Set in 1985, the story starts off with a declaration by Dr. Donner that there is a new race of super-powered beings that are coming out of the shadows and into society.  Naturally, the government hasn’t reacted with open arms to the super-beings.  Meanwhile, high school student Nate Charters is dealing with his own developing powers.  He has ultra-fast reflexes, a high metabolism, and unusual appearance, which has made him an outcast in high school and a target of bullying.  After this proclamation, everything changes for Nate as he is forced to register with his newly found powers.  He is also finding answers about his deceased father, and dealing with a jock who has bullied him and now requests a strange, private meeting.

Although I generally enjoyed Brave Men Run because of the fast pace of the writing and strong characters, what held me back from thoroughly enjoying it is that it seems to be a bit of a rip-off of the X-Men and strongly borrows elements of the X-Men trilogy of movies.  It lacked originality, and I could never get past the feeling that although the story is interesting, it’s still an X-Men wannabe.  I would be interested in reading other books in this series to see how it progresses, but as of now I would only tentatively recommend reading this novel.

When I saw the jacket cover to Born to Darkness and saw that it was a futuristic novel featuring “greater thans” that can use a greater portion of their mind, which in essence gives them super powers, I thought well that’s a cool idea.  Unfortunately, that was the only redeemable aspect of this novel.  In a time of economic depression where corporations have taken over much of government’s role, at the Obermeyer Institute, their greater thans are combatting people “Jokering”, as in acting like the Joker from Batman after taking a highly addictive drug called Destiny, which gives its users immortality and their own super powers, unless of course they Joker.  Behind the Destiny, is the generic evil organization called “The Organization.”  How original.  The bad guys are generally nameless and faceless in this book.

This novel was so awful, it’s hard to know where to start.  For one thing, the characters aren’t remotely interesting.  Every character had to have a relationship and the bulk of the book is spent on these relationships, even relationships that I had no interest in hearing about.  Second, the writing is often times amateurish.  As a writer, I find it hard to believe that this level of poor writing can make it into a major publishing company.  The novel is way oversexed.  The author even managed to find a way to link it to their powers in a desperate attempt to get as much sex into the novel as possible, which really waters it down.  Other than an interesting concept, there is nothing to like about this novel.  I strongly advise to skip it.

Carl Alves – author of Blood Street

I set my expectations high for Iron Man 3 based on the quality of the previous two movies, and this one came up woefully short.  I don’t want to say this movie was a complete bomb, but it was the worst Marvel movie since the Ang Lee directed Incredible Hulk, which was a disaster.  Without giving any spoilers, I will try to explain why the movie was exceptionally weak.

The movie fell apart for me at the time the nature of the Mandarin character was revealed.  It was nothing like what I was expecting and it just sucked the life out of the movie.  The action was solid in this movie as expected, but whoever wrote this movie should never be allowed to write another movie again.  The story starts with the United States being plagued by terrorist attacks by the Mandarin, who is represented as being Middle Eastern in the movie; despite that the comic character being Asian and the actor playing the role being British.  When a bombing badly wounds Tony Stark’s friend, Happy, Tony vows revenge, and Iron Man flies into action.  This time Tony has created about a dozen more Iron Man suits, and he can operate them remotely without having to be in the suit.  That aspect of the movie was both good and bad.  Although I found it neat when I thought Tony was in the suit and he happened to be somewhere else altogether, these suits had a tendency of falling apart.  They were nothing like the suits in previous movies.

There were plot holes in this movie about the size of craters on the moon.  One is that if things got bad, why wouldn’t Tony enlist the help of his buddies in the Avengers?  Another is that Tony has the ability to remotely call parts of his suit and have them come to him from incredibly long distances, yet when he badly needs them in the movie, he doesn’t do it until the finale, which absolutely makes no sense.  The very end of the movie also has a gaping plot hole, which was horrifically stupid.  The best part of the film was the acting by Robert Downey Jr. and his interaction with an eleven year old boy.  I know it’s tempting to want to watch this movie, but trust me, you will want to skip it.

            11/22/63 is the best Stephen King novel that I have read in years.  I have been down on the master of horror in recent years.  His latest work has made me think that he has lost a little off his fastball.  Although this still isn’t vintage King, it’s still damn good.

11/22/63 is a time travel novel, which entirely leaves out any scientific explanation of how the time travel takes place.  There is just a random wormhole located in the back of a restaurant in Maine.  Going into the wormhole takes the traveler back to the same exact spot in 1958.  The owner of the restaurant had been going there to get cheap food supplies for his restaurant, but he had a bigger mission planned, one he passed down to the novel’s protagonist, Jake Epping, a school teacher from Maine — and that is to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK.

At over 750 pages, there is much more to the novel than just stopping the assassination.  In the process Jake also tries to save a man before his father kills his family and badly injures him.  He also settles into a town in Texas and works as a teacher, growing close to the people in the community and finding a love interest.  Despite the length of this novel, there is no point where it feels like it’s dragging, a testimony to King’s writing skill.  The novel has tension in the right spots, and King clearly did his research on the assassination of Kennedy.  I also enjoyed seeing how he represents the past.  It’s almost like a living entity that is unwilling to change.  The one drawback is that this novel is heavy handed with King’s political beliefs.  I don’t read fiction to have the writer indulge me with his political agenda, something I frequently resented in this novel.  Otherwise I found it thoroughly enjoyable and worth reading.

Q:  Your first novel, Have Vampire, Will Travel, is set to be released Sunday, April 28^th. What makes your novel different from other vampire stories?

A: We always stressed in our marketing this is “a vampire story with a different spin.” We’ve taken the liberty of re-writing the traditional rules/legends/lore about vampires. Some of them remain true: a vampire’s immortality and their special abilities such as mesmerism, bat transformation or turning into a mist. Others are false: vampires cannot be kept away by garlic and they can cast reflections in mirrors. Some are half-truth distortions of the facts: vampires being inheritably evil when, in fact, they actually can be virtuous, malevolent or somewhere in-between. Vampires still require blood to sustain themselves, but don’t need to feed as often as folklore describes, nor are they required to kill their victims to feed.

The young vampire, Roger Sparks, featured in the novel actually enjoys being a vampire, living in the moment (usually with reckless abandon) and kicking butt when needed. In our novel, our vampires do not lament and sulk about their curse. We also dispense with the over-used cliché of a vampire falling in love with a human—unable to decide whether to turn the other into a vampire or become human again themselves. Other authors have presented this admirably, but you won’t find it in our novel. As a matter of fact, you will find no romantic subplots in this novel as we wanted to avoid the trap in which the villain kidnaps the hero’s girlfriend to give him a disadvantage (I do that in some of my other novels). Even as a kid, I grew tired of the cliché of the hero having to waste precious time rescuing his loved one before resolving the greater conflict. Our heroes may date, but they do so on their own time, not during the novel. Instead, we wanted to get to the heart of the adventure, investigate the crime, get to the action and stay on target until the exciting climax.

Besides featuring super-natural evils, our detective hero, Maxx Shadow, must confront dangers of the mortal world. For example, Maxx explores the very real perils of rail-hopping. His is also in conflict with a rival gang of hobos who are the enemies of the hobo minions of the main antagonist, Ruby of the Rails. Although the rival gang of hobos lack the supernatural abilities of Ruby’s hobos, they are just as vicious and deadly.

Q:  How did the two of you meet and what made you decide to co-author a novel?

A:  Eric and I met when we were co-workers at Nielsen Media Research in Schaumburg some dozen years ago. Because of our mutual interests and hobbies, a strong friendship evolved and we began to hang around outside the office. I had been writing short stories and novels since I was nineteen and, unable to find a publisher, I put them on the shelf for several years. With self-publishing sites, such as www.lulu.com, I decided to give it a try. Since Eric had a great interest in my work, I asked him to be my second set of eyes as a proofreader and editor (in addition to the fine skills of my lovely wife, Nicole). We would meet once a week to read manuscripts out loud and find the errors. Eric would also find continuity mistakes and offer suggestions of his own, often picking my brain for a character’s motivation or a more plausible conclusion to an event in the story.

In September 2009, I was hospitalized with a heart infection, which led to an artificial aortic valve replacement. Along with my wife, Nicole, Eric faithfully came regularly to visit me. With a new concept for a novel, Eric sat at my bedside and helped put together an initial outline. With this project, Eric went above and beyond the duties of copyediting, coming up with ideas and resolutions of his own. As a result, I offered Eric co-authorship if he was willing to do a bit more additional work. He gladly accepted and the rest is history.

Q:  Did you choose the genre, or did the genre choose you?

A: In this case, the genré chose me. After twenty-six years, I wanted to get something published and scratch one of many things off my Bucket List. Since vampire genré is hot and still will be for more years to come, I decided to jump on the bandwagon. I had figured that if any work I completed had a chance to be published, this one would be it. If it didn’t, I figured I would have to content myself with writing as an amusement/hobby and self-publish for friends and family. Hopefully, with, at least, one traditionally published novel in the bank, I might have a chance to expand to other genrés. I won’t expand on this here, as this should be answered with the upcoming questions.

Q: What was your inspiration for this novel? A person, place, an event? How did you get started?

A: In April of 2000, while channel-surfing, I caught a show on the A&E Network Investigative Reports hosted by former CBS Chicago anchorman and highly respected journalist, Bill Curtis. This particular episode was entitled Blood on the Tracks which focused on the dangers of rail-hopping especially to those who were weekend thrill-seekers rather than experienced hobos. A majority of the episode highlighted a serial-killing hobo, Joseph Silveria Jr. aka “Sidetrack.” Silveria is now serving two consecutive life sentences in an Oregon State prison. Silveria had confessed to five murders, but it is believed he committed dozens more before being apprehended.

I found this sub-culture, which very few knew about (or wanted to know about), to be totally fascinating.  For the most part, hobos are just folks that have given up on regular society and want to live by their wits and be left alone while not bothering anyone else; however, there are a few bad apples, which lump them all in a negative category. The world of rail-hopping is a modern day Wild West, with the criminal hobos able to get away with their crimes because they are phantoms. They have no identity, and since they own very little, they can easily skip town at the drop of a hat, leaving everything behind to avoid arrest. Since trains pass through isolated areas, criminal hobos can easily dispose of victims in areas where no one will ever find them for years, if they are found at all. There were accounts of college students rail-riding during a summer break never to be heard from again.

Other than the unsavory hobo element, there are the physical dangers of rail-riding such as falling off trains, illness, malnutrition and dehydration. Also, rail-riding is illegal and a one-time thrill-seeker can have a felony arrest on record since railyard owners are very hard on those that are caught trespassing. Even non-violent hobos are very protective of their turf and not receptive to “pretenders” (those riding the rails who aren’t hobos and plan to go on to their normal lives after their rail-riding adventure). Even crossing these folks can be dangerous.

The segment on Silveria inspired me to write a novel about a serial killing hobo able to commit his atrocities and get away with them because he has no connections to his victims—just an unknown, faceless bum whom most ignore, never noticed and who is able to disappear like a breath in the wind on a moment’s notice.

My original concept for the novel was a realistic (but fictional) thriller of a detective’s account to track down and apprehend a hobo serial killer. It sounded great as an idea, but I had no clue how do make it sound plausible. The hobo in question would be hopping from state to state and this would definitely bring in the Feds, so I would have to change my detective to an FBI agent. I would have to do research and interviews about FBI procedure and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use up my time and resources for a project that would probably remain just as unpublished as my previous ones. I also figured that since there was already a non-fiction book about Silveria entitled Murder on the Rails: The True Story of the Detective Who Unlocked the Shocking Secrets of the Boxcar Serial Killer by Lt. William G. Palmini Jr. and Tanya Chalupa, I would merely be writing a fictionalized account of the same story. I decided to put the concept on the shelf, but the idea never died.

Years later, I joined an online author group and they had a session on how to write a synopsis for a novel jacket. They asked everyone to contribute a sample to compare to the others, even asking us to make one up for those who had not completed any novels. I wanted to submit something new rather than something from one of my self-published novels.

While I was writing the blurb, I began to think of how our hero could find a serial-killing hobo anywhere at large in the United States. Thinking some more, what if the killer came to him? What if it were a band of serial killers? Finding a group would be easier than finding just one person. What if they were some insane cult coming to Chicago for some equally insane person and the hero had to figure out what, when and where so he could stop it? What if the cult were demented enough so that they worshiped an evil demon who they really believed existed and the demon wanted human sacrifices? What if the demon was real? If it were a demon, how could our hero fight it? What if the hero had a supernatural ally of his own, namely a vampire under his employ.

Without even trying, these elements slowly made a story unfold. With a supernatural backdrop, I had more leeway to suspend reality and not have to worry about making the investigation too realistic. With vampire stories being hot, this might be the project that could end up getting published.

Q:  How did you develop your characters and their motives in your story?

A:  Roger Sparks was a character I created in the 1990s and played in a fantasy role-playing game called Vampire: The Masquerade. He was basically an all-muscle-live-in-the-moment vampire who enjoys a good brawl and left the planning and strategy to his more intellectual, less combat savvy vampiric companions.

Maxx Shadow was also based on a role-playing character from the Dr. Who Role-playing Game created by a friend of mine; however, I changed the name and his physical traits of the character. Wanting to avoid romantic subplots, I made Maxx somewhat physically unappealing with a slight facial disfigurement to reinforce his lack of female companions.

The Shadow/Sparks team-up is inspired by the Green Hornet TV series from the 1960s. Shadow is the Van Williams/Britt Reid/Green Hornet figure who makes the plans while Sparks is the Bruce Lee/Kato counterpart who mops the floor with their adversaries (not to take away from Shadow who is a decent scrapper in his own right for a mere mortal).

Several of the evil hobo characters such as Slouch and Hooligan are based on the traits and motivations of the real life railway serial killer, Joseph Silveria Jr. aka “Sidetrack” as well as other nefarious hobos in my research.

Q:  If you could be any of the characters in your novel, who would you be?

A:  It might be interesting to be Dan Patch, Maxx and Roger’s spiritual advisor. He is a being, known as a Sage-Sentry, who is borderline between the natural and supernatural. He constantly reincarnates into a new body after he dies, sometimes a different gender or not even human at all (he claims to have been the world-renown harness race horse of the same name in the early 20^th century), yet still retains the memories of his past lives, unlike us mere mortals who have no recollection once we reincarnate.

Q:  I understand Have Vampire, Will Travel is the first novel in a series. Are you afraid the series will become dull or difficult to write after a while?

A:  Although each novel will have an overall arc and tie-ins to other upcoming novels, we plan to write each Have Vampire, Will Travel as its own stand-alone adventure without it being necessary to read any previous or subsequent novels (although we hope people will read them all). There is no pre-determined number of novels in the series. In the event the series becomes dull or difficult to write, we will just simply end it with the last novel. However, we will continue to write the series so long as there is an interest. We are not afraid if something becomes dull because we will just have to find something else fresh to write about.

Q:  Are there any books or authors that have inspired you in your writing?

A:  I have been influenced by Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series as well as Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné Saga. Other authors include Stephen King and Marc E. Roger’s Samurai Cat. Marvel/DC comic/books and graphic novels have had some influence on my writing as well.

Q:  Have you thought about crossing genres or writing a stand alone?

A:  Before Have Vampire, Will Travel became our first traditionally published novel, I have self-published many different genres which can be found at  http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/scot_savage. These include space spoofs, horror, sci-fi boxing, a super-hero novel and a thriller that takes place in the 1980s. One of the books, Weird Stories I Wrote While I Was Bored contains a short story that is a prequel-of-sorts to Have Vampire, Will Travel.

Q:  Have either of you thought about writing individually?

A:  As previously stated earlier, I have self-published individually. I’m sure Eric might want to try to write one solo and he’ll have my full support if he does.

Q:  Many of the authors I speak with don’t necessary enjoy reading the same type of novel as those they write. What types of stories do you enjoy reading in your leisure time?

A:  I enjoy mysteries, true crime, detective, science-fiction, fantasy, suspense, humor, light horror and an occasional biography.

First, thanks for having for another interview Carl. I really appreciate it.

So, evolution, yeah… well, there are days that I feel like really exploring language and there are days when I feel the need to tell a story. Back when I wrote BLACK & ORANGE I was having some difficulty reconciling those two desires. Only five short years later, I’m still fighting with that. So my self-imposed evolution has been a struggle for me. Yet, I will say that outside influence has caused me to evolve in different ways. I never had deadlines before. Now I do. It’s helped me produce because I don’t fancy being the guy who never turns stuff in on time. The pressure is amped up, which can be a good and bad thing. Also, I work with several different publishers, who all have their own unique processes. Some are more efficient at the editing process and some are more efficient at the marketing process. Some are equal on that field. So I’ve had to chameleon with each book as it’s come out, whereas before, I wasn’t even entertaining those concerns.

2.  Where did you get the concept for Bottled Abyss?

My family lost a dog in the foothills behind my parents’ house, a couple years back now. It was difficult. She was a great dog. Some days, as I would drive around looking for her, I’d often wonder about the coyotes. The other dog who had also broke out, did thankfully show up in a shelter, but with his throat almost torn out. It was obvious he’d been in a fight with other dogs, wild or not. Anyhow, I figured the missing dog had fallen in the fight and he was able to escape. It was just a horrible thing to contemplate. Now, while all this is going on, I’d had several hospital scares with my daughter. Two separate viruses had attacked her and the ordeal made my stomach twist into a pretzel for an entire week both times. The horror of losing my little girl and the horror of the cold world that took my family dog away took its toll on my mind. I decided to write a book about it. But then of course, the material changed into its own thing.

3.  What made you want to choose the underutilized River Styx mythos for Bottled Abyss?

I always loved the Styx mythos and perked up when the river was mentioned in various stories. In movies, and books alike, the river never seemed all the tumultuous—not like the current was so heavy you couldn’t just swim across, but my love of the unexplained caused me to ask, “Why is the Ferryman even necessary?” What is within that river that makes passage impossible without help? What’s really on the other side? What if the afterlife does exist but it’s as pointless as an Atheist’s version of death? So many questions and I just wanted to answer them in my own way, outside the explanations that even several myths offered.

4.  In Bottled Abyss the two year old daughter of your main character dies.  Is there any area that’s too sensitive or close to home for you to write about?

That would certainly be the area, for sure. I know many people don’t even want to contemplate ideas like losing their children, let alone read about them. But it’s in our heads, for better or worse, and this was my way of dealing with it. I had to find an answer. Now, as far as being too sensitive toward other concepts, I’ll probably never find something. Painstakingly, I put distance from myself in these aspects. For instance, this child in the book was killed by a hit and run, because I couldn’t write about her dying from an illness. That would have been too much.

5.  Bottled Abyss is darker and bleaker than your other novels.  Was that by design?

Absolutely. I couldn’t handle the subject matter in a different way and still be honest about it. This is why I love independent presses. You can go to these places without a fight over happy endings or sad endings. I got to take this tale to where it needed to go, in my opinion.

6.  What is your best quality as a writer?

Succeed or fail, I go for it.

7.  If you could pick one other author to collaborate with on a story, living or dead, who would it be?

Of course there are literary giants I’d love to work with, but I can’t help myself here. I must answer that I’d love to still be writing with my friend Michael Louis Calvillo. He was easy to work with, shared the same crazy drive, and fell in love with the work. We’d finished a wacked out urban fantasy called ORDER OF DEATH (think Quentin Tarantino meets George R.R. Martin) and had plans to make it into a series. Sadly, Michael passed away and that wouldn’t come to be. It’d be amazing to have him here, for so many different reasons, but writing with him is a big one for me.

8.  Tell me about your upcoming writing projects.

I’ll be working on a book about a banshee called DIVINE SCREAM and also writing the follow-up book in my surreal horror trilogy, this one called NIGHTMARE SERENADE, which will immediately answer the lingering questions of the first novel and then propel into a crazy thriller that I’m all kinds of excited to write.

9.  What made you start writing?

My teachers reinforced the love with praise, and I was an awful liar. Not to say I was bad at lying, but that I did it an awful lot. So, rather than fulfilling my need to tell stories I later had to scramble to justify, I started putting them on paper instead. It helped. And probably explained a great deal for my friends and family later on.

10.  What made you start to want to write horror?

I’ve always adored the genre, though I’m more of a dark fantasy writer than straight horror. But the boring answer is that my horror sold better than my fantasy. So it started becoming more attractive to me as an option for publication. I’m glad it was, because it’s a genre that can address the human condition in ways that haven’t been fathomed yet, both within itself and other genres. I look forward to all the new shapes of shadows to rise up in the future.

The best way to describe Bottled Abyss is dark. Benjamin Kane Ethridge in his sinister and brooding style weaves a spellbinding tale that uses the mythos of the River Styx in a way only he can tell.  He does this by exploring the psyches of his main characters, all of them flawed in some major fashion.  The novel’s two main characters, Janet and Herman Erikson suffer the ultimate tragedy of losing their daughter in a tragic hit and run accident.  As expected, they don’t cope with it well.  Herman tries to get himself lost in work while staying emotionally unattached to everything around.  Janet finds her solace in the bottle.  When Herman’s dog is lost, and he goes to find it, he meets the ferryman who transports people to the land of the dead.  The Ferryman’s world is slowly disintegrating and he needs a way to recapture it, seeing Herman as the solution to his problems.  He heals Herman’s dog with water from the Styx, and in exchange produces a coin.  When the coin is given to someone, it unleashes the Fury, who has amazing destructive capabilities.

This sets in motion a series of events that dramatically transforms the lives of Janet and Herman and those around them.  Ethridge uses his polished prose to capture the reader in a journey into the darkness that awaits them.  He travels into areas most writers won’t and does a great job of putting the reader into the minds of his characters.  The novel is tightly written with few wasted words.  Bottled Abyss is often times brutal and graphic, and anything but light reading.  If you would like to explore the darkness of the human mind, Bottled Abyss is a great place to go.

I’ve been a fan of Japanese history and culture since I was in high school. If writers are designed to write things we’re passionate about, then writing a story with a Japanese setting was inevitable for me.

2.  Who has been your biggest influence as a writer?

There are several. As for writers whose work changed my life, set me afire, there are the old pulp adventure writers, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Throw in Stephen King, and you have my formative years. A little later on, I discovered Fahrenheit 451, a book that changed the course of my life. I was always aware of Ray Bradbury, the Martian Chronicles, and his short stories, but it was Fahrenheit 451 that just broke me open. Every time I read it to this day, I am amazed not only at that books sheer prophetic genius, but that it still speaks to me at a fundamental level.

3.  How did you go about doing research for Heart of the Ronin?  What was the process like?

This is a story where starting research changed my life.

In about 1999, I knew that I wanted to write a samurai novel, so I started doing some research at the library. I had been a samurai film fan for over a decade, but I knew I still had a long way to go. With a couple of months of research under my belt, I started writing, and quickly realized that I was still hopeless ignorant about Japanese culture, how it works below the surface. The cultural paradigm differences between East and West often mystify people, so I knew I had to get my mind in there. I took a Japanese conversation class at the university, and it set me on fire. My teacher told me about the JET (Japan Exchange Teaching) Program, and three years later, I was on a plane to Tokyo to become an English teacher in a foreign land.

By this time, I had written a complete draft of the novel, and by sheer happenstance or serendipity, my JET position was in Fukuoka prefecture, exactly the locale where I had set my story. First-hand research is invaluable, so I went around to the shrines and old fortifications and saw what the land looked like, and read the accounts of what had happened. Much of that found its way into the story in some form or another.

4.  If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Fahrenheit 451.

5.  How is writing screenplays different than writing novels?

The form is so much different than narrative prose. You have to be much more cognizant of what the camera can portray, because the only thing that goes on the page is what the camera can show. You can’t just give a character an entire paragraph of inner monologue.  Screenplays also force you to be a lot sharper on your dialogue because of the firm page constraints. You get 120 pages or less for a two-hour film; that’s it. It really forces you to economize.

6.  What current writing projects are you working on?

Right now, I have a number of irons in the fire. I’m shepherding Sword of the Ronin through the editorial process and learning the ropes of what it means to publish indie-style. As for creative projects, I’m working on a steampunk novella, and I’m probably going to start a new novel this summer.

7.  How has living in the Far East affected you as a writer?

My personal horizons have broadened considerably. Anyone who lives for any length of time in a different culture experiences tremendous shifts in how he views the human race. And compared to America, Japan is as alien as it gets on this planet. All of those experiences go into the subconscious mill, and re-emerge in sometimes interesting ways. Learning Japanese also gave me tremendous insights into how language works, and how language shapes thought processes, insights I would not have had just swimming around through English like a fish in water it can’t see.

8.  What type of scenes do you most enjoy writing?

I love writing scenes with high emotional impact. Sometimes those are action scenes, sometimes they’re sex scenes, sometimes they’re simple conversations. It’s the emotional pique that makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.

9.  Is there any subject that is off limits for you as a writer?

Not so far. If my brain is strongly resisting going in a certain direction, that tells me that maybe I need to go there. There is certainly stuff that typically doesn’t interest me, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t go there if the story demanded it.

10.  How do you define success as a writer?

There are lots of ways to define success, I think, and it’s something that I wrestle with since I do this full time.

There is of course the monetary success, with enough dedicated readers to sustain your career.

And then there is the critical success, where you get recognition from fans or peers in the form of Hugo or Nebula awards.

And then there are those moments where a reader chooses to share with you just how much your book has touched his or her life.

All of those are amazing feelings, although I can’t say what the first two feel like. Writing is such a hard, soul-crushing business, subject to the whims of editors, agents, fans, and circumstance, that I think writers need all three of these.

A) They need and deserve to get paid for their work. People who think it all should be free either suck or are delusional about how the world works.

B) Not everything a writer creates will be gold. Many writers go their entire lives without quite reaching the masterpiece level. But some recognition from peers and fans can go a long way to assuaging the pain of low-sales numbers. Vice versa, healthy sales numbers go pretty far too when the rest of the industry just thinks you’re a hack. E. L. James is laughing all the way to the bank.

C) And a heartfelt fan letter can keep a destitute, otherwise unknown writer going for a long time.

Heart of the Ronin is set in feudal Japan, a setting that Travis Heermann wove into the story with great skill to the point where it almost becomes like an extra character in the story.  The story’s protagonist, Ken’ishi, is an outsider as his name would suggest.  Taught in the art of the samurai by a most unusual instructor, Ken’ishi is a skilled warrior who is trying to find a place in society that isn’t ready to accept him.  Besides his skill as a warrior, Ken’ishi is also able to speak with animals.  There is an inherent shyness and lack of confidence to his personality, which works well in the story.

There are a good number of action and fighting scenes, which Heermann wrote with some skill.  These were some of the more enjoyable scenes in the story.  There is also a great deal of character development both with Ken’ishi and Yohachi.  The pace of the story worked well, and there was sufficient tension throughout.  From a technical standpoint, I enjoyed Heermann’s prose.  There was a level of professionalism that, as a fellow writer, I could admire.  Heart of the Ronin sets itself up for a sequel at the very least, and I look forward to reading it.