The Qwillery

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first piece you remember writing?

Adam:  My father used to bring me along to art museums (he’s a painter and professor at Maryland Institute College of Art) and I remember writing bad, earnest poems about different works of art when I was about seven or eight. Early ekphrastic experiments.



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Adam:  Probably a hybrid. I have a sense of the structure, but especially since this book deals with the nature of time, I spent many years moving around chapters and scenes into nonlinear arrangements. I have a sense of where the narrative is going but I try not to plot everything out and allow the story to steer itself in unexpected directions.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Adam:  The most challenging this is finding the time—I have a fulltime career at History Factory (www.historyfactory.com) writing books and other content for Fortune 500 companies, I help run a music education nonprofit, and above all I enjoy being a husband and a father of two kids. So figuring out how to carve out the time in odd hours isn’t easy.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Adam:  Everything, I guess? My life, the stories I hear and details I steal from others, the books I read and movies/TV I see, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, the news, history, the current state of our world.



TQ:  Describe We Can Save Us All using only 5 words.

Adam:  Student superheroes start a revolution



TQ:  Tell us something about We Can Save Us All that is not found in the book description.

Adam:  It took about 12 years to get it written, revised and published.



TQ:  What inspired you to write We Can Save Us All?

Adam:  Again, too many things to list, but I went to college during a particularly transitional time—from 1999 to 2003—which spanned Columbine, the Bush/Gore election, September 11th, and the war that followed—so I think some of this book was inspired by an increasingly uncertain world and how one group of students might respond to it.

This is far from an exhaustive list, but here are a few books that were influential:

White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen
The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor
The Girls by Emma Cline
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for We Can Save Us All?

Adam:  More than I can recount, but I read all kinds of fiction and nonfiction, studied cults and communes, and studied both the practical and overblown versions of doomsday prepping, along with plenty of research into superheroes—mythical, fictional and “real.”



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for We Can Save Us All.

Adam:  The beautiful cover, designed by Jaya Nicely at The Unnamed Press, is more impressionistic, but I guess you could make an argument that the small white bits symbolize pills, a blizzard, or rice kernels…



TQ:  In We Can Save Us All who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Adam:  I’m not sure that any of the characters were particularly “easy” or “hard,” but David was the probably the closest character to my own personality (with some major exceptions). I think there was a period when I was especially conscious that with the characters that were farther away from my lived experience—the non-white, non-male characters—I had more of a responsibility to write them in realistic, complicated ways, and not fall into tropes or stereotypes, but these characters all took on lives of their own pretty swiftly and I tried to not police myself and let the characters do their thing.



TQ:  Does We Can Save Us All touch on any social issues?

Adam:  The book deals with, among other things, class privilege, climate change, spirituality/mutual aid societies vs. cults/authoritarianism, the value of liberal arts education vs. knowledge of trade skills, polyamorous relationships, hero worship, and sexual assault. On that last issue, I had no idea the book would be published during the #MeToo movement and while a trigger warning is warranted, I believe the assault that occurs in the book is confronted in a substantial and significant way.



TQ:  Which question about We Can Save Us All do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Adam:

Q: How hard was it to write and publish this book as a working father? How do you balance your home/family life and work life?

A: It’s hard! Both my wife and I are committed parents, and we both have fulltime careers, and we both have personal/creative projects that we pursue. It’s tough to juggle—between those three major roles and between what each of us needs to prioritize at a given time—but we’re making it work. I do my best, write in odd hours and when the kids are asleep, and try to be present when they’re awake, realizing that a huge part of writing is about observing and considering life from unexpected angles, and the earnest innocence with which children approach the world is a great teaching tool for this.



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from We Can Save Us All.

Adam:

On the protagonist’s lack of knowledge about comic books:
“My relationship to superheroes is mystical, not fundamentalist.”

On fireworks exploding:
“David found it fascinating to watch this refuse, these ashes, and wondered if this was the reality of the Big Bang: trillions of years ago, all that far-flung carbon was merely a worthless by-product of an infinitely pretty explosion; now, they were all merely star farts.”



TQ:  What's next?

Adam:  I don’t feel like the We Can Save Us All work is over just yet. I maybe had the naïve misconception that once the book was published everything was out of my hands, but my publisher (The Unnamed Press) has been a terrific partner and helped me see that there’s a lot I can be doing to help my novel be successful and reach a wider audience—being available for press and participating in interviews, writing personal essays, being active on social media, keeping my website current, reading colleagues books, planning and attending book events, etc. Some of this is orchestrated by my publisher and some of it is really proactive stuff that I’m working on and almost all of it is a collaboration between myself, my publisher and my agent. That work will continue early next year when I do more touring on the West Coast (feel free to keep track at www.AdamNemett.com), but once this phase is in the rearview I have some ideas for the next book(s)—children’s books, and two ideas for novels—and would be interested in certain ancillary offshoots for We Can Save Us All, such as a graphic novel or film adaptation.



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

Adam:  Thank YOU! And thanks for supporting debut novels!

We Can Save Us All
The Unnamed Press, November 13, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 363 pages

"Nemett's wondrously fresh novel positively bursts with charm, heart, and invention." ―Booklist, Starred Review

Welcome to The Egg, an off-campus geodesic dome where David Fuffman and his crew of alienated Princeton students train for what might be the end of days: America is in a perpetual state of war, climate disasters create a global state of emergency, and scientists believe time itself may be collapsing.

Funded by the charismatic Mathias Blue and fueled by performance enhancers and psychedelic drugs, a student revolution incubates at The Egg, inspired by the superheroes that dominate American culture. The arrival of Haley Roth―an impassioned heroine with a dark secret―propels David and Mathias to expand their movement across college campuses nationwide, inspiring a cult-like following. As the final superstorm arrives, they toe the line between good and evil, deliverance and demagogues, the damned and the saved.

In this sprawling, ambitious debut, Adam Nemett delves into contemporary life in all of its chaos and unknowing. We Can Save Us All is a brave, ribald, and multi-layered examination of what may be the fundamental question of our time: just who is responsible for fixing all of this?

About Adam

Adam Nemett graduated from Princeton University and received his MFA in Fiction/Screenwriting from California College of the Arts. He serves as creative director and author for The History Factory, where he's written award-winning nonfiction books for Lockheed Martin, Brooks Brothers, City of Hope Medical Center, and Huntington Bank, and directed campaigns for 21st Century Fox, Adobe Systems, HarperCollins, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, New Balance, Pfizer and Whirlpool. An excerpt of his debut novel, WE CAN SAVE US ALL, was anthologized in The Apocalypse Reader.

He is the writer/director of the feature film, The Instrument (2005), which LA Weekly described as, "damn near unclassifiable." At Princeton Nemett co-founded MIMA Music Inc., a student organization that grew into an educational 501(c)3 nonprofit that has operated in 40 countries worldwide. Adam's work has been published, reviewed and featured in Variety, LA Weekly, The New Yorker, Washington Post, Forbes.com, The Brooklyn Rail, Cville Niche, C-Ville Weekly and Cornel West's memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud.

He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and two kids.

Website  ~  Twitter @NemoAuthor  ~  Instagram

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first piece you remember writing?

Clay:  I think I was about 12 or 13 when I started writing Forgotten Realms fan-fic short stories that had an actual beginning, middle, and end. I wrote a pretty fair number of those, actually. Long before I ever found out that wasn't how publishing in shared worlds or other people's IP's works. Which was kind of a bummer when I did figure that out.



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Clay:  Hybrid. Early development is plotting – a haphazard constellation of Word document fragments, sticky notes, and text messages to myself. Then I sit down to write it and accept that no plot completely survives first contact with the enemy and let the story take me where it decides we need to go. Then I pants it and try to keep up. So, hybrid-cat-herder, I suppose.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Clay:  My attention deficit when it comes to what project I'm going to work on now/next. My brain is buried under an avalanche of stories I'd like to get written – more than I will ever live long enough to actually write. Don’t get me wrong, it's not a bad problem to have, but grabbing hold of one out of the all the swirling debris and sticking with it to the end requires constant conscious effort.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Clay:  The creative influences are huge, not even sure where I'd start drilling down into those. But it was when I read The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore that I first asked myself, "I wonder if I could do this? I wonder if I could write stories?" I was a kid, but I remember that. Very vividly. Everything else sort of flows from that moment. Music influences my writing tremendously. Different music for different projects. And I suppose it was Stephen King that gave a teenage-me the idea I could write anything I damn well pleased.



TQ:  Describe Endsville using only 5 words.

Clay:  Ruthless occult gangsters for hire.



TQ:  Tell us something about Endsville that is not found in the book description.

Clay:  Fundamentally, it's a story about a family. A toxic, brutal, terminally dysfunctional one, but a family nonetheless.



TQ:  What inspired you to write Endsville? Why did you set the novel in Los Angeles?

Clay:  I love crime stories, and I love occult horror and dark fantasy. I got fixated on the idea that they would blend together nicely, and the rest is history. I originally started delving into the mythos of this world by following the story of the "good guys" – but I quickly fell in love with the "bad guys" and realized I wanted to tell the story from their perspective instead. As to why I set the novel in Los Angeles: I lived in Southern California back in the mid-'90s, and L.A. and the Southern California desert is just a playground of the wonderful and the bizarre. Once I started putting the first snippets of the Outlaw Arcana mythos on paper, I couldn't see it any other way but as an L.A. crime story. With teeth. Literally.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for Endsville?

Clay:  My bookshelves started filling up with books on secret societies, occult practices, myths, legends, Paganism, and bizarre cults. Pretty sure my Amazon order history looks like the last desperate shopping list of a madman. I also spent a lot of time researching L.A. gangland and Southern California crime dynasties – the good guys, the bad guys, and everything in between.



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for Endsville.

Clay:  The artist is the incredible Shawn T. King of STK•Kreations. I had the (rare and wonderful) experience of being able to work directly with him during production of the cover art. That's a special treat for an author. After some back and forth, we settled on a depiction of the protagonist Gabriel – and the sigil of the House of the Crow inked on his back – the sign of his rank and station in the family. In the opening chapters of the novel, Gabriel is asked about his Crow tattoo, what it means. His reply tells it all: "It means we're bad people... We lie. We cheat. We steal. We kill. So long as we take out the trash and keep the peace with the other liars, cheaters, thieves, and killers, nobody really cares."



TQ:  In Endsville who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Clay:  The easiest and hardest are the same characters: Gabriel and his sister Delilah. Their lives turn into a tornado of grief, guilt, regret, and trauma in this story while they fight tooth and nail to get a hand back on the reins. That's familiar territory for me, so it's not a hard head-space to get into. And for that reason, getting dressed up with those characters and telling their story takes a toll. It's an easy river to dive into. A damn hard one to climb back out of when I step away from the keyboard for the night. But I suppose it's kind of cathartic too.



TQ:  Does Endsville touch on any social issues?

Clay:  Endsville plants the seeds for some that I'll be delving into deeper as the series unfolds – drug abuse and addiction, toxic and abusive family relationships, and the dangerous spiral of living a life of crime – both by choice and by inescapable circumstances.



TQ:  Which question about Endsville do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Clay:  The question: "So is Endsville really about the bad guys being bad guys?" The answer: "Why, yes, it is." A lot of urban fantasy stories play with the idea – a protagonist who used to be bad but is trying to reform. Bad guys who really do good but no one gives them credit for it. But for this one, I decided I'd go at telling the story of the bad guys with both barrels and didn't look back. It seemed like a good idea. Looking forward to seeing if the readers agree.



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from Endsville.

Clay:

#1: "No one loves a crow. Scavengers. Thieves. Liars. Harbingers of death. Loyal to and beholden to no one but their own kind. Drawn to the chaos and carnage so they can pick gold from the bones. Good, bad, indifferent. A crow does what a crow does. Nothing commands a crow. Not men. Not kings. Not gods. The House of the Crow lives up to its namesake."

#2: " Choices have consequences. The inescapable gravity of consequence is a real son of a bitch. As anybody who’d ever jumped off a cliff can tell you, gravity kills. When the stop comes, it’s sudden. Then everything breaks."



TQ:  What's next?

Clay:  Book 2 of my Outlaw Arcana series is on the workbench, so that's somewhere on the not-too-distant horizon. I have a short story appearing in Knaves: A Blackguards Anthology coming soon from Outland Entertainment. Other novels currently on my workbench: a grimdark dieselpunk fantasy, an apocalyptic space opera, and a straight-up crime thriller. We'll have to see where they go, and whether or not my head explodes into a shower of confetti while juggling them all.



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

Clay:  Thank you for having me. It was certainly a lot of fun!

Endsville
Outlaw Arcana 1
Crossroad Press, December 25, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 458 pages

Welcome to Los Angeles—where the secret worlds of the criminal and supernatural collide. Crime and black magic pay. In the City of Angels, no one does it better than Gabriel St. John and the House of the Crow…

ENDSVILLE introduces readers to the House of the Crow. Led by their enigmatic street captain Gabriel, the Crows are a secret coven of high-rolling occult gangsters operating out of Los Angeles. A gangland king by the name of Dante Washington enlists their aid to recover 34 million dollars in cash—stolen from him by what appears to be a hostile sorcerer.

The Crows battle through a vicious cycle of betrayal, violence, and black magic while on the hunt for Mr. Washington’s missing money. In the end, allies prove to be enemies, and there are much greater things at stake than covering up a multi-million dollar gangland heist.

About Clay

Clay Sanger is a professional technogeek by day and a writer fiction the rest of the time. A life-long lover of all things wild, Clay spent much of his early adulthood wandering the four corners of the country in search of the weird and wonderful, the dark and the light.  As chance would have it he found them. After meandering far and wide he returned to his native Ozarks where he lives with his dazzling wife, their sons, and a menagerie of mythical creatures both real and imagined.







Website  ~  Twitter @claysanger  ~  Facebook

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first piece you remember writing?

Victor:  Hmm, I think it was a short story with pictures I drew when I was around 10, with a kid who gets kidnapped out of his bed by aliens and taken on adventures. He wakes up at the end back in his bed, thinking it was all a dream, but you can see the alien’s antennas outside his window. I hate the “It was all a dream” trope in fiction, incidentally. Lame!



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Victor:  Hybrid. I generally have an overall vision of how I want the story to go, but the day-to-day writing is generally a surprise to me. I do sometimes write myself into a plot corner as a result, but the easiest way out is usually just to imagine how my protagonist would react to the situation he or she is in. Or sometimes I just send in killer robots with laser guns and missile launchers. That tends to reboot a scene pretty quickly.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Victor:  Lol, all of it? It’s always a bit excruciating. Giving different characters distinctive voices and behaviors is a big challenge. We’re so used to thinking as ourselves that it’s very hard to think like someone else, or to feel or talk like someone else.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Victor:  Well, there are good and bad influences, right? On the positive side, you can round up the usual suspects: Tolkien, Stephen King, Douglas Adams, T.H. White, Asimov, and so on. On the negative side, well, I love twitter, but it does condition you to have the attention span of a hyperactive fruit fly. Spending 30 minutes or an hour writing long form does get easier with practice, but internet culture does not encourage patient diligence.



TQ:  Describe The First Protectors using only 5 words.

Victor:  Fighting aliens with alien science.



TQ:  Tell us something about The First Protectors that is not found in the book description.

Victor:  Political intrigue and upheaval among Earth’s governments as the invasion unfolds plays a big part in how the confrontation plays out.




TQ:  What inspired you to write The First Protectors? What appeals to you about writing Science Fiction?

Victor:  I wanted to explore what an alien invasion might realistically look like and how we might realistically fight back against it. At the same time, the various real-world military conflicts over the last decade-plus have made it impossible to ignore war’s mental and spiritual toll on those who fight in them. So I wanted to explore that internal tension, as well, of someone who never wanted to fight again being essentially forced to fight for the entire world. Ultimately, science fiction is about what it means to be human as technological change accelerates. All the hardware and spaceships and whatnot are only interesting if you put confused, scared, determined, smart, overwhelmed people in front of them and behind them and inside them.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for The First Protectors?

Victor:  Fortunately, in the internet age, you never have to leave your chair to wander a Russian street or peruse artillery manuals. But that also means you have no excuse not to do those things. So I spent a lot of time in Google Earth, or reading U.S. military websites, or looking up the chemical compositions of various materials or researching theoretical space propulsion systems.



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for The First Protectors.

Victor:  All credit to the great Amir Zand (https://www.artstation.com/amirzand) for the fantastic cover. That illustration represents a scene in the book where Ben Shepherd, the protagonist, first encounters the alien visitors out in the New Mexico desert.



TQ:  In The First Protectors who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Victor:  I think the “comic relief” characters often feel the easiest to write, at least on the first pass. But as I kept revising, I wanted to dig deeper into these characters. So you just keep peeling away, trying to find their humanity, without sacrificing the tone you want them to bring to the tale. That’s not easy!



TQ:  Does The First Protectors touch on any social issues?

Victor:  It does dig into the political impact that an alien invasion might have, how different governments and populations might react to that news and the chaos pouring down on them from above. I do wonder if any governments keep contingency plans for this sort of thing on a shelf somewhere, just in case.



TQ:  Which question about The First Protectors do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Victor:  Did you really think you would be able to get your book published when you first started writing? I had no idea how to get a book published when I started. But I knew that it was a story I wanted to tell, because it was a story I wanted to read. So I figured someone else might want to read it, too.



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from The First Protectors.

Victor: 

“But tea did not come from Russia,” Gretchencko said, folding his hands on the table in front of him and ignoring the steam and the storm. “In 1638, an envoy from Tsar Michael I to Altyn Khan, a Mongolian ruler, came back with these dried leaves, a strange gift. But it was not long before Russians saw the value of this new material and adopted tea as our own, a national drink. And you, Lt. Shepherd, are tea, a strange new thing from a very distant place.”

Gretchenko finally lifted his cup and blew softly over the hot liquid, his eyes never leaving his visitors. He sipped, expressionless. “The only question is, are you a gift, or something else?”



TQ:  What's next?

Victor:  Possibly a sequel, if readers like The First Protectors. And I’m working on a few unrelated sci-fi novels. So we’ll see!



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

Victor:  Thanks for the invite!

The First Protectors
Talos Press, November 13, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 304 pages

The last thing Ben Shepherd wanted was another war. But sometimes the universe won’t take no for an answer.

His body and spirit mangled by a lifetime of combat, Shepherd, a retired Navy SEAL, has retreated to the desolate desert of New Mexico to heal his wounds and dodge his demons. All he wants now is peace and quiet.

Both are shattered one starry night, when an alien ship crashes nearby. Out of the ship crawls the last, dying member of a conquered civilization. It’s been shot down by an extraterrestrial enemy, the vanguard of a ravenous force hunting for a new homeland. With its last gasp, the wounded alien injects Shepherd with a high-tech serum that gives him near superhuman powers.

Now, with a new body but a soul as fractured as ever, Shepherd becomes the reluctant leader of the human resistance against the coming invasion. With enemies on all sides, the man who couldn’t bear the guilt of seeing one more friend die in battle now finds himself charged with protecting the entire planet.

About Victor

Victor Godinez is a former newspaper reporter and current works in public relations. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Sarah, three kids, two dogs and, according to the most recent household census, two guinea pigs. You can find him on twitter @VictorGodinez, where he rambles about self-driving cars, The Simpsons, and sci-fi.

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first piece of fiction you remember writing?

W. L.:  I remember starting a noir detective story when I was in the 1st grade. I didn’t know that detective stories had to have a plot – I was mostly focused on the cool hat and trench coat – so I didn’t make it much past the first scene, but I was hooked and have been writing ever since.



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

W. L.:  Originally I was a proud pantser, but I can’t do it anymore; outlines are just too helpful. My creative process benefits from separating the “coming up with an interesting story” bit from the “write good words” bit. Otherwise I spend too long staring at a blank page and a blinking cursor. That said, at least twice while writing Breach I made significant deviations from the outline because the story made it clear that it needed to go in a new direction.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

W. L.:  Being creative on demand. I like to sit and wait for inspiration to strike – actually I like to go for long walks, that’s when my imagination works best. But deadlines don’t go away, so I’ve had to learn to just start writing. Once I’ve built some momentum, the creativity usually catches up, and we’ll clean up the rest in editing.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

W. L.:  Like most writers, I read constantly and I know my writing benefits from all those wonderful stories and well-crafted sentences bouncing around in my head. There are brilliant writers who I wish would influence me more so I could have a fraction of their skill, some of my favorites being Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Cormac McCarthy. For Breach though, my inspiration came mostly from the books of John le Carré and Lev Grossman, and from the TV show Agent Carter.



TQ:  Describe Breach using only 5 words.

W. L.:  Cold War magicians uncovering secrets.



TQ:  Tell us something about Breach that is not found in the book description.

W. L.:  Here’s a Breach Easter egg for you: one of the villains is named after a dear friend of mine. When I started writing the book, he offered to help me with any untranslated Russian, so in turn I immortalized him as a bad guy. Seemed like a fair trade.



TQ:  What inspired you to write Breach? What appeals to you about writing Alternate History?

W. L.:  The idea came to me in fairly vague terms: Cold War fantasy novel. There are a few examples out there of this sub-sub-sub-genre, but not many. The Cold War spans the whole globe and a huge timeline, but I immediately knew I wanted to write something set in divided Berlin in the years following WWII. It is such a unique and strange part of our recent history, and I knew throwing magic into the mix could only make it more so.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for Breach?

W. L.:  Once I had the idea for the story, I knew I needed to learn a lot more, so I did what any writer would do: I got a bunch of books. Some were very helpful; some were a bit dry (turns out that the CIA and KGB don’t always hire agents because of their engaging prose). The best were Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall: A World Divided and Frederick Kempe’s Berlin 1961.



TQ:  Why did you set the novel in Berlin during the Cold War?

W. L.:  It is just such an evocative setting: the clothes people wore, the cars they drove, the condition of the city as it recovered from the war, all of it. And Cold War Berlin has an abundance of what every good novel requires: conflict.



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for Breach.

W. L.:  I love the cover for Breach. I was honored to have a cover by Pete Garceau who has done stunning covers for Neil Gaiman, Lee Child, Mary Roach, and many others. The cover shows a historic map of Berlin overlaid with the colors of the German flag and a bright and jagged tear – the titular breach. I love that I’ve never seen a cover quite like it; it really stands out on a bookshelf.



TQ:  In Breach who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

W. L.:  My main character Karen was often the hardest, because I so desperately wanted to get her right. I did not want to join the ever-expanding Hall of Shame for men writers who write terrible female characters; my readers (and my characters) deserve better. Through the hard work of my wife, my agent, and my editor, I hope she feels authentic.

Villains are often the most fun to write, and I very much enjoyed writing for my deadly KGB colonel, the Nightingale. He believes himself a decent man, committed to his family and his country, despite the terrible things he does for the Soviet Union. That duality – and sometimes just hypocrisy – made writing him always interesting.



TQ:  Does Breach touch on any social issues?

W. L.:  Since the book is set in the 1950’s with a female main character who is driven to succeed in a male-dominated field, she’s forced to confront misogyny as well as Soviet spies. I wish struggles like this were – like the Berlin Wall – relegated to the past, but obviously our society still doesn’t know how to treat women equally. I think Karen does a good job excelling despite the confines her culture tries to force on her, but it means she’s hindered even by her allies.



TQ:  Which question about Breach do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

W. L.:  “What’s the deal with that one Yiddish phrase you use in the first chapter?”

I’m glad you asked! The phrase is: “A shod m’hot nisht geredt fun moshiach” and literally translates to “We should have been speaking of Messiah.” It is used the same as the English phrase “Speak of the devil and he shall appear.” I think the idea is “We were talking about this guy and he showed up; maybe if we were talking about Messiah, he’d appear too.” I found it on the internet some years back and thought it was such an interesting phrase so I’ve been looking for a way to use it. During copyediting for Breach, my publisher wanted me to confirm that it meant what I thought, but that proved harder than expected. A friend put me in touch with a dozen or so rabbis and professors, who all had different takes on it, ranging from “Never heard of it” to “Well, maybe…” In the end, I decided to keep it in the book and hope for the best.



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from Breach.

W. L.:  I love Karen’s exchange with one of her sexist co-workers early on in the book, after she runs out of patience for being talked down to:

          “Listen here, Honey—”

          “Yes, Sweetheart?” Karen replied. This stopped the old Texan cold. Stopped the whole room, actually. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Karen said, “I thought we were being familiar. My mistake.”


And I think the curmudgeonly but poetic nature of Arthur, the CIA chief in West Berlin, is well summarized by this quote of his:

“Someone once told me that life is just the accumulation of memories and regrets. Worst part is, the older I get, I forget about the memories, but those regrets tend to stick around.”



TQ:  What's next?

W. L.:  Currently I’m working on edits for the sequel to Breach, which should be out in November 2019. The Cold War has decades of conflict available for inspiration, so there are plenty more stories to tell.


TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery!

Breach
A Cold War Magic Novel 1
Ace, November 6, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 368 pages

The first novel in a new Cold War fantasy series, where the Berlin Wall is made entirely of magic. When a breach unexpectedly appears in the wall, spies from both sides swarm to the city as World War III threatens to spark.

AFTER THE WAR, THE WALL BROUGHT AN UNEASY PEACE.

When Soviet magicians conjured an arcane wall to blockade occupied Berlin, the world was outraged but let it stand for the sake of peace. Now, after ten years of fighting with spies instead of spells, the CIA has discovered the unthinkable…

THE WALL IS FAILING.

While refugees and soldiers mass along the border, operatives from East and West converge on the most dangerous city in the world to either stop the crisis, or take advantage of it.

Karen, a young magician with the American Office of Magical Research and Deployment, is sent to investigate the breach in the Wall and determine if it can be fixed. Instead, she discovers that the truth is elusive in this divided city–and that even magic itself has its own agenda.

THE TRUTH OF THE WALL IS ABOUT TO BE REVEALED.

About W. L. Goodwater

Walter was born in northern California, in a small (and often miserably hot) town called Red Bluff. He started writing at a young age, writing often about magic, history, detectives, and swords. He went to college to study Computer Science at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and fell in love with the mild climate and decided to stay. While in college, he competed with the Cal Poly fencing team, who won league titles nearly every season. He currently coaches the high school fencing team for the Dunn School in Los Olivos, which has won multiple championship titles.

While he loves to read and write fantasy, he especially enjoys books that span genres. His debut novel, BREACH, takes the chocolate + peanut butter approach of merging fantasy with a Cold War spy thriller, to create a world that benefits from the power of both kinds of stories.

When he isn't writing, Walter is a software engineer specializing in user interface design. He has a passion for creating enjoyable user experiences even out of mundane tasks, and applies the principles of good UX even when writing novels.

Walter loves books, the beach, and Birkenstocks. Root beer floats are also pretty great.

For more insight into the mysteries of Walter, check out the Journal.

Website  ~  Twitter @wlgoodwater  ~  Instagram

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first fiction piece you remember writing?

Ian:  I don’t remember so much the piece as the word. I scribbled down something in a creative writing class including the description of a politician as “tergiversatory”. I remember my English teacher calling me over to ask what on earth it meant (it means evasive, or prone to switch sides).

I was clearly a pretentious twelve-year-old.



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Ian:  Undoubtedly a hybrid. The essence of the All Father Paradox are these set pieces, moments in an alternate timeline. Each of those is like a segment jigsaw, they have to fit the big picture. But within each of those stories, I found that the characters took on a life of their own – their Viking voyage, so to speak, was full of wanderlust and abandon. Moreover, because the book hinges of these little bits of history repeating, these echoes of previous chapters, you’d find that what you planned was constantly pummelled with waves of implications. Adaption was the only way the DNA blueprint could survive.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Ian:  The on ramp. The starting point for the story. New writers, top tip: I wouldn’t advise eliminating spoken dialogue from your arsenal.

In the All Father Paradox, we quickly meet some Benedictine monks who have taken a vow of silence. To be authentic to the characters and the period, they couldn’t talk. That means the entire scene has to be carried by internal monologue and exterior description. And because this is an unfamiliar scene – how may readers know intimate details of Charlemagne’s Saxon Wars 1250 years ago? – I had a fair amount of world building to do.

The monks had to go first in sequence, for reasons that will be obvious to someone who picks up the book, but boy howdy, sign language is a pain in the neck to write.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Ian:  When I am writing, the temptation to through in a flippant, tangential, irrelevant or downright obscure reference can only come from Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. They are like two Good Omens demons, wittering on my shoulders. But also, George MacDonald Fraser, who wrote Harry Flashman into just about every conflict the British Empire had across the Victorian era. Reading him humbug the potentates of Europe and beyond was a riot.



TQ:  Describe The All Father Paradox using only 5 words.

Ian:  What if the Vikings won?



TQ:  Tell us something about The All Father Paradox that is not found in the book description.

Ian:  We talk about the storied heroes of mankind, emerging from the sagas in new and brutal form, but we don’t say how, or why.

One of the long marches of our civilisation has been from mysticism through humanism to empiricism and rationalism. Simply put, our thinking about our place in the universe has evolved. I think one of the most interesting things I had to do was develop Norse thinking, from its Iron Age roots, into the Modern era. I’d removed Christianity from the equation early on, so what would the new formula look like? What does a world that places a great tree, Yggdrasil, as its central pillar look like?



TQ:  What inspired you to write The All Father Paradox? Why Vikings?

Ian:  The book is partly about demons and being demonised. Stories are simplifications, designed to resonate across the ages, to stick in the mind. One of the best ways to do this is to paint someone in the blackest light.

Take the arch-fiend Lucifer, for instance. If you explore the meaning behind the word, you find some academics making the case for the name meaning “morning star” and referring to a failed coup by the son of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. Looking down the long lens of history, it is breath-taking how perspectives change. One minute he is a prince, the next he is The Prince of Darkness.

A similar thing happened to the Vikings. Do you really think they were smell, horned-helmeted barbarians? Or does the record need setting straight? That was my impetus.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for The All Father Paradox?

Ian:  It really ran the gamut between Old Norse sagas and poring through NASA data about exoplanets. That’s the challenge with writing about a civilisation, I wasn’t so much world-building as universe creating.



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for The All Father Paradox.

Ian:  The cover is an illustration penned with great care and attention by Jeremy Mohler at Outland, the publisher. It is a faithful representation of a real place – St. Mary’s Church, and the 1,000-year-old Viking Cross that can still be found in the churchyard there. The cross, the convergence of religions it represents, and the battle that revolves around it are captured perfectly in Jeremy’s scene.



TQ:  In The All Father Paradox who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Ian:  Churchwarden Michaels was the easiest to write, because he represents the England I grew up in, and is therefore an amalgam of people I knew and know. As a contemporary voice in the novel, and the frame of reference for the reader, he is designed to be a sympathetic, if flawed, character.

Conversely, at the other end of the time spectrum, the monk Folkward was hard to write – not just because of the vow of silence but because of the sheer bloody mindedness and unflinching devotion it took to be a Dark Age monk. I simply don’t have that “worshipfulness” in me.



TQ:  Does The All Father Paradox touch on any social issues?

Ian:  The All Father Paradox touches on religion, the role of women, the collapse of civilization, military coups, the perils of migration, and ultimately ecology too. I wanted to write a novel that started in the Dark Ages, that held a cracked mirror to the age we are in. There are candles, flickering in the darkness, throughout. I hope they are illuminating in some small way.



TQ:  Which question about The All Father Paradox do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Ian:  In the novel, I explore the notion that “like ripples emanating from a single, solitary drop, the waves [of change] will roll though history”. I’d like someone to sit down and plot them, join the dots, find the parallels. And then ask – as per Romeo and Juliet (Act 2, scene 2): "What's in a name?”

And I’d answer, “everything, names have power and meaning, start looking for your clue there”



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from The All Father Paradox.

Ian:  Here is a quote that references Churchwarden Michaels and the cross on the cover, and the sheer Englishness of it all.

“Tea, he reflected, would be especially welcome on a day like today. Michaels had always thought it a shame to leave the cross standing out in the British weather. One thousand years of this, it was a miracle that it had survived at all, but there it was: a wealth of detail carved into fifteen feet of red sandstone, round at the base, rising to a square top with a cross head, each of the four sides carrying images of a horseman, dragons, serpents, and all kinds of gorgeous, interlaced patterns.”

And then this is a rejoinder to him, drawn from later in the novel, that speaks to what is unfurled:

“So, my little sparrow. You are back in my hall. Back in my Midgard. Your Christianity is being ripped from the past like so much rot. You have seen the dark winter outside, the worlds of the Álfar and the Jötnar. The realms of the dead, all joined by the great World Tree. Are you so certain of what went before and what is to follow?”



TQ:  What's next?

Ian:  There is a sequel, already underway. You might think it difficult to pen a follow up to Ragnarok, but the old Icelandic skalds managed it and I am following gin their footsteps. There is also a plan to “fill in the gaps” – the novel was always designed as a springboard, a way to create the Vikingverse. Now it exists, we have a myriad of stories to tell, some standalone, some crucial to the overarching plot. We’ll do that not just with novels, but with comics, games and who know what else!



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

The All Father Paradox
Vikingverse 1
Outland Entertainment, October 9, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 414 pages

What if an ancient god escaped his fate…and history was thrown to the wolves?

Churchwarden Michaels thought it was just a run-of-the-mill crazy old man who stood in the graveyard, hellbent on studying the thousand-year-old Viking memorial there. But when things start changing and outright disappearing, Michaels realizes there is more to this old man than meets the eye. Now, Michaels finds himself swept up in an ancient god’s quest to escape his destiny by reworking reality, putting history—and to Michaels’s dismay, Christianity itself—to the Viking sword. In this new Vikingverse, storied heroes of mankind emerge in new and brutal guises drawn from the sagas:

A young Norse prince plots to shatter empires and claim the heavens…
A scholar exiled to the frontier braves the dangers of the New World, only to find those “new worlds” are greater than he imagined…
A captured Jötunn plants the dreams of freedom during a worlds-spanning war…
A bold empress discovers there is a price for immortality, one her ancestors have come to collect…

With the timelines stretched to breaking point, it’s up to Churchwarden Michaels to save reality as we know it…

About Ian

Ian Sharpe was born in London, UK, and now lives in British Columbia, Canada. Having worked for the BBC, IMG, Atari and Electronic Arts, he is now CEO of a tech start up. As a child he discovered his love of books, sci-fi and sagas: devouring the works of Douglas Adams, J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and George MacDonald Fraser alongside Snorri Sturluson and Sigvat the Skald. He once won a prize at school for Outstanding Progress and chose a dictionary as his reward, secretly wishing it had been an Old Norse phrasebook. The All Father Paradox is his first novel.



Website  ~  Facebook  ~  Twitter @vikingverse

Twitter @IanStuartSharpe

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first fiction piece you remember writing?

Hester:  I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I used to write little magazines for my pets when I was 5 or 6, but the first piece of fiction I think was a story about a mouse named Squeaky and his adventures.



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Hester:  I started out as a pantser, but now that I have deadlines to meet I’ve become a plotter. I never thought that I would be able to write with an outline, but I’m finding that it gives me more freedom than I anticipated. Having a roadmap allows me to be much more creative because I don’t have to worry about what comes next or dead-ends; I can focus on the characters, the setting, and layering on historic details.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Hester:  Letting go of perfectionism and just getting the story out.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Hester:  The history and natural beauty of New England. It’s a place that lends itself to stories, and I want to tell them all.



TQ:  Describe The Witch of Willow Hall using only 5 words.

Hester:  Sisters, secrets, spirits, and romance.



TQ:  What inspired you to write The Witch of Willow Hall?

Hester:  I was doing a museum collections internship that took me to different historic houses around New England and there was one house in particular that captured my imagination. There was something melancholy but beautiful about the old house, and the rural setting was exquisite. As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to set a book there.



TQ:  Is The Witch of Willow Hall in the tradition of the Gothic novel? Do you have any favorite Gothic novels?

Hester:  Oh yes. I grew up on books like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and works by Austen, Dickens, Poe, and Hardy. Some of my favorite recent books are Gothic in tone and tradition, such as The Dress Lodger by Sherri Holman, The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell, and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for The Witch of Willow Hall?

Hester:  A lot of my research was by osmosis from my education in historical archaeology, as well as from working in the museum field. Handling and studying historic objects really helped me see the world through the eyes of someone living in the 19th century.

I also started an herb garden in my yard and learned a lot about herb magic and lore. Being able to smell, feel, and in some cases even taste the herbs was a great experience; not only did it help me write about witchcraft, now I have a lovely herb garden of my own!



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for The Witch of Willow Hall.

Hester:  The team at Harlequin did a beautiful job with the cover. It has a wonderful sense of movement and really captures the quiet magic of the main character, Lydia.



TQ:  In The Witch of Willow Hall who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Hester:  Since the story is told from Lydia’s point of view, she was probably the easiest to write as I was completely in her head. It was harder to write John because he keeps so much close to his chest.



TQ:  Does The Witch of Willow Hall touch on any social issues?

Hester:  The magic that Lydia employs is a direct reaction against the patriarchal society in which she lives. A lot has changed since 1821, but some of the situations in which she finds herself are all too familiar to women today.



TQ:  Which question about The Witch of Willow Hall do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Hester: 

-Where did the last name Montrose come from?

-My office window overlooks a street named Montrose and I thought it would be fitting for a Gothic family name. Later, when I was researching old Gothic novels, I learned that Sir Walter Scott wrote a book called A Legend of Montrose!



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from The Witch of Willow Hall.

Hester: 

    When he speaks again it’s low and even. Determined. “It does matter. I’ll be back for you, Lydia. I swear it.”

    And with that, he touches his heels to his horse, taking off at a canter down the road. I hardly dare to breathe as I stand there, watching his straight back and broad shoulders grow smaller and smaller until the trees swallow him up.

---

It’s peaceful, but in an awful, greedy sort of way. The night, the water, they want to take me. They want to swallow me up until I’m nothing more than a sigh, a forgotten secret. And I want to let them.



TQ:  What's next?

Hester:  My second book is another Gothic novel and is slated for release in 2019. It’s a gender-flipped Beauty and the Beast retelling set in the 1840s in coastal Maine, and features an agoraphobic widow and a reluctant minister.



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery!

The Witch of Willow Hall
Graydon House, October 2, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 368 pages

Two centuries after the Salem witch trials, there’s still one witch left in Massachusetts. But she doesn’t even know it.

Take this as a warning: if you are not able or willing to control yourself, it will not only be you who suffers the consequences, but those around you, as well.

New Oldbury, 1821

In the wake of a scandal, the Montrose family and their three daughters—Catherine, Lydia and Emeline—flee Boston for their new country home, Willow Hall.

The estate seems sleepy and idyllic. But a subtle menace creeps into the atmosphere, remnants of a dark history that call to Lydia, and to the youngest, Emeline.

All three daughters will be irrevocably changed by what follows, but none more than Lydia, who must draw on a power she never knew she possessed if she wants to protect those she loves. For Willow Hall’s secrets will rise, in the end…

About Hester

Photograph © Stephanie Patalano Photography

​When not writing and painting, Hester works in the museum field as a collections maintenance technician. This job has taken her from historic houses to fine art museums, where she has the privilege of cleaning and caring for collections that range from paintings by old masters, to ancient artifacts, to early American furniture. She has a master’s degree in historical archaeology, as well as a background in Medieval studies and art history. Hester lives outside of Boston with her husband.

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first piece you remember writing?

Sonia:  When I was nine, I wrote a story about a little girl my own age taking care of pigeons.



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Sonia:  Definitely a plotter! I spent three months plotting The Oyster Thief scene by scene.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Sonia:  The solitary aspect of it.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Sonia:  Coming across good writing that inspires me to do better.



TQ:  Describe The Oyster Thief using only 5 words.

Sonia:  Mermaid novel of a lifetime.



TQ:  Tell us something about The Oyster Thief that is not found in the book description.

Sonia:  As far as I know, it is the world's first fantasy featuring a detailed, real-feeling underwater culture of merpeople.



TQ:  What inspired you to write The Oyster Thief? What appeals to you about writing Fantasy?

Sonia:  The idea of an underwater world fell into my mind on January 1st, 2015. It was a freezing-cold morning in Canada, and I wished I could escape into tropical waters. But it was too expensive to book a last-minute flight, so I decided to escape in my mind. With a cup of tea in hand, I started inventing an underwater world. I like that fantasy allows us to escape without escaping. And science fantasy allows us to enter a world that exists (the ocean, for instance) but to which we may have more access through the imagination than real life. Parts of the ocean are less known than the moon!



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for The Oyster Thief?

Sonia:  I snorkeled, scuba-dived, swam with sharks, and pored over books and countless articles about the ocean.



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for The Oyster Thief.

Sonia:  The cover shows an artistic underwater scene, with a mermaid tail in the foreground.



TQ:  In The Oyster Thief who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Sonia:  Coralline, the protagonist, was easy to write in some ways because I could relate to her. Izar, the other protagonist, was a little harder to write because he is an engineer and inventor whose strong suit is physics - not my strong suit.



TQ:  Does The Oyster Thief touch on any social issues?

Sonia:  Absolutely! I find that literature can be an important tool for education and social change. The Oyster Thief touches on themes of ocean conservation.



TQ:  Which question about The Oyster Thief do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Sonia:  Hmm.... Why a mermaid novel? Because it would be amazing if mermaids existed!



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from The Oyster Thief.

Sonia:  “In order to heal others, you have to first heal yourself. . . . Success is an outcome not of imitation but of authenticity—of not abiding by the rules but changing them. The questions are more important than the answers.”


“Infidelity is not an act but a feeling.”



TQ:  What's next?

Sonia:  I am considering a sequel to The Oyster Thief.



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

Sonia:  Thank you!

The Oyster Thief
Pegasus Books, October 16, 2018
Hardcover and eBook, 304 pages

Two worlds collide when a mermaid and human man meet, plunging readers into a vast underwater realm brimming with adventure and intrigue.

"The mermaid’s scales were bronze, and they shimmered like hundreds of pennies arranged close together. Her immense blue-green eyes gave a look of fragility to her face, yet he found her eyes unsettling. She was leaning against a thirty-foot-long shark, which emerged from behind her and opened its mouth to reveal a great big cavern lined with hundreds of teeth—a black tunnel ready to swallow him."

Coralline is a mermaid who is engaged to the merman of her dreams. But when an oil spill wreaks havoc on her idyllic village life, her little brother falls gravely ill. Desperate to save him, she embarks on aquest to find a legendary elixir made of starlight.

Izar, a human man, is on the cusp of an invention that will enable him to mine the depths of the ocean. His discovery will soon make him the richest man on earth—while threatening merpeople with extinction. But then, suddenly, Izar finds himself transformed into a merman and caught in a web of betrayal and intrigue. Meeting Coralline in the ocean, he decides to join her on her quest for the elixir, hoping it will turn him human again.

The quest pushes Coralline and Izar together, even though their worlds are at odds. Their pasts threaten to tear them apart, while a growing attraction adds to the danger. Ultimately, each of them faces an impossible choice. Should Coralline leave her fiancé for a man who might betray her? And Izar has a dark secret of his own—one that could cause him to lose Coralline forever.

Magnificent and moving, set against a breathtaking ocean landscape, The Oyster Thief is a richly imagined odyssey destined to become a classic.

About Sonia

Sonia pushes the boundaries of imagination in her debut novel The Oyster Thief, an underwater odyssey. She is also the author of critically acclaimed Project Animal Farm, about the world’s food system. A skilled storyteller and speaker, she lives in Toronto, Canada.











Website  ~ Twitter @Sonia_Faruqi  ~  Facebook

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first fiction piece you remember writing?

Sherri:  Thank you very much for having me!

I didn’t write it, but my first imaginings were fan fiction of the Elfquest graphic novels by Wendy and Richard Pini. I loved the world of two moons and how each member of the tribe had their own storyline. I remember going to Balticon and waiting with a comic book (still in wrapper, of course) to get Wendy’s signature. Mumbling about how I liked her drawings or something equally banal when I was really about to faint from excitement.



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Sherri:  While writing Walking Through Fire I was more of a pantser because I had static images in my head. I arranged those in order, but then, in revision, I had to figure out WHY the dots connected in that order. It wasn’t a particularly efficient method, but sometimes being intuitive isn’t efficient. The trade-off is that you explore places and ideas that you might have missed otherwise.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Sherri:  Short Answer: Time.

Long Answer: I get my four kids off to three schools, walk the dog, teach morning yoga classes, and then have two hours before the older kids get home from school and the afternoon driving begins. That’s how I know I’m a writer. I would quit if I could! But, I can’t. I’ve tried. Instead, I have to schedule writing time and not wait for some muse to show up. Slow and Steady.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Sherri:  Most recently I had the opportunity to attend a two-week writing seminar called Taos Toolbox in New Mexico led by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress. It was an intense time of critiquing and writing and meeting guest lecturers like Carrie Vaughn and this guy you might have heard of: George R. R. Martin. The two weeks were incredible. I’d never been away from my family that long, but I was so happy immersed in reading and writing and meeting the other writers participating in the seminar.



TQ:  Describe Walking Through Fire using only 5 words.

Sherri:  Mother and son battle gods.



TQ:  Tell us something about Walking Through Fire that is not found in the book description.

Sherri:  The opening scene was originally a homestead near Harper’s Ferry, WV being attacked by a two-headed moose. My beta readers had so many questions that I had to keep backing up to explain how we’d gotten to that point.



TQ:  What inspired you to write Walking Through Fire? What appeals to you about writing Dystopian fantasy?

Sherri:  I think post-apocalyptic and dystopian fantasy are both influenced by a combination of fear and hope. At least, that’s how it is for me. I see trends in current society and I need to chase them down to the worst-case scenario. But, I firmly believe there are always heroes who run TOWARD the fire while everyone else is running away. That feels true to me and is something I want to explore.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for Walking Through Fire?

Sherri:  I taught Intro. to World Mythology at University of Maryland years ago. I got to revisit the stories of Mesopotamia as I decided how to actualize each deity. One of the fun things about Mesopotamian myth is that there are so many variations in the stories, changes over time conflating with which city-state was in power, thus bringing their deity to power.

Then, for my magic system, I took the Sumerian concept of etemmu or etemu (Akkadian), which is the animating spirit and changed it to be the primal spiritual energy that gods can easily manipulate and humans have the ability, with work, to manipulate in individual ways.



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for Walking Through Fire.

Sherri:  Jeff Chapman is the amazing artist who designed the cover from an early scene in the novel. Rachel and Adam are standing in a very recognizable part of Baltimore – an intersection I’ve driven a thousand times – and he even put a little hint in the flames that lick the sky.



TQ:  In Walking Through Fire who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Sherri:  An, the Sumerian sky god, was so much fun to write. He’s a fan of the Fab Four and sprinkles quotes from The Beatles into his conversations. As one of the oldest gods, he historically lost his power to the younger gods. So, he came into my novel with a chip already on his shoulder and a need to prove he’s still relevant even while he claims that he wants to stay out the upcoming war.

Rachel was the hardest. She’s not a “chosen one.” Instead, she’s a suburban mom with a degree in art history who is faced with an unimaginable unnatural disaster. Rachel experiences anxiety and doesn’t always know what to do, but she leads with her heart and she’s loyal to her found family. She worries too much – but what mother doesn’t? I hope that readers appreciate her vulnerability and don’t see it as weakness. Ha ha, maybe that’s my anxiety speaking.



TQ:  Does Walking Through Fire touch on any social issues?

Sherri:  I wanted to read about a mother, not a superhero. I wanted to read about someone who doesn’t already have a network of friends and, instead, has to find her tribe. Before N. K. Jemison’s Broken Earth series I hadn’t seen moms that I could relate to in speculative fiction. They were killed off to give the husband or the children a revenge motivation to start a quest. They were the authority figure who had to be defied for the other characters to have agency. They were the ones left behind to guard hearth and home so the heroes could leave. And mothers who did have agency, like Evelyn in the Divergent series, is the antagonist so that the characters can have moral agency.

This is a social issue because of today’s demand for mothers to sacrifice themselves, their art, their own desires, and sometimes their own bodies for their children. #MothersArePeopleToo. That can be our hashtag. Talking to fellow moms during play groups, we want to have our own books. Where we can love our children and still get to go on adventures without being judged. It feels like today’s culture is incredibly demanding and judgmental. A mother is judged if she goes to work, she’s judged if she stays home. She’s called a helicopter parent or a free-range parent. She’s supposed to read about Tiger moms and French moms and EVERY kind of parenting, except, maybe, there are a lot of different ways to parent your kids, with kindness and human decency being top of the list.



TQ:  Which question about Walking Through Fire do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Sherri:  What is your favorite animal from the novel? Answer: My favorite animal is actually in the second novel, which might be a tease, but if you’d like to find YOUR Misbegotten pet, I wrote a fun quiz: https://tasteofsherri.wordpress.com/2018/08/14/critter-quiz-for-walking-through-fire/



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from Walking Through Fire.

Sherri:

“Behind him she saw the sky rip open. A flaming meteor fell and an orange glow lit the horizon. The world was on fire.”



TQ:  What's next?

Sherri:  I’ll be signing books and speaking on two panels at the Baltimore Book Festival September 29-30th and I’ll be reading an excerpt of Walking Through Fire at Charm City Spec’s meeting at Bird in Hand bookstore in Baltimore on Halloween (October 31st).



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

Sherri:  Thank you for having me!

Walking Through Fire
A Misbegotten Novel 1
Talos, September 4, 2018
Trade Paperback and eBook, 400 pages

For fans of American Gods, a dark, humorous, and richly written, dystopian fantasy about the unbreakable bonds of family and the undying strength of a mother's love.

The end of the world begins as literal fire rains down from the heavens. Ancient gods are released from their prison, eager to reestablish their long-lost power. But Rachel Deneuve has bigger, more contemporary concerns than a divine war.

Her son Adam is in the middle of a fight against leukemia, and Rachel is determined to keep focused on that battle. But when humans begin picking sides and the fighting escalates, their home in Baltimore becomes a war zone, one she can’t ignore.

Desperate to stay away from the carnage—as well as the germ-ridden refugee center—Rachel and Adam flee to their remote mountain cottage, only to find their refuge marred by mutated, grotesque plants and animals. Eventually, the cancerous cells in Adam's body begin evolving as well, threatening his life and forcing Rachel to venture back into the eye of the storm. Left with no other choice but to sacrifice her own freedom for her son's safety, she must become an unwilling warrior in a battle unlike anything seen in millennia, or lose everything she holds dear.

About Sherri

Sherri Cook Woosley, a Baltimore native, is an active member of the Baltimore Science Fiction Circle, and was a winner of their amateur writing contest in 2014. Her short stories can be found in Abyss & Apex, Pantheon Magazine, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Walking Through Fire is her debut novel. In addition to writing, she teaches yoga so other people can balance their lives while she juggles four kids, a dog, rabbit, and various other animals. She lives in Maryland with her family.

Website  ~  Twitter @SherriWoosley

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first piece you remember writing?

Signe:  I got my first diary in second grade. When I think back on my earliest writing, this is what comes to mind, because it contains the purest seed of my relationship with writing. "Dear Diary..." I wrote to my diary as if it were my truest friend. My relationship with writing has become more complex as I've aged because of the various forms in which I work with writing -- memoir, poetry, fiction. But at the heart of it, has anything really changed at all? Writing is still my truest friend. I turn to it, I confide in it, I create with it. Every day it saves me.



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Signe:  Hybrid! In historical fiction the timeline, historical people and historical events create the foundation of the plot. The pantser part comes in having to reimagine the motivations and details.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Signe:  Two things - Drowning out the voice of my inner critic and keeping my mind focused on the task at hand.



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Signe:  Ancient Celtic culture, a reverence for the natural world, other writers of all genres who have a deftness to their craft, the desire to know.



TQ:  Describe The Lost Queen using only 5 words.

Signe:  Family, love, belief, war, destiny.



TQ:  Tell us something about The Lost Queen that is not found in the book description.

Signe:  In this book you will read about delicious early medieval food and adorable white cows.



TQ:  What inspired you to write The Lost Queen? What appeals to you about writing a historical fiction?

Signe:  I was inspired to write The Lost Queen when I learned who Languoreth was and the truly epic events in history she lived through. Historical fiction is a powerful way to resurrect people from our past who deserve to be remembered.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for The Lost Queen?

Signe:  What sort of research... tons, and never-ending! I looked at -- and continue to look at, being that this is the first in a trilogy -- hagiographies of saints, ancient Welsh triads, scholarly papers on everything from the Arthurian legends to archeological studies of pollen in early medieval Ireland and Britain, books on ancient Celtic society, on gender roles and early medieval women in the Celtic world, ancient poetry, ancient law. When I visit Scotland, I travel to hillforts and explore with Ordinance Survey maps to try and find possible ruin locations, I visit museums, lots of libraries, and talk to local people in an effort to uncover folk memory of various locations. It's like being a really geeky detective, but with sturdy hiking boots and lots of bug spray.



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for The Lost Queen.

Signe:  The cover contains symbolism central to the book in both the animal depicted and the brooch.



TQ:  In The Lost Queen who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Signe:  Languoreth was the easiest character to write - her voice just seemed to come very effortlessly. The hardest character to write was Mungo. He is the patron saint of Glasgow, but it's difficult to reconcile the tone of his hagiography (i.e. that of miracle worker and persecuted, saintly saint!) with the actions detailed within that very same account. When you begin to consider how Mungo's historical actions would have effected those he directly impacted, those on the other side of the story, it becomes nearly impossible to see him as a saint.



TQ:  Which question about The Lost Queen do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Signe:  Question: What percentage of your day do you spend wishing you could dress in tailor-made early medieval dresses and ride white horses?

Answer: 100%



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from The Lost Queen.

Signe:

“War is not about victory. War is about survival.”


"This was the time before we were seen, when none knew of our presence save the spirits of the wood in their sunset kingdom."


“In times such as these, when the people need a hero, so are such heroes
made.”



TQ:  If you could go back in time and visit one of the 6 Celtic nations (Brittany, Scotland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Cornwall or Wales) where would you go and when?

Signe:  Yes, please. Oh, just one? OK, fine. I would visit Scotland, of course. I would give anything to be able to step inside Languoreth and Lailoken's real childhood home, the timber hall I believe lies buried or lost beneath the ruins of a much later medieval castle in Chatelherault Country Park in Hamilton.



TQ:  What's next?

Signe:  Book Two of The Lost Queen Trilogy! The book opens right where The Lost Queen leaves off, right in the middle of the action. It's exhilarating and has been incredible so far to write. The world of The Lost Queen feels to me as if it just explodes in Book Two into this new and even fuller experience of Languoreth's story, told from a few carefully chosen view points. I'm following characters I love as each of them embarks on their own transformative "hero's" journey. I've got people running all over various parts of Scotland (the site research has been nuts for Book Two), and there's this over-arching pressure pressing down upon all these people due to the historical events that were taking place. The voices are coming through so strongly. I can't wait to get home from book tour and get back to it!



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

Signe:  It's been a pleasure. I hope to hear from readers who take on the challenge and have a chance to read the book!

The Lost Queen
The Lost Queen 1
Touchstone, September 4, 2018
Hardcover and eBook, 544 pages

Compared to Outlander and The Mists of Avalon, this thrilling first novel of a debut trilogy reveals the untold story of Languoreth—a forgotten queen of sixth-century Scotland—twin sister of the man who inspired the legend of Merlin.

I write because I have seen the darkness that will come. Already there are those who seek to tell a new history...

In a land of mountains and mist, tradition and superstition, Languoreth and her brother Lailoken are raised in the Old Way of their ancestors. But in Scotland, a new religion is rising, one that brings disruption, bloodshed, and riot. And even as her family faces the burgeoning forces of Christianity, the Anglo-Saxons, bent on colonization, are encroaching from the east. When conflict brings the hero Emrys Pendragon to her father’s door, Languoreth finds love with one of his warriors. Her deep connection to Maelgwn is forged by enchantment, but she is promised in marriage to Rhydderch, son of a Christian king. As Languoreth is catapulted into a world of violence and political intrigue, she must learn to adapt. Together with her brother—a warrior and druid known to history as Myrddin—Languoreth must assume her duty to fight for the preservation of the Old Way and the survival of her kingdom, or risk the loss of them both forever.

Based on new scholarship, this tale of bravery and conflicted love brings a lost queen back to life—rescuing her from obscurity, and reaffirming her place at the center of one of the most enduring legends of all time.

About Signe

Photo by Tiffany Mizzell Photography ©

Signe Pike is the author of the travel memoir Faery Tale and has researched and written about Celtic history and folklore for more than a decade. A former book editor, she lives in Charleston, South Carolina where she writes full time. Visit her at SignePike.com.











Twitter @ SignePike  ~  Facebook

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first fiction piece you remember writing?

Drew:  Hmmm. The key to that question really is 'remember', isn't it? I've been writing fiction since well before I could clearly tell you what I was writing: I remember making up stories as a little kid - usually with my cousins or my brother, sometimes alone - and thinking we'd written the next great American novel (usually involving cyborgs or zombies, and topping out at all of five pages). I finished my first full-length novel at twelve or so, so we'll go ahead and count that as the first real 'piece', I suppose. (Don't get me wrong, it was terrible: a mishmash of stolen ideas and, just, horrid writing, but you didn't ask 'what was the first good piece of fiction you remember!').



TQ:  Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?

Drew:  Oh, absolutely a pantser, no question. (Though I have to admit, that phrasing makes me feel like a British boarding school villain : 'watch out for Geordie Wilkins; he's a pantser, he is!’) I sometimes get scattered lines of dialog, impressions of an upcoming character, or brief images of scenes yet to come - and I'll dutifully jot them down, and sometimes use them, and sometimes forget them entirely once I've gone haring off in another direction - but ninety-seven percent of my writing is done in chronological order, start to finish, with nothing but the preceding sentence to go off of. My absolute favorite thing about writing (and make no mistake - my first audience is always myself; I write for me, I just happen to be lucky enough to get paid to do so!) is to be surprised by something - a line of dialog I wouldn’t have thought a character would have said, a realization that comes to me at the same time it comes to the characters, even just a grace note in a description - and that’s much harder to achieve if I already know what’s going to happen!



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

Drew:  Endings. Definitely endings. Part of that’s building off of the last question - once I’m past the climax and into the denouement, I pretty much know how things need to wrap up, and that’s just… not as interesting for me to write - but I also mean it much more literally, as in I find it insanely difficult to find the last sentence, or even scene: that place where a story should end, to look back and yet forward into everything all at once. (Honestly, I think part of the reason I write books in series is so that I can put off that final moment, where it’s all done, for as long as possible!)



TQ:  What has influenced / influences your writing?

Drew:  Outside of treacly-but-necessary responses like ‘my friends and family’ - in terms of style, it’s hard to get past Stephen King, honestly. The man can sketch a character in just a few lines, and yet you know them inside out; he can also nail a character’s interior voice in a way that very few can match.



TQ:  You are a bookseller. What is it like for you to see your own novel on bookstore shelves?

Drew:  Insanely surreal - I say that, and I’ve (redacted by Drew’s assistant, because he’s an idiot who probably shouldn’t be allowed to do any more interviews)! I mentioned Stephen King above - we’re a small bookstore, which means we’ve only got one section for speculative fiction, with sci-fi and horror and fantasy all mixed in together, which means MY book is in the same section as Stephen King! My book! Same section! I honestly still don’t quite believe it!



TQ:  Describe The Stars Now Unclaimed using only 5 words.

Drew:  ‘Grief Can Be Used Bravely’. If you want something a little more descriptive and less thematic: ‘Space Opera, Quips, More Quips’.



TQ:  Tell us something about The Stars Now Unclaimed that is not found in the book description.

Drew:  The entire last two acts are climax! Seriously, it’s all one big, chaotic, sound-barrier-breaking rush, because I have no impulse control, and nobody told me not to!



TQ:  What inspired you to write The Stars Now Unclaimed? What appeals to you about writing Science Fiction and in particular a Space Opera?

Drew:  Those questions are linked, actually (well done!). Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy is fun for me partially because I’m not beholden to history or social mores or little things like ‘physics’ or ‘reality’ if I don’t want to be. I can sort of pick and choose what I want to carry over, and what I want to leave behind. Plus, my writing process - on the creative side, in terms of ‘where do I begin, what is this story’, rather than the procedural ‘the actual writing’ side - usually starts with world-building: ‘how is this world different from our own?’ Which, of course, inherently means I’m not going to be writing contemporary fiction.

So with that question in mind: I started Stars because I wanted to write a sort of post-apocalyptic space opera, to mash up those two genres, mainly to give myself as broad a canvas as possible - it meant I could have dogfights in space in one scene, and desperate one-on-one scrabbles in blasted-out cityscapes the next. So I asked the question ‘how could that sort of universe come about’, came up with a very specific type of apocalypse, which led me back to the creation of the nuclear bomb (where my thoughts always tend when the apocalypse comes up) and the idea that men did this thing: men set it loose. Whether they meant to or not. And then I had myself a narrative.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for The Stars Now Unclaimed?

Drew:  Very little! That’s part of the fun of writing science fiction! You look up very specific things online when you need it - physics or biology or astronomy - and the rest of it, you can just make up, because it’s your universe, and you don’t have to be beholden to the same rules as this one!



TQ:  Please tell us about the cover for The Stars Now Unclaimed.

Drew:  I was privileged enough to work very closely with my editor, Devi Pillai, and Tor’s in-house art director, Peter Lutjen, who did the cover (or at least, they were kind enough to at least entertain my constant stream of suggestions: ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’). We wanted to get across that very bifurcated idea of this universe, that it was this divided place where you could have spaceships and high technology one moment, and then abandoned, pre-industrial societies on the very next page, and I think Peter nailed it! (Devi was the one who was insistent on the big, floating type, though. Which is fair: the big, floating type is awesome!)



TQ:  In The Stars Now Unclaimed who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?

Drew:  Jane (the protagonist), just because we’re in her mind, seeing things from her view - if I hadn’t been able to find her voice, and quickly, there wouldn’t have been a novel. She snapped into place pretty much from the first page, thankfully; was just there, waiting for me, tapping her foot impatiently like I was overdue (and Jane’s not someone you want pissed at you - even a little!). The hardest was probably the Preacher, just because - again, coming at that character from Jane’s perspective, she’s the hardest for Jane to read, which made her harder for me to pin down, and also because, as an advanced machine intelligence, her way of thinking needed to feel a little alien to the reader.



TQ:  Does The Stars Now Unclaimed touch on any social issues?

Drew:  I would say ‘themes’ rather than specific issues: since I was writing sci-fi, I allowed myself to be a little utopian (even in a sometimes post-apocalyptic setting) with the notion that certain ugly current social impulses like racism, misogyny, and homophobia were mostly-forgotten relics of the distant past. Thematically, though, I was say the thrust of not just Stars but the entire Universe After series is the idea that we cannot pass our own sins on to our children - which is exactly how we need to wipe out those ugly impulses I just mentioned. So long as each generation is just a little better than the next, we will get there eventually.



TQ:  Which question about The Stars Now Unclaimed do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!

Drew:  Honestly, this is only like my third interview, so I haven’t had time to get used to the idea that there are questions I’ve already heard too much! I’d say my thinking is more ‘I’m horrified someone’s going to ask me a question I absolutely cannot answer’ - sort of like this one! Hooray, milestone!



TQ:  Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from The Stars Now Unclaimed.

Drew:

‘It hovered above the burning town, almost drawn even against the bulk of the orbital gun, as if it were a mirror image of the flaming settlement below—broken towers and shattered structures on both craft and township, fires flickering in the interior of buildings and bulkheads both, the dreadnaught still shedding metal like a snake molting its skin.’ (I just like the description here, and I’m usually not wild about my own descriptive writing.)


“Well I don’t know, but it’s the thought that counts! They’re art students, you know how hard it is to find a virgin in an art school?” (That one just makes me crack up; apologies to my friends - and your various readers - who are art students... but I bet very few of them are virgins.)


“But you could have been.” (I realize that one means literally nothing without context, but you did ask me for my favorite lines, and that one absolutely slays me, every time I re-read Stars on an editing pass - it’s a knife to the heart, another one of those lines that surprised me, came out of nowhere.)



TQ:  What's next?

Drew:  The rest of the series, of course! I don’t think I’m allowed to give out pertinent information yet, not even titles (though I’ve got them in my back pocket!), so I’ll just say this: exploring the relationship between Jane and Esa - in ways that I think, or at least I hope, will surprise the reader - is definitely the focus of the next novel.



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

The Stars Now Unclaimed
The Universe After 1
Tor Books, August 21, 2018
Hardcover and eBook, 448 pages

Drew Williams's The Stars Now Unclaimed is a fun, adventure-filled space opera set in a far-future galaxy.

Jane Kamali is an agent for the Justified. Her mission: to recruit children with miraculous gifts in the hope that they might prevent the Pulse from once again sending countless worlds back to the dark ages.

Hot on her trail is the Pax--a collection of fascist zealots who believe they are the rightful rulers of the galaxy and who remain untouched by the Pulse.

Now Jane, a handful of comrades from her past, and a telekinetic girl called Esa must fight their way through a galaxy full of dangerous conflicts, remnants of ancient technology, and other hidden dangers.

And that's just the beginning . . .

About Drew

Photo by Daniel Barnacastle

Drew Williams has been a bookseller in Birmingham, Alabama since he was sixteen years old, when he got the job because he came in looking for work on a day when someone else had just quit. Outside of arguing with his coworkers about whether Moby Dick is brilliant (nope) or terrible (that one), his favorite part of the job is discovering new authors and sharing them with his customers.Drew is the author of The Universe After series, including The Stars Now Unclaimed.





Twitter @DrewWilliamsIRL