Q: Can you Tell us a bit about Dark Obsession?
A: It is a fantasy novel – swords and sorcery. The hero of the novel, Margot Master, is asked by a member of the trusted Vow to bring back a young girl for their unknown purposes. Margot had previously been a slave, and finds the idea offensive. But his deliberate disobedience has consequences. He becomes a fugitive and enters into a running battle with the Vow, only to find out he’s dealing with a rogue priest and not the Vow at all. In order to clear his name, he has to run. And the girl, and another woman fighting to save her home from invaders, have to help him, before the priest manages to destroy Margot, the order he’d promised to protect, and possibly civilization itself.
Q: How did you originally come up with the idea for the book?
Carl and I have each been avid readers of science fiction and fantasy for many years. In addition, we’d each made up worlds and run DnD campaigns for years – that is, we had many ideas that wanted creative outlets. And lastly, we both liked to write, so it was natural for us to start.
The idea for the book itself was straightforward. We both wanted to explore the things that drive people, good people, to do bad things.Sometimes it’s as simple as love of country. Sometimes it is desire of achieving a goal at any cost, or winning a heart, or doing something that will be remembered.
The trick was then putting the story together in such a way that we could explore obsession.
Q: What drove you to write fantasy fiction in the first place?
A: Regardless of what people may actually say, a person writes a story for themselves. The story is lurking inside and wants to get out. The person has a need to write it. So he does. Hopefully he does this without getting his ego so tied into knots that bad things happen. I’d like to think we wrote the story because we felt the story needed to be told.
Furthermore, while there are very good writers out there – Orson Scot tCard, Spider Robinson, Robert Jordan, there are also a lot of books published that aren’t of that quality. We wanted to see if we could do better (and learned what every amateur learns when a pro makes things look easy. The process is much harder than it appears.)
Additionally, I had another reason. My daughter, Holly (14), had expressed a lot of interest in writing, so I thought the timing was right todo this and be a role model. Holly turned out to be our best editor.
As for the genre, it is easier to weave the many kinds of threads together in a ficticious world. I’m sure Carl and I could have done the same in a non-fantasy setting, but we each work a lot of hours every week and the time requirements would have been prohibitive.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the experience of co-authoring the book when the two authors live in Seattle and Boston?
A: Carl and I worked for the same company in Massachusetts in 1996 for six weeks. Microsoft bought the company and move the jobs, and Carl, to Washington. While in the same company we had traded bits of writing and enjoyed each other’s work, so when the thought crossed my mind to write a book, I contacted Carl by email and phone.
We were so excited that we each dashed off two chapters each within a couple of days of the start. (In all fairness, these formed the gist of the two story lines we would wind up weaving together, but very little of this survives.) At that point we stopped, realized we were writing in a vacuum,invented the world that would be the backgound of the novel with the help of friends, and only then started trading emails with story outlines and ideas.
This was all done by email. We’ve now got a web site, and it would be easier to keep a master copy there that we could both be editing.
The work itself was straightforward. We would ‘lock’ a chapter while we worked on it until that pass was complete, then email it back to the other coast for more work. Usually we would have two to five chapters locked (out of 40). And if we needed to edit a chapter that was being worked on, there were enough other things that needed to be done that we’d just do those.Carl and I made sure that we didn’t hold onto a chapter for more than a week.
Both of us locked the whole book for consistency sweeps, usually at the times when the other was buried at work or needed a week off. In general,having two writers kept things moving forward even when one was blocked.
It also helps that Carl and I have similar styles of writing. Even our friends have not been able to tell where I leave off and Carl begins
Q: What’s your experience with print-on-demand publishing?
A: I find myself wishing I’d worked a little harder to attract a mainstream publisher. The book is real; I can hold it, touch it, show it off. But all of the sales so far have required our active involvement and we want to write not do sales and marketing.
Further, while getting published was easier, the rest of the world treats print-on-demand as a new kind of vanity press because of it. That means there are automatic barriers that you have to work to overcome when you want to sell copies of the book.
On the good side, the novel will always be available, and 1st Books got the novel into the Amazon.coms of the world. On the bad side, they put such a huge price tag on it that I don’t expect any sales from that venue at all.My website, my author signings, and my working to find customers has been required. Plus it helps that my price is 50% of Amazon’s.
A mainstream publisher might have made that a bit easier. And since print-on-demand allows us to keep the rights to the book, we may yet try again to go to a mainstream publisher.
Q: What did you like to read when you were a child?
A: Anything and everything. English is my third language (German, Latvian) and I’d read books in all three languages. Growing up was in the States, and I was most interested in the Hardy Boys while young, then science fiction as I got to middle school.
Q: What has the Internet meant for you as an author?
A: It’s been very helpful. Carl and I couldn’t have pulled this off without the net and emails. We got our cover art via an artist in Albany and did that whole effort by email. The corrections of the galleys that went back and forth to Indiana were mostly done by email, even with the publisher. The ebook communications went to California by net. The audiobook (which we declined) meant emails to Florida. And the printer was in Tennessee.
The one thing I’ve wished I’d done more of is researching the connections between publishing badges. You submit your manuscript to a Tor, get a rejection, then submit it to a Baen and it comes back immediately. It’s only later that you find out the submissions have gone to the same company and may even have gone to the same reviewer. In the future, the net will help with that too – now that I’ve learned the questions to ask.
