author interview Archives - Invisible Ink Editing

Joanna Homer, author of the sci-fi romance Encounter series, lives in London with her husband, her five-year-old son, and her basset hound. In addition to writing, she works in human resources for the NHS.

Since Joanna was young, she’s loved losing herself in the magic of stories, and any free time she has (which isn’t much!) is spent curled up with a book or at the movies.

We interviewed Joanna to learn more about her inspiration, her process, and what she has planned for the future of her series.

Tell us how you conceived of the Encounter series. Have you always been fascinated by the idea of extraterrestrials?

The idea of aliens has always interested me, and movies like Independence Day and shows like Roswell are among my past favourites.

The Encounter Series, however, was originally an idea about a guardian angel begrudgingly tasked with protecting a teenage girl. The bank raid scene with Dray came first, and once the time-freeze happened, the story moved to sci-fi and aliens pretty quickly.

Do you think aliens have been to Earth?

My son has been learning about planets and the solar system at the moment and the sheer enormity and vastness of the universe really is mind-blowing. Whenever I find myself being cynical, I remind myself of how small we are. Why shouldn’t there be more intelligent beings out there who have visited us?

You’ve done a lot of world-building in your books. How do you keep track of all of the different types of aliens, cultures, and histories in your novels?

I’ve created a series bible to keep track of all the history, alien races, locations, and characters. It has been really useful so far and saved me a lot of time. When I finish the series, I may add in some extra/deleted scenes, maybe some character artwork, maps, et cetera, and give all that to my readers.

I also created a glossary for my website, a quick and easy way to remember the names of Aethian words and what they mean.

Your books are a blend of romance and sci-fi. How do you think those two genres work together?

Personally, I enjoy a little bit of romance with all my genres. In my eyes you can’t beat two characters with amazing chemistry. Having relationships face challenges and obstacles makes it all the more exciting.

And if those obstacles happen to be of an otherworldly nature, then the possibilities are limitless.

Tell us about your book editing process.

Once I have completed my first draft I don’t look at it again for a while. My aim is to wait a couple of weeks, but I usually crack before that. I read though the draft and, aside from making some notes here and there, I just read to give myself an idea of how well it flows. Next, I go through and make my corrections and edits until I feel it is in good shape.

Sometimes my manuscript goes through a few beta readers, depending on timescales. Then I hand it over to my book editor at Invisible Ink for a developmental edit to look at the pace, tone, characters, and so on. I always book an editing bundle, which includes a developmental edit, a line edit, and a final novel proofread, as the improvement to the quality of my novels is invaluable. Plus, I learn a bit more from the feedback every time.

Your latest novel in the Encounter series, Alliance, is vastly different from the first two novels in the series. Without giving anything away, it’s fair to say that you took the world you built and turned it upside down. What was that experience like? Was it difficult to do that to Eliza and her world?

I intended for things to go that way right from day one, and I was looking forward to doing it. Yet I was surprised to find that, when it came down to it, wreaking havoc in the world I had created was more difficult than I had imagined. Having your characters operate on such a high level of fear and anxiety without losing impact is hard to maintain, too. But as a reader I think I would enjoy going on the adventure with Eliza.

Any hints at what’s up next in the Encounter series?

Well, the title of the next book is Aether, and, considering how Alliance ended, I expect you can imagine where things are headed, but I probably shouldn’t give away anything else. One thing I can say, though, is that Eliza finally comes face to face with Queen Aylaiana, which will certainly be interesting!

Are you working on anything else at the moment, outside of the next installment in the Encounter series?

Yes. Alongside Aether, I have started writing Dark Fire, a new Urban Fantasy series. It begins when a girl teams up with a couple of demon-hunting brothers in search of the monster who murdered her family. Initially it will be a trilogy, but I have a whole range of books/spin-offs planned in the same world. So far it has been strange yet fun to write different characters and create a different world.

What advice would you have for other writers getting started? What do you wish you had known when you were in the early stages?

Thinking back, the main piece of advice I would give myself is something I still tell myself all the time:

Just write.

I am constantly looking into the latest software that helps writers, or reading up on social media fads, or things I can add to my website.

While this can be helpful, at the end of the day you need content. If a reader enjoys your book they will want to read more from you. You need words on the page, which means you need to set aside time to sit down and write.

It can feel overwhelming at the beginning of a novel, but even if you only do a little bit each day, it all adds up.

You can read Joanna Homer’s Encounter series and learn more about the author by visiting her homepage: www.joannahomer.com. Connect with Joanna on social media via Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Bradley West is an American expatriate who has worked and lived in Asia since 1983. His website, www.bradleywest.net, hosts the True Lies blog, which showcases conspiracies and mysteries featured in his fiction, plus deleted scenes, and book reviews. He also has an author webpage on Facebook at Facebook Bradley West.

West is the author of Sea of Lies (2016) and Pack of Lies, which comes out on October 11th (though you can pre-order now). The culmination of the Lies trilogy, End of Lies, is scheduled for release at the end of 2018.

He lives in Singapore, where he writes, exercises, and drinks red wine on a daily basis.

Your book series centers around a real event: the disappearance of Malaysia Airways flight 370. How did this event inspire you to write this series?

Remember the scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone was hiding in Sicily and saw Apolonia, the village beauty, for the first time? One of Michael’s bodyguards observes to his companion that the boss just got hit by the thunderbolt. That was what happened to me on March 8, 2014—the day MH370 disappeared. Three and a half years later, I’m two books deep into MH370, with many, many other conspiracies addressed as well. The tragic irony is that the actual plane hasn’t been found in all that time. So now I’ll still be able to use MH370 as a subplot of the third book in the Lies series.

What interests you about this genre of novels—conspiracy thrillers?

Shortly after I moved to Asia, I shared a flat with a newly single businessman, and a year later a regional newspaper named him as a senior CIA operative. “What was appearance versus reality?” became one of the core questions of my life.

In business, you’re always trying to infer or deduce the truth from imperfect information. Over the years, I collected stories about weird goings-on, mostly in Asia. Who knew that the secret war in Laos in the early 1970s saw the US drop more tonnage of bombs than in all of WWII in Europe? More recently, we have had regional prime ministers with unexplained billion-dollar bank balances, Osama bin Laden hid in plain sight for six years a kilometer away from the front gates of Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, and there’s still what I would consider a multi-government-led cover up in respect of MH370’s fatal descent. Since the 1980s, I’d had all these unanswered questions bottled up, so when I shifted to writing as a career the first order of business was to research them. If I found a novel suggested by the material, then that would be the natural next step.

Talk us through the process from conceptualization through to edits.

I’m new to writing novels, and as a result my process is also in flux. I started Sea of Lies with a twenty-eight page book outline. That took at least two months after I’d spent three or four months researching the real-world conspiracies featured in the True Lies blog. Outlining proved to be an enormous time-sink, but I’d always outlined before writing a business report, so that’s how I approached the first novel.

Soon enough, I realized that Steve King was right: the characters begin to take on lives of their own. Somewhere early on, maybe chapter four or five, Bob Nolan and his cohorts weren’t sticking with the script. What I’d thought they were supposed to do no longer rang true. Characters that were supposed to end up allied to Nolan ended up enemies, and vice versa. Eventually I threw away the outline and moved to a chapter-by-chapter, modified “panster” approach. The majority of Sea of Lies and all of Pack of Lies ended up written on a Lego-block basis.

I have a quote from a thriller writer written on a sticky on the bulletin board next to my desk. It reads, “Determine what is the worst thing that can befall your protagonist, and then make it happen.” Words to write by!

Pack of Lies was written faster with less waste than Sea of Lies. I’m still using Lego blocks, but abandoned large-scale outlining for an accretive process called the Snowflake method that places more emphasis on characters and slightly less on story.

Bob Nolan is far from the typical action hero. What prompted you to create someone like him?

I created Nolan to be a pure anti-action hero. Modern bookshelves are full of Jason Bournes, Jack Reachers, John Rains and other hyper-capable secret agents. I wanted to write about a younger analog of George Smiley with maybe a little Walter Mitty thrown in. Ordinary readers can pick up my books and say, “That could be me in that impossible situation!” instead of, “I wonder how many years you have to study to achieve a 7^th degree black belt in karate?”

Nolan also has a strong moral compass. He’s not a goody-goody—in fact, he’s a lawbreaker when it suits him—but he tries to do the right thing (at least in matters other than adultery). He shares my deep cynicism in respect of the competence of many arms of the US intelligence community, but never gives up. Being a physically weak man, his survival in these harrowing circumstances is due to a combination of high intelligence and strong support from people who are more adept in martial matters.

As time progresses, Nolan grows in self-confidence and competence. By the time we get to the end of Pack of Lies, Nolan is out of his shell and no longer the introvert we met in Sea of Lies. Nevertheless, you won’t see Bob fighting anyone hand-to-hand or taking sniper shots from a mile away in End of Lies.

What can we expect from Pack of Lies, out on October 11th?

Pack of Lies starts off just weeks after Sea of Lies concluded with a happy ending. The first few chapters take everything good away from Nolan. In short order the action shifts from Singapore to Pakistan before winding up in Sri Lanka. Four threads interweave, led by MH370 and then a corrupt Malaysia prime minister, Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, and Osama bin Laden’s lost years.

**You’ve also got a third book in the trilogy scheduled, End of Lies. How about a sneak preview?**

I’ve got an entire magazine holder full of plastic folders with typed up scenes, handwritten pages for plot lines and ideas scribbled on beer mats. It’s still very much up in the air. We know that Bob Nolan will remain the focus, the action shifts largely to the US, and in addition to finally tying up MH370 we’re going to address the recent history of the Deep State in the US, going back to the 1960s and the Secret Team, and then the more recent incarnations. Nolan’s children are back in the picture, as are his nemeses Chumakov from Russia and Yu Kaili from China. I think you’ll like it, but I won’t know how it ends until April next year.

Any closing advice for fellow novelists?

My best advice is to write about topics you feel passionate about, and then try hard to discover a readership with similar tastes. As is always the case with building a brand, most of the work is done by word of mouth, which always takes time. You need to be in this for the long haul and resist the temptation to buy into the “instant success” hype.