Category: Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Natania Barron

Erin Penn

Character spread with Book Cover by Natania Barron

Cover artist and writer, Natania Barron recently changed up her normal style of monsters and mayhem for a private project: Rock Revival: A Music Novel. My publisher took on the literary novel, and I had the pleasure of working with Natania on it.

Why did she stray from her traditional style?

Music has been such a deep, essential part of my life for so long, and I wanted to write this book to bring to life what I felt was a plausible story — not just about music but also about the complications of living that kind of life.

For me, taking the journey with her, brought back memories of my church choir years, especially one set of incredible youth directors who lived in Nashville writing secular songs before they settled down with children. Kate Styx’s and Tom Chesley’s journey matched so many of the stories they shared with me when I hung out with the youth director’s teen daughters.

Sometimes the best excitement in the world are stories close to reality, and Ms. Barron captures the music industry well.

Her other books include Pilgrim in the Sky (2011), Wothwood (2017), and the Frost & Filigree novella series (2017-2018). If you would like to learn more about her, visit her blog at: www.nataniabarron.com.

Rock Revival can be bought through Amazon: eBook.

Author Spotlight: Patrick Dugan

Erin Penn

Cover from Amazon

The wonderful thing about editing is getting to know authors on levels not normally found in a professional relationship. Perfecting a story in someone’s voice means knowing that voice, the values in the voice; not necessarily where the values came from, but what the author treasures and wants to share with the world. An editor helps an author hone that and all other aspects of the voice.

Patrick Dugan, whom I edited Storm Forged and the forthcoming Unbreakable Storm for, has been a joy to get to know during the editing process. His voice is uplifting. The process to get that voice on paper, not always as spiritual. Sometimes we banged heads, and sometimes the banging of the heads had stuff fall out which amazed us both. But most times we were just passing secret notes back and forth, him asking “what do you think?” and me going “write it out, now!”

He has a story to tell, several in fact, both entertaining and enlightening. The superhero series is not only about being a superhero and all the wonder using powers entails, but a coming-of-age story for the main character and a social commentary on institutionalized racism. And family, central to the series is a sense of family.

Family is also central to Mr. Dugan. I got to attend the book release party at his house for Storm Forged where his family and friends gathered to congratulate him on moving from a writer to a published author. The party was for them, those that took the journey with him over the years to get to the point he had words within a book. A thank you. I was along for the last few steps of his trip and was honored he asked me to join the celebration.

Mr. Dugan is good about that. Thank yous. He realizes the journey, whichever one you take –  programming (his day job), raising children, or writing a book – is not a solitary one.

Look up the Dark Storm series. It’s about heroes, and family; about never going it alone, and growing up; about the horrors the world can create, and how they should be fought.

Patrick Dugan can be found at his Secret Lair website here: http://www.patrickdugan.net/

Dark Storm can be bought through Square direct from the publisher in paperback format (giving the author maximum profits): Paperback

And here is the link is to Amazon for the eBook and Audio book.

 

Author Spotlight: Elisa Hansen

Erin Penn

Book Cover from Amazon

Editing can be a long journey, and I started the journey with Elisa Hansen over a year ago when I first read her “The Company of Death” and told my boss at Falstaff Publishing I wanted the book. During that time we did a minor rewrite, a couple other editing passes, brought on new staff at the publisher, and dealt with bottlenecks in getting books out the doors into hands. Also during that time I got to know Elisa Hansen as a person. And she is a pretty awesome person.

On one hand, she is a vlogger about Vampires of all sorts. Check out her youtube channel “The Maven of the Eventide”. Wonderfully camping, she explores books and movies on this long-running vlog (four years and counting). If it has fangs, it is fang-tastic for her channel. (Also includes her announcement about this book.)

On another hand, she is a mother of a soon-to-be expanding family. Her present spawn is adorable in his madness, and I think present-parasite-soon-to-be-outside-body shall be equally entertaining in her ability to tear through the house faster than the progenitors. 

A third hand is devoted to her writing career, with the publication of her second book this week and working on other vlogs.

Want to get to know this awesome lady too? Her website is here. And her patreon is here. If you are into vampires and camp, I highly recommend her vlog. If you just want to dive into an urban fantasy about Death (not humor-oriented), check out her book on Amazon (and other outlets).

Author Spotlight: Dr. Seuss

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover

What was your favorite Dr. Seuss growing up? Go on, I’ll wait.

My sisters loved to torture me with Fox in Socks. I personally loved Hop on Pop. Other people identified with Horton Hears a Who or Cat in Hat. And off course the seasonal favorite, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which has permanently embedded into our society the concept of anyone hating Christmas is a Grinch. And most people accused don’t care because the Grinch was awesome in his wallowing in his grinch-ness; they can only aspire to his commitment to the grump.

Answering a bet to write a children’s book with fifty or fewer different words, Green Eggs and Ham was born. From there Dr. Seuss made reading accessible as the boring Dick and Jane stories never could; the rhyme and meter and cartoonish art delighted children in book after book.

But did you know he had two books written in straight prose? One is high fantasy, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, and the other is horror – it certainly meets most of the horror tropes and ticks – Bartholomew and the Oobleck.

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss

Memorable first lines in books – we writers always try to hone the hook. Here is one:

In the beginning, Bartholomew Cubbins didn’t have five hundred hats.

Going Christmas shopping for nieces and nephews I ran across a high fantasy story I read again and again growing up. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss. Still a fine story; I hope nephew number five likes it.

Written in prose instead of his normal poem scheme, the fantasy by Dr. Seuss has a beautiful pace and flow. Enemies and friends – from the executioner to the spoiled Grand Duke – distract Bartholomew from his ongoing issue of the hat which would not come off. The 1940 story still holds up perfectly for today’s world.

Amazon Cover

Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss

A revisit to Bartholomew Cubbins who previously appeared in The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins finds him the King’s page and the Grand Duke missing. Again the prose form rules this darker fantasy (sequel?) written 9 years after the original story instead of the normal Seussian poetry; I vastly prefer the clever and surreal 500 Hats of the two books.

The king wants to establish his power and uniqueness and calls his magicians to make Oobleck fall from the sky. Bartholomew attempts to be the voice of reason to the hubris-plagued king, but the king wasn’t having it. When the first drops of green fall, the royal page feels nothing but fear.

Want to know where the generation of urban fantasy – horror fans came from? I bet many of them had this book in their homes growing up. Where 500 Hats is fantasy, Oobleck is a horror – child version.

Still a solid book after all this time. 

Author Spotlight: Anne McCaffrey

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover

To Ride Pegasus: Talent #1 by Anne McCaffrey
Pegasus in Flight: Talent #2 by Anne McCaffrey
Get off the Unicorn by Anne McCaffrey

Rereading old favorites can be hazardous to your comfortable memories. The Talent series by Anne McCaffrey soared me to the stars in my teens, while Get off the Unicorn kept me there. Women had powers equal to men. They were beside them in space. Things I had never seen from all the male science fiction authors which I read voraciously were in her books. Women had agency. Women – no – me, I was represented. I didn’t know that was what I had been looking for, the concept didn’t exist in the eighties, but she provided me validity, with representation.

Now (sigh) we have moved beyond the ground-breaking societies these stories predicted. I can’t recommend them to teenage girls of today because these future women need to go further than Anne McCaffrey could dare fifty years ago.

But, me, they shaped.

Strangely I always loved her short stories and novellas (like Helva, the Ship who Sang) more than her novels and series – unless the series was a series of short stories and novellas.

The grandmaster passed in November 21, 2011 at age 85. On the eve of the anniversary of her passing, I thought I would share some of the legacy she left behind.

To Ride Pegasus: Talent #1 by Anne McCaffrey

One of my favorite books of all time, this collection of Anne McCaffrey’s short stories from what would become her Talent Universe, To Ride Pegasus was published in 1973. I picked up the ninth printing from 1983. As a decade of printings indicate, I wasn’t the only person who loved this book.

The collection contains four short stories/novellas, one of which was specifically written for the book. All the stories were amazing to my 80’s teenage self – showing strong women for the day.

To Ride Pegasus (first published in this collection 1973)
A Womanly Talent (first published 1969 in Analog)
Apple (first published 1969 in an anthology)
A Bridle for Pegasus (first published 1973 in Analog)

Rereading the book in 2016 changed the glasses of how I viewed the book – no women in leadership roles – The Directors were men, the politicians were men. But the women did have psychic powers, some even were bad guys of great danger. On the other hand, “A Womanly Talent” had a woman defining herself by being a mother and was manipulated by the men around her to make certain she was happy in her role. The reread also showed me how I got so many of my attitudes of what a woman should be; I didn’t realize how much Ms. McCaffrey shaped who I was.

Should teenage girls of today read this book – likely not. It’s attitudes toward women is now 40 years out-of-date – two generations. But for its day, this book was amazing.

Pegasus in Flight: Talent #2 by Anne McCaffrey

You know, I am not sure I have ever read this book. It came out after I became an adult, had a good job, and could easily buy whatever I wanted, so it’s been on my shelf forever – traveling across the country over 2,000 miles in various moves but I think I read it for the first time yesterday (in 2016 when I wrote the review). Problem with the good job and adulthood is finding time to read. Lack of good job does have some pluses.

I’ve been reading so much new stuff from urban fantasy, romance, self-published, and new writers, I had forgotten how layered Ms. McCaffrey would write her soft sci-fi books. Three separate main story-lines, two romances, three or four character growth lines, etc. So dense and marvelous in her Talent Universe, this 1990 full novel updates and expands the Talent Universe short stories which she had started writing in the ’50s.

But the book is showing its age in its racial and gender attitudes. Yes, Ms. McCaffrey was exceptional for her time at having lead females and people of color in her books, but at the same time because she pushed the envelope out, the edge of what is acceptable has moved far beyond this book. Older people will enjoy reading it, especially those who picked up every book this woman wrote, but the new generation … it is no longer relevant. Pegasus in Flight isn’t so long in tooth it isn’t readable yet, but soon, so sadly soon, it will be.

Amazon Cover

I had an Anne McCaffrey two-day reading fest, going through three of her books from the Talent Universe. “Get Off the Unicorn” short story collection contained stories from McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, the Ship that Sang, and Talent Universes as well as several stand-alone stories. Below are short reviews of each story and the date it was originally published. All of them are over 40 years old and many of them are showing their age, even though, for their day, they were cutting edge.

Lady in the Tower (1959 – Talent Universe) & A Meeting of Minds (1969 – Talent Universe) – These two together are a great combination of hope and caution. I totally fell for Afra because of them.

Daughter (1971) & Dull Drums (1973) – These two together made me think about what I wanted to be in relation to my family. Dated for today’s world, yet still fresh for the constant struggle of becoming your own person while not walking away from those you love.

Changeling (1977) – This story STUCK with me. Crawled in my mind and stayed there for some reason. LTGB before it was even a thing.

Weather on Welladay (1969) – This mystery shows how everyone can only see things visible to them.

The Thorns of Barevi (1970) – Forget this story unless you need to see when Ms. McCaffrey failed at something – she even admits in the notes on page 153 it didn’t work.

The Great Canine Chorus (1971) – A weird character study of a character going bad. Not Ms. McCaffrey’s normal fare of hope.

Finder’s Keeper (1973) – A young Talented Finder tries to avoid being taken over by a man with gray morals.

A Proper Santa Claus (1973) – Everyone outgrows Santa Claus and magic.

The Smallest Dragonboy (1973 – Dragonriders of Pern Universe) – I think this is the only story in the book which hasn’t become out-dated, mostly because it wasn’t set on contemporary earth.

Apple (1969 – Talent Universe) – Sometimes even the FT&T had failures; not everyone is salvageable.

Honeymoon (1977 – Helva, the Ship that Sang Universe) – I loved this as a bookend to the Helva story. Not really canon like the rest of the series, this is more like a fanfic – only written by the author.