Really excited about today’s guests: David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt, authors of Heaven’s Shadow. If you read my review of their book, you can see a bit of my fangirling over them so this was a fantastic opportunity which I am pleased to be sharing with our readers. Enjoy!!

Thanks so much for allowing me to interview you guys :) What was it like working together?

DG: We had a lot of fun. We’ve both worked in television, which is a much more collaborative medium. We broke the story of the novel with index cards — the old-fashioned way. Then we split up, wrote separately, and revised each other’s work many, many times. We both brought certain skill-sets to the project. Michael had obviously written novels before and was really steeped in the space/NASA community. I have had a lot of experience with large-canvas, fast-paced movie epics.

MC: As David said, we developed a detailed storyline together, ala Niven & Pournelle, then I started writing first draft with David hot on my heels. Ultimately the text is the result of two keen intelligences working in perfect harmony. (More seriously, we never had a major disagreement. So, bottom line, working together was as fun as it was productive.)

Did the book start out as a screenplay or vice versa?

DG: It started out as a film treatment, then morphed into a book proposal. Then we finished the book manuscript, got a publishing deal, and decided to try and sell the film rights. We did and I am now beginning the screenplay adaptation of the book.

MC: Yeah… I was the one who said, early in the film treatment development, “Hey, if this becomes a successful movie, it will need sequels. What would those be?” And from there it was a quick step to…. why don’t we write HS as a novel as well as a treatment, ala Kubrick and Clarke on 2001. And repeat that for the two sequels.

Michael is the author of a few novels but David, as a screenwriter and comic book writer, how was the transition to novels for you?

DG: The transition was harder than I thought. On one hand, it was much more liberating to be able to delve into a character’s internal state of mind and to not be restricted by running time. But it was also a lot more rigorous and time-consuming than writing a screenplay. Still, it’s fun to be able to stretch your muscles in other mediums.

MC: He’s a natural, adapting very quickly to the different form — and now he faces the challenge of turning novel into script.

Which sci-fi staples, if any, were particular inspirations for Heaven’s Shadow?

DG: H.G. Wells, Clarke, Alan Steele, Jack McDevitt, and many, many others.

MC: Also Heinlein just because he informs any SF I write, Niven & Pournelle’s FOOTFALL, Michael Crichton, Gregory Benford’s IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT

I’m of the belief that books can’t always transfer straight from the page to screen, so how can be expect the film to be different than the novel?

DG: Many books don’t properly translate. As for this one, I guess we’ll have to see — as I am just dipping into the screenplay right now. But I think the overall pace should work out. One of the challenges will, of course, be all the technical details that we worked so hard to put in. Film executives have far less patience for that kind of stuff. What will be interesting is to see if we end up bringing any of the plot elements from our upcoming sequel, Heaven’s War, into the screenplay — since we are working on them simultaneously.

MC: What David says. The story should lay out, but the challenge will be making sure the audience knows what it needs to know…..

Thanks so much! Can’t wait for the next book (and the film)!

Teresa

Teresa (nom de plume: Torrance Sené) is a self-proclaimed geek, a Janeite, a lover of werewolves and bad-ass angels, an aspiring novelist and an avid book reader who freelances as a web designer. You can follow her on Twitter at @eireannoir.

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Thanks so much for joining us, Christina. I really, really loved Black Wings so I have to say, I am especially excited to be interviewing you.

Thanks so much for having me here! I’m really happy to hear that you enjoyed the book.

For those who haven’t heard of Black Wings, can you tell us a little about it? (note to readers: you can read my review here)

Maddy Black is an Agent of death. It’s an inherited job with no pay. She’s broke, she’s stressed and she’s got to rent the apartment in her building if she wants to have some income. She takes on a new tenant who winds up bringing a whole host of new supernatural problems with him. She’s also got a very mouthy gargoyle with a bad popcorn habit who loves to express his opinion on everything.

I’m a sucker for angels, demons and nephilim. What drew you into that world?

When I sold Black Wings to Ace (a year and a half ago) there really were not very many angelic books/TV/movies out…although it does seem like there’s been a sudden explosion of angels! I was looking for creatures that had an interesting mythology and were a little different from what was out at the time when I was writing the book.

How much research went into your mythology?

I looked up a few angelic names on Wikipedia, and some basic info on the Grigori and nephilim. I didn’t want to draw too much on existing mythologies – I really wanted to try to create a mythology that is unique to the world of Black Wings.

Beezle. Such an amazingly fantastic character. How’d he develop?

I love to write dialogue so I wanted Maddy to have someone to talk to. When you write in first person there’s a danger that you’ll spend too much time in the character’s head. Having another character on hand for Maddy to bounce ideas off keeps the narrative fresh and prevents Maddy from spending too much time brooding over her problems. Really, how can you brood when you’ve got a hungry gargoyle to feed?

Plus, since Beezle is a home guardian he’s pretty much always around, unlike a roommate or relative who might possibly have a life of one’s own. Beezle’s life is Maddy’s life – he delights in sticking his beak in her business – and everyone else’s business for that matter. This keeps him readily on hand for whatever I might need.

What are your thoughts on the angel invasion we are seeing in today’s entertainment world?

I think that a lot of writers were probably like me – thinking that they wanted to do something a little different from vampires and werewolves. All these books just happened to hit the market at the same time!

Tell us a bit about your writing habits. Do you have a certain ritual or anything?

I always put together a playlist for each book that I write. I start off with an 8-10 song playlist and then I add to it as I get further into the novel until I’ve got about 20-25 songs that I listen to while I write. Every time I sit down at my laptop that playlist brings me right back into the story and the overall emotional arc of Maddy’s character. When I get to a point where the writing feels stuck or stale, I’ll put the playlist on my iPod and just listen to the music while I run errands or bake something in the kitchen. If I let my mind wander while still staying inside Maddy’s world through the music the next piece of the story will usually occur to me.

Which authors inspire you?

I may possibly be Jim Butcher’s biggest fan. I am crazy about the Dresden Files series. I also love Stephen King, Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Neil Gaiman, Tanya Huff, Lori Handeland, Kim Harrison, Kelley Armstrong, China Mieville, Nancy Holzner, Simon R. Green, Joe Hill…it’s actually kind of hard for me to make a short list!

Any books you think we shouldn’t miss?

My favorite book of all time is “Nobody’s Fool” by Richard Russo. It’s not a fantasy novel but it is an absolute masterpiece of characterization.

If a Black Wings movie were made, who do you see as cast members?

I don’t know who would play Maddy. I just think I would hate it if she was played by a super-skinny actress, because Maddy is slightly overweight and I like that about her – it makes her more human and less physically perfect than a lot of heroines. The actress would also need a major attitude, because Maddy’s definitely got a chip on her shoulder! Sandra Bullock totally could have played this role ten years ago but I don’t know who would do it now.

Gabriel could be Michael Fassbender (who was on the British TV show “Hex”, if you’ve ever seen that) or Richard Armitage (who was on the BBC’s “Robin Hood” series). They each have the really strong bone structure and quiet voice that I think of with Gabriel. Plus, it does not hurt that they are both gorgeous and have adorable accents.

Can’t you just see Gerard Butler as J.B.? He doesn’t look exactly the way I describe J.B. in the book but I can see him playing that part really well. Actually, Richard Armitage could do this role also if Michael Fassbender played Gabriel.

Of course, there is no creature in the universe as adorable as Beezle so he would have to be computer-generated.

We have quite a long wait for the sequel (Black Night is due out Autumn 2011) but can you hint at what might happen for Maddy, Gabriel and Beezle?

Quite a few people have asked about J.B. – if he’s going to be around in future books. J.B. is definitely going to play a bigger role in the next book. You also get to meet his mother – he has a cryptic comment about his mom in Black Wings that I never expanded on. His mother is a major player in the world of Black Wings and both J.B. and his mom will be around for the foreseeable future. I can’t tell you too much more than that without giving away some of the twists in the sequel.

Thanks for much for being here, Christina. Anything else you’d like to add?

Thanks so much for having me here and I hope your readers enjoy Black Wings!

Christina’s website can be found at http://www.christinahenry.net/ and her Facebook page is located at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christina-Henry/152170358141765.

If you have any comments or questions for Christina, feel free to ask them below.

Giveaway

Thanks to Ace, we have one lovely copy of Black Wings to give away to one lucky follower. US/Canada residents only, no P.O. Boxes, please. Simply be a follower and comment below with your name, email and how you are following us (and it would be lovely if you left a question or comment for Christina as well). On December 30th (contest ends December 31st at 11:59pm central time), I’ll announce the winners.

Teresa

Teresa (nom de plume: Torrance Sené) is a self-proclaimed geek, a Janeite, a lover of werewolves and bad-ass angels, an aspiring novelist and an avid book reader who freelances as a web designer. You can follow her on Twitter at @eireannoir.

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Today we are joined by author Skyler White whose second book In Dreams Begin will be released on November 2nd. Skyler kindly took a few moments out of her busy schedule to chat with RAO Reviews about her new book (read my review of the book here). After reading the interview, if you have any questions for Skyler, feel free to leave them below.

Also, don’t forget we are giving away an autographed copy of In Dreams Begin here.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for allowing RAO Review to interview you once again.

My pleasure! You ask some of the most interesting questions in book bloggery, so I’m very happy to be back.

So let’s dive right into it: Why William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne?

After the modern intellectualism of Dominic in and Falling, Fly, I was interested in good, old-fashioned romance. I wanted to create a hero who was romantic in all the classic ways: good-looking, brave, and devoted. And as I started trying to write that, I found myself struggling with what it would look like today. Can a modern man still go down on one knee, profess his undying love, and propose marriage to a woman he’s only seen once or twice? I couldn’t make it work. It either felt like parody or innocence, and I didn’t want to write YA.

So I started reading the Romantics, but they, of course, didn’t feel modern enough. Yeats was closer to me in time than Byron, but still had the optimism and total lack of irony I was looking for. You can see, particularly in his work before the First World War, a sort of self-confidence in humanity and a belief that the world was perfectible, the idea that science could prove the existence of the soul and that all the mysteries of god and man could yield their secrets and respond to our improvements. I found that very attractive, and I was excited about putting a modern woman against that kind of man. And at first that was all I was looking for in research, “that kind of man.” I had no intention, initially, of writing real people into the story. I’m not crazy, really. And research is hard. I was planning to write a turn-of-the-century Irish poet based loosely on Yeats who could fall in love with a modern woman moving backward in time through some time-travel device or portal.

But. But the more I read about Yeats, the more I was becoming attracted to him specifically – to his height and his wire-frame glasses, to his poetry, but also to his biography. I was intrigued by his thirty years of fruitless love for Maud Gonne. He proposed to her and to her daughter. He wrote about her as a woman, as a symbol, and as a supernatural being. And I couldn’t stop wondering what was going on with that. He, after all, wasn’t crazy either. He was at odds with Maud’s politics, the two of them were rarely in the same country, and neither of them was much interested in changing to meet another person’s needs. He liked quiet, she travelled with over a dozen animals. He loved the Irish countryside. She adored Paris. This was never going to work. And he knew as much. But she was an amazing woman – she worked for Irish independence but not women’s suffrage, claimed to be part faery, bore two children to a married French revolutionary, and married a man who was subsequently shot by firing squad for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. She was six feet tall, famed for her beauty, pro-violence, and psychic. If I was going to write a book set in the literary circles of Victorian Ireland, she was going to have to at least make a cameo. She was just too cool not to include.

There’s some very interesting parallels between you, Laura Armstrong and Maud Gonne (shared birthday, name, and I believe you even worked in advertising like Laura). Intentional?

Oh yes. That was the final straw. I was already half in love with Yeats, and determined to find a place for Maud in the book when I came across the tidbit of her birth date. She and I were both born on the winter solstice exactly a hundred years apart. I’d already run across the Yeats quote that’s on the back cover “Every passionate man is linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy,” and I’d never really been happy with the portal/time machine device anyway. I started to toy with the idea that perhaps, if two woman had a connection in time, like their birthdates, and the time of one was the era to which she was linked in the way Yeats mentions, then might that not connect them somehow? But how? I already knew that both Maud and Will were involved in the occult, she intermittently and he throughout his life, and that the two of them even talked about the marriage they had “on the spiritual plane.” And that’s where the idea of the modern woman being channeled into Maud’s body began.

That idea opened up a lot of others. What would it be like to inhabit a different body? Would time move differently in the past and present? What would be in the modern woman’s present? And how much of it would she remember in the past? And those questions got me even more excited. That Yeats’s first love’s name was Laura, which is my given name, and that his first lover was named Olivia, which is the female lead from my first book, was all just gravy.

All the pieces just lined up. Yeats was too wonderful not to write as himself. Maud’s life was full of actual events that were too bizarre not to include. The fiction made sense of the facts. Their mutual engagement with the occult provided a means to move spirits through time, as did Maud’s belief in her faery heritage, and the more of Yeats’s poetry I read, the more he seemed to be hinting at a secret very much like this one. Also, importantly, it gave me space to ask some questions that were becoming relevant from my own, personal, modern life about the nature of love and fidelity. And finally, it was that I was falling in love with the poet. And if a writer can’t get a little wish-fulfillment for all the agony, than what are we in it for? Read more

Teresa

Teresa (nom de plume: Torrance Sené) is a self-proclaimed geek, a Janeite, a lover of werewolves and bad-ass angels, an aspiring novelist and an avid book reader who freelances as a web designer. You can follow her on Twitter at @eireannoir.

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Tonight we are honored to have indie author and fellow book blogger, E.J. Stevens with us. Her young adult novel, She Smells the Dead, has been creating quite the buzz in the book community so I thought I would talk a little bit about it with her as well as some seasonal topics. After reading the interview, be sure to go over to our giveaway to win a She Smells the Dead autographed book and some swag! If you have any questions for E.J., feel free to leave them in the comments below as she’ll be popping by to answer them this weekend.

Thanks so much for allowing me to interview you, E.J.

The pleasure is all mine. I’m excited to be a part of the 31 Days of Halloween festivities.

What prompted you to write She Smells the Dead? What was your inspiration?

I had just finished work on Shadows of Myth and Legend, a collection of haunting paranormal poetry, and was taking a celebratory walk in the woods with my corgi. When we approached the overgrown graveyard near my home I was suddenly overwhelmed by a strong smell and suddenly wondered what it would be like to have a psychic connection with spirits of the dead that came in the form of smells, rather than sight or sound. I knew immediately that this was a story that I needed to write and felt inspired to begin work on She Smells the Dead.

Yuki has such a unique gift, and one you’d not normally run across in the paranormal genre, did that develop naturally or did you purposely give her that ability?

The idea for Yuki’s gift came to me in the graveyard, but the way in which she uses her paranormal talent developed gradually as I was writing. I wanted to allow the characters to guide the story and let their personalities influence how I envisioned Yuki’s paranormal ability.

What about you? If you could have an ability, what would it be?

I definitely wouldn’t want Yuki’s paranormal talent! I would prefer to have the ability to create a glamour. I have always been intrigued by the symbolism of masks and the glamour that faeries conjure is the ultimate form of mask. They can appear as hideous or beautiful as they wish, which would be very useful for Halloween…and for bad hair days. ;)

When can we expect another chapter in Yuki’s tale?

Spirit Storm, the second book in the Spirit Guide series, is due to release in early 2011.

Any favorite “thing” that goes bump in the night?

I am very fond of the night creatures of the Unseelie court. I wouldn’t want to meet any of the Unseelie in a dark alley, but they are the magical folktale monsters of my childhood that I have never outgrown.

What’s your best Halloween memory?

When I was eight or nine I had a Halloween slumber party. I already had a reputation for telling scary stories so we dimmed the lights and I told a chilling ghost story. Just as I reached the climatic ending thunder boomed, lightning flashed, and the power went out. It was a perfectly terrifying way to end the story.

Any Halloween ritual you have? A certain movie or book that you have to watch or read this time of year?

My Halloween ritual is to visit Salem, Massachusetts. I travel to Salem throughout the year, but October is my favorite time to stroll the cobbled streets and bask in the Halloween atmosphere.

Thanks so much for being here, E.J.! I’ve had a blast!

Thank you so much for having me!

You can find E.J. online at her paranormal book blog From the Shadows, her official blog and the Spirit Guide series blog.

Teresa

Teresa (nom de plume: Torrance Sené) is a self-proclaimed geek, a Janeite, a lover of werewolves and bad-ass angels, an aspiring novelist and an avid book reader who freelances as a web designer. You can follow her on Twitter at @eireannoir.

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