ELLE ANDREWS PATT

Get Charles A Cornell's "Crystal Night" free today from Kindle! Charles Cornell and Ken Pelham founded the Alvarium Experiment, a group of like-minded authors who are working together to discover new ways of presenting and marketing new fiction. The Prometheus Saga is their first project and consists of science-fiction stories which all involve in some way 'Prometheus', the same alien character threaded into each unique story. In this interview, Charles discusses his work and his process. I'm always curious to know how other writers go about laying out their framework for a story :-)

Q: How does your work differ from others in its genre?

CAC: In my thriller, Tiger Paw, I definitely channeled my 'inner Edgar Allan Poe'. Woven into the intrigue and suspense are elements of the macabre and the occult. This portrayal of the dark side of human nature can also be found in my sci-fi/fantasy novel, DragonFly in the character of Nazi wizard, Reichsfuhrer Morax. My novels unabashedly contain a strong 'good vs evil' theme as the main protagonists are in an 'against all odds' journey to triumph over the worst mankind has to offer. I like to think out of the box regarding the plot, embed a twist or two, and definitely want my work to be unique. Why write what others have already written?

Q: Why do you write what you write?

CAC: Why? Simply, to make people think. My novels have a lot of historical and social messages embedded in them. I view my work as having three layers, like peeling back an onion. The outer layer is entertainment. My thrillers thrill, and my sci-fi creates wonder as it should. The next layer is information. My references to history or descriptions of locations are intended to make the reader curious to find out more. Underlying all of that is meaning. In Tiger Paw, set on Wall Street, how much money & power is enough, and how much is too much? In DragonFly, can a woman succeed in a man's World War? The answer is yes, spectacularly!

Q: How does your writing process work?

CAC: I'm an outliner or plotter. I need to know my story's ending ahead of time. This is especially important when writing a mystery or thriller in order to seed clues into the narrative. I outline using old fashioned paper index cards laid on a big table so I can glance at the whole structure at once. The process is usually accompanied by a glass of wine. Once the forty chapters or so are roughed with a sentence or two on each card that captures the scene, I transfer them to my iPad into a writing app called Storyist. There I can change their order and rearrange to my heart's content. I write the draft on the iPad in Storyist and export it to Word on my desktop when I think I've done enough self-editing. I send that out to professional editors, do their recommended revisions when it comes back, and then self-publish.

Q: Tell me more about your short story in the Prometheus Saga. Why did you pick that episode in history?

CAC: I have an affinity for World War Two history. Both my parents served in the British Royal Air Force during the war. My mother was a 'grease monkey', a mechanic on Spitfires and Mustangs. My father retired in the fifties with the rank of Squadron Leader. Both my parents have passed away and the survivors, both military and civilian, from those war years are passing at an incredible rate. At some point soon we may hear that the last WW2 veteran is gone and we will only have books and videos to understand those turbulent times.

One of the things I'm trying to do is find ways to connect the lessons of WW2 to a younger generation. I thought, what about science fiction? So I wrote DragonFly, a sci-fi fantasy about a female British pilot fighting Nazi wizards and monsters in an experimental fighter plane, the DragonFly, which is fueled by water. When we came up with the premise for The Prometheus Saga, my mind immediately gravitated to WW2 and in particular the Holocaust. What would an alien have thought about how people treated each other inside the Third Reich?

Q: What are your writing plans for 2015? What does the new year hold in store for you?

CAC: Last year I launched DragonFly, a collision of science fiction & fantasy in the dieselpunk genre. I'm working on its sequel, 'Spies in Manhattan' as well as some short companion fiction to the DragonFly world. I have a crazy number of projects in the concept and outlining stage. There will be a third DragonFly novel called 'The Machine That Changed The World'.

I'm really excited about starting a five-novel futuristic science fiction series I've planned and have begun outlining. That may be the next world I build after the DragonFly books. But I promised my readers I would write the second and third book in my FBI thriller series, Tiger Paw. Did I also mention steampunk & dystopian? Yes, I have novel concepts underway in both of those genres too. I reckon I have at least ten years of writing ahead of me to completely write everything I've imagined , and that doesn't count anything else I might dream up in the future.

To learn more about Charles A. Cornell, visit him at charlesacornell.com .
For more information and links to all the other Prometheus Saga fics, go here.

Today, I have a Prometheus Saga interview with Parker Francis. Through tomorrow, you can get his fantastic 'The Strange Case of Lord Byron's Lover' for FREE in the Kindle store.


Q: What inspired you to launch / join the Alvarium Experiment?


PF: Ken Pelham contacted me prior to the 2014 FWA Conference to ask if I’d be interested in joining other writers in a what he said was “a cool idea” called The Alvarium Experiment. I’m always open to cool ideas and asked for more details. Ken sent me two working papers I call the Prometheus Bible, an incredibly well thought-out concept with a spec sheet and working arrangement for the consortium of writers. Ken and Charles Cornell had obviously given this a lot of thought, and I was both impressed and intrigued. Though I didn’t write SF, I spent much of my wasted youth reading the masters of SF and fantasy. And when Ken said they were looking for writers of all genres, I jumped aboard the Alvarium bandwagon.

Q: What are some of the benefits and challenges of writing “into” an existing framework for Prometheus as a character? How did that shape your creative process for your story? Is it different from your usual writing process?

PF: The benefits far outweighed the challenges since I became part of a beehive of awesomely talented people and the ideas flowed continuously. Having a framework in place provided some structure, the challenge was how to fit my story—whatever that turned out to be—into the framework, and best utilize the Prometheus character to shed light on my story. I decided early on not to concentrate wholly on Prometheus, or any of the superhuman abilities of the alien probe, but to create a character shaded in mystery, acting in a way to cause my protagonist to question the nature of what he/she observed, and also cause some change in that character’s life. Not surprisingly for a writer who has long-established patterns for writing (go ahead and say it, I’m a creature of habit and set in my ways) but the process turned out to be about the same as how I approach my other writing projects. I came up with a “What if” idea, noodled on it, researched it, sketched out some plot points, and created a rough outline before jumping on my computer—which is done with extreme caution since Duke, my golden tabby and sometime editor, likes to cuddle on the keyboard. 

Q: Tell me more about your other work.

PF: Although I’ve always considered myself a writer, I didn’t complete my first book until after retirement. And since my wife and I had a house full of cats at the time (that’s another story), it seemed only right that my story should be about cats. That’s how the Windrusher trilogy was born. Windrusher, the feline protagonist, starred in each of the three adventure/fantasy novels. There were mystical threads running through the stories, and I found a good audience among younger readers as well as adults. Each of the three books, Windrusher, Windrusher and the Cave of Tho-hoth, and Windrusher and the Trail of Fire, were traditionally published and won at least one award. While writing the second in the series, I had an idea of how to use one of the characters in a separate story. The character was Quint Mitchell, a private detective who played a major role in that book. Since I was reading a lot of mystery/suspense and thriller novels, I decided I’d give it a try. Writing as Parker Francis, I wrote my first Quint Mitchell Mystery, Matanzas Bay. As an unpublished manuscript, the story won the 2007 Josiah W. Bancroft Award, and was named the Book of the Year in the 2009 Royal Palm Literary Awards competition in the pre-published category. I’ve since written the second in the series, Bring Down the Furies, which won the Gold Medal in the Florida Authors & Publishers Association’s President’s Award Competition. As Parker Francis, I’ve also published the novella, Blue Crabs at Midnight featuring Quint as a young teen, and the short story collection, Ghostly Whispers, Secret Voices. And I digitally published two writing booklets based on some of the craft workshops I’ve done.

Q: Tell me more about your short story in the Prometheus Saga. Why did you pick that episode in history?

PF: For some reason, one of my first thoughts about the Prometheus character was the literary monster Frankenstein. I recalled the title of Mary Shelley’s original story was Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. I wasn’t sure how this would work in a short story, and I certainly didn’t want to make the alien humanoid into a Frankenstein monster, but the Frankenstein idea stuck with me, and I began researching Mary Shelley and how she came to write the book. I found a wealth of information online, and couldn’t have asked for a better starting point. The historical truth was as dramatic as any fiction I could make up since Mary and her soon-to-be husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, spent a summer holiday with none other than Lord Byron in his rented mansion on Lake Geneva. During their stay, they read ghost stories and decided to write their own. Mary wrote in her journal that she had a vivid dream the night before they were to tell their stories (it was reported the creative process might have been helped by the copious amounts of wine they drank, as well as the use of laudanum), and in the dream she saw her Frankenstein monster being created. This was wonderful stuff, and I turned our Prometheus character into an attractive Greek servant girl who also doubled as Lord Byron’s lover.

Here’s the story description for “The Strange Case of Lord Byron’s Lover:” Writing in her journal, Mary Shelley recounts a series of perplexing events during her visit with Lord Byron—a visit that resulted in the creation of her famous Frankenstein novel, but also uncovered a remarkable mystery.

Q: What are your writing plans for 2015? What does the new year hold in store for you?

PF: I’m in the final stages of preparing Hurricane Island, the third Quint Mitchell Mystery, for publication. Once it’s published I’ll do a lot of marketing for the book. I also had Matanzas Bay made into an audio book that will be sold through Audible.com. More marketing. If it sells, I’ll convert the other two books in the series. I’m also doing some minor tweaking of the second and third Windrusher books. My publisher and I parted ways after he changed his business model to nonfiction environmental books, and I got my rights back. I’ve already revised the first book and republished it under my own imprint, Windrusher Hall Press, and will do the same with the other two. I’ve also been plotting a collection of themed short stories I’d like to work on, as well as a trilogy of short novels set in the near future.

For more from Parker Francis, check out his website at parkerfrancis.com.
For more info on the Alvarium Experiment and links to all the Prometheus Saga stories, go HERE.