Sumiko Saulson's Blog, page 49

Interview with Amanda Lyons, author of “Eyes Like Blue Fire”

The Author

A longtime fan of horror and fantasy Ms. Lyons writes character driven novels that while influenced by her darker interests, can also be heavily laced with fantasy, romance, history and magic. Amanda M. Lyons has lived her whole life in rural Ohio where she lives with her fiance and two children. “Eyes Like Blue Fire” is her first novel.

The Book

Katja is a vampire who has lost sense of herself and her value in the world. Lost, broken and damaged she wanders the streets of Europe hoping to find some sense of purpose beyond the death and tragedy she has always known. Betrayed by her sire and left alone in the night she is startled to discover herself forming a connection to a young man who shares a close resemblance to her master and lover. Though everything in her begs her to stay with him she flees only to come running back to save him when a sadistic monster from her sire’s past comes to destroy the only hope she has had in 300 years.

Katja and Raven will face many horrors among them Renfield style zombies, ghosts and the undead. This is also the first in the series Broken Edges.

The Interview

Q. As a fan of the horror genre, what are some of your favorite authors and novels? How are some of your influences?

A. I’ve got quite a few favorites Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Brian Keene, Gary Braunbeck and Shirley Jackson are some of the favorite authors that come to mind. As far as novels I’d say The Stand, It, Queen of the Damned, Drawing Blood, Mr. Hands, The Ghoul, Imagica and Let’s Go Play at the Adams’. A lot of my favorite authors are major influencers. If you look at the books I chose you’ll notice that a lot of them have elements of fantasy, the gothic and surreal to them. They’re also very emotional books. All of those elements end up in my books in various ways.

Q.  Your novel “ Eyes Like Blue Fire” delves into a number of different kinds of supernatural or paranormal mythologies, with vampires and zombies and ghosts. What was it like combining them?

A. Oddly enough that’s just how it turned out in the end, little bits and pieces tying into each other and creating connections. ELBF has a lot of supernatural elements because it actually has a dream like quality. Some scenes are very surreal and haunted because people from Katja and Raven’s past retain a lasting influence years later. Sometimes we have to ask if there’s a ghost or if it’s just how much of a hole that person left in the character’s life. As for zombies I know I’m not the first person to connect ghouls and vampires, after all that’s essentially what Renfield becomes after Dracula bites him. Here zombies are created when a vampire drinks a person’s blood after the heart has stopped. It activates a sort of half-life in the dead. It was actually a lot of fun coming up with ways that my vampires differed from other renditions especially where I took something traditionally believed and gave it a different reason for being true.

Q. Did you research traditional mythologies for these creatures, or create your own fictional myths the way fantasy authors like Tolkien have in the past?

A. I didn’t so much come up with new mythologies as give them a bit of a twist. For example my vampires aren’t inherently evil so crosses don’t have an effect, they’re only sensitive to holy water that has been drawn from underwater springs and therefore are tainted with different elements that react to vampiric flesh, and rather than being invisible in mirrors a much more horrific image is reflected back. They also have different ways of handling feeding including sex. I had a pretty broad range of supernatural belief to draw from and I tried to give some of the old ideas new life.

Q.  Speaking of fantasy, in what ways do you combine the genre with horror in your writing?

A. Tanith Lee and Clive Barker are some great examples of writers that often write dark fantasy or fantastic horror. The places where these stories happen are beyond the norm, set in fantasy or fairy tale settings with a very surreal aspect to them. I’ve been told before that ELBF has an air about it like a fairy tale, a sort of legend for grownups that includes the horrific and strange. In dreams when things are frightening it’s often because they are foreign to us, sort of make believe and odd for no other reason than that it’s what our mind offers us. A lot of what I write can be this way, like we’ve walked into someone else’s dream and things aren’t always as they seem.

Q. Your central protagonist is more than three hundred years old. Did you have to do a lot of research in order to write about Katja’s origins?

A. I’m a fan of historical fiction and history in general. While I didn’t worry about making the setting perfectly suited to that era I did do a little looking around to make sure I wasn’t completely off on how Katja’s life would have been then.

Q.    Will Katja be the main character in the rest of your Broken Edges stories?

A. Yes and no. While she’ll always be one of the central characters she won’t always be the center of the story. For example in the 2nd novel Cool Green Waters the plot centers more on Zero and Michael as they try to find Mateo. Katja and Raven are still integral to the plot but we learn a great deal more about them and Mateo himself. I do think the 3rd novel will have  a lot to do with Katja as it centers on some very important changes for her character.

Q.   Is there anything you would like our readers to know that we haven’t covered yet?

A. ”Eyes Like Blue Fire” is a gothic horror novel. Some might mistake this as meaning that it’s paranormal romance. The reality is that it’s much closer to the traditional gothics which were a blend of mystery, suspense, horror, romance and tragedy. It has a lot more in common with the works of writers like Shirley Jackson and Anne Rice than modern paranormal romance which tends to have a stronger focus on beefcake and heroism than those older gothics did (not that that’s a bad thing it just isn’t where ELBF ended up).

Where To Find Amanda and ELBF:

Twitter
Facebook
Website
Goodreads

Giveaway on Goodreads

Giveaway on Goodreads until May 24th! Enter to win a copy of “Eyes Like Blue Fire!”
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/52940-eyes-like-blue-fire

Kickstarter project for “Solitude:Disillusionment” draft feedback wanted!

I finished putting all of the information in for the Kickstarter program, and I am wondering what you think of it. Can you maybe take a look at the page, and the proposal, and the video and tell me what you think of it?

Here is the link!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/887283131/2143153594?token=75eeb256

Happy Mother’s Day

I have decided to make “The Moon Cried Blood” free for Mother’s Day as a promotion. It is a coming-of-age story about a young girl who discovers that she is from a long line of witches who are imbued with powers by the moon, known as Luna Our heroine, Leticia, has been separated from her institutionalized mother. She has been raised by her stepmother. Much of this story has to do with how we, as young women coming to understand our womanhood, our lives, our communities and where we come from, need to get to know our mothers and our grandmothers in order to better understand ourselves.

I hope you will check out – and enjoy – “The Moon Cried Blood,” a work of dark fiction/urban fantasy about a young girl of black and Latina heritage in the mid 70s struggling to survive and reconnect with the women in her family, who are the only ones who can help her to understand and control her newfound powers.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Cried-Blood-ebook/dp/B007P9WL4W

Considering Kickstarter

I am thinking about using Kickstarter to raise money related to the completion of a sequel to “Solitude,” “Solitude: Disillusionment.” Although I completed my previous projects with a zero budget, I have learned through experience that proofreading and copyediting for a novel length work is something that does require some kind of budget, both for software that can be utilized to assist in this process, and for the absolutely necessary human component. I was wondering if you would be so kind as to take a look at this preview of what the project might look like (it’s not live, this is just what I have so far). Tell me what you think. Thank you.

Just take a look at the Preview Link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/887283131/2143153594?token=75eeb256

OUCH! Change Hurts!

Ann Fields interviewed me about the horror genre, since its something she is wanting to delve into herself. I hope you find the interview thought-provoking and informative.

OUCH! Change Hurts!.

Stop! Grammar Time.

(With apologies to MC Hammer)

Those, those, those commas hit me so hard
Make me scream “Oh dear Lord” 
I can’t tell it’s from its 
So grammar nazis keep giving me shit
One hundred thousand words are too much
To proofread – I need a crutch

I’m crying and I know
I can’t proof this
I can’t proof this
I can’t proof this

Mainstream publishers give an advance
Indies shake chump change out of their pants
Or pennies that fell under the seat
Begging people to download their eBook free 
Grammarly costs a monthly free
Not a dollar, but damn near thirty
Perfect-It is less than that 
It’s ninety-nine bucks in just one crack
But Ginger’s free and not that whack
If your income’s not that much
Then free is a price you can’t touch

 

The Liebster Awards

I would like to thank Elisabeth D. Rosa for nominating me for the Liebster Awards. This is the first time I have been nominated. This award is for blogs with 200 or fewer followers. I’m going to be nominating 11 other blogs after this in accordance with these rules:

I have made a video with the 11 Factoids about Moi, and the other stuffs, the answers to the questions from my nominee, will be below it in interview format. Last, will be my nominees and their questions.

11 Factoids about Moi

My Answers to Elisabeth’s Questions

Q.What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?

I’m not sure “failure to understand commas” counts as a writing quirk. I hate commas, they are evil and are totally out to get me. Other than that, I think I’ve noticed an inordinately large number of stories I’ve written are about fertility, infertility, and pregnancy gone wrong – I’m starting to think this might reflect some deep seated issues I have about my fertility problems.

Q. What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating your own books?

Before I finally got the courage to write my own books, I noticed a typo in a book by a mainstream publisher. I was so excited, I decided I could just write novels, and they would not have to be grammatically perfect or anything. I was surprised to learn that no matter how many times I proof them, or get other people to proof them, they still have more typos than the mainstream published kind. I think the mainstream publishers probably have staffs with dozens of editors and proofreaders going over the texts multiple times – not just three of their lit-chick friends, and that one dude who is the editor on a state university student paper.

Q. Where do you get the ideas for your books?

From my nightmares, and my deeply wounded psyche. When it comes to the science fiction I also get a lot of inspiration from the world of politics and today’s headlines. Even there, I find that a lot of the storylines seem to come from my own bizarre thoughts and dreams. I had to stop writing fanfic because it was all deeply disturbed, and I figured that I should just take personal responsibility for all of the scary, twisted things that hang out in my mind. When I say “today’s headlines” I don’t just mean politics. A lot of the pseudo-science in “Warmth” was inspired by stories coming across my Facebook feed about insects and fungi that take over and zombify other lifeforms, like bees. Reality is filled with endless examples of disturbing ideas for horror and dystopic or apocalyptic science-fiction. “Solitude” was influenced by people freaking out about the so-called Mayan prophecy and endless episodes of the program “Life After People.”

Q. What do you think makes a good story?

Strong characters matter. If the characters aren’t interesting, it’s harder to keep the reader engaged. This means both sympathetic heroes and hate-inspiring villains, and sometimes hate-inspiring heroes and sympathetic villains – it depends on the story. I like to use a lot of descriptive language. I love to include some kind of major twists and turns and surprises because I am one of those peoples who can always guess what is going to happen in a movie. I like to use that mental gift to come up with new and exciting ways to keep people guessing, because I always figure that the best way to write things my readers will like is to think of what would excite me as a reader.

Q. Who are some of your favorite authors?

Frank Herbert, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Toni Morrison, Peter Straub, Michael Criton, Clive Barker, Susan Cooper, C.S. Lewis, Alice Walker – although, mostly she writes poetry – Dean Koontz, well you get the picture – I’m really into commercial suspense and horror, with a side of sci-fi.

Q. If you could pick one actor to play a character in your book in the movie version, who would it be?

Amandla Stenberg, that little girl who played Rue in the “Hunger Games”, could play Tisha Gordon in “The Moon Cried Blood.” I loved her in Colombiana. Of course, she will be too old for the role before a movie is ever made. If a movie is ever made, which is really highly unlikely since nobody knows or cares who I am right now. But maybe we could get Quvenzhané Wallis, she’ll be old enough to play Leticia Gordon in three or four years. And maybe by then, more than 200 people will have read my book.

Q. What song best describes your book, and why?

Fun. Let’s see… for “Solitude” we can have “One is the Loneliest Number” by Three Dog Night, because I think that’s funny, mostly. It’s a story about everyone disappearing and the few people remaining thinking they are the last person left. Yea. I better quit while I’m ahead.

Q. If you had one piece of advice for an aspiring author, what would it be?

Don’t let any of your critical friends read it until you’re done with a first draft, because you might get too discouraged to finish. Don’t let your internal critic speak while you are in the middle of a first draft, either. You can’t write and do re-writes at the same time. Write first, do re-writes second. I wish someone had told me that when I was younger, I would have probably finished my first novel fifteen years ago if I wasn’t busy trying to edit it in the middle of writing it.

Q. What kind of sweet things do you like to eat?

They just told me my blood sugar was a little high and to cut back on sweets, so the only sweet things I have left are breakfast cereal and sugar free Popsicles and Jello. I really miss eating soft serve. I like soft serve. I know – it’s not even real ice cream – but still.

Q. What’s your guilty pleasure that you can’t miss on TV?

I don’t feel guilty about any of the TV shows I follow, so, not sure if I can say guilty pleasure but I loved Spartacus and I miss that. I also like Game of Thrones, Vikings, Supernatural, Grimm, Supernatural, Lost Girl and Defiance. Oh and The Borgias.

Q. What funny memories do you have of your childhood? Name one.

My mom used to keep me in two ponytails as a child. I remember one time when I was five or six I decided that it would be a good idea to put one of my father’s sweat socks over each pony tail so I could walk around on all fours and pretend to be a dog with big, floppy ears. I don’t think my parents found this as amusing as I did, though, since all of their stories of my childhood seemed to be really embarrassing and involve poop.

My Nominees

The Secret Chicken
Gothic Genie
Myriads of Thoughts
Textual Fury
A Poets Progress
Light Bearer
Kitty Muse and Me
Come Selaway with Me
Year in the Life of an Opera Singer
No Pants
Wench Writer

My Questions for My Nominees

What inspired you to start blogging?
How long have you been blogging?
Out of the blog posts you’ve written, which is your favorite or the one you feel the best about?
What advice would you give to other bloggers?
Do you prefer video, audio, or written blogs, or some combination of the three?
Do you think that blogging is bring new voices to the worlds of art, literature, fashion, entertainment and politics in a way we hadn’t experienced before the internet?
How do you think print columns compare to blogs?
If you could interview anyone for your blog, who would it be?
How did you come up with the name for your blog?
Random acts of kindness – what was the last one you witnessed that brightened your day?
What was the best thing that happened to you this year?

 

Second Edition of “Warmth”, and editing in general

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Sera – Protagonist of “Warmth”.

Thanks for hanging in there with me through all of the trials and tribulations that 2013 has had to bring. As you know if you follow my blog, my father passed away on January 3 of this year, and it’s been one thing after another since. First we had to raise money for funeral expenses, which I thank God and the many wonderful donors who helped us for the fact that we were able to do. Since then it has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for me. I tried to do a physical labor inclusive job while grieving, and it turned out disastrously.  I am passing my classes at school this semester, though, and keeping up with things the best that I can.

One thing I have decided to do, since I have summer coming up and will have time on my hands since I won’t be going to school this summer (I need time off to adjust to my loss and changes in my life, something I didn’t give myself because I didn’t want to withdraw this semester) is that I will be working on a series of re-edited reissues of my first three books.

Well, I am happy to say that the first of the three is already done!

The Warmth Second Edition

What’s New:

New Cover Art:  I’ve revised the cover art for all three editions of the book: the hardback edition (available for $33 on Lulu.com), the paperback (available on CreateSpace for $17.50) – and on the eBook for the Kindle, which will be available in a day or two.


New Layout: The Second Edition features a new, easier-to-read layout based upon several mainstream paperbacks I studied while reformatting it. Chapter headings are easier to find and easier to look at.
Fresh Editing:  I used some new tools, as well as my own eyeballs. Details below.

The Proofreading Experience

I used two different proofreading softwares to improve the quality of editing in the second edition of “Warmth.” I would have used Grammarly, but I couldn’t really afford the $29 monthly fee for use. Also – I started out using Grammarly on the re-edit of my larger tome, the nearly 500 page “The Moon Cried Blood,” and about 45 pages into the editing process, the computer I have Word 2007 installed on stopped working. I do not have Word 2007 on my other computer, the one I wrote all of my novels on, and Word 2003 does not meet the minimum requirements for Grammarly.

The tools I ended up using are Ginger - which is free – and Perfect-It, which is 99 dollars. I have a 30 day trial. If I can come up with 99 dollars, I rate it as totally worth it. I would need the pro version (which costs 99 dollars) due to the length of my files. My preference for these two over Grammarly is not just a cost thing. I had a lot of trouble with the server connection for the Grammarly Word plug-in, so Grammarly basically is only useful to me as a web-based program.

Like Spellcheck, these are assistance devices that work best if the human driving them is also playing close attention. In my ideal world, I would be running all three, because they each catch different types of errors. However, this is not an ideal world. I would have to say that Ginger rocks my socks. Not only is it free, but it is probably the best of the three. However, Grammarly is better with punctuation, and Perfect-It is very good for helping to ferret out inconsistencies such as inconsistent use of numbers (spelled out as words, or as numerical characters), etc. So if I could afford it, I would have all three.

The Grammarly plug in for the internet is really cool, too. Especially cool for bloggers.

Testing out editing and grammar check software

I decided that Grammarly costs too much and I can’t justify it. The deciding point came when the waning battery on my dedicated-to-writing Acer finally totally died, and I found out that the laptop won’t power up on plain old AC from the wall socket without a working battery in there. I figured that out by using a different power cord. So – that being the case, I needed to spend $43 bucks on a half-off priced battery over the internet. That made me realize the $29 a month Grammarly wanted was way out of my price range. Besides, their plug in was constantly losing the server connection when I was trying to use it with MS Word. That made it take forever.

Now, I am trying something called PerfectIt out (30 Day Trial).

So far one thing that I really love about PerfectIt, above MSWord’s built-in features and the Grammarly plug in, is that it is REALLY fast, churning through a 100k + word document. Usually, the checkers choke on these bigger documents. Perfect-it is able to be faster because it breaks down each task: for instance, it checks for inconsistencies in capitalization in one run, pausing before the next task.

Do you have a favorite grammar and spell checking software?

Editors are really valuable. Too bad I can’t afford professional editing. I am going to have to double-check all of my work myself, in some cases first-check it because I don’t have an editor for The Moon Cried Blood. I do have one for Warmth (thank you Aurora Martinez) and Solitude has been partially edited by two people so far. It seems to constantly need more help. Maybe I should just – well, try to help myself this time, if I can.

Either that or I’ll be over on Kickstart, begging for editor funding. lol!

The Mechanics of Things

I’m really in a funk about writing lately. I am trying to perfect works that I have no reason whatsoever to believe anyone is actually going to read, and I suppose that shouldn’t really matter to me. It didn’t when I wrote the first three books: after all, my dad might read them, or my mom, and that seemed good enough. But now I’m editing my books (again) and crying over my keyboard, because my dad is dead, and I kind of don’t getting much feedback good or bad from anyone to let me know if people are actually reading anything I write, so I feel supremely unmotivated.

No, I don’t want to finish “Disillusionment”. I don’t think I can.

I just wanted to let you know that “Disiullsionment” is tabled indefinitely. I am not able to write it – I don’t really have any confidence at all that there would be any market for it, and I feel supremely unmotivated about writing it – or writing anything. I’m basically really depressed.

I’m guessing no one really cares if I don’t write it.

I’m going to go back to trying to perfect “The Moon Cried Blood” and crying. But not blood. Just water.

Thank you.