Interviews

Back in June, I reviewed Bitterwood which fast became one of my favorites books of the year. Author James Maxey agreed to an interview… and an extra bonus:
Check back tomorrow to enter a giveaway for a signed copy of Bitterwood!

Angela/SciFiChick: For those who haven’t read Bitterwood yet, can you give us a brief synopsis?

James Maxey: Bant Bitterwood’s family was killed by dragons twenty years before the novel begins. Since then, he’s led a silent and deadly campaign of revenge against the dragons who rule his world, striking from the shadows whenever the opportunity arises. Bitterwood has become a legendary figure; a hero to humans, a bogeyman to dragons, but no one is even certain if he’s real. Some dragons think that any human who kills a dragon just places the blame on the mythical figure. When the novel opens, the dragon king Albekizan’s favorite son is killed and Bitterwood is blamed. Albekizan decides that there’s only one certain way to rid his kingdom of the danger of Bitterwood–by killing every last human in the kingdom. The novel unfolds against a backdrop of impending genocide as a small handful of humans and dragons work to avert the tragedy.

Angela: How did you decide to make dragons such major characters in your story?

JM: Dragons are just cool! I didn’t want them to be simply big scaly monsters. The story is more dramatic because my dragons are capable of love and anger, hope and despair. If a dragon were to pick it up and read Bitterwood, he’d be able to think he’d be reading a book where the dragons are the protagonists and Bitterwood is just a terrorist. It’s not a book with clear-cut lines of right and wrong; hopefully readers will find some of the moral situations within it thought provoking. To me, the greatest drama happens not by setting good guys up against cartoonish bad guys, but to pit sympathetic characters with conflicting yet understandable goals against each other.

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The other day, I reviewed the debut novel of the talented Jennifer Rardin.
Below is an informal interview with the Indiana-born author (a fellow Hoosier!):

Angela/SciFiChick: Tell us a little about Once Bitten, Twice Shy.

Jennifer Rardin: The story takes place in Miami, where CIA assassins Jaz Parks and her boss, the vampire Vayl, have arrived on New Year’s Eve. Their mission is to take out a plastic surgeon with terrorist ties named Assan. But first they have to figure out who his new, powerful partners are. The plot thickens like good, spicy sausage gravy as you race through the book. You also need to know that Jaz is struggling with major issues from her past that are affecting her in fairly bizarre and sometimes frightening ways.

Angela: Tell us a bit about yourself and your experience in writing.

Rardin: What does it say about you when, by the time you’re eighteen you’ve already read every book you really care to from your local library? Um, get a life, girl! Yeah, there for a while I’d be reading four books at once, living out separate fantasies, all of them heroic and utterly fascinating. I can’t resist a good story. Not the soap opera kind. Nope, never was hooked on those. The kind where decisions matter, good can triumph over evil and mundane crap like taking out the trash can transform into adventure when you find a demon munching on your garbage.

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Pete Tzinski, an editor at BBT Magazine, has begun a new project – God in the Machine. In order to promote his new online serial, we decided to do an informal interview to give readers more information…

Angela: So what is God in the Machine?

Pete: God in the Machine is a science fiction series. I’d trot out the old “in the tradition of…” line, except that if I tell you what the direct parents are of the series…it’ll give away plot details from later on. It’s the story of a robot named Loeb – and his apparent companion, a bigger robot named Max – who are caught in an electromagnetic storm which, instead of destroying them, brings them “awake.” They suddenly think and, more importantly, they feel. The problem is, to the rest of the galaxy of robots (and there are only robots left), this is nothing but damage to be repaired. To start with, it’s the story of them surviving.

The series is about quite a lot more than that, ultimately, but that’s its humble origin. That’s where we begin.

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