Author Interview: Katharine Kerr

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Katharine Kerr: From childhood on, I’ve always loved to read. Somewhere around age 8 I realized that books did not just magically appear – they were written by people! And I vowed that one day I’d be one of them. I never lost sight of that goal, even when my life turned very difficult in my 20’s. I just kept reading and kept writing for practice. When I finally finished a novel, FLICKERS, that is, a family saga such as was popular in the 1980s, I realized I’d need an agent. People ask me: how did you learn how to get published without the internet? The answer always seems to surprise them. I don’t know why. I went to the public library and looked up the subject in the old-fashioned card catalog. Lo and behold! There was a whole shelf of books on the subject. I read several and followed their advice.

 

DJR: What inspired your book, Haze? 

KK: For some time, several years really, before I started work on it, I had a scene in my mind. A derelict, probably an addict, was sitting on the sidewalk in a far future city when a military officer came striding to offer him redemption . . . for something, I didn’t know what. But they turned out to be Dan Brennan and Captain Evans. I started writing from there.

 

DJR: How does it relate to your other hard sf?

KK: When I wrote POLAR CITY BLUES, back in the 1990s, I didn’t realize that it was the beginning of something longer. After years of working on the Deverry Saga, I wanted to write a one-off, something that ended! One of my friends, Kate Daniel, thought otherwise. She wrote almost all of POLAR CITY NIGHTMARE even though my name’s on the cover – commercial reasons, of course. In these two books, Humanity have settled only a few exoplanets. The dominant species are the Kar-Li and the H’Allevae (known as Hoppers), but the Leps are represented too, under the condescending name of “lizzies”.

            In a short story I wrote, “Its Own Reward,” another sapient species appears, the Val Chiri Gan. This story takes place a long while before the Polar City pair, when the Old Earth is dying. They may reappear in ZYON. I’m not sure yet.

            SNARE and PALACE are two books more closely linked to HAZE. Both are victims of the sudden closing of the same interstellar shunt.  PALACE was another collaboration. I had nothing to do with the sequel, however, and unlike PCN, my name certainly belongs on the cover of PALACE itself.

Author Interview: Dave Smeds on "The Wind's Kiss"

Dave Smeds has authored novels (including The Sorcery Within and X-Men: Law of the Jungle), screenplays, comic book scripts, and articles, but is best known for his short fiction. His work has graced the pages of Asimov's SF, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, and a plethora of anthologies, including most particularly the Sword and Sorceress series and the Lace and Blade series. His wonderful short fiction piece, "The Wind's Kiss," first appeared in Lace and Blade 4. It's a marvelous story, exquisitely written, full of pitch-perfect heart. Now it's also available in Dave's collection Swords, Magic, and Heart (see the cover below). 

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Dave Smeds: I loved fiction from an early age. I was particularly drawn to stories of imaginary worlds, or at least by settings that were in effect imaginary, such as Mars as depicted by Edgar Rice Burroughs. At age fifteen, it occurred to me I might be able to write a short story or two. I did that. The result was crap, of course, but every time I did another story or fragment of a novel, I could see how to improve. (It was, as you might imagine, REALLY OBVIOUS how I could improve.) I felt driven to eventually write something at a level I’d want to read if someone else had written it.

DJR: What inspired your story in Lace and Blade 4?

DS: There is a great deal of me in “The Wind’s Kiss.” The fulfillment I feel in being a father. The contemplation of the pioneer life led by my ancestors as they moved westward, often literally dwelling right at the edge of civilization, first settlers on the scene. The vital need in our hearts for passion between, and admiration of, one’s lover. However, there is also a more specific inspiration for this particular piece. In August, 2016, I was finally able to take a journey through Nebraska. For the first time in my life, and quite possibly for the last time, I visited the grave of my great great grandmother, Marancy Alexander Warner. The land there has a windswept, deeply conscious aspect. I wanted to install that presence in my fiction as soon as possible, and as it happened, that sort of setting and mood was perfect for what I wanted to write for Lace and Blade 4. 

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?  What about them do you find inspiring?

DS: In the early days, I never thought of myself as deeply influenced by any particular author, except perhaps in the sense that I loved to write sword-and-sorcery, and back then, anyone doing that was standing on the shoulders of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien. In retrospect, I see L. Frank Baum’s influence upon the way I structure a story. Baum did not write The Hero’s Journey. He wrote The Heroine’s Journey. That is to say, he wrote books in which the protagonist — usually a girl — makes alliances, as opposed to the Campbell paradigm where a young man pulls himself up by the bootstraps, stands alone, and takes sole credit for defeating an antagonist. I prefer the complexity and subtlety of The Heroine’s Journey.

DJR: Why do you write what you do, and how does your work differ from others in your genre?

DS: At first I wrote to prove I could do it. Next I wrote to earn money. Both motivations, in my view, demanded that I write the best work I could, so in that respect, I have no regrets. But I write now with the awareness that an author of fiction has an obligation to inject meaning into an essentially meaningless universe. That’s our job as human beings. We are creatures of pattern recognition. It’s our chief survival trait. But a fiction writer must do it better than anyone. Hard to do. However, at this point in my life I’ve proven I can write many types of fiction and I’m at a point where I don’t need the money, really, so what keeps me putting the words down on the chance it will move a reader in a way that would not have happened otherwise. As said, hard to do. I try anyway.

Author Interview: Dave Smeds

From lands distant or nearby, familiar or utterly strange, historical or imaginary, from ancient times to the Belle Époque comes a treasury of luscious, elegant, romantic fantasy. Come with us on a journey through time and across boundaries, inspired by the longings of the heart and the courage residing in even the meekest person.

I met Dave Smeds in the early years of my writing career through the pages of the early volumes of Sword and Sorceress, in which we each had stories. We discovered a shared background in martial arts, as well. His beautiful designs grace the covers of many of the anthologies I've edited, including this one.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Dave Smeds: One way to put it is that it was an entirely natural thing. I did a lot of reading as a kid, and wanted to create my own stuff. The only thing as alluring as writing fiction was to be a comic book artist, but while I took some steps in that direction and still do make some of my income as an artist, I just wasn’t fast enough or good enough to realize that particular pipe dream. Your question, though, makes me aware of how generational my choice was. I was born in the mid-1950s. In my youth I didn’t have the distraction of iphones and cable channels and the World Wide Web. Heck, at first, there wasn’t even any color on the television programs I watched. My leisure entertainment came in the form of paperbacks, print magazines, and comic books. Those outlets were a big deal back then to the whole society in terms of providing sustaining creative entertainment and edification. I wanted to be part of that big deal. I wonder if I would have headed in that direction if I had been part of the millennial generation. I think the answer would probably be no.

DJR: What inspired your story in Lace and Blade 5?

DS: The theme of the series is along the lines of “swashbuckling tales of romance” and of course I pointed my muse in that direction, but when it comes to the Lace and Blade series, my muse has pretty consistently been a contrary wench. I saw an image in my mind of the lone adventurer wandering the land. That seemed pretty spot-on in terms of theme, but when the fellow came completely into view I saw that he was the pilot of a gondola on a river, à la Charon on the River Styx if only Charon had possessed sex appeal and if only the river weren’t so singular of purpose. My plan of course was for the story to involve a romance. That element is in fact in there in the final draft, but to my surprise it is unconsummated, which is not one of my usual modes.

Once I had the idea of using a river as a setting, I’m afraid I had no choice but to go forward. The Kings River of the southern San Joaquin Valley runs along the edge of the farm where I grew up. I spent many an hour on that waterway, floating on tractor inner tubes below the bluffs and oak trees. The water was snow melt from the High Sierra so it was bracing even in July, but that was great because the air temperature of a Fresno County day in July is usually above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I also really appreciated the safety aspect. If you get a tired of swimming when you’re in the middle of a lake, you’re screwed. If you get tired on a river, just tread water for a few moments and the current will carry you to the bank and you don’t have to drown after all.

Author Interview: Samaire Wynne

I recently had a chance to chat with Samaire Wynne, the author of the "Meridian Pack" series, the first volume of which, Awakening Fae: Fated Mates, I reviewed here.

 

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?  

Samaire Wynne: Well, I have loved books and reading since I was a very young child. Wanting to create stories and books came naturally from that.

 

DJR: What inspired your book?  

SW: I love urban fantasy and have read many wolf-shifter books, and I thought I’d try my hand at that genre. I thought I would be taking a break from writing about fae creatures, but they crept into my story anyway!

 

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?  What about them do you find inspiring?   

SW: Madeleine L’Engle, Walter Farley, Susan Cooper, and Neil Gaiman have influenced me the most. They write about utterly fantastical places and characters, and I loved getting lost in their stories. They taught me how to write.

 

DJR: Why do you write what you do, and how does your work differ from others in your genre?  

SW:  I love writing fantasy: It’s my favorite genre. I write about characters that my readers end up caring deeply about, especially when the characters find a family of friends. “Found Family” is the theme running through every book I’ve written. As to how my work differs from others in the Urban Fantasy genre, I am not sure. There are some really fantastic writers and storytellers out there creating some amazing books. I hope I stand out to readers. I love world-building and character backstories, and I love creating stories. I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

DJR: How does your writing process work?  

SW: To begin a new book, I always write a detailed outline. A typical 100,000-word book will have an outline at least five to seven pages long detailing character quirks, motivations, and backgrounds, and outlining the entire story from start to finish. I write early in the morning. Most of the time, I use the Pomodoro Method and write in 25-minute sprints. I try to see how many words I can write during each session, and I usually get so involved with the story that I write well into the afternoon.

Author Interview: Joyce Reynolds-Ward

Joyce Reynolds-Ward and I met the pre-pandemic days when I regularly traveled to conventions in the Pacific Northwest. She’s warm, funny, endlessly curious, and a fantastic writer. And a knowledgeable and enthusiastic horse person. So when I heard she’d just put out a new book, I couldn’t wait to find out about it.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Joyce Reynolds-Ward: I've been making up stories to entertain myself since I was little. At first, they were about books I'd read or TV shows I watched. Then I started writing stories off and on, starting with my junior high literary magazine continuing through the present day. I've gotten somewhat serious about writing since the late '00s, however, and have been writing regularly since 2008 or so.

 

DJR: What inspired your book? 

JRW: My most recently published book, A Different Life: Now. Always. Forever. was an attempt to write something light. Um. Well. Maybe. It's set in what I call the Martiniere Multiverse, a spinoff from my main series, The Martiniere Legacy and the People of the Martiniere Legacy.

When writing A Different Life: What If?, I half-toyed with the idea of writing about my main characters, Ruby and Gabe, from the perspective of Ruby's best friend in college, Linda Coates, who Ruby hires to be her executive assistant. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea, and I figured that it would make a nice, light little story, which was what I needed to think about after several years of Covid and my worries about the 2022 election.

Things kinda happened from there. The book took a more political tone after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, with Linda's brother-in-law becoming a rising reactionary political leader who has nefarious designs involving Linda. But there are still light moments, and we have a bit of biobot action where Ruby and Linda release the latest version of Ruby's bots that are intended to counter climate change by helping plants absorb and retain moisture better. Plus--Linda's reaction to living in an Art Nouveau palace in Paris, France. That was fun to visualize.

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?  What about them do you find inspiring?

JRW: My influences come from several very odd and unusual places, especially for a writer in the speculative fiction genre. One of my earliest influences was Mary O'Hara, of My Friend Flicka fame. If you have only read the first book, especially in an abridged edition considered suitable for children, you miss a LOT of the deeper undercurrents of O'Hara's writing. The other two books in the trilogy, Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming, delve into spirituality (O'Hara had become involved with early versions of Eastern mysticism) and conflicted, difficult marital relationships. Writing this, I suddenly realize that my character Gabriel Martiniere owes a little bit to O'Hara's Rob McLaughlin. Not a lot--but there's a little bit of Rob in Gabe.

One thing to consider, though, about O'Hara, is that she was one of the original script doctors in Hollywood during the silent film era. While she only cites a few instances where she got called in to work on scripts gone wrong, it's enough to make me wish that she had written a memoir about that Hollywood experience. Nonetheless, her life story (as related in Flicka's Friend) is quite fascinating.

John Steinbeck is another literary influence that I frequently cite from my early days of writing. One of my high school English teachers used his Travels with Charley as a textbook for her advanced writing class. From Charley, I moved on to his Journal of a Novel, drafted while he was writing East of Eden. Then I went on to read all of his books. Steinbeck, along with O'Hara, taught me a lot about the use of settings in my work that I think really still shows up.

Otherwise, there are many writers who have influenced my work and made me think more about the process of writing and what I was doing while writing. Obviously, I read widely and well beyond the genre. Recent influences include C.J. Cherryh, Beverly Jenkins, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott (especially her so-underestimated Jaran books), Craig Johnson, N. K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, and many, many more. I am always eager to discover a new writer and new works. My ebook library card gets a LOT of use these days.

DJR: Why do you write what you do, and how does your work differ from
others in your genre?

JRW: Originally, I started writing what I do because I wasn't finding the books I wanted to read. I wanted to read about more strong women, but I also wanted to read fantasy in settings that weren't quasi-medieval Europe, as well as science fiction that wasn't set in Southern California or New York. I wanted to see more work that included the things I was interested in, including realistic horses, the inland West as a setting, examination of political power that didn't make me want to throw the book across the room, and other things.

 I write politics from my training in political science and the nearly two decades I spent as a political organizer. Some writers in genre have that knowledge and understanding, but many don't. While my understanding is more on the state and local level, it's enough to extrapolate for larger settings. Additionally, because I spent many years as a corporate wife at the middle management level in sales, I know somewhat more about some of the stuff that goes on in that realm than most people. The ins and outs of management fads, the degree to which certain things get done, the internal politics...all of that. I focus on multigenerational privately-held corporate entities rather than larger publicly-held companies because that's easier to control in a story.

Author Interview: Louise Marley on The Great Witch of Brittany

Award-winning author Louise Marley has long been one of my favorite writers. From the chillingly prescient The Terrorists of Irustan to the deeply touching The Glass Harmonica, to the YA "Horsemistress" series (as Toby Bishop), to the music-themed Mozart's Blood and The Brahms Deception, the scope and insightfulness of her writing mark her as a major voice in fantasy and science fiction. Her newest novel, The Great Witch of Brittany, will be released in February 2022.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Louise Marley: Like so many of us, I was an avid reader as a child, and it followed logically—since I am by nature a performer—that I wanted to write stories myself. My musical ambitions dominated the first part of my life, but I always meant to return to writing. It has been amazing to learn how much the two careers have in common.

 

DJR: What inspired your book?

LM: There is no one factor that inspires any of my novels, but the witch novels definitely had their origins in my fascination with witchcraft and the practice of it. I had fallen into the habit of writing historicals, and so the historical settings for A Secret History of Witches and now its prequel, The Great Witch of Brittany, came naturally.

 

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?  What about them do you find inspiring?

LM: I love many writers, from the Western authors I read as a girl to the Golden Age gothic mysteries to the great feminist science fiction writers of the latter half of the 20^th century. I’m often inspired by the most recent really good novel I’ve read, and I find that enriches my own imagination. I’m not tempted to copy, fortunately, but I learn and absorb from some of the amazing prose and incredible plots I find. Thrillers have been my most recent indulgence, and wow! do those writers know how to plot!

 

DJR: Why do you write what you do, and how does your work differ from others in your genre?

LM: I’m extremely lucky to be in a place where I can write what I want to write. My last four books have featured witches and witchcraft, and I do hope they have my own particular stamp on them, which is working witches—women who have to study and practice and explore to make their magic work. I’ve found that the witch genre has many facets, and lots of excellent writers are working in it, with results that vary from terrifying to downright funny.

New Interview!

 I was interviewed by NF Reads. Here's a sample:

# How do you deal with creative block?

For a long time, I used to joke that I couldn’t afford writer’s block. I began writing professionally when my first child was a baby and I learned to use very small amounts of time. This involved “pre-writing,” going over the next scene in my mind (while doing stuff like washing the dishes) until I knew exactly how I wanted it to go; when I’d get a few minutes at the typewriter (no home computers yet), I’d write like mad. I always had a backlog of scenes and stories and whole books, screaming at me to be written. The bottleneck was the time in which to work on them. Now I understand that it is indeed possible to run into a brick wall, creatively speaking. This usually means there is an issue in my set-up or I need more time to mull over a problem that just under the surface. In all of these cases, the best thing I can do is to write something else: a journal, poetry (I’m a terrible poet), blog posts, something hideously self-indulgent and unpublishable, letters, shopping lists…the point is to keep the words flowing while the “back” part of my mind sorts things out.

Author Interview: Nancy Jane Moore

Today I chat with Nancy Jane Moore, whose feminist retelling of The Three Musketeers -- For the Good of the Realm -- came out from Aqueduct Press.

 

Deborah Jean Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Nancy Jane Moore: I grew up in a world in which reading and writing were taken very seriously. My parents were both journalists, so they wrote and edited and had strong opinions about the way other people reported news and wrote stories. When my sister and I were young, my mother would take us to the bookmobile (we lived in the country, so there wasn’t a regular library nearby) to get two weeks worth of books. We’d also grab a box of Hershey’s almond bars at the store and come home to read and eat chocolate.

When I was older, my mother would edit my papers for school, which taught me more about how to write than the work I actually did in class. By the time I finished high school, I had lots of confidence in my basic ability to write.

Two things about reading fiction pushed me toward writing it. First, I came across the occasional story or novel that had a profound effect on me – for example, Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City – which made me want to write something that did that for someone else. For all that I read lots of non-fiction, it was always the fiction that inspired that feeling.

Secondly, I spent a lot of time as a teenager reading stories in which I found myself identifying with the main male character because any women in the stories were just there for sex appeal or to tell the man “Don’t go.” I wanted to write stories in which women got to do things. I hope I’ve done that.

 

DJR: What inspired your book, For the Good of the Realm?

NJM: Some years back, I re-read The Three Musketeers and one of the sequels Dumas wrote, Twenty Years After. After d’Artagnan progressed from a romantic young man to a disillusioned older one, I gave up, but the core story stayed with me. I love adventure stories, but of course the role of women in the Dumas stories was unsatisfying. So I came up with the idea that an all-woman Queen’s Guard should protect the Queen, and went on from there. The short story “A Mere Scutcheon” came first – it’s in my collection Conscientious Inconsistencies – and I finally got around to taking the advice of the editor who bought the collection to expand it into a novel.

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?  What about them do you find inspiring?

NJM: There have been different ones at different times, but perhaps the most crucial ones were the ones I read starting in 1979. I had complained to a co-worker about the fiction I was reading – for years I described the mainstream/literary fiction of the 1970s as “people living in the Hamptons and getting divorced” – and he said, “You should read C.J. Cherryh.” So I found the first book of the Morgaine series at the local mall bookstore and was hooked. From there I stumbled onto most of the major women science fiction writers of the 1970s and 1980s, both those writing great adventures and those writing incredible feminist fiction. (The feminist science fiction from the 70s was so much better than the mainstream feminist fiction.) I read a few male authors, too – Samuel Delany and William Gibson in particular – but mostly I read Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, and for awhile everything Cherryh wrote (she was so prolific she got ahead of me). Among other things, they made me realize that if I set a story in the future or in a world that doesn’t exist, I could write about women with agency without spending time explaining how they were able to be that way. That got me started.

 

Tim Susman's The Revolution and the Fox: Book Release and Author Interview

Today's Author Interview is with Tim Susman, who is celebrating the upcoming release of his queer furry alternate history, The Revolution and the Fox.


Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself. How did you come to be a writer?
Tim Susman: I was encouraged to read by my parents, both English majors, and I read everything I could get my hands on. Eventually I found that I had stories in my head that I wanted to work out on paper, so I joined my college’s science fiction magazine and started writing short stories. After college, I kept on writing, and reached a point where I wanted to do more with it, so I took some writing workshop classes at our local university. I started writing novels, and when I got laid off from my tech job some years later, my husband encouraged me to write full time. I’ve been doing that for ten years now, and it is the best job I’ve ever had.


DJR: What inspired your book?
TS: This is the fourth (and final) book in a series inspired by the idea that coming-of-age stories play out in our lives at many different scales, that a country’s war of independence is a coming-of-age story, that a magical race created by a human sorcerer can, like any child, also have a coming-of-age story. The fourth book specifically grew out of two ideas: first, the idea that what a person or country does with their independence is as interesting as how they achieved it, and I wanted to explore that both for my protagonists and their new country; and second, that the magic system I’d built for the British Empire wouldn’t necessarily be the same system used all over the world. I wanted to explore other cultures and give the reader a sense of how different magic might be outside of Britain.


DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing? What about them do you find inspiring?
TS: Stephen King for his ability to create a mood. David Mitchell for his ability to find the perfect little details to describe a character, whether in narrative or in the character’s voice (also for his use of language and the craft in the endings of his books). Kazuo Ishiguro for the fragility of perception and memory (and also for his lovely characters). Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series and the way she brings real people to meet epic moments will always be in the back of my head, as will much of Madeleine L’Engle’s work for the same reason. For this series specifically I often thought back to Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.’s Flinger series (Caverns, Reefs, Lava, Cliffs) because he so ably portrayed a protagonist growing up with powers he needed to constantly build on in order to fight the forces arrayed against him for no logical reason other than an accident around his birth.


DJR: Why do you write what you do, and how does your work differ from others in your genre?
TS: I write furry fiction, meaning my stories usually have animal-people of some kind in them. I like that aesthetic and the idea that culturally we invest certain animals with certain traits; furry fiction is the logical extension of that. We think foxes are crafty; what if you had a whole group of fox-people who would be viewed as crafty? That’s the literary explanation, but it may be more of a justification after the fact of my having seen Disney’s Robin Hood at a young age and wanting desperately to live in that world.

I also write queer fiction because I think there needs to be more queer fiction, and also because I love to see the breadth of ways in which people find love and identity. I’m old enough to remember when I thought the world was divided into straight and gay, and to see people come forward year after year to show us how diverse the world is, and how blurred the distinctions are that we once thought so sharp, has been just a continuing source of joy.

As for what differs from others in my genre, I think what I try to bring to each of my works is a sense of optimism that everyone can find out their truest self and can express that. I hope that reading my books will give readers confidence that they too can find who they are and live their best lives.

Author Interview: Marella Sands Interviews Me

In a fun turnabout, author Marella Sands interviewed me on her blog about my forthcoming release, Collaborators. Here's our chat:

Marella Sands: What prompted you to write this book?

Deborah J. Ross: I lived the better part of 1991 in Lyons, France, and I was repeatedly struck by how history permeated every aspect. Some buildings showed damage from cannon balls during the French Revolution. Plaques marked places where citizens were executed by the Nazis or Jewish families were deported. After visiting the tiny Musée de la Résistance, I became interested in how many varied ways the French responded to the German occupation. Some protested from the very beginning for religious or ethical reasons, but others went along, whether from fear or apathy or entrenched anti-Semitism, or simply because the war did not affect them personally. Yet others more sought to exploit the situation for personal power or financial gain. Some became active only when their own personal lives were affected.

I knew then that I had to tell this story. Because I’m not a writer of history or historical fiction, but of science fiction and fantasy, I would tell it in the genre I know. I would set my tale on an alien planet, in an alien city . . . but one that I love even as I had come to love Lyons.

MS: How did you develop the motivations of the main characters? 

DJR: The central inspiration for Collaborators – that individuals respond in a variety of complex and contradictory ways to a situation of occupation and resistance – immediately suggested many types of characters: the rebel, the idealist, the opportunist, the political player, the merchant willing to sell to anyone if the profit is high enough, sadist who exploits the powerlessness of others for his own gratification, the ambitious person who doesn’t care who his allies are, the negotiator, the peace-maker, the patriot.

One of the first characters to speak to me arose from an unexpected source. I never knew either of my paternal grandparents, for both had perished in the lawlessness and pogroms in the Ukraine shortly after the first World War. My father told me about  how his mother ran a bookstore that was the center of intellectual (and revolutionary!) thought in their village, how when that village was destroyed, she kept her two children alive as they wandered the countryside for two years, going from one cousin’s house to another but never staying very long. He spoke of her courage, her idealism, and her unfailing love. Some piece of her, or her-as-remembered, stayed with me, and I wondered if I could create a character with that strength and devotion to her children. I began to write about Hayke, who opens the book as he lies in a field with his two children, gazing up at the stars and wondering what these star-people might be like. Hayke had other ideas about what his life was like besides merely following in my grandmother’s footsteps, and everything changed once it became clear to me that the alien race – the Bandari – were gender-fluid. Hayke, like my grandmother, was a widow (using the term generically to include both sexes), and one of his children was born of his own body, but the other of his dead spouse’s, and he told me he felt an especial tenderness for the latter child.

Even though the ground action takes place in an area roughly the size of Western Europe and most of the characters live or come from Chacarre, I didn’t want all the national territories to be the same. I wanted differences in language, dress, attitudes toward authority, etc., between Chacarre and its rival, Erlind, and also within Chacarre itself. Every once in a while, a new character would surprise me, like Na-chee-nal with his “barbarian” vigor and his smelly woolen vest, or Lexis, the dangerously repressed academic poet.

The Terrans presented a different challenge because they were more homogeneous than the Bandari. They inhabit a single spacecraft and although there is a natural division between crew and scientific personnel, for the most part their goals are shared and their hierarchies are well-defined. Left unchecked, that’s a recipe for boring, so I added some friction, a few divergent motives, a highly stressed environment . . . and into this walked Dr. Vera Eisenstein, eccentric genius. Most of the inspiration for her character came from the women engineers and physicists I’d gotten to know (thank you, Society of Women Engineers!) with a touch of Dr. Richard Feynmann thrown in. She doesn’t play by anyone’s rules, she cares far more about science than diplomacy, she’s simply too good at what she does to disregard, and her mind never stays still. I had a ball cooping her up in the infirmary and watching what kind of trouble she’d get into, but I didn’t realize at first that she would become a pivotal character, one capable of acting for the greatest good despite the depth of her loss. I’d been thinking about her passion in terms of science, not in terms of her capacity for love nor in terms of her ruthless commitment to understanding everything she sees around her, whether it is a problem in laser spectroscopy or alien psychology or the nature of her own grief.

Author Interview: James Alan Gardner

Today I chat with Canadian SF author James Alan Garner, whose wonderfully inventive and hilarious novels, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault (2017) and They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded (2018) I have previously reviewed here.

Deborah J. Ross: Where did you get the idea for The Dark vs. The Spark series?

James Alan Gardner: I have always loved superheroes. I owned the first 8 Avengers comics, bought when they first came out, plus many other comics from the early 1960s. (Yes, I'm that old.) I kept on reading Marvel and DC down through the years, until the early 1980s when I began playing Champions, a table-top role-playing game. I've been role-playing ever since, pretty much once a week for 40 years (yikes!) Over that time, I've played many games (including of course a lot of Dungeons & Dragons) but the games that stand out most in my mind are Champions and the White Wolf "World of Darkness" games in which you could play vampires, werewolves, ghosts and other such "monsters".

I don't really know what brought superheroes and "monsters" together in my mind...but when the Occupy movement started in 2011, the idea of the 1% being monsters and the 99% being protected by superheroes seemed like a natural. From that point on, it was just a matter of figuring out who my superheroes would be and what kind of trouble they'd get into.


DJR: Tell us a little about your previous books.

JAG: Before the Dark vs. Spark books, I had a science fiction series that took place in what I called the League of Peoples universe. The idea was that the most powerful alien races in the galaxy had banded together to impose a single inescapable law on the galaxy: dangerous non-sentient creatures were not allowed to leave their home solar system. Dangerous non-sentient creatures included anyone or anything who was prepared to kill a sentient creature. So if a murderer or someone even willing to commit murder tried to leave their home system, they simply died: 100% infallibly. In terms of humans, peaceful people could safely go almost anywhere in the galaxy, but anyone who tried to leave Earth's solar system with any sort of deadly weapon just died, always always always. Earth therefore remained the home of people who refused to play nice, but anyone with kindly intentions had free run of the galaxy (along with all the other alien races that were similarly civilized).

It was a fun series. Some of the books took place on Earth among the dregs who'd stayed behind. Other books took place in various star systems; they mostly featured human Explorers getting into trouble. On the one hand, villains simply couldn't go interstellar; however, any particular planet might have homegrown threats...and of course, the Explorers couldn't carry lethal weapons themselves. I liked playing around with the possibilities.

Author Interview: Helen Harper

Today I chat with Helen Harper, author of the delightful fantasy, Wishful Thinking (How To Be The Best Damn Faery Godmother In The World (Or Die Trying), which I reviewed here.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Helen Harper: I always thought of myself as a reader rather than a writer. I grew up

entirely immersed in books of all sorts, but fantasy was always my

favourite. In my early twenties I had vague notions of trying to write

for Mills and Boon but, when I tried to write something, I realised it

was far harder than I thought so I abandoned my efforts. Much later on,

when I found myself under a great deal of stress at work, I discovered

that writing was the perfect way to take a step back from life and

immerse myself in other worlds. Instead of slobbing out in front of the

television, I would write. I didn't have any plans to share what I

wrote. It was purely a release for myself. Nobody was more surprised

than myself when I realised that not only had I managed to write

complete books but that other people wanted to read them.

DJR: What inspires your books?

HH: I'm a pantser rather than a plotter so I tend to make things up as I go

along. However, I always start with a germ of an idea that can come from

anywhere. With The Lazy Girl's Guide to Magic, it was a chat with a good

friend about how we would make useless book heroines because we were too

lazy. With Highland Magic, the ideas came from wondering about the

divide between the Highlands and the Lowlands of Scotland and the

Dreamweaver series was inspired by an article I read about adult night

terrors.

Author Interview: B. A. Williamson, Author of the Gwendolyn Gray Adventures

Today I chat with Brent Williamson, author of the marvelous Gwendolyn Gray books. I reviewed the first one, The Marvelous Adventures of Gwendolyn Gray here, and the hot-off-the-presses sequel, The Fantastical Exploits of Gwendolyn Gray here.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Brent Williamson: Uh, boredom. I was on a charter bus taking a group of 5th graders to Washington DC. It was 2 AM, and some kid kept kicking my seat in his sleep. I had no wi-fi and no cell signal. So I got to thinking. I suddenly got that creative itch you get in those surreal moments in the wee hours in unfamiliar surroundings. My wife was pregnant with our first child, so I decided to write a bedtime story. That was the first time I ever thought of myself as a writer. Of course, later on, I looked back on the comics and musicals I had written in college, and the notebooks of songs and poems from high school, and realized that I had been writing all along. I hadn't thought of myself as a "writer," but I wasn't afraid of writing either. I had just enough experience that when I thought, "I should write a book!" I wasn't too intimidated to instantly rule it out. Also, stupid ideas seem much less stupid at 2 AM on a bus.

DJR: And in the shower!

DJR: What led you to write MG and how is it different from YA or adult fantasy?

BW: I never really thought about it. My favorite books are all mostly sci-fi and fantasy, and mostly for kids, so that's what I gravitated to. I had an idea and a character, and it wasn't until the book was done and ready for pitching that I found out that it was what was called "middle grade." From what I can tell, the big difference between YA and MG is intensity--violence, language... *ahem* relationships. You can go farther in YA. MG typically focuses on 4th-6th grade age characters, and YA focuses on older kids. You end up dealing with whole different sets of issues, because of the different challenges faced at those times of life. I picture this series as being an MG/YA crossover. Gwendolyn grows so much over the course of these stories. If you finish book two and take a glance back to the first few pages of book one, you realize just how far she's come. And in future books, I plan to follow her into the YA territory of her teen years.  

DJR: That will make me, and many readers, very happy! I love watching characters mature from one story to the next. 

Author Interview: Tara Gilboy

Please welcome Tara Gilboy, author of the Middle Grade adventures, Unwritten and Rewritten.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Tara Gilboy: I am, first and foremost, a reader. Books and stories have always been one of the most important things in my life, and I’ve wanted to write pretty much since I learned to read. I still have some of the stories I wrote in elementary school. My mom recently gave me a letter I wrote to a publisher when I was in third grade, asking if I could write books for their series. (Apparently she never mailed it!) Unfortunately, until I was in my twenties, I had never actually met a writer, and so writing started to seem like this kind of “impossible dream.” Then in college, I took some creative writing classes, published a couple short stories, and worked as an editor at a literary journal, and I realized: “Hey, I can really do this!” I completed my MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, which ended up being very humbling and also one of the most formative experiences of my writing life.

DJR: What led you to write MG and how is it different from YA or adult fantasy?

TG: Even though I have always loved children’s books and read tons of middle grade (and actually my first ventures into writing were always in middle grade, which is what I wrote for fun), when I was in college and started seriously pursuing writing, I focused on adult fiction. I am embarrassed to admit that I was a bit of a literary snob, and I had these really pretentious ideas about writing. My sense of story was virtually nonexistent, I sneered at plot, and I was writing a lot of “purple prose,” these kind of overwritten sentences, way too much description and exposition. But a lot of my stories left me feeling cold. I wasn’t in love with the stories and characters. I remember in my first year of my MFA at UBC, I was taking a novel-writing workshop and working on an adult novel that was this really serious historical piece about a marriage and a woman finding herself within her marriage. I was really struggling with it and couldn’t wait for the workshop to be over so I never had to look at the novel again. At the same time, I was taking a class on writing children’s books and reading all these amazing middle grade novels and having wonderful class discussions about them, and I realized that I was happiest when I was writing these kinds of stories. At the end of the first year, I changed my thesis genre and never looked back.

I think middle grade differs from adult fantasy (and to some extent, YA), in that it is really condensed into its essential elements – there is no room to digress or go off on tangents or you risk losing your reader. Middle grade readers have great eyes for what actually needs to be there in the text, and when I am writing middle grade, I am ruthless about cutting. I am also very careful about structure and pacing when I am revising. I want to keep the reader turning pages without making things feel too rushed. The focus is always on telling a good story, which is what I love so much about these books. I also think middle grade tends to look inward, where characters really make sense of their own identities, who they are, whereas in YA, the books tend to look outward, with the main characters finding their place in the world, which makes sense, since YA readers are often on the cusp of leaving home in just a few short years.

Author Interview: R.A. McCandless on The Clockwork Detective, Writing, and Life

Recently I reviewed R.A. McCandless's excellent steampunk novel, The Clockwork Detective, here. I said, 

The last couple of years have brought a slew of wonderful steampunk adventures with resourceful, kick-ass heroines, and this one by McCandless is a worthy addition.

Here I chat with the author about his inspiration, his future projects, and his advice for aspiring writers.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

R.A. McCandless: I came out writing, which was a weird delivery for the doctor. But really, I found myself telling stories early in grade school. We'd have assignments to write a complete sentence using a set of vocabulary words, and I'd get bored with that. Instead, I'd use the words to tell a short story. From there, it was only a short jaunt to writing my own stories.

Dragons are one of my chief inspirations. I've only included one once, in a short story. But any world where dragons can conceivably exist—please and thank you! That's almost any fantasy or science fiction story, which creates a broad palette for me to enjoy. From there, it's a hop, skip, and a wardrobe journey into another world that I'm fascinated to start exploring and sharing.

DJR: What inspired The Clockwork Detective?

RAMcC: I’ve always, always, always loved the steampunk/dieselpunk aesthetic. I’d been approached by a publisher to submit a horror story for an anthology they were doing featuring Kevin J. Anderson. I love Anderson, but I’m not a horror writer. I knew this might be my one chance, so I buckled down and started working on a story. At the time, I was watching a lot of “Murdoch Mysteries” and “Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries” and really enjoying that pseudo-steampunk atmosphere. It wasn’t a huge leap for me to incorporate the same setting into my story, and suddenly I had Constable Aubrey Hartmann, solving mysteries, riding airships, and going on adventures.

Guest Interview: Heather Albano, Author of the Keeping Time Trilogy

Welcome Heather Albano, author of the wonderful steampunk time-travel novel, Timepiece, and its sequels. I reviewed it here. She's graciously agreed to give us a peek behind the scenes.

What inspired your novel?

(I love telling this story.) It started when afriend of mine told me about a dream she’d had, in which a package arrived in the mail for her then-infant son. Inside the package addressed to him was a package addressed to me (how odd, she thought) and inside that was a velvet bag containing a pocket watch. Opening the pocket watch, my friend discovered the period casing contained a futuristic-looking screen cycling through images of different historical times and places. “I think I had your dream, Heather.”

I tried to write a story about her son and me and the pocket watch, including a reason for the nested packages, but I couldn’t get it to gel. A pocket watch seemed to belong to an older era anyway…so maybe this wanted to be a Victorian time travel story. Maybe steampunk—huge mechanical monsters stomping down a gaslit street? Yeah. Stomping after what? What would mechanical Victorian monsters hunt? Something natural run amuck, of course. The Victorians would totally build monstrous scientific artificial things to constrain monstrous natural things.

Okay, so where did the run-amuck natural things come from? And when? It would have to be long enough before the Victorian era for the organic monsters to become a problem, for a solution to be generated, and for the solution to become its own problem. Seventy to eighty years, say? The “Victorian era” spanned a long time, of course, but I meant the Sherlock Holmes / Jack the Ripper / Dracula / H.G. Wells part of it—so call it 1880 to 1895. What was going on in England seventy to eighty years before, say, 1885?

Five seconds later, I was scrambling for Wikipedia to look up the dates of the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Five seconds after that, I knew exactly what the story was about.



What was your favorite part of writing the Keeping Time trilogy?

My favorite type of reading experience is the one in which I suddenly realize the story I thought I was reading is not the story I am actually reading—the moment when the addition of a perspective or a backstory changes the context entirely. So it’s not entirely true that I wrote the first two books just so I could rewrite the scenes from a different character’s perspective in the third…but it was my favorite part of writing the third. Other people were in the middle of their lives when Elizabeth’s exuberant bildungsroman intersected with them, after all, and their stories have a different shape than hers…

Where’d You Get That Idea? Story Inspirations from Lace and Blade 4 Authors

Reposting a favorite round-table blog.

Carol Berg: One of my aims when I create new heroes or heroines is to make them real people. I want readers to believe they had a life before walking onto the canvas of my story and will (if the story permits!) have a life when they walk off again. But of course, after the traumas/losses/victories of the story, the nature of that life is often irrevocably changed. 

Ever since my novel Song of the Beast was published, I’ve had readers asking what became of Aidan McAllister--a scarred, broken singer of visions, who saved his world from the scourge of dragon warfare. At the end of the story, he abandons his friends and his hope of a normal life to lead the beasts into the wild. I decided that it would be fun to satisfy the readers’ curiosity and mine, and so I wrote “The Heart’s Coda.”

Marie Brennan: Some years ago I bought a pair of black-and-red beaded earrings from the jeweler Elise Matthesen, who habitually gives titles to all the pieces she makes. The earrings are called "At the Sign of the Crow and Quill," and like many authors, I pledged to Elise that I would try to write something by that title someday. The mood that evoked in my mind was very much a Lace and Blade mood, so when I received an invitation to submit to the anthology, that turned out to be the spark I needed to transform the phrase into characters and plot.

Heather Rose Jones:  “Gifts Tell Truth” is set in the same world as my Alpennia series: a 

mildly alternate Ruritanian early 19th century with magic. One of the things I love to do when exploring characters it to make offhand references to events in their past. Events where I may not know all the details of what happened, just that it shaped them in some way. One thing that is very clear about Jeanne, Vicomtesse de Cherdillac, one of the protagonists of The Mystic Marriage and a continuing character throughout the series, is that she is a “Woman With A Past.” The more I write about her, the more fascinated I am by how she came to be the person she is in the novels.

The events in “Gifts Tell Truth” haven’t been specifically referenced in the books, other than a passing comment about how the stories of her youth aren’t appropriate for innocent ears. But I knew in a general way that during the French occupation of Alpennia, just after Jeanne’s unexpected marriage to a much older French aristocratic émigré, she led a wild and scandalous life, spurred on by a tragic event in her coming-out season (which will be told in a later story). The current story grew out of wanting to explore the origins of some of her later attitudes and reflexes, with the added bonus of showing the start of an odd but enduring friendship that features in the novels.

Citadels of Darkover Author Interview: Barb Caffrey

Coming in May 2019

Strongholds of rock . . . fortresses of the spirit . . . a planet set apart . . .

Citadels can be psychic, emotional, and cultural as well as military, and the wonderfully imaginative contributors to this volume have taken the basic idea and spun out stories in different and often unexpected directions.

Pre-order it at:
ePub https://books2read.com/u/4XRR0N
Kindle https://amzn.to/2TmBBW0

Here I chat with contributor Barb Caffrey:

Deborah J. Ross: How did you become a writer?

Barb Caffrey: When I was very young, I started writing. I don't remember exactly when, either; I do remember that my first try at a really elaborate story was when I was eleven years old. I wrote about the first ball girl at Milwaukee County Stadium (then the home of the Milwaukee Brewers); at the time, there were no ball girls, just ball boys, and that annoyed me. But because I felt, even at eleven, that the boys wouldn't like it if the girls got to play along with 'em, my female character pretended to be a young boy. And was found out...but another of the boys liked her, and kept her secrets.

I wish I still had that story...ahem.

Anyway, I also wrote poetry, a few SF stories, and some Star Trek pastiches when I was in high school. I enjoyed it, but at the time my focus was on music; I never thought this would end up my career, and the music a sidelight, but life is what it is. (And I'd not have it any other way.)

DJR: What authors inspired you?

BC: There were so many, growing up. Probably the first writer I read a lot from was Poul Anderson; our junior high library had a lot of his books, and I found them amusing. (I did not take Dominic Flandry seriously, but I enjoyed his adventures. Had I been a bit older, I might've been alarmed by Flandry's misogyny, or at least by his cynicism. But I've always had a soft spot for him.) Then I read Andre Norton, and was so pleased to find out Andre was a woman...then, when I was in high school, I remember reading several of Marion Zimmer Bradley's books, mostly the juveniles (we'd definitely now call 'em YA), including the romance between Andrew Carr and his eventual wife, Callista.

I returned to Darkover again and again, because I found it to be such an interesting world. 

Then I found The Shattered Chain, and I was riveted. The structure. The style. The story!

Best of all, I got to meet three strong women in Lady Rohana, Terran Magda Lorne, and Jaelle n'ha Melora. And I loved 'em all, and could see at least a little of myself reflected in all...no matter what choices they made, they knew they had to make them consciously, as best they could. And the idea of conscious choice was new to me, so I wanted to know more.

Anyway, more contemporary writers who've definitely made an impact include Rosemary Edghill, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, and of course my late husband, writer Michael B. Caffrey. Without all three of them, I would not be the writer I am today.

Citadels of Darkover Author Interviews: Lillian Csernica

Coming in May 2019

Strongholds of rock . . . fortresses of the spirit . . . a planet set apart . . .

Citadels can be psychic, emotional, and cultural as well as military, and the wonderfully imaginative contributors to this volume have taken the basic idea and spun out stories in different and often unexpected directions.

Here I chat with contributor Lillian Csernica:

Pre-order it at:

ePub https://books2read.com/u/4XRR0N

Kindle https://amzn.to/2TmBBW0

Deborah J. Ross: How did you become a writer?

Lillian Csernica: As far back as I can remember, I've always loved stories. I still have the copy of the Little Golden Book of Fairy Tales my mother gave me when I was in kindergarten. In elementary school we made our own books. Like many writers, I spent a lot of my childhood at the library. Stories have always been important to me, both for the reading and the writing.

DJR: What authors inspired you?

LC: Ray Bradbury, Tanith Lee, Harlan Ellison, and Agatha Christie, among others.

DJR: Were there any pivotal moments in your literary journey?

LC: My first short story sale, Fallen Idol, made it into DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories XX. The sale of my pirate romance, Ship of Dreams, was a major career milestone. The Treehouse Writers Group, the folks behind the Clockwork Alchemy steampunk convention, invited me to contribute to their convention anthologies. We're currently in production on the fourth anthology in the series. Writing steampunk has opened my eyes to the wonders of combining science and fantasy.