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| Meet The Author |
ChrisChat: Why did you write the book that brought you to MuseItUp Publishing?
Bryan: In a letter to a friend, Robert E. Howard once described how Conan, alone of all his creations, “stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.” Rose is the closest I’ve ever come to meeting a character that way.
Rose started out in a dream, a perky, mischievous lady in her early twenties. At the same time, I knew she was a dragon. I knew she had a tattoo of her human self on her thigh, to help her shape-changing spell stay on. I knew she needed people to love her, and that she fed herself by killing and eating people whose absence made the world a better place. When I woke up, I staggered to my computer and wrote down everything I could remember, and the next day, her story unfolded like a self-inflating life raft. I named David after two friends I met playing ‘Horizons’, the only online role-playing game where you can play as a dragon (sensing a theme here…), and asked Rose, “What happened next?” I had two short stories finished in a week.
At the time, there was a submissions call for an anthology about dragons. I submitted both stories, but Rose wasn’t satisfied, and neither were my beta readers. All of them said the stories were too short. Rose herself was very vocal about them not doing her justice, so I rewrote both into novellas. By the time I finished the rewrites, I’d decided to withdraw the short stories from the dragon anthology. The editor beat me to it. I’ve never been so happy to get a rejection letter, and this one is a keeper:
“I want to thank you for submitting your two stories for consideration. Unfortunately, neither of them were accepted for the anthology. The main reason was the preoccupation with sex and excessive cuss language. Neither of these elements make for a good story.”
Obviously, I was doing something right. I wrote a third story and titled the collection “The Dragon With the Girl Tattoo”. I had only collected thirty rejections or so when another friend from ‘Horizons’, Graeme Smith, recommended I try MuseItUp. He had published ‘A Comedy of Terrors’ and ‘Road Like a River’ with MIU and thought I could do well there. As of today, I have two books out, one is being edited, and I’m writing David & Rose’s fourth tale.
ChrisChat: And being your lucky content editor, I know these stories well and love them. You’ve hit on something many authors will tell newbies…listen to your characters. How vital is that advice? How do you listen to the character(s) and turn off the critical internal editor?
Bryan: I think it’s critical if you plan on having more than one story with a given group of characters. You can do a story with the character’s actions and the plot events on rails once, maybe twice, and tell a great story that way, but that path leads to formula, rote storytelling. Your character can—and will—come up with some outrageous, crazy ideas. Some work, some don’t, and some they won’t let go of. That’s when the internal editor has to intervene and help sort the good from the bad. Unfortunately, the only thing that helps develop that…awareness…is practice.
ChrisChat: Do you hear every character telling you their story or is it all through Rose’s voice they come alive?
Bryan: Usually I hear the story in David’s voice, but not always. And I’m going to roll this answer over into the next one…
ChrisChat: I’ve never played any live on-line games, well, any game where I get to make/be my own character, but does that experience make it easier or harder for you to write you own characters/stories? Because I lack the experience, I flip back and forth…easier because you’re already letting go of yourself and becoming someone/thing else…but, harder because you need to create your own without the influence of the game.
Bryan: In the case of tabletop role-playing, which is you and a bunch of your friends actually sitting at the same table and making your way through an adventure with dice and a human referee resolving actions, I’d give the question a qualified ‘yes’. It all depends on what kind of game you’re running. When I was running games, I’d ask the players to come up with a casting call (who would play that person in a movie) and a theme song (because every hero has to have theme music). It gave me some ideas about the character, and it required the player to think about who they wanted to play, who that person was.
A game like that can teach you how to think and react and speak with the character’s voice, which is a huge help as a writer. I’d say an online game, if you were playing on a server where role-playing was required, could give some of the same benefits, but, as a writer, I have to say that running a tabletop game, as referee, world-builder, scenario creator, all that, was the best preparation I could have asked for. Tabletop role-playing games, at their best, are real-time, interactive, cooperative storytelling. You and your friends get together and tell a story about the people you dream of being.
I don’t think the game environment, the mechanics and rules of the game, interferes with your ability to create memorable characters. If I define Rose as, say, a 16-Hit Dice Young Adult Amethyst Dragon (to put her in Dungeons and Dragons terms), that doesn’t tell you who she is. You have to provide that. There’s no statistic called ‘personality’.
ChrisChat: Going to toss you to your friends for a moment…you mentioned naming David after a couple of friends. Now, yes, I’m a writer, too, but it’s you in the hot seat at the moment…how much do you find yourself watching people (friends and strangers) and not being able to stop yourself from noting little quirks, sayings, habits, anything that ends up sneaking into your stories?
Bryan: Oh, I warn people about it. I’ll tell people I’m stealing something or that an anecdote is going to be worked in to a story. If I run in to a person with a great name, I’ll write it down and wait for a chance to use it. All those little quirks and mannerisms and such are invaluable for bringing characters to life. They don’t even have to appear in the story, if they give the author inspiration.
For example, in ‘Life With a Fire-Breathing Girlfriend”, Randall was an amalgam of several really annoying people I’ve known. The main one was a guy I’d played D&D with a few times. He was an armed security guard, and one game session at his house, he got angry at the other players over something in-game. He didn’t have just any pistol for his duty weapon, he had a nickel-plated Colt Python .357 magnum. No, not compensating at all… He pulled this out in the middle of the game and started cleaning it. Bad enough, but when he finished, he loaded it, left the hammer on a chambered round, and set the pistol next to his dice. That idiot’s actions defined Randall for me, and I think it helped me define him for the reader.
And no, no one at the table that evening ever gamed with that moron again.
ChrisChat: As I mentioned earlier, I’m lucky enough to work with you at MIU during edits. Now, I know there’s some frisky feelings going on, can’t say I remember a whole lot of cussing, but nothing to the level the rejection (thank you for it, too) letter appears to note. Granted, each have their own definition and thoughts. But, when you read a response either from a rejection or review and you know/feel they’re just not getting what you wrote, do you let it slide (with any emotion it may bring) or does it spur you on to change how you write the next story?
Bryan: It depends on what the criticism arises from. I don’t mind if someone objects to my work because of their personal beliefs, but I’m not going to change anything to make them happy. My favorite criticism so far came from a guy who cancelled my appearance on his blog because my book had “an anti-Christian bias and promoted a pro-gay agenda”. I am not anti-Christian; I was raised Southern Baptist. I just don’t see the loving and merciful Christ as an avenging action hero drenched in the blood of unbelievers and liberals. The Christ I respect is the pissed-off carpenter who trashed the moneylenders in the temple, hung out with fishermen and tax collectors, and fell in love with an ex-hooker. That guy was talking about loving people and accepting them for who they are, where they are. Now David, as the narrator, is a Whovian – that is, he bases his morality on Doctor Who. That’s going to carry over into the story. I’m not changing it.
Legitimate criticism of the story is different. I’ve had a few reviews raise the point that I’m telling the stories too fast. That’s fair, and in ‘Dragon’s Luck’, I tried to slow things down, but still maintain a level of tension. I decided to accomplish that by capturing the feel of multiple deadlines coming due, the chaos of a gaming convention, and the stress of staying awake four days straight. I like my fight scenes short and brutal, and didn’t want to change that, so I added several brief fights and an extended, running battle across northern Arizona. I didn’t see David or Rose having a significant amount of character growth, so I added a number of significant secondary characters and focused on their growth.
ChrisChat: You’ve mentioned Graeme, another MIU author I get to work with, recommending MuseItUp. And, of course, there’s our newest MIU author Noelle Meade whom you know (another of my MIU authors 🙂 How important are author-friend recommendations in finding your publishing home? Any advice for those out there still searching?
Bryan: Contacts are great, but, at best, all they do is get your work in front of someone. Then it’s up to you and your work. When I recommended Noelle submit ‘Forging Day’ to MuseItUp, it was because I thought she’d be a good fit with the MIU way of doing things, but it was her work that got her the contract.
Recommendations can go bad, too. I’ve been having issues with another publisher for over a year, trying to get an accurate royalty summary, and it was a friend of mine who referred me to them. So, by all means, use any method available to get your work in front of agents or publishers, but…watch your back.
ChrisChat: I really want to ask about some items I know from behind the scenes, but not sure if now’s the time and the place for that…so…what can you share about Rose’s upcoming tales? Where does she want you to take us in upcoming stories? Does David get a voice in any of these?
Bryan: ‘Dragon’s Luck’ is a fun romp, with David and Rose heading to Las Vegas for a gaming convention. The casino is based on the world’s most popular online role-playing game, and there are a lot of references gamers will enjoy. Rose gets her claws messy a few times; I really enjoyed one bit where she’s yanking this guy’s teeth out of his skull and crushing them to get the gold fillings out.
David is a full-fledged Hero now and is running a gaming company, trying to produce a new online fantasy game and failing miserably. I asked my friends in the gaming industry to send me nightmares they’ve seen at work, and I got some doozies. Every event David has to deal with came out of the stories I received.
One thing that came out of ‘Dragon’s Luck’ was Noelle and I deciding to tie our story worlds together. We drive to work together, so our morning commute is usually a critique session where we toss around ideas and give each other feedback on the previous night’s work. Noelle’s stories are further in the future but she keeps elaborate notes on exactly when events happen and we share a calendar to keep everything straight.
The story I’m working on now, ‘Born With Wings’, takes place at the same time as ‘Forging Day’, but is totally separate. The main plot brings back Aparna, David and Sharon’s in vitro child from the first book. Sharon’s wife, Manya, carried and gave birth to Aparna and has been raising her in Mumbai. Aparna is an Indian citizen, a Hindu, hates studying English, and is a red-haired, green-eyed, ghostly-white Irish kid. Manya is one of the Changed, becoming a humanoid tigress – fangs, claws, orange and black fur, tail, the lot. For Aparna’s safety, David has to learn to be a father and take custody of her. Thirteen is back, which is fun, because on his world, India was the arch-enemy of the American Republic. He was raised to hate everything Indian, and has to work to get past that. Sharon’s parents are causing trouble, all the visiting Dragons are leaving Earth, and David has to figure out how to get a car from Thirteens world registered in Colorado. Should be fun.
ChrisChat: Outside of Rose and David’s world, are there any other voices demanding their stories be told?
Bryan: I have a Steampunk series I’d like to explore, and I need to finish rewrites on the first book I actually finished, which is a fairy-tale police procedural. Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks as Detectives in the Crimes Against Any Form of Person division.
And yes, it has Dragons.
ChrisChat: Anything you wish someone would ask…feel free to share.
Bryan: Aside from “where can I buy your books?” No. I have enough problems figuring out what I want to ask – everyone else is one their own.
Now available: Life With a Fire-Breathing Girlfriend:
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