JANUARY 2017 READING

Yesterday I posted about my writing accomplishments in January. Today’s post is about my reading.

I set myself several reading challenges each year, and I’ll write about this year’s challenges in an upcoming post. (I also need to write up a post about how I did with my reading challenges for 2016, but first I have to find the word doc in which I crunched all those numbers…) For now, here’s a look at the two I do every year, and how I’m progressing:

BOOKS

I set myself an annual goal over on Goodreads of 100 books. I track books the same way GR does, so self-published short stories in ebook format count, as do magazines if I read the entire issue and not just a story or two. January’s books read were:

1. Locke and Key Vol 1.: Welcome To Lovecraft, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. I’ve been meaning to read this series for a while, and finally got around to it because my nephew Brandon forced it into my hands during a December visit. I’m glad he did. Really enjoyed the set-up, and am looking forward to reading the rest of the series soon.
2. Battle Hill Bolero (Bone Street Rhumba #3) by Daniel Jose Older.  I love urban fantasy. If you love urban fantasy, and you’re not reading Older’s NYC-set story of ghosts, magic, and political machinations … well, why not? This third book closes out the Rhumba series, but I’m sure Older isn’t done with these characters or this world. And his writing has a musicality to it I can’t remember feeling with anything else I’ve read.
3. Lily, by Michael Thomas Ford, with illustrations by Staven Andersen.  Classic fairy-tale tropes (Baba Yaga, hidden villages, a girl with a power she doesn’t understand, adults who try to suppress that power) come together in a modern setting. Some types of stories stay true no matter when they’re set, and Ford does a great job of balancing the fantastical with modern realities. And Andersen’s illustrations are disturbing and beautiful at the same time.
4. Heaps of Pearls by Seanan McGuire. McGuire publishes a lot of stand-alone short stories from her various fictional series worlds on her website and her Patreon page. This one details how two secondary characters from the October Daye series, Patrick and Dianda, first met. It takes place prior to book one of the series but is probably best read after book 9. And what a meet-cute it is.
5. Lightspeed Magazine #80 (January, 2017), edited by John Joseph Adams. I’m the proofreader for the Kindle ebook edition of Lightspeed, so it’s the one magazine I read front-to-back every month. The eight stories and one novella in each issue also account for 9 of the short stories I read every month. (See below for brief thoughts on those.)
6. Lumberjanes Volume 5: Band Together, by Shannon Waters, Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Brooke Allen and Carolyn Nowak.  My good friends Kay Holt and Bart Leib introduced me to the Lumberjanes collected volumes on a visit to Boston last year, and I’ve eagerly awaited each new volume (since I don’t buy individual monthly comics anymore for a variety of reasons). I love the characters, the mystery, and the pacing. I have to admit that the change to the art in the run of issues collected here didn’t quite work for me: some of the characters barely looked like themselves for me. The art’s not bad, it just took some getting used to. But the story is a lot of fun.
7. In Sea-Salt Tears by Seanan McGuire. Another short story in McGuire’s October Daye universe, this time telling a tale of romance and secrets involving everyone’s favorite sea-witch, The Luideag. I know, I know: “romance” and “the Luideag” are not words one expects to hear in the same sentence. Best read after book five of the October Daye series.
8. Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day by Seanan McGuire. A new novella from McGuire that doesn’t seem to connect to any of her other existing series (although I can see it connecting to her novel Sparrow Hill Road in some ways). There’s some great world-building around a main character whose voice clicked with me right away, making me want to know more about her and the characters around her. A very satisfying “done in one” story.

So: eight books read in January, and Goodreads tells me that means I’m “on track” for my yearly goal.

SHORT STORIES

I also set myself a goal each year of reading 365 short stories: 1 per day, theoretically, although it doesn’t always work out quite that way. (366 in leap years, of course)

I didn’t quite hit the “one per day” goal in January, but here’s what I did read and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too:

The first 9 stories come from the January 2017 issue of Lightspeed Magazine. The first 8 are available to read for free on the magazine’s website, while the 9th story is only available as part of the ebook edition.

1. Rate of Change by James S.A. Corey. A look at a future where brain/spinal transplants have become the norm — how does that affect our basic humanity.
2. The Whole Crew Hates Me by Adam-Troy Castro. First person narrative about why the title of the story may be true. As soon as I finished reading it, I thought “man, this would make a fantastic acting monologue!” Great, is-he-paranoid-or-not voice.
3. Tracker by Mary Rosenblum. Intriguing future (?) world where seeming gods control the weather, population, etc., and the title character is trapped in the middle of a power struggle.
4. Nine-Tenths of the Law by Molly Tanzer. What happens when your husband is replaced by an alien intelligence just as you’re getting ready to divorce him. There’s a bit of comedy and tragedy mixed together here.
5. Seven Salt Tears by Kat Howard. Another moving, very personal story from Howard, this one about how childhood stories involving the ocean impact a woman’s life.
6. Daddy Long-Legs of the Evening by Jeffrey Ford. I read this one years ago, was completely creeped out by it, and am happy to say the reread was just as creepy. Urban legend about a boy whose brain is infested by a spider.
7. The West Topeka Triangle by Jeremiah Tolbert. This one really brought back middle school memories, even though I didn’t grow up anywhere near Kansas nor in any urban setting. I love that lingering question as to whether anything supernatural is really happening, a tone Tolbert expertly keeps up throughout the story.
8. Nine by Kima Jones. Fantasy trappings on a real-world setting: Tanner, Jessie and Flo run a motel for blacks moving west after the Civil War, but even the three proprietors are running from something that seems destined to catch up with them. Heart-breaking and full of love at the same time.
9. Awakening by Judith Berman. Aleya wakes in a dungeon full of corpses, unsure how she got there. This story takes more twists than a D&D campaign, and each one is layered brilliantly onto the previous. It kept me guessing throughout as to how it would end.
10. Heaps of Pearls by Seanan McGuire. (self-pubbed on the author’s website). As mentioned above, a really cute story about how Patrick and Dianda met. It has the feel of a screwball rom-com.
11. Stage of Fools by Seanan McGuire. (self-pubbed on the author’s Patreon page) A story of Tybalt, the King of Cats, during his days in London, long before Toby Daye was even born. The first of three connected stories about how Tybalt re-opened his court after a long period of being alone.
12. The Voice of Lions by Seanan McGuire (self-pubbed on the author’s Patreon page) The second connected story about Tybalt reopening his court in London, with some interesting political intrigue thrown in.
13. Lunching with the Sphinxes by Richard Bowes. (from Grendelsong magazine, issue #2). A story set in Bowes’ Big Arena (NYC) future-history. Political intrigue from the perspective of a person who never thought she’d be a politician. I’d not read this when it first came out, but it seems a bit prescient in light of recent political events here in the US.
14. Singing Wings by Keffy R.M. Kehrli. (from Fireside magazine #27). Aduaa is about to go through her species’ natural transformation, which means saying goodbye to those she’ll no longer be able to interact with. Kehrli really sucker-punches you with a depth of emotion we all recognize when life forces us to move on.
15. Bones at the Door by John Wiswell (from Fireside magazine #27). Mandy starts discovering animal bones left at her front door, which leads to life changes she never could have expected. Eerie and disturbing.
16. The Closest Thing To Animals by Sofia Samatar (from Fireside magazine #27). The narrator discloses a history ofher failing relationships in a city closed off from the rest of the world due to a plague that doesn’t kill. Great world-building, interesting story structure.
17. The Acts of Hares by Seanan McGuire (self-pubbed on the author’s Patreon page). The third of the connected Tybalt stories, this one about how he finally finds that last reason to re-open his court to other cats, putting him further on the road to being the Tybalt we know in the current Toby Daye books.
18. Beks and the Second Note by Bruce Arthurs. (from the December 2016 issue of Alfred Hitchcock magazine). Appearances are deceiving and not every case is as simple as it seems, as Detective Beks discovers investing a case of a good gun-carrying citizen killing a bank robber.
19. Whatever It Takes by Lawrence Block (from the December 2016 issue of Alfred Hitchcock magazine)  An old, previously-unpublished Block tale of a group of cops trying to get a man to turn informant against a big time, almost-untouchable gangster, and the lengths to which they’ll go. The dialogue-heavy story structure makes it an even more fun read.
20. Through This House by Seanan McGuire (from the anthology Home Improvement: Undead Edition). Another story set in McGuire’s Toby Daye universe, but in modern times compared to the others read this month. Toby, May, Quentin and Danny must figure out how to reopen the sealed fairie Knowe of Goldengreen before it kills them. It’sbit of a haunted house adventure, with all the creeping shadows and jump-scares one would expect.
21. In Sea-Salt Tears by Seanan McGuire (self-pubbed on the author’s website). As mentioned above, this one is set prior to the first novel of the Toby Daye series and doesn’t involve Toby herself. But it’s a great love story, slowly and carefully told.

So: 21 stories read in January, which means I’m 10 stories behind on my “read 365 stories this year” goal. But I suspect I’ll be catching up soon. One of my problems is I keep buying short story anthologies and then setting them aside for when I have time to read “the whole thing.” Which rarely seems to happen. So I’m making a sub-challenge for myself that each time I buy a new anthology, I will read at least one story the day I buy it. That might help with this a bit.

Clearly, between books and stories this has been a Seanan McGuire heavy month. She is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve been working towards finally reading all of the stories connected to her main novel series. So there’ll be another batch of McGuire reviews in the wrap-up post for February’s reading as well.

LINDA POITEVIN "SINS OF THE LOST" - Interview

It’s always a pleasure to welcome Linda Poitevin back to the site to talk about her latest. This time out, we’re discussing SINS OF THE LOST, the third book in her four-part series The Grigori Legacy. Linda is also the author of the contemporary romance GWYNNETH EVER AFTER. You can read all of my previous interviews with Linda, and get a sense of how The Grigori Legacy series has developed, by clicking HERE.

ANTHONY: SINS OF THE LOST, book three of The Grigori Legacy, comes out this month. Now that you’re several books into the series, what roadblocks or character moments did you hit while writing the new book that caught you by surprise in comparison to the earlier books?

LINDA:  I was actually surprised at how difficult the entire book was to write, to be honest…probably because I had to do so many awful things to my characters. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from the trauma, lol!

ANTHONY: There’s been a bit of a gap from the publication of book two, SINS OF THE SON, to book three. You published GWYNNETH EVER AFTER, a stand-alone romance, in between.  What caused the long break from TGL?

LINDA: There were a number of reasons for the gap: (1) it took a while to settle on a contract with my publisher; (2) when I’m not under a fixed deadline, I tend to drag my heels on writing; (3) this really was a tough story to write; and (4) I met with a dog-walking accident (hint: one should not have the leash of a 127-pound dog wrapped around an index finger) that put me out of commission for almost a month with a bad sprain.

ANTHONY: OUCH! How much time has passed for the characters, and where do we find them at the start of the new book? (And can you answer this question without major spoilers, haha?)

LINDA: Very little time passes between the books; Sins of the Lost picks up a scant two weeks after Sins of the Son left off. Alex and Seth are back in Toronto, struggling to make a go of their fledgling relationship in the aftermath of the events in Vancouver, and Alex is just returning to her job.

ANTHONY: Assuming we will be spending plenty of time with Alex, Aramael, Seth, Lucifer and the rest … are there any new characters we should be excited for / wary of?

LINDA: One very important new character is hinted at in Sins of the Lost, but you won’t actually get to meet her until the fourth and final book. Apart from that, there’s a return of an old enemy and more of the Archangel Michael…who really is one of my favorites. 

The Grigori Legacy, Book Three

ANTHONY: Color me intrigued! SINS OF THE LOST is only out in e-book format, right? Why the change from the print versions we got for books one and two?

LINDA: Sins of the Lost is what my publisher is calling “digital first” — which essentially means that there’s a possibility of print, but no guarantee (it will depend on sales figures). The change occurred because sales on book 2 slumped a little, as second books often do, apparently. But, while that slump generally spells death for a series, my publisher (and my amazing editor) really likes the series and wanted to give it another chance. Talk about a vote of confidence! 

ANTHONY: That is a great vote of confidence. Please thank the publisher for giving it another go. So many fun urban fantasy series do seem to fail with book two. Now, the cover art is also a bit different. It seems that Alexandra Jarvis is not on the cover for the first time. Does this bode unwell for our heroine?

LINDA: LOL…Alex is safe, Anthony, I promise. Horribly tortured, perhaps, but safe. The change in art was made because of the switch to digital-first. Too much detail doesn’t show up well on the widgets you see online, so we needed to simplify the design a bit. We also wanted to place more emphasis on the angel aspect of the story.

ANTHONY: Which makes sense, given the events of the book.  And not that I’m rushing you, but what will book four be called and when will it be done? No, like, seriously. When? 

LINDA: This book is going much faster than the last one, lol. It’s tentatively entitled Sins of the Warrior (expect a lot more Michael in this one), and I plan to have the first draft done by the end of March. No word yet on publication, however…sorry! 

ANTHONY: Well, you know, if you need a beta-reader for it, you have my email address.   Instead of my usual “what’s your favorite book” question, which I think you’ve answered several times, tell us what your resource on Angels and their mythology has been most helpful/influential on you in creating the Grigori series.

LINDA: Google was my best friend when it came to research for this series. Because I knew I would be twisting angel mythology to fit with my own nefarious purposes, I didn’t need accuracy as much as I did inspiration—and the Internet is rifewith sources for that. I read extensively on Bible study, Catholic, and new age sites, taking bits and pieces from all over in order to construct my own world for the series. The diversity in the takes on angel lore was utterly fascinating and made for great fodder…and I barely even scratched the surface of what’s out there.

J.M. LOFFICIER - Author

I’ve been a fan of publishers J.M. and Randy Lofficier’s writing for decades now, and I was honored in 2013 to become one of the authors published by Black Coat Press, their small press focused on new and reprinted adventures of classic French pulp magazine characters such as Harry Dickson, Judex, Rouletabille, the Black Coats and more.  I conducted this interview with J.M., about Black Coats’ history and mission, months ago and owe him an apology for how long it’s taken to post this.  Read along as we discuss French pulp characters, Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton concept, and the overlap between the two, among other subjects:

ANTHONY: How long has Black Coat Press been in existence, and where does the company name come from? What was the company’s first published title?

JM: We started Black Coat Press in the Summer of 2003, just in time to be able to release our first book — Arnould Galopin’s DOCTOR OMEGA — for the San Diego Comicon of that year. The name “Black Coat” was taken from Paul Féval’s ground-breaking criminal saga which we intended to translate and publish at some point. I’m pleased to say that, thanks to Brian Stableford’s industriousness, we were able to release all seven volumes (plus a few related titles). The last one was released in 2011, so it did take about eight years!

ANTHONY: Where did you love for the pulps in general, and French pulps in particular, start?

JM: Like most of us, during my childhood and teen years. There is one major difference, however, which is that most English-language “classics” were readily available to me in the same paperback imprints as their French counterparts. For example, the Livre de poche imprint released editions of Holmes and Lupin, Fantomas and the Saint, Poirot and Rouletabille. Marabout published the Black Coats and Rocambole next to the Scarlet Pimpernel, Doc Savage next to Bob Morane. So the “universe” of pulp literature to which I had access was vastly greater than the ones accessible in the US or the UK.

ANTHONY: It seems, in the US at least, we’re experiencing a “pulp resurgence,” with publishers like Meteor House, Dynamite, Moonstone and others bringing back every 1880s to 1940s adventure character they can get their hands on. What is the attraction for modern readers to these classic, and sometimes campy, pulp characters?

JM: Some of it is nostalgia, of course. But I think there is a perennial aspect to the best pulps that transcends time and changing fashions. Sherlock Holmes, The Three Musketeers, Tarzan, The Count of Monte-Cristo, The Shadow, Arsene Lupin (to name but a few) have survived the test of time and will likely be remembered forever; their modern-day descendants are to be found on television. The TV series, especially today with its complex plots, character arcs, etc. is the inheritor of Alexandre Dumas and Paul Feval. The same people who rushed to the New York harbor to get their next installment of Monte-Cristo in the French papers (at a time when a lot of educated Americans knew foreign languages) are the same today eagerly waiting for the next episode of LOST or MAD MEN.

Tales of the Shadowmen includes a short story by Anthony R. Cardno

ANTHONY: The idea of having classic characters meet up is not a new one in world literature, although in the modern day I think Philip Jose Farmer deserves a lot of the credit, through his Wold-Newton Family concept, for making such crossovers more than just fun mash-ups. In your TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN anthologies, you encourage writers to cross the French pulp characters who are your forte with just about everything else in the pop culture canon.  What criteria do you follow for those stories?  Is any “crossover” concept just too out there?

JM: Jess Nevins wrote authoritatively in his intro to Win Eckert’s CROSSOVERS about the history of “crossovers”, going back to Jason and the Argonauts, the Round Table tales, etc. So yes it is hardly a new phenomenon, although I think Maurice Leblanc’s bold initiative of having Lupin cross swords with Holmes deserves a lot of credit. Regarding TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN, my only two criteria are: (1) there has to be a character from French fiction (being Black Coat Press, this comes with the territory) and (2) the story has to be in continuity and respectful of the original materials. No funny ha-ha pastiches, no killing off heroes, no dark reinterpretations. That’s all. Other than that, I welcome any crossover, the more outré, the better. To quote but a few of the more unexpected crossovers, we had stories featuring The Little Prince and Doc Savage, Zorro and Jean Valjean, The Wizard of Oz and Richard Matheson’s Born of Man and Woman, Jerry Cornelius, Pere Ubu and the movie Alphaville… This year, for example, we have a story that conflates Boulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Jean Ray’s Malpertuis and Marie Nizet’s Captain Vampire… As you can see, we roam pretty far and wide.

ANTHONY: What’s the weirdest crossover you’ve seen submitted to you, the type of thing that made you think ‘this can’t possibly work’ but then it did?

JM: The ones I mentioned above all fit the bill. I myself wrote the one mixing The Wizard of Oz with Richard Matheson’s horror tale Born of Man and Woman because someone challenged me to do it. I have another one mixing Enid Blyton’s Famous Five with the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, but I haven’t written it yet.

ANTHONY: I’m sort of excited but disturbed by that concept. Did you intend TotS to be an annual anthology event when you put the first volume out?

JM: Yes, I always did, which is why I put a #1 on the spine of the first book!  That’s a clue.  Since then, we’ve also released some character-themed anthologies that include about 50% of already published stories (usually from TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN) and 50% new stories. We’ve had anthos dedicated to Arsene Lupin, Dr. Omega, the Nyctalope and Judex, and I’m preparing one on Harry Dickson.

ANTHONY: The 10th volume came out a few months ago. Has your process for choosing stories or putting the book together changed at all?

JM: Not in the least.

ANTHONY: Do you have any plans to bring the TotS books out in ebook format in the near future?

JM: Yes, I have been slowly making our catalog available as ebooks, but it is a slow process. I still have the Black Coats series to do and then I’ll tackle the Shadowmen. I’m also working on converting our huge library of comics (in French) for Comixology, and that is a long and time consuming process, and there are only so many hours in the day — and I’m basically the only person doing all this.

ANTHONY: I really need to get a tablet I can read comics on. Right now I just have the Nook Simple Touch (I’ve been slow to move to e-readers) and it’s not really good for comics. I want to circle back to the Wold-Newton concept for a moment. Farmer created a pretty distinct family tree and linked them to a particular event, the crash of the meteor at Wold-Newton.  People have referred to Black Coats’ output as “The French Wold-Newton Universe.”  Have you ever posited an event similar to the WN meteor to explain what Farmer would call “a supernova of genetic splendor” in France?

JM: No, not at all. At best, I piggybacked on Farmer’s concept; he already had ancestors of Arsene Lupin and Monsieur Lecoq at Wold Newton, because there were the two French characters he knew best. So I merely suggested a few more, a notion that has since been coopted by a few other authors. I also added some French historical content (as it were) by suggesting that the French characters at Wold Newton had a political agenda, which resulted first in the French Revolution, then, later, the ascent of Napoleon. That notion was first put forward by Alexandre Dumas, so it is not mine, entirely, but it blended rather well with Farmer’s. You can read it in greater detail here:
http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/wnu7.htm

ANTHONY: In addition to “new pulp” books like the TotS series, you also publish a large number of translations of French pulps into English (the Harry Dickson and Madame Atomos books, most notably, but too many others to list here).  How do you decide what to translate and what authors to use to do the translating (when, that is, you don’t do the translating yourself)?

As far as deciding what deserves to be translated (or in some cases retranslated), obviously, I use my own judgment of what is really important. If you were doing it the other way, you would translate Doc Savage, but perhaps not Jim Anthony. So I think characters like Mme Atomos, Lupin, Fantomas, Harry Dickson, Doctor Omega, Sar Dubnotal, Rouletabille, etc. deserve to have at least a reasonable sampling of their adventures made available in English. I’d like to do Jean-Claude Carriere’s six remarkable Frankenstein novels but they’re not in the public domain and the rights aren’t available. Rocambole is something I’d like to do too, but someone else already put out a good series of abridged / condensed versions that pretty much cover it. I rely on Brian Stableford, Michael Shreve and a few more hand-picked folks to help me with the translations. The great majority of the books we publish ARE important; they all contain some ground-breaking idea, some new stylistic inventions… Whether we’re talking vampires or space travel, mystic heroes or cloaked avengers, criminal conspiracies or super-detectives, French popular literature contains a huge number of truly wonderful works which deserved to be made accessible to the English-speaking audience.

ANTHONY: What is upcoming from BCP in the near future?

JM: We tend to plan ahead, so for what’s coming up, you can check this link:
http://www.blackcoatpress.com/catalog.htm#SOON

Pulp-wise, in 2014, we’ll have all 18 MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR CORNELIUS novels released in a big, fat trilogy of books; hopefully the last two never published before in English FANTOMAS novels; the last two DOC ARDAN stories (a French young Doc Savage-type hero), the end of the MADAME ATOMOS saga; a new FU MANCHU novel; a series of books from the early 1900s about DR. CARESCO and PROFESSOR TORNADA, two mad scientists and another early Martian saga.

ANTHONY: I think the sound we hear in the background is my bank account collapsing. So let’s go to my usual closing question: What is your favorite book, and what would you say to someone who has not read it to convince them that they should?

 JM: If you’re a pulp mystery fan, the BLACK COATS (INVISIBLE WEAPON would be my recommendation) or JOHN DEVIL by Paul Feval; if you’re more sf-minded, anything by Maurice Renard is really quite good — he wasn’t nicknamed the French HG Wells for nothing.

WIN SCOTT ECKERT - Interview

This has been a long time in coming, this interview with my friend Win Scott Eckert. I’m not sure how long ago I first became familiar with Win’s work, but it’s been several years at the least. He plays in the playground I love, that giant sandbox where everything in popular culture, from gothic heroines to modern masked men, can interact … and he plays in it so well. His recent stories featuring the Green Hornet and The Avenger stand out, and of course he’s learned the art of finding character connections from one of the greatest such sleuths, Philip Jose Farmer, with whom Win co-wrote THE EVIL IN PEMBERLEY HOUSE.  Here’s our long chat, with lots of illustrations:

ANTHONY: Win, thanks for taking the time to be interviewed.

WSE:  Thank you, Anthony.

ANTHONY: You’re most well-known currently as the lead “banner-carrier,” so to speak, of Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Family concept. What was your first exposure to Farmer’s work and how has it influenced your own writing?

WSE:   My mind-blowing introduction to Farmer was his “pseudo-biography” Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, at the tender age of eight. I recently had the pleasure of editing an updated and definitive edition of the book, which is a companion to his Tarzan Alive. Both books follow the Sherlockian tradition, known as “the Game,” of treating their subjects as real people who actually lived (or… still live!). In my new foreword to Doc Savage, I abandon my usual practice of penning forewords and afterwords within the context of the Game (see my pieces in the recent Farmer reissues by Titan Books), and step out from behind the curtain, so to speak. The piece is an unabashed love letter to the book and to Farmer. Which is a roundabout way of answering your question about how it has influenced my own writing. Without Doc Savage, there is no Win Scott Eckert, author–for better or worse.

The definitive, hardcover reissue of Doc Savage is available from Meteor House. It’s a true labor of love, and I hope folks will check it out.

ANTHONY: You had the chance to collaborate with Farmer, completing The Evil in Pemberley House. I know you’ve written in other forums about how that project came to be. I’ve read the book and honestly can’t tell where Farmer ends and you begin, so I’d like to hear a little about the process of completing a novel started by someone else. What challenges did you face and how did you solve them?

WSE:   First of all, thank you for commenting that the transition from Farmer to me was seamless. I take that as the highest possible compliment. I had been reading Farmer all my life, and continue to reread his work, so undoubtedly I absorbed some of his stylistic tendencies through osmosis. That said, I was also conscious of many of Phil’s writing patterns and made sure to incorporate them into the prose when it was natural to do so, as I took over writing where he left off.

The process felt straightforward to me. Immerse myself in the chapters he had written. Study the outline for the remainder of the novel and flesh it out, where necessary. Consult the accompanying notes and follow them as closely as possible. Make judicious changes to bring small details in line with what had been published in his other Wold Newton works, particularly in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (for the uninitiated, Farmer revealed, in the biography Doc Savage, that the real name of the man upon whom the fictionalized Doc Savage pulp novels was based was Dr. James Clarke Wildman, Jr.; The Evil in Pemberley House introduces us to Doc Wildman’s daughter, Patricia Wildman); in line with this, do not alter Phil’s words, except where absolutely necessary for continuity. This latter point is extremely important to me, and has also guided me when participating in bringing other previously unpublished works by Phil to publication, or when preparing manuscripts for reissue by Titan: do not have the audacity to rewrite Philip José Farmer. He’s a Hugo-award winning author and a science fiction Grand Master!

Once the polished outline was approved by Phil and his wife Bette, I proceeded to write, and sent bundles of chapters to them for their review and comments. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Evil in Pemberley House came out in 2009 and is now out of print although I believe Camelot Books may have a few copies left in stock of both the trade and limited editions. I’m writing a series of follow-up novellas. The first is The Scarlet Jaguarand is “volume II of the memoirs of Pat Wildman,” out now from Meteor House.

ANTHONY: Your short stories all feature classic pulp or adventure fiction characters, which means you constantly get to play “what if X met K…” Given free rein, what are your dream match-ups that you haven’t gotten a chance to write yet?

WSE:   I would love to take on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Avengers (Steed and Emma Peel). And of course Farmer’s own pulp hero analogues, Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban, from his novels A Feast Unknown , Lord of the Trees, and The Mad Goblin. Interestingly, Farmer left a fourth novel featuring Caliban, The Monster on Hold, unfinished.

ANTHONY: And I know I’m not the only one hoping that someone, someday, will finish The Monster On Hold and bring it to print.  You’ve written tales of Zorro, the Green Hornet, Sherlock Holmes, Captain Midnight, and the Avenger for various anthologies, as well as a Honey West / T.H.E. Cat novel (co-written with Matthew Baugh). What’s your writing process like for these stories? I understand it all starts with being invited to participate, but how do you proceed from invite to publication?

WSE:   The “bible” is key. I come into these projects with a high degree of familiarity with the characters, but sometimes the publisher has a particular take to which the writers need to adhere, and that’s outlined in the bible. This is particularly important when there are several versions of a character to be addressed–or ignored, as the case may be. Adherence to canon, and honoring the character, is paramount (of course, even reasonable people can sometimes disagree on the definition of canon), and Moonstone shares these sensibilities, which is why I enjoy working with them so often on their licensed properties. For example, in the thirteenth Avenger pulp novel, Murder on Wheels, Richard Benson loses the ability to mold his face, and his hair reverts from shock-white to black. Moonstone felt that this removed perhaps the primary interesting feature of the character and mandated in the bible that the stories features the white-haired, white skin Benson with the moldable facial features–a decision I heartily endorsed. But this mandate also causes problems for some writers, like me, who also feel that adhering to canon means adhering to a realistic chronology of a character’s adventures. How to tell a story of Benson later in his career and also have him white-haired? I solved the problem in my first Avenger tale with a reference to the recent reappearance of his powers and white skin and hair. A few other writers also wrestled with this and addressed it in a similar way.

Another example is Honey West. The Moonstone version is an amalgamation of the eleven novels and the television series with Anne Francis, which ran for one season. Both have different supporting characters. The Moonstone bible takes the best of both. But I wanted to take it one step further. To guide writing the novella A Girl and Her Cat(co-written with Matthew Baugh), I worked up a Honey West timeline. This is the sort of exercise which helps me get centered for the writing process. Fortunately, the television series (and the Moonstone comic and stories) can be neatly placed in a gap between the ninth novel, Bombshell, which came out in 1964, and the tenth novel, which came out in 1971. Creating a timeline usually reveals gaps which can be filled in. For instance, in 1971’s Honey on Her Tail, it’s revealed that Honey and Lt. Mark Storm have not seen each other in several years. So we wrote their “goodbye” scene into A Girl and Her Cat. In the 1971 book, Honey has given up her private eye practice and is now a secret agent. While we don’t show that career change in A Girl and Her Cat (Moonstone doesn’t care for Honey’s secret agent phase), we do take Honey along the path of that transition.

By the way, Honey West and T.H.E. Cat: A Girl and Her Cat, is due out from Moonstone in January 2014 in a limited edition hardcover. It’s listed for order in the November 2013 Diamond Previews catalogue. The Diamond Item Code is NOV131140. It can also be ordered from Things From Another World at a nice discount!

ANTHONY: Well, I pre-ordered mine from Midtown Comics in NYC. And for those interested: apparently the Diamond ordering deadline is December 6th, which is just a few days away as I post this interview. So click those links, especially if you’re a fan of 60s spy/crime/thrillers with strong female leads!

Now, You’ve also annually contributed stories to Black Coat Press’ Tales of the Shadowmen series. Those anthologies are themed rather than focusing on a single character, so how do you choose the lead characters for those stories? How involved in character and plot choice are the publishers?

WSE:   Fortunately, even though each annual book has a theme, the theme is a suggestion rather than a requirement. So, I rarely feel bound by the theme and instead focus on which French characters interest me. The publisher, Jean-Marc Lofficier, is quite ready to suggest French characters, or characters created by French writers, but is equally willing to give the writers latitude, as long as there is some kind of substantial “French connection.” Jean-Marc has plot approval, of course, to ensure that the tale meets quality standards and comports with the generally understood canon of the characters–but again, he also gives the writers a nice amount of leeway.

I’ve had the opportunity to write several stories about Doc Ardan, Madame Atomos, and the Scarlet Pimpernel, among others.

ANTHONY: Sadly, you’re not in the current Volume 10: Esprit De Corps … But I am! (Sorry to highjack your spotlight for just a second there, but I couldn’t resist. Moving on…. Your Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World, Volume 1 and Volume 2, is a pretty exhaustive look at the history of literary interconnectedness that Philip José Farmer really popularized. In your researches, what connection between characters did it surprise you to discover? And are you constantly looking for new connections to make? (For instance, I recently read Jess Faraday’s The Affair of the Porcelain Dog, which has a number of Holmes connections including a lead character named Ira Adler, and Lester Heath’s The Case of the Aluminum Crutch, featuring a teenage detective named “Sherlock” Jones. You can imagine the paths my brain traveled in both cases.) And to piggy-back on that question: new crossover stories, including your own, are constantly appearing. How often, if at all, do you plan on updating Crossovers?

WSE:   There are thousands of crossovers noted in the books, and it’s very hard to pick out just a few highlights. Turning the question on its ear, the crossovers that really inspired me, captured my interest, and led me down the OCD path of creating a cohesive Crossover Universe, were those found in the writings of Philip José Farmer (such as the Sherlock Holmes-Lord Greystoke novel The Adventure of the Peerless Peer); the unnamed cameos of Doc Savage and the Amazing Five in Dave’s Stevens’ magnificent The Rocketeer (and The Shadow in the follow-up); Ron Fortier and Jeff Butler’s wonderful four-part comic series Sting of the Green Hornet; Cay Van Ash’s Fu Manchu-Sherlock Holmes novel Ten Years Beyond Baker Street; and David McDaniel’s fantastic Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels, particularly The Dagger Affair and The Rainbow Affair.

I’m sure I’m leaving many on the table, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind.

I’m always keeping an eye out for new crossovers, and taking note of them. That said, it’s a monumental task that tends to displace all other activities, and I’ve put aside the formal documentation of additions to the Crossover Universe for the foreseeable future, in order to focus on writing fiction.

This is a good a place as any to announce that Sean Levin, a fan and expert on both Farmer and crossovers, and a wonderful and talented guy, has taken over formally tracking and documenting crossovers. He’s following my Crossover Universe framework to a “T,” and doing a better job than I could have ever hoped for. So, there will be Crossoversvolumes 3 & 4 in the future, although I don’t have any further details or information to announce right now in that regard. These books are multi-year efforts, so stay tuned!

ANTHONY: Of course! You’ve co-edited three volumes of Green Hornet short stories with Joe Gentile (the third volume was also co-edited with Matthew Baugh), both from Moonstone Books. How do you break apart the editing chores?

WSE:   It’s very organic, a lot of back and forth. We had a lot of input into the bible, including settling once and for all on the 1960s television continuity as the setting for our books. On the first book, The Green Hornet Chronicles, Joe solicited writers and I took the first several passes at copyediting. Joe then took final passes; it was his baby, after all. For the second book, The Green Hornet Casefiles, I took the lead on author selection, although of course Joe had a lot of say. On the third book, I just had too much going on and suggested we bring in a trusted third, Matthew Baugh. Again it was organic. Sometimes Matthew took the first pass, and sometimes I did. Joe once more did final passes. I’m very proud of the work we did on those books, both in terms of the quality of writing and the proofing/quality control processes we utilized. In fact, the third book, The Green Hornet: Still at Large, won the 2013 Pulp Ark Award for best anthology.

ANTHONY: Congrats on that! Have you edited or co-edited any other anthologies recently? Are you editing or co-editing any other anthologies in the near future?

WSE:   I co-edited, with my good friend Christopher Paul Carey, the recently-released Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, for Titan Books. The book collects, for the first time ever in one volume, SF Grand Master Philip José Farmer‘s Wold Newton short stories, as well as authorized tales by other Farmerian writers.

I should add what a pleasure it was to work with Chris on the book and our introduction, which can be read online at SF Signal; he’s such a talented writer and editor, and I know he’s going places–big places.

I don’t see any editing projects in my future. If another “can’t say no” opportunity like Tales of the Wold Newton Universe comes along, I would have to rethink that answer, but editing anthologies requires a time commitment of Brobdingnagian proportions, and right now I’m focusing on my own writing.

ANTHONY: We’ve established how much fun you have working with all these classic characters. Are you working on a novel or series-recurring character of your own creation? (In other words, what does the near future hold for fans of your writing?)

WSE:   Well, I do plan on at least three or four more Pat Wildman novellas. These would bring Pat through the 1970s and into the early 1980s . . . which, not coincidentally, is about when the unfinished Monster on Hold occurs. The Doc Caliban tales take place in a parallel universe to the Doc Wildman / Pat Wildman stories (see my introduction to the Titan Books edition of Lord of the Trees and my chronology in the Titan edition of The Mad Goblin), but nonetheless there is a tight connection between the two universes. The Pat Wildman books, taking place in the Wold Newton Universe, will lead up to the events of The Monster on Hold in the Grandrith/Caliban Universe.

Of course, I should emphasize there are no firm plans–yet–for The Monster on Hold. But I do have a lot mapped out already. So, fingers crossed it will come together. In the meantime, I plan to have fun revealing Pat Wildman’s next adventures, and I have high-level ideas for at least the next two or three.

Matthew Baugh and I are also deep into mapping out a Honey West / T.H.E. Cat follow-up for Moonstone Books. It’s a caper taking place in Europe in the early 1970s and I can tell you it’s going to be quite sexy and fun. I really enjoy the creative jamming back-and-forth Matthew and I have on these books.

I’m writing a Pat Wildman / Kent Lane short story for Meteor House’s The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer 5. And I’ve been approached for a short story for a licensed character anthology which is going to be super-cool. I can’t discuss that further right now, but I’m really jazzed about it.

I also plan on writing a Sherlock Holmes novella for Meteor House. It flows out of the already-published short story “The Adventure of the Fallen Stone” (Sherlock Holmes: The Crossovers Casebook) and will be called The Dynamics of a Meteor. The time-frame for this one is 1919, and will take place shortly after Farmer’s authorized Doc Savage novel, Escape from Loki: Doc Savage’s First Adventure.

And . . . I’m tacking my first comic book script, a Honey West tale for Moonstone. This one is going to fill in a pretty important piece of Honey’s history, and will be illustrated by the super-talented Silvestre Szilagyi, who has done some of the other Honey comics.

ANTHONY: Well, this conversation has wandered far and wide, and could keep wandering, so I’ll bring it around to my usual final question: What is your favorite book, and what would you say to convince someone who has never read it that they should read it?

WSE:   Which brings us full circle back to the beginning of this interview. My favorite book is Philip José Farmer’s Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. If you love 1930s and ’40s pulp heroes, fictional biographies, and metafictional mashups such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels (and by the way, both Alan Moore and Kim Newman acknowledge their debt to Farmer and the Wold Newton mythos), then this book (and the companion biography, Tarzan Alive) will be right up your literary alley.

 ANTHONY: Thanks, Win!

WSE:   Thank you very much, Anthony! This was fun.

You can find Win all over the internet: on his own website, on Twitter as @woldnewton, on Facebook, Pinterest, tumblr, Goodreads and Amazon and of course at most of the links embedded in the interview.

Note: If you’re interested in Meteor House, you can find my interview with publisher Mike Croteau HERE. And later this week, I’ll also be posting an interview with Black Coat Press publisher J.M. Lofficier, so be sure to come back for that!

5 ODD QUESTIONS FOR JEREMY C. SHIPP - Interview

It’s been a while since I’ve interviewed my friend Jeremy C. Shipp (he of such bizarro fiction as Vacation, Sheeps And Wolves, the Stoker Award nominated Cursed,  Attic Toys(editor) and Always Remember To Tip Your Ninja, among others). His shorter tales have appeared in over 60 publications, the likes of Cemetery Dance, ChiZine, Apex Magazine, Withersin, and Shroud Magazine. Jeremy enjoys living in Southern California in a moderately haunted Victorian farmhouse called Rose Cottage. He lives there with a couple of pygmy tigers and a legion of yard gnomes. The gnomes like him. The clowns living in his attic–not so much.

He’s doing a blog tour throughout October, with each interviewer asking him FIVE ODD QUESTIONS. Here are mine:

ANTHONY: What’s the best recipe for Smurf you’ve found?

JEREMY: Smurf brain tacos. First you break open the skull with a nutcracker shaped like Gargamel, and you remove the brain. Put the brain into cold water with a tablespoon of vinegar. Leave the brain submerged in the water and then gently remove the membrane. You can check out the rest of the recipe in my cookbook HOW TO EAT SMURFS AND OTHER TINY CREATURES.

ANTHONY: Attic Clown or Bozo the Clown: Who would win in a fight?

JEREMY: The Attic Clown has a lot of respect for Bozo, so I doubt any argument they had would actually resort to fisticuffs. But if they had to fight each other in a Battle Royale-type situation, the Attic Clown would definitely win. The Attic Clown is a demon equipped with a whole arsenal of silly weaponry, such as exploding balloon animals and rubber chicken nunchakus and flaming pies.

ANTHONY: Complete the sentence: “Green is the color of ___________.”

JEREMY: Green is the color of projectile pea soup vomit. Green is the color of Vulcan blood. Green is the color of retromutagen ooze. Green is the color of Piccolo’s skin. Green is the color of Good Luck Bear’s fur.

ANTHONY: What really lurks in the subsurface strata under Denver ?

JEREMY: Underneath the substrata exists Bizarro Denver, a place devoid of sun, snow, and breweries. It’s an awful place.

ANTHONY: Why are Garden Gnomes so misunderstood?

JEREMY:

MYTH: Gnomes eat children.

TRUTH: Gnomes are vegan. Some Gnomes simply cook children for ogres, to exchange for shoe horns.

MYTH: Gnomes use urine to clean their windows.

TRUTH: That’s disgusting. Gnomes actually use chupacabra vomit as a cleaning agent.

MYTH: Gnomes can’t read.

TRUTH: Gnomes can read, though only after slaying and eating a fresh bookworm.

MYTHS: Gnome hats are silly.

TRUTH: That’s a matter of opinion, buster!

MYTH: Gnomes will murder you if you shave off their beards.

TRUTH: Actually, that one is true.

Clearly, Jeremy’s brain is a land of oddities and mundanities mixed in all sorts of delightfully clever ways. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, his website … and most importantly, you can find his latest collection, Monstrosities, available at Amazon for the Kindle.

LAWRENCE BLOCK RETURNS - Interview

I’m always happy to welcome previous interview subjects back to ramble on with me, but it’s always an honor when someone really well known agrees to be interviewed or re-interviewed. Today I get to welcome back the great Lawrence Block. You know him at the author of the Bernie Rhodenbarr and Matthew Scudder mysteries, among many others. He’s got a new short story collection out, so we chatted via email about it.

ANTHONY: Hard Case Crime just released the hardcover edition of CATCH AND RELEASE through special arrangement with Subterranean Press.  How closely did HCC publisher Charles Ardai work with you to choose the contents of the book?

LAWRENCE: Not at all, actually. I proposed the book to Bill Schafer, and made up a list of contents. Charles was good enough to offer his support and co-sponsorship for the book.

ANTHONY: The advertising copy for CATCH AND RELEASE says the contents are all short works that have not appeared in previous collections. When did the oldest story in the book last see print?

LAWRENCE: Well, remarkably enough, “Part of the Job” was published in Dapper in 1967—but I didn’t learn about it for over 40 years! The whole story of its publication and re-discovery is included with the story itself.

With that curious exception, these are all recent stories, all written in the present century. Thus they weren’t included in my omnibus collection, Enough Rope.

ANTHONY: What is the newest piece in the book?

LAWRENCE: Probably “See the Woman,” written a couple of years ago for the L.A. Noire anthology.

ANTHONY: CATCH AND RELEASE includes stories featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr and Matthew Scudder, correct?

LAWRENCE: Bernie’s here in “A Burglar’s-Eye View of Greed,” a newspaper op-ed piece I did for New York Newsday in 2002. Mark Lavendier published it as a deluxe limited-edition broadside, but it’s never appeared anywhere else. Matthew Scudder’s here twice, with “Mick Ballou Looks at the Blank Screen” and “One Last Night at Grogan’s.” These are the last two stories in the Scudder collection, The Night and the Music.

ANTHONY: The volume also includes a play script. Was the script ever produced? (And if so, can you tell us a bit about the production?)

LAWRENCE: It’s the adaptation of a short story, and I believe it was performed a couple of times in Australia. And there have been a couple of Stateside nibbles, but so far nothing has happened—as is not unusual in the theater. It’s a natural for an amateur production—two characters, one set—so if anyone wants to stage it, all they have to do is get in touch.

ANTHONY: Are there any other Block (or pseudonymous) stories out there left to be collected, or have they finally all been un-earthed?

LAWRENCE: Well, only “Part of the Job” was unearthed; the others are all pretty recent. It would surprise me mightily if any more stories turned up from way back when, but the possibility’s hard to rule out.

ANTHONY: This is the second time Hard Case Crime has partnered with Subterranean to release a limited edition hardcover collection of yours. The STRANGE EMBRACE / 69 BARROW STREET collection is out of print now?

LAWRENCE: I believe so. The two individual titles are eVailable as eBooks from Open Road.

ANTHONY: Most of the Hard Case Crime line is mass market or trade paperback editions. Will we be seeing paperback releases for either of the Subterranean titles?

LAWRENCE: No plans that I know of for PB editions of Strange Embrace or 69 Barrow Street. As far as CATCH AND RELEASE is concerned, I retained both eBook and paperback rights, and have already self-published the eBook edition; it’s on sale even as we speak, and here’s a Kindle link.

I’ll also be bringing out a trade paperback edition any day now; it’s coming from CreateSpace, and will be widely available at Amazon and other online booksellers as well. Same format as the SubPress hardcover, same great cover art—and, since the hardcover’s essentially sold out on publication, a chance for readers to get the printed book at a reasonable price.

There an audiobook coming, too, and Dreamscape is already taking preorders in advance of a November release date. I did the narration, with an assistant from the beautiful and talented Lynne Wood Block; the play, “How Far,” needed two voices, one male, one female. And while she was at it she also voiced “Without a Body,” a brief monologue with a woman narrator.

ANTHONY: Since there’s a Scudder story in the new collection, I have to ask how filming for “A Walk Among The Tombstones” has progressed. Are they still filming, or are they in post-production now?

LAWRENCE: It’s in post-production, and I don’t know if they’ve set a release date, but I’m sure it’ll be sometime in the first half of 2014.

ANTHONY: You got to spend some time on the set. How was that?

LAWRENCE: It was fun. Liam Neeson was absolutely brilliant in the scenes I saw, and I think fans will love him as Scudder.

ANTHONY: I’m looking forward to that. Final question: What’s coming down the pike in the next few months?

LAWRENCE: A brand-new novel, the one I wrote this summer on a Holland America cruise. Don’t ask me where we went, as I barely got out of my cabin. I’m very excited about the book, and couldn’t bear to wait a year and a half for a traditional publisher to bring it out. So I’m publishing it myself, and we’ve settled on Christmas as  our release date.

Yeah, this Christmas. Christmas of 2013, which is like 90 days from now.

And, for the moment, that’s all I can tell you about it…

You can find more of Lawrence Block’s discussions of his writing on his website, his blog, his facebook and his goodreads discussion group. You can also follow him on Twitter as @LawrenceBlock.

RICHARD BOWES, author - Interview

Richard Bowes is an author I should have been long-since familiar with, but who I’ve only started reading in the past two years or so. Rick has lived an interesting life, a large portion of it in Greenwich Village serving as a librarian at NYU.  He’s seen the city change a lot, and regularly posts photos of Old New York on his Facebook page. He was, of course, in the city on September 11, 2001, and one of his most moving stories, “There’s a Hole in the City,” takes place in the days immediately following; WBAI out of NYC airs Rick’s reading of the story ever year to commemorate the anniversary of the event.  All of Rick’s stories and novels are character-driven and many, but not all, have some aspect of the supernatural or fantastic.  I met Rick in person, finally, at Readercon 2013 in Boston, and he’s as fun to talk to in person as he is on Twitter or Facebook.

ANTHONY: Thanks for taking the time to chat, Rick. Let’s start with an easy one: when was your first professional sale?

RICK: It was early 1985. Before then I’d designed board games that got bought and published. And I wrote gay porn under a pseudonym. But my first real fiction sale was a paperback time travel/alternate worlds novel, WARCHILD, to Warner Questar in 1985. It was the first piece of real spec fiction I’d written.

ANTHONY: What is your writing process like? What’s a Day In The Life of Rick Bowes?

RICK: Well I’m old so a day in the life isn’t as exciting as it might once have been.  I’m retired and can stay up far into the night like I’m doing as I write this and can sleep until noon if I want. I try to have something: Yoga class, shopping, early brunch with a friend, to get me out the door before noon. I live in a tiny apartment in what was the heart of the 1950’s/1960’s Greenwich Village and I love this place dearly. I almost always manage to write something each day. I don’t have those spectacular daily word counts I read about in young writers’ tweets and Facebook entries but I produce stories and they get bought and published.

ANTHONY: You’ve written short stories and novels. Does your process change at all from one form to the other?

RICK: The two are often intertwined. The first three books I published, WARCHILD and its sequel GOBLIN MARKET plus the standalone FERAL CELL were novels written as novels. In 1989 I began writing short stories for the first time since college nearly 25 years before. The first one never sold (though I cannibalized it many years later). Every story since then has sold. My fifth story “On Death and the Deuce” was my first fictionalized autobiographical story. It was about kicking alcohol and drugs which I’d done 15 years or so years earlier and it introduced Kevin Grierson and his doppelganger who was his addictions. A couple of my other stories had already been bought but ODATD was the first to be published (in F&SF May 1992).  I wrote nine more Grierson stories and all ten became the Lambda Award winning MINIONS OF THE MOON.

At some point fairly early on I realized I had a book and began “hooking” the stories,  introducing the same characters in different stories, creating story arcs (like showing Grierson going from self destructive kid hustler to a gay man in an adult relationship). Each piece had to be written in the classic short story form in order to sell to the magazines and anthologies.  But certain changes had to be made for them to then serve as chapters. My story, “Streetcar Dreams” which won a World Fantasy Award was actually the linking material that joined the other stories together in the finished novel.

ANTHONY: You know I’m a big fan of your short fiction. A lot (if not all of it) draws from your real life in a much more concrete way than I think a lot of authors would be comfortable doing (at least, while the people they’re drawing from are still alive).  Are there any pieces of your past that are “off limits” as story fodder or inspiration?

RICK: “Still alive,” may play a bigger part in this than I’d consciously realized. Except for my late brother Gerry, I guess I’ve written less about my family than I might have. Gerry and my relationship was what my story “Circle Dance” was about. It appeared in Postscripts magazine and my 2006 collection STREETCAR DREAMS then got adapted into a chapter of DUST DEVIL.  Gerry and I were in the East Village together in the heady late ’60’s and grim early ’70’s. I was as close to him in many ways as I’ve ever been to anyone.

“Off limits”? I’m not sure. My parents were fascinating people. My father and mother were both in the theater when I was a kid. Both were writers. I use some of that in DUST DEVIL and in my “were actor” story “A Song to the Moon” which I’ve included in IF ANGELS FIGHT.  Often my narrator’s mother is crazy/unhappy and his father is angry and tough (mine had been a WW2 army bomber crewman). I’ve written about my father in the story “My Life in Speculative Fiction (in the STREETCAR DREAM and TRANSFIGURED NIGHT collections) and in an upcoming non-speculative fiction story for the magazine “The Revelator”.  I used an aspect of my mother for the mother in MINIONS. But there was much more to each of them than I’ve shown.

My sisters and their husbands and children and my youngest brother are all highly successful many of them in the creative arts and I’ve never really written about them.  I’d love to but, yeah, that can get difficult and somehow the right circumstances never seemed to arise.

ANTHONY: Without naming names (unless you want to), have there been any instances where you’ve based a character on someone from your past and they’ve reacted negatively?

RICK: The friends/boyfriends/girlfriends/chance encounters in my stories tend to be modular creations; a single character will be drawn from several different people. Also this is fiction. I make varying amounts of this up. It draws from real life but isn’t autobiography.

That said one advantage I had was that in a large part of my life most of the people I associated with weren’t readers or if they were didn’t read fiction. It’s only in the last fifteen or so years that I’ve started hanging out with writers. I put aspects of people in books and they never knew. Now the God-damnedest people see themselves in my stories. Usually they seem pleased. Maybe they’re right but it wasn’t intentional.

Dust Devil on a Quiet Street

ANTHONY: I remember a guest on the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers Chat on Twitter (#sffwrtcht) once commenting that the defining aspect of “urban fantasy” is that the setting is as much a character as the actual characters are. It strikes me that this is very true of a lot of your work: most obviously with Greenwich Village in DUST DEVIL ON A QUIET STREET, but even with your Time Ranger stories (especially “The Ferryman’s Wife” and “Mask of the Rex”) and your story “Seven Days of Poe” in Steve Berman’s WHERE THY DARK EYE GLANCES. Do you intentionally give Place this level of importance, or is it something that is just organic to your style and process?

RICK: So do you consider any of your story cycles to be “urban fantasy?”  If not, is there a sub-genre you would say your work falls into?

I’m going to try to answer both of these questions in one if you don’t mind. It’s probably a sign of my alienation that I find my surroundings so endlessly fascinating and surprising that I don’t really need to invent imaginary ones.

FERAL CELL was my second novel. It came out in 1987. FC gets talked about in DUST DEVIL in the chapter where the narrator is in St. Vincent’s Hospital. I had cancer in 1984/5 which is when I began writing FERAL CELL. It’s set slightly in the future in a New York where the narrator is dying of cancer and when he discovers an alternate world called Capricorn where people dying of cancer in our world (which they call Cancer) appear like spirits and are considered sacred. There are evil aristocrats in Capricorn and rival gangs of skateboard and roller skaters here in NYC.

The vast apparatus of online websites and blogs and so on didn’t exist twenty-six years ago. The book got interesting reviews and attention, especially from people who had or once had cancer. Among them was Terri Windling the editor/author whose BORDERTOWN anthologies in the 1980’s did so much to establish Urban Fantasy as a sub-genre. She discovered Feral Cell, included my story “On Death and the Deuce, in YEAR’S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR and helped get MINIONS published. Terri identified me as one of the early practitioners of the sub-genre.

Stories of magic set in cities go back as far as cities do. Urban Fantasy wasn’t something I did intentionally. The Boston (especially the Boston Public Library) of  1960 in my Poe Story, the Bar Harbor Maine of FROM THE FILES OF THE TIME RANGERS, the New York of the late 20th/early 21st centuries in DUST DEVIL ON A QUIET STREET are my world.  I’m glad there’s a subgenre to accommodate it.

If Angels Fight

ANTHONY: In October, Fairwood Press is releasing your collection IF ANGELS FIGHT, which brings together stories from across your career, with new introductions written by you. How did you choose what would be included? Was there anything that didn’t quite make the cut that you wish you’d had the room to include?

RICK: Patrick Swenson of Fairwood Press has been great to work with. The stories in the book are the ones I wanted included. It could have been a longer book if I’d decided I needed that.

But I intend it to give an overview of my career as a short fiction writer from my first published story to very recent pieces. I included stories like “Jacket Jackson” (my collaboration with Marc Rich) and some recent stories that appeared in large anthologies because I didn’t think they got the attention they deserved. Also I thought would give variety to the collection and show what I could do.  Others like “If Angels Fight” itself, a Nebula nominee and World Fantasy Award winner is a personal favorite I wanted to show off.

ANTHONY: IF ANGELS FIGHT includes a number of stories that went on to be folded into full novel narratives: the Time Rangers stories are part of a ‘mosaic novel,’ but the Kevin Grierson story became part of MINIONS OF THE MOON and “A Hole In The City” became the lead-off chapter of your recent novel DUST DEVIL ON A QUIET STREET. Is the concept of merging short stories into novel form something you’re always thinking about as you write?

RICK: “On Death and the Deuce,” “The Ferryman’s Wife,” “The Mask of the Rex,” “There’s a Hole in the City,” were changed in the process of being turned into novel chapters and I present them here in their original story format – all of them also attracted attention (award nominations, inclusion in Year’s Best anthologies etc).

I often have a novel in mind as a final destination when I’m writing a story. But sometimes stories I think of as part of a novel, don’t fit into the finished manuscript. Doing a novel about Greenwich Village and how I ended up here was already a concept when I wrote the first story, “There’s a Hole in the City” in 2005 and I wrote many stories that became chapters in what turned out to be DUST DEVIL ON A QUIET STREET. It didn’t always work out. “If Angels Fight,” for example was intended it to be part of DUST DEVIL but it turned out  to be too much an entity unto itself to fit.

A lot of the stories I write are stand alones. That’s why I do collections.

ANTHONY: What is the appeal, and what are the challenges, of taking a short story cycle and creating a full novel around them rather than just releasing a story collection?

RICK: I get a lot of satisfaction out of fitting the pieces together. Also novels generally sell better than short story collections and do more to establish a certain name recognition which then helps the process of selling more stories. That may sound a bit brutal but this is a commercial medium.

ANTHONY: I think I’ve told you the story of reading the first chapter of DUST DEVILS in a restaurant in Alexandria VA and being almost in tears as you describe New York City in the days immediately after September 11, and then hearing Ryan Adams’ “I Still Love You, New York,” (the video for which was filmed only days before the Towers fell) and completely losing it. Does music play a part in your creative process, as it does for many writers?

RICK: Music is my main love. I confess I don’t keep up with current popular music. I know Rock from the fifties through the seventies but not much later. Aside from that – classical music, opera, classic jazz, Broadway and what’s called The American Songbook – especially stuff from the thirties and forties Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, Porter etc. are what I listen to.

(As I write this at 2 AM on September 12, 2013, twelve years and a couple of hours after 9/11 I’m listening (as I know you are) to Jim Freund playing the wrong version of me reading “There’s a Hole in the City” on WBAI radio).

The Queen, The Cambion and Seven Others

ANTHONY: I felt bad for Jim when we realized the wrong version was playing, but I loved the insight it gave to how he works with voice folks. In addition to DUST DEVILS and IF ANGELS FIGHT, you’ve also recently released THE QUEEN, THE CAMBION AND SEVEN OTHERS, another short story collection with the focus on “modern fairy tales.” Tell us a little about that collection and how/if it differs from your previous collections.

RICK: TQTCASO has been a joy. I’ve always been interested in fairy tales. You should see my shelves. But in the last few years reading them and reading about them has become a minor obsession. And I wrote stories in that mode – third person, past tense fantasy tales. Chris Barzak turned me on to Aqueduct Press and their Conversation Series: small books nicely produced.

Aqueduct is mainly a feminist press and the fairy tale was for much of its history largely a woman’s genre and a refuge for gay and lesbian writers (think of Anderson and Wilde) in bad times. So I asked and Timmi Duchamp the publisher was interested. She and Kathryn Wilham, the editor, were very supportive. The book includes an essay and eight stories involving everything from the daughter of Winter and Summer (very unhappy marriage), to a young woman who learns to dress bears, to stuff you didn’t know about Merlin and Queen Victoria.

Just under 35 thousand words which I think is a perfect length for such an enterprise. In fact my essay (one of maybe five which I’ve written in my entire life) is titled “A Secret History of Small Books.”

Kath Wilham suggested the pictures and helped me find suitable ones by Rackham and Dore. There’s a generous sampling (and what is a fairy tale book without pictures?).  I know I would have been delighted to find something like this.

ANTHONY: What work do you have due to be published in the near future?

RICK: Getting four books out this year took a lot of my time and took a lot of writing over the last year. Both TQTCASO and IF ANGELS FIGHT include never-before-seen stories. DUST DEVIL needed lots of new linking material. Even the new edition of MINIONS has the first new Grierson story in many years.

So only a couple of new stories are due out:

One is:

“Tales That Fairies Tell” involving a certain famous fairy tale cat and set in a more desperate New York (The Big Arena) fifty or so years down the line.

It’s included in: Once Upon A Time: A modern fairy tale anthology (Guran ed), Prime Books,  October.

The other is:

“Stories I Tell My Friends” – Narrated by the same kid who appears in my “Seven Days of Poe” (from the Berman/Lethe WHERE THY DARK EYE GLANCES). But this will be a first:  sex and drugs and parent problems in Boston circa 1960 but NON GENRE!  NO SPEC FICTION ELEMENT! It will appear later this year in Matthew Cheney and Eric Schaller’s experimental online magazine The Revelator (which everyone should check out).

Currently I’m writing a story about a play being staged in an abandoned hotel in the same NYC as “Tales That Fairies Tell.”

And I’m writing what seems to be a very short story about a mortal, once a fairy bridegroom now the owner of a bar in the current Greenwich Village.

ANTHONY: Now I’m looking forward to all of those. And my usual closing question: What is your favorite book and what would you say to someone who has never read it to convince them that they should?

RICK: Not one book but two! I would like to thank Steve Berman and his Lethe Press for bringing out a new edition MINIONS OF THE MOON as well as the first publication of DUST DEVIL ON A QUIET STREET.  Together I think they make a gay chronicle from the 1940’s till now.

You can follow Rick on Twitter @rickbowes, find him on Facebook, and of course check Rick’s website for updates on his work.  DUST DEVIL ON A QUIET STREETand MINIONS OF THE MOON can both be purchased from Lethe Press, Amazon or BN.  IF ANGELS FIGHT will be out in October from Fairwood Press and on Amazon and BN.  THE QUEEN, THE CAMBION, AND SEVEN OTHERS is available from Aqueduct and on Amazon and BN.

MEGAN LAVEY-HEATON and ISABELLE MELANCON OF NAMESAKE - Interview

It’s a week for welcoming back previous interviewees! Today, I’m catching up with Megan Lavey-Heaton and Isabelle Melancon, creators of the webcomic NAMESAKE. It’s been a while since my last interview with them; we’d meant to do one during their second Kickstarter project, but that sort of fell through. So here they are to talk to us about how that went and what’s upcoming:

ANTHONY: You successfully funded the print version of Namesake Book Two not so long ago. How is the production process coming, and when will the book be available to the general public?

ISA: Production is pretty much over. I re-colored a couple of the pages, polished it up, added an extra story… and then Megan did all the book putting-together part. The toughest part for me is always to design the covers. And I had to design 3 this time. Whew! Since we had the hardcover version coming out with this Kickstarter too. But they turned out great too. The books should be available in August/September if all goes well, but we might open pre-orders before then.

ANTHONY: Are there plans already afoot for collecting book three in print form?

ISA: Book three is almost fully posted online, so as soon as that’s done, plans for the next Kickstarter will probably start.

ANTHONY: What’s your process been like for transferring from web content to the printed page? Did it change at all between books one and two?

ISA: Well, the pages have a pretty standard format, so making the jump from digital to print wasn’t that hard. I perfected my drawing techniques and scanning techniques, and Megan started doing allt he lettering in indesign to make the whole process go more smoothly. Our processes kinda changed about half-way into book one, so book 2 went considerably better.

ANTHONY: Where do we find the characters at the start of book two?

MEG: Emma is still entrenched in Oz at the beginning of book 2. We take a slight detour to check in on Alice and Lewis in the 1800s, then Ben, Elaine, Fred and the Calliope staff in the modern era, along with the introduction of some new cast members who will be very important in the future. For now though, most of this book tells the bulk of Emma’s adventure in Oz.

ISA: And Warrick’s backstory is revealed in book 2. Everyone loves a good tragic backstory.

ANTHONY: How much material will be in the print edition of book two versus the online edition? Any new special extras?

MEG: Book 2 contains Intermission 1 and chapters 6-10. We are about to start chapter 13 in the online edition. We have a book bonus story with Warrick and a Kickstarter-only story with Chiseri and Adora.

ANTHONY: Has your collaborative process changed at all since you started Namesake?

MEG: Not off the top of our head. The machine isn’t broken!

ISA: Nope, if anything, we just have MORE fun. Because the story is gradually becoming more engaging and creative.

ANTHONY: How about your individual creative processes?

MEG: I know for me, I have switched to doing the lettering of the pages in InDesign. Makes it vastly easier when it comes to creating the books!

ISA: I started doing more storyboarding and I have a notebook listing important visual details for all characters… to make sure I don’t forget anything! I plan to make character turnarounds too. It’s more of a process used in animation, but it helps not to draw someone off-model.

ANTHONY: Has the story continued to play out according to your original master plan, or has it taken any interesting side turns?

MEG: It’s definitely taking interesting side turns. For example, Selva has become one of the main cast when originally she wasn’t supposed to have much of a role beyond chapter 1. Nose is another unexpected developed character. We still have the master plan, but we’re letting the different stories develop organically and adjust as needed.

ISA: Characters change a lot, but the main plot stays stable. I think it’s nice that characters are kinda “telling” us who they want to be.

ANTHONY: What other projects are you both working on?

MEG: I’ll let Isa answer that one!

ISA: We have a couple of things we wish to start. I have a few ideas for graphic novels for kids and pre-teens, because it’s an age group I love to write for. Mostly fantasy stuff. Megan has a few ideas that are really exciting too, but she tends to write more for adults, with police mysteries and diabolical curses. I guess we’ll flip a coin and see who gets to choose first. On the short term, we plan to do a couple of short comics to try different things as a team.

ANTHONY: A slight tweak on my usual closing question: If you could only recommend one of the books your characters are based on/connected to, which one would it be?

ISA: Probably a complete book of Andersen’s works. I love his fairy tales. They are my favorites.

LINDA POITEVIN's NEW ROMANCE - Interview

It’s always fun to welcome certain folks back to Ramble On with me about new projects. Linda Poitevin is one of those folks. Linda is the creator of THE GRIGORI LEGACY series of urban fantasy (SINS OF THE ANGELS and SINS OF THE SON available now), and she recently debuted a new romance novel. You can see my previous interviews with Linda HERE and ALSO HERE, and sharp-eyed readers of my story “Chasing Satellites,” now available in the anthology BEYOND THE SUN, may notice a nod to Linda therein as well.

ANTHONY: Welcome back, Linda!

LINDA: First of all, Anthony, thank you SO much for inviting me onto your blog again—I’m truly honored to be here!

ANTHONY: You released GWYNNETH EVER AFTER recently. Tell us a bit about the story.

LINDA:  I’m not very good at seeing the underlying themes in stories (I detested that part of high school English, lol), but a reviewer identified Gwynneth Ever After as a “Cinderella tale” and darned if she isn’t right! In my story’s case, “Cinderella” is an ordinary single mom/architect raising three children and juggling all the ordinary stresses in life, and her Prince Charming is a famous Hollywood actor. But all isn’t love and sweetness, because they have a lot to try to overcome. Gwyn’s and her children’s hearts have been badly damaged and she is fiercely protective of them all—and Gareth is harboring a secret that could drive her away forever.

ANTHONY: GWYNNETH is not at all connected to your “Grigori Legacy” series, correct?  Where did the inspiration for this story come from?

LINDA: No, Gwynneth isn’t connected with the Grigori Legacy at all. It was actually written (and published) before Sins of the Angels was released. At the time, I was focusing on writing romance, had a huge crush on an actor who shall remain unnamed, and regularly walked past a house in my town that became my inspiration for Gwyn’s home — and her occupation.

And wanna know something weird? About three years after I wrote the book, I found out that home’s owner—who had renovated the house just as Gwyn did—was also an architect.

ANTHONY: That is a little eerie! Did you find that your writing or editing process changed because you were writing in a different genre?

LINDA: My writing and editing process is…well, I’d have to call it a work in progress, lol. Gwynneth Ever After came earlier in my career, so my process has actually evolved a great deal since I wrote it. For instance, I used to be a pure “pantser,” not plotting out anything in advance. That worked well enough with Gwynneth, but needed to change with the complexity of the Grigori Legacy series because there were just too many threads to keep track of entirely in my head. Now I straddle the fence between pantser and plotter, having just enough of an idea of what’s coming up to be sure I don’t miss something or—even worse—write myself into a corner when it comes to a future plot point.

ANTHONY: That last comment is a logical segue into this question, if you can answer it without spoiling the outcome: is GWYNNETH a stand-alone novel or the start of a new series?

LINDA: Gwynneth was written as a stand-alone, but I haven’t ruled out a sequel at some point down the road. Mostly because there’s a certain cousin in the book who really, really needs to meet his match, in my opinion. J Also, several readers have suggested a novella that perhaps features Gwyn & Gareth’s wedding…I’ve never tackled a novella, but it might be fun!

ANTHONY: What prompted the decision to self-publish this book after going the traditional publisher route for the first two “Grigori” books?

LINDA: My publisher was actually interested in taking on Gwynneth as well, but once I made the decision to release, I wanted to do so faster than they could manage. With almost a year and a half between the releases of books 2 and 3 in the Grigori Legacy series, Sins of the Son and Sins of the Lost, I felt I owed it to readers to fill the gap with something and my editor and agent were very supportive of the idea.

ANTHONY: That’s fantastic that they were supportive. What were the challenges of self-publishing? And why only in e-book form?

LINDA: The main challenges of self-publishing were the enormous learning curve and the sheer amount of information I had to sift through to find the answers I was looking for. It really is a “buyer beware” world out there when it comes to the plethora of services offered to authors who are self-publishing and you need to be very well informed in order to make sound decisions.

As to why only e-book, I honestly just haven’t had a chance to look at the possibility of print at this point. Again, I haven’t ruled it out.

ANTHONY: What would your two lead females, Alexandra Jarvis and Gwynneth, think of each other?

LINDA: That is such an interesting question. Both women are very strong in their own right—they’ve had to be, given the circumstances of their lives. I think they would recognize and respect that strength in one another if they were to meet, but I also think Gwynneth would want to keep her family as far away from Alex as possible if she knew even a fraction of what was going on in Alex’s life these days. Alex would be inclined to agree with her—the war between Heaven and Hell has no place in the lives of three small children and their mother.

ANTHONY: And speaking of Alex, when is the next Grigori Legacy book coming out, and what can you tell us about the plot?

Sins of the Lost will be out on October 15th—darker and grittier than either of its predecessors. Alex’s new relationship with Seth is struggling, Lucifer’s Nephilim army is on the brink of its birth, and humanity is beginning to disintegrate in the face of its own fear. Apart from that, all I can tell you is that bad things happen, Anthony…very bad things. (I’m beginning to become a little concerned about this sadistic streak I’ve uncovered in myself, lol!) Before readers become too upset with me, however, I’d just like to point out that the Grigori Legacy is not a trilogy and there will be a fourth book!!!

You can follow linda on Twitter @lindapoitevin, and “like” her page on Facebook, or go direct to her website for updates on all of her projects.  GWYNNETH EVER AFTER is available in e-book form at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

STEVE B. HOWELL, Author - Interview

In June, Hadrosaur Productions published A KEPLER’S DOZEN: Thirteen Stories About Distant Worlds That Really Exist, a science fiction anthology co-edited by Steve B. Howell and David Lee Summers.  In this second of two interviews, I talk to co-editor Steve B. Howell about the anthology and about the actual Kepler Mission.

Dr. Steve B. Howell is currently the project scientist for the NASA Kepler Space telescope. Kepler was launched in 2009 with a goal to discover planets orbiting other stars – exoplanets – using the transit technique. Dr. Howell is a highly distinguished astronomer having worked in the field for over 25 years. He has been a university professor, built instruments for the NASA Space Shuttle, worked as a scientist at the Kitt Peak National Observatory, and now is the science head for NASA’s most scientifically and publicly visible mission, Kepler. He is the author of over 600 scientific publications, numerous popular and technical articles, and has written and edited 8 books on astronomy and astronomical instrumentation. Dr. Howell is highly involved with informal and formal scientific education for kids to adults and as an entertaining speaker, he is often asked to talk as various functions both professionally and publically. He currently lives in Redwood City, CA where he loves to hike, prepare gourmet meals, and play blues music.

ANTHONY: What is your current role with the Kepler mission?

STEVE: I am the Project Scientist for the Kepler mission. As project scientist, it is my job to get the most science out of the Kepler mission. The job is a sort of overseer of the science for the entire mission. The work includes science for both exoplanets and work on stars themselves.

Stellar astrophysics using Kepler data, for example, studies of interacting binary stars, pulsating stars, rotations of stars as measured by watching starspots on their surface, has been very exciting as well. I work at such tasks as getting astronomers around the world involved in using the data we have collected for a variety of science purposes and to make sure we get the funding we need from NASA to accomplish our goals.
ANTHONY: Can you tell us a little about the original intent and time-span of the mission?

STEVE: The mission was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-size planets orbiting stars similar to our sun. The mission life time was originally 3.5 years but was extended to 4 years.

ANTHONY: How does the camera function?

STEVE: The camera is a 16 million pixel large format array of digital detectors. The array is about 16 inches on a side and consists of 42 separate large charge-coupled detectors. These are similar to the cameras in a cell phone only much, much better quality and tremendously larger. Kepler states at one field of view in the sky all the time. The camera has no shutter so reads out the images constantly. At NASA Ames Research Center, where I work, we use sophisticated software and a supercomputer to search all the data to look for small drops in light from any star that might indicate an exoplanet has passed in front of the star (a transit event).

ANTHONY: It seems like there’s the potential for an exorbitant amount of data to be collected. How is that all transferred back to Earth?

STEVE: There is indeed a tremendous amount of data collected and sent back to Earth. Once a month, the spacecraft turns to point an antenna toward the earth and we use about 20-24 hours of time to transfer all the data back to the ground.

ANTHONY: What’s involved in analyzing the data? I guess I’m asking how you know what’s going on in each of the systems you’re investigating.

STEVE: Each star we observe, over 150,000 of them, has its light curve examined in great detail. A light curve is simply a measure of the star brightness over time. We observe each star every 30 minutes and produce a record of that stars brightness every 30 minutes for days to weeks to years. Each measurement is looked at by our software system to see if there is a chance that the star has dimmed just enough and in the correct way to indicate a possible transit by a planet orbiting that star.

ANTHONY: How many exo-planets have been identified since the mission started?

STEVE: Kepler has found over 3500 exoplanet candidates, of which we believe that 90-90% are certainly real exoplanets. They range in size from about that of our moon to larger than Jupiter. Most are small in the 2-5 earth radius size range.

As we examine more of the data, smaller planets, similar to Earth-size, will be discovered and we expect to end up with hundreds of exoplanets near the size of our earth.

ANTHONY: There’s a distinct naming convention for stars and planets identified through the mission, correct?

STEVE: Yes, it is simple. The first planet we found that we could absolutely confirm as a planet we called Kepler 1b. The next was Kepler 2b and so on. The “b” is used to designate that we are talking about the planet in orbit about a star and not the star itself. So far, we are up to naming over 100 confirmed exoplanets.

ANTHONY: One of the things I liked about the format of A Kepler’s Dozen was the introduction to each story, which included hard data on the stars and planets the authors set their stories on or near. How much input did you provide to authors in terms of choosing stars to write about?

STEVE: The book had one firm rule – each story had to be about a real Kepler discovered and confirmed exoplanet. The authors were given the details of the planets they choose to write about and had to stay scientifically true to those data in their story. I believe this is the first such science fiction book that uses real exoplanets.

Steve B. Howell

ANTHONY: I think that’s correct. Was there any thought of including even more planetary or system data with the stories?

STEVE: Each author was free to include whatever data they wished about the planet or planets they chose for their story. Some stories simply name the planet as a destination others use more information to develop the story.

ANTHONY: Tell us a bit about your own story in the collection, “A Mango and Two Peanuts.”

STEVE: Well, that story formed in my head soon after David and I agreed to work on this anthology. Kepler 37 was just discovered and we were really busy working on the science paper to announce it. There was a sort of race as to what would come out first – the science paper or the Anthology? The science paper won by 3 weeks.

The hard part was the ending. If you read the story you may see that a number of possible endings are possible. I think I choose a rather unusual one, certainly one that fits me well. I tried to integrate a number of favorite topics, persons, and other information into the story using them as spring boards toward the story line.

ANTHONY: I identified a bit with several of the characters in the story, the ones who know they are part of something bigger but don’t really understand the science behind the mission. Do you find that’s a normal thing when dealing with missions the size of most NASA projects?

STEVE: Yes, this is a realistic view of some of the players in real missions. The work on a space mission in very complex and involves hundreds of people from engineers to software programmers to astronomers like me. At each stage, each person’s contribution is important and taken together they make it all work. Some folks are more in tune with the science and some are not, but all are crucial parts of the whole. I am blessed to have such a great team working on the Kepler mission

ANTHONY: The mission has faced some challenges with the craft’s reaction wheels. How does this impact the mission going forward?

STEVE: Indeed! In fact, as of May 2013, just about when our book was released, Kepler lost its second of four reaction wheels. The collection of science data may be finished for the exoplanet part of the mission, but we are exploring ways to revive the reaction wheels and to look at what other science mission the telescope might be able to do. This work in on-going and we should know the answers by end of summer.

ANTHONY: What do the reaction wheels do, and what makes them particularly hard to fix?
STEVE: Reaction wheels are used to point the Kepler telescope very precisely. This precise pointing allows us to collect very precise photometry, giving us the ability to detect the small (<1%) drop in light from a star as a planet passes in front during a transit.

ANTHONY: And my usual closing question: What is your favorite book, and what would you say to someone who hasn’t read it to convince them that they should?

STEVE: Wow! This is tough. I read a lot and on many different topics. I’ll stick to Sci Fi for this answer. My favorite Scifi Book (so far) is The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells (1897) because he used real physics principles and the possibility of what we might be able to do with them to create his “monster”. It was one of my early scifi reads as well and that probably adds to the interest. I think the simplicity of the principle and the human condition story that ensues are good elements to make one think as they read along.

You can learn even more about the Mission at NASA’s Kepler Website. You can order print copies of A KEPLER’S DOZEN directly from Hadrosaur Productions, or find the ebooks on Smashwords.

And you can read my interview with Steve’s co-editor, David Lee Summers, by clicking on the little link at the bottom of this post that takes you to the previous interview.