Today I have an interview with talented author Briane Pagel. He stops by to chat about his books, including his newest, the sci-fi thriller
Codes, and his writing. Enjoy...
Interview With Author Briane Pagel
Why don’t you begin by
sharing a little about yourself.
Here is my biggest, and possibly
only, regret in life: that I never became a pole vaulter. I wanted so much in
high school to be a pole vaulter on the track team. Being seriously overweight
and unathletic was a big impediment to that; when I tried out for the team,
they put me into shot put and discus, where I failed to excel. I do still
remember (kind of) how to shot put, but that hasn't been terribly helpful and
isn't awe-inspiring the way it would be if I could say “Oh, yeah, I was a
pole vaulter.”
Other than that, my life has
progressed more or less exactly the way I have intended: I spend most of my
time being a consumer protection litigator, and the time I don’t do that I
spend with my family (5 kids, ages 8-27, and a grandkid already, too!). My
hobbies (aside from writing) are pizza (You read that right. Just: pizza),
music (I play guitar and piano but haven’t done either in a while) and trying
to learn to draw.
Can you tell us a bit about your latest book, the sci-fi novel, Codes?
Codes
is easily the best book I have ever written, and I’m not just saying that
because it’s true.
Codes is a thriller with enough twists and turns in it to make it
as a carnival ride. Set in the near
future, it focuses on Robbie, who has a run-in with a beautiful blonde woman
that results in a murder (or is it?) outside his apartment. Suddenly everyone
seems to be after him, and he keep seeing posters and website with mysterious code-phrases,
and having strange encounters. Eventually he learns that both a corporation
that has learned how to clone humans and imprint them with computerized
personalities, and a group trying to stop that, are all looking for him. None
of them are sure why Robbie’s so important, but they all know he
is important, and whoever figures it out
first is certain they’re going to have the upper edge in this fight.
You've also written several other books. Care to share any tidbits
about them?
My favorite book, after Codes, is Eclipse. Also scifi, it’s the story of Claudius, an astronaut who
wanted to go into space, but might have gone mad instead. It’s the literary equivalent of a hall of
mirrors, and I enjoy people guessing in their reviews as to what really happened. (I won’t tell.)
Also, I really like the After, which is about a woman named
Saoirse who dies in a plane crash, then finds herself in a strange sort of
afterlife where William Howard Taft asks her to help him find a way out. It sounds like a silly setup, but the way it
works out it’s surprisingly touching.
I've also written some humorous
scifi, and a collection of horror stories, as well as one well-received
literary novel.
As well as novels, you write short stories. Do you prefer writing short
fiction to penning novels, or do you find they have equal merits?
I like writing both, and I never
really set out to write one or the other. I start writing a story, and it’s
over when it’s over. Codes, for example, I meant to be a
short story originally, or at least I thought it would be. I started writing
it, figuring it’d end up being about 10-15 pages. At page 50 I thought Well this just kept on going.
I think a story needs to be as long
as it ought to be, and no more. If there’s a lot to tell, tell it. But I have
begun experimenting with writing short short stories, too, as a way to practice
writing.
When did you realize you wanted to start writing professionally?
I wrote some short stories in college
in the 90s, but then didn't do much writing for about 10 years while I finished
law school and got going on my career.
When I went back to writing, it was as a hobby and I posted stories on
blogs. I sent some stories to publishers
from time to time, but got tired of rejections.
Once indie publishing came along, with the Kindle and Lulu, I decided to
try to sell my books myself. I've been
doing that for a few years now, but when I wrote Codes I thought it deserved wider dissemination than I've been able
to get for my own books, and so I decided to find a more traditional publisher
for it. Golden Fleece seemed a perfect
fit for me.
I know that doesn't answer the
question very well. I guess to shorten it up: Codes is the first thing I've written that I think engages my own
interests in unique storytelling, and yet has commercial potential. Before I
wrote Codes, I never gave much
thought to selling books. But Codes seemed like it might be the
breakthrough. So I would say: I first began thinking I might do this as a
profession about as I finished the first draft of Codes.
Has anything surprised you about the process of writing your books? Any
characters or plots that took unexpected turns?
EVERYTHING has. I usually start out with a slim idea for a
story, sometimes just a quick thought or a line I found catchy, and then start
writing and see where it goes. Or I will
take a theme and write a bunch of stories about that, like 10 short stories in
a row about robots, or the time I wrote a series of shorts each based on a
different noble gas in the periodic table of elements.
I like writing that way: I never
really know where a story will end up or where it will go. I just pick up an idea and begin spreading it
out in every direction, mulling over all the interesting parts of it. Writing,
to me, feels like exploring.
What is your greatest
challenge as a writer?
Focusing on one thing at a time. I
have so many ideas that I’d like to try, but I have to be disciplined and finish
them. So I've developed a system: each
day, I work about 30 minutes or so on my current project, and then if I have
more time (I usually do my writing from about 8-9 at night) I might tinker away
at a side project. That lets me finish one project while still messing around
with writing short stories or coming up with new novel ideas, or blog posts or
the like.
Having now published both as an indie and with a more traditional
publishing company, do you have any advice for writers looking to be published?
Persistence. And rewrites. When I finished the first draft
of Codes, I decided that I would send
it to a minimum of fifty publishers
before putting it out myself. While I
was going through the process of sending it out – one a day, usually-- I was editing and rewriting the book. So by
the time I got to Golden Fleece Press, the book was already well into a second
round of (re)writing, which was at the time unusual for me, as I hate editing
and rewriting. What was different here was that, , like I said, this was a book
I really believed in and knew could be very well-received, but it needed that
extra push. So the extra push came from within, through the rewriting, and from
without, through help from Golden Fleece Press.
In the end, I didn't even get
halfway to fifty, because Golden Fleece was pretty quick to say yes. (So quick that I got a few
rejections from people who were slow to respond, after Golden Fleece Press had already accepted it. It stings less
to get a rejection for a book you know has already been published.) They helped
me re-edit and make the book even better, which I found an excellent tool to
improve the story even more.
Having indie published some books
before going the traditional route, too, I knew what I was looking for from a
publisher. My goal wasn't just “get this book on the shelves,” since I knew I
could do that on my own. Instead, I wanted help reaching a broader audience and
improving the quality of my book. Those
are tough things for a solo writer to do.
Knowing those were my goals, I was
able to focus on looking for publishers and agents who could help me further
those. By going with Golden Fleece Press, I got an editor and publisher who
were invested in making my book the best, and helping to sell it. I don’t think
I would've gotten that at one of the bigger publishers, where I’d be dumped
into a pile of other small authors to die on some bookshelf somewhere.
What’s next for you?
I've begun working on a sequel to Codes,
tentatively titled The Watson Protocol;
like most sequels, it expands on the first by adding more villains and changing
the main characters a bit, as well as building on the events of the first. I
won’t say who’s in it, because that might spoil what happens in Codes. Codes
can still be read as a stand-alone, but I figured there was more to
tell, in that world.
I've also got a collection of short stories, written over the course of
a year, one per day. Each story is one word shorter than the one prior, so the
first was 365 words, the second 364, and so on.
There’s a lot of other ideas I've had, but those two will take up the
bulk of that first 30 minutes of writing each night.
Then, who knows? Maybe I’ll see if there are any adult pole-vaulting
clubs around Middleton, Wisconsin.
For more about Briane Pagel and his books you can check out these sites:
You can find Codes at:
