Thank you so much for sharing your time with us! What follows are brief blurbs and samplings from Advanced Mythology and Myth Fits, after which are Jody’s social media and book buy links.

Advanced Mythology:

Keith Doyle has made it to graduate school! In between classes and hanging out with his magical friends, the Little Folk, he has a new job as a copywriter for PDQ advertising agency, working on a campaign for a revolutionary electronic device. His plans for the party to end all parties on Hollow Tree Farm are coming along nicely. Things are not so rosy for the Little Folk. They’re being haunted not only by malevolent spirits passing through their cellar, but a Big Person who has discovered Keith’s supposedly well-camouflaged invitation to all creatures magical. Keith finds himself in danger trying to keep out of the hands of the industrial spy to protect not only the trade secrets of his client’s firm, but his friends and their home. Can Keith’s ingenuity and his limited magic keep the elves from being revealed to the world? Will the party ever take place? Will Keith ever get his hands on one of those wonderful devices?

“Hello?” Keith called as he walked down the cellar steps. “Come out. I won’t hurt you.”

He heard a rustling, then realized it was footsteps coming from upstairs. Half a dozen people saw him go into the basement. Most likely a sizeable group was gathering, wondering if he was going to be walking back up there under his own power. Of course he was, Keith thought firmly.

The small windows high in the wall between the lanterns were dark. Sunset was long past. Keith should have felt tired. Instead, he experienced a rush of energy brought on by the possibility of experiencing something new. Human nature was a funny thing, Keith thought. He was likely to get thoroughly roughed up, even killed, but his steps were light. … Keith preferred his chances with something out of the unseen world…. Keith felt his way along the walls, sensing the spell that protected the house. It was a version of the charm that ran all the way around the property: more thorough but less powerful, and smooth as plastic under his fingertips. Not completely; he sensed rather than felt jangling edges where the charm had been disrupted. An answering tingle ran down his spine. It had broken through again. Was it here now?

The sound of crackling answered him. He suddenly realized that he was casting a deep shadow that danced against a wall suddenly lit in orange. His spine still tingled, but it was growing very warm, too. Slowly, Keith turned around. Hovering in the air at eye level was a ball of fire about the size of a cat. It had small black eyes that glared unblinkingly at him.

“Hi. I’m a friend of the owners. Who are you?”

Wham! An invisible cannonball hit him in the stomach, propelling him the short distance to the wall. Another knot of force met him there, and sent him sprawling across the room.

“Hey, wait, I’m friendly!” Keith protested, picking himself up. The poltergeist, or whatever it was, had uncoiled like a snake, and was swimming toward him in the air. He threw up his hands to protect himself. Quick as lightning, the streak of fire was behind him. Another kick sent him back the other way. He rolled to a halt against the wall under the stairs. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of the newel post and wrapped his arms around it. The next kick hurt, but he managed to hold on. “Stop! Why are you doing this? Look, my friends are nice people. You’re scaring them. They haven’t done anything wrong. All they want to do is live here. Look!”

He hooked one elbow in between the treads of the staircase. With one hand he started drawing illusions. Enoch might have taken off points for technique, but under the circumstances his images were pretty good. First he showed the village the way he remembered it first: everybody sitting down to dinner in the basement of the library. …Then, he created a really detailed image of the farmhouse sitting on its hilltop, surrounded by a glow. The elves, looking much happier, started farming and gardening and building little houses. The fire creature didn’t let up. Once it discovered it couldn’t throw him around anymore, it started ramming him with its nose, burning his shirt and pants in patches the size of Keith’s fist. … Keith ducked, covering his face with both arms, but he didn’t let the image die.

“Wait, you’ve got to see more! This place is very important to them. They’re really nice to be around.” The one thing he vowed not to do was hit back. He had an idea that that was what got Holl and the others in trouble with the creature in the first place. No matter what it did to him, he’d respond with more information. It was his only chance to break through. If this didn’t work, the elves would have to keep from doing magic here forever. Keith was determined to make peace. “See? The Master is my teacher. He’s great. He’s taught Big People as well as little people.” He showed the Elf Master with the mixed class on Sundays, showing many of the students who had passed under his hands: Lee, Teri, Dunn, even Karl Mueller, who’d turned out to be a rat, and told the monster what they’d been able to accomplish because of their education. “Lee’s a newspaper writer now. Teri designs clothes—oof!” Keith didn’t dodge fast enough to miss the next pass. The snakelike tail whipped him in the cheek.

“Hey!” he exclaimed. “That hurt! You’re not listening to me!”

…Wherever the little monster shot off to in the room, Keith had a picture waiting there for it: Enoch carving lantern screens, Dola babysitting Asrai, Keva kneading bread. Each showed one or more of the elves engaged in a peaceful, productive occupation.

… Keith had to jerk his head back to avoid being smacked in the face by a wave of fire. It threatened to pin him against the wall. He wiggled out from behind it, only to be met by another wave. He ran across the cellar, meaning to take shelter among the barrels, and plunged directly through another that sprang up in the center of the room. It shed little heat. The creature meant to scare him, not hurt him.

“Oh, so you’re not so bad after all,” Keith said. “But I’m not budging.”

He kept up the picture show, making visuals out of vivid memories. He had to grin at the recollection of Enoch trying to parallel park his car, his head barely showing over the edge of the steering wheel, concentration written all over his dour face. A powerful blow in the chest knocked Keith over backward. He found himself on the floor, looking up into the bright black eyes.

“Hi,” Keith said. “Forget it. I’m not going anywhere. You might kill me, but you won’t outwait me.” He squeezed his eyes shut as the flames came closer and closer to his face.

“Not the ssssame,” came a sibilant voice from inside the flames.

Keith’s eyes flew open. It could talk! “As who? Not the same as who?”

Instead of answering, part of the creature seemed to dissolve into a haze as the rest of it gathered in a loop. Within the confines of the circle, a picture formed in flame. Keith recognized the elves, faces drawn in hair-thin lines of fire. “They fight and flee. You sssstay. Ssssuperior.”

“Me? Superior? Compared with them?” Keith asked, getting used to the hissing voice. “No way. I’m just more stubborn.”

Myth-Fits:

Business is slow for M.Y.T.H., Inc., and its president, Bunny, is getting nervous that the company might not meet its quarterly goal. So when a job comes in that’s worth an absurd amount of gold—and also happens to take them to Winslow, the most luxurious vacation resort in any dimension—the team jumps at the opportunity to recoup some cash and maybe catch some R&R.

Only, magician Skeeve has an unsettling feeling that this mission might be trickier than it seems. Someone in Winslow is messing with the magic lines and working hard to ensure that the M.Y.T.H. crew gets nowhere near the powerful relic that they’ve been hired to find. And as the mysterious manipulation turns deadly, Skeeve, Bunny, Aahz, and the rest of their partners find themselves in a race not only to finish the job but also to escape paradise alive…

A cheerful female in white shorts and a bandanna top rushed over to me and handed me a parchment scroll.

“What’s all this?” I asked her.

“It’s simple. Find all the items on this list by midnight tonight and win a prize!”

“Big deal,” Aahz said, holding up his hand and beckoning. A waiter appeared out of thin air and presented him with a bucket-sized goblet sloshing with beer. He glugged down half the brew, and let out a sigh of pleasure. “What do we get? A t-shirt? No, thanks.””

“No, sir!” Campfya said. “Winslow only offers attractive prizes to our honored guests! One hundred gold pieces!

Bunny’s big blue eyes shone. “A hundred gold pieces?”

“Yes, Miss Bunny!”…

“We’re overqualified,” Aahz said, with a yawn. He handed the empty pail to the server, who promptly vanished. “But it might be entertaining to shellac the competition while we’re waiting for the cup to turn up.”

“So you will enter?” Servis asked. His face creased in a delighted smile.

“Yeah, why not?” Aahz said. “What are we looking for?”

Campfya handed us a blue-tinted parchment and a large white sack. I unrolled the scroll and read down the list.

A handful of Troll fur

A Deveel’s hoofprint

A Klahdish expression

Two ounces of pink sand

A blank look

Some blue air

A pair of dice

Dragon breath

I skimmed down. I wasn’t sure what a few of the items were, but I was sure the others would know. Then I read the final entry:

The Loving Cup

“What?” I demanded. I pointed to the final item. “Why is this on the list? It’s one of a kind. That’s supposed to be ours! We’re waiting for it to be delivered.”

Servis looked at the list. His kindly brows drew down.

“Oh, my. That wasn’t on the original list. There should be only twenty items. I have it here.” He reached into the air and pulled a purple-rimmed scroll out of nothingness. “You see? – Oh, my courteous aunt, it is there! That’s not right!”

“How many groups are on this scavenger hunt?” I asked.

“About a hundred and fifty,” Servis said. He looked worried, but no more worried than I felt. “Someone has tampered with the list!”

“But who?” I asked.

“Your girlfriend,” Markie said, in a flat voice.

“She’s not my girlfriend!” I exclaimed. But the expressions on my friends’ faces told me they didn’t believe me. …

“Who wants to hold the bag?” Aahz asked.

“I will,” Bunny said at once. “We ought to divide up the list.”

“In a minute. First, number one,” Tananda said. She beckoned to Chumley to hold up his arm. The big Troll cringed.

“But, Little Sis, it hurts when you do that!”

“I’ll try to keep it painless,” she said. Chumley held still with admirable patience while his sister plucked a sizeable pinch of fur from the back of his arm and placed it in the bag. A check mark appeared beside the first entry on the scroll.

“Another easy one,” Aahz said. “Dragon breath. I can’t believe they want a dose of halitosis. They must mean fire.”

“But Gleep’s fire will just burn the bag up,” I pointed out.

“Gleep!” my dragon agreed.

“Piece of cake,” Aahz said, with an expansive sweep of his hand. “Remember when I taught you to levitate? Same thing.”

I frowned. “How could it be the same thing?”

“To lift yourself off the ground, you use magik to push against it. The same principle applies here. Take some magik out of the force line. Picture it forming a globe with one arc still open. Like a hollow ball with a hole in it. Imagine all the force pushing inward. Got it?”

“I think so,” I said.

It was easy enough to pick up a small quantity of magik from the wavy blue force line that ran beneath our feet. In my mind, I shaped it as Aahz directed. It formed a bubble about the size of my fist, pale green in color, right in front of my stomach. I nodded.

“Good,” Aahz said. “Show me where it is.”

I held my hands on either side of the globe.

Aahz turned to Gleep.

“Can you breathe into that?” he asked. “Without causing a massive house fire or giving Skeeve a hotfoot?”

“Gleep!” my dragon protested, hurt in his large blue eyes. But he flared his nostrils and took a deep breath.

I turned my face to one side as Gleep exhaled a narrow stream of bright golden fire directly toward me. The heat was unbelievable, but to my delight and amazement the force bubble absorbed it all.

“Close it, kid!” Aahz bellowed. I turned back to look. The lance of dragon breath bounded around inside the globe, trying to find a way out. A tongue of flame licked out of the one place on the bubble that faced my dragon. Swiftly, I pinched the opening shut. The fire kept ricocheting around, drawing patterns of red light against the magikal surface.

“That’s one neat piece of magik!” I said, turning the small orb over and over. “Thanks, Aahz!”

“It’s nothing special,” Aahz said, with a shrug. “Just doing my job as an instructor. Looks like you still need continuing education, if you never worked out that you can use magik to press against other substances or itself for other purposes on your own.”

My face grew as hot as the bubble.

“Maybe if you explained that in the first place, I would have known it!”

“Some people figure it out without being told! I didn’t realize your aptitude was so low you never tried to experiment!”

“You always stressed how dangerous it was!”

“You won’t know how to minimize the danger if you don’t try!”

“Boys, boys,” Tananda said, putting a hand in each of our chests and shoving us away from one another. “Let’s get a move on. There are a lot of things to find!”

“What about a Klahdish expression?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

Aahz shrugged. “Same thing as a blank look, is my guess.”

“What?” I asked. Suddenly, a pink haze covered my face. It moved outward and shrank to an oval the size of my hand. In it, I could see my own reflection. My mouth was open and my brows were high up. Two check marks appeared on the list.

“Perfect,” Markie said, gleefully. “Just don’t let anybody else get you to make that face, and we’re ahead of the game. And don’t let your dragon breathe fire anywhere else, no matter what.”

Book online sales links:

Advanced Mythology

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Mythology-Jody-Lynn-Nye-ebook/dp/B00UXHNRNC/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467065154&sr=1-1&keywords=advanced+mythology#navbar

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/advanced-mythology-jody-lynn-nye/1102079010?ean=9781614752738

Myth-Fits

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Asprins-Myth-Fits-Myth-Adventures-Jody/dp/0425257029/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1467064986&sr=1-1

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/robert-asprins-myth-fits-jody-lynn-nye/1123289747?ean=9780425257029

Social Media Links:

Website: www.jodylynnnye.com

Myth website: www.mythadventures.net

Twitter: @JodyLynnNye

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jodylynn.nye

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/9615.Jody_Lynn_Nye

The Write Stuff – Monday, June 20 – Interview With Ken Scholes

June 20, 2016June 24, 2016 raymondbolton 1 Comment

I couldn’t be happier than I am to feature this week’s guest, Ken Scholes. I had been trying to corral Ken for two or three months, but several events got in the way and many of the questions I had prepared for him were based on flat-out misconceptions. In order to get around these issues and present something both cogent and revealing, we arranged to get better acquainted over lunch at a restaurant near his home. As a result, much of what follows after his bio reads like the recorded conversation it actually was.

For those who don’t know him, Ken is an award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of five novels and three short story collections. His work has appeared in print for over fifteen years. His eclectic background includes time spent as a label gun repairman, a sailor who never sailed, a soldier who commanded a desk, a preacher (he got better), a nonprofit executive, a musician and a government procurement analyst. He has a degree in History from Western Washington University. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Ken makes his home in Saint Helens, Oregon, where he lives with his twin daughters and plays gigs at his local Village Inn Lounge. You can learn more about him by visiting www.kenscholes.com.

Although he’d been turning out stories for many years prior, 2009 was when the publishing world stood up and took notice. His debut novel, Lamentation, earned high praise—“Ken Scholes mixes wildly beautiful imagery with the sharply visceral; the profoundly mythic with the profanely human. These keenly observed stories of faith, love, and loss will resonate in your bones.” ~ Tina Connolly—as have his subsequent books. Followers of The Psalms of Isaak series that Lamentation began, may feel sorrow when the saga concludes sometime in 2017 with the release of volume number five, entitled Hymn, but also joy over its completion. Until then, his readers will have to content themselves with Ken’s short stories… an entirely pleasurable task, to be sure. At the interview’s end, we will take a look at part of that collection.

Several obstacles kept us from getting this interview out of the blocks as soon as we had intended. Most recently, you were out of town at the end of May. As I understand it, you were teaching a class.

I was at MisCon in Missoula, which is a science fiction and fantasy convention that runs every Memorial Day weekend from Friday through Monday early afternoon. It’s much like OryCon or the others here locally, but what I like about it is that it’s small and intimate and a lot of fun. Kevin J. Anderson was there along with Jim Butcher. Pat Rothfuss made an appearance. J. A. Pitts was there, as well as Peter Orullian and Rhiannon Held. It’s just a nice gathering of science fiction and fantasy writers. There were a ton of us. While I was in town, I did my Muse Management and Production in the Story Factory Workshop the day before the con started, so I offered a Con discount and I think maybe a dozen to fifteen people spent the day with me learning to write short stories.

You’ve told me you intend to write a book dealing with PTSD. That’s quite a departure from your usual fare. Would you care to tell us what inspired it?

I’ve had complex PTSD since early childhood. We factor probably age two is when it was fully in place for me. So it’s been a lifelong struggle that I wasn’t necessarily aware of having until my kids were born and my parents died all in a mad rush over about fifteen… eighteen months of my life in my early forties. Ultimately out of that experience, not only did I try out a bunch of other things for PTSD like medication, EMDR, cognitive behavioral therapy, I also discovered Dr. Eugene Lipov’s use of the stellate ganglion block—a nerve block for pain—and its effect on PTSD by rebooting the amygdala and turning off the panic signal. So I go into Chicago as needed for an injection to the C3 ganglia nerve cluster. It’s a normal pain treatment. It’s used in pain centers all around the country. It’s just not been authorized for PTSD yet by the FDA.

And what do you intend to include in the book itself?

In the book, I’ll be talking about my experience with Lipov’s work on the stellate ganglion block. I’ll be talking about my other experiences around PTSD: tips and tricks for living with PTSD, staying the course when it comes to finding the best path for treatment of PTSD, but certainly advocating at this point—because I’ve now been in remission for close to eighteen months—advocating that the people look to what he’s doing as a first line. There’s nothing invasive, other than an injection. There’s no ongoing medication. It’s a shot of anesthetic that shuts down the PTSD.

You’re involved in a lot of social issues and you’re now planning on using your kick starter books to address them. Do you want to tell us something about the book or books in that series and what you hope to accomplish in the near future?

Sure. I’ve been doing a lot of thought on how to expand my life in the direction that it needs to go in, now that I’m divorced and don’t have that second income supporting this writer. So one of the ventures I’m looking at is beefing up my indie pubbing presence. And in the midst of thinking about all of that, I suddenly realized that there really doesn’t appear to be an e-book publisher out there with a specific focus just on doing good: a social justice approach to publishing. For instance, I’ve had Walking Bear Media as a DBA for several years and have done very little with it, other than a few indie pubbed collections. And now I am looking at a team of writers coming together, both allies and transgender people, to address the bathroom laws issues that are cropping up in North Carolina and other parts of the country. So I am looking at a model, now, where a group of authors or creatives would come together to donate various bits of their art, whether it’s essays, blog posts, short stories they’ve already sold. I wouldn’t be looking for any real fresh material, other than maybe supporting essays. But primarily, I’d be looking for folks of passion who care about a cause, willing to offer up something that’s a reprint. Put it all together along with a plan for what they want to do that’s good out of the proceeds of that anthology, and then leverage a $2.99 book through Amazon’s Kindle, so that at a dollar fifty of that’s going back in. If you are familiar with the Amazon model, you get about two dollars back on a $2.99 book. So having three quarters of that go directly to whatever cause they’re wanting to work on seems like a good starting place. I’m hoping to do a few of those. We’ll start with the transgender bathroom laws anthology, and then we’ll see what we can do in the quarters ahead.

Can you talk a little bit about the METAtropolis book that you wrote with Jay Lake and maybe discuss a little bit about his passing?

Jay was involved with the initial METAtropolis, which was the brainchild of John Scalzi and Steve Feldberg over at Audible and they invited Jay along with a group of other writers. And then John Scalzi bowed out for various reasons and Jay took on editing that project for the second version which was METAtropolis Cascadia. At that point, he invited me in, along with a couple of other writers. And when I did that, I thought that it would be fun for Jay and I to connect our stories together, since we were best pals and we lived in within close vicinity of each other. So, he and I both worked off of each other. And he and I used the character and the setting from his first METAtropolis story, which I think was called “In the Gardens of the Night,” that dealt with a character named Tygre Tygre and a security officer named Bashar. I took that story and expanded it and set it later. I dropped in new characters, mixed with the Bashar character, to write the novella “A Symmetry of Serpents and Doves.” He then took the world that he had created in that first novella and did a story interconnecting with mine called “The Ball Dancers.” He put his at the beginning of the anthology and mine at the end of the anthology, and it did well. The anthology had an all-Star-Trek cast with various stories—mine, his, Seanan McGuire, Mary Robinette Kowal, Karl Schroeder, Tobias Buckell and I think Elizabeth Bear. I can be missing some names. But anyway, the second one went on to win an Audie Award.

And then for the third one, because Jay’s health was declining, he asked me if I would co-edit it with him. So we did METAtropolis Green Space together. And, out of that, we decided that, because we had so much fun at the last round, we would tighten the stories up even more so. And so this time around, he wrote the first novelette which was called “Rock of Ages.” And then, I took his novelette and added to it, creating a second novelette that basically stood alone, but finished out his story, and called it “Let Me Hide Myself in Thee,” referencing back to the old hymn, “Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee,” also bringing in the same characters.

So we had five novelettes and novellas set in the same universe, using the same characters, but we had not been able to find a print market for the entire METAtropolis Cascadia or Green Space projects. So volumes two and three lived on in audio, but nobody wanted to do a print version of these books. Then, Jay and I packaged it together with the five pieces, each written under our own individual names—three by him, two by me—and Kevin J. Anderson picked it up at WordFire. We were really fortunate in that we wanted to get this done and into Jay’s hands before cancer got him. And we managed, I think, by about two weeks. We put a copy of the book into his hands and two weeks later he was gone. It’s our first and only book together and I’m proud of it. Oddly enough, it’s not sold really well, but I’m hoping that it will pick up some steam as people start to hear more about it.

You recently finished the first draft of Hymn, the fifth and final volume of The Psalms of Isaak series. The series has taken several years to complete. Will you tell us about your journey?

I started the Psalms of Isaac with a short story that I wrote in 2005, and that short story evolved into the novel, Lamentation, which I wrote in 2006 over a mad rush of about six and a half weeks on a dare from Jay Lake and my wife at the time. It came together fast and everybody loved it instantly. It went out and landed the first agent that touched it. It went out and landed the first publisher that touched it. The publisher, Tor, loved the book so much that Tom Doherty said, “Hey, get all five of these.” I was about halfway into the second book when all of this happened. I came home from that experience and my mother died within just a few weeks of coming home from this whirlwind Cinderella trip to New York. So, we instantly were challenged around productivity and I found myself writing through major losses all the way up until this book, Hymn, the last book in the series. My mom died halfway into Canticle. I finished Canticle, and my nephew died while I was starting the revision process of the second book. I was halfway into the third book, Antiphon, when my father died. I was at the tail end, as I remember, as I typed the last sentences of Antiphon, while Jen and the girls were in the hospital right after they were born. I managed to get Antiphon done and then, at that point, I did not come around to finishing Requiem until 2012. That was a long, long gap. And, of course, that was during the time that I was dealing with PTSD at its worst. It was 2011 that I first discovered the block and I went off to Chicago to experience Lipov’s magic cure, so to speak. It’s great having a mad scientist in your pocket.

Of course, sales suffered as a result of Hymn not being written and Requiem not being written and turned in on time. But at the same time, I had such a splash front end, with world rights and foreign publications, that we were able to earn out my advance rather quickly. I had an advance against all five books and we had earned that out by the time the second book was in paperback. So we did well in that regard. However, it’s still not been a big money maker and sales have gone down with each book. My tardiness on the books has not helped that process at all, but the hope is that now it’s done—it’s ten years of my life that I’ve poured into this by group of people, these characters, the problems they’re solving—now that it’s a complete package, Tor can push it, I can push it. Now that it’s finished, more people may be inclined to pick up and start a new series.

Thank you so much for giving us all a glimpse into the often not-so-simple life of a writer. I, for one, am glad I persisted and cornered you.

For our visitors, here is an introductory blurb, followed by a very short story from Ken’s most recent work:

Scholes’s third Imagination Forest collection which he released in August of 2015 (after Diving Mimes, Weeping Czars, and Other Unusual Suspects) continues exploring the limits of speculative fiction in seventeen short stories whose genres include playful fantasy and SF as well as edge-of-your-seat suspense. Scholes revels in the offbeat and surreal, marrying otherworldliness with very real human fears and concerns, and his stories are all the richer for it. Curious characters abound, including “The Starship Mechanic,” about an alien mechanic fascinated with the holdings of a San Francisco bookstore, and a cat-woman trying to escape her former owner in “A Chance of Cats and Dogs.” The collection has a distinctive rhythm, with the novella-length standout piece, “A Symmetry of Serpents and Doves”, bookended by shorter vignettes. Scholes’s work is considerably inventive, and this collection showcases his versatility as a writer.

Awash in Autumn, the Queen Reflects

Every day is the same and yet different.

Emily goes to him on her lunch break, her eyes flitting over him and away quickly though she knows he knows. And Tony smiles and asks her what she wants but she always wants the special — his special — and he always adds magic to it.

“Pumpkin spice latte?”

Her eyes are on him. They are away again. “Please.”

Then, small talk. But the best conversation of her day. Concluded by the flourish of his art in the foam and money changing hands.

What magic be today? She looks a the foam and her eyebrows furrow. She doesn’t recognize the tiny image.

“You’ll see,” Tony says.

She sits in the park on a bench in the gray October day. She eats her sandwich first. Then her apple slices. Only after does she consider the latte.

Emily ponders it, then sips it.

Antlers.

She smiles and closes her eyes. He’s never done antlers before.

It is warmer in the clearing; she stands in it in her gown, the crown heavy upon her head. In this place, she is a queen. And the world is on fire around her, the leaves blazing autumn red and yellow, orange for as far as her eye can see. Her feet itch to run the leaf carpet but she waits for Tony, wondering how he will come to her in this place

He snorts as he runs into the clearing, scattering leaves with his hooves as he tosses his antlered head. He prances around her, then sets off east and she follows.

She runs after him, feeling the crown grow lighter upon her brow as she picks up speed. When she reaches him, she leaps and mid-leap, she lands upon his back and seizes hold of his neck.

They run the forest now, dodging fallen branches and racing through alternating shafts of sunlight and shadow. He carries her for hours before the trees fall away and they run old pastures gone to grass, leaping the fallen stone walls that occasionally intersect them. The sun is low in the sky behind them, the sky shot through with red, when she bids him stop beside a burbling creek.

There, she stretches out upon her stomach to drink her fill while the stag stands beside her doing the same.

Crickets are singing and she sees the forests that surround them in the distance blazing with glory beneath a crimson sky. Emily sees the meadow taking on the same glory. And the white hide of her friend, Tony. Last, she looks at her own arms washed gold and red in the setting sun, and closes her eyes. Glory shining everywhere about me and upon me, Emily realizes.

Awash in Autumn, the queen reflects.

When she opens her eyes again, there is just enough time to walk back to the motel and re-stock her cleaning cart. She drinks the last of her latte and when she walks past Tony’s espresso stand she looks away and smiles when he winks at her.

You can purchase it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Yonders-Grateful-Other-Fanciful-Feasts/dp/1933846518/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462473599&sr=8-1&keywords=blue+yonders%2C+grateful+pies

The Write Stuff – Monday, June 6 – Interview With Michael R. Collings

June 6, 2016July 20, 2020 raymondbolton Leave a comment

In April 2016, the World Horror Convention presented Michael R. Collings its Grand Master Award. This placed him alongside such notables as Stephen King, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Dan Simmons and a host of other notables. Once we reveal Michael’s amazing curriculum vitae, we will open our interview by discussing his unique science fantasy, Singer of Lies. We will then touch on his career in academia, where he broke the accepted academic model and which then became part of the life events that led up to his recent honor. After visiting his “other” life, we will talk about the award itself and the circumstances surrounding it.

Michael R. Collings is an educator, literary scholar and critic, poet, novelist, essayist, columnist, reviewer, and editor whose work over three decades—more than one hundred books and chapbooks and thousands of chapters, essays, reviews, and poems—has concentrated on science fiction, fantasy, and horror, emphasizing the works of Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, C.S. Lewis, and others. His books for Starmont House, beginning in 1984, were among the earliest serious scholarly appraisals of King. His 1990 study of Card was the first book-length exploration of Card’s fictions.

His publications include a Wildside Press best-selling horror novel, The Slab; a 6,500-line Renaissance epic in full Miltonic style, The Nephiad: An Epic Poem in XII Books; two discussions of writing, The Art and Craft of Poetry: Twenty Exercises toward Mastery and Chain of Evil: The JournalStone Guide to Writing Horror; literary analyses, as in C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy: A Study in Genres; and Averse To Horrors: An Abecedary of Monsters and the Monstrous, an alphabetical treatise on horror, written in limericks.

He has served as Guest, Special Guest, and Guest of Honor at a number of cons, professional as well as fan-oriented, including Academic Guest of Honor at MythCon (Conference of the Mythopoeic Society), where he presented the Keynote Address on Orson Scott Card; Academic Guest of Honor at EnderCon, celebrating the novel’s 25th anniversary; Special Guest at the Salt Lake Comic Con (2014); and three-time Academic Guest of Honor at the World Horror Con (2008, 2012, and 2016). He is a triple finalist for the Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association; and has been twice nominated for the Bram Stoker Award® from the Horror Writers Association, once for non-fiction and once for poetry. In April 2016, he received the Grand Master of Horror award from the World Horror Convention, 2016.

He is a past Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publications, where several of the books he worked with went on to become Stoker® finalists; and his articles and reviews have appeared in both Hellnotes and the print-magazine Dark Discoveries. These and other writings are posted online at michaelrcollings.blogspot.com.

Dr. Collings was poet in residence at Pepperdine University from 1997-2003. Now retired as a professor emeritus of English after almost thirty years at Pepperdine, where his courses included literature, composition, and creative writing, he lives in Idaho with his wife and number-one fan, Judi, and writes and writes and writes.

This is how Michael summarizes Singer of Lies.

He is young and intelligent and highly trained. He is Erik Baanfeld—shipwrecked on a long-forgotten Colony world, where brawn and brute strength are more valued than knowledge. Physically untrained and emotionally unprepared in the barest skills of survival, he seems compelled to spend a short, unpleasant life as a half-naked savage worked like a beast of burden, on a world sunk into barbarism. It’s either that… or die. His only possible chance, his only hope of becoming one with the Folk, is to become a singer—and not just any singer, but a Singer of Lies!

In Singer of Lies, I enjoyed reading about an abandoned Earth colony whose culture was consciously based around the Earth epic, Beowolf, but what made you decide to use Anglo Saxon as its language base?

When Singer was drafted, I had just completed my doctoral work in English at the University of California, Riverside, a goodly portion of which included Anglo-Saxon (in the original language) and Middle English literature. My brain was steeped in the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon, as well as in the language and power of Beowulf. So, logically, I decided to put that background to good use and imagined a culture, abandoned for centuries, that had modeled itself on the epic, largely to defend itself from a creature native to the planet.

Through its various drafts, until its final publication in 2009, the one remaining constant in the novel was the setting: an Anglo-Saxon world in which a future language scholar, stranded and essentially helpless, had to figure out a way to survive.

You’ve said that there is as much horror in Beowolf as there is in a Steven King novel. Clearly, your book has its Grendel, but what else about the epic led you to write Singer of Lies?

Basically, you just answered the question. Beowulf is an epic. The Stand is an epic. The Talisman is an epic. Much of science fiction—and for that matter, much of modern fantasy and horror—picks up on the basic elements of epic and makes them contemporary. At UCR, I had taken a course in epic, in one manifestation or another, every semester for three years; I even took a directed-studies course under a world-class Miltonist and epic scholar, in which I traced epic into the twentieth century through science fiction. So when I wrote the novel—my second—it seemed obvious that it would incorporate as much of an epical sense as it could.

The Grendel-monster is one result. The world itself is another—a place so difficult for survival that Weard and his people consciously re-created a heroic age, with warriors mighty of thew and no place for the weak…which Erik definitely was.

There was a striking poem that occurred in the first half of the book. When I didn’t recognize it, I thought it might be yours. If so, what is its title? Where can we find more of your poems?

The poem (on page 173) is my translation of one of the earliest English poems, “Caedmon’s Hymn.” Even older than Beowulf, the hymn was written around 660 A.D. and survives in a number of manuscript copies.

Erik steals the context of the “Hymn” when he recites the poem as if he had composed it, which lead to him becoming the community’s Singer, but also makes him a Singer of Lies—he has stolen his way into the community, not knowing that Aethele and Weard know exactly what he has done.

I have written a great deal of poetry—in fact, one of the reasons for my receiving the Grand Master award was my support of poetry, SF/F/H especially, at a number of conventions over the past thirty years. Most of my poetry is available through Amazon, including, surprisingly enough, a Miltonic Renaissance style epic, The Nephiad: An Epic in XXIV Books; In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Myth, and Horror; Som Certaine Sonets, which contains a number of horror-oriented short poems; and Hai-(And Assorted Other)-Ku, which contains a fair number of scifai-ku and horror-ku.

One of my books, A Verse to Horror: An Abecedary of Monsters and the Monstrous, was a Bram Stoker Award® finalist for poetry. It is an alphabetical encyclopedia of horror motifs, each entry reduced to a single poem…a limerick.

My current project, Corona Obscura: Sonets Dark and Elemental is a “corona” or “crown” of sonnets on horror themes. A sonnet corona typically consists of seven poems on a single theme, the last line of the first becoming the first line of the second, and so on until the final poem. Its last line is identical to the first line of the sequence, completing the circle or crown. Corona Obscura is a squared-corona… forty-nine sonnet-like poems, each linked last line to first.

The Dean at your division at Pepperdine University once told you that he and your colleagues, in your words, “did not feel you were doing literary work.” You also related that you had been denied an academic chair as a result of your focus on speculative fiction. Has that academic short-sightedness changed in any appreciable way since then, either at Pepperdine, or throughout academia at large?

In all fairness, the Division chair was relaying the feelings of several colleagues; throughout my tenure at Pepperdine, the chairs supported me as much as possible, but, yes, there was considerable hesitance about my work in speculative fiction. One colleague told one of my students that Stephen King had no place on a college campus; another sat down with me and told me exactly how to get my career back on track.

I have been told that part of the reason SF/F/H is increasingly accepted in academics is that my early work on King demonstrated how his stories could be discussed in academic terms. By the time I left Pepperdine, half a dozen others in my division were working at one level or another with speculative fiction, and in general I think that is true of many colleges and universities. It is, after all, difficult to completely ignore the books that students seem to find important.

I often find that when I am under the gun I produce more work. Conversely, when I have more leisure time, I get less done. Now that you are retired, do you find more time to write than when you were working, or just the opposite?

My first two novels were drafted while I was in graduate school. Many of my academic books were written while I was teaching. But since I left Pepperdine on a medical early retirement (my increasing deafness made it difficult for me to hear my students) in 2006, I have revised much of that early work, including those first two novels and my doctoral dissertation on Milton, and published them, many through Wildside Press. The bulk of my publications have come in the past ten years: novels, collections of short fiction, poetry collections. It seems that I can’t not write.

Is there an author who fascinates you, whom you have yet to write about, and do you have plans to do so?

Not an author, but a body of work. I still intend to do a book-length study of King’s Dark Tower Series. I’ve written on Orson Scott Card and his Ender novels; on C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy; on my son Michaelbrent’s Billy Saga…and next is the most challenging of all.

Why do you say your children didn’t dare bring their writing to you, but rather to your wife, Judi?

From the time I received my doctorate, I became “Doctor Daddy,” the professional writer and reader, the one they saw making big red marks on student papers and the one who talked about what was right and wrong in other people’s writing. Judi was the nurturer. They knew she was “safe”—she would love them and what they gave her no matter what. Understand that my older son was writing “novels” by the age of seven. They all went through an early apprenticeship in writing something, having Mom read it, and going back and writing something else. I think Doctor Daddy was just too unapproachable at that stage.

Aside from reading and writing, what are your favorite pursuits?

I love music. I played the organ for my church for over fifty years and treasure every moment of the experience. I stopped about a year ago—I could no longer hear the notes I was playing and relied on Judi for signals about volume. It finally became too much and I asked to be released. I’ve not touched a keyboard since.

It’s much the same with everything else. Being severely deaf, with world-class tinnitus in both ears and frequent balance problems as well, I’ve been systematically cut off from much that I enjoy. I rarely participate in groups of more than one or two, since I won’t understand most of what is said otherwise. On panels, I usually do not hear the other panelists’ comments, and Judi usually repeats audience questions for me.

Movies are out, as are sports—too much noise, not enough understood.

So basically, I read and write, take drives with Judi, enjoy my children and grandchildren (in small doses—I can’t understand most of what the younger ones say) and in the most literal of senses, try to stay sane.

In the world of literary cons, where will the next year take you?

This is a difficult question, because of the hearing. Travel is hard; air travel especially leaves my ears roaring for hours afterward. Con attendance is something that I am thinking about seriously, although I enjoy the opportunities to present papers and do Q&A sessions.

Tell us about the circumstances surrounding your recent award, Grand Master of Horror. Who made the decision and how were you notified?

Early in the planning process for each World Horror Convention, attending and supporting members of the World Horror Society receive requests to nominate a Grand Master recipient. The recipient must be living (at least at the time of the nomination) and have many years of participation in any facet of horror, including literature, film, or art. The nominations are closed at the end of the preceding year, ballots counted, and (if still living) the recipient is notified about a month before the WHC.

I received an email from the WHC coordinator at the end of March this year, telling me about the award. At the end of WHC2016, I formally received the award.

There is a list of all previous Grand Masters posted at http://whc2016.org/gma.html. It is an intimidating list of extraordinarily talented story tellers, including many of the people whose books I have reviewed and otherwise written about. I was stunned to be told that my name would now be on the list. And am still stunned…but proud.

Those who would like to purchase Michael’s books can do so at:

http://www.amazon.com/Michael-R.-Collings/e/B001HPWLC2

His review/essay site, Collings Notes, is:

http://michaelrcollings.blogspot.com

You can find him on Facebook as:

https://www.facebook.com/michael.collings.7

The Write Stuff – Monday, April 25 – Interview With Charles David Carpenter & D. W. Jones

April 25, 2016April 26, 2016 raymondbolton 1 Comment

For the first time since I launched my interview series, I’m featuring two authors at once. Charles David Carpenter and D. W. Jones have co-authored a YA fantasy series. Rather than my introducing them, it’s simpler if I allow each one to fill you in on his own background.

Charles D. Carpenter: Welcome to my mind’s eye view of the world. Besides being a writer, I am an actor and martial artist who was born and reared in sunny Southern California. Yes, I am the rare native who was actually born here. See, we do exist.

As a martial artist, I have learned how to fight people. As an Angeleno, I have learned how to fight traffic. Traffic is tougher, by far. I attended California State University Northridge, but my father instilled in me my love for writing. My family has always said, “Before he could talk, he could write.” Thank you, family.

My love and passion is writing novels. To be very specific, fantasy novels. Although, D.W. and I have written various works together in differing genres, fantasy is the genre that moves my heart.

D.W. Jones: Spending my formative years in Washington, D.C., I know about cold. I was accepted into the prestigious Duke Ellington School of the Arts in high school and several years after graduating from Northwood High, I made my way to Los Angeles, where I have lived for the past ??? years. So now, I know about sunny and warm. Um, sunny and warm is better.

Stories of daring adventures in faraway places with action and romance helped me to avoid the pitfalls of the streets, inspiring me to dream bigger and reach farther. Those stories still inspire me today.

In 2005, I joined creative forces with Charles David Carpenter and began collaborating on various writing projects, including the very successful original comedy series for the Internet called CAN WE DO THAT?

Like night and day, we are two uniquely different authors who came together to form what we feel is a dynamic writing team. After several screenplays, TV pilots and commercial copy we embarked on writing our first novel series.

They have completed the third book in the series entitled Storm of Shadows, and they describe it this way:

Humanity teeters on the edge of chaos as war looms imminent and natural disasters strike the world of Tarune. The Necromancers, knowing their time is running out, intensify their plot as they close in on the Pride. As Velladriana struggles to control her growing powers, the blossoming emotions between she and Corwyn threaten to tear them apart. Only time will tell if hope will survive.

Tell us about your most recent release.

CDC: Before I do that, I want to take a moment to thank you for your EXTRAORDINARY patience, as well as for honoring us with this invitation to your interview series. We are huge fans of your work and are humbled by this consideration. So, thank you! Now, on with the show. Storm of Shadows is the third novel in series. It is difficult to give too much comprehensive detail about this novel without compromising the surprises waiting for you in the first two books. That having been said, I am really proud of this installment. I guess I’d say I have pride in this Pride. Anyone? Hello…is this thing on?

DWJ: Unfortunately for us, it is. Anyway, the action is fast paced as the world of Tarune heads to the brink of a war between both human and supernatural forces.

CDC: That, though, is just the backdrop. It is the interpersonal relationships and how they are developing that we truly love about this book. For us, characters and their motivations hold the true heft and power of any story.

DWJ: These characters are real. Their lives and needs are real. As such, the world they inhabit is real. A lot of surprises await the characters we hope you have come to love… and hate.

What was the inspiration behind your series?

CDC: For me, the original inspiration behind these books was to create a world in which people could immerse themselves and feel safe. You see; I was bullied as a kid. I didn’t have many friends in this world, so I sought them in other worlds. Most specifically, I found them in the pages of the novels that allowed me to escape my tormentors. Now, not to worry, I got through it and have a rich and bountiful circle of friends today, but those books did help me through some dark times. So, my inspiration was to create a world that would allow any child going through what I did to find a magical place of solace.

DWJ: Also, we have a lot of voices constantly talking, singing, chanting and squabbling inside our respective minds. Writing lets others hear those voices, too.

What other novels have you written?

CDC: We have written the first two installments of the series: Quest for Elderstone and Tides of War.

Have there been any awards, productions, videos or anything else of interest associated with your work?

CDC: Actually, Quest for Elderstone is currently required reading for Diversity and Social Justice in Counseling class and Internship in Clinical Mental Health Counseling for the Department of Counseling at Johns Hopkins University. I think that is pretty darn cool.

DWJ: As a matter of fact, we will be the keynote speakers there for a symposium on bullying at the end of the month.

That is seriously cool! How did that happen?

CDC: Quest for Elderstone was discovered by a doctor named Marsha Boveja Riggio and she reached out to D.W.. Her complete title is Dr. Marsha Boveja Riggio, LPC -S (DC & MD), NCC, President, Maryland Association of Marriage & Family Counselors Executive Director, Maryland Counseling Association, Board Member, William V.S. Tubman University Foundation.

When D.W. told Dr. Riggio about the books we had written, she had the idea of using the books for her classes, as she is constantly looking for new client cases for her students to analyze and conceptualize as part of their clinical development.

She read the books herself and loved them. She said she was not really a fantasy fan, but our books touched her on a number of levels, and now she is very interested in exploring the genre.

Quest for Elderstone seems to be a successful integration. The characters give the students strong archetypes with well developed life histories for reference. Dr. Riggio may be adding the other two books as required reading, as well.

As I said, this is seriously cool, as well as an unexpected reader base. What else are you working on?

CDC: Along with the fourth and final novel in series, we are writing several short stories based on the characters we have introduced in the series. Corwyn, Reese, Dolthaia, most of the Companions of the Pride, in point of fact, will have eventual origin stories about them.

DWJ: Also, we will give origin stories on the different character classes and groups unique to our world, like the Oslyn and Weavers, to name a couple.

What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?

CDC: When we are involved in the heavy lifting of the writing, meaning we have set the basic, loose outline and chatted at length about the world’s development, writing is best accomplished by setting aside hours in the morning. D.W. and I have schedules that are a bit more flexible than most. Personally, if I can keep my mornings clear, attacking the novel after a super early workout gives me a feeling of true accomplishment.

DWJ: The most important thing, though, is to put your proverbial butt in the seat and write something everyday.

Do you create an outline before you write?

CDC: We loosely outline. Since there are two of us, we need to be on the same page. We know the basic direction of where we want to take storylines and plot twists. That having been said, we really do allow the characters and the stories to speak to us as we go. It lets the life of the world grow on its own.

DWJ: Sounds artsy-fartsy, I know, but it really does gives us some interesting twists and turns in the creative process.

Why do you write?

CDC: Same reason I breathe.

DWJ: Wow, that is the shortest answer he has ever given. It is the truth, though.

How do you think you’ve evolved creatively?

CDC: Writing is a collaborative art form. People talk about the lonely life of the writer. Well, it may be true that it is a solitary endeavor but, at some point, you need other people.

DWJ: Developmental editors, copyeditors, beta readers; you need help. We have learned to listen to others and openly accept and utilize their input and critiques.

Is there anything you want to make sure potential readers know?

CDC: Yes, this is a story about real people. Some of their powers and abilities may be unique and unusual, some may not even be completely human, but their motives and desires are the same ones that drive us all. We didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel. We just wanted to paint it our own color. From teens to adults, I truly feel this series has something for everyone.

DWJ: Also, check out our site, necromancerspride.com. We have great gear, from shirts to beanies to hats, which we think you will really like. We want your experience in the world our Necromancers inhabit to be immersive and interactive. The books are just the beginning…

Do you have another job outside of writing?

CDC: Acting.

DWJ: Entrepreneur.

How do you pick yourself up in the face of adversity?

CDC: It’s not how, but how often. We will all fall at some point, most likely at many points. We all make mistakes. The biggest mistake would be to stop getting back up. DWJ: We are here for each other in that way. Everybody needs a hand.

Who has been your greatest inspiration?

CDC: My wife, daughter and son.

DWJ: My son.

Before I provide our visitors an excerpt from Storm of Shadows, as well as book buy and social links, I’d like to thank you both for taking time out of your busy schedules to participate in The Write Stuff. It’s been an honor to have you aboard. I’m sure our visitors are curious by now, so here is a taste of Storm of Shadows:

Zara was somber as she looked out across the rolling landscape of the Locksdale Foothills. Here, so close to the border between Canodria and Medioc, the two great armies assembled for war. This beautiful countryside would bear the full brunt of the destructive might of both kingdoms. Neither would be foolish enough to willingly wage battle on the scorched earth of the Kerathic Plains. No, it would be this rustic setting, as well as the Flat Lands to the south that the war would ravage. The peoples of these lands would suffer, and many innocents would die. It was a morbid proposition.

The sweeping beauty of the land always made her reflective. The many canyons, gullies and undulating hillocks of the terrain often made her contemplate settling there when her time as a Herrod was done. The Flat Lands had their own subtle charms: windswept bluffs that opened onto vast savannahs leading to the shore. But something about the Foothills of Locksdale always held her heart.

That thought so burdened her soul at this moment.

She focused attention from the landscape and back to the situation at hand. The sounds of battle preparations filled her ears. Had she her way, only the sounds of music, reverie and song would ever reach her ears. As a Weaver, that was her passion. There were songs here, of course, but they were different. As the battalions marched past, the horns would blast, and the soldiers would sing. Theirs, though, were not songs of beauty. Theirs were rousing, bawdy songs of glory in battle and of crushing their enemies.

From her position on the wide hilltop, to her left, she watched the gleaming armor of thousands of men marching down into the large, open flat below. Banners streamed in the wind, and sunlight glinted off armor forged by the finest smiths in the southern kingdom. To her right, cavalry marching six abreast moved into their positions. The soldiers set up camp. They dug latrine trenches and erected tents in neat, tight columns. They had set the horse lines and put feed stations into position. They fortified the positions of the ballistae, which hundreds of heavy beasts of burden pulled.

The songs of war, she thought sadly as a particularly boisterous contingent of archers marched past. “What a sad refrain they do make,” she whispered aloud.

“Mistress Herrod,” a small voice behind her called. “My Lady?”

Zara saw Danth, a young boy, approaching her. He could be no more than seven winters, or perhaps eight. His eyes were brown and sparkled with the cheerfulness of youth. His smile was wide, with a large gap where his two upper front teeth used to be. He wore a doublet of brown leather much too large for him with the Cougar of Canodria emblazoned in red on the chest and a motley colored jester’s cap that slumped over his thick eyebrows.

“Yes, Danth.”

“King Forlmorlaine wishes to see you now,” he said with a smile.

He always seemed to smile. He was obviously well pleased at having so important a task as to call the Herrod of the South to have audience with the king.

“Lead the way,” she said with a grin, her smoky voice sweet and comforting.

The boy ran back toward the large tent erected as the king’s residence while on the march. Supported by three 20-foot tent poles, the huge burgundy canvas structure looked regal indeed in the final light of day. The golden rays of early sunset had broken through the clouds, sending rich yellow beams across the fields. The royal tent was bathed in it. The banners of Canodria blew majestically in the breeze from each tent pole, and several other banner stands had been set about the field.

Smaller tents of multiple colors surrounded the main royal lodging, the mobile residences of the nobles and generals that comprised the upper echelon of the army’s ranks. Cast in the dramatic rays of the sun, the scene had quite a noble and heroic feel. It evoked images of the tales of battles of long ago. For those Weavers who excelled at composing battle hymns, it would strike a most inspiring vision. For Zara, whose tastes leaned toward love and nature, the scene rang far more of melancholy than majesty. Where others would see future glory, she only saw inevitable death.

Those of you who are interested in keeping up with these authors can find them here:

Website: http://necromancerspride.com/

Blog: http://necromancerspride.com/blog/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Necromancers-Pride

Twitter: @charlesdavidcar

Twitter: @writerdwjones

You may purchase their books at:

http://necromancerspride.com/product/quest-for-elderstone-bk-1/

http://necromancerspride.com/product/tides-of-war-bk-2/

http://necromancerspride.com/product/storm-of-shadows-bk3/

The Write Stuff – Monday, April 11 – Interview With Matthew Pallamary

April 11, 2016April 12, 2016 raymondbolton Leave a comment

Matthew Pallamary is an author who writes in multiple genres and seems to do everything well. Ray Bradbury praised his collection of horror stories, The Small Dark Room of the Soul as well as his historical novel dealing with shamanism and, as pervades much of his work, spirituality, Land Without Evil, saying, “Bravo! More!” Three of his works were award winning finalists in the International Book Awards: Cyber Christ in the Thriller/Adventure category, A Short Walk to the Other Side, his collection of short stories, and Eye of the Predator in the Visionary Fiction category. He’s written a memoir and edited a biography, both of which have received notable reviews. He’s also written a science fiction novel entitled Dreamland and a dark novel entitled Night Whispers.

Matt’s work has appeared in Oui, New Dimensions, The Iconoclast, Starbright, Infinity, Passport, The Short Story Digest, Redcat, The San Diego Writer’s Monthly, Connotations, Phantasm, Essentially You, The Haven Journal, and many others. His fiction has been featured in The San Diego Union Tribune, for which he has also reviewed books, and his work has been heard on KPBS-FM in San Diego, KUCI FM in Irvine, television Channel Three in Santa Barbara, and The Susan Cameron Block Show in Vancouver. He has been a guest on the following nationally syndicated talk shows: Paul Rodriguez, In The Light with Michelle Whitedove, Susun Weed, Medicine Woman, Inner Journey with Greg Friedman, and Environmental Directions Radio series. He has received the Man of the Year 2000 from San Diego Writer’s Monthly Magazine and has taught a fiction workshop at the Southern California Writers’ Conference in San Diego, Palm Springs, and Los Angeles, and at the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference for twenty five years. He has lectured at the Greater Los Angeles Writer’s Conference, the Getting It Write conference in Oregon, the Saddleback Writers’ Conference and numerous others. He is presently Editor in Chief of Mystic Ink Publishing.

Your endeavors are so varied, it was difficult to decide where to begin. Since spirituality is at the core of everything you do, I am focusing on Land Without Evil and your shamanic approach to writing and teaching others how to write.

Over the years, you’ve made several trips to the Amazon rain forest. How did these trips feed Land Without Evil and your writing courses?

I took an honors course in anthropology titled “A Forest of Symbols – Orientation and Meaning of South American Indian Religions” which is where I learned of the actual Guarani story of the Land Without Evil, which is what the book is based on, so I actually wrote and published the book before ever going into the jungle. Prior to that course I was researching the lycanthropy mythos, (Werewolves), for my novel Eye of the Predator which led me to shape shifting. The jungles of South America have the strongest shape shifting traditions and these were tied to visionary plants. I have had a lifelong fascination with altered states and shamanism and one of the things that struck me the most through my research in anthropology was the fact that shamanism is based on experiential knowledge. You can read textbooks about it for the rest of your life, but you will have no real conception of what it is and what it entails. You can’t learn much of anything about it by watching or observing native people performing rituals. The only way you can truly learn is through direct subjective experience, which means taking part in the rituals and ordeals to learn first hand what the teacher plants have to teach you – if you prove you are worthy.

You’ve been teaching writers for a quarter of a century, packing the house I might add. And now you’ve translated your courses into a book. Without giving away all of your course’s or Phantastic Fiction’s teachings, will you provide one or two salient points that might encourage visiting authors to explore the rest of what you teach?

In the shamanic world view, absolutely everything is energy. When we write and create we are manipulating energies on multiple levels and we are working in-depth with our subconscious, so we are in essence manipulating energy, whether it is plotting, pacing, dialogue exchanges, emotions, punctuation, and many more variables. Additionally, the shaman’s descent into the underworld where he experiences death, dismemberment, and rebirth in order to become a “man of power” is exactly what happens on Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, which is the essence of story that has been around in this transformational process since prehistoric times, long, long, before the written word came into being.

How is it being received?

It’s been an eye opener for many people as it gets as far into the roots of what a story is as possible. These time honored concepts are deeply embedded in the psyche of humanity and have much to teach us about ourselves. Aside from its esoteric aspects, I have been blessed by the “wisdom of the masters” through all my years of being with the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the Southern California Writers Conference where I was mentored and really adopted into the writing family of Ray Bradbury, Charles Schulz, Barnaby Conrad, Chuck Champlin, a leading L.A. Times Film Critic, and Paul Lazarus, former Vice President of Columbia Pictures as well as many others. They have all passed on and I find myself one of the few keepers of the wisdom and tradition they blessed me with, so I am also passing on much of what came from them.

Like all of your work, Land Without Evil has garnered high praise. In addition to the wonderful plaudits, it’s been made into a play. And now, I’ve heard rumors there’s something greater waiting in the wings. Would you care to elaborate on this new development, touching on key points of the book’s journey?

There was some interest from a producer in making Land Without Evil into a film, so I have written the script, but things appear to have come to a standstill there. What I am very excited about now is that Land Without Evil is being translated into Spanish. In the Lonely Planet Travel Guide under Paraguay, they say that if you want to learn about the history of Paraguay, read Land Without Evil, and it was listed as the top fiction pick on the Paraguayan Embassy web page. It’s a huge part of Latin American history, so I think it will find a good audience in Spanish.

Whose idea was it to have it translated? Yours or your publishers?

It was my idea to get Land Without Evil translated and I have been trying to make that happen for some years now.

What can you tell us about your translator?

Through a service called Babelcube I found Rosina Iglesias who works in Spanish Administration as a civil servant.

Are you able to participate in the translation process? If so, how and to what extent?

She also asks me questions from time to time when she has them regarding certain parts of the book.

Shifting the focus from your work to you as a writer, what is your work schedule like when you’re writing?

On an uninterrupted day, I like to hit it first thing in the morning after the first cup of coffee and morning email/business/posting chores are done, straight through until afternoon. After a bite and a break I hit it again until dinner time around 7:00.

It’s all about the discipline.

Indeed it is. Do you create an outline before you write?

I do, but it’s a bit different than what many might think. I have a chapter that goes into detail about it in Phantastic Fiction.

Why do you write?

Because I have to.

What is the single most powerful challenge when it comes to writing a novel?

Fighting daily procrastination.

Is there anything you want to make sure potential readers know?

My work is quite varied. I have ten books in print. Land Without Evil is a historical novel. I also have two short story collections that are science fiction/horror in the Twilight Zone tradition, a memoir about my shamanic studies that ends in the Peruvian Amazon. Two science fiction novels, two nonfiction books, one about perfect form and motion, and the other about writing, and two novels that are thrillers, one of which is horror.

About your “other” life, do you have another job outside of writing?

I edit, critique, teach, and guide people toward publication.

Would you care to share something about your home life?

I am a nomad.

How do you pick yourself up in the face of adversity?

By understanding that everything is transitory and nothing is permanent. I have been through some extremely challenging ordeals in my life and have learned the art of flexibility. It didn’t kill me and yes it made me stronger.

What has been your greatest success in life?

The Land Without Evil show!

There is not enough space to go into how Land Without Evil was made into a play. But, for those who are interested, you can find the complete story here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/SkyCandyAustin2012/LandWithoutEvil11/prweb10182711.htm

That said, what do you consider your biggest failure?

I’ve had many, but I am still alive, so the game is not up yet.

Do you have any pet projects?

I am presently collaborating on a book about the history of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference which is now in its 43rd year.

Who has been your greatest inspiration?

I’d have to say Ray Bradbury. But the biggest of all time was my Mom, who was my very best friend. She left the planet about twelve years ago.

Before I present an excerpt from Land Without Evil and provide your book buy and social media links, I’d like to finish as I usually do with a Lightning Round. In as few words as possible, please answer the following:

My best friend would tell you I’m a …

Bit crazy and eccentric.

The one thing I would change about my life:

I would have made different relationship and financial decisions if I had any inkling of where they might have gone, but then again, I may not have learned what I needed.

My biggest peeve is:

Hate

The thing I’m most satisfied with is:

My writing and the craft that goes with it.

Now, without further ado, Land Without Evil:

ONE

Avá-Tapé gazed up at the crescent moon looming high above. He felt the weight of the humid rain forest air hanging thick and still, and the presence of the trees pressing in on him. Firelight flickered at the edge of the clearing, darkened from time to time by the formless shadows of the dancers, led by his father.

Rattles shook and a new round of chants rose into the starlit sky as each syllable took wing and fluttered through the darkness like the cry of night birds.

Like Avá-Tapé, most of the tribe huddled around the fire watching the men dressed in feathered headdresses, armbands, and anklets dance as one. Their movements kept a rhythm that gave meaning to the unseen forces between the beats of time.

Avá-Tapé’s round face made him look younger than his sixteen harvests, but his dark, almond-shaped eyes missed nothing. He sat straight and alert, his long arms and legs coiled, ready to spring into the dance with the others. While he watched the pageantry unfold, Avá-Tapé pondered what his father had taught him. Chaos. Order. Destruction. Thoughts that held fear for the white people, but were everyday parts of his father’s world. He sighed remembering how important he had felt helping the Christian priests with their sacraments. His chest grew tight as the two realities fought for possession of his heart.

His father, Avá-Nembiará, had become the most powerful holy man of their people by the force of his visions. Most of the people now called him Nandérú, “our father.” In front of whites they called him paí, the solitary one who lives between man and the gods. Some whispered that Tupá, the son of gods, spoke through Avá-Nembiará.

Two men tossed another log on the fire, showering the night in a flurry of shimmering sparks. The tempo of the chants increased and the dancers quickened their pace. Flames jumped higher.

Avá-Nembiará’s voice rose above the rest, its tone full of yearning. Avá-Tapé shivered and watched his father’s dance become erratic, his movements larger and wider, until Avá-Nembiará threw his whole being open like the wings of a butterfly embracing the sky. A moment later, his steps grew fitful and jerky until he dance-staggered out of step with the others, keeping a rhythm only he could hear.

The chants and dances of the others faded until Avá-Nembiará remained alone clutching a feathered rattle, swaying before the fire, his handsome angular face impassive, short black hair flattened against his sweaty forehead.

Fire glow highlighted the brilliant colored feathers of his headband, reminding Avá-Tapé of the lights above the heads of the Christian saints in the pictures the whites had shown him. Light from the orange flames caressed the sweaty sheen of his father’s muscled form as if infusing it with new life. Swirling patterns washed over Avá-Nembiará’s dark features, illuminating his glazed eyes and changing expression.

Avá-Nembiará sank to the ground and tilted sideways, then straightened as though pulled upright by the head. His normally sharp eyes became unreadable hollows that glinted in the flickering light. Other than the fire’s crackle, the clearing remained silent and still. No wind. No bird or animal cries. No sound from the awestruck tribe.

Avá-Tapé held his breath, expecting flames to burst from his father’s chest… until Avá-Nembiará spoke. His words and voice were those of another.

“The time of destruction has returned. The Earth is old. Your tribe is no longer growing. Your world is bloated with death and decay. I have heard the Earth cry out to our Creator-Father. ‘Father,’ it says, ‘I have devoured too many bodies; I am stuffed and tired; put an end to my suffering.’”

“Tupá,” someone whispered.

“The weight of your faults has made your souls heavy and holds you from magic flight. You eat the food of the whites and live their ways, not the ways of your ancestors. The growing weight of your faults has brought you to the end of the world through the fleeing of the light. The bulk of your errors will soon block it. The sun will disappear and there will be nothing for you to do on this Earth. This will be the moment of the ará-kañí. This will be your last day. The last time that you shall see this world.”

Spiraling patterns from the fire accented his features as he spoke. Sometimes the calm face of Tupá and the sweep of his grand language dominated; other times the tenseness of an all too human expression came back amidst strange words. Avá-Tapé looked around at the faces of the people. Some showed the same intensity, some fear, others concern. The older men’s expressions revealed acceptance.

“You do not have to fall to the crushing weight of techó-achy,” he continued. “You can free yourself from the weight of your faults, lighten your bodies, and reach perfection by abandoning the food and the ways of the whites. You must journey to where you can dance until your bodies rise above the earth and fly across the great primeval sea to the Land Without Evil.”

A murmur rose from the crowd.

“Ywy Mará Ey, a paradise of abundance and wealth. True immortality awaits you there. You do not have to die to enter. It is a real world that lies in the place where the sun rises. Only dancing believers dwell there. To find paradise you must…”

The clearing came alive with the soft rustling of robes fluttering like the wings of bats as Father Antonio rushed forward brandishing a cross, followed by a mob of black‑robed Jesuits. “I exorcise you, Most Unclean Spirit!” he bellowed, dark eyes blazing. “Invading enemy! In the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

He made the sign of the cross, causing the people to scatter into the forest. Avá-Nembiará looked up at the priests, his expression dazed and unfocused.

“Be uprooted and expelled from this creature of God.” Father Antonio’s hands moved deftly as he made the sign of the cross again. “He who commands you is He who ordered you to be thrown down from the highest Heaven into the depths of Hell. He who commands you is He who dominated the sea, the wind, and the storms. Hear, therefore, and fear, Satan! Enemy of faith! Enemy of the human race! Source of death! Robber of life! Root of evil and seducer of men!”

Satan? Confusion swept through Avá-Tapé. Tupá spoke through his father. Not Satan!

Avá-Nembiará shook his head and glared at the Jesuits. His features hardened. He rose, standing tall in the firelight, his headdress backlit by flames. His shiny skin glowed orange as if it held a life of its own, in stark contrast to the dark formless robes of the priests that seemed to swallow light. His father looked every part the Holy Man. Avá-Tapé felt a surge of pride swell in his chest.

One of the priests looked over, his glare pinning Avá-Tapé. “Begone!” the man shouted.

Avá-Tapé didn’t move. Father Antonio started speaking Latin and making elaborate movements around Avá-Nembiará while Father Lorenzo sprinkled him with holy water. Avá-Tapé stood on trembling legs, wanting to run, but willing himself to stay.

When the priest started toward him, Avá-Tapé ran to his father’s side. Father Antonio continued his rituals and Latin chants while thrusting the cross at Avá-Tapé and his father. Avá-Nembiará put his arm around his son, grunted, and pushed his way through the black robes. The priests let out astonished gasps, and Father Antonio stopped his invocations.

Avá-Tapé walked into the darkened forest at his father’s side, leaving the muttering priests alone in the clearing.

* * *

To learn more about Matt or to purchase his books, you may do so here:

Social media links:

Website: https://www.mattpallamary.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattpallamary

Instagram: https://instagram.com/matthewpallamary/

Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattpallamary

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Others: http://www.amazon.com/Matthew-J.-Pallamary/e/B001K7YB52/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1

http://www.tsu.co/MatthewJPallamary

http://coldcoffeecafe.com/profile/MattPallamary

Book online sales links

http://lrd.to/Land-Without-Evil

http://lrd.to/The-Small-Dark-Room-of-the-Soul-and-Other-Stories

http://lrd.to/spirit-matters

http://lrd.to/a-short-walk-to-other-side

http://lrd.to/dreamland

http://lrd.to/infinity-zone

http://lrd.to/eye-of-predator

http://lrd.to/cyberchrist

http://lrd.to/phantastic-fiction

http://lrd.to/night-whispers

The Write Stuff – Monday, March 28 – Interview With Jim C. Hines

March 28, 2016March 27, 2016 raymondbolton 3 Comments

Jim C. Hines’ writing is so varied, it makes him a difficult author to label. His first novel was Goblin Quest, the humorous tale of a nearsighted goblin runt and his pet fire-spider. Actor and author Wil Wheaton described the book as “too f***ing cool for words,” which is pretty much the Best Blurb Ever. After finishing the goblin trilogy, he went on to write the Princess series of fairy tale retellings and the Magic ex Libris books, a modern-day fantasy series about a magic-wielding librarian, a dryad, a secret society founded by Johannes Gutenberg, a flaming spider, and an enchanted convertible. He’s also the author of the Fable Legends tie-in Blood of Heroes. His short fiction has appeared in more than 50 magazines and anthologies.

Jim is an active blogger about topics ranging from sexism and harassment to zombie-themed Christmas carols, and won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2012. He has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a Masters in English, and lives with his wife and two children in mid-Michigan.

Every now and then, an author breaks new ground. In today’s publishing world filled with thematic repetition—galactic conquest, defeating a dragon, an evil wizard—it’s refreshing to encounter something untried. When he introduces us to Isaac Vainio, a libiomancer, in his Magic ex Libris series, he takes us onto untrodden soil. I asked Jim to tell us about Revisionary, his latest release and the fourth in the series. He describes it as follows:

When Isaac Vainio helped to reveal magic to the world, he dreamed of a utopian future, a new millennium of magical prosperity. One year later, things aren’t going quite as he’d hoped. An organization known as Vanguard, made up of magical creatures and ex-Porters, wants open war with the mundane world. Isaac’s own government is incarcerating “potential supernatural enemies” in prisons and internment camps. And Isaac finds himself targeted by all sides.

It’s a war that will soon envelop the world, and the key to victory may lie with Isaac himself, as he struggles to incorporate everything he’s learned into a new, more powerful form of libriomancy. Surrounded by betrayal and political intrigue, Isaac and a ragtag group of allies must evade pursuit both magical and mundane, expose a conspiracy by some of the most powerful people in the world, and find a path to a better future.

But what will that future cost Isaac and the ones he loves?

Will you tell us something more about it?

This is the fourth and final (for now) book in the Magic ex Libris series, which is based on the premise that a small number of people can reach into the pages of books and pull out the objects described in the story. As long as they physically fit through the book. Isaac Vainio is a librarian and libriomancer from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and an unabashed fan of all things magical. He’s very enthusiastic, which tends to get him into trouble, and very bright, which helps him to get back out of it again. Also, he has a pet spider who can set things on fire.

I am intrigued by your Magic ex Libris series and find the concept of a librarian being able to draw magic from a book, or step from a taxi that had been skirting Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere only to emerge from a pizza delivery truck in our nation’s capitol both enticing and delightful. Will you fill us in on how that concept came about?

The seed of the series was planted at a convention in Chicago many years ago, when an editor asked me to write a short story that took Smudge the fire-spider from my goblin books and brought him into the real world. So I had to figure out how to set that up, which led to a character who could pull things out of books.

The story was published in Gamer Fantastic, but the idea had so much more potential. Imagine all the things, good and bad, you could create with our collective literature. So I fleshed it out, added more characters like Lena the dryad and Johannes Gutenberg and more, and just ran with it.

I’ve been looking at the other books you have written. I must say it’s rare that someone’s book blurb brings me to laughter, but Goblin Hero’s description did just that. How much fun did you have producing your Goblin Quest series?

Jig and Smudge and the rest were great to write about. I’m a long time D&D player, and this series was a chance to go back and mess with some of those old tropes, to change up the traditional stories, and to just really play. I really enjoyed the characters, and the goblins in general. It’s one of the reasons I’ve gone back a few times to write shorter stories in that world.

I was delighted when Gregory Maguire spun off the 1939 the movie classic, The Wizard of Oz, with his Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Now—and I admit I am frightfully behind the reading curve—I encounter your princess series where you expand on Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White. What was the spark that ignited that series?

Those books began when my daughter was a lot younger, and was going through a princess phase. A lot of the toys and merchandise she collected showed these characters as pretty, but… not much else. Some of the movies did a decent job of giving the characters strength and agency. Others, not so much.

So I decided to go all out and write a series that turned these traditional fairy tale princesses into action heroes. Snow White would get her mother’s magic mirror and be the sorceress. Sleeping Beauty and her fairy gifts of grace would become the ninja/assassin character. And Cinderella would receive an enchanted glass sword from her mother’s ghost.

Basically, I wrote it because I wanted more stories like this to be out there for my daughter and everyone else.

What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?

It depends on the day. I quit my full-time day job last fall. Before then, I wrote every day on my lunch hour. Now my schedule is a lot more flexible…and at times, a lot more complicated. Some days I’ll put in four hours or more at the keyboard. Others I’m running kids to doctor appointments and dealing with calls from the school and chasing after the dog who got through the gate in the back yard again.

Most writers will envy your new situation. Why do you write and when did you first realize you were a writer?

I write because I enjoy it. I love inventing stories and sharing them with people. There are days when it’s frustrating or painful trying to get the story in your head onto the screen, and it’s just not coming out right. But then there are the moments when it comes together, or when you come up with a clever twist or idea, or you hit on something powerful. Those moments are amazing.

Plus I like fantasizing about swords and magic and robots and all that other cool, shiny stuff.

When did I realize I was a writer? That’s hard to say. I toyed with writing a bit as a kid. Started doing it more seriously toward the end of my undergraduate degree. To some extent, I started to really feel like a writer after my first fantasy novel Goblin Quest came out.

And then there are the days when I still don’t entirely feel like A Real Writer. Like I’ve been playing a trick on the world for 20+ years and having a blast with it, but sooner or later someone’s going to catch on.

You have blogged about some unfortunate incidents pertaining to sexual and racial harassment at several Cons. I think these occurrences are appalling and I applaud you for calling attention to them. Would you care to discuss this?

There’s so much to discuss, but in short, this stuff happens. At cons, at schools, at workplaces, and more. For a long time, there’s been pressure not to talk about it, but that’s one of the reasons it keeps happening. I’m encouraged by the shift I’ve seen in some areas to say no, we are going to talk about it, we are going to let people know this behavior is not acceptable, and we are going to take steps when and if it happens.

Please give some mention of your work as crisis councilor, especially as the Male Outreach Coordinator at Michigan State University.

I spent a total of about five years volunteering at the Listening Ear crisis center in East Lansing, working on the phone hotline for all kinds of crisis calls, as well as working in (and at one point, helping to coordinate) the sexual assault counseling program. In another position, I worked as the Male Outreach Coordinator for Safe Place, the domestic violence shelter and program at MSU.

A lot of that second position involved outreach and education, talking to men about consent and power and abuse, things a lot of guys may not be that aware of. It’s hard to solve a problem when a large number of people won’t even acknowledge the problem exists.

It was intense work at times, but also very powerful and eye-opening. I certainly learned a lot about the world that I hadn’t seen growing up.

Would you care to share how your work led you to write Goldfish Dreams?

Basically, Goldfish Dreams was a mainstream novel I wrote about rape and recovery, based on some of the things I learned and experienced during my time at Listening Ear. It’s not based on an actual person or anything like that. But it was a way for me to take all of those stories I’d heard and turn them into something I hope is both honest and, ultimately, hopeful.

Do you have anything else in the works you are free to discuss?

A few short stories, and a new three-book humorous SF series I’m writing for DAW (who published my fantasy books).

What motivates or inspires you (not necessarily as regards your writing)?

A sense of wonder, and wanting to share that sense with family, friends, fans, and anyone else who’d like to get some.

Would you care to share something about your home life?

We have a cat who likes to wake me up in the morning by jumping onto the bed and licking my scalp. It’s a bizarre and disturbing way to wake up.

I always conclude each interview with what I call a Lightning Round, because it often yields unexpected insights. Answer as many as you care to in as few words as possible.:

My best friend would tell you I’m a … Turtle.

The one thing I cannot do without is: Insulin.

The one thing I would change about my life: Fewer chronic illnesses for me and my family.

My biggest peeve is: Coconut.

The person/thing I’m most satisfied with is: Mister Rogers.

Before I provide links to your books and social media, I’m going to insert an excerpt from Revisionary:

Hearing

of the

Joint Committee on Magical Security

before the

U.S. House of Representatives

and the

U.S. Senate

Chairman: Alexander Keeler

U.S. House of Representatives,

Committee on Magical Security

Derek Vaughn, Louisiana

Tammy Hoeve, Michigan

Timothy Hoffman, Ohio

Anthony Hays, Colorado

Susan Brown, Florida

Elizabeth Garcia, Oklahoma

John Senn, Nevada

U.S. Senate,

Committee on Magical Security

Alexander Keeler, Illinois

Kenneth Tindill, Rhode Island

Mary Pat Clarke, Maryland

Kent Childress, Oregon

Testimony and Questioning of Witness Number 18: Isaac Vainio

The CHAIRMAN: This hearing will come to order.

It’s my privilege and honor to welcome the members of the Joint Committee on Magical Security, as well as the witnesses who have been called to testify as we help to shape the future of this great nation during this time of worldwide turmoil and conflict.

Mister Vainio, thank you for taking time from your work with New Millennium to join us today.

Mr. VAINIO: Your invitation made it clear I didn’t have a choice.

The CHAIRMAN: Do you affirm that the testimony you will give before this committee is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Mr. VAINIO: Aren’t I supposed to be sworn in on a Bible?

The CHAIRMAN: For security reasons, no books will be permitted in the chamber during your testimony.

Mr. VAINIO: Don’t worry, I’m not about to try libriomancy with a Bible, or any other religious text. Gutenberg might have been able to handle that kind of intensity and belief, but—oh, sorry. Yes, I do so affirm.

The CHAIRMAN: Thank you. You may be seated. Mr. Vainio, would you please—what is that?

Mr. VAINIO: His name is Smudge. He’s a fire-spider. He’s perfectly safe as long as he’s in his cage. Don’t go poking your fingers in there, though. He’s my service animal. My lawyer advised me this was permitted under disability law.

Mr. CHILDRESS: You have a service spider?

Mr. VAINIO: He senses danger. Like Spider-Man. Having him around helps me with some…anxiety issues. It’s been a traumatic few years. I have a letter from my therapist if you’d like to see it.

The CHAIRMAN: That won’t be necessary. For the record, please state your history and current role with the organization known as the Porters.

Mr. VAINIO: I’ve been a member of the Porters—intermittently—for about seven years, working to protect the world from magical threats. I’ve been a cataloguer, field agent, and researcher. Ten months back, I helped to found the New Millennium project in Nevada, where I currently work as Director of Research and Development.

The CHAIRMAN: Ten months. That would be shortly after you announced the existence of magic to the world.

Mr. VAINIO: Correct.

The CHAIRMAN: You constructed New Millennium in the United States. You yourself are an American citizen, born and raised in Michigan. Are you loyal to this country, Isaac?

Mr. VAINIO: How do you mean?

The CHAIRMAN: There are hundreds of you libriomancers scattered throughout the world, and thousands of other creatures. Vampires and merfolk and werewolves and bigfoots and Heaven knows what else. What assurances does this committee have that you won’t turn against the United States of America? How do we prevent people like you from selling your abilities to the highest bidder?

Mr. VAINIO: Maybe you could start by not treating us all like potential criminals and terrorists.

Thanks, Jim, for taking the time to tell us about yourself. Those visitors who would like to learn more about Jim or purchase his books can do so here:

Website: http://www.jimchines.com

Blog: http://www.jimchines.com/blog/

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jimchines

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jimhines

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