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.
