Please welcome distinguished author Steven Harper-Piziks, who has published science fiction, fantasy and much much more. Steven is an old friend of mine, and I'm thrilled to have him here today, telling us all about his recent forays into digital publishing by way of Amazon and the Kindle. His Silent Empire novels feature a romantic relationship between two gay men. The first two in that series, DREAMER, and NIGHTMARE, are currently available for the Kindle.
DREAMER is available at http://www.amazon.com/Dreamer-Novel-Silent-Empire/dp/B002DML10G.
NIGHTMARE can be found at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002ECF1R4.
For an excerpt from DREAMER, please read down to the bottom of the post.
Tell us about your decision to release your out of print novels on the Kindle. How has the experience been so far, and what do you hope to get out of it?
Well, once a book goes out of print, it’s not earning anything, and I decided there was no point in holding onto a piece of property that wasn’t going anywhere. Kindle seems to be the biggest thing going right now, with the widest readership, so I took a deep breath and took the plunge.
Kindle let me set the price, and I decided to keep it low. Apple showed us that micropayments are a great way to get people to take a risk on content. And I realized that as a Kindle owner myself, I find myself reluctant to shell out $10 for a book that I don’t actually get to hold, you know? If I don’t like it, I don’t even have the option of giving it to a friend or donating it to the library. But a couple of bucks? Sure! I figured I can’t be the only one who feels this way, so I set the price for DREAMER and for NIGHTMARE at just under
$2. I got a couple of sales within an hour of it going live. We’ll see if this keeps up.
I’m hoping once my entire backlist is up, I can build some momentum. It seems to me a good way to keep my name circulating, let more people know about my books--and generate more royalties that will let me keep writing.
Tell us about DREAMER and NIGHTMARE.
DREAMER and NIGHTMARE are my third and fourth SF novels, the first ones I
wrote as Steven Harper. (My real name is Steven Piziks.) They're also the first
in what became the Silent Empire series. The other books are TRICKSTER, and
OFFSPRING.
In the far future, we have faster-than-light travel but not faster-than-light
communication. The Silent are telepaths who hold interstellar governments and
corporations together by going into the Dream, a shared plane of consciousness
where anyone can communicate with anyone else. In some places Silent are
exhalted, in some places they’re ordinary workers, and in some places they’re
slaves.
In DREAMER, Kendi, the main character, belongs to the Children of Irfan, a
semi-monastic order of Silent. They sell their communication services and use
the money to buy, steal, and otherwise rescue Silent slaves. Kendi has just
learned about a Silent teenager who can use his Silence to possess other
people. His singular power has the ability to topple entire
governments--or even destroy the Dream. Kendi and the Children of Irfan have to
find the boy before the terrible, far-reaching Empire of Human Unity does.
As it happens, Kendi is also gay. He’s estranged from his long-time partner
Ben, and a major subplot of the book deals with the two men trying to
reconcile.
NIGHTMARE is actually set before DREAMER--I wrote the series a little
bass-ackwards. The book details Kendi's journey from slavery into the
Children of Irfan. He discovers his Silence and his sexual
orientation. Meanwhile, a serial killer is murdering Silent in the
Dream. Kendi unexpectedly witnesses one of the killings, so now the killer
has his sights set on Kendi and his teacher Ara--who happens to be Ben's
mother.
What gave you the idea for DREAMER?
This was actually my "I hated THE PHANTOM MENACE" book. I was so disgusted with the movie that I found myself saying, "If I did a book with an order of sneaky warrior monks and an intergalactic empire and a bunch of slaves, I’d do it RIGHT." I found out that my friend Sarah Zettel felt exactly the same way, and we started out doing a collaboration. We’d designed most of the universe and had started on the plot when Sarah was offered an unrelated three-book fantasy contract. She wouldn’t have time for the Silent Empire, so she handed the whole thing over to me. It turned into four books.
The term "Silent," incidentally, was an accidental creation. Sarah was using dictation software on her computer, and it was unfamiliar with the word "psionic." It translated the word into "silent," which we both thought was a pretty cool, so we kept it. We had an SFnal word created by a computer!
What do you like about m/m?
It creates an entire new story out of every old romantic trope. You can take any tired, worn out relationship cliche, change the concerned people into two guys, and suddenly you have a whole new story. Kendi and Ben are doing the divorce and reconciliation thing--not a new idea in itself, but their version of it is definitely a new twist. In TRICKSTER, they decide to have children, a new twist on fertility troubles. And in OFFSPRING they deal with parenthood and the impact it has on their relationship. All age-old problems, but with a new perspective.
In m/m, you also don’t have to worry if one gender is portrayed "better" than another. These days, female protagonists are not "allowed" to be weak or make major mistakes or come across as foolish in any way unless you want to be seriously excoriated. (I’m exaggerating a bit, but only a bit.) This means that when you’re building a relationship in a book, you’re always worrying about what I call the 1950s Factor. Oh no! My female protagonist allowed my male protagonist to take the first step in the relationship. Does she appear subservient? Does he look sexist if he hits on her? Better re-check that dialogue another dozen times. Okay . . . we have some romantic overtures going on. Are they responding exactly equally? Oh no! He said she was pretty! Is that wrong? Oi!
When both people involved are guys, these problems go out the window.
To what/whom do you credit your success?
Lots and lots of writing and a willingness to listen to criticism. And being a member of the Untitled Writers Group, one of the toughest writers groups in existence. Every month is writers boot camp!
How did you start writing?
I started my first novel when I was about eight years old because no one seemed to be writing the sort of stories I wanted to read. The book was about a boy who got kidnapped off a sailboat by aliens who lived under the ocean. The manuscript has long since disappeared. I’ve often wondered whether I’d find it nostalgic or embarrassing if I came across it again.
When I was thirteen, my parents were subscribers to THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS. The NEWS had several columns that readers could submit little thingies to, and I sent one in. Pat Stone, the editor, wrote back and said he couldn’t use my submission, but he could see that I could write, and he’d be interested in seeing a full-fledged article from me. I was raising rabbits at the time, so I wrote an article about that and sent it in. Pat accepted it, and BAM! At thirteen I was a published author.
Which, of course, means I stopped trying to write.
Well, not entirely true. I wrote for myself, but I didn’t really think I could make a serious go at writing professionally. I mean, writers were interesting people who lived in cool places like Miami or New York or San Francisco. They weren’t farm kids in middle Michigan who fed hay into one end of a horse and forked up what came out of the other. I learned much later, of course, that plenty of writers had similar backgrounds to mine, but back then . . .
In my mid-twenties, I got hit by an idea for a short story. It just seized me and wouldn’t let go. I wrote it in a single feverish night and, on a whim, sent it to Marion Bradley at SWORD AND SORCERESS. I expected her to reject it, but I’d heard she often rejected with comments and I thought I might learn something. She bought it instead, and "Hoard" appeared in SWORD AND SORCERESS IX.
I’ve been rejected a lot since then, but these two events really got me started, and they told me early on that I could write.
What was one of your favorite books as a kid?
HALF MAGIC, by Edward Eager. I still re-read it every so often. Eager was ahead of his time--writing urban fantasy before anyone had even invented the term. Fast, funny, character-driven book with lots of magic. Rapture!
Do you now write, or have you ever written, fanfic? If so, what fandoms, pairings, etc?
I sort-of wrote Star Trek fanfic for years. When I was in college in the late 80s, I joined a group called Stellar Operations Command, a group that combined fanfic with role-playing. We used the Star Trek universe, but not the Star Trek characters. You created a main character and assorted minor characters for yourself, and you were put on a ship with about six other people. Every month, the captain sent out "orders," basically an overview of what was happening on the ship, and then you wrote up your character’s adventures. You could use other people’s characters as well, but you couldn’t kill or otherwise change them. You mailed a copy to everyone else in your group, and they mailed their stuff to you.
I loved it. It meant that someone was reading my stuff, and it was really fun to see how other people interpreted characters I created. Stellar Operations Command was huge, with hundreds of people, but it didn’t survive the Internet, weirdly, and it faded away in the late 90s.
I actually created Command history, in a small way. I’d been writing about my character Rusty for several months before I realized that he was gay. Remember, this was in Reagan’s America, and I wasn’t sure if could get away with using a gay character back then. I talked to another member of my ship, and she said I should go for it, so Rusty "came out" and entered into a relationship with another man. I got universal praise for it, and a few months later, there were at least a dozen other gay characters on various ships. Sometimes you just need one person to step forward.
Kirk, or Spock?
Spock! Both the Nimoy and the Quinto versions!
Please click the link below for an excerpt from DREAMER. And a big hug and thanks to Steven for participating in Author Spotlight! Your answers were very revealing and I learned things about you that I didn't know before, which is the whole point.
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