Shawna McCullough is enjoying a quiet evening with a book
when her six-year-old daughter, Alexis, awakens and talks of dreaming
about her own death, describing it in vivid detail. They fall asleep
next to each other, but when Shawna wakes up just after midnight,
instead of her daughter, she discovers a strange man in her bed. She
also now has two daughters, neither of them Alexis, and she’s nine
months pregnant. This is only the beginning of the strangeness as she
discovers the man is just as confused as she is. He is Mark LaValley, a
police officer who claims to have been killed in this same house years
earlier while answering a domestic dispute between her and her husband, a
dispute that led to his death. Except in this reality, he is no longer a
police officer but a substitute teacher. It isn’t long before Shawna
and Mark realize they have been entrusted with guarding “the children of
time,” as a demon known as Zuriz Falcon, who has been exiled to another
realm, sends his henchman to kidnap the girls, including the one she’s
pregnant with. Only with the powers of these three “children” and that
of a collection of unique books can Falcon be released from the dark
realm to unleash his evil upon the world.
Hello,
Eric! Thanks for stopping by! I bet you’re super pumped to have another novel
out in the world.
Thank you for having me, Celeste.
Could
you tell us a little bit about your new novel, Children of Time?
Children
of Time is about a demon trying to escape a hellish exile
and will stop at nothing to do so… or is that really his motivation? This demon
is quite tricky, and nothing he says or does can be trusted.
Can
you speak to the writing process?
After completing A
Light in the Dark, I began a novel I called Temporal Winter. The title came from a play on the phrase “nuclear
winter,” which describes a particularly bad outcome of a nuclear war. This
story was about a war between time periods instead of nations. In the distant
future, humans develop “temporal weapons” that have the ability to erase people
or events from history. The novel opened up with a temporal attack on the
present.
The novel just was not working. Maybe it was too
difficult, or maybe I couldn’t stop thinking about the how the fate of the
villain of A Light in the Dark was
left pretty ambiguous. I kept thinking about the dark world he’d been exiled
to…thinking about what he was doing there. So I decided to write another novel
that I called City of Evil.
When I finished City
of Evil, I realized I didn’t have enough story for a full-length novel, and
what I had served better a back story to something better anyway. So I put it that
aside and began working on Temporal
Winter again. Then it dawned on me that these were actually two parts of
the same story, that it was really the demon in the dark world affecting time,
not humans from the future.
Children
of Time ties into An
Inner Darkness and A Light in the
Dark, but is intended to be read as a stand-alone novel.
How
long have you been writing?
I have been writing my whole life, but first decided
to tackle a novel-length work in 2009 when my friend, Andrew Utley, and I outline
what would eventually become Harvester:
Ascension.
After completing Harvester:
Ascension, I immediately began work on a novel I called The Twins of Noremway Parish, which
eventual became two books titled An Inner
Darkness and A Light in the Dark.
I began my new novel, Children of Time, shortly after completing A Light in the Dark.
What
advice do you have for writers who are trying to make their way into print? Is
there anything they can do to catch the attention of potential
agents/publishers?
First, you have to have a good novel to sell. So write,
write, write, write. You will get better with every word. Next, before you send
it anywhere, EDIT! EDIT! EDIT! Take the editing process seriously. Whether it’s
your own read-throughs or a beta-reader. Take it seriously, take the critiques
seriously, and don’t be afraid to cut crap. Don’t worry about word count or
page count. If it’s crap, cut it. If it needlessly slows the narrative, cut it.
If it’s self-indulgent, cut it. Don’t tell yourself you need to write
everything you know about the story. No, if it isn’t 100% required, cut it!
Don’t tell yourself that you will fix whatever is
wrong with the book when you have the help of a professional editor at Harper
Collins or Random House…no, your editor is not your mother and will not
tolerate your laziness. Suck it up and do the work to polish the book, or your
novel will be thrown out like a piece of trash.
Also, I can tell you from my own experience reading
through submissions that a writer wanting to be published needs to represent
themselves and their writing well in their query and synopsis. If your query is
poorly written, full of mistakes, etc. why would I think your novel is any
different? Not only am I looking for a good story, one I would buy, one that I
believe others would buy, I am also looking for something that wouldn’t make my
eyes bleed while reading it. If I’m yelling at the page, complaining about
adverb overload and a plethora of misplaced modifiers, I’m far less likely to
recommend your novel for acceptance. Publishers have so many submissions to go
through, so there is no patience for a lack of care. If you don’t care enough
to polish your novel, don’t expect someone else to.
We’ve
seen a lot of recent changes to the publishing industry and the avenues
available to writers seeking publication. Do you think the changes are good or
bad?
I assume you are referring to self-publishing
avenues as well of the growth of small press publishers. I think they are very
good. I can tell you I actually enjoy the “indie” novels I read far more than
those published with a major publisher. That just goes to show that people are
writing a lot of good stuff that would otherwise fall through the cracks.
Whenever anyone disses a self-published book, I like
to remind them that Thomas Paine (author of “Common Sense” and The Rights of Man) self-published his
work and he is one of the greatest and most influential writers who ever lived.
Since
you’re also an editor, can you tell us a few things that drive you crazy when
you’re going over other writer’s manuscripts?
One thing that really drives me absolutely insane is
mistakes that I see many, many, many, many authors making. Mistakes that I have
no idea why so many people get wrong. Although this is country-specific because
different countries have different rules on this, but it really gets on my
nerves when I see a manuscript filled with single quotation marks…you know,
‘these’? I thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it’s not, but in
American fiction single quotation marks have ONE purpose, and ONE purpose
ONLY—a quote within a quote. It is not to indicate a word used for a special
meaning. It is not used for thoughts. It is not used for dialogue not spoken.
It is used for a quote within a quote, and that’s it!
Besides other countries having slightly different
rules on this (outside of North America quotation marks are used in the
opposite way), the only thing I can think of why this is such a common error is
the common use of the single quotation mark in news headlines. The AP uses its
own set of rules to save space. You will find single quotation marks in the
headlines and you will find the “s” dropped off a possessive name that ends in
“s” (e.g. John Roberts’), things that would be considered incorrect in an
American novel.
I
know you’re also an avid reader. What does it take for a story to take your
mind hostage?
I used to teach a reading class. One the things I
told my students was that reading is a conversation between the reader and the
text. The text has the words, the story, the characters, but the reader brings
with them the experiences, interests, and knowledge to interpret them. In this
context I would say a story needs to be relevant to me, important to me. It
needs to change my life in some way. A life-changing story for me may not be
the same as for someone else (which is why the idea of an absolute literary
canon is total bunk). It doesn’t have to
be the greatest story, but what the story has to say has to be something that
makes me a different person—makes me see the world differently—than before I
read it.
Wow, those were great answers! I hope you guys took notes because that guy knows what he's talking about. When you leave here, be sure to pop over to Amazon to read an excerpt of
Children of Time
Until next time, happy writing or whatever makes you smile. :)
So, I'm guessing lots of you think my title for this post is harsh. Let me explain. Do any of you have totally clueless people in your lives who don't realize how much work goes into writing? Or maybe you have an idiot or two who thinks the time you spend online is the equivalent to the guy above. I don't have a magic remedy for these idiots, but I think venting about them is a great way to cleanse ourselves of bitterness and possibly keep us from tearing up our pretty lawns to bury dead bodies in our backyards. :P
How's that for venting? I could say tons more, but I don't want my eye to start twitching again. However, I'd love to hear some rants from my fellow writers. Before I sign off, I'll leave you with this lovely thought.
