Ghouliana Stories (Bess Sturgis) writes tales for young readers that are spooky but not too scary. She is one of the hardest working writers I know and also one of the most optimistic. She is a champion of literacy for children, and uses costumes and props to enact her stories. If you live in Indiana and frequent writerly festivals/events chances are you have come across Mrs. Sturgis.

Sturgis as “Ghouliana”

You write “Not Too Scary Tales” for young readers. Where is the line between Not Too Scary and Too Scary?

I’m very old school when it comes to the line between “Not Too Scary” and “Too Scary Tales”.
Because I write for advanced young readers (7+), I refrain from putting my characters in situations of true terror. While they may become lost, frightened or bullied, NEVER are they stolen, unnecessarily terrorized or graphically eaten alive.

How do you walk it?

Very carefully! I use a lot of silliness and humor to keep the tension levels at bay. Grown-ups DO NOT thank you for giving their young readers nightmares.

How important is promoting literacy among the young?

Is this a trick question (insert snarky grin here…)???

The ability to read defines a person’s ability to navigate life.
I believe there is no such thing as “too early” to snuggle a baby and read aloud from a book.
It doesn’t matter what the text says. It’s the warmth, closeness and tone of voice that makes the little one smile and recognize books as something wonderful.

A display in a local library shows off “The Shoe Troll” by Ghouliana Stories

You are perhaps the most active author I know. Between all the public readings, fairs, appearances, and social media, when and how do you actually write?

I write ridiculously early in the morning, usually from 5:00am until whenever, however, some of my most beloved characters have appeared after 3:30 am and before 7:00am.
These characters didn’t shuffle in as yawning and sleepy wisps wearing pajamas and slippers. They arrived without warning; wide awake, fully formed and ready to play.
As to how I write: first drafts are almost always written by hand, in pen, on recycled paper.
I love the freedom of scribbling words across the clean side of a used page. This gives me a feeling of “No Rules-No Fear” and allows me to dance with whoever shows up.
Also, this allows me to write just about any time and anywhere I have a few extra minutes.

How important is “legwork” for new writers?

Legwork is crucial! No one is going to walk up, knock on your door and ask, “Do you have any books in a box under your bed I can buy?”
If you don’t “put your book out there”, who will? Even if you have a traditional publisher, you are still expected to do a lot of self-promotion.

Mrs. Sturgis matches costumes with her characters.

In one sentence, why are libraries important?

“Libraries are equal opportunity information providers.”
(Original Copyright 1992: Bess Sturgis)

Works by Bess Sturgis

I recently had the pleasure of asking Robert Mullin a few questions. Robert is an author of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and is also a cryptozoologist who has been featured on the History Channel. A search for a living dinosaur has taken Robert to Africa multiple times.

I actually have no problem taking readers through a long, dark tunnel, so long as there is a light at the end of it.

Your debut fantasy novel, Bid the Gods Arise, has been well received. In February, you released a standalone prequel to the events of BTGA. I assume this was, in part, to satiate your fans. So tell us, when’s the sequel?!

You are correct that the novella (Blood Song) is a hat tip to the fans who have been waiting so long for the second book in The Wells of the Worlds series. It is also a way to develop a popular character’s past, which will be explored in Book 2, and so I want to have that story locked in my head before I proceed further.

I hoped to have the sequel finished by the time my son was born (sometime near the beginning of August). However, as busy as things have gotten lately, the new goal is to finish before the end of the year.

My fans are extremely patient, thank goodness.

BTGA weighs in at a whopping 481 pages. How important is book length to you?

You should have seen it before my editor got to it.

I actually prefer shorter works now that I’m a busy adult, but I love the richness and depth of a well-developed world — so it’s the bigger books that still catch my eye on the bookshelf. Ultimately, though, my philosophy has always been that a well-told story is simply as long as it needs to be. We have all seen examples of those tales that dragged on longer than they should have, or those that simply whetted our appetite for what they could have been.

Describe “Mullinesque” Fantasy/Sci-Fi.

By “Mullinesque,” I’m going to assume that you mean fantasy that reflects my personal tastes or worldview.

There is a trend in modern fantasy to approach the fantastical from a nihilistic perspective. It is no doubt a knee-jerk reaction to hopelessly romantic fantasy stories wherein reality is considered to take a back seat, and good always triumphs over evil. I actually understand where this “grimdark” sensibility comes from, but I fundamentally disagree with it as both a reader and as an author. I was enraptured by the world-building, characterization, and richness of story that George R. R. Martin brought to ASOIAF, but (sadly) ultimately abandoned that author for the same reason I did Stephen King many years ago: I decided that no matter how talented he was at bringing a story to life, I no longer cared to be saturated with such a hopeless viewpoint.

I actually have no problem taking readers through a long, dark tunnel, so long as there is a light at the end of it. As a Christian, I can see both dark and light in the world, and want to make sure that they are accurately represented. (This does not mean that I don’t believe in shades of gray or even moral complexity; I simply don’t approach life or writing with an amoral or nihilistic viewpoint, and my books reflect this.)

With fantasy, I tend to prefer “mythic” or “mystical” over “magical.” I’m more interested in spiritual themes than magic-as-technology, so no matter how consistent or in-depth the magical system in any given world, it’s going to be lost on me if that is the primary focus of the book. With science fiction, it’s the same. I’m more interested in Romantic ideas (in the classical sense) than I am in nuts-and-bolts, or clinical storytelling that ultimately neither inspires nor informs. Take me on an adventure. It can be scary, it can be wondrous, it can be sad, but give me a world I’m interested in and characters I can relate to. I’m fond of stories that are not afraid to blend genres somewhat (as mine do), and that focus on character as much as setting. Ultimately people are drawn to the human condition, and I think that is what makes a timeless narrative.

Name two authors that inspired you. Why?

C.S. Lewis for his ability to expand the mind and cause the spirit to reflect. Timothy Zahn for his ability to make one forget that one is reading, and simply absorb the twists and turns as if one were watching a movie. I know of many more authors that are probably more artful, but those are qualities I would wish to emulate in my own writing.

Plug someone else’s work. Not yours, not mine. What author should we know more about?

I’m actually intrigued by several up-and-coming fantasy novelists whose tastes seem to reflect mine, but have not yet had a chance to delve into their works, so I hesitate to recommend them. Rest assured, though, that I shall. (Some of these have been kind enough to read and recommend my own books, so I have gotten introduced to them as readers first, and writers second.)

Probably the most influential author in my recent life has been J.C. Lamont. Her epic, Frank Peretti-meets-Tolkien take on history (Prophecy of the Heir) is probably one of the most ambitious projects one is likely to encounter.  I think that one day, should her novels ever reach public acclaim, she might be considered one of the ground-breakers in the speculative/historical fiction genre.

Robert Mullen, Fantasy-Science Fiction author

Pick up Robert’s Books

“…with the economics of publishing changing, it’s incredibly important for authors to be able to promote and market themselves.”

I interview John Adcox and receive some of the most-detailed answers to date. We explore John’s varied background, relate his marketing background to writing, and ask him to predict the future.

John Adcox

The first impression I have of you is that you are a man who wears many hats – publisher, author, and screenwriter for starters. You also boast a solid background in marketing and communications, and have helped some notable companies develop their brand. As a writerly person how important is it to be flexible in the age of the internet?

Well, with the economics of publishing changing, it’s incredibly important for authors to be able to promote and market themselves. The publishers, even the larger ones, really don’t do that anymore … at all. Even when they did, they never did it well. By and large, publishers have always marketed directly to booksellers, not book readers. That means, out of all the people in the world who might fall in love with your story, publishers are, at best, marketing to the few who happen to wander into bookstores.

In marketing, we call that “white hart” marketing. That’s a term that comes from mythology — the white hart is the object of the quest, a sort of walking Holy Grail. It grants wishes. The point is, they are (at best!) few, and they’re really, really hard to find.

The better way is to concentrate on all the other harts, the plain old brown ones. There’s lots of those, and no one is after them.

In this case, think of white harts as the people who frequent bookstores, and buy two or three books a week … pretty much every week. That sounds like the ideal audience, right?

The thing is, there are hundreds of new books published every week, and this white hart is buying three.

Books like, say, The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter series reach way, way beyond the audiences that usually buy books. Those people are hungry for stories, too. They are the brown harts. Go after them. Of course, the publishers will never do that.

So it’s pretty much up to writers. That’s not something we’re necessarily comfortable with, but I think it’s easier if you think in terms of building genuine relationships with audiences, or potential audiences, rather than selling.

Technology gives you amazing tools for communicating, and participating in the kind of communities that develop around stories. When you write, you’re writing for an audience. As much as we all like to think of ourselves as writing for the entire world, we’re actually writing for a smaller, specific audience — at least to start with. You might every well grow beyond that base, but you have to start someone.

The people in this audience share things in common … interests, passions, hobbies. There’s something in most of us, I think, that yearns to meet people “like us,” people who understand. C.S. Lewis put it like this in The Four Loves: “Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .” So those people tend to congregate somewhere.

For example, my agent is shopping a book of mine that’s set at a Renaissance fair. At least five million people go to a fair somewhere in the US every year … twice. Now then. Count the ones who go once a year, or every other year, and you have a fairly significant audience. You can use, say, Facebook to find people who love Renaissance fairs and, again for example, fantasy and/or paranormal romance, and you start to have a group that you can start interacting with.

You’ll find that most of them will say, “wow, here’s someone like me!” And they’re eager to help. Treat them with genuine respect and gratitude, and pretty soon you’ll have an audience. Just be sure to give back.

Your bio mentions that you are now focusing on storytelling, how do you bring everything together and streamline your efforts?

Mostly, that was a case of eliminating all the things that weren’t focused on storytelling. Sounds simple, right?

My company, Gramarye Media was lucky enough to be accepted into a business accelerator, Georgia Tech’s Flashpoint program. That program is designed to eliminate years of startup mistakes (and literally millions of dollars of wasted money). As a result, we were able to attract the attention of major investors.

Now, my job is to make books and movies – we’re the world’s first cross-media story incubator (basically taking the Silicon Valley business incubator model and applying it to storytelling and franchise development). So I am always in that creative space. As a result, it’s easier for me to switch gears when it’s time to concentrate on my own stories.

Plus, I’m constantly surrounded by extraordinary individuals who raise the creative bar so high that I can’t help being awed and inspired. I can’t say enough about the idea of creatives working in community.

Which one of your works best represents you? Why?

That’s way hard to answer, because I think on some level, they all do. At the very least, there’s something in all of them that I am passionate about, or even that I love dearly. Otherwise, why on earth would I devote so much time and energy to them? I think writing has to come from passion. It’s the difference between art and artifice.

But if I absolutely had to answer, I guess I’d say The Widening Gyre or The Sword and the Grail

John Adcox getting his pirate on.

You are an avid reader with an interest in Arthurian lore. Tell me, what is your favorite Arthurian work to read and way?

That’s just as hard to answer! I borrowed from so many (and I tried to acknowledge as many as I could) in The Widening Gyre. If I had to pick, I’d go with the first ones I fell in love with as a child, the ones that have never quite left me. One was (I think) The Boy’s King Arthur by Sidney Lanier (I was in the second grade at the time, so it might have been Howard Pyle’s.) The other was The Once and Future King. I adored that, and it changed me as the best books do. It’s where I learned philosophy, lovely writing, irony, and the ache of loss.

Tell me, what does the future hold?

Okay. Let’s see.

Sloths will one day rule the world. Seriously. Sloths. Don’t let the apes fool you. This will happen not when mankind dies out, but when we finally perfect the holodeck from Star Trek, because seriously, when we have those, why would anyone ever come out?

Aliens will make contact within the next century, mark my words. However, they will turn out to be the equivalent of intergalactic Amway salesmen, and everyone will be just all kinds of disappointed.

We will be able to buy self-cleaning clothes, but we’ll still find it too much trouble, and they’ll still wind up in piles in the corner.

The flying car will (soon!) become a reality. Alas, the invisible car will become real at about the same time, and it won’t go well. I blame the sloths in their secret, slow-moving labs.

Student essays and government bills will both be limited to 140 characters. They still won’t be read.

Walt Disney, who really IS frozen under Disneyland, will be thawed out to save the dystopian future with the magic of imagination. All of the news channels will use the tagline “Disney on Ice.”

Smart homes will become real. Unfortunately, that means most people will have to live elsewhere.

McDonald’s will exit fast food and go gourmet. The McQuick-seared Salmon with McMint-lime Cream Sauce will be to die for. The kid-sized portion, only available well done, alas, will still come with a Happy Meal toy, but they will all be sloths dressed as Marvel or Disney characters. No one will question this. It is all a part of the plan.

Star Wars Episode XXIII: The New Shadow will have an all-female cast. They still won’t release female action figures.

A frustrated electorate will demand that a third option, “Let’s Just Do Without a President for the Next Four Years” be added to the ballot. It will be a landslide.

The porn industry will collapse and die out when technology makes nurses, flight attendants, and pizza delivery boys obsolete. I mean, without the stories, why would anyone want to watch?

Lost will be remade, and it will still piss people off. [Editor’s note, I still haven’t finished the last season of Lost.]

Jesus will return in glory, and the Westboro Baptist Church will be there to protest.

Shortly after all this has come to pass, Patrick Rothfuss will finish book three.

If you’d like to find out more about Mr. Adcox please visit his website www.johnadcox.com

I recently sent C.D. Gallant-King a list of five questions. In his upcoming book, Hell Comes to Hogtown, a comic book nerd and a pro-wrestler try to clear their names in a kidnapping while evading a bloodthirsty demon hobo…

THE BOOK!

Title: Hell Comes to Hogtown
Author: C.D Gallant-King
Genre: Comic Horror
Length: 65,000 words
Cover Art: Jason Salvatori and Max Covers
Editing: Amy Allen-MacLeod
Release Date: July 1, 2016

Fitz is a broke night manager for a grubby comic book store. His only friend Dee is a drugged-out, womanizing pro-wrestler. Together they’re the most pathetic losers on the face of the planet. Their lives cannot possibly get any worse.

And then they’re implicated in the kidnapping of the prime minister’s wife.

On the run from the cops, Fitz and Dee discover there is something far worse than the RCMP stalking the dark streets of Toronto. They are being hunted by an ancient demon of unspeakable evil with an insatiable taste for blood… or maybe it’s just your run-of-the-mill giant murderous hobo?

Either way, life in prison might be better than whatever the creepy drifter has in store for them…

Writer, tabletop gamer, pro-wrestling aficionado. Dad.

C.D. Gallant-King is an independent writer originally from Newfoundland, Canada, though he’s not fond of fishing and hates boats. He moved to Toronto to study theatre, and then later moved to Ottawa where he does absolutely nothing related to theatre.

He hangs out on Twitter and Facebook, and blogs at Stories I Found in the Closet and Rule of the Dice.

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What follows is the first of many author interviews I’ll be posting throughout the summer. Hope Ann is a Christian Fantasy author and contributing member of Fantasy Writers and Readers Facebook Group.

Christian Fantasy Author Hope Ann

What are the challenges of being a devoutly Christian author?

Quite frankly, the challenges of being a Christian author aren’t all that different from the challenges of authors in general: creating distinct characters, forming a tight plot, not getting distracted, writing realistic emotion…oh yes, and figuring out what on earth to title the book. As a Christian author, there is the additional challenge of presenting the message or theme of the story without it being forced or sounding preachy. Sometimes the presentation is harder than other times, but in the whole scheme of writing a book, it’s only one challenge among the normal amount of complications.

How do you “keep it real” when it comes to the Christian faith when writing fantasy?

In fantasy, the worlds, settings, and terms of region change, but people and emotions remain the same. And that is what I build my stories around; the characters and their actions and reactions as well as the plot. I also build in central themes into my writing. Sometimes they are obvious and sometimes they are more subtle, but a good theme is intertwined with the characters and plot until it is indispensable. It’s not forced into the story, but builds it up and weaves through character arcs so that, if absent, the story would feel like it was missing something.

We can likely figure out what binds you to other Christian Fantasy authors, but I’d like to ask what separates you from your peers?

There are other Christian fantasy authors who write allegorical books. I’d love to be able to say that I write in a completely unique style that no one has tried before, or that I have a revolutionary view on fantasy and allegory no one else has thought of. Unfortunately I can’t. What I do enjoy doing is taking themes which are familiar to Christians in theory, but harder to grasp in reality because of their abstractness (such as the source of true joy or relying on God completely for peace during trouble) and showing how such ideas look and work in the lives and struggles of my characters. And, by extension, how they can look and work in the lives of my readers.

Hope takes aim.

Who are the Realm Leapers?

Stealthmaster Kirin and Scrollmistress Elena were two characters I created who can ‘leap’ between all realms real and imagined. Oh yes, and they can time travel. I can use the monthly stories I write about them to build up backstories of my characters or worlds, write a fanfiction in another realm such as Middle Earth, or just have fun. Their original intention was to liven up my newsletters and be my ‘on location researchers’ for fantasy articles on my blog. But recently they’ve taken on lives of their own and now want me to write a book about them. Someday, I might just listen.

What’s on the horizon for you?

Chocolate, notebooks full of random ideas I’ll never have time for, and lots of writing. As I’m getting more ideas than I have time to write, I plan, Lord willing, to write for the rest of my life. In the more immediate future, however, I am working on writing and self-publishing the Legends of Light; a series of nine novellas which retell fairy tales and focus on the nine aspects of the Fruit of the Spirit. I’ve another novel I hope to submit for traditional publication late this year and after that…more writing.

For more on Hope Ann please visit her website.
Hope Ann’s Work: