Interview with Author April M Reign

Here's an interview with the prolific and popular April M Reign by M Joseph Murphy. April commented on this interview afterwards on her blog: "I’m partial to this interview because Joseph took the time to ask me personal questions that relate to ME, MY KIDS, MY WRITING and MY BOOK PROMOTIONS!" (Emphasis is hers.)

April M. Reign is the author of several fan-favorite series (e.g. Dhellia Series, Mancini Saga, Disciples of the Damned Series, etc.) I met her on Twitter. However, after following her on Facebook I became a huge fan. Not just of her writing, but of the way she interacts with her fans.

And her fans love her. I wanted to find out how she was so prolific and how she managed her brand. I was fortunate enough to be granted an interview.

1. You are very prolific. From the looks of it, you have 5 series (including HASH, book 1 in the Imprint Trilogy), several standalone books and you’re also branching out into horror. What’s your secret for getting so much work done?

My secret is consistency. Every day, I sit in front of my laptop and I write. I may only write 200 words (on a bad day) or 3000 words (on a good day) but there is never a day that goes by when I don’t write. Consistency combined with my overly active imagination gives me the foundation to create new storylines and constantly provide new books for my readers.

2. With so many projects on the go, is it difficult keeping your stories straight? Have you ever mistakenly put a character into the wrong series?

I don’t usually put a character into the wrong series but I do have a tendency to mix 3rd and 1st person narrative. I’ve written three of my series in 1st person and two in 3rd person. At times, it gets confusing. (smile)

As far as keeping my stories straight, (Laugh) I have to reread each book in a series before I can write the next one, so that I keep the voice of my characters the same. With so many series going at once, I find this is the best way to keep it all straight in the chaos that I call my…creative mind. 

3. You are a very proud mother. What do you think is the greatest lesson you’ve been able to teach your sons? What’s the greatest lesson they have taught you?

Yes, I am a very proud mother of two amazing sons. Although, I’ve taught my boys many lessons in life, I’d have to say one in particular stands out above the rest… Finding and following their dreams.  Hard work, perseverance and determination are important factors in achieving their dreams and making them reality.  I’ve tried to lead them by example. 

They have taught me a thousand different things. But if I had to choose one, I’d say they’ve taught me the importance of being patient.

4. You also have very devoted fans: almost 25,000 on Twitter, over 3,000 on Facebook, and you have comments on all your blog posts. Does that put more pressure on you creatively or does it inspire you to work harder?

Both! I have supportive, amazing readers. They’ve watched me grow as an author. I can honestly say that my readers inspire me to work harder, and create different worlds where they can truly get lost. 

Of course, that also puts creative pressure on me, but I thrive in the midst of pressure.


 

5. “The Dhellia Series Fun Video” is a superb video. Very simple and yet highly polished and professional. Who did the video and what was the process like for you? What do you think makes for good video promotion?

Well, I’m not an expert on video promotion. One day, I was browsing the internet, and I saw this cool thing called a whiteboard video used as advertisement. I searched high and low for someone to create this video, but every company I researched had prices that ranged from $1500.00 to $10,000.00. That was certainly out of my price range for promotional tools. Then I found a person on a discount website that could do the video for me at a reasonable price. 

I love the video and it gives The Dhellia Series a thirty-second opportunity to shine. 

6. Lastly, if you could give fellow writers one piece of advice on how to promote their products, what would it be?

Be consistent with writing. One published story is an accomplishment, but a reader who enjoys your work will want to read more than one story. Are you giving them a selection? Sometimes individuals will wrap themselves up in promoting one story and they will forget to write the next. Your name is your brand, write the next story and your fans/readers will follow you.

Links:

April M. Reign's Website
April M. Reign's Amazon Author Page
April M. Reign's Goodread Page
April M. Reign on Smashwords
April M. Reign on Twitter
April M. Reign on Facebook

Luke Bellmason Interview, Part One

Here's part one of M Joseph Murphy's interview with Luke Bellmason:

I met Luke Bellmason through our mutual friend Jae Blakney. She posted the preface to Canterbury Tales on her blog. I was immediately impressed by the quality of writing. Thankfully, Luke and I have talked several times and he recently agreed to an in-depth interview. Here is Part 1.

  

In your preface you discuss the process of coming up with Canterbury Tales. I think it’s a valuable story for young writers. Did you have someone give you helpful advice when you started writing? If so, who was it and what did they say?

I can't think of any one person who gave me advice when I started writing because I don't think I told anybody I was doing it! I was one of those writers who was scared to show my work to anyone because they might not like it. I am still like that and I imagine it's a natural thing not to want to hear criticism but I didn't even give my work to my friends to read.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to join a writing group and it covered everything you needed to know from fiction, to writing articles, to how newspaper stories are written, to poetry, to romance, to short stories to novels. I can remember reading out a story I'd written for the first time to the group. It was a ghost story about a submarine and it was quite 'atmospheric'. I read it out to the class and it was the very first time anyone had heard my work. A woman at the front of the class said she had been 'transported away' to the place I was describing and she could see the rolling waves, the rain and the dripping walls. I think that was the moment I realised the power that writing could have. Unfortunately, I had neglected to give the story an ending so she said she was dying to know what happened next!

That was the one experience I'd say that made me realise that being an author gave you a tremendous power to create anything you wanted inside people's heads. After that I was hooked, and even though sometimes I feel like life would be a lot easier if I didn't have this little writing demon nagging at me day and night to "sit down and write", I know I'll never be able to give it up.

Once you become a writer, you can never look at the world the same way again. Wherever you go and whatever you do it gives you a purpose; you're an observer, you get to look at things and think about why they are the way they are, what they would be like if they were different.

One if the other major events in my early writing days was finding Douglas Adams. When I first saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on TV, the old 80s series, I realised that I was Ford Prefect. I'd always suspected that I wasn't originally from this planet, so the idea of being a researcher for some intergalactic guide book really appealed to me. That and the fact that Ford (like his creator) managed to be a writer without actually doing that much writing. For Ford (and Douglas) the experiencing of things was far more important than the writing about them bit.

Sorry, I seem to have drifted somewhat from the original question.

No. That’s a perfect answer. In your introduction you mention a video game called Elite. Have you tried replaying it recently?

Yes, I did play a game called 'Oolite' a few years ago, which is a freeware version of Elite for the Mac. It's been updated and expanded quite a bit and has a great modding community, but it has a mode which lets you play it as the original Elite. What you tend to forget is how boring it was! Compared to modern games, there's really very little going on, so much of the game is in your own imagination. That's also the key to good writing I think. The more you cram into someone's head, the less work the reader, or the player, has to do which means they're less engaged.

I often wonder if playing Elite had an influence on my choice of career because I ended up as a truck driver! I even started learning to fly a helicopter about two years ago and there's a lot of that piloting, trucking kind of vibe going on in the my stories. A lot of the stories involve sitting trapped inside a box, and yet being free to roam the galaxy.

Are you aware that Elite has a sequel coming out (Elite: Dangerous). If so, do you plan on playing it?

Yes! In fact I found out about Elite: Dangerous from Twitter and I saw the Kickstarter page the day after it ended. There was an option on there to buy the rights to publish an official Elite book, but I just missed out! So I could have quite easily made 'The Canterbury Tales' into an Elite book, and it would have been nice to have been part of the big launch next year when the game and all the other books come out. The publicity would have been handy too. In another way though I'm glad I missed the deadline because a) I need the money for flying and b) this way I get total creative control.

From what I read the new game is everything we've been waiting for all these years. I played the original Elite sequel, Frontiers, but found it totally unplayable. They had given it realistic physics and made an astronomically accurate galaxy and solar systems, which was incredibly impressive in its own way, but it totally ruined space combat. The speed of everything was all relative to the nearest planet or star and enemy ships would whip past you at thousands of miles per hour, then circle around and whip back again just as fast. You couldn't even hit them!

So I understand that this new Elite has gone in for more of a classic feel, with much more detailed planetary systems, economics and political systems, and everything is supposed to be tied in with one online persistent universe, so when a system decides to build a new station, it will affect the commodity prices for the construction materials in the surrounding systems and so on. Wars can cause humanitarian disasters which will put the food prices up, all kinds of complex interactions will be going on all the time.

What interests me about all of this is the law of 'unintended consequences' and what happens when you let real people loose on an open world. Emergent behaviour is certain to create new and fascinating things in the game which the designers hadn't anticipated. I love all of that. I played EVE Online for a bit and liked how the stories in the game came purely from the player interactions rather than being put there by the designers.

One of the stories I'm working on now for Volume 2, the Miner's Tale, is based on my brief experiences inEVE Online. If Elite: Dangerous can somehow mix the chaos of an online game with the structure of the old Elite, it will be awesome.

If I remember correctly, you’ve never actually read the original Canterbury Tales.  Do you plan on reading it now?

I fear that the original Canterbury Tales is totally impenetrable to anyone who hasn't studied the medieval period and knows how to read “olde English”. Plus the fact it's poetry. I read somewhere that it wasn't just one of the first books published, but one of the first published in English. At the time, books were in German, French or Latin, and the English people spoke was far removed from what we speak now, it really is another language. Remember also that not many people would have been able to read or write when the Canterbury Tales came out.

I suppose in a way, the world of medieval England is as far removed from us now as the world of starships, faster-than-light travel and aliens, so maybe there's a neat sort of parallel.

I did find an updated version of the Canterbury Tales translated into a more readable kind of English, the Percy Mackaye version if anyone wants to find it. I could see myself reading this at some point, though it's still quite hard going. I actually based the language of the 'story-teller' in my book on the kind of language used in this 19th century version.

LINK: Canterbury Tales Kindle Version Translation by Percy Mackaye

The main problem in understanding the book for me would be not knowing much about that time period. The church was a much more powerful force in people's lives and a few of the characters in the original stories are related to religion. In a way, it would be like reading a science-fiction story with all the exposition removed, which might be an interesting exercise.

History fascinates me and I never took much interest in it at school. One of the hardest things about history is forgetting everything that you know and trying to imagine what it was like for people at the time. It's so easy for us to look at major events, like world war two or the sinking of the titanic for example, and look at them with hindsight. People knew and believed different things in the past and that shaped their actions. It's one of the things that annoys me about 'steampunk'. It's lazy history; it doesn't bother to filter out the modern world, it simply assumes everything was the same then as it is now. All steampunk is basically the 'Flintstones' to me.

 Part Two of the Interview Will Be Posted Thursday

For My Review of Canterbury Tales: Click Here

Purchase Canterbury Tales Now on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

 
 

What's with All the Guest Posts?

This time last year, pretty much every post in this blog had to come from me, because I hardly knew any other writers, and the ones I did know didn't write very much. Since then, I've met a lot of great writers, mostly on Twitter. A few of them in particular keep teaching me things I find very helpful, or explaining important points much better than I could. There's also the fact that I've noticed my readers seem happiest (or at least most engaged) when I post frequently, and that can be time-consuming. So for all these reasons, I've decided to step back from being the primary writer for this blog, and become something more like an editor-in-chief.

This means you'll no longer see the words 'guest post' in the titles to the entries by other people, but I will still introduce them so you know who they are and can check out their websites, books or whatever.

Feedback is always appreciated, whether it agrees or disagrees. In fact, I believe honest discussion among people of differing viewpoints is one of the most effective tools for creativity and problem-solving.

If you're a fiction writer, or you have something to say that would benefit fiction writers, maybe you would like to write a post. Feel free to leave a comment on any post or email me at MaryJeddoreBlakney@yahoo.com.

Guest Post: So You Published. Now What?

I liked how Suckers Guild co-founder M Joseph Murphy announced the launch of his new book Council of Peacocks on his blog, so I got permission to share it with you:

My book, Council of Peacocks, is finished. I'm about to upload it to Amazon. Everyone tells me I should feel proud, that I've accomplished something amazing. But I don't feel it.

Surprisingly, I'm a little bit numb to it all. I keep wondering why I'm not jumping up and down and celebrating. Maybe it's because, for me, the publishing part isn't the accomplishment. And it's not about the money either. My expectations are very realistic. The average indie author only sells a few hundred copies. That's about all I'm expecting.

For me, the most important thing is to have people read the book and enjoy it. Maybe I'll jump up and down at my first positive review. Before indie publishing became a reality, I always expected to get my first rejection slip. That was how I would know I was a real author. So maybe it will be my first bad review. Maybe it will be my book showing up on LousyBookCovers.com.

Here's what I do know: now that I'm published I will not be watching sales numbers on KDP. Would Stephen King lurk in Barnes & Noble waiting for someone to pick up his book? No. What he did is what I'm going to do: keep on writing.

Young Stephen King

Most experts will tell you the way to make money as a writer is to write a crap load of things. I'm not going to waste too much time promoting Council of Peacocks right now. It will sell the more people become aware of me. I'll feel more excited when I have 3 or 4 books published. Maybe.

Truth is, the only time I get really excited is when I'm writing. All the other stuff - the promotion, the editing, working with cover artists and beta readers - all of that is a necessary evil. My passion is doing the work.

So what should I do know that I'm published? I'm going to celebrate by doing what I do best.  I'm going to write.

Guest Post: Inspiration 101

Today's guest blogger is Luke Bellmason:

Inspiration 101

or

Where it all began…

Sometimes people ask writers, "where do you get your ideas from?" Joyce Grenfell always used to reply with "If I knew, I'd go there more often." If you're a writer chances are you've had inspiration hit you from one of many millions of possible directions, but I'd be willing to bet that none of you has ever had an idea for a three volume collection of short stories from quite the same unlikely source as I did.

I remember very clearly where the first idea for what became 'Canterbury Tales' came from, and back then it wasn't even an idea for a book at all.

I was sitting in the canteen at work, which is a place drivers get sent to when there's no work, or no trucks, or when a load isn't ready, or when they just don't have anything for you to do. This is when you're supposed to wait, and by wait I'm talking about two, three, four or maybe even five hours. This was back in the day before I carried an iPad everywhere, or had a portable computer of any kind. I just had a bunch of blank forms and a pen. So I decided to make a board game.

I don't know why I picked a space trading and exploration game as an idea for a board game, but I think I wanted to make it something simple. Some of my favourite board games involvled 'resource management', like Settlers of Catan, and I had played a lot of video games which used this theme, all of them in the shadow of the greatest of them all: ELITE. So I knew all about the mechanics of the game right from the start; players would fly around discovering planets, fighting pirates and police (if they became criminals), buying commodities, shipping them somewhere and then selling them. Then they would spend the money they'd made upgrading their ship.

It sounded so simple, but Elite: The Board Game, as I started to call it, was incredibly complex and involved. Every tiny detail, such as how pirates got spawned, how they moved, how they attacked the player, took months of working out. Then there was the economic structure which meant that riskier commodities such as Narcotics and Firearms could make more money for the player than Food or Textiles. Just like the video game, players could end up with a criminal rating which would then mean the authorities could come after them if they entered Corporate or Democracy systems, but Feudal and Anarchy systems had no police. Then again, criminal players had a bounty placed on them so other players could track them down and kill them for their reward. Then there were the many, many combat systems I tried to make, each more complicated than the last.

It seemed like each new layer of functionality I added to the game made everything a lot more complicated. I had some pretty cool ideas in there, but the problem was that playing the game to completion, ie a player earning enough victory points to be declared 'ELITE', didn't just take hours it took days. Most games were never completed. I started to look around for a solution that would speed things up a bit.

Then I was at a board gaming convention and met some guys from Games Workshop. They had been updating the old classic 'Talisman', which was a game I used to play when I was a teenager. I sat down at their table and spent a couple of hours playing this new version. One of the mechanics I liked was the character cards. These gave each player different skills, starting stats and strengths. I started to think about how different characters in my Elite game could start out with different ships, equipment and objectives.

Instead of everyone chasing victory points, I thought about objectives for each character. The Bounty Hunter would get points for killing pirates and hunting down players with bounties on them. The Pirate would earn points for killing players and stealing their cargo. The Miner would earn points for finding asteroid fields and mining minerals. From there it was a simple step to coming up with six character 'classes' and having a 'good' and 'evil' version of each.

Another game which served as inspiration at this point was 'Chrononauts', which had a little story card handed out to the players at the start. What if the characters in my game had a 100 words of set-up related to what they did and then a mission card which they picked up during the game which told the next part of their story? I took a new notebook and wrote down some ideas. This notebook became the basis for what would eventually, years and years later, become Canterbury Tales.

I'm not quite sure when my project crossed over from being a board game into a book, but I think I became far more interested in the characters than in the game. The board game was so huge and unplayable that I pretty much abandoned it, with occassional prompts from my gaming group to dust it off to play test again, but the 'game' of playing it became 'let's make dozens of suggestions about how to fix this' rather than the game itself. It wasn't fun to play something so broken, which I understood, but which everyone else thought could be improved.

The notebook of those twelve characters on the other hand, became a well of inspiration which really had a lot of potential, and I was more adept at fixing the problems of plot and story than I was at fixing the mechanics of an interactive game.

Indie Writer Professionalism

One of my favorite times of the day is the hour I set aside for reading. The truism 'you can't write if you don't read' gives me the perfect excuse to lose myself in the magic of all those wonderful books on my Kindle shelf.

Theoretically. What really happens is usually more like this:

I climb the ladder into the loft just under the roof of my family's cabin. I arrange the pillows and, if it's chilly, throw a fluffy featherbed over my legs. I open the Kindle app on my netbook and select that indie book I'd downloaded, that I've been dying to get my teeth into. I convert the netbook to a tablet, lean back against the pillows and start to read.

And it's awful. So I go back to the bookshelf and pick out another book, and it's just as bad. I end up spending the whole hour looking for a book instead of reading one. Sometimes the beginning is boring and I plow through, telling myself to be patient and see if it gets better, but it doesn't. Sometimes the characters don't feel like people, or feel like six iterations of the same person. Sometimes the text rambles until I'm lost, or the sentences just don't make sense. Sometimes the meaning is clear but the narrative is so hiccuppy it takes work to trudge through a page.

Sound familiar? It probably wouldn't take many hours like that to make me swear off indie books and stick with the imprints, except that I believe in indie publishing: I think it's the future of the industry. And one of those indie books is mine. No wonder it's so hard to get readers to take me seriously. No wonder my friends look so surprised when they read my novel.

But my experiences with indie reading also force me to ask: how good is my own book? I'm not worried about the plot or the characters. I have confidence in my writing voice, and was lucky to have beta readers with experience, expertise and honesty. But the reviewers may have been comparing my novel to a batch of indies like the one I described above, beta readers aren't copy editors, and I'm a terrible proofreader of my own work because I tend see what I meant to type.

One solution I've seen proposed (often by free-lance editors, of course) is to hire an editor. That's a great idea, but first we have to figure out where the inventor parked his time machine (somewhere in the borough of Richmond, outside London, of course). I think most of us right now are lucky to have enough money to sleep indoors and keep our children clothed. But of course, after our professionally edited books go blockbuster, we'll have enough to hire editors. So we just have to run to the future ATM real quick, and we'll get right on it.

As Star Trek's Captain Picard used to say, "Options?"

Three of us indie writers were talking about this problem on Twitter, and decided to look into forming an indie writers' guild. A few of the potential benefits:

• Pooling our strengths (and compensating for each other's weaknesses). For example, I'm good at characterization and grammar, and would gladly trade services in these areas for help with marketing, cover art or shoring up a sagging plot.
• Working more efficiently. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to have thousands of individuals stumbling around in isolation, teaching ourselves the arts of book formatting, cover graphics, personal branding, blogging, social media marketing, video creation and whatever else. If we combine our efforts, we should all have more time to write.



Photo: writetodone.com

• Raising our reputation. It used to be acceptance by a recognized publishing house that distinguished the quality authors from the dabblers. But now that the recognized houses have pretty much turned into a handful of mega corporations that avoid debut authors as much as possible, it's time for a new method of distinction. Membership in a guild with reasonable standards of professionalism would seem to serve that purpose nicely.

It all starts with the first step, of course, and that's finding out what you think. So we created a survey. The more indie writers who take this survey, the better the guild will be, so please take it and invite your friends. It's only ten questions.

Survey: What Indie Writers Need

Fiction Writer Spotlight: Steven Ramirez

I'm considering starting an 'occasional series,' to borrow a newspaper term, in which I help you get to know the writers mentioned in my New Year's Day post "Fiction Writers to Watch."

So I'm starting with Steven Ramirez because his short story "Walker" is going to be free this week.

Among Steven's works are a screenplay, Killers, and several short stories. His short story "Walker" will be free on Thursday and Friday (January 10th and 11th) in the US.

You can connect with Steven on Twitter (@GrimBlazer) or Facebook (www.Facebook.com/GrimBlazer), or through his blog, Glass Highway.

Fiction Writers to Watch

Happy New Year!

I thought it would be fun and helpful to list of some of the fiction writers I'll be watching in 2013. I'd provide links to talented unpublished or indie writers who haven't 'made it' yet. But when I started jotting down names I realized that what I was undertaking wasn't a blog post, it was a book project. So I'll just list a random five writers today and keep adding more throughout the year. Please keep in mind that there's no significance to the order of appearance here:

Thanks to Bill Watterson/Universal Press Syndicate

• Wilabea94
• Steven Ramirez
• Sara Harricharan
• Leeland Artra
• Bronwyn Cair
• Billie Thomas
• M Joseph Murphy
• Michael Lane
• Cathrine Garnell
• John Ludden
• Mark O'Brien

But it'll be so much better if we all do it. Please help me add names to this list. Just enter their names/URL's in the comments box. Thank you.