Andrea Höst, dominant force in the psychic space ninja subgenre, whose tiny room at Monash Uni we spent part of our honeymoon in, tagged us for this “Next Big Thing” meme. So here tis!
What is the working title of your next book?
Misconception.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It will be self-published. For some time we have been enthusiastically saying self-publishing was the way of the future and last year we finally decided to stick our necks out and have a go.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
It is the second in the Rainier Fields series (after Misfortune), which had its genesis in a role-playing game. The role-playing game started with one of us writing a five page short story introducing a character and a lot of mysterious unexplained plot hooks, which the other of us then took off in completely unexpected directions.
What genre does your book fall under?
We think of it as Science Fantasy. It is not quite on a grand enough scale to be Space Opera, so maybe Space Operetta would be a good name for it.
How long does it take to write the first draft of your manuscript?
It depends how many other things distract us on the way. Our three published works each took between three weeks and three months to write the first draft. We have other books that have been going for twenty years, dribbling along at ten thousand words a year or so.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
This is a really hard question since we can’t remember having read anything remotely like it, but we’re not going to pike out… It is driven by characters, rather than plot or grand ideas, so it is more like the Vorkosigan books than a lot of other things that could fall under the ‘Science Fantasy’ umbrella.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
We think it would be most fun to play them ourselves as ultra-high budget CGI characters, with high-budget electronic tweaking to make our voices sound right.
Who or What inspired you to write this book?
We inspired each other. It was a very small project that got wildly out of hand. The original germ of the Rainier Fields series was very much inspired by Diana Wynne Jones, though I am sure she would have been alarmed at how it turned out.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Mercery behaves very badly.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Having escaped from the mysterious Project that gave him his technomantic powers, Rainier Fields is trying to lead a normal life on another continent when he unexpectedly appears on the Emperor’s Birthday “Most Wanted” list.
We would like to tag David Versace, whose short story “Imported Goods – Aisle Nine” is appearing the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild’s “Next” anthology real soon now. Long ago we were kayaking with David Versace in the Northwest Territories when a strange green meteorite crashed nearby, giving us superpowers and animating the corpses from an ancient Native American graveyard. After we defeated the zombies, we became active in student politics, wrote songs about Australian television news personalities, ran several play-by-mail games about alien pirates, and stuff.
“Leaving Loris” is now available on Amazon as a kindle version.
Print version will be available soon.
…And there’s the next one. Honestly I never meant them all to get finished around the same time. It just turned out that way.
So, finally “The Ghost Years” which has been competing for my attention with its publishing demands, alongside “Misfortune” and “Leaving Loris” has gone live on Amazon.
Our first novel! How nervous-making.
I expect the “Misfortune” kindle version will be finished within a week. The print versions are still in their final throes of formatting, but again, should not take long now.
“Leaving Loris” will be a little while yet, since I decided it needs one more final editing run after my last re-read.