The best feeling in the world for me is when I am reading a book and fall so completely into the story that I feel like I’m there. That feeling of being transported is why I wanted to be an author from a young age. I loved that sensation and want to create it for others. I work hard to suck my readers in, and some of the best compliments I receive about my books is readers telling me they didn’t want to leave the world I’ve created, or that the book can’t be long enough for their liking. Or that they read through the night and ended up going to work in zombie mode. Winning! 🙂 I started out writing historical fiction, and while the times and places I wrote about really existed, as we don’t (yet) have the ability to travel back in time, it is still a foreign landscape. The world-building was just as intricate and challenging for my historicals as the worlds I create for my fantasy and science fiction romance novels. I think that’s why I was able to move from historicals into fantasy and science fiction so easily. The world-building skill-set was the same….

THE THORNE CHRONICLES started out on a hot strip of the 405 in traffic, where heat-induced frustration made me blurt out, “I want to write a feminist Sleeping Beauty story with a mohawked punk 13th fairy! In a spiked leather jacket! And what if she gives the princess a bullshit detector?” It’s fair to observe that I was already planning to break a few genre conventions. There are punk fairies in a pre-industrial, pseudo-European medieval setting. Also, there is…okay, no, there is a lot of bullshit in that setting, and in fairytales in general, but that made me think about Princess Leia’s no-bullshit attitude in, well, all the films. Which pretty much settled me on the setting. Fiction set in space (space opera, SF, however one decides to parse out the definitions) deals with tech that looks like magic to most people anyway (FTL, wormholes, jump-gates, laser-beams, sentient machines, cybernetics). Also, aliens! Which at their heart, is what fairies are. As my fairies became xenos, and once upon a time started on a distant planet, I soon realized the difficulty would be to preserve the feel of the fairy tale. I needed magic (even if no one says oh, this…

Tell us a little about your latest project, the upcoming YA science fiction novel, DEVASTATION CLASS.  EM: The book is set in the distant future, with seven military cadets and seventy civilian students aboard a starship on a mission of science and learning. When most of the adults are off-ship, the ship is attacked by the Kastazi, a vicious enemy alien race thought vanquished. Our protagonists–best friends and cadets JD and Viv–are forced to make an impossible choice that will change their lives forever: obey their superiors and die, or mutiny to save the ship and the lives of everyone aboard. But that’s just the beginning. What at first looks like an obvious re-invasion by a former enemy turns out to be something much darker and shocking, and a mystery eons in the making will have to be unraveled for them to have any hope of surviving. GZ: Devastation Class is a multi-POV story, so we get to spend time in the heads of more than one character. Viv and JD are trying to succeed under the weight and long shadows of their war hero parents. There’s Nicholas, a cypher whose intentions and motivations are shrouded in mystery, and who…

Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Ian! Please introduce yourself and tell us about your latest sci-fi novel, ALIEN SECRETS. Well, I’m Ian Douglas, also known as William H. Keith, H. Jay Riker, and a few other names. Alien Secrets is the first book in the Solar Warden series.  Solar Warden, in real life, is a conspiracy theory about a top secret US government program of the same name, involving our government back-engineering crashed flying saucers, trading abductees for advanced technology, working with various alien species, and keeping it all hidden from the public. This is the first book in your new series, Solar Warden. What do you enjoy about starting a new series? What will readers find within the world you’ve built in ALIEN SECRETS? Unlike much of my SF writing, the Solar Warden series is set pretty much in the present day. While I get to imagine the various alien technologies available, I can also reference recent world events without having the characters think of them as ancient history.    There’s quite a bit of history throughout ALIEN SECRETS. Did you initially intend for this? Where did the idea come from? I’m a history buff anyway, and much of the current conspiracy…

Somebody asked me the other day if I ever get tired of chocolate, since my funny, romantic Sci-Fi series revolves around it.  And I Instagram about it.  And post recipes, and cooking videos, and have a whole chocolate-themed cookbook.  And – I’m growing it. Don’t tell anybody, but yes, I go through phases where the last thing I want to do is think about another piece of chocolate – let alone eat one.  But when we travel, I’ll check out the shops in town, to find craft chocolate makers and mom-and-pop candy shops, and unique chocolatiers marching to the beat of their own kazoos. Talking to someone about their passion for chocolate as an art form, or for blending flavors the way a wine-maker does, or teaching kids about food or using chocolate to connect with the local community – or to communities of farmers around the world — is some pretty heady stuff.  And getting to taste the chocolate they’ve put all that passion into – that’s the kind of thing you can’t get tired of. There’s an almost universal connection that people have to chocolate.  Often, when I go to handsell the Chocoverse books I say, “The aliens…

I got my first job at eleven, working at a doggy daycare, and I’ve been more-or-less continuously employed since then. Now, at age 34, my full work history is long and weird: server, gas station attendant, construction worker, theater set builder, house cleaner, bookseller, landscaper, bike mechanic, teacher, freelance writer, and editor. A lot of this work brought me joy, particularly when I was lucky enough to have great coworkers, or supervisors who invested in their teams. I’ve also seen firsthand the ways employers can exploit, belittle, and manipulate their workers. I poured years of frustration into my novella, FINNA. FINNA begins in an enormous homegoods store where, thanks to the uniquely awful corporate layout, reality has a tendency to tear doorways into other worlds. When an elderly customer wanders into a wormhole in a furniture showroom, the task of tracking her down falls to Jules and Ava, the workers with the least seniority. (There used to be a specialized division that handled these cases, but they were cut during the Recession.) Navigating a series of hostile, alien worlds would be hard enough, but Ava and Jules broke up three days ago. Before you ask: no, there’s no overtime (unless…

1–What’s the name of your latest release? SELECTED 2–What is it about? A teen who comes from nothing and finds herself at an amazing school with a golden ticket for the future. She quickly learns that nothing at the school is what is seems and falls for a guy who she isn’t sure she can trust. 3–What word best describes your heroine? Gifted. 4–What makes your hero irresistible? He’s superpopular but turns his back on his shallow friends to find something real in life, to find someone real. I love that quality in him. 5–Who are the people your main characters turn to when they need help? My main characters turn to their friends when they need help. They are also very self-reliant. 6–What do you love about the setting of your book? I loved playing around in the near future, like, twenty years ahead. I loved playing around with what society would look like if an overarching government broke down. And I loved setting a story in a make-believe prep school. There’s so much pressure on teens today that I think is captures at Easton Prep. 7–Are you a plotter (follow an outline) or a pantster (write by the…

Fresh Fiction Senior Reviewer Debbie Wiley  Fantasy novels are magical with their ability to transport you to other worlds. Worldbuilding is crucial to the success of any fantasy novel as we need to believe in these imaginary and sometimes quite fantastical worlds. Character development is important as well since we have to care about the fates of the characters. Despite the fact that both elements are important to any genre but particularly the fantasy genre, most readers have a preference for one or the other and I have to admit I prefer complex worldbuilding over character-driven novels. Here are some of my recent favorite fantasy novels in which the authors do a marvelous job at balancing both character development and worldbuilding. Who doesn’t love a series featuring a Library in charge of the world? Rachel Caine’s brilliant series, The Great Library, recently concluded with the fifth and final book, SWORD AND PEN. SWORD AND PEN showcases all of the characters we’ve grown to love and cheer for putting it all on the line in hopes of finally creating a world of peace and information, where the Library doesn’t squelch knowledge it doesn’t like. The worldbuilding is phenomenal, as we have…

I love worldbuilding. It’s fun, the best kind of neverending logic puzzle, and it’s easy for me to spend days or months layering details onto a burgeoning universe. Nobody wants to read what amounts to a history book about a fictional world, though. No matter how intricate and interesting the worldbuilding is, it’s the people who populate it who are going to be the tethers that pull readers across a landscape. I’m not one of those authors who knows everything about a character down to their blood type before I put words on pages. In fact, often the non-physical truths (i.e. things other than height, age, eye color, etc) I know about a character when I start writing can be listed on one hand. I treat characters like strangers I’m meeting for the first time, and I write partially to unveil the core of an individual. For me, worldbuilding is layering up. Building characters, though, is more a process of stripping down. Everyone has a core of principles, beliefs, motivations, and needs. Sometimes (okay, rarely) these are all in easy alignment and sometimes they’re diametrically opposed, but no matter what, the core of a person is what drives everything they…

Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors as a reader you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present M.C. Planck!  WRITES: Science Fiction and Fantasy ABOUT THE AUTHOR: I was born in the USA and spent a good four decades there, studying philosophy at the University of Arizona and co-founding a small scientific instrument company. After that I spent a few years convincing missiles to fly but that was never really satisfying, so when I met an Aussie girl in an on-line debate forum I packed up and moved to Melbourne. We now have a brilliant daughter and two lazy cats, but sadly no kangaroos. WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR IN MY IDEAL READER MATCH: Readers who want to read about heroes, who care as much about the side characters as the main, who want a world they could imagine living in, who want to see happy endings even while they know that the real world does not sell its victories cheaply. WHAT TO EXPECT IF COMPATIBLE: Realistic, believable worlds with real human characters even while they are zooming around in…