http://www.amazon.com/Was-Once-A-Hero-ebook/dp/B006UMTBY8/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1326144528&sr=1-1
Name
Edward McKeown
Age
EFM
Ahem over the age of consent in a youth-obsessed culture ;-)
Where
are you from-
EFM
originally from NYC the Big Apple.
A
little about your self `ie your education Family life ect
EFM
A fascinating subject indeed ;-) I’m a writer living in Charlotte, NC
USA. I have a wide varierty of interests:
I’m a black belt/sash with the Lai Tai Pung Style, a ballroom dancer (ok I am
better at the kicking and punching) I’ve
had a life-long love of SF and Fantasy. I
have been married to the talented artist, Schelly Keefer for the best (in every
sense) part of my life.
Fiona: Tell us your latest news?
EFM The big news for me is the publication
of my first novel Was Once A Hero through Hellfire Publishing. http://www.amazon.com/Was-Once-A-Hero-ebook/dp/B006UMTBY8/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1326144528&sr=1-1 We
are out with the e-version now and print to follow soon.
Fiona: When and why did you begin writing?
EFM I took it up seriously about ten years
ago when I was inspired by my good friend Tim McLoughlin, who wrote a book
called “Heart of the Old Country” which was made into the movie the “The
Narrows.” Knowing someone who had “made
the grade” inspired me to try.
Fiona: When did you first consider yourself a writer?
EFM I would say when I got into the
hardcover anthology Lowport by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller for my campy SF noir
story, “Lair of the Lesbian Love Goddess,” which later grew into my most
popular series. http://www.amazon.com/Hot-read-collection-Lesbian-ebook/dp/B005POO1II/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1326913195&sr=1-1
Fiona: What inspired you to write your first book?
EFM I love what I call the “Planet” story
where a crew of diverse people of wildly different talents and motivations are
cast into the crucible of a totally new environment. I want starships, alien cultures and worlds, and
adventure but I always leaven it with a strong romantic element. It seemed that sort of book was growing
uncommon. So while in my short fiction I
tended toward urban fantasy or humorous SF shorts (doesn’t that sound like a
form of kinky underwear?) at novel length I wanted to deal seriously with
questions of love and courage.
Fiona: Do you have a specific writing
style?
EFM No, not that I am aware of. The Robert Fenaday/Shasti Rainhell books (Was
Once A Hero being the first in a trilogy) are in third person past tense. The current books I am working on with an
ancient alien android named Maauro and her newfound friend, the disgraced
military pilot Wrik Trigardt, are in first person past tense for Wrik and first
person present for Maauro to highlight the fact that she as an essentially
deathless AI does not experience time the same way.
Fiona: How did you come up with the title?
EFM
I wanted to touch on the fact that a man or being can be a Hero in one instance
and something very different in another. Courage is a mutable quality
Fiona: Is there a message in your novel
that you want readers to grasp?
EFM
Too many
characters in science-fiction are too heroic, too unafraid, and too
matter-of-fact about danger. Those of us
who have faced danger and triumphed over it usually did it either with our
hearts in our mouths, fighting to overcome fear, or it was over so fast that we
didn’t have time for panic. There are
surely people of steely nerves and endless reserves of courage (check your
local Seal Team) but they are not common.
Most of us struggle to find courage and apply it. So I decided that my character would be a
man, drawn from a more ordinary life, no Captain Kirk, no Captain Sheridan, but
someone more like one of us.
Another them was the potential
for violence in the best of men. This
came out of knowing some World War II vets, genial men, all heroes in my eyes,
many who seemed like they would not harm a fly.
Yet these were the amtrac gunners at Tarawa, the crew in the B-17 from
the mighty Eighth, the marine crouching in the darkness at the edge of
Henderson Field when the banzai charges came in. That geniality masked the fact that we
ordinary men are capable of deeds that scar the soul. However gentle and kind we are to friends and
family, in the right situation we can be the instruments of immense
destruction. So this would be a theme
that I would explore in my book. There
times in the trilogy that you will feel very ambivalent about Robert and or
Shasti. You should, they themselves do.
Fiona: How much of the book is realistic?
EFM I try to have an underlying verity in
all that I do. Obviously not being a
combat veteran or an astronaut, there is a limit to that. But as a martial artist, I worked out most of
the fights that in my books by having my class attack me in the same manner.
Fear on the other hand is as well known to
me as to any man. I have had a gun
pulled on me and been shot at in that disinterested fashion people are shot at
in NYC (i.e crazy person shooting at something else in the area.) I captured a mugger, ok it was a small one,
and the police threw it back a few days later but heck I pinned him in a
doorway until the cops came. I’ve lost
friends and acquaintances to violence.
In the second Fenaday book he is
parajumping. I used my own parajumps for
the sensations; the watery feeling in the gut before, the snapping of the chute
and the sudden jerk of the harness. How
it felt to jump into the dark. Ditto for
flying belted onto the floor of a helicopter at treetop height or in a
hang-glider.
In the love story, well I have both won
and lost in love, been elated and uncertain and all that is used.
Regarding the science: I am not a
scientist though I know several. I take
the minimum liberties with science that I must.
My starships have hyperdrive and AG, but once they get from star to
star, they drive around a solar system by throwing reaction mass out the rear
of their atomic engines in Einsteinien space.
Weapons similarly are extrapolations of current ones but with less
emphasis on energy weapons. It will
always be cheaper to accelerate a piece of something whether by expanding gas
or or electromagnetism, through an enemy than to disintergatet something.
Fiona: Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?
EFM
Only in as much as loneliness, loss, love, fear and triumph are part of
all of our lives.
Fiona: What books have most influenced your life most?
EFM Wow hard one. The works of Andre Norton started me on this
path and I retain my love of these tales of otherworld. The characters are usually the loner, the
uncertain young person facing a hostile world, these spoke to me clearly in my
childhood. I would cite Star Gate, The
Stars our Ours and the Zero Stone as big influences. C J Cherryh with her Morgaine series
introduced me to a serious minded and strong heroine who did not have to outmuscle
the boys to outplay them. No one does
aliens better than Niven in his Known Space Work. In Fantasy the Lord of the Rings vied with
the Robert Howard Conan works for supremacy.
I have a copy of Jack Sutton’s the Beyond that was one of the first
books I felt a powerful connection to.
Fiona: If you had to choose, which writer
would you consider a mentor?
EFM I have been helped a great deal by a
number of people: Orson Scott Card with
his bootcamp class, Mike Resnick as generous a grandmaster as lives, Catherine
Asaro who is proof brains and beauty can travel together and C J Cherryh an
occasional correspondent who has offered encouragement at opportune times and
Janet Morris who wrote an introduction for me..
Fiona: What book are you reading now?
EFM Actually for a break I am reading one
of Kathy Reichs, “Bones” series I try to very my reading out of the genre but
rarely read other fiction. I am a
history buff because the weird stuff that real people do is more interesting.
Ins’t that true, General Custer?
Fiona: Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
EFM This is something I am kind of
grappling with, most of the authors I know or read are older and I am looking
for some new ones to follow, yet Steampunk does not appeal to me and it seems
like there are about 300 leather-clad, bare-midriffed hot girls boffing
vampires while dating werewolves or vice-versa.
I even satirized that trend in the second Sha’daa anthology Last Call
that I wrote in the piece “I Kill Zombies” with the character of Raven
Blackstone. http://www.amazon.com/Shadaa-Last-Call-Michael-Hanson/dp/1936021307/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_10
I would love some recommendations to keep
me in touch with the current New Wave. I
am finding a lot of the game tie in SF and Fantasy just… without flavor. So who do YOU like?
Fiona: What are your current projects?
EFM I am writing the second Maauro novel,
looking at a Shasti Rainhell novel (she’s the gorgeous girl with the muscles on
the cover of Was Once a Hero) and some more short stories based on my recent
trip to Europe. The first one of these
“Death in Venice” is being offered for sale now
Fiona: Name one entity that you feel
supported you outside of family members.
EFM
The Brinkers Writing Group: Laura
Jean Stroupe, Kim Wright (Love in Mid- Air) Paul Barrett (my own discovery who
I have put in two anthologies) Leigh Jenkins, Alan Jenkins, Mark Kust, Shontelle
MaQueen all fine writers in their own rights who make me a hell of a lot better
than I would ever have been on my own
Otherise
it has to be Hellfire Publishing, Keira Kroft aka Dawn Binkley who is
running with the Fenaday Trilogy, a wonderful and encouraging lady with a
boundless source of energy and enthusiasm.
Fiona: Do you see writing as a career?
I do but as a means of making a living it
is like acting, for every one person making a living at it, 100 have day jobs
and write on the weekend or holidays
Fiona: If you had to do it all over again,
would you change anything in your latest book?
EFM
Like every writer you always want to improve something but as with
cooking, you have to stop before you ruin the dish by destroying its
spontanaeity or you never get to the next work either.
Fiona: Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?
EFM I think like many it was a moment of
ego reading a book, putting it down and saying, “Heck , I can write better than
that!” You mercifully don’t find out
right away that you were wrong by then you may have developed some skills.
Fiona: Can you share a little of your current work with us?
EFM How about an excerpt from Was Once A
Hero to whet your appetite?
“There’s Gigor,” Fenaday said. The sun cleared the horizon and its rays lit
the tops of trees and buildings, leaving the field still cloaked in purple
shadow. He heard Shasti’s seat creak as
she leaned forward to look beyond the backrest of his seat. Fenaday put the Wildcat in a slow circle at a height of four hundred meters. Shasti and he looked out at the devastated
base. Gigor base extended for tens of
kilometers. The beige and yellow Enshari
buildings in the distance had the squat and unlovely utilitarian look favored
by governments. Beyond them, toward the
city proper lay the domes and half-domes preferred by the Enshari. Shattered glass in those buildings splintered
and threw back the sunlight.
“Looks worse than it did from
orbit,” she said.
“Yeah,” Fenaday said. “No question that the base was attacked. By what I can’t imagine, the pattern of
destruction doesn’t resemble that from an airburst nuclear weapon. Nothing else I know of—not even a mass
driver—creates destruction like this.”
“Only a few military spaceships
were based at Gigor,” Shasti said. “Most
Navy traffic used the port at the capital city of Barjan
Fenaday pointed. “There’s the Navy area. It’s completely destroyed.” They had seen all this from orbit, but it
lacked the effect of viewing it with their own eyes.
“Notice something?” asked Shasti.
“Yeah,” Fenaday replied. “Those shuttles on the apron look like they
were cut down by a laser fired from ground level. See that neat slice on the metal of that
green and white hospital shuttle? It’s
cut almost in half. Whatever it was
started striking the ground at a low angle, bubbling the apron.”
“Energy weapons don’t work that
way,” Shasti said. “Why use massive
quantities of power to cut metal when a kinetic weapon does it cheaper and
faster? Lasers are for burning flesh,
starting fires and damaging sensitive instruments—-”
“These are a few of your favorite
things,” Fenaday murmured.
Shasti ignored the comment, “Well,
this isn’t Conchirri work. If they had
energy weapons like this, we would all be dinner.”
Fenaday brought the Wildcat to a hover near the edge of the
apron close to the barracks. The sun had
risen enough to light the field. A
brilliant, dark-blue ground cover, reminiscent of pansies, dotted some of the
nearby tarmac.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said
tightly. “Are you ready, Shasti?”
“Locked and loaded,” she said,
putting her tri-auto in her lap.
“Telisan, this is Fenaday. I’m going in.
Keep circling. If anything
happens, run for it. That is an order.”
“Of course,” replied Telisan. The Denlenn’s easy answer made Fenaday
suspect Telisan was simply humoring him.
“Fenaday to Sidhe, we are landing.”
The fighter landed smoothly,
blowing dust and debris away from the Wildcat. Fenaday throttled back the engines, but
didn’t cut them off. He kept the HOTAS
stick, which controlled thrust and weapons, in his right hand. Fenaday looked to starboard, Shasti to port. The fighter’s swivel-mounted guns followed
the motion of his eyes. The Confed
shuttles from the first expedition landed only sixty-three seconds before being
overwhelmed by whatever killed their crews.
Fenaday didn’t look at the clock.
He scanned every shadow, dreading the sight of a dust cloud similar to
the one that enveloped the Confederate shuttles three years ago. Telisan circled above, equally vigilant.
From Perez’ station aboard Sidhe, the engineer announced, “Thirty
seconds.”
Fenaday kept his eyes on the
ground. His heart pounded and his mouth
felt dry. “Nothing in sight,” he
reported. To his own surprise, his voice
sounded calm.
“All clear here,” Shasti said. She didn’t even have the grace to sound
concerned.
“Same,” Telisan reported. “Nothing on motion sensors.”
“Forty-five seconds.”
For an instant, Fenaday thought
about saying something to Shasti, something about the night before. He snapped a quick glance into the one of the
mirrors. She stared out the canopy,
catlike, intent, totally focused on here and now.
He returned his attention to the
field.
“Sixty seconds.”
Fenaday held his breath, his finger
on the trigger.
“Seventy seconds, Captain. Congratulations on a new world record.”
The breath left his body in a
whoosh.
“Okay,” he said, voice shaking
slightly. “I’m heading into overheat,
initiating engine shutdown.
“Telisan, keep circling. Perez, start the shuttles down. Tell Karass he is to abort if at any time we
lose contact before landing.”
Fiona: Is there anything you find
particularly challenging in your writing?
EFM Plot.
I can find characters to fill an auditorium and can write reams of
dialogue. Finding a strong and viable
plot for them to inhabit is where the heavy lifting comes in.
Fiona: Do you have to travel much concerning your book(s)?
EFM
Not so far but it is early days yet.
I plan to do Concarolinas and Libertycon.
Fiona: Who designed the covers?
EFM I have a friend who is a glamor
photographer, Michael Church, occasionally I tear him away from photographing
beautiful women and he does a cover for me.
I will include a couple below.
Michael can find a good angle on anyone and is interested in doing more
covers and I cannot recommend him highly enough. http://www.michaelchurch.com
Fiona: What was the hardest part of
writing your book?
None of writing the book was hard,
critiquing is slightly more difficult, marketing it is where suffering comes
in.
Fiona: Did you learn anything from writing
your book and what was it?
EFM I learned that when you really love
doing something, it’s not work. I
actually do not feel well if I go for too long without writing. I hope it always stays that way.
Fiona: Do you have any advice for other
writers?
EFM The difference between the pro and the amateur is
that amateur gave up. You have to have the hide of a rhino to do this and you
have to write. Don’t try to produce perfect work or you will never produce
anything. Line up words and get moving. But the best advice I got was from
Orson Scott Card and it’s a mistake a lot of us make early on. We go for the
action, the big bang. It’s more important to make us CARE about people and what
is happening. Otherwise the big bang means little if all it is doing is taking
out faceless stormtroopers or other “red shirts” (Star Trek geek reference). If
I care what is going on and to whom it is happening, a paper cut can have the
significance of an atom bomb
Fiona: Do you have anything specific that
you want to say to your readers?
EFM
Yes, thanks. It is an astonishing
experience to become part of other people’s lives in this way. If anything I write ever encourages you,
eases a heartache, or makes you feel less alone, well then it was all worth it.
Fiona: If you were not a
writer what else would you like to have done ?
EFM
A full time martial arts instructor, I discovered the art as an adult. Had I found it as a child I think it would
have made a huge difference to my life not that I am unhappy at all about how
it has gone. Roads not travelled always
beckon but who knows where they lead?
Fiona: Do you have a blog/website? if so
what is it?
See you around the galaxy,
Edward McKeown
=
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