Interview with Loren W. Cooper Author of Crosstown
Have a seat and grab an insulated mug. I’ve got hot chocolate, hot cider and coffee. Choose your pot, they’re labeled. Pick your choice of a Snicker-doodle, Chocolate Chip or Peanut butter cookie from the plate. Yep, I baked them myself. Lets find out a little about Loren and see what CrossTown is all about. Thanks for joining us!
I have a few questions for your Loren, lets start with what defines you as an author? As a person? Are they one in the same?Always try to set the bar a little higher. Choosing when and where that is appropriate can be difficult, but I’d say it is the same as an author and as a person.
What inspired this particular story?A horror scene done badly made me want to write a scene I felt more appropriate. The story grew far beyond that, but that’s the first seed.
What secret do you use to blast through writer’s block?Work on more than one thing at a time. If you’re slowing on a project, turn to a different project.
Who is your favorite character of all of the books you’ve written and Why?The White Wolf and permutations of that character, the acerbic wolf-spirit, crop up again and again. That character archetype runs deep for me, obviously, so I’d probably say he’s my favorite.
What inspired you to write?I’ve loved stories and storytelling as long as I can remember. Eventually I had enough stressors I turned to writing as a release, and then it became something more.
How long have you been writing? Over 20 years.
Did you tell friends and family that you were writing a book? Or did it take a while to come out and tell friends and family you were a writer?I was through my first mss before I let anyone see a few of the first pages. After that I had a few regular readers.
Do you see yourself in your characters? Absolutely. Not just the main character. All those voices are facets of our own personality as writers.
What do you want your readers to take away from your books?The best fiction entertains and informs, enlarges our world to some extent. If I succeed there, I have succeeded completely.
Where do your story ideas come from? If they come to you in the middle of the night, do you get up and write them all down?I will jot down lines, images, ideas at any time of the day or night if it captures me.
Do you find it easier to write from a male or female point of view? Why? My main characters tend to reflect my perspective, within limits, so male is generally the primary point of view, but the world is a better place for having strong women in it, and so are stories, whether the main character or not.
Why do you write what you write? Contemporary, paranormal, suspense, etc. I write my interests, which tend to be history, mythology, and science and technology. F/SF is a natural follow on to that.
If writing is your first passion, what is your second? Martial Arts.
What do you like to do when you are not writing? Martial Arts, spend time with family, cook, motorcycle, read.
You’ve got a time machine, a cloak of invisibility, and one hour. Where would you go, and what eavesdropping would you do? It’s a where and when, of course—and such a tight timeline. I’d probably like to go back and see Stonehenge being built and used. Probably wouldn’t understand the language but could get a slice of insight into use and building techniques.
A peek between the pages of CrossTown:
Roads and streets run like veins and arteries through the beating heart of CrossTown. Each runs through all manner of distant and not-so-distant possibilities.
There’s a theory in modern physics that posits a universe for every decision we make. Each time we choose, right or left, high or low, vanilla or chocolate, we split into separate universes. A vanilla me here, a chocolate me there, a rocky road with pistachio me somewhere else, and some poor lactose intolerant me further down the line. The dominant me is my subjective reality. In CrossTown, the probable mes collapse into the dominant wave, but all those wandering Ways continually wash other alternate lives, lives meant to be lived in CrossTown, up on its jagged shores.
The names of roads are choices; the turning and branching of roads are choices; roads are physical manifestations of their builders’ decisions…
Everywhere, every place and every time where man or something like him has lived, roads run into one another, branch, disappear here and reappear over there as if they were quantum tunneling. They run, meet, part, cross again, and form a bewildering Mandelbrot set of linked probabilities.
Beware the road outside your front door, for it is both old friend and passing stranger.
All those choices, all hooked together, comprise a vast sea of possibility. A knowledgeable traveler can ride the currents in that sea to unimagined destinations…
CrossTown is the crossroads of probability.
Views: 58
Posted in Authors' Secrets Blog and tagged CrossTown, fantasy, Loren W. Cooper, Science Fiction by Tena Stetler with comments disabled.