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GVTV: Dorchester Authors Anna DeStefano, Leanna Renee Hieber, Jack Ketchum, Charles Ardai, Nicholas Kaufmann

September 18, 2009 Thanks to volunteer transcriptionist Daniel L. Monson, our latest GVTV video is captioned and posted! A few weeks ago we went to a group reading by Dorchester authors Anna DeStefano (Dark Legacy), Leanna Renee Hieber (The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker), Jack Ketchum (Cover), and Charles Ardai (Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear), all of whom kindly agreed to answer a few questions on camera after the book-signing madness was done. We spotted "Adventures of Gabriel Hunt" author Nicholas Kaufmann in the audience and roped him in as well. Dorchester's fabulous manager of marketing, Erin Galloway, introduces the group and talks a bit about the joys of mass market genre fiction. Full transcript follows the embedded video.


Erin Galloway: Mass market novels are not only wonderful escapist fiction, they're affordable, especially in the economy right now, and they're doing some really phenomenal, ground-breaking work. I think a lot of people focus on literary fiction and genre fiction does amazing things with language, with plot, with world-building, and we were able to bring that to so many readers here tonight with four fantastic authors: Leanna Renee Hieber, doing something really new and exciting with a gothic paranormal romance; Jack Ketchum with absolutely fantastic horror, really exploring the malevolence in humanity; and then we of course have Charles Ardai, aka Richard Aleas and Gabriel Hunt, talking about some wonderful adventure fiction; and Anna DeStefano, really bringing something new to the field with dream theory and weaponizing dreams with an awesome romantic angle as well. So I'm really hoping that the people that came out tonight just see what fantastic worlds lie in genre fiction and are willing to give it a try.

What makes these books different and yet the same is that they all take risks and I think that's what Dorchester is known for. We really like books that don't fit easily in any category—that are sort of outside the box but are the book of an author's heart. That's what we pride ourselves on doing and I think we do it successfully. I think these four authors are great examples of that. Something really struck a chord in them with what they wanted to write about and look how far they've come and look at what an incredible crowd they drew this evening to really talk about what's in their hearts and what they can bring to everyone else's.

Anna DeStefano: I think that the basis of a good romance novel is a relationship that pulls you into a story and makes whatever is happening to the characters feel real to you and feel close to you because we all are in relationships. So writing a supernatural thriller—writing a thriller about psychic ability—is kind of out there for a lot of people so I'm using the romance and the characters' relationships in that story to pull the reader into the paranormal aspect. So it's similar but then I get to break way outside of the box. The pacing gets to be fanatical at times and I get to write about dream theory and a lot of the fun stuff that don't necessarily fit into a traditional romance. So I get the best of both worlds. I get the thriller and the relationship at the same time.

It's interesting that reviewers have reacted to this book differently. It's been called urban fantasy, it's been called romantic suspense, and it's been called romantic thriller, so I think I'm going to keep doing this and just try and—and again—to break out a little more of the boundaries around the story. I have an idea for another set of siblings, another family that could play well with the story, too. So I'm gonna try to make it as big, as exciting, and as thrilling as I can. I love it. I love what I'm doing now.

Leanna Renee Hieber: Well, I had the idea with characters first. And so the characters appear to me and the heroine is entirely white, ghost white—eerie. Not even albino white, even more so than that. She looks just like a ghost. So I asked myself, why is it that she is a ghost, and suddenly all—why is it she is human, but she looks like a ghost, and all of these explanations about the underworld started cropping up in my head and thusly, sort of one thing led to another.But when she appeared to me, she appeared to me in my favorite time period, which is Victorian England, and so it was merging my favorite time period with one of my favorite things to explore, which are these mythicthemes and sort of a reincarnation theme and how all of that tends to come together. And it was surprising how some of the little characters from the canon of Greek mythology justkind of fell into place as the narrative kind of went along. I started with the characters that I lovedand then the rest of this—the rest of these pieces—these mythological pieces just kind of came into play and hopefully it all works.

Jack Ketchum: Well, I start with the characters. I don't start writing until I know who my characters are and what their emotional range is. The plot is actually secondary. The plot can make itself up somewhat as it goes along if I have the characters down. I know the notion, I know the theme, I know the basic thrust of the plot. But the characters, once I create them, they lead me down the garden path and hopefully they lead me the right place. So it all starts with people. I write about people.

I write about stuff that's based on true crimes, amalgams of true crimes—things, people—I'll put together two or three different strange people and make one criminal out of them and then try to make the characters come to life. Essentially what I'm after is the sense that there are very bad guys out there, and we know that, but the important thing is we're good people, and it's how good people survive bad people and how we come through that experience intact and with our souls still working.

Charles Ardai: I think every child who grew up in the 80's always dreamed of being Indiana Jones. This is my chance to be Indiana Jones.
Nicholas Kaufmann: I felt exactly the same way, actually and I don't have his athleticism or his courage but...
[Josh, offscreen: But his rugged good looks, you've got.]
Charles: I think we could both do fine being dragged under a truck. We wouldn't survive, but we could be dragged under a truck.
Nicholas: We'd leave good-looking corpses.
Charles: We are having more fun writing these books, and I can say this with great confidence, than any other books we've ever written.
Nicholas: Yes, absolutely.
Charles: It's your first novel, for one thing.
Nicholas: Well, yes, but you shouldn't have said that.
Charles: Well, they can cut it out. I had more fun writing this than anything else and it is pure pulp fun. So every time Gabriel gets into one scrape or another, I get him out, all I'm doing is throwing him into another. It's a succession of frying pans and fires.
Nicholas: Absolutely. It's been a real joy, just so much fun to write these action-packed adventures.

Charles: The wonderful thing is if you've grown up in a modern world, you are less inclined to throw sexism and racism into the books than you would be if you had grown up in 1880. So I think it probably comes naturally for us not to be insensitive clods.
Nicholas: One would hope. I did try to keep an eye on such things. I have various native tribes in Burma* that Gabriel told me about for this book and I try not to make them seem completely stereotypical or anything like that. Yeah, it's something I try to keep an eye on.
Charles: Yeah, you try to do the best you can to be inclusive and diverse and have a lot of fun at the same time.

_{* Nick told me later that the book is actually set in Borneo, not Burma. Oops.}

Posted by Rose Fox on September 18, 2009 | Comments (0)