Connections DEC 2014 | Page 7

What genre do you enjoy writing the most and why? Speculative fiction: science fiction and fantasy. My first books are Steampunk, which was a new genre for when I first started them, but it was the only genre where I felt I could write the combination of characters I envisioned, particularly an essentially Western/frontier character alongside socialites and combat-engineers. From where do you draw your inspiration? All sorts of places. The aforementioned frontier character and socialite sprang almost fully formed in a sort of waking dream. Then came the historical research. The sci-fi adventure novel coming out next year for Fire and Ice YA Press started with a series of geek jokes among friends. Do you ever base your characters on real people in your life? Does it help your characters come alive? No, sometimes people I know in real life help contribute something to a character or provide some ideas, but the characters themselves are not typically based on any real person. Which is of your books is your favorite and why? Dawn of Steam: Gods of the Sun is the strongest of the two books so far. I enjoyed writing the characters, and liked the chance to give more of them more of a direct voice in the story. Which of your books was the most fun to write and why? The Dawn of Steam books in general were pretty cathartic. I had just been laid-off from one of those soul-killing jobs, and had had very little success with trying to do anyting creative for some time. When I wrote them, I had a lot of time, and a lot of energy to devote to just creating the story. I wrote all 315k words of the first drafts in one month - and they were terrible. Its needed a lot of editing and revision since, but it still felt really good to get the ideas out on the page at the time. Which of your characters is your favorite and why? Sam Bowe is my favorite of my characters. She's a throwback in a story that's all about technology and an age of supposed enlightenment marching forward, and kind of a callback to some of the western heroes I read about growing up. Tell us about your latest book. Dawn of Steam: Gods of the Sun is the second of my alt-history/emergent Steampunk epistolary trilogy, the first being Dawn of Steam: First Light. It continues the story of a postNapoleonic war airship expedition as the crew travel to four continents and get embroiled in fighting on three of them. The story is told through letters and diary entries in Regency style, and it touches on lots of real historical events, such as the Year Without a Summer of 1815-16 and the Maori potato wars.