Category: Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Margaret S. McGraw

Erin Penn

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When you go to conventions as a guest, you always have some trepidation about who else is going to be on panels with you. Will they be well spoken? Do they understand the topic? Will they let you get a word in edgewise or will you need to carry the show?

And then you walk in to the editing panel and see Margaret S. McGraw at the table and you sag a little in relief. Always professional, always smiling, well-read and knowledgeable – with her on the panel, the day just got a lot better.

Ms. McGraw is an editor more than a writer. She helped organized Lawless Lands and The Weird Wild West, as well as the upcoming Chasing the Light. Her fingers in the pie take anthologies to the next level.

If you attend a convention and she is in attendance, get a sit in the audience. She will make it worth your time.

Author Spotlight: David Drake

Erin Penn

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Dravid Drake’s works are known for the detailed description of the battle action and technology of the military. In addition, the author both glorifies military action and bring its horrific consequences to the unblinking eye of reality through the use of black humor. He is most famous for his Hammer’s Slammers series where the men, and handful of women who ride with Hammer’s Slammers know their chosen mercenary profession will either kill them or leave them crippled, mentally and physically, but wouldn’t do anything else.

Considered a master of science fiction military ground-action, Mr. Drake’s books shows the mastery in his worldbuilding of the battlefield, the armor, the tanks and combat cars, the soldiers, and what is left of the environment after they have done their thing. His writing is heavily influence by his time in Vietnam, and as a lawyer.

I really enjoyed his Redliners, a stand-alone novel where you not only have all the military action, but also one of the most unforgiving enemies of all time. The environment. In Redliners, broken soldiers have become dangerous to themselves and their units but are in no shape to be released into the civilian population. So the government uses them to protect new colonists as they settle on a borderline planet – rated borderline because of the local flora (yep, that is right,forget about the animals, the plants are crazy dangerous). The government could not afford to rehabilitate the soldiers or to pay for the protection of the colonists; this solved both of its problems at once. The question is will it solve the problems the broken and the disenfranchised?

Author Spotlight: Emily Lavin Leverett

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover

I crossed paths with Dr. Emily Lavin Leverett at my first ConCarolinas. She mentioned a press she worked with, and I started haunting that press’ blog. From there, the blog’s visual writer’s prompts tempted me so I started writing responses and created my own blog. When a job opened in the administrative branch, I offered to remote work for the Canadian company. After a time, I started line editing for them too.

So you can blame where I am today in the publishing industry on her. I would have found a path of some sort – after all I met her at ConCarolinas – but this particular path I’m on started with a throw-away remark by her on a con panel.

Eventually that press folded, and I went onto another press. I still attended ConCarolinas and so did she, so we would say “hi” on occasion.  Though she was a panelist, an editor of anthologies, and I was just a paying attendee, Dr. Leverett was always polite during our short exchanges. Short because my shyness and her guest-panel-busy. 

Then my next press folded (Amazon did some changes on how romances could be advertised and that tanked a lot of the small press industry) and I was at loose ends. Thanks to a different network opportunity, I fell into Falstaff and discovered Dr. Leverett already there. In fact, her manuscript, Changeling’s Fall, had inspired the publisher, John Hartness, to take the step to becoming a publisher of other people’s works.

Her day job is an English professor and a medievalist. Her afternoon job is editing anthologies and writing papers required to remain a professor. And when she finds the time, she is working with her co-author Dr. Sarah Joy Adams on the other three books of The Eisteddford Chronicles.

It’s been an interesting walking along the same path as her. We take different stops in the publishing industry, but I admire her craftsmanship and determination as she trail blazes ahead of me. She is an amazing woman.

Author Spotlight: John Scalzi

Erin Penn

Book cover from Amazon

How did you first discover John Scalzi? For me, the military science-fiction story of Old Man’s War introduced me to this sarcastic, politically-opinionated, inventive author. For a friend, the entry-drug was the science-fiction satire Redshirts. Maybe you were one of the firsts, finding him through his blog “Whatever” back in 1998.

No matter where you first heard about him, you will be seeing books from him for a long time to come. He has signed a 10-year, 13-book deal with Tor.

Ten years.

Are writers allowed that type of economic security? I mean, he has plans now to help pay for his daughter’s college. That can’t be healthy – like opening the curtains in the den while the writer is typing. They aren’t allowed to see the sun or know where their next check is coming from.

But then John Scalzi always has been a maverick in the field, sneaking in fiction field through his non-fiction website. From there he released chapters online of a new novel he was writing, which got him an editor. That is when he became a staid, predictable and respectable, big-press author.

For all fifty seconds.

Convincing the big-press to try the serialization technique popular with self-published authors for one of his books destroyed any illusion of staid and predictable real quick. Another experiment meant trundling off to a small press because he wanted to prove he didn’t just write humor, happy books. Any time his readers start deciding what his style should be, he changes it up.

So now he has sold out, getting a multi-million multi-year deal.

Sold out is bad. Right?

Except he always meant this to be a career, so money is kind-of a necessary part of it. And he never has ceased his highly politicized blog, so selling-out is really hard to define when the boy ain’t exactly going to ever accept a muzzle.

The only thing a reader of science fiction should expect from Mr. Scalzi is he is going to try something new … very soon.

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Information for this blog was drawn from several sources, more notably from an interview with Andrew Liptak: “I aspire to be a cockroach” published March 22, 2017 by The Verge.

Author Spotlight: Nora Roberts

Erin Penn

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Nora Roberts shook my world when I first read her. This happy Harlequin/Solitude style writer helped define Paranormal Romance – a genre which one can arguably say birthed Urban Fantasy. HER romances had witches and psychic powers, sharing shelf space with the typical millionaire romances.

Her books took up a shelf by the time I went off to college. I’ve since gone more into Urban Fantasy, as that genre has grown, and she has concentrated on her bread-and-butter market of traditional romance.

But every now-and-again, she brushes off her magic and reminds people that romance happens in all circumstances. If you haven’t looked her up in a while, you might want to read her Apocalypse series starting with Year One: Chronicles of The One.