BIG BIRTHDAY BASH KINDLE GIVEAWAY!

Tomorrow begins a big free Kindle e-book giveaway. It will run between June 1-5, 2012. I've never done this before and thought I'd give it a whirl. I'm giving away 5 novels, 2 short stories, and 2 short story collections for readers and I hope you will pick up a few if you're interested in dark fiction. I have 39 separate titles on the Kindle platform as e-books. This giveaway represents about one-fourth of my titles. I know that's a lot and not everyone will want it all, but I thought this way readers could have a pick of this or that, a novel, a story, a collection of stories.

I don't expect I'll burn down Amazon and make it hiccup the way other promotions of free books have done. I only hope to pick up some new readers who might like my works. I've been quite busy creating new works in the past year. I have a new novel, BANISHED, and several new short stories, plus collections where I gathered some of the stories together. I haven't counted up how many words I wrote this past year, but it's been quite a lot. Does that mean it isn't quality work, that I rushed my fiction to market just because it was easy to do with e-books? No, I wouldn't do that. I take pride in my work and take as much time as a particular work needs to make it as error-free and well-written as I possibly can. Does that mean everything I've written this year is outstanding? Probably not. But some of it is, I think. That is up to the reader anyway. The author rarely knows how well she is writing until others read and respond with reviews or messages.

I'm just grateful I have been able to stay so busy writing because that's what we do--we write. Sometimes we give away our writing, but that doesn't mean we think less of it. I won't be doing such a large giveaway of free books in the near future. This is a blowout. This is a birthday celebration. My birthday is June 5 and I wanted to do something spectacular involving my books. I wanted to be generous and share and give out presents to strangers. This is one way to do it.

I hope you will sample my novels, stories, and collections. I hope you will enjoy them and if you have the time, leave short reviews. Authors can never get enough reviews and I certainly could use them.

These free books range in genre from suspense thrillers to horror stories. There might even be a little fantasy in there. It is a lot to choose from and a crazy thing to do, but some birthdays make you crazy, you know?  Please partake and enjoy yourself. It is my present to YOU, dear readers.

Just do a search on BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN in the search bar on Kindle.com to find the free titles or go to my Kindle store at: MY KINDLE STORE

KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING BEFORE YOU DO IT

We can't sell books if the descriptions and the books contain mistakes. I understand formatting mistakes and overlook them, because that can happen to anyone--and does! It happened to me. As soon as I found out, I made corrections, and when that still wasn't good enough, because the book had been scanned from a paperback and then put through OCR, I had my proofreader go over it to catch the mistakes I missed. Not only that, I owned up to the error-ridden e-book and offered everyone who had downloaded it on a KDP Free day a replacement book.

The mistakes we need to really talk about aren't made by scanning and OCR errors. I'm talking about the mistakes made in grammar or spelling, wrong punctuation or garbled sentence construction. These are the problems that really turn me off from wanting to read a Kindle title. I think everyone reacts that way.

I read a whole blog about a woman who received a bad review. She began defending herself, but her remarks were so littered with bad spelling, word use (their for there), and pure, crazy anger that she proved the review to be true. The big problem was she really believed her book was "fine," as she called it. It was not fine. The writer hadn't done her homework and did not get her work checked for mistakes before putting the book up on Kindle. Once called out, she proceeded to make blog posts that were senseless and full of grammatical errors. This not only did harm to her reputation, but it tolled a death knell for her book sales.

There are few places we need perfection--or as close to it as humanly possible--and one of those places is in publishing our books for public consumption.

I used to teach writing for the Writer's Digest School (and a course for novelists on AOL) and, at one time, I used to charge a set fee per page and edited books for people. Writers who want to give their books every chance for success don't have to necessarily hire any editor to go over their works, but they do need feedback and critiques by someone who is competent, someone they trust. I use a writer friend who is extremely good at finding technical mistakes in manuscripts and who also is adept at plot construction. I try my best to be careful with my own work, but just because I can edit others doesn't mean I'm perfect in editing my own writing. I think we all need other eyes on the work before it's published. You can lure in a buyer for your e-book with a great cover, title, and description, but if the book itself is riddled with grammatical mistakes, poor plotting, or poor characterization, that reader won't come back for another book by you.

We have to face the fact that there are over 750,000 e-books on Kindle so it's always important to give our work the best we have. If readers buy one of our books and they aren't happy, we have lost the potential to sell them the rest of our novels.

How many of you have editors or other good writers go over your book before offering it for sale? How important do you think it is to do so? The books I've put up so far, except for one, were published in print first, so they had editorial input. When I put up my original that had never been print published before, you can bet it was checked carefully first by both my reader and my proofreader. How did I do? Not badly. The reader found a plot hole and I rewrote a couple of chapters. The proofreader discovered I had two Chapter 17s and I had to fix the chapter numbers. He also found a few other mistakes that I corrected. Overall, it wasn't in terrible shape, but I sure wouldn't have wanted it to go out into the world with plot holes and duplicate chapter numbers and other small mistakes. Being a professional means you care enough to work hard on your novel and then find others who can work hard on it too. Not your mom or your best friend, either, but someone who has technical expertise and who will tell you the truth.

There are fewer e-books lately that I notice are full of bad writing and I think that's because those who tried to sell them discovered it wasn't going to work. Readers are used to reading books from print publishers who employ editors and proofreaders. They simply will not put up with a book, e-book or paper print, that is riddled with mistakes and bad writing. Why should they pay for that? You have to respect your reader most of all. He is your boss. If you abuse him and make him upset with your writing, you're upsetting the boss--and trust me, he'll fire you. Or in the case of e-books, he might ask for a refund and never buy another word you ever write. That's the same as being fired. You only have one chance to impress your reader and you have to make the most of it if you want him to return to find more of your work.

There are people online now who are very competent editors and proofreaders. Employ them. Care enough to do what you're doing the right way. Never go for second best, never take the chances that could mean the end of your career. Do it right. As a reader, that's all I want. As readers, that's what we demand. If you're going to be a professional writer then make sure you give the reader the best that's in you and that means your spelling is correct, your punctuation is correct, your verb tenses and sentence construction is correct. That means you must know how to write characterization, description, and dialogue. You have to know your business and then you'll get the business--sales of your work. And isn't that what we all want? Without an audience, can you be a writer? I guess you could, but it's a whole lot better WITH an audience. Give them--your bosses--what they deserve and at the very least that is a competently written, technically correct piece of work.

KILLING CARLA

This suspense novel, KILLING CARLA, was written in a white, hot heat during a period of my life when I needed my novel writing to support the family. My husband was looking for a job and having trouble finding one in the small lake town we had recently moved to. We had two children under 12 years old who not only needed feeding, housing, and baseball uniforms for school, but we had all the other bills families rack up to stay afloat. I had published three novels at this time and had a great agent and publishers interested in my novels, but I didn't have a novel. I was running a small used and new bookstore in the front of the house and we lived in the rooms in the back. The bookstore was making ten or twenty dollars a day on a lucky day. Things were in a dire condition and heading toward catastrophic. Until this point in our lives we always had an income. My novel writing and advances were windfalls, gifts, but the money I made wasn't necessary to pay the bills. This time it was.

I decided I needed to write a book--FAST--and sell it--FAST. I pinned a calendar on the wall near my desk where I wrote and where I sat watching over the bookstore. I turned on the computer and began to write. I had no outline, no characters, no idea what I was going to do. I had been writing about serial killers in my previous novels. They were my field of expertise because I'd spent years researching and reading about them. I came at them from different directions, in various books, exploring the aberrant mind of this particular type of killer.

When I began KILLING CARLA (originally titled SLICE by the publisher, Pocket Books), I thought this: the killer kills a man's wife and gets away with it. His case is thrown out of court. He walks free. What happens then? The husband of the victim is not a macho man. He isn't a gun expert or a hunter. He isn't a coward, not at all, and he adored his wife, but up against a seasoned veteran of murder, he was totally unprepared. What if the victim's younger sister is the tough one, the one ready and willing to take on getting revenge for her beloved sister's murder?

So the book pages began to roll out. The file grew. I worked on the book every single minute I could find between handling sales in the bookstore, washing clothes, cooking meals, and caring for my family. I wrote at night when everyone was sleeping and the house was quiet. I wrote out of desperation and from a feeling of peril. I was not the characters in the book dealing with the loss of a loved one through murder, but I was on the brink of bankruptcy and being on the street. Never before had my family needed me so badly to come through for them.

The book rolled on. The characters came alive for me and I knew them as well as I knew all the people in my real world. Sully was a man devastated by the loss of his wife. Carla was in a fury of wanting revenge against the cold-hearted killer who had waltzed into her life and stolen away her sister. And Martin Lansing, the killer, was changing...

You see sometimes books write themselves and sometimes characters take on a life that is not what you, the writer, planned. I thought Lansing had been in one foster home after another and he had been horribly abused by these people. It had chilled his heart and turned it to stone. He killed out of this terrible past that weighed on him and that had ruined the innocent child within him.

But no. Wait. As I wrote, the night flying past, the dark outside the windows my companion, the house quiet with my sleeping children and husband, all the books sitting silent on the bookshelves in the bookstore...as I wrote...Lansing told me his story and it was not about abuse at the hands of foster parents. That wasn't it at all! When the revelation of the true reason behind this man's murderous sprees was revealed to me, the words pouring out fast and furious, I lifted my hands from the keyboard, sat back in my desk chair, and just stared dumbfounded at the monitor screen. What? What? I couldn't believe it. For the first time ever what I thought about a character was not right, was not true. For the first time a character took on Such Real Life that he wrote himself and explained himself and made me see him in his own truth.

Amazing, I thought. That's just amazing. And it makes perfect sense. It's a twist and I didn't see it coming, but I knew it was absolutely perfect.

I won't tell you what it was about Lansing that makes him who he is in KILLING CARLA. That would ruin the story. But I can tell you it is a true character, perhaps the truest fictional character I've ever written about and I think that's what makes the book special and worth reading.

I have the book up for free through KDP on Kindle for 3 days. I hope a lot of people find it and give it a read. I hope they will be as surprised as I was when writing it and yet it makes perfect sense and Lansing is exactly as he should have been, exactly as he wrote himself.

Did the book save our family's finances? Yes, there's a happy ending in the real world now and then and this was one of them. I wrote the novel in 23 days over a 2 month period (there were days I could not get to the computer to write no matter how I tried--real life intervened). It was the fastest book I ever wrote in my life. As soon as I mailed it to my agent and he had it in his hands, he sold it to Pocket Books, the paperback division of Simon and Schuster. It brought in an advance that floated us and paid our bills until my husband found a job.

That's what this book did for me and I'm grateful to it for that. It was the one book that saved this writer from disaster. I hope you will give it a read and I hope that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it through those 23 days and nights of desperation and darkness. Here is a link for your free copy May 3-5.

Free-KILLING CARLA

Interview with ARMAND ROSAMILIA

Introduce yourself and your credits.

Armand Rosamilia, a New Jersey boy currently living in sunny Florida. I'm into horror, heavy metal, zombies and steampunk. I have over 40 releases to date and hope to keep adding to them and people keep buying and reading my work.

When did you start writing and how long was it before you were published?

I started writing when I was eleven or twelve, but it was all rubbish. I got semi-serious in my early twenties and had a short story or two published, but

not for any real money. I started my own mag, Black Moon Magazine, in the mid-90's and it lasted a few issues and a few years.

Tell us about your latest book and what inspired it.

My very latest work is actually not a zombie book. "Bones. Death. Cenote" is a three-story release set in South America, featuring an unnamed reporter who finds himself

in strange and occult settings. The first story I wrote with him was featured in the Skeletal Remains anthology,and then I wrote the next two because I thought he had

more to say about his adventures.

 What genre do you write in, if any? How do you feel about the genre, the future of it, and the authors in it?

I write horror (mostly). Most of my latest books are in the zombie subgenre, and I've written non-fiction heavy metal books, a thriller/horror novella... I try to simply

write and then classify it later. I think horror is a strong but smaller community, and their are some outstanding authors putting out quality books in it, and the fanbase for horror is great. Fans of zombie stories are a small but rabid group as well.

What/who do you read for pleasure?

I read three or four books a week via my Kindle. I have to read at least an hour before I can sleep, sometimes two. I read horror, but I will read anything that sounds interesting. Right now I'm reading the four books released by a local author, Tim Baker, and loving them so far. It's a thriller set in St. Augustine, Florida (where, coincidentally, my "Dying Days" zombie books are set), and his writing is topnotch. I hope he puts out more of these thrillride releases.

Is writing pleasure or work for you?

Pleasure. To read along as a character does something unexpected or tells you what they want to do is amazing. When the story is flowing, and you finish that chapter, and can't wait to start the next one and see what happens is pure joy.

If you had to exchange your writing life with another writer, who would that writer be and why?

I wish I was as prolific as Scott Nicholson, and had the respect he garnered over the years. People consider him a horror writer, but he is so much more. he dabbles

in and out of genres (sometimes within the samestory!) that it's hard to pigeonhole him into one thing. And he's a great writer, always willing to help others with

writing, answers questions, and seems like a great guy. I hope to meet him someday and personally thank him for all he's done for me, whether he knows it or not. I'm such a fanboy, lol...

 How do your friends and family cope knowing you have such dark thoughts?

They're used to me. One of the first times Kim and I dated we were standing on this balcony overlooking Daytona Beach, the waves crashing and kids playing in the surf, blue skies and sailboats... in my mind, creatures were creeping from the water and ripping people apart. She thought I was nuts when I told her, and wasn't surprised when a scene like that showed up in a zombie story a couple years later.

How supportive is your spouse and your family?

Supportive within reason. I have a very addictive personality, so when I jump into something it's 110% and I don't care about anything else. When I'm writing I want to be left alone. Completely. I can be a jerk at times (most times) and it's trying for others in my life. I have kids, and I know I sometimes ignore them when I'm in the zone for six straight hours. It's stressful, plus I hate doing housework, so I get yelled at a lot like I'm on of the kids.

What inspires you? Or triggers a story idea?

Anything and everything. I could be reading a story about satanists and an idea will pop up about a motorcycle gang for no reason. I file the thought in my head and if it was good enough it will come back to me later. People in line in Walmart make me laugh and give me some good characters. I'll tell Kim all the time that these people will be in the next zombie book.

 What has been the most difficult/painful/surreal story to write, and why?

Years ago I wrote an unpublished short story based on my uncle Armand. He was my father's brother, and made some mistakes in his life. He was a Vietnam Veteran and got hooked on drugs and was an alcoholic who left his family and moved to Las Vegas, where he lived for years as a pit boss in a casino until he died. I wrote a story about him as he died that night and one of his Vietnam buddies was there as a ghost to walk him through his life. It was emotional. I wrote it for me and never to be published, but it is a great story.

How do you see the story in your mind as it's created? Is it like making a plan, seeing a mental movie, or do you just write down what the voices in your head tell you?

When it's working, I see it like a movie and it flows. Sometimes a certain look to it, like a scene, will emerge. Then I know I'm onto something.

Now that traditional publishing vs digital publishing has taken really different turns lately, how do you feel about authors going the small press or traditonal publishing route over the digital route? Indie or Traditional for you or both and why?

I think each author has their own goals, and we all now have the means to do it, which is great. I've never been one of those writers who wanted a huge contract, book tours, awards, and all that. Call me stupid, but I just wanted to write. Digital publishing gave me the means to release my work, when I wanted, how I wanted, and let people judge my work and see if they wanted to read more of it. So far, most people want to read more of it. But authors who sign with traditional publishers are following their dreams and their own paths, and I applaud them.

What's the best book you ever read?

As a kid (eleven or twelve) Phantoms from Dean Koontz scared me, especially the beginning. As I got older, an author named Phil Rickman (Curfew, December, Candlenight) was amazing. I just started talking on goodreads to another person who was a huge Rickman fan, and that was neat.

 Who are your influences in literature?        

I grew up on Koontz (not King too much), R.E. Howard, and a ton of dog-eared paperback horror books my mom read and let me read.

Do you feel traditional publishing may become a niche? Is digital publishing going to reach a bubble stage that could burst, much to the detriment of authors?

There's always a ceiling. With the changes in the last year and a half, who knows what the next year or even six months will have for us? Amazon could pull out a completely new game-changer again. I don't think traditional publishing will ever go away, but it needs to change to survive. So far I don't see it.

 What is your education and job, other than writing?

High school diploma, did amazing on my SAT's and then... nothing. I wasted my intelligence, I was a slacker who just got by instead of getting straight A's and doing something. I had a change to go to Seton Hall University but opted for the easier community college instead. I got bored and dropped out, never to return. Instead I took a twenty year journey into the horrors of retail. My last job was as a retail store manager. When that ended in September 2011 I decided to take a serious shot at writing full-time. So far it's the best job I ever had, but it doesn't pay as much!

 Do you ever, like Truman Capote confessed doing, take from real life, friends, and family situations or characters to use in your fiction? If so, do you tell them or keep it secret?

I take and let them know. I've written several people into the "Dying Days" series, I even have an indigogo setup right now where, for a donation to me, you become a character in the next book. I think it's fun, it helps with fresh ideas, and people get a kick out of seeing themselves in these situations.

Do you belong to any writer's organizations? If so, which ones, and how do you feel about professional organizations?

I belong to a loose collective known as Florida Horror Writers. We don't have meetings, dues or anything, we just help one another out on facebook, if anyone has a book signing, or stuff like that. Jeff Strand, Richard Lee Byers, and Bruce Boston are the better-known members. We used to gather at Florida conventions just to chat, but never organized. Hopefully this summer something can get put together, even a picnic and we can all sit and chat.

Do you think networking on social sites has helped your career and sales?

Tremendously. Twitter has been a great thing for me, with so many readers retweeting my posts and my blog (http://armandrosamilia.com) getting hits all day. Facebook is fun but it's more casual, so I tend to meet people there and if they really want to buy a book or learn more about me, I push them to Twitter or the blog.

What is the hardest thing you've ever had to do concerning your work as a writer?

I had a publisher like my novel but want a complete change in the second act of it. He wanted a rewrite in five days. 25,000 words. I did it but it wasn't fun with such

a crazy deadline. And the book is still sitting on his desk four months later.

What/who do you read for pleasure?

I read anything and everything I can get my hands on. I'm a big believer in reading other indie author's works and reviewing it and helping the community grow.

I love pointing out new author's I've found and helping them out, and hoping they do the same.

 Writing fiction is important to all authors, but how much does it mean to you? If there were no outlets for fiction of any kind, how would that feel? If for some reason you could not write anymore, what would you do instead?

Writing is a huge part of my life. I get antsy when I'm not writing or at least jotting down notes. I can't imagine not writing. I always have several ideas and stories in my head at the same time, and need to get them out.

What three things should our world have that would make it a better place?

More book readers, more tolerance/less racism, and everyone should have a pair of comfortable shoes.

DYING DAYS by Armand Rosamilia

BONES. DEATH. CENOTE.

HIGHWAY TO HELL

INTERVIEW WITH LEIGH M. LANE

Introduce yourself and your credits.

I’m a speculative fiction author with nine published books and several short stories in multiple genres (dystopia, allegory, horror, erotic horror, and space opera). I have a Bachelor’s degree in English, having graduated Magna Cum Laude in UNLV’s largest graduating class to date.

When did you start writing and how long was it before you were published?

I started writing at the tender age of eight, making numerous failed attempts at publication throughout my youth. I wrote my first novel when I was in my early teens, although that manuscript has long been lost. I finally made my small-press publishing debut in 2008 with a couple of anthology short stories, and sold my first novel soon thereafter.

Tell us about your latest book and what inspired it.

Finding Poe is the result of a couple of factors that came into play at just the right time. I had recently finished reading Foe, by J. M. Coetzee, which is a retelling of a famous novel through the point of view of a character who never made it into the original book. I had also finished reading several Edgar Allan Poe works and had done some research on Poe’s mysterious death and “The Lighthouse,” the short story he never had the chance to finish, when the muses suddenly hit me with the question: What if an unwritten character from “The Lighthouse” retold the story from her point of view?

What genre do you write in, if any? How do you feel about the genre, the future of it, and the authors in it?

I write a wide range of speculative fiction, my favorites being dystopia and horror. I think the future looks positive for both. While dystopia has suffered a lull over the past decades, with some authors even attempting to reinvent the genre (with happy endings—ugh!), I do think the time has come for it to find its place back—in its original form—in the forefront. The success of dystopia comes about when enough of the population is ready to address the social and political issues that have been weighing them down for far too long, and I think people are ready to pull their heads out of the sand and face their current issues head-on. As far as horror is concerned, I think it’s been going strong for decades and, based on some of the most recent works I’ve read, the genre is being upheld by some really great talent.

What/who do you read for pleasure?

I do all of my reading for review these days, so pleasure reading only comes when I’m fortunate enough to be reviewing a talented author. With that said, I’ve been fortunate enough to come across some amazing works.

Is writing pleasure or work for you?

Both. Writing is like air to me; without it, I think I’d die. At the same time, it’s not always a cakewalk and sometimes it takes a good amount of motivation and discipline to get through a given scene or draft. Editing is the hardest, and it’s definitely the most tedious part of the process. Luckily, I’m a perfectionist, so there is that drive to continue pushing through that part of it even if it isn’t so pleasant.

If you had to exchange your writing life with another writer, who would that writer be and why?

I wouldn’t trade any aspect of my life for anyone else’s, no matter how successful they were. I’ve been through enough to know that no one’s life is perfect, and even with my minimal success, I love being me and I love the books I’ve written. I wouldn’t trade any of that for all the success in the world.

How do your friends and family cope knowing you have such dark or unusual thoughts?

My husband knows it’s just a part of my being a writer, and he’s gotten to the point where nothing I write surprises him anymore. He has come to understand that being haunted by muses, sometimes very dark and disturbing muses, is part of what I do—part of who I am—and he is very encouraging of my need and desire to release what those muses demand through the written word. Most of the rest of my family would rather not know just how dark my thoughts can get.

How supportive is your spouse and/or your family?

My husband is the most supportive person I’ve ever known—and he’s probably also my biggest fan. I have a few family members who are supportive of what I do, but most of them are awful, awful people who would rather see me fail than succeed, regardless of my endeavors. I jokingly call myself the Meg (Family Guy) of my family; there’s really no rhyme or reason to my family’s seeming need to a) single me out and b) be the antithesis of support, but I’ve gotten to the point where it just doesn’t matter anymore. Some people are just a**holes, and I happen to be related to several of them. On the positive, they helped me to develop a very thick skin, and for that, I’m grateful.

What inspires you? Or triggers a story idea?

A story can come from anywhere. It can come from a word, the envisioning of a character, or even an ambiance. Muses nearly always surround me, each of them fighting over the others to get their story told. Life inspires me, as do dreams, nightmares, and even personal fantasies. The key is finding a balance between all of those and moving between enough projects at any given time to keep the ideas fresh and exciting enough to see them each through to completion.

What has been the most difficult/painful/surreal story to write, and why?

Off and on, I have worked on my own narrative nonfiction, which is a painful retelling of my childhood and young adult life. It is a work that I will not likely publish for many years, as revisiting many parts of my past has been difficult and I don’t think I’ll be able to find the eloquence necessary to tell it right until a few more of my scars have healed. I grew up with an absent adopted father, a sociopathic mother, and a family that punished me for . . . well, for being me. In my young adult life, I went from one bad relationship to the next, one of which left me with a cracked skull, head-to-toe bruises, and many emotional scars. It is a story that I do feel the need to share, but it has been painful to revisit the misery that led up to the joy that is my current life.

How do you see the story in your mind as it's created? Is it like making a plan, seeing a mental movie, or do you just write down what the voices in your head tell you?

It definitely comes as a movie that plays within my mind’s eye. I see every detail, and sometimes it is all I can do to keep up with the visuals given to me by the muses as I attempt to relay them in simple words.

Now that traditional publishing vs. digital publishing have taken really different turns lately, how do you feel about authors going the small press or traditional publishing route over the digital route? Indie or Traditional for you or both and why?

I’m all for the Indie route. While I got my start in (and am very supportive of) small press, I think there are so many talented authors who have self-published that I can’t help but see them as the future in publishing. I’ve personally found an amazing support network within the Indie community, incredibly talented people who know what they’re doing and have decided to take complete charge of their publishing future. These people are willing to peer edit, recommend cover artists, and do everything in their power to assist their fellow Indie writer in his or her road to success. They have taken the power away from the gatekeepers of generations past, and I’m very proud to be a part of that.

What's the best book you ever read?

This is a tough one, as I’ve read many amazing books that deserve mention; however, while it’s completely out of my preferred genre, the best book I’ve ever read has likely been The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, by Louise Erdrich. It’s just brilliant.

Who are your influences in literature?

Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Olaf Stapledon, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, and Roald Dahl immediately come to mind, although I know there are many others I wish I had room to mention.

Do you feel traditional publishing may become a niche?

I do. With so many options available to authors these days, I really do believe that the Big Six will be a phantom of the past, and that their books will have no notable advantage over the many amazing books now being published by the best of the best Indie authors.

Do you ever, like Truman Capote confessed doing, take from real life, friends, and family situations or characters to use in your fiction? If so, do you tell them or keep it secret?

While I don’t think any author can keep from incorporating some aspects to his or her collective experiences into the fictional realm, I do try to refrain from meshing personal history with my fiction. Someday, I will finish my autobiography. . . .

Do you think networking on social sites has helped your career and sales?

Social networking may not have had a significant impact on my sales, but it has had a definite impact on my sense of community. For once in my life, I feel as though I belong somewhere. It is an amazing feeling.

Writing fiction is important to all authors, but how much does it mean to you? If there were no outlets for fiction of any kind, how would that feel? If for some reason you could not write anymore, what would you do instead?

I would wither away and die. While I do find some creative outlet in singing, drawing, and painting, writing is what keeps me going. It is my reason for getting up in the morning, for reviewing others, and for staying connected to the rest of the world. Without my writing, I would eventually cease to exist.

What three things should our world have that would make it a better place?

Empathy across the board would solve just about every ill in our world. If others could find it in themselves just to care about their fellow human being—and their fellow animal—our world might be nearly perfect. It pains me that there are so many people in this world, even in my own country, who are starving, abused, and alone; it is just as upsetting to me that there are countless animals who must suffer, or even die an early and unnecessary death, just as much because not enough people care about their plight. Better education would improve our world dramatically. There are plenty of smart people out there, but without the direction and critical thinking that comes with formal education, that intelligence goes to waste. Finally, greater religious tolerance would make an incredible difference in our world. Far too many people allow themselves to view the world though the narrow lens of their particular religious beliefs, which encourages segregation, judgment, and ignorance. If humanity could see the similarities between us all rather than focus on our differences, we might actually see something that resembles peace.

What is the question you wish an interviewer would ask you? What is it you'd like to say that no one has asked about?

Q. What is something you’ve never before shared in an author interview?

A. Ever since my ex cracked my skull, I have had a condition called synesthesia. In my case, I “see” loud and unexpected sounds. Most sounds take on the appearance of a sudden flash of light, typically black and white and similar in appearance to a checkerboard, but every sound has its own unique pattern—and it appears on the side I most dominantly hear it. Some sounds show in color, and some show in unusual patterns, but they all come and go as quickly as the sound itself presents. At this point in my life, I have become accustomed this strange mesh of sight and sound and would feel somewhat lost without it.

World-Mart by Leigh M. Lane

Finding Poe by Leigh M. Lane

Leigh M. Lane's Kindle Store

CHARACTER-Telling the Story to Myself

I believe character makes a novel and plot is just what the character lives. I’ve loved being around people who were characters since I was a child. Real characters are bigger than life, live either on the edge or over the edge, and usually don’t give a fig about what people think of them. It was the “character” in the tiny village where my grandparents lived who dominated conversation.  People sat around on the porch in warm summers talking about the derring-do of the local characters. As a child I sat off to the side or behind the porch swing or beneath the dining table listening, a quiet little girl who was all ears.  No one was interested in the staid, upright, church-going, dull people who never did anything slanderous or risky. Talk, instead, was about the two drunks who decided one night to track down whatever strange creature was screaming in the woods that summer.  Off they went in the dead of night with a hoe and an axe, looking for the boogeyman. One said he would be the bait and the other would wait in hiding to hoe down the monster as it screamed past him chasing the other man.  This talk went on for weeks with the adults unable to agree whether the knot on one man’s head had been put there by a hoe wielded by a frightened, unsteady hand, or had he merely fallen across a root in the woods? Did the two men really hear the horrible beast scream in the night just feet away from them through the brush? These men were characters, and their plot was the decisions they made and the kind of life they lived.

I grew up, then, loving character both in real life and in fiction. What is THE GREAT GATSBY without Gatsby? What is Paul Theroux’s MOSQUITO COAST without the off-kilter father who takes his whole family off the grid and into a foreign jungle where he builds a machine to make ice? Plot and story flow from a great character, not usually the other way around. At least not for me.

Gold Rush Dream by Billie Sue Mosiman

In my novels I always think of the person, the character, first, and from that character comes her story. In GOLD RUSH DREAM, a suspense-filled western with two characters who fall in love, the first thing I wanted to do was write about a young woman who had grown up in the Texas woods with her immigrant parents and then suddenly loses them.  I asked myself questions about Rose, this young protagonist. How would she survive the harsh conditions of frontier life on her own? She was fiercely independent, but she was also young, unsophisticated, and untried by life. Along comes Travis, a lone trapper, who finds Rose rising from the root cellar in the middle of a crumbled, smoking cabin that had been burned to the ground by marauding Indians. Now the character of Rose has more conflict to endure–sparking off another strong character, Travis.  I could see in my inner vision these characters and I let them tell the story I wanted to read.

That’s another thing about writing novels. You get to tell yourself the story you’ve never read, but would like to read.  I wanted to know how Rose would fare and how Travis would keep her safe. I wanted to know what happened when they tried to cross the big wilderness of a frontier country to get Rose to her remaining family in California. I wanted to know if they would like one another and maybe even fall in love during such an arduous journey.  Then, what would happen about the outcast, mentally unstable Indian who tracked them, obsessed with Rose? Character led the way.

  WIDOW by Billie Sue Mosiman

In WIDOW I wrote the most feminist novel I ever penned. I did not set out to write a feminist novel. It was the character who lived the feminist ideal and though she was emotionally damaged by a tragic event–her husband killing her two children before her eyes then turning the gun on himself–this was a woman who pulled herself out of insanity and despair to grapple with what life had handed to her. Men, who I do love by the way--but I am not the character--do not fare well in WIDOW at the hands of Shadow, the woman who has determined she will never again let a man turn a woman or a child into a victim.  It was character who drove the novel.  Some readers confuse the author with their characters, and we can’t get away from that, but, in the main, fictional characters are a conglomerate of people an author has known or been acquainted with–sometimes they’re simply imagined in whole. In researching the subject matter of WIDOW I interviewed dozens of exotic dancers (the occupation Shadow is forced to take on since she was, like many woman, a housewife without skills or education). I interviewed a police detective in order to write about my detective in the novel. But the characters who found their way to the page were none of these real people, nor were they me. They were creations that interested me most, the characters who made me ask questions of them. What will you do now your children are murdered and your husband a suicide? What will you do now you’ve lost your home, your source of income, your mental balance? How do you live with the despair and fight your way out of it? If you take the law into your own hands, Shadow, how do you live with that and do you really have that right? What if a copycat killer begins to mimic your crimes, pinning them on you? How in the world can you stop him, how can you ever exonerate yourself? What if you’re falling in love with the one man, the detective, who is trying to find out who you really are? Those were the questions that drove the story. I wanted to know these answers and I believed readers would too.

Angelique by Billie Sue Mosiman

In my new novel, BANISHED, I was told the story about a little girl who seemed evil, who might be a voodoo queen in New Orleans. I began to think about that child and thought, well, what if she’s not a child at all? What if she’s a fallen angel who has taken that child’s body? What if she’s lived for hundreds of years? If that’s the story then how and when did she possess that body? How did she survive as a child without a parent all those hundreds of years? What was her mission, who were her companions? So I started with character only and from Angelique comes the story as she tells it to me. The reason I kept writing the book that Angelique is a part of was to find out what was going to happen next.

Without character, strong, resilient, sympathetic character, plot doesn’t even matter. Unless I care about the protagonist, I have no reason to follow the story. If I don’t care about the characters I have no questions for them, therefore no plot comes forth. All of my novels and stories are driven by character.

I am still listening to the stories I heard while hiding under the dining table, but now I listen to them in my head and try to translate them into a story people want to read. First I have to want to read it. Only then can I hope someone else will. Characters, the people in my novels, are as real to me as people I know and because of who they are, what’s happened to them, and the directions they take, I simply follow along telling the story of their lives–telling the story to myself.

INSPIRATION PLAYING IN A TOWN NEAR YOU

Let's talk about inspiration.  Without it, there are no stories or novels ever written. Where do you find it? The question is close to the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" That's the question people are always asking writers. Stephen King replied that he found his ideas in Syracuse. He can be funny, no one said he couldn't. Most of us don't know how to answer because ideas come from everywhere, from every direction. What are ideas? Inspirations! People rarely think to ask you where the inspirations come from, but ideas or inspirations, they're interchangeable anyway.

Recently I was inspired to write a short story from a single word. Some writers on Facebook were talking about how they didn't like vampires to sparkle the way they do in The Twilight vampire novels and movies. It was wimpy, it was lame. I kept thinking, Sparkle, Sparkle, Sparkle. I kept thinking, that's not a very scary word, but...what if it could be scary, what would a scary sparkle look like? I challenged myself to write a story where some being who sparkles is the epitome of fear. The result is SPARKLE-A-Tale-of-the-Devil. The story is also in my collection of stories, SUBWAY-COLLECTION-Dark Stories to Read on the Go. From those who have read it and responded I believe I was able to take an innocent little word that usually denotes flighty, fairy, pretty things and gave it a twist that reminds us dark, devilish things might also sparkle.

Another serendipity inspiration followed and it came from a picture. A book cover, specifically. My cover artist, Neil Jackson, is an inspiration in his own right the way he can take a book title and create a cover for it that makes the whole idea of the book or story pop and come alive for prospective readers. One day he offered a folder of e-book covers for the ridiculous low price of $10 per cover. I saw one that caught my attention, but I had no story or book that fit it. The cover showed a house bathed in blue shadows, a looming edifice, and it scared me just looking at it. I bought the cover. Immediately a story idea was inspired about the house on the cover, the walls inside the house, and what resulted within 48 hours was a novelette called WALLS OF THE DEAD . (It is Free on Kindle for the next couple of days if you want to give it a read.)

These might seem extreme examples of inspiration, but they aren't. Writers can be inspired by the Muse from the utterance of a single word, a picture of a house, an idea someone might be talking about, a man walking down a street, a tree that stands lonely and crooked in a field. Ideas, of course, are everywhere. When non-writers say to a writer, "I have an idea for you..." writers groan inside. Because ideas are cheap, ideas are floating around us every minute of our waking day. It is not ideas that are so hard to come by, as I've proved by my own examples, it's being INSPIRED by those ideas. Your idea might leave me cold. My idea will do the same unless it is backed by excitement, inspiration, and an urgency to see the idea come alive in a story or a novel.

What do you do if you get an inspiration? Why, if you're a working writer and you know what's good for you, you immediately get started writing with that inspiration as the driver of your mind-car. One thing about inspiration is that it can be fickle. If you delay too long, if you question it and say to yourself, oh, that's dumb, I can't write a story about something scary that sparkles, then it's all over. Without having some faith and confidence, those little inspirations can disappear just as quickly as they come.

I encourage you to trust your Muse. I encourage you to write what inspires you whether it is a small inspiration that gives you a short story or a big inspiration that leads you into the wilderness of a long piece of work like the novel. Does it always work? I can't guarantee that. I can't even guarantee it for myself. It's just as possible my ideas about the word "sparkle" and my ideas for the "walls that talk" could have fallen flat and dead. But I coddled the Muse, I thanked it, I played with the ideas the way a child plays, and the inspiration lasted through the entire story writing. You can't depend on anything in this world and that's the truth, you know that's the truth, but if you follow your inspirations you're not wasting your time, you're being open and creative and giving back to the world that inspires you.