Interview with Nathan Lowell

[Anna]

Greetings Space Opera Fans!

I've been seeing Quarter Share pop up in the nomination threads, so now that it won, I'm like "Goodie! I finally have an excuse to read it!!!" So of course the first thing your assimilation-eager Borg Queen did was hop on over and invite the author, Nathan Lowell, to come and give us all the scoop!

*****

So without further ado, here's Nathan Lowell, the author of one of this month's group reads, Quartershare.

Be epic!

Anna Erishkigal
SOF Borg Queen

*******************************************************

1. What books have most influenced your life?

I cut my reading teeth on all the books in my elementary school library with the lil rocket stickers on the spines. Heinlein, Bradbury, Alan E. Nourse, and McCaffrey. I think the first genre book that actually influenced my life was Dune.


2. How do you develop your plots and characters?

One line at a time. I'm a pantser. I seldom have more than a general idea about the story before I sit down and type so the characters can tell me what's happening.


3. Tell us about your Space Opera Fans book?

Quarter Share started as a lark. In 2005 I discovered podcasting and by 2006 I'd listened to all the titles at Podiobooks.com. The authors sounded like they were having a lot of fun and I thought I'd like to get in on it. I've been reading SF for decades and writing off and on for most of my life. The idea that I might write a sf novel, podcast it, and see what happened proved to be irresistible.

One of my peeves about current space opera is that you have to blow something up every fifteen pages and save the universe every fifty. The view that it's not really space opera without battles and bug-eyed monsters. I also wanted to hear stories about people who were not the captains, rich folks, and generally those who had agency. I wanted to know what that red shirted crewman did before he got tapped for the away team and who took his job after he didn't come back. They didn't have an HR department out there to beam in replacements. I wanted to know what it would look like if we sent freighters instead of frigates.

So, I started Ishmael Wang's story...


4. We all need a hero! Tell us about your protagonist(s)? Was there a real-life inspiration behind him or her?

Nope. He's just a guy. I tried to think of the dumbest kid I could imagine and just let him tell his story. Mostly he does things that guys do. In the early stories he really didn't have a lot happening but as he grew into adulthood his challenges became more complex.


5. A good villain is hard to write. How did you get in touch with your inner villain(s) to write this book. Was there a real-life inspiration for him/her/it?

I'm not good with villains. Villainous actions are illogical to me. There are no visible villains in Quarter Share. The first real villain I wrote was Burnside in Double Share and he was just the typical misogynist creep you find in any bar or most street corners. Self-centered, completely lacking in empathy. Just the basic twerp -- and he was the first mate who ran the ship because he allied himself with a weak captain.


6. What real-life inspirations did you draw from for the worldbuilding within your book?

I drew heavily on the idea of company towns. If companies footed the bill for interstellar expansion, it stands to reason that they'd get something out of it. So, the economic engine are the corporate planets.

I also needed clipper ships because they were the best way to get cargo across long distances without burning fuel, but you can't sail between stars ... so I needed more tech.

My own experience sailing on medium endurance cutters for the USCG in the early 70s informed much of shipboard life. Many of the complaints about how much attention the characters pay to food and coffee comes directly from that. If you haven't been there - working around the clock for weeks on end - you fail to appreciate that the things that matter are the things that change. Meals, menus, and decent coffee play heavily into the social fabric of those environments and I figure people won't leave that behind when they sail between the stars.


7. Sci-fi fans love techno-porn! What real-life science (or pseudo-science) did you research for your book?

There were two technologies that I leaned on heavily. One, the solar sail which allowed the ships to claw out of the gravity wells that surround systems. The other was the idea that one could "bend space" and punch a hole between two distant regions without passing through every point in between.

Like magical systems, I needed to balance that power so the ships have to get "out of the well" in order for their Burleson Drives to bend space-time. The bigger the ship, the farther away they have to be. Heavy freighters spend a lot of time climbing in and out of gravity wells -- which means a lot of the stories have to do with what happens when nothing's happening between ports.


8. What was the hardest part of writing this book?

Believing that anybody would want to read a story where nothing happens.


9. What was your favorite chapter (or part) to write and why?

I liked the beginning. The only thing I knew when I sat down to write was the opening line. Everybody knows "Call me Ishmael" and I wanted to riff off that. If everybody knows it, then what would somebody actually named Ishmael do with it? Which led to his mother being a Melville and Forester scholar so he has Ishmael Horatio and his birthday is August 1 (which isn't actually in the story).

Getting that set up was the most fun and the rest all happened in a blur.


10. Did you learn anything from writing this book and what was it?

I learned I can write a novel.


11. Is there a message in your novel that you hope readers will grasp?

Every book I write has a theme. Often I don't know what the theme is until I'm done. I'm not sure what it is in Quarter Share. I wanted to tell a story about the quiet hero who manages to survive and thrive without stepping on people. I wanted to get away from this idea that heroes are always larger than life striking blows agains The Man. I think a hero is the single parent working two jobs for years to keep the roof over their family's heads. People who have none of the advantages of power or wealth who get up every day and earn their crusts. Every. Single. Day.


12. What are your future project(s)?

I'm working on a new series set in the Golden Age universe called the Smuggler's Tales. It will explore the relationship between the bright, Utopian vision of the future in the Trader's Tales and the actual roots of what allowed the Confederated Planets to come into being - and how they continue.


13. If you couldn’t be an author, what would your ideal career be?

Billionaire investor.


14. What is your preferred method to have readers get in touch with or follow you (i.e., website, personal blog, Facebook page, here on Goodreads, etc.) and link(s)?

http://nathanlowell.com is where readers can find links to everything I do.

Writers can find me on Google+. I do a lot of craft/business writing with the Writer's Discussion Group.


15. Do you have anything specific that you want to say to the Space Opera Fans community members?

There's a metric buttload of interesting indie space opera out there and more coming every day.

Safe voyage.


SOF Interview granted 2016/05/04

[Anna]

***************************************************************

Come join the discussion about QUARTERSHARE over HERE:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

*****************************************************************

[J]

Pretty Awesome. I never read anything from him/you. I will give it a try.

[Jim]

"2. How do you develop your plots and characters?

One line at a time. I'm a pantser. I seldom have more than a general idea about the story before I sit down and type so the characters can tell me what's happening. "

This is exactly how I write. I figured that if I could write characters interesting enough and had a life of their own, they could tell their story better than I could. Good to hear I wasn't the only one who thought that!