Phil Giunta's Blog, page 122
March 22, 2011
Oh, God. Book Two!
For those who read Testing the Prisoner, you'll remember Miranda Lorensen--blonde, blue-eyed old flame of my protagonist, Daniel Masenda. Miranda is a psychic medium. She can communicate with the other side and through visions, can see past events that happened in a location as if there were happening again all around her.
Of all the characters in Prisoner, Miranda was clearly a viable candidate to carry her own storyline. In addition to her abilities, she also leads a motley team of paranormal investigators, something that is merely hinted at in Prisoner.
In book two, tentatively titles, By Your Side, I delve into Miranda's abilities and her relationship with her fellow investigators. We learn a bit more about her family and what makes her tick by throwing her into a situation that will stretch her talents and test her fears.
Here is a rough, brief synopsis of By Your Side:
While haunted by visions of her brother's suicide, psychic-medium Miranda Lorensen is called to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to investigate a series of bizarre deaths--half of which are suicides. Miranda and her team of paranormal investigators quickly find themselves confronted by a vengeful spirit awakened thirty five years after a bloody family tragedy. Miranda realizes that only she can stop the entity before it kills again, but will the lives she save redeem her for the brother she failed?
March 21, 2011
Author Interview: Aaron Rosenberg, Part Two
6.
I see that you published an extensive variety of educational books through Rosen Publishing between 2002 and 2007. The topics range from war to skateboarding to biographies of athletes and world leaders.
Yep. :)
Were you well versed in all of these topics prior to writing about them or was there extensive research involved? (I’m envisioning Aaron Rosenberg in helmet and pads doing ollies on a skateboard ramp).
There was a lot of research. I was initially supposed to do skateboarder bios that time around, and then they decided they wanted books on skateboarding tips instead. I told them I hadn’t skateboarded since I was a kid, but they assured me they had their own experts who would go over everything and make sure the tricks actually worked properly—my job was just to put it together and make it clean and readable and engaging. So I did. The biographies and histories were a lot easier—the skateboarding and razor scooter books were a bit more challenging, but it was fun to go outside my usual comfort zone!
I understand that you have a few more educational books coming out soon through both Scholastic and Zenoscope. What can you tell us about those?
Well, for Scholastic I’ve got a middle-grade series called Profiles. The first book is the Civil War and the second is World War II. Both books take six major figures from that event and not only tell about them but also explain how they and their actions were connected. It’s fun because you get to see how these people influenced each other, and the rest of the world as a result.
For Zenoscope I just wrote pieces for two books they’re doing for Discovery. The first one is Discovery Channel’s Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Predators and the second is Animal Planet's Top 10 Most Dangerous Animals. They’re graphic novels, which was great because I’ve loved comics since I was a kid but these will be the first illustrated stories I’ve actually had see print.
7.
Your first original novel, The Birth of the Dread Remora, is out now. Congratulations! You must be very excited! This is the first book in The Scattered Earth saga. You’re following up with a novella in March called Crossed Paths.
Thanks, yes, I am very excited! Much as I love doing tie-in work, it was really nice to write something that wasn’t based on anything but my own imagination. And yes, Crossed Paths was just released as well—it’s a companion novella to the novel, featuring the same characters and the same ship, and it includes the novel’s first two chapters afterward, so you can buy the novella and get a taste of the novel as well if you’d rather do it that way.
What can you tell us about the origins of this series and the universe in which the stories are set?
Well, my friends David Niall Wilson and Steve Savile and I got to talking at one point. We wanted to create something big together. What we came up with was the Scattered Earth saga. Basically the three of us came up with the universe and certain major events that kicked things off, and then an overarching storyline that can encompass everyone. Then each of us created our individual worlds and characters and stories within that larger framework.
How many books are planned for The Scattered Earth saga? Will you pen all of them or will other authors be involved?
Right now we’re estimating at least a dozen novels total in the saga. I’ll be writing all of the Dread Remora books, just as Dave will be doing all of his series and Steve will be writing all of his. We may eventually bring in additional authors—the great thing is, the way we’ve got Scattered Earth set up, we could easily accommodate other authors with their own series, as long as they tie in to the larger story down the road. We’re also going to be doing them as e-books, print books, and audiobooks, so you’ve got lots of ways to follow along!
8. At Farpoint in February, you co-hosted a panel with Howie Weinstein, Michael Jan Friedman, Bob Greenberger, Peter David, and Glen Hauman to announce the launch of Crazy 8 Press. Further announcements will be made at Shore Leave 33 in July.
Please describe the purpose of Crazy 8 Press and how it originated. Can you give us a hint about some of your initial contributions?
Basically Mike had been thinking about publishing and where it was going and what that would mean for authors and ways to avoid some of the problems and maybe find new opportunities to reach readers. He started talking to the rest of us, and then we all started talking together, and we agreed that it was now feasible to publish directly and get books straight to readers without any middlemen like publishing houses. That’s really what it’s all about, finding ways to get our books directly to our readers and also, as a result, being more responsive to their interests and requests.
My first contribution to Crazy 8, at least as things stand right now, is No Small Bills. No Small Bills is a humorous science fiction novel in the vein of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s about an average, ordinary guy named DuckBob Spinowitz, so named because, well, he has the head of a duck. DuckBob had a run-in with the aliens known as Grays a few years back, and he’s been this way ever since. He’s come to terms with his condition, but he’s still taken aback when two Men in Black grab him and drag him to speak to a Gray on their behalf. That conversation leads to DuckBob, the MiB he nicknames Tall, an alien tech named Ned, and a Gray-modified hot chick named Mary traveling across the galaxy in an attempt to stop an impending invasion. And yes, much wackiness ensues en route.
9.
You’re contributing to a book of short stories along with Bob Greenberger and Steve Savile. It’s due out in May. What can you tell us about it?
That would be ReDeus. A year or two ago, Bob, our buddy Paul Kupperberg, and I started talking about trying to do a project together. What we came up with was ReDeus. Paul had to bow out, so Bob and I invited Steve to join us.
ReDeus is set a few decades in the future, when the gods have returned. Literally. They all came back one day (the opening events of the 2012 Olympics, in fact) and reclaimed their former positions as rulers of the world. And each reclaimed his or her followers as well. Now the world is divided up between the warring pantheons, except for one “neutral” city: New York. It’s the only place in the world where the gods and their followers can meet and talk and trade and live without fighting over territory. Bob, Steve, and I each have our own main character, and our planned story arc—and as with Scattered Earth, those arcs are all going to converge. Eventually.
Our plan is to do short stories, which we’ll collect and sell in small packets, one story from each of us per packet. We’ll be releasing them each month, so people can start following them and expecting a new packet right on schedule. We’re hoping to generate enough interest to prove that we need to write the novels that follow.
10.
Finally, what does Aaron Rosenberg do when he isn’t writing?
I honestly don’t remember. :)
No, not really. I hang out with friends, I spend time with my family, I read, I watch movies or TV, I game, I surf the Web. Sometimes I even sleep—just to do something different. :)
You can read more about Aaron Rosenberg, including a bibliography of his written works on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_S._Rosenberg
Aaron Rosenberg on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?28068
The Birth of the Dread Remora on Crossroad Press:
http://crossroadpress.com/2011/02/09/the-birth-of-the-dread-remora-aaron-rosenberg/
Crazy 8 Press: http://www.crazy8press.com
Farpoint convention: www.farpointcon.com
Shore Leave convention: www.shore-leave.com
March 20, 2011
Author Interview: Aaron Rosenberg, Part One
In 2009, Aaron's second Warcraft novel, Beyond the Dark Portal was nominated for a Scribe Award. A year later, Aaron won the Scribe Award for his novelization of the film, Bandslam .
Aaron also took an Origins Award in 2003 for Gamemastering Secrets (Grey Ghost Press, 2002). That same year, he also won the PsiPhi Award for his Starfleet Corps of Engineers novel, Collective Hindsight, Book One (Pocket Books, 2003). He also took a Gold ENnie in 2007, for his Warhammer supplement, Lure of the Lich Lord.
March is an exciting month for Aaron, with the release of his second novel based on the popular SyFy series, Eureka (one of my all time favorite shows). The novel is called Road Less Traveled , written under the house name, Cris Ramsay.
In addition, Aaron's second original entry in The Scattered Earth series, Crossed Paths: A Tale from the Dread Remora premieres this month.
In our discussion here, Aaron and I try to cover as much ground as possible (which is one reason this is a two-part interview!).
1.
First, let us know where we can find you online such as blogs, websites, Facebook, etc.
I’m happy to oblige. :) I’m on LiveJournal at gryphonrose, and on Twitter @gryphonrose as well. My website is gryphonrose.com.
You can also find me on Facebook—I’m one of many Aaron Rosenbergs on there, but I’m the one in New York. I try to update all of those places on a regular basis, though admittedly Twitter and Facebook have the most current details just because it’s so easy to dash off a quick post on both of those.
2.
What inspired you to write fiction? Did you start with novels or short stories? What were some of your earliest publications?
It’s all about the stories for me, both telling them and inspiring them. I started writing short stories when I was a kid, and continued up through high school and into college, when I began writing longer fiction as well. My first professional publications, though, were actually in roleplaying games. Those led to some short fiction in games and in gaming magazines, and then I went from there to novels. I love writing novels because I’ve got room to spread out, space to really get into a character and have complicated plots with lots of things going on at once.
3. You’ve worked extensively as a designer of role playing games which presumably led to your two World of Warcraft novels and the Daemon’s Gate trilogy. How did your involvement in gaming come about?
Well, a friend introduced me to this brand-new thing called Dungeons & Dragons when I was in elementary school. We played off and on over the years, and then in college another friend told me about this roleplaying club on campus so I checked that out. I wound up becoming part of a really good, tight-knit group, and we played together for years. Then a few of us decided to write our own game. We brought it to GenCon, the biggest game convention in the country, and showed it and demoed it and sold it there. But I also met other designers and game company owners, and started talking to some of them. That led to writing for several of them, which led to writing for more—by now I’ve written for almost every major game company in the past ten years.
Any particular favorites among the games that you designed?
Designed as opposed to wrote for? I’ve only designed three games on my own and a few more with other people, but I’d probably have to go with either Asylum or Spookshow. Spookshow is just a clean, cool, fun concept—you play ghosts who have come back and figured out how to take on physical form again and decide to go to work as spies! Asylum was my first solo game, and so in a way it’s still my baby, plus it’s always a blast to play—it’s set in the near-future when the entire world has gone completely insane, and you play Inmates in walled-off cities that are now Wards, where everyone else is an crazy as you are. It’s a struggle to survive, but somehow Asylum games always wind up being really funny.
Do you still find time for gaming? If so, what do you play?
I do, actually. We play twice a week—one game is a playtest session for a game I’m writing, and the other is a low-fantasy game set in an alternate medieval Venice. It’s fun—there’s still nothing like gaming with a good group of people, where you all get along and all feed off each other’s creativity to craft a collective story.
4. Your media tie-in works include Star Trek’s SCE series (Starfleet Corps of Engineers), a Stargate: Atlantis novel, Hunt and Run, and your second Eureka novel, Roads Less Traveled, is premiering this month.
What sparked your interest in media tie-in work?
Well, again I started with gaming. A company called ThunderCastle Games had created a Highlander trading card game, and I started talking to them at GenCon our second year there. They were based in Kansas City, not far from where I lived at the time, and so I stopped by to check out some of their demo sessions, got to know them, and then wound up writing Highlander short stories for them. I was a huge fan of the show, so that was an absolute blast getting to tell stories with those characters. From there I was hooked!
The Eureka novels have been written under the name Cris Ramsay. Why?
That was a marketing decision by the publisher, Ace. There are three Eureka novels, written by two different authors—I wound up doing the first one and the third one—so apparently they felt they needed a single author name on all three books. Plenty of publishers have used house names for their series like that. The nice thing is, Ace told us it was an open pen name, so I’m allowed to claim the two I wrote. :)
5.
How did you come to write children’s books such as the upcoming Pete and Penny’s Pizza Puzzles (April, 2011)?
Wow, you did your research! :) Well, I wrote a PowerPuff Girls book for Scholastic, year back. That led to a few other children’s books and young adult books over the years, including some work for Penguin’s children’s book divisions. A year or so ago one of the editors there contacted me to talk about the possibility of my writing a middle-grade series for them. That became Pete and Penny’s Pizza Puzzles. It’s about a brother and sister named Pete and Penny whose parents own and run the town’s pizza parlor. The kids love pizza and puzzles more than anything, and they keep getting into situations where they have to use their puzzle-solving skills to crack mysteries and help their friends. The series is a lot of fun, lighter than most of the things I’ve written, and each story is a mystery, which is great because I love mysteries. The first book in the series, The Case of the Secret Sauce, was just named one of Scholastic’s Bestsellers in Early Chapter Books!
March 19, 2011
One Year Later, Starting to Get It Right...
One year ago this week, my first novel, Testing the Prisoner, hit the market in paperback and Kindle, and later, on audio. I am happy to report that I have not had one piece of negative feedback about the book. As a new author, believe me, I was bracing for it. Sales have been decent but not overwhelming and I take sole blame for that. Friends and co-workers have been extremely generous, some buying upwards of four or five copies each. Convention and online sales have been average.
It has been an interesting and educational year. It has also been challenging, partially because I made some mistakes with regard to promotion early on. Oh, once my manuscript was accepted, I told everyone I knew that I was about to be published. However, during the initial writing and revision processes, I focused entirely on the manuscript and did very little promotion.
In other words, to stand on my "platform" at that time, you would have needed only one foot. I didn't jump in with both feet until after the book's release.
I hadn't a clue about platform building until then. I joined Facebook and LinkedIn three months after Prisoner's release. I didn't start recording the audio book in earnest until May of last year and completed it in July. It began airing as a bi-weekly chapter podcast in August on Prometheus Radio Theatre, my publisher's Mark TIme and Parsec award-winning radio show and audio book site. It will finish in about a month, then the entire book will be posted on Podiobooks (that's the plan). That's all wonderful but my mouth should have been in front of my Blue snowball mic the moment my manuscript was accepted as the final draft, not after the book was already out.
This blog did not launch until June 2010. That was about the same time I joined The Writers Coffeehouse group on Yahoo.
As a resident of the Lehigh Valley you would think that I would have become a member of the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group ASAP. Yeah...uh...that just happened last month. I'm a late bloomer. At least I joined Peroozal last year...but only yesterday got my ass in gear and created a presence on Goodreads.
I attended a whopping two conventions in 2010 as an author. The first being Farpoint, which is a wonderful, fan-run SF media con in Maryland that was co-founded by Steven H. Wilson, the same chap that started Prometheus Radio Theatre and Firebringer Press (my publisher). The second was Shore Leave, a larger and older fan-run SF convention also in Maryland.
The thoughts running through my mind at the time were something like this: I've been attending these annual shows for 15 years, everyone knows me! They'll all buy a copy to support me, I know they will! Right? Right? Well, at Farpoint they did. Sales were excellent there despite the fact that I was not scheduled to give any readings or host any discussion panels. Hell, my first sale of the con, I had the book priced at $15 and one guy gave me $20 and told me to keep the change!!! I wish they were all like that!
That success psyched me up for Shore Leave five months later. It's a larger show with two to three times as many actor guests and higher attendance. Shore Leave even has a traditional event every Friday night called "Meet the Pros" where they line up all of their author guests in the lower lobby for two hours and for the first time in my life, I was one of them!!! It was a wonderful honor.
So, of course, my head was filled with dreams of soaring sales. Books would move so fast, I wouldn't be able to sign them quickly enough. In fact, as I did with Farpoint, I paid for a quarter page ad in the convention's program book. I'm gonna rock the house!
I sold one copy at the entire show.
And I had to guilt trip the guy into buying it after he spent about 10 minutes busting my chops about everything from the reader reviews that I had displayed down to the title of the book. He was someone I'd known for years and remain friends with today. He has a reputation as a smart ass so I wasn't taken aback, I just pressed him into buying a copy. If I had to sit there and listen to him poke at me, he's going to pay for the privilege!
You can imagine my disappointment leaving Shore Leave but I'm not one to stay down for long. I was already well into a second novel and was lining up other book signings for Prisoner. I had reached out to a number of independent bookstores earlier in 2010 to see if they would carry Prisoner on their shelves.
Then, I was slammed with some unexpected bills last April which prevented me from delving into the promotion I wanted to. But that would not have mattered had I done my work in advance. The platform would already have been there and I would not have need to scramble as much as I did after the book's release.
Now that my platform is established and people are asking when my next book is coming out, hopes are higher for my second book. I was back at Farpoint last month where I gave a reading and hosted a panel on the paranormal. That garnered some decent sales. I also finally networked with all of the veteran writers that I'd known for fifteen years(all of whom were given free copies of Prisoner last year as a thank you for inspiring me). This time, I politely asked each author if I could interview them for my blog and every one of them gave me their email address. So far this year, I've interviewed two of them, Howard Weinstein and Bob Greenberger. Aaron Rosenberg's interview will be posted next week with Steven H. Wilson, Jeffrey Allen, Michael Jan Friedman, Keith RA DiCandido, Kelly Meding, and Peter David coming soon.
And of course, the more you blog and respond on other author's blogs, the more you get your name out there. In fact, because of that, I also interviewed writer Alyce Wilson and met Jon Gibbs, an Englishman in New Jersey.
This year, although I will miss Shore Leave, I will be attending my first BaltiCon as a participant along with Steve Wilson and later in the year, the Collingswood Book Festival in New Jersey.
In summary, promote and create your platform early. Learn from my mistakes. I know I did---and I'm confident that my second novel will benefit from that education.
March 17, 2011
The Great Allentown Comic Con
Ladies and gents, The Great Allentown Comic Con is coming to the Merchant's Square Mall on Saturday, April 16! The mall is located just off of Route 309/78 near the Lehigh Street exit.
They have a wonderful guest line up with more to come. Future shows include Saturday, July 16 and a tentative weekend show scheduled for November 19 & 20.
Hope to see you there!
March 16, 2011
About This Writing Stuff...
I look forward to your comments on these helpful articles. I enjoyed Steven James' "3 Secrets to Great Storytelling" and we get some LinkedIn Tips from Robert Lee Brewer. Holly Schindler tells us "5 Ways Writers Kid Themselves" and John Rember gives us a good story about "The Relationship Between Authors, Agents, and Publishers".
Consider joining Peroozal, a fairly new site for authors to review books, make announcements, and promote!
3 Secrets to Great Storytelling by Steven James
Creating Memoir That's Bigger than Me, Me, Me by Tracy Seeley as posted by Jane Friedman
How to Get into Magazines: Write What Editors Want by David A. Fryxell
Where Should You List Your Manuscript's Word Count? by Brian A. Klems
5 Ways Writers Kid Themselves by Holly Schindler as posted by Chuck Sambuchino
LinkedIn Tips for Writers by Robert Lee Brewer
The Best Education for Writing Memoir by Darrelyn Saloom as posted by Jane Friedman
Using Conferences to Your Querying Advantage by Denise Jaden as posted by Chuck Sambuchino
E-Publishing and the Entrepreneurial Author by Heather Massey as posted by Chuck Sambuchino
How I Got My Agent by Taylor Stevens
Agent Advice: David Dunton of Harvey Klinger, Inc. posted by Chuck Sambuchino
The Relationship Between Authors, Agents, and Publishers by John Rember as posted by Jane Friedman
