Friday, May 4, 2018

Interview with Kate Rauner, author of Glory on Mars



Today I'd like to welcome author Kate Raune. Tell us a little about yourself.



I grew up in a house full of books and magazines, and learned to read before I started school. That turns out to be a huge advantage, because all the teachers thought I was really smart. I've always loved science, solving problems, and finding out how things work, which led me to degrees in chemical and environmental engineering.



Most of my career I worked in America's nuclear weapons complex. I've held plutonium in my (gloved) hands and not too many people can say that. I was lucky enough to be at the Rocky Flats Plant when the Cold War fizzled out, and was on the team that demolished the site. Now it's a wildlife refuge.



Today I live on the edge of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, USA, with my husband, cats, dog, and some elderly llamas. This is where I started writing seriously. I have seven science fiction novels published, a collection of short scifi and fantasy reads, and three collections of science-inspired poetry.



Sounds like a fun place to live. Kate, what got you into writing?



On and off in the past, I'd tried writing, but never kept any of my early efforts. A friend tricked me into my first novel. He got me writing posts for his blog. Then he wrote a children's fiction book with his grandkids, just for fun, and asked me to edit. Seeing it on Amazon was a thrill. When National Novel Writing Month rolled around, he encouraged me to try and helped edit the result into a reasonably decent book.



The effort was fascinating and it seems I'm not terrible after all. But there's a lot to learn, so I wanted to try again. I was hooked.



Is there something you learned from writing your first book?



Many things. How to write every day, how useful long walks are to jogging ideas loose in my head, and how much of a mess of repetition and contradiction I could make when I had no plan. It took forever to morph that first draft into an actual story. But it made me want to get better.



Which do you prefer: print books or ebooks?



Print books last longer and I want some favorites on my shelves forever. If you've ever had a computer or e-reader crash, or tried to transfer files to new formats, you know how ephemeral ebooks can be. But I enjoy reading curled up in a chair or outside, where my e-reader is perfect. I can read one-handed at any angle and the pages don't flutter in a breeze. So I'm a convert to ebooks for most of my reading.



Ebooks definitely have their advantages! I probably read about 50 percent ebook and 50 percent print. I still love the book in my hand. Share a short excerpt from your novel



This is from a near-future colony on Mars. Roboticist Emma Winters is on Earth, about to leave on a one-way trip to Mars:



She entered at the back of a stadium-style control room, behind two dozen stations each arranged like an individual cockpit, and scanned the room for Filip Krast, the stocky MEX mission control lead. The front row, on the lowest level, was fully occupied as always by controllers running the satellite systems that orbited Mars - communications, tracking, weather, and solar power. On the second level technicians were installing upgrades for Emma's Settler Three mission.

Filip hurried across the top level, past the special projects stations, and ushered Emma to a glass-walled cubicle against the back wall.

"There's been a... an incident at Kamp. This isn't easy to watch." He steered her to a video console in the corner and hit playback. "There's been a death."

Emma sat up straight and felt her fingers go cold.

On the vid, the colony's doctor, Ingra, was stepping through a door in the habitat module. The lights were dimmed and the audio feed was silent except for the hum of life support systems - it was pre-dawn at the settlement. She crossed to the airlock, slowly rotated the door handle, and hopped through.

Filip tapped the console, switching to the playback from inside the airlock. Ingra sealed the door and looked up at the imager.

"By the time this transmission reaches Earth, I'll be gone. I can't stay here any longer. There's a huge old oak tree beyond that little crater. No one can see it, but I know it's there. I'm going home. Forgive me." She walked past the surface survival suits hanging on the wall and reached for the airlock control panel.

Emma felt a knot tighten in her stomach.

"She can't get out without a suit, can she? The airlock pumps are slow; she'll pass out before the pressure is low enough for her to open the outer door, right?"

Filip pointed back to the screen.

Ingra stepped to the outer door. With a pull and twist, she opened the emergency decompression valve. Red lights began to flash and ice fog clouded the imager lens. Ingra fumbled with the outer door and it opened. With her last lungful of air, she pulled the door open and disappeared into the darkness.



Tell us a little bit about your main characters



The story follows Emma, a robotics engineer inspired to follow her creations to Mars. She's hard-working and tough, and dedicated (as anyone taking a one-way trip must be), but understands what she's left behind. Her crewmate Claude is more conflicted. He couldn't turn down the chance to study Martian geology firsthand, but regrets leaving his university job and especially his wife behind. They discover something's terribly wrong at the colony, but are determined to survive and explore the Red Planet.



Is this a stand-alone novel or part of a series?



Glory on Mars is the first in a series. Each book is set in the same colony but a different generation, so you can read any of them as stand-alone stories. Each follows one settler's ambitions and hopes as they struggle with the hostile planet, and sometimes hostile fellow settlers, to survive and build lives on Mars.



Currently, what are you working on?



I just published a box-set collection of my five Mars colony books, so I'm outlining and researching for a new trilogy. I going to Saturn's moon Titan next, and a brother and sister will be the main characters. It's exciting because I love learning about the Saturn system and thinking up adventures and disasters for them to tackle. Also scary, because I don't know what the books will look like yet.



It's always fun to start a new project. And you must feel a sense of accomplishment to finish a series.  I don't know that feeling yet. I have one more book to go for my Vampire trilogy. Do you have people read your drafts before you publish? How do you select beta readers?



I definitely get others to read my drafts once they're finished as best I can by myself. I've joined the on-line critique group Critters, which has workshops in many genres and posts excellent articles explaining how to make comments helpful and appropriate. Readers volunteer based on a sample chapter or two. We're all writers trying to help each other, and I've always been pleased with the critiques. It's nice to receive comments via email, so I have privacy as I read them. I want to be able to occasionally pound the desk or dance around the room.



 I've met a couple other scifi authors over the years to swap beta-reading with, too.



I think it's important to find beta-readers who read and enjoy the genre you write in, and even then, comments are most useful from people who like your premise and basic story. Beta-readers always improved my stories.



What was your biggest challenge when writing? Did you have any writer’s block? If so, how did you work your way through it?



It's a challenge to create believable characters - people to care about and who make sense as they navigate through a story. It's easy for me to lose track of time in my books, so I keep notes on dates for each chapter.



When I get stuck, I find walking in the forest helps me unblock. Having notepads handy is helpful, because ideas can pop into my head any time of day. Or night! I keep a pad at my bedside because otherwise I lay awake trying to memorize an idea (which never works, because ideas at night are like dreams and they fade.)



I know what you mean. I always regret not writing an idea down the moment it strikes!What was your writing process like?



I start by reading whatever I can find on the setting I've chosen. I need to have a picture in my head of where I am. With each project, I've spent more time creating outlines. That helps me avoid inconsistencies and lets me go backwards to add foreshadowing, so the wonderful ideas I get later in a story make sense. It's much easier to do on an outline than in a narrative.



I like to write in the mornings for an hour or two or three. Research any time of day. Afternoons work better for editing, social media, and reading. I read mostly science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction. Reading is part of the writing process because, as Stephen King says, “the more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself.”



What are your hobbies aside from writing, if any?



I'm a volunteer firefighter, which qualifies as a hobby since I don't get paid. People living in rural areas like mine must be self-sufficient, and healthy retired folk are vital. I'm our department's secretary and involved in setting up training, as well as being a firefighter myself. There are only a thousand people in my district, but ninety-three square miles including a lot of forest, so we fight more wildland fires than house fires.



With my husband, I enjoy hiking - something we've always done. Since moving to New Mexico we've added bird watching and a little geology to our interests.

Wow Firefighting! Kate, you are braver than I am.  Thanks so much for sharing with us today. Don't forget to check out Glory on Mars Book 1 and the rest of the Colonization Books.  I don't always find the time to read the authors I feature on my blog, but I have read book 1.  If you like Sci-fi this is a great story, and I am anxious to see what happens in the rest of the series.  Happy Reading!!


https://www.facebook.com/kate.rauner/
https://twitter.com/katerauner
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChqS1s_yfuN3VCJNYXH1-pg
Or visit my blog at https://katerauner.wordpress.com/
Or my Amazon author page at https://www.amazon.com/Kate-Rauner/e/B00DMEEMWS/

Find my Mars colony series on Amazon at http://a-fwd.com/asin-com=B0791GKGMX 
or start at Book 1 on other favorite stores https://books2read.com/GloryonMars 

No comments:

Post a Comment