Category: Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Balogun Ojetade

Erin Penn

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Balogun Ojetade writes very detailed hand-to-hand combat scenes with specific blows and related body damage and carries the injury forward through the fights. He provides realistic fighting, practically unheard of in the urban fantasy/sci-fi genre, but not unexpected from the author of Afrikan Martial Arts: Discovering the Warrior Within.

While he is still developing as a writer, his fist-to-cuffs scenes are amazingly detailed. He is writing a lot at this time, so hopefully his style will continue to improve and his narrative will support his action scenes … because these action scenes are worth reading.

Author Spotlight: Misty Massey

Erin Penn

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Misty Massey is a slow writer but a fast enabler. What I mean by that is don’t expect her to put out book after book, year after year. She is not in the book-a-month club, good-bad-or-indifferent. Instead, here and there a well-crafted novel will show up, and in between the major publications some clever short stories come out a couple-few times each year.

What she does well, incredibly well, is create communities which create things.

Her other works include – being the one of the founders and the major energy in running the Magical Words site, creating a Podcast with Faith Hunter, directing the author tracks at ConCarolinas, and developing and editing a number of anthologies including the Weird Wild West. If you want something to HAPPEN – something epic and amazing, invite Ms. Massey to the party. She will shimmy her way into some magic somehow.

Her opus and sequel center around Mad Kestrel. If you like fantasy, tall ships, and pirates, send that story and the followup, Kestrel’s Voyages, some loving because this woman is fire in our midst.

Author Spotlight: AJ Hartley

Erin Penn

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My publisher is ecstatic – we picked up A.J. Hartley for a short series his Big Press didn’t want to keep the rights to because it couldn’t sell the 100,000 copies they need to make money. Mr. Hartness became friends with the NY-times best-selling author on the convention circuit (remember writers, networking is a thing) and when Dr. Hartley mention a pet project of his that was available, John threw himself on that grenade to keep the Shakespearean professor from trunking his Will Hawthorne stories.

For his day job, A.J. Hartley is the Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at UNC Charlotte. Which means he doesn’t just like literature, he breathes it.  Working with David Hewson, he recreated prose versions Macbeth and Hamlet. 

Well and truly bitten by the writing bug, he puts pen to paper for a variety of genres: thriller, fantasy, the previous mentioned historical fiction, and even some middle grade and young adult. He goes as far as to write additional works under a pseudonym of Andrew Hart. But nearly everything he does, including his literary non-fiction professor publications, are doen under A.J. Hartley.

His Steeplejack series is the “new thing” and worth a read, as is nearly everything this master of the English language produces.

Author Spotlight: Alexandra Christian

Erin Penn

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Alexandra Christian writes romances for people who don’t like romances. Whether hot dragon sex in the fantasy Huntress or an angel death worshiping a self-destructive woman In The Shadow of Death contemporary paranormal, the romance will be strong and like nothing you have seen before. If your bookshelf has a hole in science fiction romance, she has something even for that – maybe NeoGeisha or one of the other books of the Phoenix Rising series will fill the gap.

But when you mix in her Sherlock Holmes obsession, things start getting really weird like The Ghost and Dr. Watson (not a romance) and forthcoming Chasing the Dragon (which is).

Nothing she writes is a straight-forward vanilla romance. Everything has another genre mixed in. Her writing is definitely a Reese’s Cup accident – you got my chocolate mixed in with your peanut butter; well your weird paranormal is mixed in with my romance! If this sounds like your jam, spread it on into your to-be-read pile.

Author Spotlight: Darin Kennedy

Erin Penn

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Dr. Darin Kennedy just had a new book come out from Falstaff for the first series he wrote. During his year-long deployment to Iraq in 2003 as an United States Army physician, he created the contemporary chess-based fantasy Pawn’s Gambit.  This became a “trunk” book as he went on to hone his writing craft once home in between his day job being a family doctor. 

He worked with short stories, publishing over twenty of them, including ones about April Sullivan: Necromancer for Hire which he has collected into a single book. And he wrote the amazing Fugue & Fable series, which I have talked about before, focused on orchestral music and a detective with some paranormal abilities.

But back to Pawn’s Gambit, the first of a series. If you read Mussorgsky Riddle before Gambit, you can see his growth as a writer. Even so, his love of the game of chess comes through on every page as well as influence of the superhero comics from his youth.

So many different interests, with a focus on the fantastic. Pick up something from the good Doctor – from Chess to Ballet, something is sure to delight.