Ronin Writer

Yes, we’re baaaaack.  It’s a been a hiatus, I know, but this summer has been devoted to craft, connections, and career building.  After a tremendous experience at the Odyssey Writing Workshop, I came home fresh and motivated to attend OSFest 2, the Omaha Science Fiction Education Society’s second annual science fiction convention, whereat I was pleased to meet Marcus Pelegrimas, a fellow Omaha-based author, whose novel series Skinners has just debuted from EOS Books. We participated in a panel for writers on avoiding the biggest mistakes that novice writers make, and the panel went extremely well, even generating compliments afterContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #51 – Marcus Pelegrimas

Marking a milestone here on Blogging the Muse, our Fiftieth Author Interview (ta daaaahh!), we have a very special treat, at least for me. See, I’ve been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for quite some time (still some of the best TV writing anytime, anywhere), so when I heard that Amber Benson–the actor who played the good witch Tara on Buffy, also a ground-breaking role as Willow’s love interest–had just published a new mass-market urban fantasy novel, Death’s Daughter, I didn’t waste any time contacting her PR firm. Of course, I was delighted when she agreed to beContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #50 – Amber Benson

Giles Kristian has led an “unconventional life.” Ex-rock’n’roll-star with the boy band Upside Down, he has sung for H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, performed with Eric Clapton, Shirley Bassey, the Back Street Boys, and Meatloaf.  As a copywriter, he has worked for marketing and ad agencies. As a model, he’s appeared on posters and TV for Panasonic, Canon, and Magnum Ice Cream. He has even played semi-pro soccer.  With that kind of a wildly varied past, he sounds a lot like a writer, too. His debut novel Raven: Blood Eye was released this February by Transworld Publishing, a division ofContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #49 – Giles Kristian

Janni Lee Simner’s Young Adult novel, Bones of Faerie, was released this January by Random House, but she’s been writing and selling short stories for readers of all ages for some time, with over thirty publications in pro markets, including Realms of Fantasy and The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and anthologies such as Chicks in Chainmail, and the short fiction podcasts Pseudopod and Escapepod. In other existences, she was born on a pirate ship, caravaned across the Sahara, and perused the stacks of the Library of Alexandria for priceless nuggets of forgotten lore.

Jaye Wells is one of those authors who, finally, after years of resisting the pull that had been built into her from birth, succumbed to the creative instinct and launched herself into fiction writing well into adulthood. Just like so many of us who choose this path, for her the need to string words together in some semblance of entertaining order is strong, and she does it with a compelling new urban fantasy character, Sabina Kane, and a ballsy sense of humor. As she describes in her blog, “How did you cultivate such a wicked sense of humor?  I madeContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #47 – Jaye Wells

Author of eighteen novels and two short story collections, Janny Wurts has been around fantasy literature for a long time, from her best-selling Empire series, co-written with Raymond Feist to two fantasy series of her own, The War of Light and Shadow and The Cycle of Fire. But she is also an accomplished artist and painter, and that is where yours truly first encountered her talent, on book covers and in fantasy art collections.  All that, and she’s also a musician, formally trained in the highland bagpipes, among other instruments.  How much more creative could one person be?