Abigail Manning

 

Interview with Abigail Manning 

Author of

The Emerald Realm Series

Please tell me a little about your current work in progress.

At the moment I am working on my second series which is an extension of my first series The Emerald Realm. This new series has yet to be announced, so I can’t share too much, but I can confirm that it will be another series of fairy tale retellings just like the Emerald Realm.

Where did you get the idea for this book or series?

I definitely got the idea for my series from reading other wonderful retelling authors, although what makes my stories unique is that I choose to retell more unusual stories such as Goldilocks and the three bears.

Do you write in more than one genre?

No, not yet… I’m currently in the process of plotting an entirely new series, so I intend to explore new writing styles soon.

Tell me about something that you believe makes your writing unique or worthy of attention.

My stories are twisted classics, which is both original and not. I would say that the major point that sets me apart from other authors, specifically retelling authors, is that I like to touch on stories that most people have never heard retold. I also like to make the reader think. While it’s true that my stories are inspired by tale you already know, the story doesn’t always go the way you think… In some cases the nods to the original tales are obvious, but it others you’ll find yourself being surprised at where they show up.

Is there anything about your personal history or personality that manifests strongly in your writing?

I actually studied theatre in college, so a lot of my scenes I end up visualizing like a staged production as I’m writing them. I studied a bit of costume design in school a well, and I definitely feel as if that shows in my clothing descriptions.

What else would be helpful for readers to know about you?

I’m also a nanny! When I’m not writing I’m wrangling kiddos which honestly affects a lot of my writing. I draw a lot of inspiration from their childlike joy and youthful imaginations.

Excluding your own work, what underrated author or book would you recommend that more people read? Why?

Cora May has some really great fantasies that I enjoy! I’m currently reading her Golden Scythe series and really enjoy it!

Which of your books do you most highly recommend? Why?

My books are a part of a series so I always recommend that you start with book 1 Poisoned Heart, but… I would say that my second book Bearly Free:A retelling of Goldilocks has a lot more humor for someone looking for a good smile alongside their adventure.

Which break, event, decision, or fortuitous circumstance has helped you or your writing career the most?

Surprisingly, being scammed did a lot for me. Back in January of 22 I got scammed by a fake promoter who flooded my reviews with negative slander. It was really awful at first, but when I reached out to my audience and writing friends for advice, their support was overwhelming. We not only won a legal case against the scammer, but I also gained a lot of positive support and my confidence in my writing boosted tenfold. It’s really heart-warming to know that your readers have your back and are willing to stand up for your stories.

What question do you wish you would get asked more often?

What’s my favorite dinosaur, I feel like that’s the real hard-hitting question that says a lot about a person. Mine for example, is the mighty Stegosaurus <3

Do you have a catch-phrase or quote that you like? What is it? And why do you choose it?

Thy will be done. All in all I don’t have control over who buys books or what people think of them, so I simply take every small victory with a smile and every downfall with a grain of salt, because in the end the work I’ve produced will have to speak for itself.

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Thanks to Abigail for participating.

I'm happy to report that the autographed books from the book giveaway went out on Friday to two lucky winners. I sent two books to the first winner and one book to the second.

I'm six chapters into the bugmageddon book, and I'll be taking a short break from it to complete a short story or two.

Is writing like carving out a pathway through a mountain? I think that's not a terrible analogy--better than a sculpting comparison. If sculpting is removing everything that isn't the desired form, writing is tunneling through the material--which may be soft or hard--to reach a destination. Wait! There's more. Writing not only requires chiseling or sometimes blasting out the path, it's also decorating the passages and rooms while populating the way with interesting characters who do exciting things to fascinate and entice the readers to continue exploring the caverns as their companions. I find it difficult to stick with a story if there are no characters that appeal to me. I don't have to like them, but I do have to care about them to some degree.

Story structures require a certain number of rooms and passages or a particular arrangement and decoration, according to the genre, and characters who are of the right type for the milieu with trauma and drama to captivate and intrigue. The tunnel must narrow at certain points and ascend, descend, or twist at the right locations to satisfy structural purists or some innate sense of continuity and archetypal expectations. Finally--well, maybe not finally, but finally as far as this little exposition goes--the chisel work should not call attention to itself, except on rare occasions to create that sense of awe and wonder the explorer craves, but which would weary or numb with profuse application.

Here endeth the lesson, such as it is.

Caribbean Scene

 

Fun Fact:

Before the outbreak of the French and Indian war, the French had traded sugar, molasses, and rum with the British North American colonies. Many American ship men ignored the trade restrictions after the war started and continued as smugglers. Others armed their vessels and went after French merchantmen. Some French shippers did likewise. Both England and France adopted a convoy system to protect the shipping.

Sugar production flourished on the French island of Martinique, and the powerful sugar lobby convinced William Pitt that it should be taken and later used as a bargaining chip to exchange for Minorca in the Mediterranean, which the French had captured. Pitt's friend and sugar magnate assured him that Martinique would be an easy conquest.

Lord Anson, first lord of the Admiralty, resisted Pitt's attempt to divert ships from the channel for the planned conquest. However, George II had caught Pitt's vision of global empire and become one Pitt's strongest supporters, avowing that Martinique must be taken to trade for the return of Minorca. 

I guess you could say: He had a yearning for a Caribbean Scene, George and Pitt were sharing the same dream, and their hearts beat as one, all for love of the rum.

November 12, 1758, and fleet of 73 ships sailed from Portsmouth for the Caribbean, arriving off Barbados in January, 1759, and joining a small squadron under the command of Commodore John Moore, who assumed command of the combined naval force. Major General Thomas Peregrine Hopson commanded the land forces.  Martinique law 125 miles to the northwest.

Hopson chose Fort Royal as his goal and landed troops on Martinique. He soon discovered that his troops would have to hack a road through tropical jungle under the constant threat of French fire along the route. He withdrew his forces. The invasion had lasted a day.

In a second effort, Commodore Moore sent Captain Edward Jekyll commanding the 60 gun ship-of-the-line Rippon to attack the coastal defenses at Saint Pierre. Contrary winds pinned the ship against the coast and Jekyll had to put down longboats to tow the damaged ship from the dangerous crossfire of the French batteries. 

Moore and Hopson re-assessed their situation and the strength of Martinique. They found that the island of Guadalupe, a hundred miles to the north, might be less formidable. January 23, 1759, the commodore sent eight ships to bombard the fort at Basse-Terre on Martinique. During the fierce exchange, a mortar shell fouled the fort's cistern, and the militia garrison instead drank rum all day. Thus relaxed, they simply went home. 

Moore launched bomb ketches against the town--which soon became a firestorm as the bombs ignited the abundant and flammable wooden warehouses of sugar and molasses. After occupying what remained of Bass-Terre, Moore took Fort Louis and the town of Grand-Terre on the opposite side of the island in a similar manner. However, the rest of Guadalupe remained under French control, and soon over a quarter of Hopson's troops took fever and had to be evacuated. Hopson himself fell victim and died. John Barrington assumed command of the land forces and hastened to attack and subdue the rest of the island before the arrival of the French fleet.

Although Governor General Marquis de Beauharnais landed troops from Martinique on Guadalupe, the French planters, tired of the destruction to their livelihoods, refused to support Beauharnais. The governor general had to return to Martinique, and Barrington's terms for their previous surrender had been most generous. 

The Guadalupe sugar producers would soon be providing the Massachusetts rum distillers with nearly half of their molasses requirements.

The above was taken from my notes from Chapter 11 of The French and Indian War by Walter R. Borneman -- and with apologies to Billy Ocean.

Don't forget, you have less than 24 hours to get in on this chance to win two autographed books:

 

 

Book Giveaway

 

An off-schedule post to let you know that I'm giving away two autographed paperbacks:  Threading the Rude Eye and Power to Hurt - the first two books in the Tomahawks and Dragon Fire Series. It's a marriage of history and fantasy that will fire your flintlock for the cause of freedom and put the suspenders (or maybe belt) to your disbelief in dragons, magic, and mythical creatures. Evil has many faces, and one of them looks like a viking. The others are even more dreadful in appearance. 

Start the adventure with Alex, Lucette, Jonathan, Rip, Antonio, Felgar, Cat, and the other dragon hunters with these two autographed books. Enter to win!

The Third Man

 Around my writing adventures on Saturday, I squeezed in some time watching music video. The music was Anton Karas on the zither and the video was The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene. It stars Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, and Orson Wells.

Filmed in bomb-ravaged locations in post-war Vienna, the black and white picture benefits from the intriguing theme played on the zither and fabulous cinematography. Joseph Cotten plays a writer of westerns who is lured to Vienna by an old friend and the promise of a job. He arrives just in time for his friend's funeral.

He learns from the British officer in charge (Trevor Howard) of the international police headquarters in Vienna that his friend Harry Lime was a smuggler. Cotten investigates and learns that Lime was killed when a truck hit him while crossing the street. Two men were present and dragged Lime's body to the side of the road. Cotten finds it a bit suspicious.

The porter at Lime's old apartment tells Cotten that there was a third man.

When Cotten returns to the building for more information, the Porter's body is being carried out.

Before all that happens, Cotten finds Alida Valli who plays Lime's girlfriend.

She's an actress whose papers Lime forged. The papers show she's Austrian, but she's actually Czech, and the Russians plan to drag her back there. She would not like that.

Cotten learns that Lime was a real slime, who stole penicillin from the hospital, doubled it by adding water and made terrible profits while people, including many infants, died or suffered long and painfully before meeting death from the tainted drugs.

Cotten and Valli seem to have a potential for romance, but it never does develop in my opinion.

Eventually, Cotten finds (s)Lime (played by Orson Wells), who is inconveniently alive.

Cotten lets the police in on the little secret and Trevor Howard wants Cotten to set a trap for Lime. Cotten resists, not wanting to rat out a former friend. Valli thinks it would not be too good either for Cotten to help put the squeeze on Lime. 

 Cotten meets Lime and they go for a spin on the wheel. Lime is unrepentant for his evil doings and declines to help Valli whose deportation is imminent.

 Cotten gets Valli's passport back to her, so she can get away - but she doesn't go.

After Howard takes Cotten on an unplanned trip to the hospital to witness the suffering of the infants. Cotten agrees to help trap Lime. Vallie shows up unexpectedly and ruins the trap before it can snap on Lime, who flees to the sewers. Officers and dogs pursue him. He kills one of the British soldiers, but he's wounded, and they're closing in on him. 

Cotten finds him. There's a gunshot. Cotten returns.

There's another funeral for Lime (with the right body this time). Afterward, Cotten has Trevor Howard drop him off so he can explore the possibilities with Valli.

She walks on by. Apparently, in the words of Air Supply, the chances are all gone.

The film ends there. All in all, the zither music is the star. I've omitted a lot of details, so you should watch the film yourself. It's on Tubi.

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More importantly, I wrote some great stuff. Sometimes, the pressing of the letters on the keyboard brings amazing results. It began with a mundane description of the character's occupation and flowed seamlessly into the revelation of something greater--a sort of parable the character will come to understand later as he makes discoveries about the dystopian society in which he lives. My working title is: Bugs in The System -- of course, that could change.

Today wrote the Author's Forward and little of chapter one for a short work I'm doing about a chap named Nephi.

YA Baylor

 Author Interview with Y.A. Baylor

Author of

The Jack Stern Series

Please tell me a little about your current work in progress.

Hi, thanks for this opportunity.  My latest work is the next installment in the Jack Stern series.  I have always believed that a book series is not really a series until you have at least three titles, so I have been pushing to finish the third one.  Mr. Wu, the antagonist from the first book, is back and looking for revenge against Jack Stern.  Wu has also deployed another doomsday machine, this one a way to assassinate anyone in the world and is using that threat to blackmail governments and industry leaders.  Jack has been ordered after Wu, not because of the blackmail skullduggery, but because the remit of Jack’s organization is to stop those who target American intelligence assets.  Jack just happens to have a personal interest in this mission.

Where did you get the idea for this book or series?

The idea of writing anything came when I noticed that there just were not enough thrillers out there that I wanted to read.  I had worked through all the classics; James Bond, Matt Helm, Parker and some others, and I decided that no one was producing the type of books I wanted to read anymore so I needed to write at least one myself.  My vision was of a character who is an ordinary guy, not some kind of superhero.  Someone who overcomes setbacks and does what needs to be done to accomplish the mission.  But I also wanted to include some science fiction aspects in the stories, since I enjoy that genre and thought including SF would jazz up the plots. 

Do you write in more than one genre?

Not so far.  I have thought about writing a Western, as you have.  I admire Elmore Leonard, and thought some of his most interesting stories were his Westerns.  Erle Stanley Gardner is another writer I like, and his stories would often veer into neo-Western territory.  I would like to give Westerns a try someday.  But first things first: Jack Stern has got some more bad guys to take care of. 

Tell me about something that you believe makes your writing unique or worthy of attention.

When I was a debater in high school, our debate coach would end every pre-tournament meeting with a quote from Emerson: “Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success.  When you do a thing, do it with all your might.  Put your whole soul into it.  Stamp it with your own personality.  Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object.  Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”  The other debaters would roll their eyes when she would recite that, but I internalized it.  Since then, I have attacked everything I do with that attitude.  I would like to think my writing reflects my enthusiasm for the project.

Is there anything about your personal history or personality that manifests strongly in your writing?

There are many autobiographical details in Jack Stern and a lot of characters I encountered in my years in the Marine Corps who pop up in the stories.  The names have been changed, but I suspect that people would recognize themselves.  And my mother was full of aphorisms that have shown up in Jack’s dialogue.  I think my mom would have gotten a kick out of reading in a book the things she used to say. 

What else would be helpful for readers to know about you?

Well, for one thing, my wife has noted that she is not enthusiastic about the number of women that Jack knows in the Biblical sense, especially since Jack talks and thinks exactly like I do.  But she has listened to various spy thrillers since we alternate book selections during long drives, so she knows the conventions of these types of stories.  And she appreciates that the bedroom scenes occur between chapters and that there is no profanity. 

And while there are indeed special access programs out there with codenames that you can’t even say, everything I have written is completely a creation of my own imagination.  No one should get the impression that I am disclosing secrets since the access I actually had predated the War on Terror, and I have seen briefings from the public affairs podiums in the Pentagon about programs that I saw Marines go to the brig for discussing back in the day.  Time moves on.

Excluding your own work, what underrated author or book would you recommend that more people read? Why?

Among contemporary authors, I read everything Mark Dawson writes.  His lead characters are flawed tough guys, his books have tight plots and he writes fast.  I have also read everything that Craig Rice put out.  She wrote mysteries and movie scripts and her dialogue is the best but she died young, drinking as hard as every character she created.  I read her books out loud to get the full effect of her character’s speeches.  And Erle Stanley Gardner, as A.A. Fair, wrote a series of books called “the Cool and Lam Mysteries.”  As tight and intricate as Perry Mason books, but Donald Lam combines Perry Mason’s brains and Paul Drake’s guts.  I collected all 30 in hardcopy during COVID and have read them multiple times.

Which of your books do you most highly recommend? Why?

The first one, “The End of the Marine.”  It provides the background and motivations for Jack Stern, and there are many references back to that book in the subsequent ones. 

Which break, event, decision, or fortuitous circumstance has helped you or your writing career the most?

The best break for me was Jeff Bezos rolling out the Kindle inside of the Amazon Book Store and allowing people like me to write a book and have it published so that anyone in the world looking for a thriller has an opportunity to see what I wrote.  I worked in a bookstore for four years and saw how much of a struggle it was for unknown authors to try to get a book stocked.  And I am blessed beyond measure to have steady hours at my day job that gives me a chance to write in the evenings, and an understanding wife who puts up with my absentmindedness at dinner because I am thinking about dialogue or a plot point instead of making conversation.

What question do you wish you would get asked more often?

Actually, I have a question I wish I would get asked once.  “Would you sell us the rights to make a mini-series?” 

Do you have a catch-phrase or quote that you like? What is it? And why do you choose it?

I already mentioned “Nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm,” but one that goes along with that is what an unnamed Drill Instructor said to my platoon full of boots the night before we started Boot Camp: “Anyone can get through this, but only if you have guts.”  There are a lot of reasons not to write: the months of lonely effort, the lack of recognition, and the critics.  But with these quotes in mind, I mustered the guts to start and persevered with enthusiasm to the finish.  I hope folks see that in the writing and enjoy the books as much as I have in writing them.

Check out Baylor's books on Amazon:

The End of the Marine: https://www.amazon.com/Marine-Jack-Stern-Adventures-Book-ebook/dp/B0CJPZK3DQ

The Rovers: https://www.amazon.com/Rovers-Stern-Adventure-Episode-Adventures-ebook/dp/B0CJRZ4TR2

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Thanks to Y.A. for participating.

In my own writing, I've launched into a thriller of my own. It's a dystopian thriller with big bugs and misery for mankind working for the machine. The mission sounds simple, but they'll have to figure out the code left by the dead informant and make their way to the secret location to execute the task that represents mankind's last hope to prevail. A multitude of huge insects and all the resources at the command of the super-powered AI stand between them and success. I hope to complete it within 3 months.