If you ever have the chance to meet Patricia Bray in person, one of your first thoughts will be, “Wow, here is a woman with some energy.” Patricia Bray was a guest lecturer at the Odyssey Writing Workshop this year, which is where yours truly met her.  With verve, humor, and enthusiasm, she offered an excellent discussion of Heroes and Sidekicks in fiction, how to do it, and how not to do it.  In her Sword of Change series, the viewpoint character is the sidekick, not the main character of the story, which leads to some interesting storytelling dynamics andContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #52 – Patricia Bray

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?

Over the course of this interview series, I have been pleased to include authors from across the English speaking world, the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand, even various islands in the Caribbean.  For this installment, I am pleased to offer an interview with our first Australian author, Karen Miller. Like so many authors who finally make it into that special realm of The Working Author Who Gets Paid Regularly, Karen has a personal history that includes numerous previous lives.  Her works include Star Wars and Stargate SG-1 novelizations, plus her own Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series, plus a secret pseudonymContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #45 – Karen Miller

So what does it take to be a freelance writer in the gaming industry?  Drive. Plus a deep love and commitment to the game in question.  Beginning writers and creative BFA/MFA graduates often agonize over a few hundred words at a time, unsuspecting that what it takes to succeed as a freelance writer often requires the production of tens of thousands of words at a shot, often in a ridiculously short window. Shawn Carman has produced vast quantities of game text, short fiction, continuing story lines, game rules, adventure scenarios, and more, with a cumulative word count into the multipleContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #44 – Shawn Carman

In accordance with what Jay Lake says below about his typical choice of attire, when we met he was wearing a shirt that looked like it was on fire. Definitely makes one stand out in a crowd of authors, particularly at World Con when authors are so thick on the ground. Since that time, I have put one of Jay Lake’s books in my two-foot tall stack of Books to be Read, and I hear comments on the Net and in Podosphere to the effect that, “This guy is pretty freakin’ good.”  He made a splash when his work startedContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #43 – Jay Lake