Interview with J.A. Beard

Today I'm interviewing an author friend of mine, J.A. Beard. J.A. and I met online in a critique group, and I fell in love with his writing style. I'm happy to have him here today.

Vicki: Tell us a little about yourself.

J.A.: I'm happily married with two children. I'm a bit of a restless soul, so I've lived several places and tried my hand at difference careers including computer programming and a stint in the USAF. Currently, though, I'm in a PhD program for microbiology. So, when I'm not writing or with my family, I'm in a lab.

Vicki: When and why did you start writing?

J.A.: I’ve been writing on and off for ten years. I began writing as a way to sate some of my creative urges and deal with the story ideas I had floating around in my head. When I was younger, I was involved in the table-top role-playing scene. As that involves character creation and world creation, it satisfied my creative urges. Years passed and I played those kinds of games less, but I still had this desire to create characters and be involved with telling their stories. I started experimenting with writing.

First, it was only short stories. I didn’t feel I had the skill level to pull off a novel. I participated in National Novel Writing Month a couple of times in the early 2000s. The novellas I produced weren’t publishable, but the experiences did help me get over my concerns about my ability to produce longer works. I wrote here and there over the years until finally buckling down a few years ago and getting serious about my writing. I started writing novels and joined writing groups to improve my craft.

Vicki: What is your book about?

J.A.: THE EMERALD CITY is a loose modern YA urban fantasy re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz.

Kansas teen Gail Dorjee has tried to escape from the pain of her parents' death by retreating into a hard shell of anger and sarcasm.

Her aunt and uncle ship her off to an elite Seattle boarding school, Osland Academy where she spends her first day making enemies, including the school's most powerful clique, the Winged, and their leader, the ruthless Diana.

Social war and the school's uptight teachers are only mild annoyances. Mysterious phone outages, bizarre behavioral blocks, and strange incidents suggest Osland is focused on something much more sinister than education.

Now Gail has to survive at the school with a pretty pathetic assortment of potential allies: her airhead roommate, Lydia, and, Leandra, a cowardly victim of the Winged. There's also the small matter of the handsome but cold Nick, a boy who seems interested in Gail. He just happens also to be Diana's boyfriend.

Vicki: Who is your favorite character?

J.A.: I have two really. Gail’s my first favorite. She’s feisty yet vulnerable. She’s a good person, for the most part, but far from perfect. I’m not so fond of anti-heroes in fiction, so I worked hard to create a realistic, flawed character that still is a heroine and not an anti-heroine.

Lydia, Gail’s roommate, is my second favorite. She’s a bit of a comic relief character who Gail calls the “Queen of Sunshine”. She has a quirk of constantly screwing up famous quotes, though she does play an important “serious” role in the plot as well. There’s a nice little contrast with her as well. She’s normally a bit of an airhead, but sometimes her weird thought processes let her figure out things that pass by others.

I’m a very cynical person, so it was a fun challenge to write a completely non-cynical character.

Vicki: Are any of your characters based on real-life people?

J.A.: Not really. Although I try to draw on my own experiences and people I've known in generating character psychology, there's no particular direct relationship between any character in THE EMERALD CITY and anyone I've known or read about.

Vicki: As authors, we often throw horrible stuff at our characters to create tension and drama, and to see how our character is going to react. In this book, what's the meanest thing you do to a character?

J.A.: Well, arguably, the cruelest thing happens before the book even starts: Gail's parents dying. Gail's also forced to confront the reality of that death in a particularly cruel way near the end of the book. There's also a phobic character, Leandra, being forced to confront one of her main phobias in a particularly extreme way.

Vicki: Do you have another book you're working on?

J.A.: With the aid of my editor, I'm finishing up edits on two other projects scheduled for release in February and March respectively, A WOMAN OF PROPER ACCOMPLISHMENTS and MIND CRAFTER.

A WOMAN OF PROPER ACCOMPLISHMENTS is a slightly alt-history (sorry Americans, we lost the Revolution in this timeline) sweet Regency paranormal romance.

MIND CRAFTER is a fantasy story focused around a young telepath who gets drawn into a dangerous conspiracy involving a religious cult.

Though I'm also working on the sequels to the above, I'm also working on a historical thriller planned for release in the fall. This story will be set in Heian era of Japanese history.

I'm "cheating" a bit in that I have several novels I'm releasing this year, but most of those manuscripts were completed previously and just in need of some editing.

Vicki: Do you have a blog or website?

J.A.: http://jabeard.com or riftwatcher.blogspot.com

Thanks for having me.

Guest Post by Cidney Swanson

Today I have the pleasure of having Cidney Swanson stop by my blog. She's just released a new book, Unfurl, and I'm thrilled to have her here as part of her blog tour.

Take it away Cidney!

Cidney: Hi Victorine! I’m so excited to be here today as part of my Unfurl Release Tour. I thought I’d share something today about how I got started writing full time.

It took two fifteen-year-old boys to convince me to follow my heart and start writing full time. Fifteen’s this great age. You’ve survived the battle arena of middle school and probably made it through your first year of high school. And in some part of you that maybe doesn’t hover on the surface, you know—absolutely know—that you can do something great.

Yeah, maybe a person or circumstance in your life has shoved that knowledge down to the deep end of the pool and tied it there with a big rock, but you still know it’s there, it’s true, and it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks because you know it.

Look around at the adults in your life: how many of them still know this, carry it around in their pockets? One? Two? Zero? We get old and we get tired and we forget that we ever felt this way once.  I mean, adults write sentences like “It’s never too old to be what you might have been” precisely because we have to see it spelled out in black and white to even remember what we knew at fifteen.

Four years ago I found Eragon by Christopher Paolini. I was standing in my Costco, looking at the books table (the coolest part of Costco.) As I browsed, I overheard these grandmas talking.

 “Wrote it when he was a teenager, and he’s a real nice kid. He home-schooled with one of my grandchildren.”

Well, you can bet that caught my attention. This gorgeous book was written by a teen? Whaaat? Anyway, I bought the book and loved it. And I thought to myself, Wow. This kid: he’s like, fifteen, and he didn’t have any issues with writing a freaking long book. He just did it. And then did it again.

That same year, I noticed another fifteen-year-old (my son) knocking out a couple of novels every couple of months. And I thought to myself: Wow. Where do you get that kind of belief in yourself and your abilities that lets you just do what you want to do?

And it’s like this light popped on, blinding me: when you’re a teenager, you know that you can do anything. Seriously, Teens. Can. Do. Anything. As a late-bloomer, I’m probably not the best person in the world to convince you of this fact, but look: someone else said it too! (Better than I did.)

So on March 20, 2009, I told myself: “No more ‘I’m-going-to-write-a-novel-someday;’ I need to just write. Like those fearless fifteen-year-olds. Forget ‘someday.’ This is someday.”

You know how adults or teachers say that their kids teach them so much? (Yeah, we do say that, and if you’re a teen and the adults in your own life aren’t saying it, that sucks—they should, because it’s true!) So anyway, it took a pair of undaunted teenage boys to teach me that if I wanted to do something bad enough, I needed to just start. Today. 

No matter what your age is: be that fifteen-year-old version of yourself.  And if you are fifteen? Do what you know you can do. Do it now before you get old and forgetful and busy doing things that don’t really matter to you anyway. Take it from a late-bloomer. Nuff said.

Thank you, Chris Paolini, for showing me that it’s okay to do what you dream of doing and that if you weren’t too young to do it, then maybe I wasn’t too old. And thanks to my son, the ‘JWS’ to whom I dedicated my first book. Because if it weren’t for him and Paolini and their teenager-ability to just do stuff, I wouldn’t be writing novels today.

And that would just be sad.

Thanks so much, everyone, for the chance to stop by and visit today! Come say hi anytime!

Linkies:

cidneyswanson at gmail dot com

http://cidneyswanson.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/cidneyswanson

http://twitter.com/#!/cidneyswanson

Books for sale: http://amzn.to/x8grXl

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/search?query=cidney+swanson

Librarything:http://www.librarything.com/author/swansoncidney

Guest Post by GM Barlean

Today I have a wonderful guest here on my blog. GM (Gina Marie) Barlean is stopping by to tell us a bit about herself and her book. I met Gina through a local writer's group. Not only is she an amazing person to know, she writes, she blogs and she makes the best gluten-free cookies. I've really enjoyed getting to know Gina, and I hope you do too.

Gina: Victorine, thank you so much for having me as your guest. Your support is truly appreciated.

Although I have written for years, my concentrated effort to write fiction began in 2009. I completed my first novel, Dead Blow, in the summer of 2010. I became a member of the Nebraska Writers Guild, participated in National Novel Writer's Month (Nanowrimo), and joined the Prairieland Romance Writers of Nebraska, that fall. When participating in Nanowrimo, I began writing the novel, Casting Stones, which I just published. I reached the goal of writing 50,000 words of this novel during Nanowrimo, and then went on to finish up the book by February of 2011. I spent the remainder of 2011 working on fine-tuning the book and I also took two different online writing courses. The process of finishing my book included many friends reading the book and helping me make it the best product it could be. In the spring of 2011 I attended an event called, Write Across Nebraska. At this event I met C. K. Volnek. C. K. (Charlie) later that year, invited me to join the Seward Writer's Group. C.K., myself and three other writers (Victorine Lieske, Kathy Gillmore, and Sabrina Sumsion) have also created another writing support group called, The Local Muse. This support has turned out to be the most important link in my chain to publishing. By November of 2011, the book was ready for professional editing, and then it was off to be published and printed.

It should be noted, as said above, I could never have written this book without the help of many friends, one of which was you Victorine. Victorine created the book cover for Casting Stones. She has also guided me along the way and answered so many questions regarding how to publish. I believe I am one of many who will tell you, Victorine is one of the most helpful people I've ever met. I also firmly believe that God has led me to all of the people who have helped me along the way, from my first reader, Donna Sturgeon (author of Millie's Rose) to my most recent relationship with my new editor, Carol Weber of carolscorrections.weebly.com/. Of course, my husband, family, and friends played an essential role as well, (specifically the hubs!).

Casting Stones is a dramatic fiction, set in Missouri and Nebraska during the years 1926 through 1945. It is a story about struggle and survival, retribution and redemption. If you wish to meet the characters, please visit my blog Moments of Clarity. Want a little free reading? I've written a short story prelude to the novel. The prelude gives a glimpse into the main characters and sets the stage for the trouble that will come. You can get a free copy of this short story either from my website: GMBarlean.com, or from Smashwords.com. Do you like movies? I have created a book trailer and posted it on Youtube.com. Just scroll down to see it. I think you will really enjoy watching this. A friend of mine, Rae Welch, created the original music for this short film, and it is perfect. The e-book for Casting Stones is available on Amazon, and Barnes and Nobel. Both of these sites offer a sample of the novel.

Thank you so much for allowing me to let your readers know about my book. I hope some of you will consider buying, Casting Stones.

I would like to give a free ebook copy of my debut novel, Casting Stones, to one lucky person who leaves a comment to this article. Check back to see who the winner is! Thank you for reading!