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!
