Updates

David: It was the first class of any kind I have taught-I got my MFA in Writing to simply become a better writer, with no eye toward teaching. My old professor and the director of the Hamline writing program Mary Rockcastle finally convinced me to try my hand at teaching. The Loft is great because they allow you to design your own class.

David: "Grounding the Fantastic" is a multi-genre fiction class (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc.) divided in two basic parts. The first half of the course we try our hands at several different genre-aimed writing exercises, with a special focus on a specific craft topic each class (such as character development).
The second half of the course is a more traditional workshop environment, with an eye on toward helping a writer develop whatever piece they submit to class (novel chapter or short story). I stress the idea that we're all "mad scientists" tinkering in the fiction lab.

David: The stranger or more out there your story is, the greater an effort you must make to not only ground it in visceral detail, but to give your piece a meaningful, emotionally resonant backbone.

David: I take it to simply mean slipping between fiction genres, or streams. Imagine two streams running alongside each other-the slipstream author is the fish jumping from one stream to the other, enjoying both. I'm currently polishing a horror-Western that fits the bill nicely.

David: The old idea that we'd have flying cars someday and the fact that we still don't.

David: Hell no, I've written twelve! My two published novels are The Suicide Collectors, which is set in a near-future America that has been devastated by a suicide plague, and Wormwood, Nevada, about an isolated town in central Nevada where a meteorite lands and slowly causes the town to unravel.

David: Three or four a year, if that. I'm always in the middle of a novel or busy drinking.

David: I have a short story called "A Fairy Tale for the Incarcerated" coming out this spring in the Write of Spring anthology.

David: Hell yes. We drink ourselves silly. At least I do-Noah takes it a little more seriously. He's the true backbone of the show-I just crack wise and interrupt him a lot.

David: We've gotten a decent amount of hits on our website, but most of the feedback has been from friends and family, who like it. Sometimes it feels like we're talking into a void.

David: I've gotten into bluegrass lately, thanks to Trampled By Turtles. I love music and writing-I have over 400 albums I rotate. I love the rock and roll.

David: Not really, but I can't listen to new albums either way. I pay too much attention to the song writing and lyrics.

David: Sometimes. Bluegrass sure perks you up, Dukes of Hazard style.

Brian: Growing up I drew a lot, and at the age of about eleven started taking pictures and making short films and animations on Super-8. During college in Minneapolis, I played in bands and hung out with the local underground music scene, documenting shows. Around 1985, a shot I took of Sonic Youth was published in Cream Magazine, and I guess that's when I found a niche. It was a natural extension of the skills I'd been playing around with all those years, plus it payed.

Brian: There's an editorial shot I did in the mid-nineties that people seem to gravitate towards. It's a telephoto black and white close-up of my girlfriend's legs. She's wearing a Betty Boop skirt and combat boots, grasping the leash of a toy dog sitting at her feet. The aromatherapy tycoon Horst bought a print to hang in one of his mansions.

Brian: Definitely later. I'd always devoured fiction and loved making up stories, so I fancied becoming a filmmaker, which was what I studied in college. It became apparent that making movies was a remarkably convoluted process, involving too many people and too much money. It's extremely rare for a filmmaker to be allowed to pursue their singular vision. So I focused on the photography, still chasing scenarios in my head, which is pretty pointless if they're not documented. Then I had a little lesson in mortality after a bad fall down the staircase of a warehouse, New Year's night, 2001. I was pretty broken. While convalescing, Rutger Hauer's soliloquy at the end of Blade Runner kept running through my head. So I started writing.

Brian: Ready-Made Dreams was written first, during the buildup and invasion of the second Bush's second Iraqi War. Godless was intended as the opening of an epic rock'n roll novel with a Sci Fi edge. And Bullseye Inc. reflects trends that seem to be happening with expanding corporate branding, homogenizing culture, taken to an extreme. They were all written independently, so the inspirations were varied, but by mixing characters from different narratives, it created an interesting time-line with back-stories to lean on.

Brian: For now, Ready-Made Dreams is the end. But one of the novella's implied themes deals with alternative realities, so you never know. Godless is the opener.

Brian: I think it would be fun to explore the underground band that Hondo, Barris, and Zelda belong to in Godless. It's always been a bit of an obsession to tell the ultimate rock'n roll story. Harlan Ellison's Spider Kiss and Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street are outstanding works on the subject, but dated, and I haven't seen anything of that caliber on the contemporary music industry yet.

Brian: Right now I see them as a series of vignettes. Originally it was to be one great sweeping novel, but written as shorts they seem to acquire a life of their own, going off in unexpected directions.

Brian: There were a lot of great experiences, but I'd have to say Marilyn Manson. I toured with him twice, and he was so giving with his time and so damned interesting, it's pretty reflective in the images.

Brian: That and filmmaking. I don't have any academic background in literature, as anyone who's helped me edit can attest, so it's got to come from somewhere. Actually, I've never taken a photography class either.

Brian: What a friend calls my 'opus,' Still Waters Run Deep is a novel about the misadventures of a gang of River Rats on the upper Mississippi in the seventies. I grew up on the Mississippi. I was a River Rat. Moving to the Twin Cities, making new friends, we'd trade war stories from our childhoods. The reaction to mine was pretty universal: dude, you should write a book- all we did was hang around at the mall.

Brian: Just finished an erotic horror short: Auto Lurkers. Dubious market potential, but it was fun to write. I've been tinkering with Skyway, an intended literary piece, for a few years. It's written in the second person point-of-view, a difficult format. There are a couple concepts for photo publications in the works as well.

Brian: I'm considering working on a piece that I started about five years ago. It starts as a satire on the commercial photography industry and slowly turns into this hallucinatory horror trip – kind of a reflection on some of the experiences in the industry.

Brian: Over the past thirty years I've seen sports rise from a celebrated pastime to a kind of fanatical devotion, on par with nationalism and religion. All three seem to thrive in politically conservative climates, so I made an extreme extrapolation for the story.

Brian: I usually have music on when writing, but there was a time I worked exclusively at the Library. The silence and the academic surroundings actually helped me focus. While finishing Still Waters Run Deep, I had the radio tuned to a seventies retro station, which is probably one of the reasons the book contains an extensive playlist of seventies hits. Working on Godless, I was into The Bronx, and band author Charlie Huston referred to in one of our correspondences as 'real skull fuckers'. I couldn't agree more.

Brian: Rock'n roll. Always.

Bob: I've been drawing as long as I can remember. I've always liked drawing. I liked other things that kids my age liked, but when I wasn't watching Transformers, I drew stories about them. When I wasn't playing Nintendo, I was drawing Super Mario comic books.
I took every art class I could in high school and then in college. I spent some time at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and I liked the time I spent there. I did a lot of life drawing classes, which were very important to cartooning. I read an interview with Charles Schulz (Peanuts) who said in order to cartoon well, you had to be able to draw realistically. So the life drawing classes became very important to my cartooning.

Bob: I was reading a lot of alternative comics about 15 years ago and started doing an autobiographical comic strip called 'Fake Farm Landscape' that was similar to a lot of what I was reading, like James Kochalka or Jeffrey Brown. After a few years of that, I wanted to try a comic book and tell longer stories. I thought I would do a more fictionalized comic than my real life comic and tell weirder, or at least different stories than what I was doing in 'Fake Farm Landscape.' But I didn't want it to be similar to my autobiographic comic, so instead of using a guy as the title character, I used a girl.
I also wanted to reach a different audience than 'Fake Farm Landscape.' Whereas the comic strip was filled with swearing and sex, I wanted to make something a little more accessible and less offensive. So I decided to leave out the swearing and make it an all ages comic. Uptown Girl found her audience and I've been having a lot of fun with it.

Bob: Little Adventures is a collection of short stories that I did off and on over the last few years, mostly while I was working on the first Uptown Girl graphic novel "Big City Secrets". Most of the stories are funny, but there are a few quieter, reflective bits in there.

Bob: I've always been a cartoonist, though for years I called myself an illustrator because I wanted to draw children's books. Eventually I moved away from those for a while and got into drawing comics. That label seemed too highbrow for what I was doing, so I embraced the title.

Bob: Like most things I write, it started with something that happened to me. I watched someone buy a lottery ticket and then after it was printer, the guy left without paying for it or taking it with him. The clerk was annoyed and feeling spontaneous, so I purchased it. I checked the numbers the following night and I lost, of course. I wasn't expecting to win, but I was still hoping I would. But the reality of my life sunk in and I realized I have it pretty good. And of course, what the clerk says to Uptown Girl at the end of the story is an inner voice of mine that tells me how corny I really am.

Bob: I am about a fourth of the way through the next Uptown Girl graphic novel. It's called "Long Forgotten Fairytale." It'll end up being the longest thing I've written mostly on my own. The first graphic novel was written by Brian Bastian, and he's helped me with some stuck plot points on the book I am working on now, but for the most part it's all me. I hope it turns out okay. It should be out in 2014. I am also putting together a collection of early Uptown Girl comics for the 10th anniversary of the character. It's called "Greatest Hits" right now, but there's a good chance that will change. That will be out next spring. And hopefully once Little Adventures comes out, I can put some more time into my kid's book and try to find a publisher for that.

Bob: That's a good question. I need to have background noise when I draw or I get kind of bored. I used to listen to podcasts, but ended up being too distracted by them and I would sit and listen to them as opposed to drawing. What I find is good to listen to are commentaries on movies or tv shows, as well as documentaries. Baseball is good, too. I also listen to music, and the type of music I listen to is usually decided by what I am drawing. If I am writing and laying out a page, I listen to music that is a little quitter, like Paul Simon, Neil Young, Bob Dylan. If I am inking then I tend to listen to louder or faster music.

Jonathan: It was because of Star Wars. Later on, there was Jack Vance, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, Stan Lee and Stephen King, but I was three when I saw Star Wars for the first time and that was it, George Lucas blew my three year old mind. Me and an entire generation, right? Clichéd, but true, just like Spielberg forever scarred me when it came to swimming in the ocean; Lucas turned me on to new worlds. After that, I was all about genre stuff. I watched it, I read it, I made it up with my action figures and eventually I started to write it down on stacks of yellow legal pads. That was how it started.

Jonathan: I studied English Lit at the University of Colorado Boulder and I took a few Creative Writing classes here and there, but in college I was more focused on Archeology. I loved to write stories, but the idea of being a professional writer never occurred to me. Then I found out how few Archeologists actually get to fight Nazis on a regular basis, so I moved to L.A. and bummed around for a few years instead. I didn’t decide to really try to be a writer until just a few years ago, after moving to Minneapolis, and finally realizing I didn’t want to—and wasn’t really capable of—doing anything else, so…

Jonathan: Harris grew like most stories. I started with the image in my head of a man in some post-apocalyptic ruins using a bow to hunt a deer, and that was cool, but I didn’t know what else to say with it. It was really the question of motivation that solidified the story for me. It had to be something simple, due to the story’s size, and yet still be believable that someone would put themselves through what the main character puts herself through. When I figured that out, I knew who the main character was and the rest just sort of worked itself out.

Jonathan: Actually, I wrote down the kernel of an idea that was kind of cool, maybe and it would include one of the side characters from this story and a group of characters from a different short story of mine, but it would take place in space and I’m not really sure if it will ever actually exist, so… yes?

Jonathan: No. I drew from some experiences, maybe, but not in any real, direct, tangible way. Except for the cannibals, that part is totally true.

Jonathan: Well, I live here, so that’s a big part. I know it. I also like Minneapolis’ status as “the big city” for like, five states around, but it’s also the biggest small town on the planet, so I figured, if alien invaders bothered to destroy Minneapolis, then they must have destroyed everywhere else too. Its inclusion in the damage adds scope.

Jonathan: This was the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It’s in L.A., right behind the Paramount lot on Santa Monica and it has a crazy history. Some of Hollywood’s original settlers are buried there, as well as Valentino, John Ford, Tyrone Powers, Mel Blanc, Cecil B. Demille, Bugsy Siegel (His plaque says: "From the Family"), and Douglas Fairbanks. I saw his corpse once. Fairbanks Junior was going to be buried in the same plot, so they had to dig up Senior to make room. So one day I went into my “office”—a dirty little storage room off the chapel—and there’s this casket sitting there in the middle of the room. Creepy, right? So I opened it. Inside? Douglas Fairbanks Sr. dead as a doornail (Thankfully…). Guess what? The guy had hermetically sealed his coffin, so you could open it and look through the glass and see this long-fingered, shriveled up, beef jerky man laying there in an immaculate silk tux. His hair was perfect. So yeah, that was the cemetery.
A man named Jules Roth for decades had owned it for decades and when he died, it was discovered that he had stolen all the money. So when the new owners came in and they were repairing the place from years of neglect, I worked as an Assistant to the Interior Designer and then as the Archivist for all the crazy old Hollywood, Masonic Lodge, L.A. gangster stuff that had accumulated in the back rooms and old buildings over the many years and after that, I was hired as the Service Coordinator. I prepared the services, I casketed the bodies.
One time, I saw the body of man who had been floating in the ocean for days. He looked like an old bloated pumpkin, all whitish-orange and puffy. And when we told the wife that she didn’t want to view the body, because of how he looked, she said: “Yes, I do. I want to make sure the son of a bitch is dead.” I also filed the death certificates and I picked up the cre-mains, where I learned that the offices of a crematorium are covered in dust… HUMAN DUST! I also drove the Limo and Hearse and worked as the Site Representative for any TV and Film shoots—which were mostly just bad TV shows that have long since been canceled. L.A. Doctors. Remember that show? Neither does the rest of the world.

Jonathan: Easy. My first job in high school. I was a dishwasher at a restaurant/hotel. It was a terrible job in a terrible place run by terrible people. And it was really gross. After that, I’d rather handle dead bodies than other people’s chewed up, wet food. Plus, the manager was a jerk like he had stepped out of an 80’s teen comedy. I ended up quitting suddenly and his whining was like a soothing balm on my soul.

Jonathan: The Scribblerati is my writing group. Most of us met during a Loft Class taught by local author Lyda Morehouse. I had been in a writing group previously with Mark Teats, but that one was quickly dissolving, so when the chance came up, we decided to form a new group with fellow classmates Shawn Enderlin and Lisa Bergin. We had a couple of members come and go and then Claudia Hankin joined and the group really solidified. Now, we meet twice a month to critique, encourage, support, etc. We’ve been together since 2009, so there’s a good foundation of trust and respect, which allows us to be honest and give tough, but fair criticism without people getting all hurt, because we understand that we’re all working toward achieving the same goal of getting published. So, it’s a really good supportive group.

Jonathan: We put together a sample book called: The Scribblerati Sample Book. Impressive title, huh? It actually turned out kind of cool. It’s just a little thing that we gave away as schwag when we went to Diversicon this past summer. Other than that, no, we all have our own projects. We’re all genre writers, yes, but we have different focuses and styles and ideas, so I don’t know how well it would work.

Jonathan: The Scribblerati Sample Book is just that...a book of samples. It's 50 pages, so you get a ten-page sample of what each of us are working on. There aren't any complete stories, just some good and hopefully enticing excerpts. But that's why we don't sell it, we don't feel like it's a "real" product. We gave it away for free at the last Diversicon, but also figured we would put up the link so that anyone who didn't make the convention (and was interested) could still get one. It's just a fun little thing, so there really isn't anything to publish. It's just samples. The cost is just the cost of making and shipping the thing from Lulu, it doesn't go to us. We don't make any money off it. But as far as making an Anthology ourselves, I'd never say never (Sean Connery taught me that...), but it's not on the table right now. As a group, we're not only genre writers, but we're also novelists and currently everyone is knee deep in their own projects. Lisa is just about to start querying, Shawn and Mark are wrapping up the final drafts of their books, and Claudia is well into the 2nd draft of hers. (Curious what those books are? Here's a link: http://thescribblerati.blogspot.com/2011/09/two-years-later.html) So we're busy and not really short story writers in the first place. Like I said: I'd never say never, but for the time being, probably not.

Jonathan: I really enjoyed David’s class. He’s a nice guy, a good writer and he’s published, so it was an all around good feeling for me to be included in his company.

Jonathan: Here’s what I sent out in my queries:

“Six months ago, the Dead rose and the world came to a sudden and violent end. The virus burned across the face of the planet and in the aftermath, the choice was clear: You either learned the rules of survival or you joined the legions of the walking Dead.
“Black Magic” Jack El-Hai learned these rules; that's how he managed to stay alive in the fiery ruins of the Collapse when so many others did not. Amidst the chaos, Jack meets a young woman named Noelle Easter—tattooed, resourceful, and rowdy—they are a perfect match and soon, wild in love. Together, they survive the end of the world.

However, staying alive means hard choices, it means spilling blood, it means killing. But when they find refuge in a small Minnesota town—a place spared due to isolation and a tall fence—Jack and Noelle also find a new purpose: scavenging. They spend their days among the ruins of the old world hunting for the things people need to survive. It’s a dangerous occupation, a daily battle against both the ravenous Dead and the murderous living alike, but the town depends on them. It’s not a great life, but it’s better than most.
Lately, though, things are getting worse. Trouble is coming; Jack knows it. The Dead are gathering at the fence in greater numbers, scavengers are dying, and the shaky truce struck with the rival camps of survivors is beginning to crumble. Finally, when the town is invaded and an iron-fisted new rule threatens everything he holds dear, including Noelle, Jack realizes that the true monsters are not the ones locked outside the fence… they’re locked within.”

Jonathan: The inspiration came from two places.
1. I was REALLY disappointed in Land of the Dead. Really disappointed.
2. One night I was riding home on the bus and it was mid-March or maybe April, so it was a really ugly time of year in Minneapolis. Dirty snow, mud, everything just felt gray and winter worn out and for some reason, a lot of people on the route 17 bus had luggage with them. They weren’t going to the airport, and they got on after me, so they weren’t coming from the airport, and they weren’t sitting together, so here’s all these strangers with crappy suitcases piled on the bus, just looking sweaty and bedraggled and beaten down. It was really depressing and I started imagining it was a bus full of American refugees, like something awful had happened and these people were all riding silently in the dark, heading for somewhere safe, just worn out and clutching everything they owned. And then this moron comes sprinting out of the dark, right in front of the bus. The bus driver slams on the breaks, everyone goes lurching forward, and super idiot goes running pell-mell off into night—most likely he was late to take a ride in his homemade catapult or something equally as stupid and suicidal. So he’s gone and the bus just goes on, no big deal. So, then I imagined that the bus driver just ran him down and everyone on the bus made that same shocked noise they had just made, while the bus bumped over him and the driver ran the wipers to get rid of the blood, and we drove on like it was no big deal. Why was it no big deal? Well, the guy must have been a zombie. In fact, that was what the bus was running from, a zombie apocalypse… and that was the beginning of the idea. This is what I think about on the bus. Also, I was watching a lot of Deadwood at the time…

Jonathan: It’s part of a series. Four books. The first one was supposed to be Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead, a kind of two-fisted noir, neo-wild west, quick draw outlaw kind of thing. The other books would kind of progress that way. Four loosely connected books featuring the same characters (more or less) which, if read together, would tell the tale of the Zombie Age from the beginning to its eventual end. Neat, huh?

Jonathan: I queried 30 agents and I got a lot of really good interest. Some requests for more, some requests for full, but no one picked it up. Maybe I missed the zombie zeitgeist, maybe it’s just that first novel that never gets to be, maybe it just needs more work, either way it’s trunked for now. One of my plans for this year is to print it out again and do a new edit with (hopefully) fresh eyes. After that, who knows?

Jonathan: Well, besides the new edit on my first book, I have also applied to Clarion West, so fingers crossed on that. Plus, I have my blog and the Scribblerati blog, so those will keep me occupied.

Jonathan: No. Well, I’ve only got one submitted at the moment and there’s maybe a half dozen or so more in various states of undress on my computer. They’re being tweaked and edited and rewritten, etc, etc… I was working on them more a month or so ago, but…

Jonathan: Yes, I’m very excited about it. It’s in progress and the prose is flowing like a mighty river! I’m about six chapters into the first draft, which is almost a third of the way done by my calculations, so that’s very exciting. It’s a post-apocalyptic, urban fantasy Dirty Dozen versus a Dragon type of thing, so it’s fun to work on.

Jonathan: With a firm and honest commitment to the editing process, multiple drafts, and to putting out the best story possible, I don’t care where a book comes from. Bottom line: a good story is a good story. That being said… if you’ve hand-drawn your cover yourself, didn’t really do more than one draft, and didn’t bother to have a real-life professional editor look at your work, then I’m out. I have a very low tolerance for that crap. This is you, this is your thing, treat it like it’s important, for God’s sake. Anything less and you should have stuck to blogging, because you’re wasting our time. For myself, I don’t rule it out as an option, but I’ll be honest with you: I want a real book. That’s what I really want. A real book in a real brick and mortar book store. That’s the pie in the sky for me. Not to say that e-books aren’t real, they totally are, but for me personally, for my own goals, if/when I ever get published, if the only version I get is an e-version, I won’t feel like I’ve really made it. Of course, the industry is continuing to change and adapt, so who knows what the future holds, right? At the moment, I don’t really give it much thought, since I don’t have anything publish-ready.

Jonathan: No, I can’t not-listen to music when it’s on. The same goes for my wife’s voice. Both break my concentration. I can write in silence, but really I prefer to write at home with the TV on. I can totally tune that out and get to work.

Jonathan: No, but I watch the same things everyday, if I’m at home. Judge shows and Cops, all day. Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Judge Mathis, the People’s Court. And Maury too, I love him, he’s the most insincere man on television. Why do I watch them? People’s bad behavior and lack of awareness of themselves or the camera… it fascinates me. Plus, I can totally tune it out. Also, I learn things. 1. Never put anyone on your cell phone plan, because they will always try to rip you off. 2. No one can be a 1000% sure about anything.

Jonathan: No, it’s based too much on ritual. Sometimes I worry that I’m Rain Man. I think I’ve seen every episode of Cops, ever. That fact embarrasses my wife so much. Hi, honey!

Erica: I never even considered it when I was a kid. I was always an avid reader, but I never wrote much of my own. I went to school for another profession entirely, but when the writing bug bit, it bit hard.
When I finished Anvil of Tears, I was still in college. I went on to internships and a couple of jobs in journalism, but rewrites and beginning work on my next book took up more and more of my attention. Eventually, I was laid off from my job. While unemployed, I could write full-time.
I loved it! As the weeks rolled by, I spent more time writing and less time job-hunting. Finally, I asked Aron if we could get by without a second steady income. We considered a while. We had to tighten our belts a little, but we could make it work. I have been a full-time author ever since. In short, writing is a new dream of mine.

Aron: When I was younger, I wrote myself little adventure stories. Nothing serious, just fun stuff for myself or my friends that I never intended to go anywhere. In school, I always enjoyed any assignment where I got to write. My writing was usually a little more creative than it was supposed to be, but humor was how I got by in school so I kind of got away with it.
I can’t say I ever wanted to be an author, though. Erica started writing books and I was her first editor, beta reader, and fan. When she got stuck, she talked out the plot with me. I actually resisted being called her co-author for a long time because I didn’t think that my contributions were equal to the work she put in, certainly not enough to put my name on the cover with hers. I just slowly got more involved until I admitted that I was actually writing the books with Erica. Now I love it.

Erica: When I say that, I don't mean in the sense of a musician who might reference classical as a kind of training. I mean that I haven't been trained at all. I have no idea what I'm doing. None. I majored in English for one very, very short semester in college. I grew quickly tired of reading plays – I remember having to read Wit in two separate classes – and changed majors. I have never taken a creative writing class. I've read a few books on writing, but not many. What education in writing I have is from reading the novels I love. A lot of them aren't classy and even fewer of them are classics.
As to how that's affected my career, it's hard to say. I'm unsure how much impact my lack of training has had. When I first started writing, I was lucky enough to be friends with a New York Times bestselling author. When I talked to her about my seedling ambitions, she had a lot of advice for me.
I had every reason to listen, but I didn't. She told me not to write about writing, but my first novella took place in an author's mind. She warned me not to make my first novel part of a series. My first book was the beginning of a trilogy that I still haven't finished! (Though I'm hoping to this year.)
The point is that I didn't follow the advice given to me. What I've finally learned about writing came only through experiencing it for myself. I don't know that advice from teachers would have helped me avoid those mistakes.
That's not to say that teachers wouldn't have helped me. While I might have made those particular mistakes anyway, a good writing professor doubtlessly would have helped me with my admittedly rough prose. I've tried to learn from my favorite authors, but trying too hard to sound like them means diluting my own voice. Maybe learning from someone who knew how to teach would have helped me through that.

Aron: I don’t have any formal background in writing either, but I am a long-time role-player. I’d say I love running games more than I like playing them. Every role-playing game calls that person something different, but the title I prefer is Storyteller. I approach my role-playing like a book or a movie and try to tell a dramatic and exciting story with a clear plot arc. When it comes to writing actual books, I think that my role-playing experience taught me a number of things that I bring into the writing process.
One of the things that I am known for among my role-playing friends is my non-player characters. My players really enjoy the variety and depth of my NPCs and I usually populate my games with them pretty heavily. Fleshing out secondary characters in our novels is something that I usually take care of.
The other thing I do is outline. I’ve run games with no plan and just embarrassed myself hideously. Thankfully, when I screw up in front of a role-playing group I’m only embarrassed in front of a half-dozen people. The same mistakes in a novel would have a much wider audience for my screw-ups! So I learned to outline and think ahead and as we’ve applied those methods more and more to our writing, I think our books have improved.

Erica: I don't quite remember why I first wrote Little Hawk. I have a hard time writing short stories, so I don't often write them. But at some point, I must have decided that it was a good idea, or else that I just wasn't going to be able to sleep until I wrote it all down.
Logan, the protagonist of Little Hawk, is one of the characters of our first book, Anvil of Tears. In that novel, he is a cop who turned heartless bounty hunter. But Aron and I started talking about how Logan might have turned into a cop in the first place. His planet is a hard, harsh place where the average citizen has a pretty loose grasp of the law. How does a little boy on a world like that grow up to be a cop? And so Little Hawk was born.
You don't need to read Anvil of Tears to get Little Hawk and vice versa. Each of them is their own story. Someone who reads both might have a little extra insight into Logan, but I certainly wouldn't want to obligate anyone read an entire novel just to understand Little Hawk!

Aron: I think Erica was just in the mood to write a short story and we started thinking about ideas. When we mentioned exploring Logan’s childhood to our friends, they got all excited so we started working with the idea. We knew how Logan had turned from cop to bounty hunter and that part is explored in Anvil of Tears, but we wanted to develop the man before he was either.
Little Hawk is a short story about a boy growing up in a hard city and the choices you have to make to survive and it sheds some light on who Logan was, who he is, and maybe hints a little bit about his future… if that’s not too much of a spoiler.

Erica: As I briefly mentioned before, I was in journalism. I had gone through nine majors in college (including criminal justice, art and anthropology) before finally settling into digital communications. My mentor was a journalism professor with a keen interest in updating the field for the digital age.
So when I graduated, I went to work first with the local newspaper and then one of the associations that works with all of the papers in California. But I was young and new to the field. I had very little to contribute and even those small ideas were generally met with disinterest or outright hostility.
As the newspaper industry fell on hard time, I was laid off. But by then, I was already writing novels.

Aron: I’m the one with the day job. I work as an analyst in the healthcare industry and make sure we can pay the mortgage and get healthcare. Some people wonder if I’m resentful to be working while Erica spends most of her time writing. Even Erica worries sometimes that I sacrifice too much for her. So here’s the deal on one of us working while the other focuses on writing: If neither of us wrote, I’d still be working this job. We need it, and I like my work. So I’m not resentful that I have to keep a job. If we ever make it big and it lets me shift to full-time writing as well, I’ll be grateful, but I’m not waiting for that day. I’m just going to keep living my life and doing what I love. If we needed the extra money, Erica would work. We both know that, but as long as I can pay the bills on my own, I’m glad to give her the time to do what she loves. I come into the writing when I get home and we communicate constantly by email to keep me in the project. We've made it work.

Erica: I love being married to my co-author. It means that I have pretty much constant access to another brain, one that I have a great deal of respect for. I'll admit, though, that it can be tough sometimes. I occasionally do freelance design and website work. When clients tell me that they don't like my artwork, I can shrug it off. I'm not invested in their opinion. But I care a great deal about what Aron thinks of my work. Not only do I give great weight to his opinion, but I love him. I don't want him to hate what I do, especially when he invests so much of his own time and effort in the results.
When we first began writing books together, there were a lot of arguments and hurt feelings. We both stuck with it, though. Like most things, it's gotten much easier with practice, and the results are well worth the effort.

Aron: The only drawback to my co-author being my spouse is that it can be a little hard to keep feelings out of it. My style is to generate a lot of half-baked ideas and throw them on the table so we can pick and chose. If we go too long without any of my ideas working, I can get frustrated.
But being married means we that know each other well and we know how to communicate, and as soon as we focus on the challenge we’re trying to resolve in the book instead of on each other, it works. It sounds strange to say that we need to keep our feelings out of it when we’re married, but being married taught us how to do that.

Aron: I am a huge gaming nerd. I’ve been role-playing since before I can remember. I know that I was young enough that I used a very simplified, almost paperless system, and grew into the more sophisticated games as I got older. I like being a player, but I also really enjoy running the games.
My gaming group was the motivation for a book on the subject. One of my players actually requested that I write one. I’m told that the way I run games is very different from anyone else and I have a lot of unique ideas. I’m always very open to criticism and suggestions and I try to treat each game like a learning experience. I keep the things that worked, jettison the things that blew up in my face and create the next game with those in mind.
I didn’t really think that I had anything unique to say about role-playing, but when we started talking about all the little things I do, it added up to a good-sized pile. I figured I may as well share the things that I learned. If people want to read it and use what I learned in my games, then maybe they can avoid some of the mistakes I made and profit from some of the lessons I learned.

Erica: Well, we're working on an ongoing short story serial, The Dead Beat. There are twenty-nine stories all together. We've written out the first twenty, so that leaves nine more to go. I've got a post-apocalyptic short collecting some dust that I'd like to find some time to finish.

Erica: Sure. Let's see... It doesn’t have title yet, but it is set in the future of the American midwest. There are desert bandits, old nuclear silos, lost technology and, in the end, a tragedy. It's not finished yet - we've been too busy with Sword of Dreams and The Dead Beat - and we have no idea what the story's publication fate will be.

Erica: We're just finishing up Sword of Dreams, the second Reforged book, and hope to have it out in the middle of this year. After that, we'll be working on the final book of the trilogy, Hammer of Time. It going to feel strange to finally finish the Reforged trilogy! Anvil of Tears was my first book and the series has been my permanently ongoing project for several years now. It's been fun, but I think I'll be sticking to single novels for a while.

Erica: When I first wrote Anvil of Tears, I spent about sixteen months querying it to agents and publishing houses. All I ever got back were rejections. To be fair, I knew even less about the querying process than I did about writing.
After I ran through every agent on my list, I shelved Anvil of Tears and got to work on my second book, In the House of Five Dragons. I sent that one out, too, and received the same response. By then, I was getting frustrated. I just wanted people to read our stories. So I cleaned up our books, edited them a few more times, and put them up online as webfiction. The response wasn't overwhelming, but it was a response. People actually read our books and commented! It felt great!
Eventually, maintaining the website became so time-consuming that it was biting into my actual writing time. That was when we moved over to paperback and ebook releases. It's been working pretty well for us ever since.
Trial and error stories? I've got lots of those. Like I said, I'm entirely self-taught. It's nothing but trial and error.
One of the first painful lessons I learned was that I'm not a seat-of-my-pants writer. I tried. Oh, how I tried! Aron told me that I should probably outline my books, but I told him that I had no interest. If I outlined, then I knew exactly what was going to happen. Where was the fun?
As it turned out, deleting hundreds of pages because the plot wandered in pointless circles was far less fun. Some authors do an excellent job of letting their stories and characters grow naturally, with no plan. I'm not one of them. Without an outline, my characters end up staring into mirrors and moping about their lives. Not exactly riveting reading…
I've been advised many, many times not to write a lot of dialect. Unless you're Stephen King, it's just going to make your prose and dialog unreadable. Well, as I had so many other wise bits of advice, I ignored this one. The first draft of Anvil of Tears contained an accent so thick that, when I went back to edit the manuscript, I couldn't understand a word I had typed. It was one of the main characters. Rewriting every line of his dialog took a week. I was miserable.
I had never heard this one before I started writing, but I wish I had: Don't write main characters with a lot of secrets from the readers. Maybe one secret or one mysterious character could have worked, but Anvil of Tears had three. Their back-stories wound up so convoluted and secretive that the characters barely made sense. It's hard to like a character whose motivation has no apparent logic. I revealed all secrets by the end of the novel, but as lot of bitter reviews remind me that it was far too late for many of them. They had already stopped reading.
When writing In the House of Five Dragons, I learned to never surround a telepathic main character with villains who need to keep secrets from him. It quickly gets tough to come up with excuses as to why the protagonist doesn't just dip into their brains to discover “The Evil Plan”. I think that it all worked out in In the House of Five Dragons, but I'll never try to write a character like Rikard Mazrem again.

Aron: Fortunately for me, Erica handled the whole publishing side of our books so I had some distance from the pain of querying and rejection. My main role was to keep Erica sending the books out. I just wanted to share what we had done and I’m persistent enough to keep at it. That really started before ebooks took off so it was a lot harder. With the explosion of ebooks, it’s now very easy to self-publish and that’s what we’re doing with everything. The hard part now is getting noticed by enough people to get them reading!

Erica: I listen to a lot of music and watch a lot of movies when I'm writing. I find it essential to maintaining the mood of a scene. A good soundtrack helps me feel the dramatic tension when I might otherwise get bogged down by the process of the writing itself, which can sometimes be a little tedious and difficult. When I'm editing, I don't need the music quite as much. By then, I've put together enough of the story that it draws me in and holds my attention. I'm less likely to get distracted by wording and grammar. But I keep the soundtrack playing… It doesn't hurt!

Aron: I don’t listen to music while writing very much, I find it more helpful to have a movie on in the background. When we’re writing Reforged I put on some sci-fi, when we wrote In the House of Five Dragons, we watched Rome, I, Claudius, and Gladiator a lot. I’m a very visual person and I find that being able to look up and soak in some imagery is more helpful to me than just music.

Dale: I started writing creatively in my early teens. I had an uncle who lived in Japan, and my brother and I arranged for him to buy each of us one of the early portable tape recorders being made there. I began writing little scripts for us to perform on audio recordings. This later blossomed into a fascination with radio dramas of the 1930s and 1940s. I remember doing historical re-enactments on audiotape for school history projects. About that time the first "portable" video equipment started appearing, and I began writing scripts for video productions at school.

Dale: I've been writing fictions from the very beginning, mostly in the form of radio, video, or film scripts. My bachelor's degree is in English Education, so I picked up some formal training along with exposure to lots of great literature during my coursework. I've taken a variety of writing classes since that time and have been a member of a couple of writing groups.

Dale: The kernel of the idea has been kicking around in my head for half-dozen years. I saw a student at my daughter's high school wearing a separate sleeve with a t-shirt, and it occurred to me that would be a good way to carry personal electronics. I later used the idea in a treatment for an instructional video that was set in the future, but sadly the project never took place. When I started thinking how the Twin Cities would be different in the future, I remembered this idea and realized we'd have very different clothing if the growth in personal electronics is any indicator. The story grew from that seed of an idea. After I wrote the story, I ran across an article about a fellow who had designed a wearable television screen as a vest. It's hard to stay ahead of the future.

Dale: I've been making movies since I was 13 years old when I fell in love with the idea of creating a world in a movie. I've produced and worked on a number of independent movies.

Dale: Making feature-length and short movies is an avocation. Making instructional, informational, and promotional videos is a big part of my vocation.

Dale: It's a feature-length science-fiction comedy romance that I wrote and produced. In the movie, a failed astrophysics student and the only tenant in the building he manages both witness a crashing UFO and are nearly incinerated by it. When a mysterious stranger, an unscrupulous UFO investigator, and a wily sheriff arrive, their lives are turned upside down. The story reveals the dangers and adventures that arise when you wish on a star -- and your dreams come true.

Dale: At age 14, I wrote my first science-fiction short story, and then audaciously mailed it off to Ben Bova – famed author and then editor of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact magazine – to be considered for publication. It was politely, but roundly, rejected.

Decades later – after writing a half-dozen feature-length screenplays, a passel of press releases, numerous Sunday School Christmas programs, scores of video scripts, and a pair of books on independent filmmaking – I offered my second science-fiction short story, Wardrobe Malfunction, for inclusion in Cifiscape Volume II. Apparently, the intervening years did me some good.

Dale: I'm editing the second draft of a book I've written on special effects for movies, and I have the outlines for a book on video production and a book on personal motivation sitting in my office and nagging me to get started on them.

Dale: I have some more in mind, but haven't put pencil to paper yet.

Dale: I have not yet done a full-length novel. I'd like to do more short stories as training ground before I tackle a novel. Besides, I'm busy revising a stage play for teenagers that I wrote with my younger daughter. I'm also working on a stage musical with my older daughter, Jen Newton, who is a music composer.

Dale: There is an animated feature-length script that is awaiting a rewrite, and I have a short puppetry film I'd like to find time to produce. I think that's plenty of projects for now.

Dale: The majority of my creative writing is done while I'm traveling on mass transit, so the background soundtrack for my work is usually the rattles and rumbles of a bus. I could bring along portable music, but the white noise of Metro Transit is enough for me to concentrate. However, when I am typing at the computer, I use a play list of music that stimulates my mind. It's quite eclectic, everything from Handel's Water Music to Regina Spektor, with Yma Sumac, Queen, Django Reinhardt, Bach, Avril Lavigne, Apollo 100, African djembe music, the Aquabats, Jen Newton, Gustave Holst, the Veronicas, and songs from Broadway musicals to spice things up between. My new favorites are the bands Vampire Weekend and Fun.

Dale: I generally use the same music for both. I find that energetic music helps me retreat into my head so I can visualize and focus on my work. When I'm doing creative writing, I just write or type as fast as I can to keep up with the movie that's playing in my head. Music helps me block out distractions and gives a forward push to the work. When I'm doing more mundane technical writing, the music helps keep me motivated and working at a good pace. It's like a treat I get to have as long as I work.

Dale: If I want strong emotional content to a scene, I'll sometimes select a CD or a song from my play list that fits the mood of it. It helps conjure up ideas in the desired mood.

Aaron: An "author," no. I have always been a writer. My parents are finally getting around to cleaning out the junk room, where they’ve stored childhood mementos, to create a workout room. Instead of tossing everything, as I’ve suggested, I’ve been getting boxes of reviews, stories, and poems that I wrote as far back as kindergarten. Yikes!

Aaron: I earned my dual undergraduate degree in Creative Writing and Rhetoric and Discourse with a minor in Environmental Studies, from Beloit College in Beloit, WI. All of my writing instructors and mentors, including those at Hamline University, where I earned my MFA in Writing, suggested that we write what we know. Thus, I’m always expanding what I know. My writing is heavily slanted towards environmental activism, using what I’ve learned from my minor.

Aaron: I love bikes and biking. When the weather is good, I bike everywhere. I used to bike to work more often that I do now: 23 miles round trip. I feel that bikes and bike mechanics make great characters, especially environmental activists. I just don’t see humanity being able to continue its love affair with the automobile. Bikes are the answer.

Aaron: I wish. I know the basics. I interviewed with a couple of places, but because of my education and natural affinity for sales and management, they wanted me out front with customers instead of in back with the grease. It is still a dream of mine. I would like to find a small town with a bike mechanic need and open my own shop.

Aaron: Yes, I don’t want to be one of those parents that has to answer their child’s question, “What were you thinking? Why is the earth such a mess? And why didn’t you do anything about it?” I want to respect the needs of future generations. The myth around organic foods is that they are healthier for you. That is marketing hype. The purpose of organic agriculture is to respect and replenish the earth, attempting to work with natural systems rather than against those systems. We need to respect natural systems or risk a societal collapse. However, in order to respect those systems and honor mother earth, we should eat as low to the ground as possible: vegetables, or as Michael Pollen puts it, “Mostly Plants.”

Aaron: Thanks for asking. The recession, mostly. However, I work in higher education as an adjunct instructor, and I see what students have to do in order to pay for school. Tuition is too high. Combine student’s plight over rising costs of education with the predatory sex trade, bingo, you’ve got The Skin Scholarship. However, in this instance, I think that reality is worse. There are amateur porn sites that pay college students to create sex videos, and those sites pay well.

Aaron: Nora is now four-months old. As the full-time (or as we call it, day-time) care provider, I do not have time to write. Thus, I am taking a writing hiatus. Once I came to the conclusion that Nora is my priority, my life became simpler. When she is older and a more independent nap-taker, I’ll resume a more regular writing regiment.

Aaron: I think that it is a parental fallacy to expect children to take an interest or appreciate their creative work. I hope that she likes it. However, I write for me first and adults second. So, it might be awhile before she sees any of it.

Aaron: No. I don’t write for her. I might write something for her in the future. I’m not going to put limitations on my creativity, but I do everything else for other people. Writing is for me.

Aaron: Yes. I’ve put my novel on hold. The plan is to write several linked stories to create a novel in the world of The Skin Scholarship. I’ve finished the first section that follows the downfall of Jonah (the main character in The Skin Scholarship), and I’m on to the second character's story.

Aaron: The Bike Mechanic is still in serial with eFiction Magazine. Right now, that is all that I have in the cooker.