L.T. Getty's Blog, page 34

Twelve Days of Author Interviews – Day 1: R.J. Hore

Hey Everybody – I know I’ve been quiet so I thought I’d kickstart blogging by doing a some author interviews over the winter holidays until the new year– though most of the authors that will be shown here belong to my publishing house, I’ve got a few others who aren’t with the Champagne Imprint. In the Spirit of 12 Days of Christmas, I’m going to showcase 12ish authors in the next few weeks by asking them silly questions and they’ll have a chance to let you know what it is they write. If you happen to be a writer and want in – message me; I got my dozen writers but I’m more then willing to carry on into the new year.

First off is R.J. Hore – and I picked him first because he’s my beta reader and I’m posting it now because the first Hobbit film comes out in about 40 minutes my time.

I joined the Writer’s Collective when I was an undergrad and needed all the help I could get learning the art of writing or something. They had a program where they paired writers of similar genre up. Basically we’ve been swapping work back and forth every month or so and having someone to swap work with semi-regularly is the ultimate accountability system – and his feedback is reflective when I do my homework at the last minute, which I’ll admit is more often then not.

Anyhow – R.J. Hore is from Winnipeg, MB., and has a far more impressive list of publishing credits then I do – he’s won contests, appeared in numerous anthologies, and his second novel is due out in April of 2013. His first novella in his Housetrap Chronicles was released earlier this month by Burst Books, an Imprint of the Champagne Books Publishing Group. You can check out our publisher’s webpage at http://www.champagnebooks.com

Let’s pretend I haven’t read The Housetrap novella or its sequels already. In a nutshell, tell me about Randolf C. Aloysius and his long-suffering assistant Bertha, and why I should check out this series.

Randolf C. Aloysius is a private eyeball in a universe just slightly one sideways step over the rainbow from ours, into a fantasy world where almost anything, or anyone, might happen. Bertha is Randy’s Secretary, Girl Friday, and Executive Assistant. If you don’t object to steam-powered taxis, or spaceships with floppy wings, or a world run by committees, usually of wizards, then this might be the place for you to drop in and visit. Randy’s adventures can take place anywhere, from the back streets of Central City to the terraformed swamps of Venus. Bertha’s duties include trying to keep him out of trouble, as well as running the office of the detective agency. Did I mention no one here is human, or rarely?

What’s the C. in Randy’s name stand for?

I don’t think anyone knows. I’m not sure Randy does. If I were guessing I would try Cluttered, or Curmudgeon, or possibly Cynic.

How would you describe your style in Housetrap as compared to say, The Dark Lady or The Queen’s Pawn?

Housetrap is a mad ramble to who knows where. I feel free to throw just about anything into the mix. The basic idea when this first popped into my head was to take the title of a famous detective or mystery thriller, mangle the title, then write a novella based around that simple plot idea. Basically, I have fun with the characters and the plot. When I did The Dark Lady, I took a more serious idea like: How do certain rulers, in this case a queen, get a bad reputation? I may have wandered a bit in the execution, but that was the starting point. It was a more serious effort than Housetrap. The Queen’s Pawn is probably somewhere in between the two. It is a semi-serious story, that gradually gets darker by the time it ends. If I rated them as to how “serious” a story they were, out of 10, I would give The Dark Lady a 9 or 10, Queen’s Pawn a 6 or 7, and Housetrap a 2 or 3. I guess the style reflects the seriousness of the subject matter and how I treat it.

How do you feel about writing the novella length as compared to other formats?

My preferred format is the novel. I have been told that some of my short story efforts read as though they should be a novel instead. I like being able to fill out more details in the novel about the setting and the characters as well as the plot. The Housetrap stories are all novellas. I think this is the ideal format for that type of tale. The reader might get a headache if it went on too long. Each story is a single case based around a main character. With a novel you can expand on the backstory and give the secondary characters more development. One type of short story I enjoy is the single page. You have to be very aware and concise. Works well, especially for a bad pun or two.

Will we ever get to see humans in Randolf’s world?

In Housetrap I think humans do appear as shadowy street people and are definitely used as models for the local equivalent of a decorative gargoyle, which is logical, since gargoyles probably prowl the streets in Randy’s world. I could envision humans only as something completely covered up (like a wizard?) or undead (like certain vampires?) A pity. I wouldn’t be surprised if Randy has 1/100 human blood in him somewhere, he is a mongrel after all.

Let’s pretend you land a movie or miniseries deal for Housetrap. Who would you like to direct it?

Toss up between Ridley Scott and Tim Burton! Joss Whedon might be a better choice than Scott.

Every author has the most loathsome part of the craft – what do you hate the most?

Marketing has to be number one, it interferes with my writing time! Editing come in second place as a necessary evil. The writing is the easiest part, I have stories and titles I will never get around to using.

You got a bunch of other projects coming up – another novella due out in March and then another medieval fantasy novel in April. Mind giving us an idea what they’re about?

Knight’s Bridge comes out in March 2013. Probably one of my darker fantasy tales. It started out as a short story about a disillusioned medieval knight fleeing a lost battle. But then I began to wonder what happened next, and what happened to the people (especially the woman!) he met along his way. It became a novella about the knight, a barbarian warlord, a squire, and the widowed woman.

The Queen’s Pawn comes out in April 2013. This is a medieval-style fantasy, a sort-of-a quest novel, where a farm boy is mistaken for a duke and ends up trying to lead a queen, her daughter, and their attendants to safety. Of course few people, except for the farm boy, are as they seem. He just wants to go home, but just keeps getting dragged in deeper. Tried to keep it light but it gets a bit darker toward the end.

You’re just putting the finishing touches on final book in The Dark Lady Trilogy – any idea as to what is next? Or, anything you’d like to take a break from?

Once I get The Dark Lady project out of the way I have a couple of areas to work on. I would like to take a bit of a medieval break and relax with another novella or two in the Housetrap universe. There are already three more in this series coming out in 2013. One consideration is to eventually bundle two or three stories together in a print volume or two under The Housetrap Chronicles. I also have at least three full length novels that i should get back to, look over, and send out. There is a what-if tale, a contemporary couple gets stuck in the wrong universe tale, and slightly futuristic mother and daughter adventure. Should do something with these. (And that is just before I go and look to see what else is hiding in my closet).

You are suddenly faced with a zombie apocalypse. You have three weapons and a strategy. Go!

Could I simply leave town? How about a nice comfortable space ship full of friends? We could just zap the planet and start over but that would probably be cheating.

How about a suit that nothing could get at me through and a gun that turned zombies into…?? (He leaves it here, I’ll say FRIED CHICKEN. Why? Because then it suddenly becomes an old school game of Quake…)

Does a battleship count as a single weapon? We could head to a remote island, or maybe just take over Hawaii. If that was already taken I suppose there is always PEI or Newfoundland?



Who is your favorite fictional villain of all time?

Tough one. I have too many. Do monsters count? Dracula, the Alien in Alien, Not too fond of (love to hate) either Queen Cersei or her son Joffrey Baratheon of Game of Thrones.

Is there anything you know now as a published author you wish you could go back and tell yourself a year ago?

Stop writing once in a while and send stuff out to more publishers more often. Pay more attention in computer and social media classes?

In the spirit of sharing, can you recommend a book that isn’t by you? What is it, and who would like it?

A recent book I enjoyed was Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay. A tale set in a fantasy version of ancient China. Would appeal to someone who likes long, complicated stories. A series I have enjoyed (only read the 2nd and 3rd in the series,) and a bit more juvenile is the Goliath, Behemoth series by Westerfeld. A steampunk in WW1 type of tale.

 

Excerpt from Housetrap:

I don’t like Elves, never have. I sat tilting back in my chair counting the stains on the ceiling when she walked through the open door of my inner office unannounced—unannounced, because I’d just given Bertha the afternoon off to visit her sick brother. Bertha’s half Banshee, thin as a lamppost with long straight dark hair and big brown eyes. She’s always got a relative down with the Black Death or some obscure curse; I think she has twelve brothers, but I digress.

The Elf arrived in my office wrapped in a full-length gold lamé coat with a large hood covering her head and hiding most of her features, but I could tell she was pure Elf. Those yellow eyes are a dead giveaway even if you can’t spot the pointed ears. I’m a student of nature, have to be; the breed often determines character, or motive, or veracity. In my business you have to stay two jumps ahead or you’re squashed like a scarab. I’m a Mongrel myself. You can never tell about Mongrels, and there are more of us around now ever since the Goldilocks affair. Now there was a real witch, not the kind with just a warty nose, but she married that Wolf back in the days before they gave femmes the vote. Then they went overboard and made it all legal in the Intermarriage Act of 1812, and everything has tumbled Jack over Jill downhill ever since.

The Elf glanced about the room nervously, then in a single fluid motion crossed her long legs and slid into the battered chair opposite me like maple syrup poured from a mason jar. I sighed deep inside, rocked forward to rest my elbows on the scratched oak desk, painted a smile across my ugly mug and waited. I had all day; it had been two weeks since my last case. She fidgeted for a minute and I matched her, stare for stare, until my eyeballs screamed for mercy. The Elf had the kind of face you see perched high on a mantelpiece, thin bone china, pale, delicate, and carved by a master.

She broke first. “I need your help, Mr. Aloysius.” Her words vibrated in the air.

The Next Big Thing

I saw Carol Berg post this – and I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m technically an author right? Right?” So if you’re an author or even just a writer looking for representation, if you’d like, I’ll tag you. Especially R.J. Hore, but I’d like to hear all of you talk about your projects!

 

What is the working title of your next book?

Tower of Obsidian is the one that’s due out in January. Yeah, it got pushed back at little, mea culpa.

Terran is the project I’m finishing up right now, so far I haven’t sent it anywhere, and it needs another edit. I have the feeling it’s going to be one of those projects I’m going to be working on for a few months more. It’s a hard novel but in a good way – I suspect it’ll be a little more polarizing then ToO. If you think my writing speed for ToO is impressive, Terran is shorter and it took me over a year to draft – not counting the two years of research prior.

 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It’s more complicated then what I’m about to admit to, but here’s the nutshell of how it started: My Little Pony.

When I was drafting the novel I was in school and watching my sister’s kids. I got my niece addicted to the toys and so, awesome auntie I was, I ordered her the movie from the 80’s because I wasn’t going to shell out for the tv series. They started to show the new version on the kid’s channel around the same time. I noted not only the change in art, audience, and characterization; but I also noticed where the newer series grabbed several of their storylines from various preestablished stories. I know various other shows from my childhood have reboots and you see it all the time with comic books – but let’s keep it simple and I’ll focus on my niece, because while I can’t really remember being three, I can remember how I felt about stuff marketed to me back in the 90’s and how I feel about seeing the same stuff now.

My niece had her birthday a month into my draft, and I noticed a trend with lots of kids merchandising – she got swarmed with Disney Princess everything. Now, I’m an animation buff and I adore Disney movies if only for the almost timeless feel they have, but I noticed how these classic stories are still reflective of a good portion of society’s ideals of that specific time period. (I could go on about some of the banned stuff from various animation studio’s vaults, but I’ll leave it for another day). So on the one hand, we had something rather timeless, and on the other, I could see the progression of various princesses they were relatively passive to becoming more active in the story line. This was also around the time that there was a lot of controversy around the Princess and the Frog movie, so let’s just say that there was tons of opinions and articles to be found relatively easily.

While people nowadays will complain that Cinderella is passive and Belle suffers from stockholm syndrome or whatever, I watched the various things that were deemed ‘children’s entertainment’ , as an adult examining character motivations, while at the same time, I could kind of see what my niece was seeing. Let’s just say that as I became a writer I started to read books differently – but it wasn’t until I was watching the same things with a young child that I remembered how I used to see the world. How we could take the same basic story and boil its basic elements for a child’s story, or, and I questioned how exactly we made something more ‘adult’ – darker, sexier, edgier, or was there something more?

In the meantime, I had come up with an idea for a novel that was floundering: Telling the same short story again and again, changing one element or story telling piece, and just seeing where it took me. I originally tried this with the Grimm’s tale Jorinda and Joringel several years prior, but it just wasn’t working. I’ll admit shorts are not my forte. So I looked at my developing novel and decided to see if I could tell the same story again and again – some times with characters actually saying the story, other times characters acting out the roles and even changing roles from hero to villain, sometimes within the same arch.

So basically I just started writing about a young archer and her hawk walking through a field when they were attacked by wolves. I had no idea who she was or where she was going, but she was looking for someone. I let the story flow, and kept in mind that I wanted to retell a story several times within the same novel.

 

What genre does your book fall under?

I call it historical fantasy.

 

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I mentioned this in the See Jane Publish interview – I’m really easy going with casting because I care more about an actor being able to pull off the part then necessarily if their bone structure is just so. Especially in a novel like mine where character interpretation and motivation can be really fluid, I’d be okay if a director wanted to take a character in a slightly different direction and because actor X is otherwise perfect but he’s got blond hair instead of red and he looks awful with a dye job… I’d say rewrite him as blond. There’s certain things I wouldn’t budge on (Naguset would have to be played by an aboriginal woman; most of the other character’s ethnicities can be altered but this is kind of important) but for the most part I’m open-minded.

But, as said before, I would cast Ben Barnes as Skolvane, but I could see Skolvane easily cast as a variety of different Hollywood actors.

 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

It’s about an immortal princess that refused to be rescued, who in her cruelty, cursed the land around her.

It’s about a young man-at-arms who is betrayed by his lord’s men and condemned to face an ancient abomination who blights the land.

It’s about a young woman who’s betrothed was stolen from her, and she will not rest until she finds him.

It’s about an ancient champion who will not let his beloved go, no matter the monster she becomes.

Take your pick.

 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Tower of Obsidian will be published by Burst Books and is due out in January. I have no agent, but I am planning on self-publishing a novel soon – the deal to myself is that I had to come up with the art for my cover myself, and I’m still not happy with my inking, so I’m hoping it’ll be sometime early in the new year, but we’ll see. It was my new year’s resolution for this year, but I’ve kinda been not doing my daily art lessons like I should have been, so once again mea culpa.

My dragons look like cows

 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Tower’s first draft was written in about 4 months, which is technically the second-fastest I ever wrote a full novel draft. I NANO’d the first 53k, and I basically kept the momentum up. I did most of the research in December and January, when I took it from generic fantasy world to the end of the Viking age. I was finishing up my paramedic course, so I was editing the manuscript in the back of an ambulance because I knew I was going to meet an editor that May, and I wanted the manuscript to be ready for then. I had two other manuscripts ready to go, but one of the editors there wrote historical fantasy herself, so I figured I could get her to help me hash out character names. Before I had my meeting I did my research on Burst/Champagne, and ToO seemed like the title they’d be best suited for.

 

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Guy Gavriel Kay is my favorite writer of historical fantasy – and I don’t think I should be comparing myself to him quite yet. Let’s say that I aspire to write something like Last Light of the Sun or Tigiana.

There’s a lot more that needs to be placed, but I’ll list the following as inspirations for ToO’s main story:

 

Gawain and the Green Knight

Deirdre of the Sorrows

Beowulf

Brunhilde and Siegfried

 

I better give a shout-out to Tokien’s Lord of the Rings, too, but not in the way most of you would expect it.

 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

One too many “All fantasy is crap/easy”, this time with a friend who likes the genre. I decided I could attempt to do something a little deeper than normal to prove that just because it’s genre, doesn’t mean that it’s all nonsensical escapism. I also picked the focus to be on a love story, because I usually put that stuff in the back ground.

Or it’s Rashomon with Vikings. Take your pick.

 

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Honestly this novel has more mass appeal then most of my other projects. And I don’t mean in the lowest-common-denominator way, either. I think because I put the focus on the story, and that because I emphasized on perspective and interpretation, it’ll be interesting to see what people think and if readers start taking sides with the main conflict, because I never some questions directly. I’d hate to be the guy who writes the Cole’s Notes on this one. 

 

I like how I wrote this entire long post and barely talked about the plot at all! 

Tesseracts 16: Parnassus Unbound Event from Bitten by Books

Third Time's the Charm...

You have a LJ for a few years and you assume you know what you're doing.

http://bittenbybooks.com/?p=59109

Bitten by Books is having a discussion with the various contributors to Edge’s latest Tesseracts anthology for the next 24 hours, starting at noon central time today, so it’s been live for just over an hour now. I’m going to try to pop my head in when I can, but I’m on pager time so I’m flaky until at least after 4pm today (which, as some of you are already aware, means el squatto in terms of being off at a regular time but, what can I say, I love what I do). I’ll definitely show up tomorrow morning unless the snow knocks out the internet connection and I don’t make it back to Winnipeg.

Check it out if you have the time; I’m humbled to be with such an amazing group of writers and artists. I’ve been reading the Tesseracts anthologies for years now, so let’s just say the experience has been kinda surreal.

My apologies if I blog this twice in a row / Tesseracts 16 Event

Me + Technology = Fail

 

http://bittenbybooks.com/?p=59109

Bitten by Books is having a discussion with the various contributors to Edge’s latest Tesseracts anthology for the next 24 hours, starting at noon central time today, so it’s been live for just over an hour now. I’m going to try to pop my head in when I can, but I’m on pager time so I’m flaky until at least after 4pm today (which, as some of you are already aware, means el squatto in terms of being off at a regular time but, what can I say, I love what I do). I’ll definitely show up tomorrow morning unless the snow knocks out the internet connection and I don’t make it back to Winnipeg.

Check it out if you have the time; I’m humbled to be with such an amazing group of writers and artists. I’ve been reading the Tesseracts anthologies for years now, so let’s just say the experience has been kinda surreal.

Tesseracts 16: Parnassus Unbound Event from Bitten by Books

Reblogged from ltgetty's Blog:

Tesseracts 16: Parnassus Unbound Event from Bitten by Books

First Author Promotion

Hey guys – we’re going down to the wire on Tower of Obsidian’s launch; I naturally have been busy in real life, but expect a few updates after Thursday.

 

 

Here’s the first link to a bit of interview/promo:

 

Http://seejanepublish.wordpress.com/

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com! This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.

Happy blogging!