From my sweet friends Lucy Taylor and Sabrina Kaleta comes this very fun little blog tour. Here are my answers - for the rest check out the ,links to the other participants below.
1) What am I working on?
Let's see ... aside from the very cool stuff that's happening with Renaissance E Books (which includes our
Futures Past Editions sf/f/h imprint and the erotic
Sizzler one), where I am an Associate Publisher, and
Digital Parchment Services, where I'm a Publisher (stay tuned, great stuff coming very soon), I just finished a sequel to
The Bachelor Machine
(a new edition coming out soon, btw), tentatively called Skin Effect. I
also just started a brand new, non-erotic, allegorical/satire SF novel
called
Blue ... which (fingers: crossed) I hope to finish by the end of the year.
Beyond those, I'm still plugging away on a few dozen other projects that are way too nascent to chat about just yet.
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Well,
my work has always been – to put it mildly – rather unusual. Yeah,
I've thought about trying my hand at more "commercially viable" things
(despite having penned two vampire novels and a romance) but I'm simply
having way too much fun writing odd stuff. Not to say that I haven't
been open to opportunities: 90% of my stuff came because someone asked
for it – erotica, gay fiction, romance, non-fiction, the whole enchilada
– but I've always put my own odd spin on it.
In the case of
Skin Effect ... well, the original
Bachelor Machine
was rather a creature of its time: full of cyberdelic psychedelics,
dystopic architecture, and circuit-pattern tattooed outlaws. Not to get
up on my soapbox but I'm frankly tired of the knee-jerk negativity that
still seems to permeate SF these days. But what honestly scares me is
that it could very well become a self-fulfilling prophecy: that we are
looking forward to the apocalypse. So I challenged myself to create a
book of erotic short stories that take some of the old cliché's of SF
(memory manipulation, genetic engineering, AIs, etc) and give them a
positive spin. I had a blast writing them ... just hope people enjoy
reading them.
3) Why do I write what I do?
I
don't really have a choice: while my day-job might be working for the
wonderful Renaissance E Books and Digital Parchment Services in my heart
I'm a writer – though my Publisher duties do give me a chance to try
and be the Publisher I'd like to have as a writer. Sure, it can get
damned hard to create anything these days – when everyone on the planet
seems to have written a novel, a screenplay, become a photographer, or
[fill in the blank] but I always try to stay to the fact that I just
love to write stories. There's really nothing more ... to be woo-woo
for a sec ... magical about putting words together to make a tale that
has never existed in the history of ... well, history and, if I'm lucky,
will outlive me by hundreds or maybe thousands of years by changing how
people see the world. Can't get much better than that.
4) How does my writing process work?
While
my Publishing jobs take up most of my time, I've been working very hard
to give myself at least one or two days a week to just write. I don’t
follow a regular schedule because I've always been very good about
knowing what I have to do and when I have to do it. An odd thing about
me is that I can't work in dead silence, so I have my Xbox running
Netflix or Hulu or Amazon or whatever all kinds of tone-setting movies
or TV shows. Another odd thing is that I don't read a lot of the genres
I write in – sure, I do when I have to, as a Publisher, but for the
most part I find it just gets in the way of what I want to do as a
writer. But that's just me and my style ... your millage may vary.
#
Sèphera Girón is a horror author, tarot reader,
editor, and paranormal investigator. Flesh Failure and Captured Souls
from Samhain Horror Publishing are her latest forays through the dark
fiction labyrinth. You can find most of her work as eBooks these days.
She has stories in Axes of Evil, High Stakes: A Vampire Anthology, The
Haunted Mansion Project: Part One and Part Two, The Unnatural Tales of
the Jackalope, and Telling Tales of Terror. Enter Sèphera’s World at
http://sephwriter666.blogspot.ca
Lucy Taylor
was born in Richmond,
VA,
and never really got the South out of her system, as evidenced by the
flavor of Southern Gothic in many of her works. She’s published
seven novels, including
NAILED,
SAVING SOULS, and
LEFT TO DIE (under the pseudonym Taylor Kincaid), and over
100 short stories.
Sabrina Kaleta is a poet, music journalist, mother, performance artist, Doo-Dah Queen, reluctant debutante, punk, hostess, fortune teller..all these labels might tell a bit of my story. As a poet, I have graced the stages of The Espresso Bar, The Old Towne Pub, Sam’s Book City, the Coconut Teazer and Highland Grounds and been published in Flipside, Saturday Afternoon Journal and Kether. Other publications include Guitar World, Metal Hammer, New Times, Diabolik and BAM. In my Pasadena, CA home, I continue to try to ignore the outside voices, have a good time and create what I can.
Sabrinakaleta.tumblr.com
John Eder has been writing fiction for the last three years or
so. He’s also a photographer, with a career spanning the film and
digital ages. You can see his photo work at
www.johneder.com.
Eder has always written, mostly non-fiction for mags like the Village
Voice, Conde Nast Traveler, Creem, Photo District News, CurbedLA.com,
and brink.com. He also draws, illustrating his own work when it’s
called for. His work is still tragically (to me, anyway) unpublished,
to which end he is starting his own house, Moon Base. Also in
production is an anthology podcast of my short stories, To The Manor
Borne (By Robots), the idea being that in the distant future a giant
monster has invaded Earth. It’s Scheherazade meets Godzilla. To The
Manor Borne (By Robots) will be on
www.radiotitans.com,
a podcast network he’s recently gotten involved in as creative
director. He lives in L.A. and grew up in south Florida, and is the
father of a wonderful daughter. May the wind be at your back as you go
check out his
blog.
http://johnederjournal.tumblr.com/