Continued from Part I >> Matthew Graybosch: Better Fantasy Through Science

What inspired the name of your series "Starbreaker"?

I stole the name from a song by Judas Priest, from their Sin After Sin album. It sounded suitably badass for a weapon capable of killing demons from outer space - instead of just destroying their avatars.

Like I said in part one of this interview, "Stormbringer" was taken. I'm already too close to writing "Elric on a Harley" for comfort.

What's your typical writing session and environment like?

I'm a lunch break novelist. I bring a laptop to work with me, and drive down the street to a nearby pizza parlor to eat a slice of pizza and belt out a scene. On a good day, I manage between 500 and 1500 words of raw text in about an hour.

I'd love to be able to write at home after work, but I rarely manage it. After a full day as a software developer, my brain shuts down once I come home. I'm more likely to curl up with my wife and read, play video games, or mess around on the net than I am to write.

When I'm writing, I put on headphones and try to find music that suits the scene and character I'm trying to write. My playlist usually includes music by Iron Maiden, Iced Earth, the Blue Oyster Cult, Judas Priest, Queensryche, Bruce Dickinson, Iced Earth, Nightwish, Without Temptation, Delain, Nemesea, Blind Guardian, The Worshyp, The Protomen, Savatage, Black Sabbath, Therion, Joe Satriani, Megadeth, Dream Theater, Coheed and Cambria, Ayreon, Symphony X, Nobuo Uematsu, and Shoji Meguro.

I tend to turn off wifi when writing. I don't think much of Jonathan Franzen's fiction, but I suspect he might be right about the difficulty of writing good fiction while jacked in.

Tell me about influences, if any:

I'd have to be especially arrogant to claim complete originality, free of any influences. However, when you ask any novelist to name their influences, you impose upon them a nigh-irresistible temptation to claim a part in the literary traditions of the authors they most admire, while omitting any mention of authors they despise.

I'd love to claim that I draw upon European Romanticism and the daring SF and fantasy for which such authors as Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Stephen Brust, Robert Heinlein, C. J. Cherryh, C. S. Friedman, and M. John Harrison are justly famous. However, I might not have proved as successful in escaping the shadows of Tolkien, Donaldson, Jordan, and Goodkind as I hoped.

An accurate account of the influences on my work is a task better left to critics, and not to novelists seeking to promote their own work.

What is the most unexpected reaction you have had to your writing?

My writing is how I've met every woman with whom I've been intimately involved, including my wife of nine years, who I courted for four. Catherine and I met on a Yahoo! forum for aspiring fantasy writers, and started out by reading each other's work. It's a long story, and perhaps beyond the scope of this interview.

Do you have any regrets pertaining to your writing?

I sometimes suspect I picked the wrong trade for a day job. Software development gave me valuable technical skills, as well as experience I used while writing Starbreaker, but it's a bad trade for writers. The demands on one's time and intellect often leave little time or energy for writing, even when I avoided working in Silicon Valley and in start-ups in favor of taking jobs involving government contracts which should only require a forty hour workweek.

Aside from that, I have no regrets. I needed to do something with my life, and writing gives me a sense of purpose. It allows me to indulge all of my nasty little control-freak tendencies without actually hurting anybody.

What plans do you have for future work?

Without Bloodshed, the first Starbreaker novel, comes out in about a month or so. Curiosity Quills Press is currently doing a new cover. I'm working on The Blackened Phoenix, as well as a short piece called "Tattoo Vampire". For Christmas, I've started kicking around some ideas for a story called "Cardigans" in which we'll see a young Morgan Stormrider knitting. I'm thinking of expanding a novelette, Steadfast, into a full-length NA science fantasy novel starring Naomi Bradleigh called Silent Clarion. I also have to plot and eventually write the last two main-sequence Starbreaker books: Proscribed Construct and A Tyranny of Demons.

After that - let's just say that chronicling the life and crimes of Imaginos could be a lifetime's work. I could write a Michener-style epic about Nationfall, the social/political/economic collapse that sets the stage for the rise of the society in which Starbreaker is set. I can do with Starbreaker what Tolkien did with Middle-Earth, only I cheat by taking our world and screwing around with history.

What is the best advice you want to share with aspiring authors?

This first bit should be obvious, but for the love of all the demons ever venerated by humankind, READ. Read your chosen genre. Get acquainted with its tropes and cliches. Figure out what readers expect, so you can screw with them if you want to. Once you're done reading within your genre, read outside it. You might find ideas and elements you can import into your chosen genre, and exposure to different styles and voices will help you develop a richer style of your own.

Half of what you hear about building an author platform is arrant nonsense, but I can't tell you which half. I've had people tell me Google+ is a waste of time, and that I should use Facebook and Twitter instead. I ignore them, because I've tried Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is the men's room wall of the internet. Facebook is how the Daleks will justify our extermination. Google+ is where I found my audience, which is currently about 18,000 followers. Maybe a tenth of them will bother to buy my book, but nobody builds an empire overnight.

Some people will tell you that fanfic is a good way to develop your technique, but I don't agree with them. I think working with an existing setting and existing characters makes it harder for writers to learn how to develop settings and characters of their own. Instead, I recommend the pastiche. Instead of taking Kirk and Spock as is, and working around them, use these characters as templates for new characters of your own creation if you lack the confidence to start from scratch.

I'd suggest learning a bit about computer programming. You don't have to do it for a living, and I lack sufficient sadism to suggest that aspiring writers take on software development as a day job. It's thankless work, and frequently makes writing unnecessarily difficult. However, learning to code requires learning logic, which serves writers as well as it does mathematicians, scientists, and programmers.

Be ruthless in pursuit of your art. Defy everybody who opposes you, and never give them time to discourage you. The converse is also true: acknowledge and treasure everybody who has ever supported you. If you're lucky enough to have a lover or spouse who's willing to help you, don't screw up that relationship.

How do you promote your work both on and off the internet?

I've focused the vast majority of my promotional efforts online, especially on Google+. I got my publishing deal by posting bits and pieces as I wrote them. Afterward, I'd talk about the plot as I worked on Without Bloodshed. I'd also post dialogue stripped of narrative context using hashtags like #ShitMyCharactersSay.

Since I'm a metalhead, and music is incredibly important to my writing, I also make a habit of posting YouTube videos of songs that helped me develop some aspect Starbreaker, and discuss why these songs matter to me.

I worked with artist Harvey Bunda of Gunship Revolution, commissioning portraits of several of my major characters. I use this character art in posts about my work and characters.

I help promote other independent writers and musicians, recommending their books and music. Sometimes they ask, and sometimes I come across them, check them out for myself, and decide they're worth mentioning.

I also comment on current events, especially if they apply to the Starbreaker setting for some reason. For example, when Google Glass was first announced, I linked it to Witness Protocol, a technology in the Starbreaker setting that allows people equipped with implanted computers and the appropriate software to record everything they see and hear.

What are your favorite writing tools?

My laptop runs CrunchBang Linux, and I tend to write my drafts in plain text files formatted with a markup language called Markdown, which I can convert to HTML and other formats using freely available tools like pandoc. When I'm ready to submit a piece for editing and publication, I use LibreOffice, which can cope with Microsoft Word's formats and includes "track changes" functionality.

I also run a dict server on my laptop, which allows me to get definitions and synonyms by typing a command into a shell prompt, such as "dict bazooka". Because I write my drafts in plain text, I can use any text editor I choose, even heavy duty programmers' editors like vim and emacs. I currently favor an app called PyRoom, an open source clone of Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom app for Mac and iOS. It's a full-screen plain text editor, which allows me to focus on my writing without distraction.

Because I run a Unix-based OS, I can use the OS itself to organize my work. I have a documents directory, just like you Windows and Mac users. In it, there's a "starbreaker" directory. In that "starbreaker" directory I have directories for each story using the Starbreaker setting. For novels like Without Bloodshed, the directory consists of a file containing the title named "00.title.md" (.md for Markdown files); a "scenebreak" text file consisting of a blank line, a line with three asterisks, and another blank line; and a directory for each chapter, named so that the OS orders it for me: "01.theunforgiven", "02.norefugebutaudacity", etc. In each directory, I have another "00.title.md" for the chapter number and title. I also have a file for each scene whose name is based on the order in which the scene occurs, and the viewpoint character's name, such as "01.morganstormrider.md", "02.naomibradleigh.md", etc.

I can then put it all together using a small shell script written so I can use it to convert any story I write into a single file for conversion to standard formats. It uses the "cat" (concatenate) command. If I want word counts for scenes, chapters, or the entire story, I can use the "wc" (word count) command. If I need to do a find, I use "grep". If I need to do a story-wide find/replace affecting more than one file, then I use "sed".

I started using Linux in 1999, after my first computer (an secondhand IBM PS/ValuePoint running PC-DOS 6, if anybody cares) died by my hand. I was trying to swap out the hard drive when my cat bit my toes to get attention. This startled me, and I ruined the computer by driving my screwdriver straight through the main board. I had to build a new one, I didn't want to keep running DOS and writing, I didn't want to pay a hundred bucks for a copy of Windows 98, and I couldn't afford a Mac. So I bought a copy of Linux on CD (Red Hat 5.2, if anybody cares), installed it, and alternated between writing and tinkering.

Since my day job involves software development on Windows, I trust Microsoft's offerings as far as I can throw them. Macbooks are nice, and I used one from 2006 until 2012, but overpriced for the hardware you get inside the pretty case. And if George R. R. Martin can keep using WordStar 4 on DOS, why shouldn't I use Linux?

Is there anything else you would like to share?

I think you and your readers are thoroughly sick of me by now, but you might also be interested in interviewing some other independent authors whose work I enjoy and recommend: Michael Shean (the Wonderland sequence), Lynda Williams (the Okal Rel saga), K. H. Koehler (the Nick Engelbrecht series), Charity Bradford (author of The Magic Wakes and Stellar Cloud), and Michael Reeves-McMillan (author of Realmgolds).

However, if I might beg your indulgence a bit longer, I'd like to mention that while Without Bloodshed is not yet available, I do have a story entitled "The Milgram Battery" available in the Curiosity Quills Primetime charity anthology. Five bucks gets you twenty short pieces of weird fiction, and ten percent goes to reputable no-kill animal shelters across the United States.

How to find Matthew Graybosch online...

• Author Website
• Starbreaker series Website
• Email: mg@matthewgraybosch.com
• Matthew Graybosch on Google+
• Twitter @MGraybosch
• Facebook
• Goodreads

Available on Amazon:

You can also try conjuring me, but the last person to try squiggled a line that should have been straight while drawing his summoning circle. The poor schmuck ended up as a chew toy for the Hounds of Tindalos. So it goes.

Talented author Gorg David Huff of Austin, Texas has agreed to an interview to tell us about his adventures in writing.  This is a road not traveled alone and he reveals to us how others have affected his writing career along the way. Rather than be a man of many trades, he decided to put his all into writing and it has become his life's work.

Book #18 in the multiple New York Times
 best-selling Ring of Fire series

What is your genre? 

Now that's a question that is subject to interpretation. If you mean writing, painting, sculpting, music, then it's mostly writing with a bit of cartography and some painting. As to type of writing, it's science fiction, mostly alternate history, but also magic and space opera. The painting is mostly impressionism to abstract.

What can you tell us about "Ritter" in particular?

A decent respect for the opinions of mankind compels me to define Ritter. A ritter, in this case, is not a German knight, but a writer who can't spell. Not being able to spell, as you might imagine, makes the writing process somewhat more difficult. It makes or made for most of my life, being published not just impossible but unthinkable. Even now with the literally amazing advances in spell checking, I'm still close to unpublishable without my co-author Paula Goodlett, who can spell as well as find the many and varied other errors that creep into anything I write.

How long have you considered yourself a writer?

From the moment someone paid me for a story. In my case that was the publication of "The Sewing Circle" in the first Grantville Gazette electronic version. If I recall correctly, I was paid two and a half cents a word. The paper version of GGI was published in 2004, so the electronic magazine was probably in '02 or '03.

Author Matthew Graybosch has allowed the opportunity to discuss his work and tell us a little about the inner-workings of his creative mind. The main focus currently is on his Starbreaker series, of which, the first book Without Bloodshed was released November 17, 2013. He has taken it upon himself to break the fantasy fiction stereotype and to write in a way that shapes the genre to suit his logical perspective. The result is that Graybosch has built his own brand of fantasy improved through science.  Here I will start the interview by sharing how he introduced himself to me:

"I'm a long-haired metalhead from New York, a mercenary programmer, and novelist with delusions of erudition. Back in 1999 I decided that if Terry Goodkind was the best the fantasy genre had to offer, then the genre needed a steel-toed boot in the rear. I spent the last couple of decades working on my craft so that I could be the man to give the genre the steel-toed butt-kicking it needs.

I don't do high fantasy. You want elves poncing about in the woods and singing to Elbereth? Look elsewhere. Likewise for farm boys marching off to adventure with Daddy's old sword bouncing off their hip. My wizards aren't kindly old mentors. My villains already rule the world, and they managed to make it a better place for most people in the bargain. If you want androids who don't know they're not human fighting demons from outer space, I'm your man. Starbreaker isn't a coming-of-age story. My characters are adults, and they think they understand the world and their place in it. They're competent. They know what they want from life, take it, and pay for it. Starbreaker is science fantasy with a metal attitude."

How long have you considered yourself a writer?

I started in 1996. Given how we're close to the end of 2013, that's eighteen years and almost half my life. I started in my senior year of high school, when I got stuck with an "elective" creative writing course taught by an instructor who insisted that the only fiction worth writing or reading came from the modernist tradition exemplified by early twentieth-century novelists like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Norman Mailer - the latter of which being the best of the lot, in my own opinion.

She spared little patience with students foolish enough to espouse any affection for "genre" work, and none whatsoever for long-haired metalheads possessed of sufficient nerve to suggest her literary idols were also genre writers. It didn't help that I turned in stories about long-haired metalheads aided by gifts from the Lead Bodhisattva, who put the hosts of Heaven and Hell alike to the sword because God and the Devil had the temerity to screw with his weekend plans by starting Armageddon.

The Lead Bodhisattva's gift, by the way, was a black diamond sword called the Starbreaker. "Stormbringer" was already taken - which surely caused the members of Deep Purple no little trouble when they released an album with that title in the 1970s.

What inspires and motivates you to write?

At risk of sounding both morbid and melodramatic, I needed a reason to go on living. When I got out of high school, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I didn't have a dream, since I realized that I would never be a good enough musician to command stages, or even earn a living. No particular career appealed to me. Since I was neither public-spirited, nor religious, I couldn't have done what other aimless young men did: enter religious life or seek a military career.

I started college because I was supposed to; going to college is what reasonably intelligent teenagers do in America once they've been released from high school. It's a prerequisite to a career, marriage, children, and all the rest of the nonsense we call the American Dream.

However, I lacked a meaningful alternative until I suffered the serendipitous misfortune of reading Terry Goodkind's first novel, Wizard's First Rule. If you haven't read it, here's the deal: an Eagle Scout picks a lousy time to finally notice the existence of women, gets infatuated with the wrong woman, gets drawn into a quest to kill a dictator whose right-hand man is a pedophile, and has one of those awkward "Luke, I am your father." moments with said dictator - whose name is "Darken Rahl".


And what does Darken Rahl want? He wants to rule the world, not that Terry Goodkind bothers to tell us why, and if he can't rule the world he'll damn well destroy it - and himself in the bargain. Add in quasi-Satanic child sacrifice, lots of torture porn, and the sort of plot twist M. Night Shyamalan might have rejected as too obvious, and you have the first volume of The Sword of Truth - a series for Wheel of Time fans to enjoy while waiting for Robert Jordan to get off his keister and move his byzantine plot along.

So, after reading some of that garbage - and paying good money for the privilege, since I was a working-class college kid cleaning toilets at a supermarket to pay for textbooks and train fare - I was thoroughly fed up with the fantasy genre. Sure, Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny shook things up in the 1970s and 1980s, but it wasn't fair to expect Moorcock to keep cranking out Eternal Champion stories when he had already published The Revenge of the Rose (an unsung classic, in my estimation), and Zelazny was dead of cancer. So it goes.

In the meantime, C. J. Cherryh was done with her Morgaine science fantasy series. C. S. Friedman had finished her utterly brilliant Coldfire Trilogy. Steven Brust still doesn't get enough respect. George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire wasn't the juggernaut it is today, neither Scott Lynch nor Joe Abercrombie were publishing yet, and I had not yet read Matthew Stover's brilliantly profane Acts of Caine. Brandon Sanderson might have been working on Elantris at the time (which I still haven't gotten around to reading). Nor had I yet discovered Glen Cook, the Vietnam vet who penned underrated classics like The Black Company and the Dread Empire sequence while making cars for GM, and I wouldn't mind buying that guy a beer.

I was pissed off with the fantasy genre as I understood it, particularly with the genre's tolerance for lousy villains - a tolerance for which blame should be laid squarely on the grave of J. R. R. Tolkien. Sauron was a lousy antagonist, from a literary standpoint. All we know about his motiviation is what his enemies tell their dupes, by which I mean what Gandalf tells Frodo to con him into taking the One Ring and buggering off to Rivendell. And what are we told about Sauron? That he wants to rule the world.

You know what a band called Tears for Fears taught me in the 80s? Everybody wants to rule the world. Tolkien, however, never bothered to tell us why Sauron wanted to rule the world. Did he want his pick of Elvish virgins? Was it payback for how the Valar bumped off his boss Morgoth back in the First Age? Did he just want to spend eternity punching kittens without any interference?

We don't know. Tolkien, perhaps because of a belief in evil as diminishment that goes all the way back to Dante Alighieri (if not further), doesn't tell us. So, after drop-kicking my copy of Wizard's First Rule across the room, I said to my cat, "You know what, furball? This genre needs a steel-toed boot up the rear. If the best we can do is rehashes of the Campbellian monomyth with some demon-ridden idiot of a farm boy marching off to adventure with his daddy's katana bouncing off his hip, and villains with less characterization than the end boss of a bad JRPG, then we deserve all the contempt we get."

My cat's response was to start licking his nuts. Not exactly supportive.

Tell me more about your brand of steel-toed fantasy.

I'm surprised you care at this point, and I'd be shocked if your readers got this far, but here goes. The following principles provide the foundation of my brand of heavy metal science fantasy. I'll admit that I didn't come up with these principles right away. It took years of further reading in the fantasy and science fiction genres, as well as outside the genre, to develop some of them.

• There is no such thing as the supernatural.
• Everything must make sense.
• Everybody has a reason for the things they do.
• The characters should be competent adults.
• If a sentence sucks, the whole book sucks.

I hope you and your readers will indulge me as I expound on these principles.

• There is no such thing as the supernatural.

I suspect many of your readers will object to the first principle, and insist that a blanket rejection of the supernatural precludes magic. I disagree. I distinguish between the supernatural and the preternatural. Supernatural phenomena are beyond the scope of human understanding, and always will be. Preternatural phenomena are currently unexplained, but may yet be explicable through diligent scientific research.

If you want examples from film, consider The Exorcist and Ghostbusters. In the former, no remedy or stratagem known to human science can banish Pazuzu from its human host, Regan. Regan's terrorized parents resort to the Catholic Church's rituals of exorcism. Demonic possession is supernatural in The Exorcist, and there is nothing humans can do about it on their own. They have to turn to a higher power.

In Ghostbusters, the ghosts are preternatural, rather than supernatural. Most people dismiss them as fakery, and the paranormal researchers portrayed by Bill Murray and Harold Ramis as charlatans, but they figure out how to trap ghosts and remove them from their haunts using unlicensed particle accelerators strapped to their backs. Instead of the power of Christ, they use the power of science, albeit Hollywood science.

• Everything must make sense.

I don't care much for Tolkien's fiction, for reasons beyond the scope of this interview, but the man not only grasped the concept of worldbuilding, but grasped the importance of keeping most of his worldbuilding in the background. I suspect his only living equal as a worldbuilder is Ursula K. Le Guin, who draws from anthropology as Tolkien did from philology, which predates modern linguistics.

Being a self-taught software developer, rather than a linguist or an anthropologist, I may never match the stature of Tolkien and Le Guin as worldbuilders. However, I grasp the importance of logic in a narrative. If there is anything in my story that I can't justify, then I screwed up. End of story. Coincidences are not permitted. Miracles are right out. Everything that happens in my fiction must have a cause, and that cause should be explained, or at least alluded to, in the text.

• Everybody has a reason for the things they do.

Remember how I griped about villains like Sauron, Lord Foul the Despiser, and Darken Rahl? My primary objection is that they are evil just because. They got stuck with the Villain Ball. I'm not naive enough to think there's no such thing as evil - not when human history is as full of examples of human depravity as I am of self-aggrandizing arrogance - but the Holocaust happened for a reason, and the reason isn't just, "Because Hitler was a pathetic wanker with a silly mustache."

As an author, it's my responsibility to bring to characterization the same exacting effort every halfway competent fantasist brings to their worldbuilding. Create as elaborate a stage as you like, but the play's the thing. What's a play without the players?

Since it's the villain who drives the story, it isn't enough to pick a character and say, "OK, you've got the Villain Ball, now run with it." The first thing I did when I started putting serious effort into Starbreaker, the first damn thing, was to sit down with my villain Imaginos. I asked questions:

1. What does Imaginos want?
2. Why does he want what he wants?
3. What gave him his reasons for wanting what he wants?
4. What has he done to get what he wants?
5. What is he willing to do to get what he wants?

These questions are Psychology 101, but a lot of traditionally published fantasy authors (at least when I was starting out) only asked such questions of their protagonists, and perhaps their minor antagonists. They might psychoanalyze the Dark Lord's flunkies, but not the Dark Lord himself.

To suggest I am unimpressed with such an approach is an understatement of Homeric proportions.

• The characters should be competent adults.

There's a reason it took me almost twenty years to publish my first novel: it's hard to write about mature adults when you're not one yourself, and when I first conceived characters like Morgan Stormrider and Naomi Bradleigh - experienced adults who think they understand the world and their place in it - I was an eighteen-year-old punk who had yet to kiss a woman. I had to grow into my cast - as if it were possible to grow up enough to properly characterize a sorceress who's over fifty thousand years old, and hides behind the persona of a Manhattan socialite devoted to horticulture and the symphony.

Morgan Stormrider isn't just some callow youth from a farming village who agrees to ride off with a sorceress he doesn't know and her bodyguard because monsters burned his house down and almost killed his father. He's a grown man, with adult problems. He's stuck with a job he's come to hate. He wants to start a career better suited to his evolving values. He's in love with a woman with whom he's been friends for years. His ex was recently murdered, and he's a possible suspect. With the possible exception of the last, these are all problems any thirty-year-old man living in a Western country might face. It's the specific nature of his problems that are extraordinary, and the efforts required to solve his problems will force him to grow, learn new skills, and reevaluate his understanding of the world around him.

• If a sentence sucks, the whole book sucks.

I know I'm likely to regret mentioning this last one, because I risk running afoul of an individual reader's tastes, but I flatter myself by thinking that I do the best I can with every word, sentence, paragraph, and scene I write. I omit needless words, and excise irrelevant details. If you see one of my characters sitting in the crapper, it won't be because everybody poops, but because something related to the plot is about to happen while this character's sitting with his pants around his ankles.

In Without Bloodshed, I have a scene where Morgan and Naomi fret about contraception not to hammer home the importance of safe sex, but to show the implications of the genetic condition they share, congenital pseudofeline morphological disorder (CPMD). When somebody with CPMD has sex with a normal person, there's no risk of pregnancy. When two people with CPMD get together, pregnancy is a possibility. This is important to the story, for reasons I'm reluctant to explain here.

To read more of my interview with author Matthew Graybosch, Click Here.

How to find Matthew Graybosch online...

• Author Website
• Starbreaker series Website
• Email: mg@matthewgraybosch.com
• Matthew Graybosch on Google+
• Twitter @MGraybosch
• Facebook
• Goodreads

Available on Amazon:

You can also try conjuring me, but the last person to try squiggled a line that should have been straight while drawing his summoning circle. The poor schmuck ended up as a chew toy for the Hounds of Tindalos. So it goes.

Marcy Luikart of Santa Barbara, California is primarily a writer, however, she also exercises her creativity by painting and playing the fiddle. She approached me with the idea of discussing in her interview how the different art forms infuse the writing. For example how does a writer "paint" a picture with words; is it similar to the process of putting color on canvas?  

Luikart's current novel is River Braids which tells us stories spanning 100 years.  In this interview she will be talking about the novel in terms of the visual process involved in addition to sharing from her personal experiences as a writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Iconoclast, Bellowing Ark, Pangolin Papers, Beginnings, QWF, and the Connecticut Review.

How long have you been writing in your current genre?

I've been writing my whole life.  This is my first historical fiction novel, but in reality writing historical fiction was more of an accident for me.  I started out writing a short story and while researching my story I found myself back at the 1904 World’s Fair. And then I found myself with a big “what if?” And the next thing I knew I was writing a novel.  Prior to this I was primarily a short story writer.  And I've got a couple of unfinished mysteries floating around on my hard drive.  I don’t have a genre. Each story is a new story and it tells me where it wants to go. What genre it wants to be. I know that’s not the trend. Writers are supposed to fit into a neat marketing box, but for me it’s all about the story.  I read all kinds of stories, mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, literary. I love all stories, and I like to write all stories.

What inspires and motivates you to write?

People motivate me.  I write to discover people.  And ultimately I discover myself.  There is something very exciting about putting people in imaginary circumstances and watching where they go. Sometimes it begins with a place and I imagine the people who live in that place.  Sometimes it’s a picture and I find myself wanting to know the story hidden in the picture.

Brooke is the author of The Brass Giant and The Mechanical Theater (initially released as The Clockwork Giant and Le Theatre Mecanique) part of the Chroniker City series for young adults. Her geeky obsession with mechanical science and history is the driving force behind her writing, flavoring her steampunk with scientific accuracy and her fantasy with the rich cultures of ancient civilizations. When she isn't writing, she enjoys a plethora of hobbies: drawing, painting, paper-craft, sewing, and baking— a Jack of all trades, master of none, in true bardic fashion.

If the world were a tabletop role-playing game, she would be the studious bard of the party, her husband the fiercely-bearded paladin, their dog the cowardly wizard who only knows one spell, and very soon to join them, their daughter, who will certainly choose her class once she arrives. They currently reside in Northwest Arkansas, but once they earn enough loot and experience, they'll build a proper castle in the mountains, defending themselves against all manner of dragons and goblin-kind. 

How long have you considered yourself a writer?

I was twelve when I made the decision to be a writer, but I don't think I ever really considered myself a "real" writer until after I graduated college. Until then, I had been a student, an artist, a gamer, spending very little time actually writing. But after college, I dove headfirst into the career I wanted to devote my life to, spending hours upon hours working on my stories every day, not just an hour or two a week. When people asked what I did, I could tell them I was a writer because that's what I did day-to-day; it became my job.

What inspires and motivates you to write?

Various things inspire me —a line from a book, a character from a movie, a random thought or dream, a painting or drawing, or even just a name or a combination of words. I don't try to explain where my inspiration comes from. It just happens, sometimes when I'm looking for it, sometimes when I'm not. But what gives me the most inspiration, what really inspires me to write, is reading a good book. Reading a good book makes me want to write something that someone else will read and be inspired. Really, that's the driving motivation behind my writing. I want to share stories. I want to make people cry because they care about a character I created. I want people to dream about the worlds in my stories. I want them to believe, for just a moment, that the world I created with my words, the people who live there, that it's all real, that if they could step through the pages of my book, they'd find a real place and real people, and hopefully, they wouldn't want to leave. That's what I want to accomplish with my stories, and that's why I keep writing, to share those stories, to share those worlds and people with others. Otherwise, they'd only exist in my head, and that's not fair.

Why Steampunk and how did you come to write Y.A.?

I sort of stumbled into writing steampunk by accident. Before writing my first steampunk novel, The Brass Giant, I was in the middle of editing a garbled mess of a fantasy novel, and it wasn't going well. One night, lying awake in bed, I had a thought: A machine is truth. It was an odd thought, and I wondered who would think such a thing. So I started exploring the idea, and out of it came my main character, a clockwork mechanic, and my setting, a city built on steam and clockwork technology. I had read a few steampunk novels by this point, and the thought of writing one terrified me since I had only ever written fantasy, but I had a story to tell. So I did.

Writing young adult fiction was also a sort of accident. My favorite stories are middle grade, meant for readers between the ages of eight and twelve, and I always wanted to write stories for that age group, but every time I came up with a story idea, it didn't fit middle grade. My protagonists were too old, their problems too complicated, and of course, I have a fondness for romance that's better suited for teenagers and older. Writing young adult wasn't really a decision so much as my stories just happening to fall into the young adult genre. My actual writing style also lends itself more toward young adult and middle grade instead of regular adult fiction. I write very simply, which works well for children's fiction and young adult.

What is the publishing process like?

The actual act of publishing a book is pretty simple. It's getting to that point that takes time and effort. My process from first draft to finished product is pretty similar from book to book. Once the first draft is done, I let it sit and mellow for a while, spending time working on something else to get my mind off it. Then I go back and do my first round of edits. After that, I might send it to beta-readers or do another edit after some time away, especially if I made a lot of changes in the first edit. I usually like for the story to be as good as I think I can make it before sending it to betas. Once it's with betas, I spend that time working on something else, usually whatever I worked on while letting the story sit after finishing the first draft. This is usually two months or so. And then once I have all of my beta feedback, I go over all their comments and follow-up with them with more specific questions if I have them. Then I do what I call my beta edit according to their feedback. After that, the book will sit for a few weeks while I work on cover art, formatting, marketing, and any other product packaging for publication. I'll do one more edit after that, make adjustments to the product packaging accordingly, and then get everything ready with retailers so that when I near my publication date, all I have to do is press "Publish."

I'm pretty lucky that I know how to do most of this stuff on my own. I have a background in graphic design and art, so I do my own cover art. I may work with another artist sometime in the future, when I have more funds to play with, but until then, I'm confident in my own work. Formatting comes pretty easy to me, and ever since publishing my first book, I now draft in the format I plan to publish in. The hardest part is always the editing —knowing what to cut, what to keep, what to change. Sometimes, it requires a second opinion, even before the beta stage, especially if I'm having a really hard time looking at the story objectively. And it takes the most time. I easily spend twice as much time editing as I do writing. 

But once the book is edited and formatted and has cover art, all I have to do is upload the files to Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, and Createspace, make sure everything looks like it's supposed to, and publish. 

What’s your typical writing session and environment like?

My desk is generally pretty cluttered. I have a bad habit of sticking post it notes and to-do lists everywhere, and because I snack quite a bit, there are usually dirty dishes, pudding cups, and half a dozen empty water bottles littering my work space. I likely have a chapter or two of my current manuscript printed out and marked up in pen, maybe a few handwritten pages of scenes or brainstorming notes half-hidden beneath my keyboard. My plot board is close by, scene cards pinned to a cork-board with pretty colored, star-shaped push-pins. 

I generally start working after lunch, once all the goofing-off-on-the-internet is done and I know I won't be disturbed. I sit at my desk, open up whatever manuscript document I happen to be working on, and start reading over the previous day's work before writing new words. I have Google+ chat going on my second monitor so that I can talk to my writer friends during the day, and depending on what I'm working on, I might have a document or two relating to the manuscript open for reference. While I write, I listen to music —usually film scores and video game soundtracks, sometimes techno. I very rarely listen to anything with lyrics. 

I tend to write in hour-long spurts and take short ten to fifteen minute breaks between. I aim for 500 words per hour, which is a really good pace for me. It's challenging but doable. I usually get three to four hours of solid writing done in the afternoon. Sometimes, I'll write another hour or two after dinner if I'm feeling particularly productive, but most of the time, my day is done when my husband gets home from work. The afternoon is my best writing time. In the morning, I'm too sleepy and distracted, and at night, I like spending time with my husband. This is likely to change soon, as we're expecting an addition to the family this fall, but I'm sure I'll figure out a new schedule eventually, even if it's not as productive as before.

What tools do you prefer to write with?

I write on a desktop computer, dual monitors for sufficient work-space, and an ergonomic keyboard for comfort. I draft in Microsoft Word 2010, which baffles many of my writer friends, who all use Scrivener, but Word works well for the way I write.

What is the most surprising response you have had to your writing?

Honestly, the thing that surprised me most was whenever my grandma read my novella. I thought she might like it, since it's a quieter, character-driven story, but I never expected her to like it so much that she read it in one sitting because she couldn't put it down. I think I always wanted her to believe in my writing and prove to her that I made a good choice with my career, so when she read my book and loved it, it sort of validated my career. I wouldn't have quit writing or anything had she not liked it, but the fact that she enjoyed my book and is proud of me and my writing, it means a lot to have that support from family, especially from a family member who thinks that job security is more important than following your dreams. 

Do you have any regrets pertaining to your writing?

Two. First, I regret rushing to publish my first book. I didn't really understand how important editing was, and I think had I waited, my book would be much better than it is. I'm still happy with it, but I think it could have been better if I would have given it the time and attention it deserved. In the future, I'll give each book the amount of time it really needs, even if that means pushing my deadlines and publication goals back. Second, I wish I trusted myself more. This is more of a general regret, but too often, I doubt myself when it comes to my work, and I make bad decisions based on that. It's something I'm working on. 

What plans do you have for future work?

My career goal is to publish fifty books. I've published two so far, so I have forty-eight to go. For short-term goals, I have the final two books in the Chroniker City series to write—The Guild Conspiracy and The Chroniker Legacy —which I plan to publish in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and I also have The Wizard's Heart, a fantasy novel in the middle of edits that I plan to publish next year. Outside of those books, I plan on pursuing traditional publication with a middle-grade fantasy that's still mulling about in my head. By the time I finish all of that, I'm likely to have twenty more ideas begging to be written.

What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

Write what you're passionate about. I've seen too many young writers write what they think will sell, or they write what other people tell them to write. They give up on the books they love because people tell them that no one reads those books, that it's not "real literature", or that publishers won't buy a book like that. Nonsense. If you write what you're passionate about, you'll write something worth reading. It's as simple as that.

Find Brooke Johnson online…

• Official Website 
• Facebook page
• Google+

Available on Amazon:

Jennifer J. Chow is a Chinese-American married into the Taiwanese culture. Her fiction has appeared in several literary magazines.  Her Taiwanese-American novel, The 228 Legacy, made it to the second round of the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest and was published by Martin Sisters Publishing in July 2013.

Book Cover for The 228 Legacy

The 228 Legacy was inspired by the family stories she heard after viewing photos of a two-million-person human chain commemorating 228. She has traveled multiple times to Taiwan and visited places dedicated to the incident. Her experience with the elderly comes from a gerontology specialization at Cornell University and her geriatric social work experience. Visit Jennifer online at her site  www.jenniferjchow.com to learn more about her work. 

What is your genre? 

My tagline is “Asian American fiction with a geriatric twist.” My recently released novel, The 228 Legacy, is categorized as multicultural women’s fiction.


Would you consider The 228 Legacy to be historical fiction?

You could reference my book as historical fiction since it explores the effects of a historical event which occurred in 1947.  However, it is officially categorized under "multicultural" and "women's fiction." I think this is because the novel is set in the 1980's which is sometimes too close to be considered historical. 

How did you get started writing? 

I started out as a young kid scribbling on scraps of paper and stealing my dad’s typewriter to bang away on its keys. As I got older, I joined school clubs like yearbook, newspaper, and the literary magazine. I also wrote poetry on the side. When I graduated from college, I focused on fiction. I have short stories published in several literary magazines. I also wrote and shelved three manuscripts before landing a contract for my debut novel. 

What is the publishing process like? 

Nowadays, the publishing process is more fluid. It used to be harder: You needed to secure a literary agent to get the attention of an acquisitions editor to present the manuscript to the publisher’s committee meeting for a vote. Writers today have more avenues to see their name in print, whether it’s through a big publishing company, a small independent press, or by self-publishing. 

What’s your typical writing session and environment like? 

I tend to write in solid chunks of time. Since I have two young children, I used to write exclusively when they went down for bed. I still like the nighttime to write. It works well for me because I require absolute quiet to craft my sentences. 

What are your favorite writing tools?

Masha du Toit is an artist and writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. She illustrates stories that don’t exist yet, and writes about unexpected magic in everyday situations. She’s inspired by folk- and fairy tales, puppetry, and spur-of-the-moment bedtime stories.

Masha writes in the genre of Contemporary Fantasy/Urban Fantasy. Because she is a visual artist, her books are illustrated as well as written by her.  "They are not graphic novels, and the stories are text-driven, but I like to find ways to expand on the story with my drawings."

What motivates your writing?

I write the kind of book that I'd love to discover in a library or second-hand bookshop and be immersed in, something that reminds me that although I'm no longer a child, magic is all around me every day.

Tell me about influences.

I'm influenced by writers like Diana Wynne-Jones, Charles de Lint, and Garth Nix, among the many!  I also grew up reading folk and fairy tales and am always looking for ways to weave those into my stories.

I'm also inspired by my environment. I keep meeting people who are so odd, or interesting, or irritating that I can't wait to place them in a story.  And living in Cape Town I'm constantly surrounded by things that just cry out to be written about, whether it is the way people speak, the city itself, or way that the natural world survives in and around the harsher urban spaces.

all images © Masha du Toit

Do you have any regrets pertaining to your writing?

I regret that I only started writing after my mother died.  She was a great inspiration to me, with her love of stories and curiosity about just about everything.  In some ways, I'm always writing about my mother, and how much I still miss her.


What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

To be aware of what motivates you. It's easy to lose sight of your own goals when you are surrounded by people with different aspirations. Some of us need the validation of getting a contract with a publisher, or making lots of sales. Others simply want readers, or even just the experience of writing itself.  Don't let anyone tell you that you are not a "real" writer, for whatever reason.  Figure out what motivates YOU and don't lose sight of that.

Discover more about Masha online…

• Website/ Blog
• Google Plus Profile
• Book Site
• New Release Mailing List 

Available on Amazon: