My interview with the Blasters and Blades podcast is now live. You can listen to it on Anchor FM or on YouTube:
My wife listened to it earlier and said to me, “You talk too much,” which is true. I was nervous during this interview, and when I get nervous, I talk.
During the interview, we mostly talked about Rags and Muffin, which, it just so happens, would make a nice Christmas gift for the geek in your life.
Check out my author interview in Book Reader Magazine, where I discuss Rags and Muffin:
Although I don’t like the term, the book is a “deconstruction” of the trope of the child hero who goes to school during the day and saves the world at night. Although almost invulnerable both physically and emotionally, Rags has surrounded herself with other children who aid her crime-fighting efforts. Unlike Rags, those children get the full brunt of their enemies’ brutality. In most stories of child heroes, the villains are buffoons, foolish adults who are so silly that even children can beat them. I wanted to change that formula by pitting kids against genuinely evil and ruthless adults who are perfectly willing to do the most atrocious things to children. For that reason, Rags and Muffin is not only a story with a lot of action and excitement but also a tale of horrifying abuse. Balancing those elements, being careful about what is shown and what is not, and being tasteful, was extremely difficult.
Fiona of the blog Author Interviews graciously interviewed me, and you can go read the results.
Here’s a snippet:
Fiona: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
I am wary of messages in fiction. Many years ago, I was tangentially involved with several authors in the Christian Booksellers’ Association; there are some talented storytellers in that set, but I got a sense that they tended to elevate message over entertainment, often to the detriment of their work. I drifted away from them, I think, because of a difference in artistic vision. In the broader publishing industry, we are now seeing something similar to what I saw in CBA, what with the heavy emphasis on social justice or inclusiveness or whatever you want to call it, where message is emphasized to the point that craftsmanship gets neglected.
The reader is free to find any message or none in Jake and the Dynamo. I am sure some of my opinions crept into the text, and anyone who wants to try to tease them out may do so. But the only messages I had firmly in mind were along the lines of, “magical girls are awesome,” and “being a teenager sucks sometimes.”
In regards to other business, I am soon leaving to join Family for a Christmas vacation. I’ll be taking my computer, of course, but my plan is to spend as much of my spare time writing as possible. I am ambitiously hoping to have a complete rough of the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo by the time my Christmas break is over.
While I am at it, I’d also like to do some maintenance on the blog. I habitually use an ad blocker, and it shows an embarrassingly high amount of blocked content on my own site, for reasons I know not. I’m going to try uninstalling and reinstalling the plugins and then deciding which ones I can remove, to see if I can cut down on this blog’s code, which is much heavier than it has a right to be.
I’ve also been gradually learning about HTML and CSS, mostly for my job, and I’d like to try my hand at possibly adding some schema.org markup, which I know Google search likes. There are plugins for that, of course—but they probably stand a good chance of adding yet more trackers.
I’d like the code on this blog to be better than it is, but the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t do everything I’d like, and adding the code by hand takes so dang much time.
