If you could work
with any other author, who would it be and why?
Diana Gabaldon, author
of the Outlander Series, which starts out with the time-traveling
nurse from post-WWII meeting the gorgeous Scottish hunk. I love her
work. I’ve read the entire Outlander Series twice and am beginning
on round # 3. These are 800 page or more novels, and maybe eight of
them exist.
I think she’s a
wonderful writer. Her historical depictions and research are
impeccable. Her characters are beyond memorable, and her locations
are compelling. She ranges all over the time span from Revolutionary
times to the late 1960s. Also, she’s sold more books than anybody
but Stephen King. And she’s smart: she has a PhD and was a
scientist. She’s just signed a deal to have Outlander made into a
TV mini-series like George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.
If I worked with her,
maybe it would rub off. All of it.
What would be a
typical working day for you? When and where do you write?
So
much is involved in the production and marketing of books that
“typical” and “normal” and “ordinary” get thrown out the
window. I have six books in print now. Writing time has become
precious.
I write whenever I can.
Knocking out four or five hours of writing every morning would be
nice, but my life seldom seems to allow that. I have responsibilities
to our family business as well as my writing. My horse and I also
have an agreement that I will keep her properly exercised.
Here’s a glimpse into
the way I’m forced to write:
Not
very long ago, I was wailing away at Mogollon, my visionary
thriller about a Native American retreat and the sequel to my first
novel, Numenon. I was making great progress rewriting the
draft I’ve had on my hard drive for twenty or so years. I’d final
broken the writer’s block that had strangled me for years. Not only
were the plot threads coming together, material for Mogollon’s
sequel was popping into my head.
Then
I had to go to New Mexico to work on an exhausting, but necessary,
family business venture. I was there almost a month with my husband,
working like a mad creature. I had a computer, but no writing time.
In
New Mexico, I did complete two very successful “KDP free book days”
with Amazon for two of my books, as I noted above. It was fun seeing
The Angel arrayed next to George R.R. Martin’s books on the
Sci-fi Adventure page. The only difference between us was that he got
paid.
To
get those results, I didn't just toss off a note to my Facebook
friends. I contacted every relevant on-line group, club, discussion
thread, my entire 9,700 strong contingent of followers on Twitter,
everyone I’d heard of on Facebook, my personal mailing list, and
everyone else I knew. It worked, but I couldn’t write while I was
doing all the above.
All
that time, I was burning to write. A scene from the sequel to
Mogollon was banging inside my skull. I thought about it in
the shower, going to sleep, and every other moment. I had to write it
or explode.
I
thought I’d be able to write one afternoon, a draft maybe—anything
to give me relief from the creative pressure. Unfortunately, an
extremely talkative fix-it person came and would not leave. Sayonara
writing time.
Add
to all that the fact that I was starting a blog tour and sheets with
interview questions had been sent to me from various blogs, I was “a
one-armed paper hanger with a fire on the stairs,” as my dad used
to say. If I couldn’t write that scene, I felt like my head would
blow up.
A few weeks later and
back in California, I was able to write the scene. Bliss! It came out
exactly the way I imagined it. Apparently, being dammed up for a
while doesn’t hurt my prose, only me. The next new scene is
forming, as I begin a three-month blog tour requiring a new post
almost every day. See you later, writing time. This time, maybe my
head will explode.
When I write at home,
my computer is in the middle of the family room. This is a really bad
place, since everyone hangs out there and they don’t want to be
quiet so I can write. So I get crabby. Once I really get into
writing, it’s OK. I could write under a railroad track when I’m
absorbed.
What is the hardest part of the writing for
you?
Getting the time for
it. Once I had the luxury of spending whole days writing. I wrote 26
pages in a day once, a lifetime record. I was burning with
creativity. Now marketing and peripheral things take big bites. In
addition to the stuff I listed above, I’m trying to get my website
spiffed up and create a new website for the
Tales
from Earth’s End, the series that
The
Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy is part of.
That’s my old blog, linked above. I find myself thinking things
like, “What’s SEO? Why do I need it?” That’s part of being a
modern writer.
I wish I had a week
carved out so I could just pound the keys of my keyboard and have
fun. I could probably finish the sequel to
Numenon:
A Tale of Mysticism & Money, my
thriller about the richest man on earth meeting a great Native
American shaman.
When and why did you first
start writing?
I started writing full
time in 1995. Before that, I wrote academically and professionally. I
used to write letters and people receiving them would respond, “Oh.
That’s so colorful. I feel like I’m there.” I knew I had
talent, but didn’t have any idea how much work I needed to do to
become an adequate writer, much less a professional one.
I’ve seen published
works by people who are hot-shot professionals in some other field,
economics, say. It’s terrible writing. To really write, a
prospective author has to learn to write. May sound simplistic, but
it’s not.
In 1995, I joined a
writing group led by a local poet and literature teacher. I was in
that group for nine years until it petered out. Then I joined a
writing group led by a full professor at the University of California
at Santa Barbara. He held a PhD in English Literature and had eight
or nine publications from major publishing houses. Most of the people
in the group were traditionally published authors.
That group was brisk.
The critiques ripped to the core. It was painful to traumatic to be
in the group, but I learned more in two years there than nine years
of the other group. Hearing twelve people rip my work became hard to
take. Now I use a terrific editor who gives as tough critiquing as
the professor’s group, it’s just not so hard to take. I’ve
worked with her about six years.
The why of my writing
is handled in the following questions. It’s a form of healing
myself and going deeper into my psyche than I can go any other way.
Note that while I talk
about mystical experience and receiving the inspiration for books
very quickly, I’ve been working on my writing techniques with pros
for seventeen years. My writing ability is something that I’ve
worked to attain.
How did you come up with the idea for
the book The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy?
Here’s the very long
answer:
The
Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy is about a
young couple and their friends facing the destruction of all life on
earth through a nuclear holocaust. It has been described as follows:
New
York City on the Eve of Nuclear Armageddon, Late 22nd Century—Perhaps
Tomorrow
morning at 7:35 AM, a nuclear holocaust will destroy the planet. Two
people carry the keys to survival: Jeremy Edgarton, a 16-year-old
tech genius and revolutionary; and Eliana, the angelic, off-world
traveler sent to Earth on a mission to prevent her planet's death.
Join
Eliana and Jeremy as they begin a quest to save two doomed planets .
. . and find each other.
There’s
a story behind the story. I unintentionally practice what I call
“literature through disaster.” When something awful happens to
me, my subconscious seems to jump in and transform my pain into a
book or a series of books. My first novel, Numenon:
A Tale of Mysticism & Money,
came from the resolution of a very painful personal calamity.
A few years ago, another
exceptionally painful event occurred. My brother died. He was my
beloved baby brother and only sibling.
Outwardly,
I looked calm, but inside I was screaming with grief.
About
three months after my brother died, I had a dream in which a
shimmering golden light floated above me as I slept. That light was
totally conscious, totally alive, and beautiful in every way. It
radiated peace and good will. As I slept, I felt it lower itself upon
me. The bliss was indescribable. The light continued to descend until
it became me, merging with me fully. I got to feel the inner state of
an angel. (Did I tell you I like meditation and spiritual practice
and have very dramatic spiritual experiences? I’ve had them most of
my life.)
When
the experience of golden light faded, a book rattled around in my
head. My unconscious mind morphed the angelic presence of the dream
into Eliana, the exquisite dancer from another world who comes to
Earth to save her planet. She appeared in my mind as a waif
materializing on the sidewalk of a New York street in the late 22nd
century.
Within
four or five days, the major outlines of the book became clear to me.
They seem to pop through a membrane separating the known world from
the vast inner world of creativity and imagination. The character
Jeremy is based on my brother. Jeremy in the book may not be much of
a likeness to my real brother, but he is my brother in my soul’s
eye. I don’t know where the other characters came from.
I
do
know the origin of the setting and socio-economic aspects of the
book. In The
Angel,
the world is a police state, civilization has disintegrated, and
nuclear Armageddon is on the horizon. It’s not a cheery place, and
it shouldn’t be.
At
the same time that one part of me was grieving for my brother,
another part of my psyche was scared silly over the state of the
global economy. For many years, I made my living as an economist. I
hold a BA and MA in economics, worked on a PhD, and was economic
analyst for Santa Clara County. (That’s the southern part of
Silicon Valley in California.) Our economy is in very bad shape. We
need to work together to solve the problems or something like what’s
depicted in The
Angel may
happen.
Historical
precedent exists. There’s a parallel between the milieu of The
Angel
and what happened after WWI in Europe. Making a complex story
ridiculously simple, Germany lost WWI. The Allies demanded
reparations from them for the damage the country did during the war.
The Treaty of Versailles granted the Allies the right to collect
reparations. They did so and Germany fell apart.
People
were starving. Society was falling apart. Toss in the Great
Depression and you had an invitation for a dictator and strongman to
take over. One did—Adolf Hitler. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi
movement occurred in large part because of Germany’s post-WWI
economic disaster.
In
The
Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy,
the
fictitious
Tsar
Yuri takes over as the world staggers from a massive depression,
which begins with the financial melt-down of 2008. The end state of
The
Angel
begins in our time, as the recovery from the current Great Recession
stalls.
Do
I believe what’s portrayed in the book could actually happen? No.
But something like it could. Everything that happens in the
book—people disappearing of off the streets, torture, illegal
surveillance, the government not telling the truth, hidden military
action, and more—is happening somewhere on the globe now.
One
of the reviewers said that The
Angel occurred
in “a future world only heartbeats from our own,” which is why he
found it so disturbing.
Are you a
big reader? If so, what are you reading now?
I read all the time. My
guilty pleasure is waiting for Pixel of Ink every day and downloading
free books. I now have over 400 on my Kindle.
I just finished
Backpacked
by Catherine Ryan Howard. Hilarious trip that Catherine took
across Central America with a friend. She really shouldn’t
backpack.
Right now I’m reading
Hush
by Eises Chayil. I haven’t got totally into it, but it’s about a
young Orthodox Jewish girl who sees some horrific thing and can’t
talk about it in her community.
Before that, I read
The
Blasphemer by John Ling. This is a thriller
about undercover agents attempting to guard a famous Islamic
professor whose latest book has Islamic militants wanting him dead.
Super fast paced. I think the author is either from New Zealand. Or
Australia. Maybe South Africa. I dunno. Very good book.
Do
you have any advice for other aspiring writers?
Learn to write.
I mean really
learn to write. I was in two writing groups for a total of eleven
years before my first book came out. Despite that, I didn’t really
know what I was doing until I . . .
Got a fantastic
content editor. I made mistakes in my early books because no one was
tough enough to say, “Look, Sandy, it doesn’t work. It’s too
long. Needs . . . everything.” My current editor has the editorial
skills to rip and shred a manuscript without mercy. She also has the
personal skills to tell me what needs to go without devastating me.
My writing gets better because I carry my editor in my head saying,
“That doesn’t move the action forward.”
Run your book past
your content editor a couple more times. I usually do three passes.
Do you know what a content editor is? That’s the person I was
talking about above. The content editor looks at the overall flow of
the manuscript, pacing, plotting, character development, and
“removing unnecessary words,” to quote the Chicago Manual of
Style.
Get a really good
copy editor and proofreader and let them loose on your edited
manuscript. The copy editor fixes glitches in English, checks that
the character has the same number of kids throughout, that his wife
and other characters have the right names. Proofreading concerns
spelling, typos, and other glitches.
Maybe give your
manuscript two passes with the copy editor and proofreader. Or
three. No such thing as too much proofing.
My advice is the same
whether you self-publish (do all the work of publishing yourself and
finance it) or try to be published traditionally (where you get a
literary agent to sign you on. The agent sells your work to a
publisher, who publishes it. And you and the agent get paid.
Eventually.)
Self-publishing has
been looked down upon by traditional publishing forever. “If you’re
a good writer, the major publishers will publish your work. If you do
it yourself, you’re a lousy writer.”
This attitude is
changing somewhat, as some self-publishers sell millions of copies
and become fat cats. Here’s a secret: If you do really well
self-publishing, agents will come to you. You don’t even have to be
a very good writer, you just have to sell.
If you write what’s
in your heart, what expresses your values, know how to write, and the
manuscript is proofed properly, “They will come.”
They do.
On the other hand, if
you self publish, you will work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you
decide to self-pub, do it right. Make your eBook something you can be
proud of and that reviewers won’t trash. This is a large project.
You can look at the blog role on
Your
Shelf Life, my blog for writers, for resources. All
the technical people I use for my books are on it.
That’s my best
advice.
About
Sandy Nathan:
Sandy
Nathan
writes to amaze and delight, uplift and inspire, as well as thrill
and occasionally terrify. She is known for creating unforgettable
characters and putting them in do or die situations. She writes in
genres ranging from science fiction, fantasy, and visionary fiction
to juvenile nonfiction to spirituality and memoir.
“I
write for people who like challenging, original work. My reader isn’t
satisfied by a worn-out story or predictable plot. I do my best to
give my readers what they want.”
Mrs.
Nathan’s books have won twenty-two national awards, including
multiple awards from oldest, largest, and most prestigious contests
for independent publishers. Her books have earned rave critical
reviews and customer reviews of close to five-star averages on
Amazon. Most are Amazon bestsellers.
Sandy
was born in San Francisco, California. She grew up in the
hard-driving, achievement orientated corporate culture of Silicon
Valley. Sandy holds Master’s Degrees in Economics and Marriage,
Family, and Child Counseling. She was a doctoral student at
Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and has been an economic
analyst, businesswoman, and negotiation coach, as well as author.
Mrs.
Nathan lives with her husband on their California ranch. They bred
Peruvian Paso horses for almost twenty years. She has three grown
children and two grandchildren.
About
The Angel and the Brown-eyed Boy:
Tomorrow
morning, a nuclear holocaust will destroy the planet. Two people
carry the keys to survival: A teenage boy and an intergalactic
traveler.
By
the late 22nd century, the Great Recession of the early 2000s has
lead to a worldwide police state. A ruined United States barely
functions. Government control masks chaos, dissenters are sent to
camps, and technology is outlawed. War rages while the authorities
proclaim the Great Peace.
Finally
it all breaks down. We’re in New York City on the eve of nuclear
Armageddon. In the morning, ultimate destructive forces will wipe out
all life on earth. Only Jeremy Edgarton, a 16-year-old, tech genius
and revolutionary; and Eliana, the angelic, off-world traveler sent
to Earth on a mission to prevent her planet’s death, can save the
world. Join Eliana and Jeremy as they begin a quest to save two
doomed planets … and find each other.
Winner
of Four National Awards:
●
2011 IPPY (Independent Press)
Award Gold Medal
in Visionary Fiction.
●
2011 Indie Excellence Award in
Visionary Fiction (Winner of Catergory)
●
Best Books of 2011, USA Book
News:
Winner, New Age Fiction
Finalist
Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Book
Trailer Code:
Release Date: Out Now!
