Monthly Archives: August 2021

An Interview with Author Victoria Murata

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Author Victoria Murata is a former middle school teacher who has published three novels since retiring in 2002. In a break from her historical fiction releases, she embraced the fantasy genre with her newest book, The Acolyte: Magicians of the Beyond (March 2021). You’ll find Vicky on Facebook and her Amazon author page.

What is your elevator pitch for The Acolyte?
Danica reads minds. It’s a problem for her because she’s been branded as “weird” by other kids at her high school. So, when Phil offers her an exciting opportunity to live with like-minded and gifted people in a place called the Beyond, she seizes it. But every opportunity comes with challenges. Her new home is literally out-of-this-world, and her training is rigorous for a mission she’s certain she’s ill-equipped. Once she leaves the Beyond and walks through the portal into another world, she discovers her lack of training is the least of her problems. The wicked magician Dumone knows her secret, and he’s been searching for her. When he finds her, he will do everything in his power to obliterate all she holds dear and destroy her.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
It’s a new genre for me. I’ve previously published two historical fiction novels, so writing fantasy required a different mindset. All fiction needs imagination, but fantasy requires the writer to venture into unknown territory and create worlds that don’t exist, with problems that have never been faced. It can be a lot of fun, but I believe the crafting must be carefully done to create a world that the reader will not only believe but will appreciate and enjoy.

How did the book come together?
I know this is overused, but the idea for this novel came from a dream which I don’t even remember any more. There’s been so many transmutations of this story since the beginning. But the main characters are still true to the original idea. All three of my novels have taken three to four years to write. When I write, and I don’t write every day, I begin with reading over the previous day’s writing. I edit and revise (I can’t help it!) and that usually gets me in the groove to continue and see where I’m taken. I’ve read often about the editing mind vs. the creating mind. For me, it’s harder to switch from one to the other when writing fantasy. Writing fantasy requires me to be in a stress-free and imaginative state of mind. If I’m distracted with a problem, it’s hard to switch it off so that I can write freely.

Who are your main characters and why will readers connect with them?
Danica is the main character in The Acolyte. She’s sixteen when she’s visited by a strange woman who tells her she has a destiny to fulfill. It all sounds wildly intriguing and mysterious to Danica whose life is underwhelming. She takes the plunge and follows this woman to a new and very different world. I think readers will connect with her because she’s a very human young “magician” who questions her abilities and wonders how she will ever be able to accomplish her mission. Another important character is Philomena. She’s a birthless, deathless magician who keeps worlds from destruction by the Others. She has a team of Coverts with unique powers who help her. Danica is the newest. She’s the acolyte, and if she’s successful on her first mission, she’ll be the next Covert.

Describe your main setting and why you chose it. Do you consider the setting a character in the book?
The settings are characters in a way because the details evoke emotions and feelings that the reader can relate to. The main setting is the Beyond. It’s a place created by Philomena where people live who have been transported from other worlds because their worlds were destroyed. In the Beyond there are five communities, one which houses the Coverts and all the people who were recruited to become Coverts. They are talented and magical, and they all constantly train for when they are called to embark on a mission. In the Beyond, they are trained not only in tactical offensive and defensive areas, but in languages, cultures, history, and skills that they need for their special objectives which all involve aiding or saving a world from interference or destruction by the Others. Another setting is Lymonia, a world in another dimension that appears Medieval but is so much more. Here is a place that is concrete and ephemeral at the same time.

What was the most difficult aspect of world building for The Acolyte?
It was fun building the worlds in The Acolyte. The Beyond is so mysterious, so full of surprising and quirky elements. At the same time, it’s familiar in an imagined paradise kind of way. For example, there’s a labyrinth in the Beyond that offers so much more than a calm and meditative walk to its center. As Danica advances deeper in, she finds clues to her past and her future that scare her and propel her forward to her mission. Deciding how fantastical I wanted to go was difficult. I personally love fantasy when there aren’t too many “out-there” elements. As a young adult, I loved the Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart. It was set in a time I love, and it was just fantastical enough for me to believe it. Fantasy is such a huge genre and deciding on the elements that I appreciate in fantasy—and that I wanted to include in mine—was challenging.

What did you enjoy most about working on this project?
My stories are character driven, and I loved seeing Danica come to life. I loved seeing her decision-making process, sometimes fear-driven, and the consequences of her choices. I so enjoyed seeing her come to terms with her action and her failure to act. Part of Danica’s training in the Beyond for her future mission involves an obstacle course designed to test a candidate’s decision-making process, but this is no ordinary obstacle course. She must constantly remind herself that “nothing is as it seems.”

Of the three novels you’ve written, which one was the most challenging?
Historical fiction is easier to write in some ways. It involves much research, but the characters get to navigate through the challenges of the day, and they grow with each one. No matter if it’s historical fiction or fantasy, the characters have complex histories and complicated personalities. The challenge in all my writing is showing how the characters handle the problems they encounter. I enjoyed creating characters with strengths and weaknesses by showing the angst and the joy, the doubt and the certainty. The absolute fear. Nervousness. Indecision. And having them come out better for it in the end.

Looking back to the beginning of your writing/publishing career, what do you know now that you wish you’d known then?
I did not hire an editor with my first novel. I had friends edit it. I had beta readers. I revised it numerous times. With my second novel, I hired an editor. She was fantastic. I was amazed at how much she found that needed “fixing.” I hired her to copy edit, not do developmental editing, but she did a little of everything, and she suggested eliminating a chapter that didn’t move the plot forward. I will never again publish a book that hasn’t been thoroughly edited by a professional.

What does a typical writing session look like for you?
I’m not a disciplined writer. I don’t keep a schedule. I have no rituals. This is probably why my books take years to write! The characters are always in my mind. I’ll go for days wondering how they’re going to handle a situation. The story is always percolating. Then I’ll get inspired and I’ll sit down and write. Sometimes I’ll write for hours. Sometimes just for a bit. Sometimes the words flow on to the page. Sometimes I do a little writing and a little thinking. I don’t revise as I write—I leave that for the next day.

Do you have a message or a theme that recurs in your writing?
I believe coming of age happens at all ages. We’re always growing and learning from life experiences. We never know it all or get it right every time. I’ve learned many lessons in my own life, and I’ve seen how repeated mistakes and lessons not learned have a ripple effect with far-reaching consequences. Most of my main characters are women. They all have devastating life events and challenges that bring them to their knees, but they come out triumphant in the end because they face their problems and overcome their sometimes crippling difficulties.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I am working on book two of The Acolyte series. I’ve introduced a new character who is intriguing to me. He’s a ranger who was brought to the Beyond because of his superior tracking abilities and his amazing attention to detail. He knows the forest, the animals, the plants, and he never loses his way. He suffers from paranoia, so he doesn’t trust people, and he doesn’t go out of his way to socialize. He will be invaluable on the next mission to another world where there are strange doings in the forest outside of the capitol city.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



Author Update: Cornelia Gamlem

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Author Cornelia Gamlem founded a management consulting firm (the Gems Group) to offer HR and business solutions to a wide variety of organizations. She has used her expertise in employee relations and human resources to co-author five business resource books with colleague Barbara Mitchell. Their newest release is They Did What? Unbelievable Tales from the Workplace (September 2020). You’ll find Cornelia at BigBookofHR.com and MakingPeopleMatter.blogspot.com, as well as on Facebook and LinkedIn. Read more about her writing in SWW’s 2019 interview.

What is your elevator pitch for the book?
It’s unlike any other business or HR book you’ve ever read. It’s been described as 50 Shades of Gray for the workplace.

What do you hope readers will take away from it?
There were a number of lessons we hoped to share. First, so much of dealing with employee workplace behavior occurs below the surface—solutions to problems are not obvious to everyone. Second, managers’ and HR professionals’ jobs are not easy. There is not one solution to similar problems. Dealing with human behavior is not black or white. Finally, for the HR reader, some of these issues occur more often than they might imagine, and we’re providing insights to different approaches to addressing them.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
My coauthor and I had always written pure nonfiction. We wanted to write a compelling book that presented stories rather than case studies. So, we chose the genre of creative nonfiction. For us, that meant we had to borrow elements from fiction writing—character development, story arc, suspense—and learn how to do that. The book is a series of short stories set against a fictitious backdrop.

Tell us how the book came together.
I was teaching an HR course at a local college when a student asked how you learn employee relations. My response was with practice and experience. When we finished our first book in 2011, The Big Book of HR, I had the idea to write this one—and our journey began. We interviewed many of our HR and business colleagues about the most challenging situations they had encountered, and a pattern of issues began to emerge. Of course, we had our own experiences to draw upon and add. The issues became the focus of each individual chapter. The challenge came with the writing and editing cycles—we’ve lost count of how many edits we did before we had a good working draft. In the meantime, we were approached by our publisher to write three more books along with a second edition of our first book. Those occurrences kept putting the project on hold, but we used these times to continue learning the craft of writing. When we tell people we took nine years to write it, we quickly explain we published other books during that period.

How was the work on They Did What? divided between you and your co-author?
This was a different approach for us. With our other books we divided the work according to our respective areas of expertise then stayed out of each other’s way. For They Did What? we divided the chapters initially by the issues, but then passed our completed drafts to each other for review, discussion, editing, rewriting. At the conclusion, we couldn’t honestly tell you who wrote what. We are lucky in the fact that we respect each other’s expertise and opinion and were both very open to critique from each other.

Would you like to share one of your favorite misbehaving tales from the book?
The cover of the book has a picture of a conference table. That’s because conference rooms and tables play prominently into many scenes—meetings and a place to gather for discussions. Employees, however, often take advantage of this space to engage in, shall we say, shenanigans, and we were surprised at the number of erotic stories we heard that involved conference tables.

What was the most rewarding aspect of putting this project together?
Learning more and more about writing and the publishing industry. We took the train from Washington DC to New York City every summer to attend the Writer’s Digest Conference and attended classes at the Smithsonian about writing. Of course, the highlight was finally finishing the book.

What marketing techniques have been most helpful to you?
Without a doubt, podcasts. We’ve been guests on quite a number of them over the past year, reaching diverse audiences. Since we write business books, we’re very active on LinkedIn, and that activity has attracted attention which has led to more invitations for podcasts, webinars and other on-line activities.

When you tackle a nonfiction project, do you think of it as storytelling?
Absolutely. The art of storytelling is emerging as a management competency in the business world. People learn from stories. It’s such a powerful way to communicate information. That was one of the reasons we looked to the genre of creative nonfiction to write this book. All the stories in the book are based on actual events, but to preserve confidentiality, we had to be creative, such as combining stories from several individuals with the same theme. The lessons, however, remain the same. In all of our books, we integrate scenarios to illustrate lessons and keep the reader engaged.

What is the best encouragement or advice you’ve received on your writing journey?
We were sitting in a session at the Writer’s Digest Conference listening to Hallie Ephron talk about backstory. “Write it out and keep it in a separate file. Then, layer information in when the reader needs to know it.” A communal light bulb went off. It was so clear that backstory is important, but you have to know how to use it.

What writing projects are you working on now?
The Big Book of HR – 10th Anniversary Edition. That book will be released in January 2022 and is the third edition. We’ve submitted a proposal to our publisher for a follow up to The Manager’s Answer Book, one that would focus on people management issues.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



Author Update 2021: Loretta Hall

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Freelance writer Loretta Hall is a space enthusiast and an award-winning author of nine nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles and reference book chapters. Her newest book release — this one co-authored with Wally Funk — is Higher, Faster, Longer: My Life in Aviation and My Quest for Spaceflight (Traitmarker Books, October 2020). “Traveling the world, shattering glass ceilings, and always keeping one eye on the stars, Wally relentlessly, joyfully reached higher, flew faster, and traveled longer on her way to space.” After waiting six decades to fulfill her dream, Wally Funk finally made it into space on July 20, 2021 onboard the first human flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard. You’ll find Loretta on Facebook, her Amazon author page, and several websites including AuthorHall.com. Visit WallyFly.com and read more about Loretta and her writing in SWW’s 2016 and 2018 interviews.

What do you want readers to know about the story you tell in Higher, Faster, Longer?
The book is Wally Funk’s memoir, for which I did the writing. I think Wally is a great role model for positivity and perseverance. She continued to pursue her lifelong goal for sixty years despite repeated roadblocks. She shrugged off each dead end and looked for a different path. And in the meantime, she developed an outstanding professional career and enjoyed an adventurous life.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
I wanted the book to be Wally telling her own story. That meant we collaborated closely on the content of the book. There was one interesting anecdote I would have liked to include, but she didn’t want it included. On the whole, though, it was a very enjoyable experience.

Tell us how the book came together.
I met Wally when I was giving a talk at a national conference. The talk was “Women Space Pioneers of New Mexico,” and she was one of the people I spoke about. She came to hear my presentation; and at the end, she came up and gave me a big hug. We quickly became dear friends. I kept telling her she should write her amazing story, and finally she asked me to help her do that. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas, so I made a couple of trips there to interview her and examine her photo albums, scrapbooks, and other memorabilia. We also spoke on the phone numerous times. Each time I drafted a chapter, I mailed her a copy (she doesn’t do email), and we discussed any changes she might want. The process took longer that I had hoped, because my husband’s health failed during that time. We published the book about two and a half years after we started working on it.

What is it about Wally Funk or her life that made you pursue writing her story?
For the past dozen years, I have focused my writing primarily on human space exploration and its history. One of the aspects that I find particularly interesting is women in space. Wally was one of a small, elite group of women who first challenged NASA to consider women as astronaut candidates at the beginning of its manned space program. Even though they didn’t succeed, they laid the groundwork for other women to finally be accepted and prove their worth as astronauts.

What are some interesting facts you discovered while doing research for the book?
When I started the project, I thought it would just be about Wally’s efforts to fly in space. Then I discovered what an amazing, barrier-breaking career she had in aviation as well. Back in the 1970s, aviation was definitely a male-dominated field, but she became the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. She made huge contributions to aviation safety.

Do you have a quote you’d like to share from Higher, Faster, Longer?
One of Wally’s favorite sayings is “throw it a fish.” When something goes wrong and she has no control over it, she “throws it a fish” and moves on in a new direction. She learned the expression from the Taos Pueblo Indians when she was growing up, and it has served her well. Now I find myself using it sometimes!

What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
There have been two favorite parts. One was getting to know Wally on a very personal level. She is a wonderfully caring and capable person. The other was making her story accessible to the general public. I think its inspiring, and it’s a fun read because she is such a fun-loving woman.

What writing projects are you working on now?
We are working on a children’s version of Wally’s story. She loves to encourage youngsters to learn about STEM subjects, and we hope to inspire students to follow their dreams with enthusiasm and determination. Now that she has finally flown to space with Blue Origin, the story will have an ending that will be more satisfying, especially for children.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
People who are interested in Wally’s life story can find more information at WallyFly.com. I update the website monthly with new photos and anecdotes. The announcement of Wally’s participation in the Blue Origin flight created a flurry of interest in her story. I was grateful that we had a website up and running long before that flurry occurred, and that it was one I could update quickly and easily.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kathy posts to a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



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