HAPPY 4 YEAR BLOGOVERSARY

WOW, I cannot believe how the time has past when I started this Blog 4 years ago. I honestly didn't think that it would last this long or I would meet and chat with so many different bloggers and authors. Thank you to those who have been reading Blood Rose Books since the beginning and Thank you to those who have decided to give it a try. I hope that you have been able to find at least one new read or author that you had not heard about before or decided to try a book based upon my review. Here's to another great year of reading and reviewing and I cannot wait to see what authors, series and books I can discover this year :)

The giveaways will end this Friday at Midnight to make sure you get your entries in by then.

Cheers
J9

Interview & Giveaway: Matthew Quirk

I am always on the the lookout for up and coming as well as debut novels. When I had a chance to read Matthew Quirk's The 500, I knew I had found someone who can not only write but create an interesting story and characters. Please Welcome to Blood Rose Books:

Matthew Quirk

If there was one author you could co-write a novel with (they can be alive or dead) who would you choose and why?

I might say William Goldman. Marathon Man was a big influence on my first novel, and he’s had a part in writing many of my favorite movies going back to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It’s hard to imagine a better guide on how to tell a great story.

You began your writing career working for The Atlantic, what prompted the change to writing novels? How did it help prepare you for writing fiction?

It's easier to jump when you get a little push. Print journalism has been having a really hard time, and when the economy crashed in 2008 I was let go in a round of cuts at the magazine. It was awful, of course, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. I had been working on a novel for many years, and I decided to live off my savings and make a go of writing full-time. I still can’t believe it worked out. Reporting is great practice for writing fiction. Living and working in Washington, I picked up a ton of material about politics, foreign affairs, and high-level intrigue. The discipline of writing professionally and being whittled down by talented editors proved invaluable for writing books.

While writing for The Atlantic the resume of what you reported on was terrorism and gang crime types, why did you decide to write in what would be considered white collar crime? Do you see parallels between terrorism and/or gangs with white collar crime that has yet to be explored in fiction novels?

Interesting question. The white collar crimes were closest to the social and political worlds I knew pretty well, so that was a natural place to start. There is a healthy dose of non-white-collar criminality in the books, too, and that has been a lot of fun to research and learn how to do myself: sneaking into buildings, running a con game, picking locks. I’d love to explore those parallels you mention. Terrorism definitely has those facets—what starts or masquerades as politics or ideology in the end is about greed—that would make for a good theme for a book.

Your debut novel, The 500 would fall into the mystery/thriller genres which can be a hard genre to get a following in as there are many well-known and well followed authors within it. How do you think that your novels differ from other authors within this genre?

I like to think that they have a distinctive voice and humor, and I try to have my heroes react like real people would in these very dangerous situations: they’re not invincible supermen. I still have my reporter habits, and love doing research and adding authentic details to the books. For my book about the Federal Reserve, The Directive, I worked with security experts and even sneaked around the New York Fed. For my next book, I just came back from a training in LA where I was kidnapped and had to escape expert trackers who were hunting me down through the city. It gave me a lot of great insights for book three.

What do you think would be the hardest or most challenging genre to write a novel in and why?

Literary novels. It’s very difficult to make a compelling 350-page book out of fine-grained character observations and quiet epiphanies. I read someone like Tobias Wolff and I think A. This is amazing and B. I could never do this.

There are points within your novel The 500 that seem to ring true in which the few control the many or in this case the 500, how true do you think this is with Corporate America? Did you have to do additional research to make your book have a real feel to it?

I was fortunate with The 500 that I had lived and worked in Washington, DC for many years and seen a lot of that up close. I had friends who worked at the White House, or big lobbying shops, or Congress. One of the main problems in politics is that interest groups that aren’t representative of citizens’ desires wield outsized influence on the political process. If you look at the money in politics, it’s incredible how few people bankroll campaigns and how much time politicians spend begging them for money.

Mike has a very interesting skill set that he developed over the years watching his father and brother work as con-men, why did you think that these skills would be an asset to a lawyer?

The confidence games are really about understanding human nature, so I’m sure that would be valuable to a lawyer. The other, more criminal skills, like picking locks, aren’t helpful in the day to day legal world, but when Mike finds himself in a scrape, they prove to be very handy. Faking IDs, picking locks, stealing cars—it’s been a lot of fun to research the skills Mike picked up in his bad old days. Picking locks has come in handy in real life quite a few times!

You have had the opportunity to take Mike Ford from a stand-alone novel to a series, as an author what makes Mike Ford such a compelling character to write about? What do you think the benefits are between writing a standalone versus a series?

Mike’s life and background brings out some great themes: Sometimes those outside the law have more honor than those who write the laws. Mike lives by the law, but comes from a family of criminals. These ideas tie readily into contemporary political and financial corruption, and I love to explore them. Series are great, because you have this continuing exploration of characters and their relationships. And I like to do standalones, as well, because then your characters can really surprise your readers by revealing secrets about their pasts or their true natures.

Do you have any information on upcoming works or events that you are able to share?

I’m deep into my third book now. It’s fast-paced thriller about a special operations team at work inside the US. And I’ll be at Bouchercon in November 2014.

What is one book (other than one of your own) that you think everyone should read?

That’s a tough one. I’m looking at my bookshelves now, and a few leap to mind. How about Catch-22? I haven’t read it in a while but I remember it being by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.

I want to saw thank you once again to Matt for being part of my Blogoversary and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of The Directive. Matt has very nicely provided a giveaway to go along with his interview so check out and fill out the Rafflecopter information below :)

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Interview & Giveaway: Timothy Hallinan

You know you're reading a great book when it can keep you on the edge of your seat but also have you laughing out loud at the same time. This was my experience with Timothy Hallinan's novel Crashed. Please Welcome to Blood Rose Books:

Timothy Hallinan

If there was one author you could co-write a novel with (they can be alive or dead) who would you choose and why? 

I'd be too intimidated to write with any of my favorites, but if I were magically courageous and self-confident, I'd say William Gibson. He has an original and prescient take on the present day—he was the first, I think, to realize that branding has replaced reality in many areas of life—and his language is so clean and essential. 

You have been a very busy man with your Junior Bender series, releasing 4 novels in less than 2 years. Did you have the stories and series preplanned or laid out in your head? Why did you decide to release the books so closely together? (Not that I am complaining about it.) 

I actually wrote the first three Juniors over a period of two years, at the same

time I was writing three Poke Rafferty books, Breathing Water, The Queen of Patpong, and The Fear Artist. My publisher at the time, HarperCollins, didn't want them and my contract was exclusive, so I self-published the first two Juniors, Crashed and Little Elvises as ebooks, and I had just put The Fame Thief up on Amazon when my editor at Soho, the great Juliet Grames, asked why Soho wasn't publishing them.  I said maybe it was because they didn't publish novels set in the United States, and Juliet said, “We'll make an exception.”  

I insisted that they be published fast because I was already writing the fourth at the time, and if they'd gone out on the usual one-per-year schedule, it would have been five years before Herbie's Game appeared in print. So four books came out in about 19 months.  I'm now happily at work on the fifth book, King Maybe. 

But no, I did no pre-planning at all, neither for the series as a whole nor for the individual books. I just wrote them as they arrived in my fore-brain, the way I write everything.  I'm completely incapable of outlining or doing much of any kind of planning ahead, about writing, at least. I never actually know what a book is about until I'm writing it. 

If you go to many popular or well-known author website, they mainly state that they will not read manuscripts and often just refer people to their agents, but you have section on your website to help would be-authors. In 2012 you spearheaded “Making a Story” where you and other authors described how they went about from turning an idea into a plot for a novel. Why did you decide to write this book? Was there an author that really helped you along the way when you were just starting out? 

I had a miserable time with my first novel. I wrote three absolute dogs before I figured out anything at all. (Raymond Chandler famously said about his own learning curve, “It took me six months to get his hat off.”) Many writers were very generous with guidance and advice, and I just wanted to pay it forward. For about five years I taught a college-level class about how to finish a novel, and that's what the material on my site came from. It's been used by more than 1000 writers who emailed me to tell me so, and a couple of them not only finished their books but also went on to sell more copies than I do.  

The Twenty-One Writers series will eventually deal with plotting, character, setting, getting out of trouble, and a bunch of other practical writing issues.  Each book is a collection of essays by writers whose work I admire, just talking about how they approach the issue under discussion. As of now, Making Story: Twenty-One Writers on How They Plot is still the only book, and that's my fault because I got snowed under with my own writing. But it's a terrific collection, I think, and it's really cheap as an ebook on Amazon. 

What do you think are the key elements to writing a thriller/mystery novel? How do you think your novels stand out from the ever increasing crowd? 

The most important thing to me in any kind of book is character. As far as I'm concerned, we read to meet characters, whatever the story or genre might be. To me, plot is what characters do, dialogue is what characters say, setting is the interaction between place and character, action arises from conflict between (and within) character, etc.  Almost the only thing I think about when I'm writing is being true to the characters. Although I also frequently visualize someone sitting across the table from me and imagine that I'm trying to hold that person's attention as I tell the story, mainly as a way to avoid bogging down. 

And I have no idea whether my books stand out from the crowd. I'd be the last person to answer that question. 

What do you think would be the hardest or most challenging genre to write a novel in and why? 

The great thing about crime fiction is that there's an inevitable structure: a question is asked at the very beginning and the story eventually answers it. I think it's kind of funny that a question mark is shaped like a fish hook, because properly used, it really does hook the reader and drag him/her across 100,000 words or so. But the fact that there's a mystery at the center of the book does NOT mean that the story doesn't explore the characters in adventurous and original ways.  

Having said all that, I think literary fiction would be hard for me because I've grown accustomed to the story momentum a good unanswered question provides. 

In your Poke Rafferty series, it seems that Poke is always getting into trouble trying to write his travel books (but that's really point of his books), have you had any Looking for Trouble

experiences in your travels or the time that you lived in Thailand? 

Yes, but in Cambodia.  When I was writing the first Poke, A Nail Through the Heart, I went to Phnom Penh to try to meet Vann Nath, an artist who lived through the worst of the Khmer Rouge world and then put it into absolutely horrifying paintings.  I talked to a bunch of people about arranging an introduction, and one day my car (I had a car and driver because I didn't have time to get lost all a hundred times a day) was pulled over by four heavyweights in a black SUV. Each of them stood at one of the doors of my car, and it was impossible for me not to notice that my driver, whom I'd always assumed to be working with the police, was both shaking and pouring sweat. There was a very sharp exchange in Khmer. The four men left, one of them slugging the driver's door as he walked away, and my driver says, “We not look for Vann Nath now.” 

Junior is very much the anti-hero, he is a burglar and private eye for other criminals, what do you think is the appeal of writing your protagonist as an anti-hero? Do you think that this give Junior a unique skills set and contacts to work with? 

For many crime fiction writers, including me, crooks are the most fun. They can say what they think, they don't have to be politically correct, and it's kind of exhilarating to write a character who's improvising his or her moral code on the fly.  The first things that came to me when I began to write Junior were his regret over his divorce and his love of his daughter.  The next thing was his mentor, Herbie Mott, and Herbie's rules. A lot of Herbie's rules are about not getting caught, but a couple of them are moral, in a way, the best of them being, “Learn to spot the one thing in the room the victim couldn't live without. And don't take it.” 

So those things made a kind of triangular base for Junior's moral code. It's elastic compared to mine and (probably) yours, but carved in stone as far as he's concerned. 

I know that I wondered this when I was reading the first book in your Junior Bender series, Crashed, is Thistle based on any star in particular or a few of the child stars out there? 

There have been so many, for decades and decades, both boys and girls. Stardom is hard on kids. I didn't choose a real model for Thistle's character, but for a physical image, I used either of the Olson twins, who—for all I know—live on wheat-grass juice and orange peel, but who for years featured on a kind of I just put down the needle and came into the light and it hurts look, which made them irresistible to Manhattan paparazzi, who were all after the shot in which they looked the wettest. 

Do you have any information on upcoming works or events that you are able to share? 

More than you want.  The sixth Poke Rafferty, For the Dead, comes out on November 4, and I think it's a good one. I just finished the seventh Poke, The Hot Countries, and it's too recent for me to have an opinion, but if it stinks it won't be because it's not ambitious. And I'm now writing the fifth Junior Bender, King Maybe, another Hollywood showbiz story, and it has the potential to be very good if I don't screw it up. 

What is one book (other than one of your own) that you think everyone should read? 

Oh, boy.  For the very patient, I'd say a good translation (Robert Fitzgerald's, maybe), of Homer's The Odyssey, the root story, more or less, of the warrior trying to get home while the gods aren't looking. So much of storytelling begins here, and the world it depicts is so fresh, so clean, with beaches that have never borne a footprint and new islands always just over the horizon.  The ragged right-hand margin might look forbidding to those who don't read poetry, but just ignore it and read a few pages. If it captures you, keep going.  You'll hear its echoes through a lifetime of reading. 

I just want to thank Tim for taking the time to answer to be part of my Blogoversary. You should read Tim's novel if you like adventure along with satire and humor. Tim has very nicely supplied two giveaways (INT) to go along with his interviews, So fill out the rafflecopter information below.

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Interview: Nicholas Kaufmann

I am always looking for male authors in the UF genre as I find they have a unique point of view for this genre. When I had to read Nicholoas Kaufmann's novel Dying is My Business I knew I wanted to have an author feature with him. He has so many interesting and cool ideas. Please Welcome to Blood Rose Books:

Nicholas Kaufamann

If there was one author you could co-write a novel with (they can be alive or dead) who would you choose and why? 

Wow, you're starting off with a really hard one! There are so many favorite authors I would love to work with that it's almost impossible to choose just one. I suppose I would have to choose my favorite author of all, Peter Straub, but I say that with no small amount of hesitation. He's such an exquisite writer, a maestro, and I feel like I'm nowhere near his level of prose. So if we worked together, I'd probably be worried the whole time about bringing the quality level down. Still, I think the process of co-writing with him would be incredible, and I have no doubt I would learn so, so much from him.  

Is there a book, author, story or person that inspired you to become a writer?  

I've been writing stories since before I knew how to write. Back then, I would just draw my stories instead. So it's hard for me to tell if there was any one thing or person that inspired me to become a writer. I loved the monster movies I saw on TV, especially the old Universal horror films, Godzilla movies, and Sinbad movies. The creatures always got my imagination fired up. So if there's a root to my telling stories, it's probably those movies. I became a voracious reader as I got older. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy in high school and college. As much as I loved horror, I didn't read a lot of it outside of Ray Bradbury's darker work, like Something Wicked This Way Comes and The October Country. Then one day I discovered Clive Barker's Books of Blood series, and I realized what I'd been missing all my life. Barker showed me what good horror fiction could do. It set me on the path of reading and writing more horror, and that's what led me to where I am today. While Dying Is My Business and its sequel, Die and Stay Dead, are labeled urban fantasies, there's a strong current of horror that runs through them. I suspect there will be some horror elements in pretty much everything I write. It's hard for me to turn it off. 

The Urban Fantasy / Paranormal genres appear to be the genre that everyone is writing in these days (even authors that are well established in other genres), what do you think draws authors to these genres? Why did you decided to release your debut in this genres? How do you believe your novels stand out from the rest of the crowd? 

Dying Is My Business isn't really my debut, though it is my first truly commercial, widely published novel. I've had story collections and novellas published by small presses, and a full-length commercial novel published widely but not under my name (Hunt at World's End, which was published originally under the house name Gabriel Hunt, but has since been re-released by another publisher with my name on it.) 

 

I don't know why other authors are drawn to urban fantasy, but I know why I am. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy. One thing I could never really get into about the fantasies I read was their setting. I just didn't care about these imaginary kingdoms with odd names. The characters had weird names, too, spelled with so many random apostrophes and hyphens that I had no idea how to pronounce them. It got to the point where if I picked up a fantasy novel and it had a map in the front of its fictional lands and a glossary in the back of all their special words, I would put it down again. It just turned me off. In fact, I poke a little fun at those kinds of fantasies in the early chapters of Dying Is My Business, where Trent is trying to read an archetypal fantasy novel complete with maps, glossaries, and unpronounceable names. But then, later, I started seeing more fantasy novels that were as filled with magic and monsters as any other but took place in recognizable settings. Cities, mostly, and as a city dweller myself that spoke to me. I'll admit I also liked that the characters didn't have unpronounceable names and that no maps were necessary. 

I think another thing that drew me to urban fantasy is that it's the most horror-like of the fantasy spectrum. Horror is often about the intrusion of the supernatural into our everyday, recognizable life, and urban fantasy does much the same. That mix of regular life with something beyond the everyday, whether that something is full of wonder or terror, really speaks to me. 

What do you think would be the hardest or most challenging genre to write a novel in and why? 

I think it's challenging to write a novel in any genre! I know the better writers out there make it look easy, but I can assure you it's not. There's a lot of effort and frustration involved, just like with any job. And just like with any job, it helps a lot if you love doing it. 

Trent has a very interesting ability of not being able to die, is there some sort of metaphor in there of you never wanting to die or how did you come up with the concept for his power? 

Everyone is scared of dying. Mostly because we're worried it'll hurt, and because we don't know what happens afterward. Do we survive as spirits or some kind of conscious energy? Do we simply cease to be? Both answers are actually quite comforting—if we live on as spirits there's nothing to worry about, and if we cease to be we won't worry about anything anyway—but it's the not knowing that really scares us. There's also a sadness to dying. We're sad at the thought of leaving our loved ones, and we're sad when they leave us. 

But people read horror and fantasy to experience things they don't in their everyday lives. Horror in particular is a safe way of exploring death and its ramifications. It allows us to practice grieving without having to lose a loved one, and it shows us death without putting us in actual danger. I'd lost some people in the recent past, including my father, and I think subconsciously I wanted to explore death a bit in Dying Is My Business. And what better way than to have a protagonist who dies frequently and can come back to report on it? 

Trent is very much the anti-hero, he is a thief, and he only takes on tasks that benefit him and his quest for his past. What do you think is the appeal of writing your protagonist as an anti-hero? 

Everyone loves a badass, including me. I love characters who you think are bad but show their goodness when their backs are against the wall. For me, it probably all stems from Han Solo, who has become the archetypal badass, rogue character for so many people of my generation. (And that's why it was so important that he shot first. There's a world of character difference between someone who shoots Greedo in cold blood and someone who shoots out of self-defense.) For the generation that followed mine, their Han Solo would probably be Severus Snape, who seems at least somewhat evil throughout the Harry Potter novels but is then revealed to be a hero at the end. It's an archetype that people will always respond to, because that kind of character can get away with doing things we only wish we could do sometimes, but then at the end they show that they're not so bad at all—which effectively lets them off the hook for all the bad things they did. It's a kind of wish fulfillment, I suppose. 

 

I also think personal quests are important for a satisfying narrative, and Trent struck me as desperate enough to do anything, even perform questionable work for a crime boss, to get the answers he needs. And that leads to some great drama. Besides, it's always a more satisfying narrative to watch a character climb a ladder than to already be at the top of it. 

Other than Trent’s mission to find his past, the main theme of the book is the battle between good and evil (with always that gray area in there), and there seems to be some folklore and tales woven in there as well, especially with the Gargoyles (I loved the gargoyle aspect). Are any of the elements within the book based upon folklore that you have researched? Are there any folklore that pique your interest that you could meld into Trent’s world? 

It's funny you should say that, because the gargoyles were actually less iconic to me than the Black Knight. The image of the Black Knight riding his armored horse down a crowded New York City street while cars swerve all around him was one of the first images that came to me when I set out to write the novel. There's always been a part of me that's drawn to monsters, as I mentioned, and gargoyles are definitely cool monsters, but I think there's a part of me that has always been fascinated by knights, too, especially the whole King Arthur story. It might stem from having seen the movie Excalibur at a young age (really too young for such a violent and sexually explicit film; it disturbed me for weeks afterward). 

In terms of folklore, I'm fascinated by the ideas of zombies (the old kind, where the dead are basically used for slave labor, not the new kind where they eat you) and necromancers and anything that can take control of your body away from you. So it's no surprise, I guess, that the main villain of the series is Reve Azrael, a necromancer who can raise an army of the dead by forcing her will into corpses in order to control them. Of course, since Trent can't die, she's especially fascinated by him. While good vs. evil is one of the themes, the series is almost more about life (Trent) vs. death (Reve Azrael) instead. 

You have stated that your book is Urban Fantasy Noir, do you have any interest in writing and developing a Noir film? When you read Dying is my Business does it play out like a Noir Film in you head? 

I'm not really interested in making a noir film, though I love them. If I were to get into filmmaking, I think I'd definitely do horror movies. They would certainly have an element of noir to them in the characters and especially in the use of shadow and light when composing a scene. Dying Is My Business did not play out like a noir film in my head, either, though the influences were obviously there. It played out much more like an adventure film, James Bond with monsters. Obviously, there's a world of difference between James Bond and Trent, but I love the action set pieces of the Bond films so much that I used the same approach to the action in the novel. 

Do you have any information on upcoming works or events that you are able to share? 

I mentioned the sequel earlier, Die and Stay Dead. It's coming out from St. Martin's Today, September 30, 2014. I'm very excited about it. I'll be doing a few events for it in New York City and maybe even in the surrounding area. Keep an eye on my blog for announcements: www.nicholaskaufmann.com. I'm working on the third Trent book right now. If the first two books do well enough, you should see book three, which is tentatively titled Only the Dead Sleep, out in 2015. I've also got some other novels percolating in the back of my mind. At some point, I'd love to write a graphic novel as well. 

What is one book (other than one of your own) that you think should be a must read for everyone? 

There are so many! So many! I've rewritten my answer ten times already! But since I mentioned it before and because it was such a huge influence on me, I'd say Clive Barker's Books of Blood. (It was originally a series of story collections, but it has since been bundled into a single volume, so it counts!) I learned so much about language and plotting and thinking outside the box of standard-issue genre tropes from those books. Barker is such an amazing writer, and his imagination always goes places that feel fresh and new. Everyone should read him, whether it's Books of Blood or one of his many superlative novels. But it helps to have a strong stomach. He doesn't shy away from gore and body horror and all that yucky stuff that I secretly love. 

I just want to say thank you once again for Nicholas for taking the time to answer my questions. I know I cannot wait to get my hands on Die and Stay Dead.