Happy Holidays

Thank you to everyone who regularly dropped in on the blog, followed, liked, blogged, and tweeted to spread the word about the spectacular debut authors that NON interviewed this year. It's been my pleasure to interview all these wonderful authors, and my delight to share their stories with you. Fifty-five of you were lucky winners of books and swag this year, thanks to the generosity of the authors and their publicists. Even if you didn't win, I hope you found some new favorite authors (I have!).

Two years of running Number One Novels, meeting authors, and helping promote debut books has been a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to discovering the debut authors of 2011. The lineup for next year is already forming, so be sure to check back on January 3 for the first interview and contest of the new year.

Happy Winter Solstice, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

Dianne Sylvan: Queen of Shadows

This contest is closed. The winner is:

wanda f

If you didn't win, you can always find Queen of Shadows at your local bookstore or online at the Official Number One Novels Amazon Bookstore.

Here's how to enter this week's contest for a chance to win an autographed copy of Dianne Sylvan's debut novel, Queen of Shadows:

1. Leave a comment after the interview. (+1)
2. Like the interview on Facebook and let me know in the comments. (+1)
3. Follow the blog and let me know in the comments after the interview. If you're already a follower, please remind me. (+1)
4. Post about NON (mentioning "Number One Novels") on your own blog and leave me the link. (+1)
5. Tweet about this interview and contest (mentioning "Number One Novels") and leave me the link. (+1)
6. Join the Number One Novels Giveaways group on Shelfari and leave a comment about this interview. (+1)
7. Purchase something from the Official Number One Novels Amazon Bookstore and let me know the date and name of your purchase. (+10 per purchase!)

With all comments, be sure to leave me an email address at which I can contact you. The winner will be selected randomly and notified next Monday. This contest is open in the United States and ends at midnight on Sunday, December 19.


Title: Queen of Shadows (A Novel of the Shadow World)
Author: Dianne Sylvan
Publisher: Ace
Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
ISBN: 9780441019250
eBook ISBN: 9781101442579

Number One Novels: Congratulations on the publication of your first book! Tell me a little about it—what's your pitch?

Dianne Sylvan: Queen of Shadows tells the story of a woman’s journey from despair to destiny. Miranda Grey, the heroine, is an up-and-coming musician in Austin, slowly losing her mind beneath the burden of her psychic abilities. After a brutal attack that leaves her world completely shattered, she comes to the attention of Prime David Solomon, the vampire monarch of the Southern United States, who is embroiled in a civil war among his kind. Over the course of the next year they change each other’s lives in ways neither would ever have imagined, and Miranda grows from a broken-down woman into a force of nature who will alter the course of vampire history.

NON: How did you get the idea for your novel?

DS: The first version of Queen of Shadows was actually a fan fiction story I wrote back in 1999 at the ripe old age of 22. Even at the time it bore little resemblance to the source material, but I was young and inexperienced and the idea of creating a universe from scratch intimidated me. The story stuck with me, though – I loved the characters, I loved the world I had created, and thought that it deserved a shot at rebirth. So, ten years after that first shaky draft, I took the basic storyline, scrapped everything else, and rewrote it as a novel. I don’t think I’ve ever been so completely consumed by a project.

NON: No two authors seem to take the same route to publication, but almost every author has an interesting story about their journey. How did you get published? Did you use an agent? How did you find out that your book had sold?

DS: The universe has a way of placing a banana peel of opportunity in front of me that I can’t help but slip on and throw my whole life into welcome chaos. I had just finished writing the novel and was working on getting an agent when a woman who had read the original story back in the early 2000s contacted me seemingly out of nowhere wondering if I had written anything else. It turned out she was an editor for Ace. I sent her the book and within a couple of weeks I had a contract for Queen of Shadows and its forthcoming sequel. I remember getting the phone call from her at my day job, and it was as if the Earth had spun off its axis for a minute. I nearly hyperventilated. I called my best friend to tell her, and then I went online and told the entire Internet. There was a good deal of joyful shrieking.

NON: I think that names say a lot about a person, especially a fictional person. How did you decide on your protagonist’s full name? Did you have any other names that were in the running?

DS: The name Miranda just sort of came out of my fingers as I was starting the book. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda is a young girl marooned on an island with her father, the sorcerer Prospero; she’s a sheltered young woman who shows a lot of empathy toward others. Also, Miranda is the name of a dead planet in the movie Serenity whose fate affects the entire universe. I’m a big Joss Whedon fan, as people reading the book will probably notice, so it felt right to me. I chose Miranda’s last name, Grey, to reflect her outlook on the world at the story’s beginning.

NON: Do you have another book in the works?

DS: Right now we’re in the editorial process for the second book in the Shadow World series, ShadowFlame, which will hit the shelves July 26, 2011. I’m about to start writing the third book, and I have the series sketched out roughly through book 6.

NON: What's your writing routine? Do you write in the mornings, nights, daily, or when the mood strikes you?

DS: I’m a mostly-nocturnal creature when left to my own devices, so I tend to do my best work at night. I’ve also discovered that I’m something of a coffee shop writer – I find it easier to concentrate sitting in a café than I do at home where there are so many tempting distractions. (Plus I like to bribe my muse with pastries.)

NON: What’s your favorite way to procrastinate?

DS: Facebook and Twitter are time-suckers of incredible power. I spend a lot of time on both sites. I also read a lot of blogs about baking, spirituality, my favorite television shows like The Vampire Diaries and Supernatural, and funny stuff like LOLCats and Cake Wrecks. I have a deep appreciation for snark.

NON: What’s your favorite non-essential item on your desk?

DS: Toys! I have a My Little Pony with butterfly wings from my childhood and an adorable doll in camo and cargo pants that I found a few years ago on a business trip. Her name’s Abby, and she represents my inner spunky butt-kicker. I also have a Poet Smurf my mother put in my Christmas stocking last year.

NON: What are you currently reading?

DS: It surprises people that I don’t read much urban fantasy and very few vampire books. I didn’t set out to write for any one particular genre, which I think shows because Queen of Shadows has been classified as both urban fantasy and paranormal romance. I have been trying to read a couple of popular urban fantasy series just to get a better taste of the genre – I’ve just started the first Mercy Thompson novel by Patricia Briggs, though I haven’t had a chance to really get into it. I’m also reading An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor and Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.

Joan Frances Turner: Dust

This contest is closed. The winner is:

Cari

If you didn't win, you can always find a copy of Dust at your local bookstore or online at the Official Number One Novels Amazon Bookstore.

Here's how to enter this week's contest for a chance to win a copy of Joan Frances Turner's debut novel, Dust:

1. Leave a comment after the interview. (+1)
2. Like the interview on Facebook and let me know in the comments. (+1)
3. Follow the blog and let me know in the comments after the interview. If you're already a follower, please remind me. (+1)
4. Post about NON (mentioning "Number One Novels") on your own blog and leave me the link. (+1)
5. Tweet about this interview and contest (mentioning "Number One Novels") and leave me the link. (+1)
6. Join the Number One Novels Giveaways group on Shelfari and leave a comment about this interview. (+1)
7. Purchase something from the Official Number One Novels Amazon Bookstore and let me know the date and name of your purchase. (+10 per purchase!)

With all comments, be sure to leave me an email address at which I can contact you. The winner will be selected randomly and notified next Monday. This contest is open in the United States and ends at midnight on Sunday, December 12.



Title: Dust

Author: Joan Frances Turner
Publisher: Ace Books
Hardcover: 374 pages
ISBN: 0441019285
eBook ISBN: B0041G6SYQ

Number One Novels: Congratulations on the publication of your first book! Tell me a little about it—what's your pitch?


Joan Frances Turner: Thank you! Dust is the story of Jessie Porter, a young woman who died in a car crash, tunneled up from her grave and was conscripted into the Fly-By-Nights, an undead gang whose turf is an abandoned state park in northwest Indiana. Zombies have always existed in this universe, living uneasily side by side with the humans they once were, and aren't mindless pursuers of braaaaaains: Jessie and her kind are an intelligent predator species with a "life cycle" (rot to dust), a complex hierarchy, memories, emotions and wide-ranging appetites. One day, Jessie's sister comes to visit Jessie's grave, finding out for the first time that her dead sibling has returned; this chance meeting sets off a chain of events that has profound consequences for Jessie, her living and undead families and, ultimately, for all of humanity--and inhumanity--itself.

Or, to use my shorter "high concept" Hollywood pitch, it's Watership Down with zombies instead of rabbits. For those who've read Watership Down, just think of Jessie as the unholy love child of Bigwig and Fiver.

NON: How did you get the idea for your novel?

JFT: Zombies may be a going craze now but my only exposure to them, back in 2003 when I began writing, was the original Night of the Living Dead (I still haven't seen any of the sequels or remakes) and the original Carnival of Souls. The bleak, open, semi-rural landscapes of both movies stuck with me, and their eerie atmospherics--there's a lot of that sort of look to things, in a partly urban, partly rural, post-industrial landscape like the Calumet region of Indiana--and it was that combined with a growing sense of pity for the undead: That's someone's loved one, turned into something still sentient but stinking and monstrous, and what if they're well aware of their fate, somewhere deep inside? What if they have actual awareness of what they are now, exiled from the world of the living, and that in all senses they can never go home again? That's usually played for horrific or comic effect--the little zombie girl killing and eating her parents in Night of the Living Dead, or the hero of Shaun of the Dead having to shoot his own, infected mother--but I wanted to see if I could do something more thoughtful with it, have the zombies be (former) people in their own right instead of just walking symbols of mindless conformity consumerism blah-blah-blah. Of course it's all up to each different reader to say whether or not I succeeded.

NON: No two authors seem to take the same route to publication, but almost every author has an interesting story about their journey. How did you get published? Did you use an agent? How did you find out that your book had sold?

JFT: Years ago I remember reading that the average author has to write four full-length novels before any one of them is accepted for publication, so I took it for granted that Dust (then called Dead of Night--I like Penguin's choice of title much better) was dead in the water, but!--I had to try and fail to sell it, because then I'd be one book down and only three more to go. I didn't know anyone in the business, didn't belong to a writing group or a workshop and had no idea how to sell a book, but some Googling brought me to the Agent Query website and so I became maniacally methodical: Any agent listed who represented sci-fi, fantasy or (since the protagonist is in her teens) young adult fiction, and who checked out clean on Preditors and Editors got a query letter and my first three chapters. This was the winter/early spring of 2009, I lived at the post office for a good two months and wore out my printer entirely.

I got my first rejection exactly twenty minutes after I sent the (e-mailed) query--an agent who said she found the sample chapters "nauseating" but she knew a tiny horror press who might like it, tell them I sent ya. They were closed to queries. Several months and eighty-two more rejections later, I got a phone call from Michelle Brower at Wendy Sherman Associates (she's at Folio Literary now), saying she almost tossed it back on the slush pile because she already represented a thinking-zombies novel--S.G. Browne's Breathers--but my writing drew her in and she wanted to see the whole thing. She liked it, I signed with her in April 2009, I spent the summer doing a horrifying number of rewrites, the book went out again in August and then, in late September, I got an afternoon call at work telling me it'd sold. I was so shocked and excited I did what I always do when something unexpectedly huge happens: I got a wicked migraine and spent the rest of the evening lying down. Though if there's such a thing as a happy lighthearted migraine, that was it.

NON: I think that names say a lot about a person, especially a fictional person. How did you decide on your protagonist’s full name? Did you have any other names that were in the running?

JFT: My protagonist is named Jessica Anne Porter because it would be completely ridiculous to name her Iphigenia de Winter or Lady Purity Corncrake or December Nightbird-Tesseract: She's an Every(dead)woman, an ordinary young girl to whom some extraordinary things have happened, and so I was keen on her having an ordinary, everyday name. (Much like Matt Groening said he placed The Simpsons in Springfield because there's a "Springfield" in nearly every state in the nation.) The hugely popular, "bog standard" girls' names when I was growing up (according to both my memory and the Social Security Administration's database) were Jessica, Jennifer, Kristin, Michelle and Nicole; Jessica won because I liked it best. Anne and Marie are two of the most ordinary, effortless middle names out there, so Jessica Anne it was. The surname Porter, besides being commonplace, was a nod to Porter County, Indiana, because the book both begins and ends at the county line and the local geography is vital, central actually, to the plot.

Now, if you're going to ask me why another major character ended up being named "Florian," not at all bog-standard outside of Europe (and he isn't European) I honestly have no idea--in my mind he just looked and sounded like a Florian, for some reason. Characters are strange that way.

NON: Do you have another book in the works?

JFT: I'm very pleased to have sold the sequel to Dust--the current working title is Frail--which picks up a few months after Dust ends and continues the story from the all-important human perspective, though who's human and who isn't is a more complicated question in this universe than ours. Barring any unforeseen events, it should be published either 2011 or 2012. I'm also wool-gathering for several other unrelated books, ideas including but not limited to Resurrection Mary (the Chicagoland take on the "vanishing hitchhiker" legend), a bizarre local television incident from the 1980s--Google "WGN" and "Max Headroom" for the details--outsider artists, the last days of a dying industrial town and a highly unconventional suicide prevention activist, but that's all in the far-ish future.

NON: What's your writing routine? Do you write in the mornings, nights, daily, or when the mood strikes you?

JFT: It's because I'm not at all a morning person that I seem to be most productive writing early in the morning: That half-awake, daydream state actually helps put me "in the zone," much like how sometimes you come up with the solution to a knotty problem when you're folding laundry or taking a jog. It's when you feel like you're not quite concentrating on anything that your thoughts are actually wide-ranging enough to light on what's important. Also, that's simply the most practical way to work it when you have a full-time day job.

An hour five days a week--or several hours seven days a week when necessary--puts me at about 600 - 1200 words every time, which is a good page-generating pace. Sometimes I sleep in when I feel like I need it, or when I'm sick to death of what I'm working on; I'm careful not to do it too often, but occasional "Sorry, not feeling it today" spontaneous vacations are good for body, soul and creative brain. I know a lot of folks swear up and down that "real" writers write through hail, snow, sleet, parental funerals, imminent nuclear attack and end-stage chemotherapy, but I'm a creative tortoise, not a hare.

NON: What’s your favorite way to procrastinate?

JFT: There is no way in hell I can possibly write with all that dust and cat hair on the floor, I just can't. Hand over the broom, and while I'm up I might as well go clean the bathroom and vacuum the living room and then make a coffee cake and…

NON: What’s your favorite non-essential item on your desk?

JFT: My "desk" is actually my bed--I like to write sitting up in it with my laptop, like a giant chaise lounge--so my favorite non-essential is the Liberty of London bedspread. It's several alarming shades of pink and magenta but somehow, it works.

NON: What are you currently reading?

JFT: I'm on an NYRB Classics kick, those beautiful book covers draw me in: I just finished Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (harrowing, henceforth to be known as Eleanor Rigby: The Novel) and Edward Lewis Wallant's The Tenants of Moonbloom (story of a 1960s slumlord rent collector and his building tenants, wonderfully sad and comic and humane). I just started P.D. James's The Children of Men--I'm a huge P.D. James fan and also one of the few people I know who wasn't crazy about the movie adaptation, so I wanted to read the source and see if I liked it better. Thus far I'm enjoying it, it's less "straight" science fiction than an interesting allegory about the universal hazards and fears of old age. Also nagging everyone I know to pick up Rodrigo Fresan's Kensington Gardens and Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, which are my picks for the most interesting fiction and non-fiction respectively I've read all year.