SAMPLE MEDIA INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

• Who or what inspired you to become an author?
• It took a few different sparks to encourage me to pursue a career as an author. In high school, one of my teachers told me she thought I had a natural talent for writing fiction. I don’t remember her name, I don’t remember anything I wrote in her class, and I hadn’t considered becoming an author until that day, but the encouragement endured. However, the idea quickly faded as a career option. I’m a juggler. At first inspection, you might guess that hobby had nothing to do with my career as an author but you’d be wrong. I’m the only juggler in the world who uses juggling patterns to help tell stories. It’s a tricky process to craft stories for juggling gigs because you’re somewhat imprisoned by a very limited amount of nouns and verbs – imagine improved object stories constrained to genre, gender, time period, and a one-room house enclosed by mustard yellow wallpaper. Despite the constraints, I loved the process – and the audience response.
• Around the same time, I started telling bedtime stories for my children and writing them down so I wouldn’t forget them. 177,000 words later, I started writing a novel on Wattpad to support my eldest daughter who was writing stories there. Soon, she surprised me by announcing my book was #9 on Wattpad. When I checked, I’d risen to #2 in fantasy. To maintain momentum, I wrote two chapters a week for four months when I somewhat-accidentally finished the book. Until Wattpad suffered a massive data crash, I was getting 1,000 reads a day. I was encouraged by those numbers so I published Moon 514 and started pursuing a full time career as an author.

• Who or what inspired your latest novel (Unproven)?
• An editor at WorldCon amicably complained that no one seemed interested in writing a book about a technological society battling a magical society. That theme was already brewing in Moon 514 so I started researching what other people had written on the subject, everything from “Who Wins: Valdemort or Han Solo?” posts to book reviews to various genre blurring ideas I found online. At the time (and after much consideration), I thought the only level of technology that offered an even playing field against a magic society would be steampunk-esque so I started envisioning how their conflict might begin. As you can see from the book cover, my answer came in the form of gliders. P.S. Gliders don’t offer much competition for dragons. After further thought, I found some ideas that would allow a magic society to be competitive with advanced technology so that is the basis of my upcoming technothriller-epic-fantasy-mashup-novel, Sea Dragon Apocalypse. I wish I’d written down the name of the editor who was making a plea for someone to write those books. It didn’t seem very impactful at the time but his comments led me to write (at least) two books and launch my writing career.

• How did you develop your plot and character for Unproven?
• Like many of my plot lines, the initial story of Unproven came from a painting I discovered. In the picture, a small group of people wander towards a gargantuan stack of bones (still in anatomical position but sticking out of the ground). That would never happen in real life without amber or tar or something … so, it had to be magical. Because this is how I think, I had to write the story of how that came to pass, how those bones came to be like that. That only provided the opening scene of Unproven but asking questions about that scene led me to a backstory and other details that ultimately allowed me to merge those ideas with the suggestion I’d received from that editor at WorldCon.
• As to character development, I recognized some holes in my game so I took David Farland’s Story Doctor course. I knew from previous experience that I could discovery write but I felt like I was missing emotional punch that I felt outlining could fix so I took Dave’s course. The course helped me develop a better system for outlining but what really helped me develop a more fulfilling plot for Unproven was looking at each supporting character and considering their aspirations and feelings about the protagonist and his story line.