Archive for category Interview
What’s the Idea with American Craftsmen? — A Guest Post by Tom Doyle
Posted by Jason Cordova in Interview on May 13, 2014
—note: Shiny Book Review would like to welcome guest author Tom Doyle. Tom is here to talk about his new book, American Craftsman, which came out last week. Please give him a warm welcome.
What’s the Idea with American Craftsmen?
by Tom Doyle
Looking at the cover of my debut novel from Tor, American Craftsmen, you might get the impression that my main idea from the outset was to write a modern-day fantasy of military intrigue. The craftsmen of my title are magician soldiers and psychic spies. Two rival craft soldiers, Captain Dale Morton and Major Michael Endicott, must fight together against a treasonous cabal in the Pentagon’s highest covert ranks.
It’s an active area: though a relatively new subgenre, modern-day military fantasy has (along with military SF) grown increasingly prominent. But what I think sets my story apart from related SF/F works are the other ideas I had before I focused on the military-intrigue storyline, ideas that gave my novel more of a sense of history, both literary and real world.
To my own surprise, one of my initial inspirations for this book was L. Frank Baum. When he began telling children’s stories, he had the notion of discarding the existing European folk tales and building a fantasy that was modern and distinctly American. That’s how we got The Wizard of Oz.
I wasn’t going to write a children’s story, but the thought of confining myself to a U.S. mythos for an adult fantasy was oddly exciting. I looked at American folklore, but I ended up spending more time with the great early American writers of the fantastic such as Poe and Hawthorne.
As Classical myths reveal the deep hopes and fears of the ancient Greeks, our nineteenth-century authors may be part of the country’s subconscious. If this is true, the overall creepiness of early American fiction should be worrisome. The founders of our independent fictional canon aren’t known for stage comedies filled with wordplay or for novels centered on the marriage plot. Nor did they master the simple pragmatic optimism that on the surface seemed to be the national zeitgeist. Rather, in tales filled with occult obsessions and morbid fascinations, they explored the shadowy underside of the New World’s psyche.
I fed the classic stories into my conceptual pot, and I didn’t just throw in the tasty bits from the usual dark suspects. For example, the parlor of the House of Morton has sickly yellow wallpaper in a nod to the early feminist story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
As I read or reread American fantastic literature and it stewed away in my mind, I saw the lineages of influence: for example, Poe to Chambers to Lovecraft. This reminded me of a concept I had played with in one of my earliest published stories: American families of magical practitioners stretching back hundreds of years. At first, my book was going to cover a whole secret world of American magic, with old families and new practitioners from a variety of backgrounds. But the reader of my earliest draft section, author Stephanie Dray, saw the military intrigue element and said, “This is great. Do this.” I really owe her a lot for getting me to focus on that plotline, as I wasn’t inclined to write a doorstopper-sized epic.
Once I made that choice, the military elements dovetailed nicely with my family lineages, as readers of Lucian Truscott IV would already know. The magic system emerged organically from the classic stories and from military necessities. My world almost seemed to build itself, and I was ready to populate it with my post-traumatically stressed magician veterans and my dangerously confused psychic spies. I hope you enjoy meeting them.
For more about American Craftsmen and my other stories, please visit www.tomdoylewriter.com or connect with me on the social media platform of your choice.
An Interview with Novelist Extraordinaire Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Interview on March 16, 2014
Over the past two years, we at Shiny Book Review have avidly devoured every last one of Katharine Eliska Kimbriel’s novels — there are five to date (FIRES OF NUALA, HIDDEN FIRES, FIRE SANCTUARY, NIGHT CALLS, and KINDRED RITES), with a sixth, SPIRAL PATH, currently being polished even as we speak.
There’s a reason for that.
Put simply, anything Ms. Kimbriel writes is worth the price of admission. It doesn’t matter whether she writes fantasy or science fiction; it doesn’t matter whether she’s writing a young adult novel, as in her Night Calls series, or if she’s writing a complex and challenging far-future epic clearly meant for adults, as with her Chronicles of Nuala.
Whatever she writes is excellent in all particulars. Guaranteed.
So, without further ado, please welcome novelist Katharine Eliska Kimbriel!
SBR: You’ve written both fantasy and hard science fiction, and your writing has been well-received in both genres. What, if anything, do you do differently when writing a fantasy story as opposed to a SF story?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: As I mention over in my bio on Book View Cafe, I return to the question of power, and the metaphor is either magic or technology. Who has it, who doesn’t, do they want it, what will they do with it, how were they affected by it? It doesn’t matter if I’m writing tech or magic–I want to know how people are changed by their surroundings, events, and the catalyst–magic or tech. On Nuala, a space-faring group of humans is changed forever by being stranded on a planet where the radiation breakdown is 3x what it is on Earth, with the resultant mutation and sterility factors to overcome. They could dwindle into death, or they could blaze a new path. In my fantasy, sometimes the magic solves problems, and sometimes it makes problems–but the people have to deal with it, while still living their lives and interacting with others, both magical and mundane. I tend not to change a lot, when I create a society–I change a little, making an interesting blend from Earth societies, just to see what will happen. On Nuala, I used three things, essentially–the increased radiation level, the mutated mineral-leeching microbe, and the mutation that amplified the ability to heal, the so-called King’s touch.
Little changes can multiply into big things!
SBR: How did you come up with your Chronicles of Nuala? (What gave you the initial idea?)
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: Two things…I was fascinated by pictures of the huge vegetables growing in the soil around Hiroshima, and the rampant fertility of the soil. I’d also read about wiring a battery to a bone break to speed healing. So I took two questions: 1) What if people could not only survive, but in some weird way, thrive, in a radioactive environment? 2) What if the the concept of laying-on of hands to heal became a reality? Then the story began.
SBR: What was your first story sale? How did that lead into writing novels?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: Actually, my first sale was Fire Sanctuary! I sold it to Bluejay Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s, but they never counter-signed the contract (they had no cash flow, and were in trouble) so I’d gotten an agent, who resold the book to Warner/Popular Library/Questar in about a year. Those were the bad old days. We were captive to New York publishing.
SBR: How did you come up with your Night Calls series starring Alfreda “Allie” Sorensson?
Older cover for NIGHT CALLS
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: Allie leapt from my subconscious at a statement from the wonderful writer and editor Jane Yolen. She was doing a series of anthologies for Harper & Row, and the first one was to be Werewolves!. A group of us were lunching at World Fantasy Convention, and we were peppering her with questions, testing the start of funny or serious short pieces. I don’t write a lot of short things–they bloom quickly into novels. But I asked her, “Does the werewolf have to be seen?” Jane replied, “The werewolf does not have to be seen, but its presence has to be felt.”
New cover for NIGHT CALLS
I then had two very sharp images come to mind. First, a young girl in clothing that was not modern–either pre- or post modern–gently brushing away snow to find garlic attempting to root under a window, and a young girl with long, blond braids dragging a chair to an interior door to hang up a braid of garlic. In that first version, Allie was post-apocalyptic, but Kim Moran at Amazing Stories convinced me to place her in the past. Allie was born there.
SBR: What sorts of research did you do to add verisimilitude for each series?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: It depended on the story. I researched Antarctica and mineral-leeching microbes for Nuala–also Mirror Matter/antimatter, recessive eye colors, sequoias! For Allie’s world I have an extensive bookshelf of books on herbs, magic, folk tales, fairy stories of Scandinavia, Ireland and the world–colonial life and times. The War of 1812…
SBR: How well did you know Roger Zelasny, and what influence (if any) did he have on your work?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: Roger Zelazny came to several Texas conventions when I lived in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. I thought he was wonderful, and he decided I was pretty interesting, too. I came up with the book title If at Faust You Don’t Succeed–that was the weekend he was all excited about the book he was writing from the POV of Jack the Ripper’s Dog, one of my favorite of his books, A Night In the Lonesome October. We exchanged letters when his schedule permitted, and had started talking on the phone (we had different networks, which back then was a good thing–we could swap industry gossip!) when he became ill with his cancer. Only very, very close friends, most of them in New Mexico, knew how ill he was…I was ready to come to Santa Fe at that point, but did not hear back from him. Then word went out through the fan networks that he had died, and I knew why I had not heard back. Instead of seeing him, I was writing an elegy for Locus and a sympathy note to Jane Lindskold.
I miss him still. He never got to see Allie, he was too ill to read the story. Roger taught me to write short stories as if they were the last chapter of a novel–and a lot about writing dialogue. You can follow his dialog for pages without any qualifiers telling you who is speaking. That helps me remember to keep speech patterns distinct.
SBR: How is being published by Book View Cafe different from working with your previous publisher(s)? What do you like about this approach, and do you think there will be more consortiums like BVC in the future?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: It is collaborative, because as a coop we do everything, and we help with everything. We have a huge forum where there are topics for kibbitzing on cover art, layout, back cover blurbs–we have people currently specializing in everything from ebook formatting to keeping the web site going through blogging and copy editing. There are people shepherding production schedules and volunteers. I could not have gotten my books up without my fellow authors, due to my health problems back in the early BVC years. I hope I have been useful to them. Right now I do everything from woman the events calendar to serve as a member of the board. And as you know, I mention all the great books we bring out. It’s a blessing to me that everyone in the coop is good at what they write, whether their work is to my personal tastes or not. I have no hesitation bringing their books to the attention of my fans, because there’s a chance that some of them may be looking for just that type of book.
I do think the producer cooperative model will be a successful one for writers. We are inventing a new way to do business, but we are hopeful and making more money each year, So…forward!
SBR: You’ve recently announced (via Facebook) that the third book in the Night Calls series has been finished. How soon will it be available?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: Well, I’m editing. Once I am satisfied with it, Spiral Path will go to at least one Book View Cafe member for a beta read, because it is an original work. (Also to my cover artist, Mitchell Bentley.) It’s at least a four month lag time from that point. I hope at the end of this week to be able to ballpark it, because I want to send out print copies for review to Locus and possibly Rave Reviews. End of summer, if I can get the lead slot at Book View Cafe? This is possibly Allie’s last chance. I have to make some money from the books, because I spent a great deal of money staying alive. I have to make a living and try to replenish the emptied investment account. So…if not Allie, I will have to try writing something else. In fact, I will be starting a new series, a contemporary fantasy, after this, and also, I hope a fourth Allie book, if she’s still telling me her story.
(Interviewer’s aside: Let us sincerely hope so! Allie’s a great character and I want more of her, pronto. End of aside.)
SBR: Ms. Kimbriel, e-books of all five of your novels are available right now. But what about hard-copy, “dead tree” editions? Are they, too, available now?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: Well, all my books exist in paper. I just don’t get any money for sales of the SF, unless you buy them from me at a convention! I’ll do the third Allie in print, but the sales on the SF are not great enough to justify new cover art. So don’t expect the Nuala books in print soon–I need a better paying job first! On the other hand, I have some new copies of Hidden Fires that might interest folk… ;^)
SBR: As an editor, what is your favorite genre to edit? (Or do you like a little bit of everything?) And what is your favorite book that you’ve ever edited, and why?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: Actually, I don’t have a favorite right now. I love the variety. I prefer fiction, and really enjoy concept editing. I like helping someone find their own voice and where they want to go, and making it the best book their idea can be. I would have liked being a NY editor, but that didn’t happen.
SBR: Why didn’t it happen?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: Becoming a known concept editor who can make a living at it tends to start with a job (working) for a NY publisher. You had to move to NY in those days, and that was something I would not have dreamed of doing when I was first publishing–my husband had a good job in Texas, and Texas was having its first tech boom at that time. Later I was trying to establish a business that would let me write fiction part time, and I was looking for life balance, so I became a clinical massage therapist. Finally, I became ill, and life has been catch-up ever since. So although I have been told by many writers that I am a good concept editor, and my resume tag line is “Writer, editor, and trainer specializing in retaining the authentic client voice”, becoming a developmental editor at this point is unlikely.
SBR: What do you think is most important when pursuing a career as a writer and editor? Talent? Persistence? Money? Connections? A little of everything? (And does fame, at all, interest you? If it does, how so? And if not, why not?)
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: None of those things hurt. To be a writer, a storyteller, you need stories you are driven to tell (and that may be harder than ever to do, with even more life distractions out there!) persistence, and talent. To be published requires persisting…at the writing, the submissions, or researching how to do it yourself. And then researching how to promote, or not–how to submit the book to a few review sites and let it go, keep writing.
Fame interests me only as a medium to reach more readers with my stories. Money, sadly, would be handy–I spent a fortune staying alive, and I must work now, and need a decent income. If the writing cannot pull its weight, then I have to relegate it to a hobby and return to school or take whatever I can find in the current market. I think Alfreda will outlive me, but who knows what future creators will do with her and her tales. I don’t know about anything else I’ve written or may yet write.
SBR: One, final question: What would you like to say to new authors?
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel: If you have a story that keeps you awake at night, then you may just be a storyteller. Figure out how you want to tell it–book, graphic novel, film–and go for it. No other hobby can compete with creating something unique. Don’t let it be the thing you regret most in life; the thing you never tried.
If you have regrets? Don’t let them be your stories.
Again, many thanks to Katharine Eliska Kimbriel for consenting to this wide-ranging interview . . . now, go forth and read her books already!
— interviewed by Barb
Interview — Stephanie Osborn
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Interview on November 14, 2013
One of the good things we at SBR are able to do from time to time is to interview writers, editors and/or publishers (well, so far we haven’t had one, but the year is young). Today’s chosen victim — er, writer and editor, is the acclaimed Stephanie Osborn, author and rocket scientist, who consented to doing one of the most wide-ranging interviews we’ve ever had. Three of her novels in her “Displaced Detectives” series have been reviewed at SBR (here and here), while her nonfiction work with scientist and author Travis S. Taylor, A New American Space Plan, is reviewed here.
SBR: Ms. Osborn, thanks for coming to visit with us today.
Stephanie Osborn: Thank you for asking me!
SBR: When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?
Stephanie Osborn: You know, I didn’t want to be a writer in my youth; I wanted to be a scientist and work in the space program. I’m not sure when I first decided to become an author. I had some notions about a possible novel franchise after the very first Men In Black movie, which I adored, and my husband Darrell encouraged me to pursue it. That’s when I discovered there were many books in me. But of course, the rights were all tied up, and the only publisher with the rights didn’t take unagented submissions, and being yet-unpublished, I couldn’t get an agent at that point. However, somewhere in there is when I realized I could do this, and that I liked it and wanted to do it.
SBR: Your most popular solo series is possibly the Displaced Detective series, which brings Sherlock Holmes into the modern day, where he solves crimes with the able assistance of hyperspatial physicist Skye Chadwick. How did you come up with the idea to meld both mystery and science fiction in this way?
Stephanie Osborn: Wow. You know, I really don’t know. I had gotten back into a spate of reading everything Sherlock Holmes I could get my hands on ― I’ve done that periodically since childhood, when I discovered Holmes ― but there wasn’t a book out there that was quite what I was looking for. So I decided to write it. I deliberately set out to do something different, to expand the range of what the Great Detective could do, and I think I succeeded rather nicely.
SBR: What’s so attractive about Sherlock Holmes, and what’s the key to Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduring appeal?
Stephanie Osborn: I really don’t know about Sir Arthur. That might sound kind of snarky or arrogant and I don’t mean it like that at all: I just don’t like to analyze an author’s work to the level that it would take to answer that question, because literary analysis always took the magic out of the book, to me. For whatever it’s worth, I think it has to do with his ability to generate these fascinating and unusual characters.
But Holmes was the first in what became a long line of characters like him ― though there were mystery and detective stories before him, he started the detective genre as we know it, AND he has a certain cachet due to his intelligence. I like to say that he had Spock Syndrome before there was a Mr. Spock to name it after.
SBR: Skye Chadwick, the heroine in the DD series, is a hyperspatial physicist. Explain how you came up with her character.
Stephanie Osborn: Well, that’s pretty simple. I wanted to give Holmes a female to interact with, someone to actually work cases with. After all, this is the 21st Century, and, well, equality, you know. But I recognized right off the bat that she would really have to BE his equal or he wouldn’t bother with her. Then I realized that if she was the scientist responsible for developing the project that brought him over from his home universe, she’d have to be bloody brilliant from the get-go, and he couldn’t possibly gainsay the fact. And the character formed from those beginnings.
SBR: What are books five and six in the Displaced Detective series going to be about? And what’s their ETA?
Stephanie Osborn: Book five is titled, A Case of Spontaneous Combustion. It starts out with a tiny village in England being wiped out – every living thing in it killed – by a phenomenon that appears to be a case of mass spontaneous combustion, but turns out to be something very different. Holmes is called in to investigate – without Skye – and hijinks ensue. I got the contract for it a couple weeks back. It should come out sometime in the Spring of 2014.
Book six is something that has been banging around in my head for awhile now, and this past weekend it congealed. I wanted to do a supernatural-based Displaced Detective story, something about a haunted something-or-other that Skye and Sherlock end up investigating, but I’d been going to set it in a European castle, either in the UK or on the continent. Well, I’d just been to CONtraflow science fiction convention in New Orleans, Louisiana! Wonderful, young convention, growing fast, lots of fun. Just as much fun, though, was going to the French Quarter and exploring. NOLA has the reputation of being the most-haunted city in the world, and it turned out to be perfect for that book concept. Scenes started coming to me as soon as we started walking around! I started writing it the next day, during the convention! It wouldn’t wait! It’s going to be called Fear in the French Quarter.
What was to have been Book six, now Book seven, is in work also. I call it A Little Matter of Earthquakes. Suffice to say that seismic activity is heating up in the Pacific Northwest, in a fashion that is not normal. When one of Skye’s friends is killed in a phreatic eruption of a Cascade volcano, she and Holmes go to the funeral and discover the abnormality. Skye’s curiosity gets the better of her, and soon they find that there’s about to be a very VERY large, not so natural disaster unless they can stop what’s happening. I have to finish six & seven before I can get any idea of a time frame for when they might appear in print. But it shouldn’t be long for either, I don’t think.
Book eight is actually finished, but it requires five & seven (and maybe six) to help it make sense. (Yes, I wrote ‘em out of sequence.) It’s called The Adventure of Shining Mountain Lodge. Rangers in Rocky Mountain National Park find an illegal immigrant in the middle of nowhere, in January, and he’s dying…of radiation exposure. His clothing is filthy with radioactive dirt. The FBI and the CIA are contacted, and the CIA believes it may have to do with rumors of a possible dirty nuke. Sherlock and Skye are called into the investigation, and they have to find out what’s going on and stop it before the rumors become reality.
I’ve been accused of giving my books jawbreaker, long titles. But that’s only for the Displaced Detective series; there, I’m trying to evoke the names of the adventures that Sir Arthur recorded: The Sign of Four; The Valley of Fear; A Study in Scarlet; The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Final Problem; The Adventure of the Empty House, etc. Other books, not so much. The Fetish, Burnout, The Y Factor, stuff like that. Granted, Burnout has a subtitle that renders it kind of lengthy, but the publisher felt it was needed.
SBR: Speaking of Burnout, what drove you to write that novel?
Stephanie Osborn: Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281 was my first novel. It’s a science fiction mystery about a space shuttle disaster that turned out NOT to have been an accident, and the ensuing investigation and cover-up. Its tag line is, “How do you react when you discover that the next Shuttle disaster has happened…right on schedule?”
It started off years ago when I was a payload flight controller for Shuttle Spacelab missions. A bunch of us were discussing what to do in the event of a “catastrophic malfunction,” and how we might be able to get the bird and its crew down intact. I went off still thinking, and eventually realized that, if said “malfunction” was in fact no accident, it might make for a good book. It made Amazon’s Top 25 Overall list, and Fictionwise’s top 25 science fiction, when it was released, so I guess other people thought so too.
The scary, distressing part for me was that in the process of writing the novel, and doing all the research to get it right, I pretty much predicted what ended up happening to shuttle Columbia on her final flight ― and she had a friend of mine aboard. Oh, I’m not saying that Columbia was anything other than pure, awful luck of the draw. But the overall scenario of re-entry, loss of thermal integrity, loss of aerodynamic stability, breakup…I got the orbital inclination, incoming trajectory, even the overflown states and debris field, all correct according to what really happened to Columbia. I…was not best pleased. My writing mentor had to talk me out of trashing the manuscript. I ended up dedicating the book to the Columbia crew.
SBR: Did your scientific background help you with Burnout? (Sometimes, here at SBR, even we must state the obvious. Apologies in advance.)
Stephanie Osborn: Oh, I couldn’t have written it without my science background, AND my experience working Shuttle program. I had to lay out a scenario that made sense on several levels, and that proved very complicated.
SBR: You’ve said that Burnout is in some senses the most personal novel you’ve ever written. Can you explain that?
Stephanie Osborn: Well, there was the Columbia connection, which was personal enough in that I lost a friend, Kalpana Chawla, and I lost the bird I worked with the most.
But the two main characters of that book are special to me. It’s kind of funny, really; I’ve been “accused” on numerous occasions of making Skye Chadwick, from the Displaced Detective series, my own personal “Mary Sue” ― meaning she’s supposedly a fictional version of me. Truthfully? She’s no more me than Holmes is; every character I write has some facet of me in it, or I couldn’t relate to the character well enough to write it. I’ve written a couple of books with strong female leads in them, and somebody always wants to make ‘em out to be my Mary Sue(s), especially if they have any sort of a science background. But Crash Murphy and Mike Anders, the protagonists in Burnout? Well, they’re different. If you combined them into one person and flipped the gender, it really WOULD be me. Astronomer and Shuttle flight controller, rolled into one. I’m fond of those characters. But nobody ever accuses me of making THEM Mary Sues. I guess it’s because they’re male.
SBR: Let’s talk about another series you’ve worked on where you’ve never once been accused of writing a “Mary Sue” character, the Cresperian Saga. What’s that about?
Stephanie Osborn: The Cresperian Saga is a series of books by several authors, about Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrials when their starship wrecks in our solar system. A few of the lifepods make it to Earth, but most of the crew (and it was a small city) dies in the disaster. Said alien lifepods land scattered around our planet, and the beings within use their shapeshifting abilities to try to blend into the general population.
The first book, Human By Choice, was co-authored by Travis S. Taylor (my writing mentor) and Darrell Bain. When it came time for book two, Travis and his wife were expecting their second child and he was snowed, so he bowed out. Lida Quillen, publisher of Twilight Times Books, tapped me to step in, so The Y Factor was written by Darrell Bain and myself, with Bain taking the lead. But Bain is up in years, and his memory isn’t what it once was; this series has a huge cast of characters over the entire story arc, and he didn’t like having to keep up with them all. I thought he was doing fine, but I suspect what it amounted to was that he just didn’t like keeping up with ‘em. I can understand that. So for book three, The Cresperian Alliance, I took the lead. I’m currently working on book four, Heritage. Hoping to get it out in the next six months or so. But it’s harder than my usual writing, because the concept wasn’t mine to begin with.
SBR: The Cresperian Saga sounds fun to read, but as you just said, it sounds extremely difficult to write as it wasn’t your original concept. What interests you so much about this series, and what makes it different from other “aliens versus humans” movies and books?
Stephanie Osborn: The concept of discovering an alien race when THEY crash into YOU, because they don’t know you’re there, is kind of different. And the problems that the aliens have with our form, our cultures, were to my knowledge unique.
SBR: How challenging was it to come into this series in Book Two, and how did that process work between you and Darrell Bain?
Stephanie Osborn: It was difficult at times, and fun at others. First and foremost was getting familiar with that world, that universe, and coming up to speed with the fictional tech. I respect Mr. Bain greatly; he’s a popular e-book writer, and I learned from him. But we have different philosophies, and sometimes we disagreed about what should be in the manuscript. Still and all, we’re both professionals, and we discussed and went back and forth, and what resulted was, if I do say so, a pretty darn good couple books.
SBR: You’ve also written some shorter works. One of them, Starsong, is meant for children. What sort of things did you do differently while writing this story, if anything?
Stephanie Osborn: My only change from the usual is in keeping in mind that it is a children’s book, and as such I have to be careful about: 1) the language used (both the basic,” not having characters cursing,” and vocabulary, choosing words that wouldn’t be over the heads of the readers) and 2) making the themes appropriate. I wrote it because my parents wanted me to write a book that my nephew (then in elementary school) could read. By the time it made it to print, he was in late junior high school and too old for it. Oh well.
SBR: How did you think up the mythos behind Starsong?
Stephanie Osborn: The same way I do all my stories…it just sort of comes to me. It’s a blend of Tolkienesque and Native American voices, when you get down to it.
SBR: Since Starsong is a bit of a departure for you, being fantasy and intended for children, how has it been received?
Stephanie Osborn: It’s been received very well, but has yet to find a large audience, unfortunately.
SBR: Another of your shorter works is The Fetish, a story from the Burnout universe. What brought that particular story to mind?
Stephanie Osborn: In Burnout, Dr. Mike Anders rather impulsively buys a lapis fetish necklace at a trading post on an Indian reservation during their efforts to get to Las Vegas undetected. The Fetish is the story of how that necklace came to be. It was an EPIC Award Finalist in the short category.
SBR: Tell me about your typical writing routine. When you’re coming up with a plot, how do you get everything to all come together in your head so you can write about it?
Stephanie Osborn: I spend a lot of time staring into space and daydreaming. Seriously. People watching me would think I was goofing off. But there are certain things I have to have in hand before I can start writing, or anything I set down is rambling gibberish.
I have to know my protagonist(s) AND I have to have the antagonist(s). The antagonist does not have to be human, or even a sentient being. Sometimes a force of nature is the best bad guy around. But I have to know who or what it is. And I have to have the names of the principal characters.
I have to have an idea about what the general problem is ― that is to say, what is the source of the drama, the conflict? Is there more than one conflict?
Once I get these things, once they come to me, then I will daydream a scene, whatever grabs me most about the conflict. It’s almost always a climax of some sort, possibly even the main climax of the book. And once I have that, then I can start writing. And it takes however long it takes. I can push it to some extent but I have to have those things, or it’s pointless to write. Better to go off and work on something I’ve already started. John Ringo is a friend of mine, and he calls this process “ideating,” or, “to ideate,” pronounced, “eye-dee-ate.” Sometimes brainstorming, either with my husband or another writer, can help this process along, and John and I have ideated together once or twice.
Now, if I AM writing on an existing manuscript, I will start the day’s work by going back to where I started writing the day before, or maybe a bit earlier. I will read through it, making sure it flows with what came before, and editing it for clarity, continuity, smoothness of wording, grammar, and the like. When I’ve read all the way through what I wrote the day before, I’ve effectively gotten into the flow, and I start in with writing the new material.
SBR: As you’re also an editor, can you discuss some of the books you have edited, at least so far as the types of books you’ve edited? What interests you about editing, and how is it different from writing?
Stephanie Osborn: Mostly science fiction of various types. Several were YA books. I’ve edited a number of books for my main publisher, Twilight Times Books, and a few more as a free-lance editor. I don’t think my publisher would want me to reveal which books I edited, but one of the free-lance jobs was just plain fun. Half the time I wasn’t sure if I was editing or just reading! The Flux Engine by Dan Willis is YA alt-history steampunk; it was a great book and I loved working on it. I’m looking forward to the sequel.
SBR: Let’s switch gears. You’re a well-known advocate for literacy. Tell me why this is so important to you.
Stephanie Osborn: I have always been a voracious, omnivorous reader. I cannot imagine my life without it. Reading is, and will be for the future of our culture, the primary means of communication of ideas and concepts and data between people. Without the ability to read and write, our civilization as we know it would collapse.
Unfortunately not only is illiteracy on the rise in our country, disinterest in reading is rampant among our young people. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I have seen teens and twenties at science fiction and fantasy conventions walk by book dealers with noses upturned. I have had teens walk up to my table, scan my books with utter indifference ― or even contempt ― then pick up a business card and ask me to autograph it. If it isn’t a film or a game, they’re just not interested. After I left the space program, I used to do some tutoring, to get me out of the house mostly, and was shocked at seeing the same attitude toward great literature. Unfortunately, it’s an attitude I have encountered again and again.
How are we to continue our society, our culture, if the next generation doesn’t READ?! How do we communicate the most important concepts of our world? How do we teach them what works and what doesn’t? It isn’t possible to cram it all into a movie, into a game. The concepts of freedom, the lessons of life, good versus evil…this is the stuff of drama, of the great and less great literature. But they won’t read it, and in some cases, can’t.
There’s an old saying: Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Trite, but true nonetheless. And it applies here doubly ― historically, societies whose literacy broke down tended to collapse shortly thereafter; and how can the kids learn history if they can’t or won’t read about it?
If this trend continues, I shudder for our people.
SBR: You’re also a well-known advocate regarding treatment for panic attacks and/or anxiety disorder. This is a disease that’s become more prominent lately, partly due to the efforts of NFL Hall of Famer Earl Campbell. What is it, why is it important to you, and what do you think should be done about it?
Stephanie Osborn: Panic attacks are horrible. They can feel like you’re having a heart attack or like you’re going to faint, and sometimes you wish you would. Faint, that is. Because then you’d be unconscious and not suffering through it. You’re scared, your heart pounds, you can’t breathe fast enough, your whole body either flushes or the blood drains away into the vital organs and you get light-headed. It can be pure, abject terror. And it can happen for no reason that you can see.
The tendency to have these attacks on a regular or frequent basis is known as anxiety disorder. There are different categories, depending on severity, acuteness of attack, and to some extent, cause of the attack, because it can have many causes.
Causes can range from things like PTSD; to problems in the brain’s amygdalae, which processes fear; to problems in utilizing neurotransmitters, particularly GABA, but also including serotonin. It isn’t fun, and the sufferer isn’t always able to control it.
As it turns out, I have anxiety disorder. It trends in my family, and I have had it off and on since I was a child. It comes and goes, and I can go for long periods of time, even years, decades, with no problems. Then something may happen to stress me ― an event, or an illness, or the like ― and it will come back and hammer me. I’ve had counseling for it and have learned various relaxation techniques, which help. But if a full-on panic attack jumps me unexpectedly, those techniques don’t work too well because they require me to concentrate on the technique, and if you’re panicked, you aren’t going to think too well. So I try very hard to catch it on the upswing by recognizing the symptoms and working to relax. I also have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), where the nerve network in the gut is exceptionally sensitive, and it’s tied into the anxiety disorder: an IBS attack can trigger an anxiety attack, and vice versa. In general, nobody but my family knows I have it, at least to see it happening. I don’t necessarily announce it to the world. But I don’t make a secret of it, either.
Interestingly, it is never DURING an acute, stressful situation that the panic or anxiety hits. If I’m in the middle of an emergency, I will work through the emergency and do whatever is required to get through the situation safely. After it’s over, I may go into a corner and hyperventilate for a few minutes! During that post-emergency time, I’m apt to shake like the proverbial aspen leaf, and all I want is to be quiet and try to relax. I may or may not have a full-blown panic attack. Having a trusted friend or family member nearby is usually soothing, if I do. And I may have recurrences of that, off and on for a few weeks, if something happens to remind me of the emergency.
I want to emphasize: it isn’t dangerous, for the person experiencing the panic or anyone around him. We won’t go ballistic or postal; we aren’t scary crazy people. In general we aren’t confrontational, because confrontation produces stress, and stress will bring on the anxiety. We’re far more apt to want to retreat to the bedroom and just be very quiet. And we aren’t having a heart attack or the like, though it can seem like it sometimes. In so far as I can tell, the very fact that you have anxiety attacks seems to be an indication of a strong circulatory system. I suppose it stands to reason. If it weren’t for the fear it creates, fear that can last for days, weeks, or even months, it probably wouldn’t even be worth a note in the medical books.
But if you know someone who has anxiety disorder, the best thing you can do, if you see him or her in a panic attack, is to take the person aside into a quiet, low-stimulus environment, and help ‘em settle down. Just a couple words to let ‘em know you’re there, you get what’s happening, and you’re there to help. Maybe holding a hand gently, or laying a hand on a shoulder. Don’t babble. In fact, other than the initial, “It’s OK. I’m here, and I get what’s going on,” you don’t really have to talk (unless the victim wants you to talk to help get his/her mind off the panic, in which case, keep the conversation light and away from the focus of the problem). The person experiencing the anxiety needs as little stimulus as possible, and needs to be able to focus on relaxation techniques. (Slow, steady breathing, in various cadences, is the best that I’ve found. If the person is having trouble, offer to count softly: “In… two… three… four… Out… two… three… four.”) When the patient begins to talk again, s/he is starting to relax. You can chat then, but keep your voice down and in a soothing pitch until the person is obviously relaxed again.
SBR: Getting back to your writing career, what sorts of awards have you been nominated for? (Not that this is the be-all and end-all, of course.)
Stephanie Osborn: I have been an EPIC Finalist twice, once for The Y Factor with Darrell Bain, and once for The Fetish. I have also been a finalist for a few other awards, not so prestigious. My experiences with awards have not been good in general — you generally have to pay a fee (the smallest I’ve encountered is $50) for every category you enter, and the final results tend, in my estimation, to be…unusual at best, questionable at worst. Like the time L. Ron Hubbard won a category for a book he wrote…over a decade after his demise. I’m proud of the EPIC finalists, and I consider that award an excellent one; I stay away from most others, these days.
SBR: Two interesting things have happened recently regarding your Displaced Detective series, as an omnibus edition has been released by your publisher, Twilight Times Books, and more interestingly yet, The Displaced Detective Suite, an album put together by composer Dan Hollifield, has also been released. How did these two things happen?
Stephanie Osborn: I couldn’t tell you how The Case of the Displaced Detective Omnibus came to be! That was a complete surprise from my publisher! I was on travel and when I got home she emailed me to surprise me with it. I’m very, VERY pleased, because this is the first omnibus that Twilight Times Books has ever produced, and I’m thrilled that it’s mine.
As for The Displaced Detective Suite**, it is a duly licensed “derivative” work, available in CD and mp3 download, from Amazon (CD), CreateSpace (CD), and Bandcamp (download). Bandcamp also has a lovely bonus track that comes with the album, but didn’t fit on the CD. The album itself is a blend of instrumental and electronica, and could readily be a film score. Each piece causes me to think of the scene(s) that inspired it, and they play out in my mind’s eye as the music plays.
How did it come to be? Well, I’ve known Dan Hollifield for some years; he’s a very talented man. He’s also a fan, particularly of my Displaced Detective series, and one day he presented a song to me on Facebook. It was a solo violin with background instrumentals, what later became the track called, “Meditations of a Displaced Detective,” and I immediately fell in love with it. It evoked a mental image for me of Holmes, yanked from his original life and plopped into the modern world, knowing no one, wondering how he was going to fit in, to make a life for himself. I could “hear” it as either what he would have played during that time if he’d had access to a violin, or what a movie director would use as the theme for that part of the story. I raved over it to Dan, and one thing led to another, and suddenly he was working on more music. Next thing I knew, we had a licensing agreement in place, and he was nearing completion on an album. I’m absolutely blown away by the music.
Since my husband is a graphics artist and does most of my cover art (as well as many other TTB books, and several other publishers too), Dan and I approached him for the album artwork. He agreed, and that was the last thing we needed. The day I got my own copy of the CD, I danced around the house before I even opened it!
SBR: (Not sure what to say to this, though admittedly we’d be tempted to do the same thing in your place.) Thanks again for this wide-ranging, comprehensive interview, Ms. Osborn.
Stephanie Osborn: Thank you most kindly for having me, and especially for allowing me to ramble!
SBR: Our pleasure.
——–
** Note: SBR will feature in coming weeks our first-ever music review, the subject of which being Dan Hollifield’s Displaced Detective Suite. Stay tuned.
Interview: Author Kal Spriggs
Posted by Jason Cordova in Interview on October 15, 2013
Editor’s note: One of the really near things we get to do here at Shiny Book Review is to interview new and upcoming authors. It’s always fun to see what goes on with the thought process behind any author’s mind, and when a new voice breaks onto the scene, it’s captivating to see just where their mind goes.
Today’s interview was set up on a whim. I’ve been horrible about reviewing books lately and decided (with Barb’s assistance) that we were going to start doing some interviews. The problem, naturally, was to decide who to interview.
After much deliberation, I decided on this young writer named Kal Spriggs. Kal is a new science fiction author who was introduced to me by past SBR reviewer Leo Champion. His first two books, Renegades: Deserter’s Redemption and Renegades: The Gentle One are both available at Amazon for a low price of $0.99. While many people shy away from an underpriced book (or, in this case, novella), I know a good deal when I see one. So without further ado, here is our exclusive interview with Kal Spriggs.
Shiny Book Review: Okay, so tell us… who is Kal Spriggs?
Kal Spriggs: Hmmm, interesting question
I would say that Kal Spriggs is a guy who likes to explore things, both in real life and in his head. He’s a guy who likes to ask what might happen if things were different, and likes to find out how things work. Less introspectively, Spriggs is active duty military, an engineer by education, and an Army brat by origin.
He’s a Scorpio, likes long walks on the beach, and meeting interesting people…
SBR: Wow. I… uh… wow. So what in the world possessed you to become an author?
KS: Frankly, I love to write. There’s few bigger rushes for me in life that can match the feeling of writing an awesome scene. Writing is something that I find to be a catharsis, and it lets me really delve into some of my curiosity about how things work. Creating an entire universe, society and then the physics, and even the fundamental laws of the universe lets me dive into asking the complicated questions.
Also, it gives me a nice escape from the mundane and a good way to share some of the cool things I’ve seen, even if reimagined a little bit.
SBR: Complicated questions? Care to give me an example?
KS: One of the complicated questions that especially appeals to me is: what exactly makes us human?
Where do you draw the line… and when you encounter aliens, or have mutants, psychics, and genetically engineered people, how does the line become blurred?
I personally think that treating people with respect is an essential part of our own humanity. But some species we encounter might be anathema to that concept. How do you respect a homicidal alien who views you as sentient food? How do you not react with instinctive fear to someone who can not only read your mind, but can bend you to their will? Human interaction at that level is interesting for me.
Another area, since I’m fascinated with warfare, is how the societal norms influences tactics, strategy, weapons design, and so-on. We see a bit of that in current warfare, quite a bit in ancient warfare (i.e., the western Greek/Roman style of shock troops versus the eastern style of skirmishers).
So I try to build a society’s war-making capabilities around their values and ideology. It gets interesting, sometimes, especially when I end up designing a race of ADHD aliens with more limbs than good sense.
SBR: So do you cover this in all of your books or do you spread it around a bit? Tell us about what you’ve written already.
KS: My current series I have published, The Renegades, uses a lot of this. I’ve got psychics and aliens and even a genetically engineered ‘super-soldier.’ The interaction between them and normal humans is particularly interesting to write, and I think I manage to make it fun to read.
There’s distrust, particularly from those who haven’t dealt with these unknown people
There’s hostility from some of the aliens, who’ve been on the wrong end of a lot of prejudice, and nervousness about the abilities of a psychic from everyone.
As far as the societal influences, there are big differences in military tech of each of the big political groups. The tactics the different groups go for, and the overall strategies and goals of the various powers are complicated.
To top things off, the future is bleak for humanity in this universe. Two alien races have invaded, most of the human nations are at war with each other, and piracy has become so rampant as to be a common occurrence.
I’ve got another series that is set a few years later, which starts with The Fallen Race, where a handful of humans are the last hope to turn things around. What can I say… I’m a sucker for the underdog.
SBR: So if I suggest the first series reminds me of 1998 Somalia, you’d say…?
KS: Well, only if Somalia had a massive military bent on world domination and the main characters started out in a Somali prison labor camp and had to stage a break-out with a werewolf, a centaur and a mix of mercenaries, missionaries, and pirates.
SBR: That’d possibly be a better result than what we got…
KS: I wouldn’t rule it out… though we didn’t get to use nukes. They do in my book.
SBR: Always a game changer, nukes. So who do you like to read in your down time — assuming you have down time?
KS: Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot of that lately. Still, I have a few favorite authors that I make time for. Heinlein is at the top. David Weber, John Ringo, Tom Kratman, Ryk Spoor, Mike Shephard, David Drake, Jim Butcher…
Pretty much I read at least two or three books a month. Down considerably from when I had lots of time and could read five in a week and still have time to write. Or maybe I’m just getting old, who knows?
SBR: Yeah, we have similar reading tastes. I’ll have to give Mike Shepard a look, though. So what do you have coming out next?
KS: I’m currently working on getting a military SF novel The Fallen Race ready to self-publish. It’s set in the same universe as Renegades, only the main character has a pocket battleship at his disposal.
To balance it, he’s got not just one, but two empires bent on his annihilation, as well as several rather large pirate factions.
When I finish edits on that, I’ve got my first Epic Fantasy coming out. Echo of the High Kings is my take on fantasy and magic. I’ll admit that I actually sat down and busted out my thermodynamics books when I went to see what was possible with the magic system
Though, again, rather little of that made it into the book. But at least it was math for a good cause.
SBR: Okay, earlier you mentioned you like to write “awesome scenes”. What, to you, defines an awesome scene?
KS: For me, an awesome scene is one where everything fits. Character, Character background, plot, theme… when it all comes together and the story damn near writes itself. When all the loose ends that were bugging me all come together in a nice little bow.
Sometimes it’s a plot twist even I didn’t see coming, and sometimes it is something so inevitable that when I read what I wrote, I realize I was headed there all along.
It normally involves a character that even I discounted stepping forward to make his mark. Sometimes it is a villain turning the tables or even renouncing his villainous ways… or sometimes it is a hero taking a last stand. It often involves some action or conflict and a strong resolution, either positive or negative. When it gets me tearing up or laughing as I write it, I know I’ve nailed it.
SBR: Nice. So is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about Kal Spriggs?
KS: There’s a question that will have me waking in the middle of the night saying “Aw, crap I should have said…”
SBR: *laughs*
KS: Seriously, I think we’ve covered most of it. Short of grovelling and asking them to read my works, I think I can safely leave it at that.
SBR: Well, that’s good enough for me. I’ll do the groveling for you. To buy Kal’s books, please follow the links below. Feel free to spread the word and let people know about this brand new up-and-coming author you heard us talk about (seriously, we like it. Lots) you discovered before he became famous. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to sit down with us, Kal.
KS: Not a problem, thanks for having me
Link for Renegades: Deserter’s Redemption
Interview — Rosemary Edghill
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Interview on June 28, 2012
Before we get into the interview, here’s a quick introduction to Rosemary Edghill and her work. She has written many books, including the acclaimed Hellflower trilogy of science fiction novels (as eluki bes shahar), the Bast series of present-day Wiccan detective novels, four fantasy novels (including the Twelve Treasures series), four Regency romances, a couple of X-men tie-ins, one time-travel romance, and now the dark SF/fantasy hybrid VENGEANCE OF MASKS (reviewed here). She’s collaborated extensively with Mercedes Lackey, most recently with DEAD RECKONING (SBR review is here; the SBR review for books 1 and 2 of the Shadow Grail series is available here), and has also collaborated with science fiction and fantasy grandmasters André Norton (THE SHADOW OF ALBION and LEOPARD IN EXILE) and Marion Zimmer Bradley (WITCHLIGHT, GHOSTLIGHT, GRAVELIGHT and HEARTLIGHT).
Shiny Book Review: Ms. Edghill, thank you for coming to Shiny Book Review for an interview. We’re very glad you’ve stopped by.
Rosemary Edghill: Thank you for inviting me! I’ve just finished what Bloomsbury calls a “virtual book tour” for my latest, a Steampunk Western With Zombies called DEAD RECKONING, and while I’ve never actually been book toured, I have to say that the virtual tour is a lot of fun. It’s great to meet readers from the comfort of my own keyboard . . . .
Shiny Book Review: DEAD RECKONING was a lot of fun to read. What prompted you and Mercedes Lackey to write a steampunk Western?
Rosemary Edghill: When we made up our mind to do a Western (I’d already had the character of Jett Gallatin in mind for some time) it would clearly, given our track records, have to be a fantasy. And we were both huge fans of the ORIGINAL Wild Wild West (just . . . don’t mention that horrible movie. Please.), which was really the very first steampunk. So since we both really love SF, going steampunk was really a way to incorporate SFnal elements into what most people would see as a straight-up historical fantasy.
Shiny Book Review: Speaking of that, does that mean DEAD RECKONING happened in “our” United States of America? Or is this an alternate history/fantasy?
Rosemary Edghill: DEAD RECKONING is a “secret history” as opposed to an “alternate history” — ie, no matter what bizarre elements surface in the course of the books, they will always be taking place in our own recognizable past.
Shiny Book Review: Which character in DEAD RECKONING did you enjoy writing the most, and why? And which one (or ones) did you enjoy writing the least?
Rosemary Edghill: I love all of them when I’m writing them (even Brother Raymond!) but the ones I really felt sorry for were the women of the commune, who were being terribly exploited.
Shiny Book Review: The way religion was subverted by Brother Shepherd in DEAD RECKONING gives an excellent “period feel” to the novel. What types of religious movements (or counter-movements) did you study/read about that gave you the idea for Brother Shepherd and his cult?
Rosemary Edghill: The Western Expansion period was a time of enormous religious experimentation in the United States. This actually began fifty years earlier, with the rise of the Mormon faith in the 1820s. In the period directly following the end of the Civil War, thousands of “Christian Primitive” and millenialist cults sprang up, many taking advantage of the looser social rules and legal strictures of the Western territories. These cult/communes really haven’t changed much since the Anabaptists kicked things off in the 1400s, and were still going strong in the California of the 1930s — Raymond Chandler uses them as backdrop for a couple of his Philip Marlowe novels.
Shiny Book Review: You’ve collaborated often with Mercedes Lackey; what’s it like to write with her?
Rosemary Edghill: It’s a lot of fun! You’re never alone with a co-author!
Shiny Book Review: Tell me about VENGEANCE OF MASKS. What prompted this specific, dark-tinged plotline?
Shiny Book Review: That’s one of the reasons VENGEANCE is such an interesting book. But speaking of your hero, Childeric, what is it that torments him so?
Rosemary Edghill: He destroyed his entire world by being manipulated by the Dead God Malvisage into freeing him. That can leave a guy with a real complex.
Shiny Book Review: What about your heroine, Arcadia? What in her responds so strongly to Childeric?
Rosemary Edghill: She wrote the books about him. I wanted to put her in the context of the early Sixties Sword and Sorcery revival — the Conan books were being reprinted everywhere, and they had billions of imitators. I used to own quite a number of those: Brak and Blade and oh, every possible one-syllable grunt you can imagine. And there were a lot of what we would consider today fly by night publishing houses out there, to which you might sell a book if you needed a quick few hundred bucks, and then find you’d signed away all rights forever.
Shiny Book Review: What made you come up with such a unique and interesting plot, as this reads half like a fantasy, and half like science fiction (a la Sheri S. Tepper)?
Rosemary Edghill: As for the plot, it really isn’t unique. It’s a variation on an old fannish trope: “fan finds themselves in sourcetext universe of their choice”. I’ve seen it done for Star Wars, Star Trek, and Blake’s 7 — the only change I made was to have Cady create the sourcetext she fell into. And I don’t think that idea is unique either. But as I’ve always said: if you find an original idea anywhere in my work, I will eat it. Good stories aren’t about showing us something we’ve never seen before. Good stories are about showing us things we’ve seen all over the place in a way we’ve never quite seen them.
Shiny Book Review: Cross-genre books seem to be one of your specialties, going back to the Twelve Treasures series — what is it about books like VENGEANCE OF MASKS or DEAD RECKONING that first makes you want to write them, then makes you perfect them to the point the reader has a hard time putting them down?
Rosemary Edghill: ::laughs:: Well, I HOPE the reader has a hard time putting them down! The answer to that is another one of those bizarrely-simple-only-not ones: write what you want to read. A writer’s first audience is themself: you tell yourself the story. As for *why* this is the kind of story that attracts me, I can’t really say. Maybe I’m just always hoping for magic to show up in my world — the fantasy kind, with swords and unicorns and heroes. Especially heroes.
Shiny Book Review: Nothing wrong with that. At any rate, I’d like to shift the focus now and ask some questions about your writing career. For starters, when did you first realize that you enjoyed writing and that you weren’t about to give it up?
Rosemary Edghill: I started writing back in the 1980s, and I sold my first two books (one SF, one Regency) very quickly, and both on multi-book contracts. So I had commitments to write several books from the very beginning, and like a good do-bee, I kept right on typing. Later, of course, things got hard, and the market changed, and a lot of other things happened. But I pretty much committed as a writer long before I evaluated the question of whether or not I wanted a career as a writer. Hey. Sometimes that happens.
Shiny Book Review: What drove you to write your first novel, TURKISH DELIGHT?
Rosemary Edghill: When I wrote TURKISH DELIGHT, I’d read through all of Georgette Heyer and was totally in love with the whole “comedy of manners” idea, but the books I was seeing on the stands fell somewhat short of the standard set by the Divine Georgette. So I wrote my own.
I would be happy to still be writing them, but the overall market collapsed, including the St. Martin’s Press program that had been doing them in hardcover. My editor, Lincoln Child, had moved on (to his own career as a best-selling novelist, as a matter of fact), and it was pretty much a case of my corner of the market having dried up. At the same time, I’d just finished the last of the SF trilogy I sold the same week that I sold the first of the Regencies, and while my editor (Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books) liked my writing style, science fiction wasn’t 
selling. So I ended up over in Urban Fantasy, with the Twelve Treasures series. While I was selling multi-genre-ally from the beginning, it has to be acknowledged that there’s a certain cachet to hardcover publication, and while my sales figures weren’t terribly impressive on any of my first six books, the critical reviews were, and that helped a lot.
Shiny Book Review: You’ve worked with two acknowledged Grandmasters, Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley. What was that like? And what did you learn from them that you’ve taken into other writing projects (solo and/or collaborative)?
Rosemary Edghill: What I learned from each of them was to find out where the story was and tell it. Both of them were really straightforward as writers, and focused most of all on the story. I loved working with each of them: the two experiences were very different (with Marion I got notes at the end of each draft, and I was working from a lot of material; with Andre it was weekly phone calls as we went over the project just about scene by scene), both in the nuts and bolts of the method, and just in how the whole project was influenced by their personalities.
Shiny Book Review: Tell me about your Bast series. What was it like to write that?
Rosemary Edghill: One of the reasons I wrote it was that I’d just moved Upstate and was terribly homesick for New York, so writing a story set in Manhattan was a way of going back there. For another, I just wasn’t seeing a lot of Wiccan character fiction that wasn’t outright fantasy (full of spells and fantasy creatures) or that concentrated on the Wicca part of stuff. Also, as I think I mentioned once to somebody else, the first in the series SPEAK DAGGERS TO HER, was my attempt to come up with (at least in a fictional setting) the answer to a question I’d had for a long time. Because, you see, a friend of mine knew someone very much like Miriam Seabrook, who died in the way the one in the story does. Who she got mixed up with, and how she died, and why, are questions that remain unanswered in the real world. But it is the province of fiction to make a completed story out of a handful of unfinished facts . . .
Shiny Book Review: Tell me about WARSLAYER.
Rosemary Edghill: The Warslayer is one of my favorite books to have written (it has much the same plot as VENGEANCE OF MASKS, actually, only from a slightly different angle) but my very favorite parts of it are the ones I didn’t write. The Forward and the First Season Episode Guide to “The Incredibly True Adventures of Vixen the Slayer” were written by noted author, my former editor, and all around nice guy Greg Cox. He’d done guides for Xena and Hercules, so it was really a no-brainer to come and ask him to play.
As for the book itself, one of my favorite stories is that of The Accidental Hero — the ordinary person who stands up at a moment of crisis and peril and just goes for it. And while Glory McArdle — ex-Olympic athelete, current cable TV sensation — isn’t entirely ordinary, she’s far from being the character she plays. So that was totally a romp for me.
My one regret is that the book didn’t generate a sequel, since I would really have liked to tell more stories set in Erchanen. There’s this Sister Bernadette cosplayer from our world, you see, and . . .
Shiny Book Review: You’ve written in many genres in the past; which genre, overall, would you like to work more in down the road?
Rosemary Edghill: My forlorn dream is to write more space opera, since I started there, and I really love it. And maybe someday I can figure out a way to get back there. I just finished a short story for a small press anthology called GALACTIC CREATURES, where I experimented with the idea of a hard-science space opera: using the space-opera tropes that could be mapped onto a science-based future that does not contain things like handwavy FTL and miraculous fake gravity. It involved many long nights on Wikipedia, but it was a lot of fun.
Shiny Book Review: It sounds like it. I’ll have to remember to look that one up.
Anyway, since you’ve written in a great many genres, you must have had to research all sorts of things. Which genre is the most demanding to research?
Rosemary Edghill: The most demanding genre to research is near-past historical, fifty to a hundred years before your now. Farther back, the period has been studied and written about, and most of all, there’s nobody still alive from then. If you make a mistake, so long as it is imbedded in a plausible matrix of period work, you’ll probably get away with it. With the near-past stuff, somebody’s always going to call you on it.
That being said, my favorite book of all I’ve written is still HEARTLIGHT, when I had to do huge huge huge amounts of research about the 60s through the 80s. I wrote it in the late 1990s, and I was still having to chase down and nail landmark 80s fashions, fads, and news stories from the point of view of an outsider. I hadn’t been taking notes!
Shiny Book Review: Since you’ve written some X-men tie-ins and are familiar with the superhero genre, what do you think it is about superheroes that’s brought them into the mainstream?
Rosemary Edghill: Oh, that one’s easy: Money. ComicCon got “big” when television and movie publicity machines started using it as their main venue to premier and pump up genre releases and programming. Hollywood has crazy amounts of money compared to every other entertainment field, and it’s really the eight thousand pound gorilla. So once it had monetized ComicCon, everybody looked around and saw all those superheroes just standing around. But getting them onto the screen in a way the audience could buy in was still a long way off. It was a question of “selling the sizzle” carried to its ultimate expression. And it wasn’t the subject matter. The *idea* of the superhero has been with us since the dawn of tale-telling. Achilles and Beowulf both fill the social niche of the superhero. But once you start dealing with people who can fly, or burst into flames, if you want to *film* them, you need to wait for your SFX to catch up.
The other thing the Hollywood Superhero Renaissance was waiting for was smart scripts, and those really couldn’t be written by superhero outsiders. Unless you’ve bought into the whole superhero mythos at the visceral level, the barrier to entry (i.e., to writing a script that takes the tropes of the comic book superhero seriously) is just too high. And passing that sort of barrier on to moviegoing audiences has never been what the movies are about: their gig is to make you an instant insider. And for that, the movies had to be put out there by people who already were. As Chris Sarandon’s character says in the 1985 FRIGHT NIGHT: “You gotta believe.”
Shiny Book Review: You’ve written short stories, novellas, novels, take your pick. What is different about the process of writing from the shorter stories to the longer ones? And which type of story (short story, novella, novel) do you enjoy writing the most?
Rosemary Edghill: Novels, the longer the better. I used to hate long form, now I’ve discovered I love the elbow room (had to cut my last manuscript down from 1600 pages to 600 for publication: ouch). The difference between a short story and a novel is that the short story, classically, deals with the single defining incident in the protagonist’s life: boom, you’re in. Boom, you’re out. Story done! The novel, on the other hand, wants to show us how they got there, and where they’re going next. It’s more about the journey than about the goal.
Shiny Book Review: If there was anything you could change about publishing, what would it be and why?
Rosemary Edghill: The IRS’s “Thor Power Tools” decision, which required that inventory be taxed as income. It destroyed the backlist and the midlist in Publishing, and crippled a lot of writers’ careers. Things are changing with PoD becoming more sophisticated and flexible, but that drives its own rights-grab problems, as it means the publisher controls the copyright of the book essentially in perpetuity, since with PoD, the book never goes out of print. There’s a lot of grabbyhands going on in Publishing right now — our editors may believe we’re artists, but nobody else does. All the upper echelons see, most places, is interchangeable Book Food Product units.
If I could change one other thing, I would wave my hand and institute Point of Sale Inventory everywhere in Bookdom as of tomorrow. It would take me much too long to even scratch the surface of orders, inventory control, and returns in the Publishing business, but the bottom line is: Publishing really isn’t sure about what sold, or where, or when. And it only develops some faint idea about a year and a half later. When Point of Sale Inventory Control was instituted for CDs, Country became an 800-pound-gorilla OVERNIGHT. (Okay, the third thing I would do is get rid of Amazon. Because it is the Wal-Mart of the Internet, and its insistence on deep discounts for books is killing Publishing.)
Shiny Book Review: Shifting gears, what is your writing process like every day?
Rosemary Edghill: It’s pretty simple: get up, go to the computer, sit down, type. I start by re-reading the previous day’s pages, then I start the new day’s work. I have a set word-count minimum that I have to meet each day [in my head] but sometimes I’ll do a time-thing too, and set my stint for X hours.
Shiny Book Review: What advice would you like to give to new and/or aspiring writers?
Rosemary Edghill: Be honest with yourself. Do you want to write and tell stories? There are a lot of venues to getting them out there without going the Big Six published route. Do you want to be a published author and make money from your writing? The advice here is “don’t quit your day job”, because 95% of all published and publishing writers don’t make a living from their writing. What do you really want?
To hone your craft, write. To hone the related skills that are just as important, finish what you write. To develop discipline, write every day. There really isn’t other advice. All the rest is frosting.
Shiny Book Review: One final question: if you could be the Galactic Overlord for a day, what would you change about the world, and why?
Rosemary Edghill: I don’t think I could change everything I wanted to change in just one day, and I would not want to make sweeping changes that controlled people’s thoughts, like “stop being stupid” or “be pro-equality and women’s and gay rights”. For one thing, anybody who reads fairy tales knows that always boomerangs badly. For another, it just seems to me it would be wrong to take away anyone’s freedom that way, even if they’re abusing it enormously. So if I only have 24 hours, I think I would have Incredibly Advanced Aliens come to Earth and give us FTL travel. I think the major psychological problem we’re facing today comes from the dual sense of not having an available frontier, and the knowledge (without the wisdom to deal with it) that our planetary resources are finite and dwindling. Having a whole galaxy full of colonizable planets would change that. For the better, I’d hope.
Shiny Book Review: And that concludes today’s interview with author Rosemary Edghill. Thank you very much again for coming to SBR.
Rosemary Edghill: Thank you for having me! I love to hear from readers (no matter what they read, because I’m always on the lookout for a new favorite author!) and I can usually be found either at: http://rosemary-edghill.dreamwidth.org/ or http://www.facebook.com/rosemary.edghill My home page has a lot of bibliography and links, and it’s at: http://www.sff.net/people/eluki Feel free to come by and chat about my books and anybody else’s. Really!
Exciting News for SBR: Rosemary Edghill Consents to Interview
Posted by Barb Caffrey in Interview on June 23, 2012
Shiny Book Review is proud to announce that author Rosemary Edghill has consented to do a wide-ranging interview, which will run next Thursday, June 28, 2012. Edghill, co-author of DEAD RECKONING along with Mercedes Lackey (previously reviewed here at SBR) and author of VENGEANCE OF MASKS (soon to be reviewed), will discuss her career, including the highlights of working with science fiction and fantasy Grandmasters Marion Zimmer Bradley and André Norton and her long-standing collaboration with renowned fantasist Lackey. She’ll also give some helpful tips for writers, discuss her writing process, and talk about what she finds to be the most distressing aspects of publishing.
So be sure to come back next Thursday, as Ms. Edghill has many interesting ideas to impart due to her lengthy and wide-ranging career. (You’ll be glad you did.)
Interview — Scott Oden
Posted by Jason Cordova in Interview on June 1, 2011
Have you ever wanted to wander the streets of Cairo, or see the mighty armies of the Crusades? Ever wondered why Alexander the Great was able to rip through Persia so easily, or wanted to read intrigue and mystery in the ancient world? Author Scott Oden takes us there in his books, Men of Bronze, Memnon and his latest, The Lion of Cairo.
Shiny Book Review – Thanks for joining us, Scott. So tell us: what possessed you to write about Cairo in The Lion of Cairo?
Scott Oden, Author – Glad to be here. There’s a line from Sir Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights that has always stuck with me:
“Whoso hath not seen Cairo hath not seen the world. Her dust is golden and her Nile a miracle holden; and her women are as Houris fair; puppets, beautiful pictures; her houses are palaces rare; her water is sweet and light, and her mud a commodity and a medicine beyond compare . . . Moreover temperate is her air, and with fragrance blent, which surpasseth aloes wood in scent; and how should it be otherwise, she being the Mother of the World?”
So says the father of the Jewish doctor in The Hunchback’s Tale. Until I started work on the Lion of Cairo, my body of knowledge regarding Egypt didn’t extend much beyond the fall of the Ptolemaic dynasty in 30 BCE. Indeed, besides the Arabian Nights, my library had but a single book that delved into the rise of Islamic Egypt—this book being Harold Lamb’s excellent The Crusades: the Flame of Islam (Garden City Publishing, 1931).
SBR – Interesting. So were you able to use any research from Memnon in The Lion of Cairo, or was that just a one time coincidence?
Oden – No, the research from Memnon didn’t really carry over, except in the most general sense. But, my first book — Men of Bronze — was also set in Egypt (albeit the Late Period, circa 525 BC) so I had quite a few text to draw upon. Part of the challenge to me was to make the ghost of ancient Egypt a tangible part of The Lion of Cairo. I wanted visual reminders of ancient glories — repurposed columns, bits of carving half-glimpsed, that sort of thing. The Lion of Cairo is as much a fantasy as it is an historical, so I felt compelled to assemble “Cairo as it should have been” . . . a kind of Arabian Nights hodge-podge of styles, drawn from such diverse times as the Mameluke era and the more recent Ottoman era.
SBR – Yes, I could feel the ghosts running through the streets of Cairo in The Lion of Cairo. It was a very vivid picture, imagining the smells, sights and sounds of Cairo during the times of the Crusades. Since you mentioned Men of Bronze (which is, I’ll add for the reader’s benefit, a bestseller and highly acclaimed novel which I recommend the voracious reader to pick up), I have to ask: Greeks and Persians, working together?
Oden – In answer, I give you Xenophon. The whole thrust of the Anabasis was a band of Greek mercenaries working for a disaffected Persian noble who came *this* close to taking the purple tiara for their paymaster. Also, Memnon and Mentor of Rhodes: Greek brothers who married into the Persian royal family and fought against the invading Macedonians during the time of Alexander. It happened so often the Greeks had a name for it: “Medizing” — the act of becoming an ally of the Medes (Persians). So, there’s plenty of precedent for Greeks and Persians to wind up on the same side, be it for pay or for family.
SBR – See, this is what happens when you watch too much 300 and don’t read enough. You get horrible misconceptions! So tell us, what have you been up to lately? Any new projects in the works?
Oden – Ah, 300 . . . a great movie from a great graphic novel, but about as historically accurate as The Lord of the Rings. For the truth of Thermopylae, in fiction form, one needs must read Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire. Probably the finest historical novel I’ve ever come across.
New projects? Well, I got a couple: I’m wrapping up a novel set around the sea battle of Artemisium, circa 480 BC; I’m hammering out the outline to the sequel of The Lion of Cairo, called The Damascene Blade; I’m writing a wicked cycle of short stories for the revitalized Heroes in Hell franchise — tales featuring Leonidas and his 300 Spartans . . . in Hades; I’m working up another outline and sample chapters for a novel that will hopefully turn those staples of fantasy armies everywhere, the Orcs, on their pointy ears. AND, I’m editing an anthology of Orcish short fiction featuring the work of Janet and Chris Morris, Ed Greenwood, and a veritable horde of talented wordsmiths! I still need a name for it, though . . .
SBR – Wow, sounds like you’re keeping busy. Glad to see you aren’t resting on your laurels. Any advice for struggling writers out there who are trying to get into the business?
Oden – Probably the best advice is to cultivate the two P’s: Patience and Persistence. This is an industry that fickle on its best days, and now it’s been thrown for a loop thanks to the e-book revolution.
Patience will help a writer weather not only the paradigm shifts, but also the day-to-day annoyances, like slow response times and glacial publishing schedules. Persistence is the true key: so long as you have an honest opinion of your writing (meaning you’re not comparing yourself to Tolkien or JK Rowling and counting your millions before you ever even finish a novel), you can be assured your work WILL find a home . . . it might take it a while, though. Persistence will get you through those endless bouts of rejection.
The only other advice I can give is to volunteer as a slush reader. Go online and offer yourself as an intern or an unpaid reader to a literary agency. No better primer for what NOT to do exists. It will give you a new perspective on your work, on the notion of literary competition, and on why agents and editors are oft-times slow to respond. Provided you don’t gouge your eyes out with a spork, first.
SBR – Good advice. Last question, Scott, then we’ll let you get back to your work. Star Trek or Star Wars?
Oden – Star Wars, man! What are their paltry phasers compared to the power of the Force?! Honestly, though, my answer would be C) None of the Above. My geekgasm of choice is for the work of Robert E. Howard… Conan of Cimmeria would tear Darth Vader a new one, then shove Jean-Luc Picard into that newly-minted orifice…
SBR – The Barbarian for the win! Thank you again, Scott, for taking the time out to sit down with us. We look forward to seeing your work in the near future.
Don’t forget to check out Scott Oden in the upcoming Lawyers in Hell anthology, due to be released July 15, 2011 from Perseid Publishing. Also, remember that Amazon has his books at a discount rate. Watch for this exciting new writer in the years to come!
Author Bio: Hailing from the hills of rural North Alabama, Scott Oden’s fascination with far-off places began when his oldest brother introduced him to the staggering and savage vistas of Robert E. Howard and Harold Lamb. Though Oden started writing his own tales at the age of fourteen, it would be many years before anything would come of it.
In the meantime, he had a brief and tempestuous fling with academia before retiring to the private sector, where he worked the usual roster of odd jobs-from delivering pizza to stacking paper in the bindery of a printing company to clerking at a video store. Nowadays, Oden writes full-time from his family home near Huntsville.
Oden is the author of Men of Bronze, Memnon, and The Lion of Cairo.
Shiny Book Review 