SPFBO Author Interview: Steve Turnbull
I’m back with another interview! I’ve received about twenty so far. Today I bring you Steve Turnbull, author of “The Dragons Esternes” series. This year to SPFBO he has brought DRAGONS OF ESTERNES to the table. Click on the link below to go to the buy link on Amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/REBEL-DRAGON-Dragons-Esternes-Turnbull/dp/1910342858
Past SPFBO5 Interviews (Click on the book cover)
And now I bring you the interview with Mr. Turnbull! First, a little author bio which he was gracious enough to give me:
When he's not sitting at his computer building websites for national institutions and international companies, USA Today bestselling author Steve Turnbull can be found sitting at his computer building new worlds of steampunk, science fiction and fantasy.
Technically Steve was born a cockney but after five years he was moved out from London to the suburbs where he grew up and he talks posh now. He's been a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy since his early years, and spent twenty years editing and writing for computer magazines.
Nowadays he writes screenplays, prose and computer programs.
And an author photo!
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First of all, tell me about yourself! What do you write?
I’m an old white British dude, who writes books with diverse characters – and who has very strong opinions on the difference between “settings” and “genres”.
I write stories in SF, Fantasy and Steampunk settings, the genre of those stories may be thriller, action-adventure, crime, slice-of-life, whatever.
How do you develop your plots and characters?
What is this “develop” you speak of? Mostly I’m a pantser, I have an idea for the sort of story I want to write, with or without pre-existing characters. I usually have an idea of how I want it to end (because you need a destination). Then I just start.
That’s how I wrote DRAGONS OF ESTERNES, my SPFBO5 entry, which is 280K long and no padding.
On the other hand my multiple protagonist, multiple throughline, SF epic MONSTERS was planned in detail because everything had to end up at the same time in the same place for the climax.
Tell us about your current project.
It’s a story set in my steampunk universe and is the second in the Veronica’s Life series which is slice-of-life disabled erotica. I write these books under a pseudonym to avoid accidental cross-reading but, as with all my steampunk, the stories overlap and characters from one story may appear in others. As they do here.
Without going into lurid details, Veronica is a hunchback (severe kyphosis) and has been kept out of sight by her parents (who have yet to appear – they stay away from her).
The story is how she slowly achieves empowerment in a world where the odds are stacked against her. Because it’s “slice of life”, there’s no specific bad guy and nothing world shattering happens. It’s just Veronica’s life and how she succeeds – and, being erotica, there’s lots of explicit sex along the way but it’s all done in the best possible taste.
After I’ve finished this (nearly done) I’ll be writing a couple more shorter give-away stories to use in free book promos. One for DRAGONS, one for MONSTERS, and maybe one for my FROZEN BEAUTY steampunk stories.
Is this your first entry into SPFBO? If not, how many times have you entered?
It’s not my first, I entered the fantasy story ELONA a couple of years ago. ELONA is set in the same world as DRAGONS and, yes, characters from that book appear in the other. In fact ELONA was the first publishable book I wrote and was intended as a trilogy, but I haven’t written the second two. My plan is to get those done next.
Who would you say is the main character of your novels? And tell me a little bit about them!
I have so many books that’s not an easy answer. From DRAGONS, there is Kantees who’s a slave at the start of the book. She lacks any self-confidence and the last thing she wants to be is a leader, all she wants is to find her people.
In my MALIHA ANDERSON steampunk books, Maliha is an Anglo-Indian who has no place in any society but she’s of Holmesian intellect with an eidetic memory – she solves crimes. But she has a personal story line witihin the books as she gathers a “family” around her.
For MONSTERS, Chloe Dark is just an ordinary schoolgirl in a dystopian post-apocalyptic world – in fact the apocalypse hasn’t finished yet, but the people are pretending it has. MONSTERS was my response to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except there’s no supernatural and no magic, it’s pure SF. And Chloe isn’t ordinary at all.
What advice would you give new writers on how to delve into creative fiction?
Read more, write more. You learn how to write by writing, not by talking to other writers on Twitter (guilty as charged).
What real-life inspirations did you draw from for the worldbuilding within your book?
I like my fiction to be as real as it can be.
My fantasy world has entire an geological history, and evolution. Except it also has magic which is part of the natural world too—so some animals are also magic.
My steampunk world has only one change to physics: In 1843 Sir Michael Faraday demonstrated his “Principle for the Partial Nullification of the Effects of Gravity”. The rest is alternate history. Social history diverges only very slowly form that point, though it gathers momentum, so my Steampunk world is historically accurate – except where it isn’t.
What inspires you to write?
Nothing 
