Taking a short break

by Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

Hi guys! I'm sorry to disappoint you today, but I've just come off a very busy holiday season, I'm working on three different books, and I just haven't had a chance to devote time and grey matter to a blog article for today.

We have family scattered over three states, and everybody does stuff at different times, beginning at Thanksgiving. See, there's my in-laws, who do lunch. My family, who does dinner. Oh, and my sister's birthday is Thanksgiving weekend, so we have to celebrate her birthday while everyone's in one spot. And traditionally we all decorate my parents' Christmas tree too, because again, all in one spot. All that makes for one very long, very eventful, very fun day.

Plus my husband, graphic artist and award-winning magician Darrell Osborn, scheduled several really cool shows for us to attend -- such as the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at the Opryhouse in Nashville TN. And the Mythbusters Behind the Myths Tour.

So we did a lot -- a LOT -- of traveling. Pretty much all day trips, but still. It was a good holiday season.

Meanwhile, I'm working on, like I said, three different books. Four really, if you count the one I'm editing. Okay, there's five I really need to work on. Six, if you count the one that's at the publisher's editor right now. (Yeah, I am a busy little -- LOOK! SQUIRREL!)

I'm working on the Cresperian Saga book #4, which will be titled Heritage. I've kind of decided that, well, I'm already the THIRD author to have worked on the series, maybe it should be one of those "shared universes" things, like the 1632 Series (into which I've been invited to venture, by the by, just as soon as I can dig out from under). So I've invited another author to come in and co-author with me, and he's agreed. More about that at a later date, but it'll be fun, and it'll help provide my co-author with some good experience and training, and most importantly we will get the current Cresperian War story arc tied up. I don't plan on closing off the book with a hard series ending, because I think this might be a fun series, like I said, to be a shared universe, and just maybe my co-author and others might want to kick up their heels in it.

The book at the publisher's editor is the fifth Displaced Detective book, entitled A Case of Spontaneous Combustion. I swear to you that the story is contained in one volume this time! I'm currently waiting for edits to come back from the publisher, then I'll have to review them and incorporate them. The core of the mystery involves a tiny village in England, on the Salisbury Plain, which is wiped out in an apparent mass spontaneous combustion. Holmes is, naturally, brought in to investigate, and hijinks ensue.

I'm writing book 6 in the same series, and it's going to be called Fear in the French Quarter. I'd had an idea for a story in the series, but I was going to set it in a castle in Europe someplace, much later on in the series sequence. But back in October I was a special guest at a science fiction convention in greater New Orleans, called CONtraflow. It was HUGE fun, made more so by getting to play tourist while we were there. I got to try alligator (I love it!) and visit Cafe du Monde, and prowl the French Quarter with friends (one of which had been a Tulane student, so knew the area well), and generally enjoy myself. (I already knew I liked crawdads, gumbo, jumbalaya, and beignets.) So I'm walking through the French Quarter at night and suddenly in my head I start hearing Holmes and Skye talking, making comments about the place, and I realize they're having their own adventure -- someplace out there in the multiverse where they exist and are real!

I started writing that story the next day.

It's already completely plotted out; I just need to get it into the computer in readable form. It's basically a ghost story -- since NOLA is rumored to be the most haunted city in the world, it seemed an even more natural setting than an ancient castle, for that sort of thing.

Book 7 in that same series was originally going to be book 6, until the plot bunny of Fear in the French Quarter hit. So I just slid it on back -- it works even better that way, I think -- and so I've started A Little Matter of Earthquakes. Actually had started it early in 2013, but I'm still working on the science to make the central concept doable, aided by my friend and grad school mate, physicist Dr. James K. Woosley. (He makes a great partner to brainstorm scientific concepts, being a huge SF fan himself.) So sliding it back a bit, like I said, works well, not only in terms of my work load, but in terms of the flow from book to book of the series. What's it about? Eh, just what it sounds like: seismic activity is ramping up in the Pacific Northwest. The problem is that it's even occurring in places that, geologically speaking, it shouldn't. When an old friend of Skye's from their graduate school days is killed in a phreatic eruption, the Holmeses attend the funeral, and discover the unusual nature of the seismic activity.

And Book 8 is that book I told you I was editing on, but haven't submitted yet. The Adventure of Shining Mountain Lodge was written before I even finished Book 5, but it requires some building of history among the characters. It's finished, I just have to tweak it periodically to account for things that get included in 5, 6, and 7. A wetback is found in the middle of a snowdrift in January in Rocky Mountain National Park, half-starved, barely dressed, filthy and battered...and dies almost before they can get him to the hospital. Of radiation exposure.

The book that I need to be working on is the sequel to Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281. It's in work...slowly. It's called Escape Velocity. And it picks up pretty much where Burnout left off.

But you're going to have to be very very patient with me for this one. It took me over a decade just to write Burnout, because it hit so close to home. I spent over two decades working console for space missions of one sort or another, much of it for Shuttle and Station, and my main focus was getting the science while protecting the astronauts. When I lost a friend aboard the Columbia disaster, it devastated me. It was all I could do to keep working on Burnout. It was written, but it needed polishing, see. And I find that Escape Velocity is just as hard to write, and for the same reasons. So it comes in fits and spurts. I plan to try to get it completed in 2014 though. Because I've also developed a concept that my partners and I believe will ensure that no one else has to die like KC did.

I'll tell you about SPEARED next week, if y'all are interested.


-Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

Fantastic Blog Hop!

I'm joining the Fantastic Blog Hop! The Cereal Authors group is doing a blog hop, with events and giveaways on Facebook at the Fantastic Blog Party! The party runs today and tomorrow, and we're supposed to answer some trivia questions about ourselves, so hang on!

-Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

Name a famous author you've met, nearly met or wish you'd met.

   I met Ray Bradbury briefly at the World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta in 1986. I had just bought a large plush stegosaurus in the dealer’s room and was carrying it under one arm through the room, when Mr. Bradbury, with his handler, came down the aisle from the other direction. He halted his handler in mid-sentence, left his side and made a beeline for me, when he started petting my stuffed dinosaur and discussing the creatures with me! Turns out he loved dinos. It was very cool.

   At that time, I wasn’t a writer. Since becoming a writer, I’ve met numerous authors, including New York Times bestsellers, like Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Larry Correia, Eric Flint, John Ringo, Travis S. Taylor, Sarah Hoyt, and more.

What are the weirdest things a character ever did in a book?

   Oh me. I suppose it depends on your definition of weird. I write science fiction; in the regular world, most of it would be weird!

   Falling in love with and marrying an alien, maybe? That happened several times in the Cresperian Saga. 

   Then there’s always deciding you’re going to infiltrate Area 51 while being a fugitive yourself, which happened in Burnout.

Who really wrote the book, you or your characters?

   Initially it was, more or less, the characters. It’s been said that I write very cinematically; well, that’s because I watch the events play out on this little screen inside my eyelids, and I just write down what I see, hear, and otherwise observe. But as I’ve gained more writing experience, I have gotten rather more control over the plot, at least. Now I tell the characters what I want them to do, and they tell me how they’d do it!

How many books have you started and how many have you finished?

   There isn’t a book that I’ve started that I haven’t finished, sooner or later. Some are currently in work; there’s 4 of those. There’s a couple of things that I wrote some years ago that are derivative works, and I’m dinking around with “filing off the serial numbers,” as Sarah Hoyt puts it, and making it fully my own original work. But I do that around working on other stuff, because I don’t know if it’ll work or not, so I don’t want to waste a bunch of time and energy on it, when I have other stuff I know I need to do.

What's the hardest part with writing: the writing of the story or the editing?

   Oh, the writing, by far. In general editing is fairly easy for me. I’ve done so much editing over the years – theses, government papers, reports, etc. – I actually free-lance as an editor and like it. I love writing too, but the creative energy that I have to pour into it renders it much harder than editing.

If one of your books could be made into a movie, which would you choose and who would you cast?

   Do I have to choose?

   Well, my first book, Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281, was a film in my head, no lie. And there have been numerous attempts to translate it to film, but so far it hasn’t gone through. We do keep trying.

   But when I first wrote it, I could see actors playing the roles. Tommy Lee Jones was Crash Murphy; Hugo Weaving was Dr. Michael Anders. Hugh Jackman was Steve Blake, Harrison Ford was Jet Jackson, James Cromwell a NASA manager…on and on. I had every major character cast in my head. It’d never get made like that; too many stars, too many schedules to coordinate, too much money. But in my head, that’s what they look like.

How many books have you written in total?

   Well, back when I was first trying to get published, I wrote an entire series that was intended to become a movie-to-novel franchise. Unfortunately I was never able to sell it due to the issue of rights being tied up. I currently have 22 books (some contributions to anthologies and the like) in print, with a 23^rd coming soon. If I add in that unpublished series and a few other novella-to-novel-length stories I wrote but never published, I’ve probably written close to 40 books.

Where did the last one take place?

   The one that’s just gone under contract is Displaced Detective book 5, A Case of Spontaneous Combustion, and it takes place in London. The one I’m working on now, Displaced Detective number 6, is called Fear in the French Quarter and takes place in New Orleans.

   Then there’s the sequel to Burnout, called Escape Velocity. It, like its predecessor, roams over half the planet.

   And the fourth Cresperian Saga book, Heritage, takes place partly on Earth, partly in space, and partly in the Cresperian system.

Besides writing, what’s your favorite hobby?

   Oh um, that’s a hard one. I read – a LOT – and I like to shop. I like researching stuff – yeah, I really do. I can lose hours to the search for information, learning new stuff the whole time. But then, what does one expect of a scientist, I suppose. I used to do a good bit of live theatre, but that requires a bigger block of time than I have to give these days. Still, it’s how I met my husband: we both auditioned for and were cast in a play in college.

What is your genre?

   Well, I tend to cross genres a lot.  Science fiction mystery, for the most part, I’d say. I usually throw in some romance (because romance occurs in real life – people do fall in love, and I want my characters to be as realistic as possible), and a judicious dash of suspense/thriller.

What’s your Country of Origin?

   Born and reared in the good ol’ USA.

What are the names of your two leads?

   For which books?

   For Burnout, it’s “Crash” Murphy and Mike Anders. For the Point series, it’s Ray and Samantha Brady. For the Cresperian Saga, it changes from book to book. For the Displaced Detective series, it’s Sherlock Holmes and Skye Chadwick.

Don't forget to stop by The Fantastic Blog Party and enter to win a free book!

-Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com