KJ Hannah Greenberg Guest Post

My theory that indie authors are some of the most interesting people around has been reinforced.  Today's guest post is from KJ Hannah Greenberg, whose Don't Pet the Sweaty Things is being released this week.  View it at http://www.bardsandsages.com/greenberg. Take it away, Hannah:

Today, I quelled three uprisings and decimated an entire outpost of spacelings. My occupational hazards, ranging from getting drunk on the particulars of integrating anthropomorphism into subject matter, to losing my cool when defining atomic boundaries, do little to interfere with the fun I am having.

Bewilderingly, I did not always amuse myself by arranging mosaics of make-believe entities. Short of my terminal degree, I left The University of Iowa’s esteemed halls of language and literature to: marry my undergraduate honey, complete my schooling (elsewhere) and raise a family. Along the way, I taught English and communication courses and remained sufficiently distracted by academic activities to not fully actualize my artistic faculty.

Nonetheless, after my children grew older and my family moved to “the other side” of the globe, I began to contrast the results of my verbal experiments with those of my theoretical modeling. There was rot in the ratios. Espousing rhetorical and literary criticism was doing nothing for my inventive yield. Only reallocating my resources to the construction of stories, of poems, of plays, and of essays might change my essential mix.

Thus, initially, the structure and composition of my offerings were less important to me than was those works’ existence. Without facts on the ground, per se, I feared

I would remain another commentator among thousands. I had to make haste to write creatively, to capture a hibernaculum of pretend hedgehogs, or both.

Accordingly, I dismissed internal arguments against “sensibly,” which indentured my energies to the pursuit of scholarship. As well, I tried out a handful of rationale for allowing my adolescent sons and daughters to receive a little less of my supervision. Our home did not entirely burn down. The toilet overflowed only sporadically, and we grasped that a former President was correct in considering ketchup to be a vegetable.

I muddled. I splattered. I dribbled a little here and there. I made many, many mistakes. What’s more, I refused to apologize for entire suites of efforts that lacked linguistic flourishes or any other “social worth.” Instead, I urged myself to continue to scribble narratives more full of irreverence than grace, and to continue to build poetry containing more superfluous references than measures of parsimony.

My tales became populated with jilted lovers, fledgling children’s book authors, awkward neighbors, and troubled elders. My essays flowed with anecdotes about my sons and daughters, about editors and publishers’ peccadilloes, and about road kill. My verse eked out paramagnetic materials from philological molecules and demonstrated that moral spin would be forever indeterminate. I snuck in paragraphs or stanzas, too, here and there, which suited no onomasticon, yet made my writing the ideal material with which to line budgie cages.

From hornbeam branch to shadblow bough, my craft became washable and worrisome. Not believing, even for a nanosecond or its cousin, that “sexy” or “comfortable” conceptions always superlatively benefit readers, I dared to roll in the waste of slipstream and pulp, and, in doing so caught, mostly by accident, some gatekeepers’ attention. It seems that fairytales, made urbane, are the “new black.”

Meanwhile, both my esteem and my social ranking took hits. Trading in prescribed academic paraphernalia for the less straightforward tools of original output hurt. Whereas the texts I offered up, in my fifth decade, spoke to the human addiction to adrenaline, and to publishers’ appetite for irregular outcomes, they did nothing to build on my previous, carefully structured, professional career. Indubitably, imaginative writing, if properly fed and watered, needs no blender, dryer, or lawn mower to be processed, and has the potential to move more souls than does any lecture on media and society or on the ethics of persuasion (my former areas of expertise). However, the realm of creative writing comes with a much smaller prospect of success that does the staid university world.

In balance, mental sprouting, whispered, shouted, or executed at any decibel in between, is not a “now or never” business, but a soft form of movement. Raging mentations, furthermore, are best facilitated by bobcats, or by intentionally allowing otherworldly monsters to feast on the flesh of invisible friends. Otherwise, powerful ideas persist in marauding on our highways as glittery personalities like crystalline chanticleers. There’s room in writing for growth.

Sure, many “refined” writers claim to operate within the confines of cultural licensure, to act within the parameters of de rigueur notions, to merely cast a sheen of mawkishness on already popular bits and pieces; such goings on are profitable. In spite of that, Yours Truly, even now, usually fails to be deterred by threatening garbles or by gallons of institutionalized drugging and cutting; I still push at edges. There’s little point in running with small, prickly mammals if one’s not willing to risk getting jabbed.

I purposefully fashion villains and heroes seasoned with dashes of imperfection, colonize fictions with the sort of huzzah more often associated with prides of cats lamenting missed wildebeest steaks than with polite exchanges, and engage in the kind of language-related maneuvers most familiar to adolescents who don’t really want to complete their algebra homework. In brief, I intentionally sought to join the ranks of word workers that elect not to employ fire sleeves.

As a result, presently, I write about a regional cleanout company’s monopoly, about Ilocano banquets, and about moments when butterfly kisses subsume all. My art is as likely to reflect my former students’ business acumen as it is to reflect my attempts to get giggy with piles of dishes. Occasionally, my writing espouses means to repair flattened garter snakes, to boot.

In the near future, I’d like to serve up more mindful discourse and to be able to explain why octopuses ought to have the right of way in bathrooms. I aspire, additionally, to be able to clarify why elementary school kids, who let lizards soil carpets, ought to be made to clean up, and why flying squirrels need to be reprimanded when making off with grocery coupons.

I’ve been fortunate to find audiences for my fun and games. I’ve been blessed to glean cheer and energy from my intellectual sport. I’ve been privileged, as well, to continue to embrace the oddities embedded in my performances. In brief, I’ve taken to this nature of output like a carnivorous, two-headed alien that gets invited in for tea.

Guest Post - J. A. Beard

You meet the most interesting people in this line of work - at least, for sufficiently broad definitions of "meet" and "work."  Today I'm pleased to present J. A. Beard, who has just released The Emerald City, a young adult urban fantasy novel set in Seattle.  It's clever, engaging, and thoroughly original, but it's also a fascinating re-framing of The Wizard of Oz. 

Today's guest post is from Mr. Beard, who shares his insights into the changing nature of fantasy worlds.  Take it away, J. A.:

Our World versus Their World

In the past, there was far less separation between the idea of “our” world and the world of the fantastical. Storytellers would spin tales about creatures traveling around the outskirts of humanity, distant lands, or even the past, but there typically was less a sense that the magical world was something discrete and forever disconnected from the mundane “real” world.

Some of this was because our worldview was different. The magical world, for many people in the past, was the real world. A story about creatures that eat children who stray too far from home may have served a useful social purpose, but many people did legitimately fear creatures in untamed lands bordering their villages and cities. A lack of understanding of the forces of nature in many societies often manifested in the elevation of practitioners of what we’d now consider mystical arts.

The government of ancient Heian Japan, for instance, had an entire government department staffed with onmyoji, a group of men we’d classify as mystics and diviners. These were not priests. The ancient Japanese had plenty of Shinto and Buddhist priests. Onmyoji were professional “magical” bureaucrats. Magic was their science.

Slowly, though, humanity’s understanding of the world advanced. The dragons of ignorance fell before the blades of science and controlled observation. Where many ancients worshipped the moon as a deity, we’ve walked upon it. Magic has been forced to mostly retreat from our daily existence. People may accept many elements of the supernatural, but in most places a more rational non-magical worldview has settled in. Most people no longer fear ogres in the woods, vampires, shape-shifting foxes, or other sorts of supernatural beings.

Concurrent with the retreat of magic from daily existence, we saw the rise of fantasy as a distinct genre with its stories of magic, monsters, and heroes. Unlike earlier tales that included such elements, these types of stories typically were often not set on Earth, or if they were, would define their setting as some lost mythical age totally divorced from the present. There were exceptions, but in general fantasy became something associated not just with magic, but with different worlds.

This persists to this day. The gritty politics and betrayals in Westeros may have been inspired partially by the War of the Roses of our own world, but no one would ever mistake anything in the A Song of Fire and Ice series for Earth-based fantasy.

Even many stories that did establish a link to our world would quickly shuffle their characters off to somewhere completely fantastical and separate from our mundane little blue planet. Whether they are gritty struggles of brawn, epic magical adventures, whimsical explorations, or something else entirely, these second world fantasies have formed the basis of a rich canon. They allow complete escape into an all-encompassing adventure: new world, new creatures, new rules.

In recent years, the rise of contemporary and urban fantasy has challenged the dominance of second world fantasy. Of course, ever since the rise of fantasy as a true separate genre, there have been stories that inserted magic into a modern milieu, but they’ve typically been overshadowed by their second world cousins. Now, though, when one goes to the bookstore, they’re as likely to find a fantasy story set in a major modern city as they are in some country set in a different world and time. Vampires again lurk in the darkness, faeries in the forest, and the occasional fox does change shape. Mages battle in secret (or out in the open) for control of Earth.

Unlike the second world fantasies, contemporary and urban fantasies don’t allow a total escape. Sure, they do have creatures and new magical rules, but can an adventure of someone adventuring around, for example, Chicago ever capture the same feeling that comes with visiting somewhere totally new?

In a sense, the very familiarity of the world in such books produces a sense of wonder of its own. The tweaking of the familiar sets up a different but still satisfying exploration into the unknown. Whether it is the shadow worlds of settings where the supernatural is hidden to the twists on the modern where the supernatural creatures walk openly among us, the mere inclusion of these elements in our rational and oh-so-scientific world produces a new setting every bit as rich in unexpected possibility as any distant land.

As humanity continues to advance, change, and adapt, it’ll be interesting to see how our age-old interest in the supernatural continues to infuse itself into our fiction. Perhaps in a few decades, we’ll have a whole genre of fantasy taking place in domed lunar cities.

J.A. Beard likes to describe himself as a restless soul married to an equally restless soul. His two children are too young yet to discuss whether or not they are restless souls, but he’s betting on it. He likes to call himself the Pie Master, yet is too cowardly to prove his skills in an actual baking competition.

While writing is one of his great passions, science is another, and when he’s not writing or worrying about baking, he’s working on the completion of his PhD in microbiology.

He blogs at riftwatcher.blogspot.com and is on Twitter as @jabeard_rf.

His current release, a young adult urban fantasy, THE EMERALD CITY, doesn’t take place in Chicago, but it does have a lot of mystical action in the fine modern city of Seattle. It’s available for sale at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Emerald-City-ebook/dp/B00761LCTY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330061232&sr=8-1

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-emerald-city-ja-beard/1108613536?ean=2940014100717&itm=1&usri=the+emerald+city+beard

Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/130023

Author Interview - Craig Comer

I've got something a bit unusual to tell you about today.  The Roads to Baldairn Motte is not the typical fantasy novel.  It is in fact three novellas in one volume, by three authors, telling linked, interwoven stories of the same war, especially one key battle.  You can read more about it here: http://www.craigcomer.com/BaldairnMotte.htm

It's written in a gritty, authentic-feeling style, with a worm's eye view.  This isn't the story of kings and princes, but rather of common men and women caught up in great events.  Thralls of the Fairie, for instance, centers on a farmer deeply worried about his sons.  He ends up marching off to battle in an attempt to keep his family together.

I interviewed Craig Comer, author of the third novella in the book.  I'm going to let him tell you about the story and its genesis in his own words.



Tell me about The Roads to Baldairn Motte.


The Roads to Baldairn Motte is a mosaic fantasy novel centered around the conquest for an empty throne. The novel consists of three novellas, each written by a different author, and each telling a different point of view of the same battle.


The captain of the Black Wind is forced into the service of the powerful Earl of Gaulang. Ensnared in a tangle of bargains and betrayal, the captain and his crew fight for survival, finding allies in the unlikeliest of places.


To the north, the commander of the Titan Guard, the elite fighting force of Lord North, travels to the edge of civilization to enlist the help of barbarian giants known as the Marchers. But such aid comes at a cost, and the price of victory may spell doom for all.


From simple crofts, farms, and villages come the ranks of the engaging armies. A crofter hunts for his missing sons at the peril of his life and honor, while a miller follows his lord to battle, eager to rattle spears against enemy shields. Hungry and exhausted, both men will find they are but dander upon the wind in the great game of the Passions.


Yet struggle as they might, all roads will lead them to the ruins at Baldairn Motte.


What was it like working collaboratively with two other authors? How did it make the book stronger? What were the challenges?


Unlike traditional co-authored books, we wrote our stories independently so that each viewpoint came from a completely different creative genesis. We feel this created a unique overall story because the different factions are truly pursuing their own ends, they aren't pulled along by an overall plot thread. For example, Garrett Calcaterra's piece, On the Black Wind to Baldairn Motte, chronologically stops well short of the other two, yet it still gives a heavy dose of what is to come. It doesn't matter that his characters don't appear in the final novella, Thralls of the Fairie; their story has ended, and in a satisfying way.


That isn't to say we didn't call out each other's works once we were in revision mode. That's part of the fun of collaboration! Having your ideas rebutted when you're still writing drafts makes you think about why you're making certain choices, and what choices you'll risk an argument to defend versus what you're willing to let go. Plus, your collaborators may take your story to places you hadn't considered, which may spark better ideas of your own.


What is world building like when you have collaborators? How did it affect the development of your characters?


For continuity, we created a bible for the world with major characters, events, cultures, and even a lexicon of swear words. But it wasn't until we started kicking out drafts that we knew the more lush details like whether it was raining on a particular day, or what type of tree is common near a village. Through email, we were able to make quick decisions and revise as we wrote, changing the name of a river or the size of a town as our characters entered those places.


From a character development standpoint, one thing that really helped was our desire to keep our characters at a ground level. That is, we wanted to experience the war through the eyes of the common soldier, sailor, and farmer, not from the view of lords and the realm's powerplayers. This allowed us to grow our characters without worrying too much about how their decisions would impact each other's storylines. Our characters do cross paths (if you look close enough) but we didn't want them to dwell too long together. After all, swords are sharp, and something bad might've happened!

Guest Blogger - Ty Johnston

Today I have a guest post from an author I respect and whose work I enjoy, Ty Johnston.  Take it away, Ty:

Fantasy author Ty Johnston’s blog tour 2011 is running from November 1 through November 30. His novels include City of Rogues, Bayne’s Climb and More than Kin, all of which are available for the Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/Ty-Johnston/e/B002MCBQRU/ ), the Nook (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/ty-johnston ) and online at Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/darkbow). His latest novel, Ghosts of the Asylum, will be available for e-books on November 21. To find out more, follow him at his blog tyjohnston.blogspot.com.

As a writer, lots of different authors have influenced my own interests, writing style and favorite genres. From Alexandre Dumas to Stephen King, Leo Tolstoy to Max Brooks, Homer to Ed McBain, my list of favorite authors could be quite extensive.

But for the most part, I write fantasy, usually epic fantasy. This brings up the question, which fantasy authors have influenced me the most?

Like many youngsters who were readers growing up in the 1970s, I took my first bite of fantasy literature with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, following it up soon after with The Lord of the Rings. For my generation, many got their start with Tolkien and his tales of Bilbo and Frodo.

Growing up, I did not have much access to fantasy, so discovering Tolkien was eye opening. I was transported away to a land where even the least among us could at least try to accomplish great good. For the 7-year-old me, that was heady stuff.

Soon after, as I neared my teen years, I discovered Sword and Sorcery literature through the Thieves’ World anthologies of short stories, edited by Robert Asprin and later co-edited with his then-wife, Lynn Abbey. Again, my eyes were opened, this time to a much more gritty version of fantasy, one that seemed much more adult to the young me.

At this point, I was thirsty for more fantasy fiction, but there just wasn’t that much available in the town where I lived. That changed in 1983 when a local book store began carrying the Dungeons & Dragons games. The games were popular, and right away the store started selling more and more fantasy literature. This is how I discovered Fred Saberhagen and The First Book of Swords, and soon after Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight. These two novels were each the beginning of a separate series, so I had my reading cut out for me for some little while.

One element I’ve always enjoyed about Saberhagen’s writing, and that of Weis and Hickman, is the prose was not overly flowery. They told their stories with lots of characters and lots of action, and they didn’t take a thousand pages to do so. I strive for much of that in my own writing to this day.

So far I’ve outlined the majority of my early fantasy reading. I left out a handful of authors, some of whom I quite enjoy, because I’ve never felt they had a major influence upon myself as a writer. But I have to mention Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber, two astounding authors who kept my interest in fantasy going strong.

As I grew older, I began to read less fantasy. Actually, I began to read less in general, though I never stopped completely. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, my interests were drawn to horror, with the likes of Stephen King and Robert McCammon holding sway over much of my reading during this era. Also during this time, I became a huge fan of The Sandman graphic novels, written by Neil Gaiman, and found them an excellent mixture of fantasy and horror. To this day I consider it some of Gaiman’s strongest writing.

By the late 1990s, I was burning myself out on horror. I began to turn back to fantasy more and more.

I found I had a lot of catching up to do, as I had missed a lot of the newer fantasy authors who had come along during my dry spell.

When I dipped back into fantasy, I started with R.A. Salvatore, mainly because he was such a popular writer. The first book of his I read was Homeland, and I still enjoy that novel. Since then I’ve read about a dozen of Salvatore’s books, some I like and some not so much, but I still like much of his writing style.

More recently, in the last few years I’ve been turned onto Steven Erikson and his Malazan Books of the Fallen. I’ve read the first 9 books in this 10-book series, and I’ve found much to love about each and every one of them. I think Erikson is overly long-winded and could use a strong editor, but he’s the only fantasy author who raises such strong emotions within me.

Also, over the last few years I’ve found myself turning more and more back to Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, and the father of Sword and Sorcery literature. I read a fair amount of Howard when I was younger, but it was not until I was in my late 30s that I truly appreciated how gifted a writer he was. I wish there was more material by the man, as I’ve read just about everything of his I can find, and that includes a lot of short stories outside the fantasy genres.

Stephen King continues to hold my interest, though I think his novels are a little more hit-and-miss than they were a couple of decades ago. While I don’t find it perfect, I did quite enjoy his series The Dark Tower and its mixture of epic fantasy, horror and even science fiction.

That about wraps my list for fantasy authors who have had a major influence upon me. You might be surprised at some names that are missing. George R.R. Martin comes to mind, as does Brian Jacques. To be honest, I’ve yet to read those authors. I have several of their books, but I keep putting them off because there is so much out there to read, within and outside of the fantasy genres.

But I’ll get to them. I promise. I’m always looking to discover great authors.

Author Interview - Erin Lale

Today's bonus treat is an interview with Erin Lale, author of the Punch novels, bigger-than-life science fiction set in a shared universe called Time Yarns.  Take it away, Erin...

You've taken your writing in some innovative directions with Time Yarns.  Tell us a little bit about how the Time Yarns shared universe works.

Time Yarns is a different kind of shared world; instead of sharing characters or settings, what all the different stories have in common is the way physics and magic work. The core idea of Time Yarns is that time travelers have gone back to change history and have created many parallel universes, and that these time travelers use the power of the mind to travel in time because human beings cannot actually invent time machines.

When someone tries to invent a time machine, what they get is a machine like The Timelessness Machine, which is the title of a short story I published in the first issue of Sterling Web long ago and have recently reprinted in my collection of my short fiction, Universal Genius.

There is a story about a timelessness machine in each of the two upcoming Time Yarns multi-author anthologies, Cassandra's Time Yarns and Anarchy Zone Time Yarns, by New Zealander and aglal biofuel inventor Ian Miller and by Canary Islands resident Tony Thorne MBE, who was awarded a chivalric order by the Queen of England for advances in cryosurgery tools and carbon fiber furnaces. They each came up with the idea of the physics of timelessness independently, without having read my classic of hard sf. Great minds think alike. 

The Punch books are a series of transmedia novels.  Tell us how that works.  What are the transmedia elements?  Do you see multimedia as the future of ebooks?

The Punch books are packed with pictures, video clips, sound, and art. I imagine a future in which what sort of creative a person is has become disconnected from the medium because all creative works are on the same electronic platform. People will no longer define their work as being on cellulose or celluloid, sound waves or light waves, because everything is on the net and on ebook readers that double as computers and smart phones. People will no longer call themselves writers, filmmakers, game designers, musicians, photographers, composers, graphic designers, or animators; everyone will be a transmedia artist.


One of the other Time Yarns authors, Humberto Sachs, believes so much in my vision of the future of transmedia that he set up a project within his company, TeknoX, to bring it about. Sachs is an aerospace engineer from Brazil, co-designer of the F-18 and the International Space Station, but now he has started a company to design an open source integrated hardware / software design and production platform, and he's using the transmedia project to test the platform.


If an edition of Punch can be published as one long book with all its transmedia elements intact and fully imbedded instead of having to link the videos from host sites, that will prove the platform superior to today's platforms. It's been really exciting to set out to publish sf anthologies and happen to connect with a writer who is also working on bringing about the next technical revolution.

Carla Punch's story is one wild ride.  Marine, knight, captain, saint...  How did you dream up this incredible journey that she's on?

Her story is Life 2.0, my own life re-imagined. I started writing the first draft of Punch 10 years ago, shortly after completing my memoir of Life 1.0, my nonfiction book Greater Than the Sum of My Parts: My Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder. The autobiography is raw life, and Punch is life whipped up into a feast. Some people give their problems to a higher power; I gave mine to an action hero.


The Punch books deal with a lot of the same issues I deal with in my memoir, such as recovery from PTSD, gender and sexual orientation issues, issues around career as identity, religious conversion experiences, disability issues, cultural assimilation, infertility and substitute child-figures, and how a person reinvents herself and achieves personal growth, all re-envisioned as a hero's journey. 

Humour is an important element of the Punch books.  How do you juggle so many elements, high adventure and epic plot scope, and still keep things fun and funny?

That's just the way my mind works. I see humor in so many things. Even the name of the universe, Time Yarns, is a kind of pun, because a yarn is a story and it also refers to string theory and to the classical fates or wyrd sisters spinning the threads of time and weaving the fabric of the universe.


In fact, that's an image I use in the Time Yarns Universe trailer that recently wrapped filming and is now being edited, and which I hope to have ready in January for the release of the multi-author anthologies. There's even an element of humor in the trailer, when the voiceover says, "What if thousands of individuals who did not agree with each other all went back in time to change history for the better? What if, among the many resultant parallel universes, was the one we live in?" And then the image cuts to a Chevy hood being thumped open with a literal ba-da-boom sound. That's just the sort of thing that bubbles up in my brain.

What's it like to craft a seven-volume epic?  What have you learned about storytelling from working on such a large canvas?

The first draft of Punch was originally shown to fellow writers years ago as it was written, chapter by chapter, so it was actually a serial from the very beginning. In fact, some of the plot elements were crowdsourced, as a reader suggested the Nelonn / Khunnir pairing and the whole subplot of Nelonn's apprenticeship to Brinonn was created just to set up the scene in the tent a dozen chapters later. Working on the second draft after deciding to unify Punch with other stories into a shared world really made me focus on what was essential to the story.


I also realized that Punch naturally broke into 7 pieces of novella size, like acts in a play.  But I learned the most when I tried to write a description of book 1 to put on the book's Amazon page. I couldn't wrap my mind around a short description of book 1 until I read a voluminous tome called The Seven Basic Plots, and realized I had inadvertantly written a comedy. Book 1: The Loribond has the same plot structure as a classical Greek comedy.

What do you want people to take away from the Punch stories?  What impact do you want to have on your readers?

I want readers to experience Punch the same way I experience it: as a healing journey. Every time I re-read it to edit it, I start in rags along with Carla in book 1, and by book 7 I've experienced spiritual riches.


Read Loribond, Book 1 of the Punch series.

Interview with Phoebe Wray

In the Plowshare, the crew and the civilians were in the galley, watching the live feed from the cameras in Renn’s helmet. No one talked. Her voice was piped in, but she wasn’t doing much talking, either. Leaving the sled for a careening object was one of the most dangerous steps, and she concentrated on it.

“Okay, there’s something here...” They could hear her breathing a little faster but they couldn’t see what she was doing.

“Renn?” Harry’s voice was quiet. “Talk to us.”

She scoffed and everyone relaxed a little. “I’m busy! It’s a—I dunno what—a control box, I think.”

Today's special treat is an interview with Phoebe Wray, who has a short story in an anthology of military SF by all female authors.  Take it away, Wray:

Tell us a little bit about Trashing.

It’s a short story in the anthology “No Man’s Land” from Dark Quest Books; Volume 4 of the “Defending the Future” series edited by Mike McPhail. They are futurist, military science fiction tales, all written by women. I’m very proud to have a story in it. They’re whopping good yarns.

Trashing has an unusual premise. How did you come up with the idea?

It was a story sitting half-done when I heard about “No Man’s Land.” I dug it out and polished it up. My heroine is a Lieutenant in the Targus Navy, a specialist identifying, assessing and retrieving the debris and odds and ends of satellites, booster rockets and the like, tumbling around in her galaxy. She makes a splendid find just as the Bad Guys show up.

I’ve been collecting news stories and NASA reports about space junk for a long time. That stuff, and there’s a lot of it up there, is a navigation hazard, among other things. Even a paint chip traveling 17,000 mph can do a lot of damage. And then, of course, there’s the glove that a Gemini10 crew member lost, still orbiting.

Oddly, the week after the book was released this past May, the International Space Station was on alert because a piece of junk was heading straight for it. Fortunately, it missed; but the crew had already identified their “Safe places,” in case it didn’t.

By the way, I got the planet name “Targus” from the online NASA list of named space objects. There are a gazillion of them!

You're the president of Broad Universe. Tell us about the organization.

Broad Universe is a support and information organization for women who write genre fiction. It was founded in 1999 at the Feminist Convention, WisCon. I’m one of the “mothers” and have served on the Boards from the beginning.

We ask: Why don’t women get more genre fiction published? Why don’t we get as many reviews as the boys do? Why do some stick-in-muds still say we can’t write those tales? Just read what’s out there and your mind will change.

BU is supports and encourages, and through our website (www.broaduniverse.org) and several online lists, we provide a sounding board/tip board/information. We’re a non-profit and all-volunteer group, with members around the world. It’s an amazingly congenial place. There hasn't been a flame war ever, since the beginning.

I stepped down as the Prez in August, having served on the Motherboard for a number of years. It was time to pass the torch. I remain on the Advisory Board.

There was a time when science fiction seemed mostly like a club for boys. You're challenging that notion by writing successfully in the genre, and you create characters who fly in the face of conventional genre stereotypes. Has it been an extra challenge to be a woman writing military science fiction?

It’s getting better. Women still aren’t taken as seriously as men in some of the subgenres, military sci fi being one. The sheer number of women who are willing to put their thoughts out there helps. For new writers, it’s challenging. And, trust me, there are still men—writers, reviewers, editors—who scoff and/or sneer.

It’s a slippery fish to land. Right now, Broad Universe has two members who are professional number-crunchers, and they are undertaking a systematic (scientific) look at the stats so we will have more meaningful data. I’ve been working on that particular issue for years. Their findings are starting to go up on our website. They are sobering.

I normally blog about indie e-books, but I have a soft spot for Edge Publishing, since they're here in Calgary, my home town. Tell us a bit about Jemma7729.

That’s my first novel, and it was a delight to work with the genial Brian Hades at EDGE. He’s a savvy, enthusiastic person, and very encouraging. EDGE continues to grow and is publishing excellent work.

The “elevator” on Jemma is that it’s “a futurist, feminist, dystopian, action-adventure novel.” Whew! It continues to get great reviews. Jemma is a rebel in North America in the 23rd century. She’s a skilled saboteur (saboteuse?), who joins with an underground movement to bring a constitutional government back to the Northern continent. She’s smart and compassionate, and the odds are totally stacked against her. She fights for freedom—for herself and everyone—no matter what.

There is a sequel—called J2—which will be out this fall from Dark Quest. It’s a bit odd, perhaps, because the heroine is Jemma’s clone. She looks like Jemma, and there are certain personality quirks that they share, but J2’s a lab rat and a thinking machine. It was fun to write.

It can be tough for a writer, sitting safely in a comfortable chair, to write credibly about the terror inherent in an action scene. You have an advantage, though. You've done things that would scare a veteran soldier green. What did you find more terrifying: standup comedy or live theatre? Do you draw on those experiences when you write?

Oh, yeah! Stand-up can be very daunting. Especially if the jokes don’t work. I loved, especially, acting Shakespeare. He never misses, if you trust him, for one thing. If you tell the truth. You have to do that in stand-up, too. Audiences know when you’re faking.

I DO use my theatre background, mainly in two places: character development and dialogue. My stories and books are loaded with dialogue. Jemma is written in first-person, so it’s one long monologue. J2 is not first person, and that allows me more character development of secondary characters. There are some people from the first book in the second. I have to be extra aware of their voices.  

Interview With the Vampire Author

Today I have a special treat for you, an interview with Julie Dawson of Bards and Sages Publishing.  Julie has written a dark and riveting vampire novel called A Game of Blood.

A Game of Blood includes a quotation from HP Lovecraft, and themes that would be familiar to any Lovecraft fan.  Your protagonist, Detective Grogan, grapples with unspeakable horror, and his very sanity is at risk.  Are you influenced by Lovecraft?  How has this impacted the writing of this novel?

I have always felt that the thing that made Lovecraft’s work so terrifying was the fact that these insanely powerful entities were not engaging humanity as rivals or adversaries or even useful pawns in some cosmic game, but just didn’t care about us.  We humans have this tendency to think we are the center of the cosmos.  And yet here was Lovecraft presenting these beings who honestly thought no more about humans than we think about ants.  Most of Lovecraft’s work isn’t about some monster going out to cause chaos and destroy humanity.  It isn’t some epic struggle between good and evil.  No, it is usually about some human accidentally stumbling upon something they should never have seen, and the entity suddenly thinking “Oh, a human” kind of like we would think “Oh, a mosquito.”

There is also the underlying theme in Lovecraft’s work that we are not nearly as smart as we think we are, and that there are all sorts of things going on around us that we are oblivious to.  Whether it is actual ignorance of our surroundings or wilful ignorance to shut out unpleasant thoughts, there is the notion that the world we think we know is not what we think it is.  That was one of the things I wanted to examine.  In the book, Mitch is less horrified by the reality that vampires exist than by the fact that they have been able to function, in complete secret, for so many centuries.  And the more he digs, the more he sees, and the more it terrifies him.

Vampires get a lot of different treatments these days.  Comedic, romantic, dramatic, we've even seen vampires as private detectives. But you've taken the vampire story back to its roots.  A Game of Blood is horror, and your vampire is a monster.  How did you choose this portrayal of vampires?  I know that Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot was an early influence for you as a writer.  What else inspired you in your vision of the vampire Darius Hawthorne?

The novel actually started off as a short story.  I call it my “Anti-Twilight” tale.  What would a “real” vampire do with a love struck girl with a romantic interest in vampires?  I’ve often joked that the whole “vampire as love interest” thing is actually a vampire plot to make it easier to feed.  So that was part of the direction of the original short story.  When I was finished with the story, however, I realized Darius needed a bigger stage.  

What I tried to do is look at the vampire from both a folklore level and a psychological level.  People who read the book are going to recognize the vampires are close to a lot of the Eastern European lore.  Some can turn into mist form.  Some have animalistic features.  They don’t cast reflections.  In terms of their powers, they very much reflect the type of vampire more often associated with 19^th century gothic literature than modern portrayals.   

But there is also the psychological aspect of vampirism.  What impact would that actually have on a person’s psyche?  One day you are human, and then next the only way to survive is to drain the blood from people?  Nobody comes out of that mentally unscathed.  And I think this is the part a lot of modern vampire authors gloss over, or outright ignore. 

Survival instincts take over. Predatory instincts emerge.  Empathy for your prey diminishes.  You can’t be friends with your food, after all.  And other vampires aren’t your friends, either.  They are competition for hunting grounds, because a territory can only support so many apex predators. 

So you start to do things to secure your territory.  You accumulate wealth and resources.  You manipulate institutions in order to mask your existence.  Darius, for all of his charm and wit and humor, is a sociopath.  He has to be in order to survive. 

So much has been written about vampires that it's a challenge to make a vampire character who is fresh and original.  How did you make Darius stand out from the literary legions of the undead?

I think what makes Darius stand out is not that he is something new on the vampire scene, but rather a very traditional vampire concept.  On the vampire family tree, he is much closer to Polidori’s Lord Ruthven than Meyers’ Edward.  One reviewer called him “The new Lestat,” but while it’s flattering to be put in the same category as Rice, I don’t think that is accurate.  Lestat at least struggled at times with his morality.  He lost that struggle more often than not, but at least he was somewhat aware that his behavior was inherently wrong.  Darius doesn’t suffer from any moral struggle.  He sees nothing wrong with his behavior. 

In fact, he considers humanity’s empathy to be out of sync with the natural world and actively rants against it.  There is a scene in the book in which Mitch confronts Darius concerning the rivalry between Darius and his sire.  At one point, Mitch tries to make Darius feel some sort of guilt for his crimes by mentioning the death of a woman he was engaged to marry when mortal.  Instead, it reinforces Darius’ position.

“You can’t even compare the two!”  Hawthorne jumped out of his seat and started pacing like a caged beast.  “This…this is the problem with this modern age!  Political correctness run amok!  All humans are not created equal!  In your attempts to value all lives equally you devalue those that actually matter!  You coddle your weak and invalid at the expense of the strong!  You throw resources at deformities that should not even have been born, while allowing the healthy to do without!  No other creature wastes so much to protect the worthless among them!”

Tell me a bit about your hero, Mitch Grogan, and how you created him.

 Mitch suffers from what can be called a case of chronic empathy.  At the beginning of the book, he’s separated from his wife, who is going through her own personal crisis after having a miscarriage and developing breast cancer.  He wants to be there to support her, but she keeps pushing him away and it is eating him up inside.  Though he’s a bit rough around the edges and curses like a sailor, he has a big heart and wants to do the right thing. 

The concept behind Mitch was that he is someone who is Darius’ polar opposite, and yet they are more alike than Mitch would ever want to admit.  Both are competitive, and that competitive nature is what drives a lot of the one-upmanship in the story.    

Both are also pragmatists.  For Darius, that simply means doing what is necessary to protect himself.  For Mitch, that means weighing the lesser of two evils and trying to mitigate the damage being done.  Mitch knows his hands are tied in a lot of ways.  He can’t challenge Darius physically.  He can’t compete against him in terms of resources.  He can’t even employ the full support of the police department without endangering his partner’s family.  And he can’t go public with information about vampires without either being branded insane or causing a panic that could lead to even more deaths.  So he is forced to play this game by vampire rules, and he is willing to do that because it is the only way to protect the most people.

What were your goals with this novel?  What impact do you want to have on your readers?

The first goal was to bring the literary vampire back to its roots and remind people why the motif has remained so alluring for so long.  Secondly, I hope readers can form a connection with the characters and feel a bond with them.  A story like this only works if the readers can care about the characters and what happens to them.  I like to think I’ve given readers characters they can care about.  Even the minor characters have their own distinct personalities and you can relate to them. 

You have a background in designing role-playing games.  How has this affected your writing?

I think what having a background in RPGs does is force you to think through your world building.  Even when you are setting stories in the real world, you are presenting your version of the world.  That means you have to make sure that all of the pieces fit together.  In RPGs, we call it game balance.  Game balance doesn’t mean all powers are created equal.  It means that no one power is so powerful that it fundamentally changes the world.  So if you think of the traditional fantasy world, you have mages that can throw fireballs from a hundred yards away.  That is a hugely powerful ability if left unchecked.  So it gets balanced out by the fact that there are usually some sort of restrictions on how many spells a mage can cast, either because they can only memorize X number of spells per day or because those spells pull from the mage’s own life force.  If you have priests that can cast resurrection on the dead, how does that impact the world?  Without something to restrict the use of the spell, death becomes a nuisance and nothing more.  So you require expensive components for the spell or say it has to be cast in a certain time period. 

So you take those thought processes and you apply them to what you are writing.  In the modern world, if vampires existed, how would they keep their existence secret?  Why would they need to?  What entities or institutions would exist to challenge them?  What powers would they need to survive?   How would those powers give them an advantage, and how does one mitigate those advantages?  What are their weaknesses?  Do those weaknesses make sense within the lore you have established for the story?  If you put everything together right, you have a world full of supernatural creatures that still feels organic and believable.