Today I'm interviewing my favorite current author from across the pond, David Bridger. His debut release, "Beauty and the Bastard" from Liquid Silver Books, has received such reviews as "intriguing" and "ultimately enjoyable". You can’t know how excited I am to have you here! First off, we’d like to hear a little background on you before we jump into your work.
Thank you, Miranda! I'm thrilled to be here on your new blog, which really is delicious!
I'm a first-time published author who's been working hard for fifteen years to become an overnight sensation. :)
My first love was the ocean. I went to sea almost straight from school (after a fabulous long summer when I was eighteen, playing guitar in a touring rock band out of Liverpool, which mainly involved me losing my virginity and ensuring it stayed lost) and enjoyed various jobs on the wet and bouncy stuff, including lifeguard, sailor, intelligence gatherer, and investigator.
But I always knew I'd come home to write one day. And here I am.
Brilliant. You are most fascinating! So, Let's talk about "Beauty and the Bastard". I have fond memories of when you were trying to name this story! What is it about?
Saul the Bastard is a fallen angel who works as a bounty hunter for powerful urban demon families. Rebecca Drake, a modern day demon princess, is being hunted by dangerous desert demons. When Rebecca’s family hires Saul to protect her, they are both unhappy with the arrangement, but before long sparks fly as they try to resist their strong mutual attraction. For the first time in living memory, Saul has someone to love; someone he is scared of losing; someone the desert demons have marked to be their next sacrifice.
How imaginative! What was your inspiration for these characters?
Saul walked into my mind almost fully formed. That is, in my original vision of the closed-down, privately-tortured, ruthlessly efficient antihero, I saw enough of him to know I had to drop everything I was doing and get to know him intimately right there and then. Next thing was to find a heroine who would be strong enough to balance his strength of character, and place her in serious danger so that her vulnerability would help bring his out. Rebecca answered the call almost fully formed, too.
Privately-tortured... Ruthlessly efficient? I would like to get to know him intimately as well! Do you personally identify with your hero?
Yes. You know, you're the first person who's asked me that, so I haven't even dealt with it myself until now - but, yes, I do.
As you will see from the excerpt I've linked to below, Saul is living a kind of hell on earth. He knows he committed a terrible sin, but the memory of it has been removed from his mind. And he knows his sentence will continue until he has righted whatever wrong it was that got him into this fix in the first place.
He sees his sentence not as a punishment, but as an opportunity to atone for his sin. That doesn't mean he enjoys it, though, because it causes him terrible pain. Saul is a creature of the night, but not through choice. As soon as the sun rises, he is transformed into stone. And he stays trapped like that until the sun goes down again. He maintains full consciousness throughout. In fact, he never sleeps. But he can't move or even breathe while he is in the stone. Every evening, when the stone releases him at sundown, he suffers physical agony while his body starts to work again.
It's this aspect of his life that I identify with. My seagoing days ended when I got hurt, and I came home in quite a bad way. I was paralyzed for two years before I regained any kind of movement, then spent several more years progressing from bedbound to a wheelchair to up on sticks and finally, fifteen years later, to standing unaided on my own two feet again. I still get the pain. It'll never go away. But I wrote Saul's agony from my memories of the terrible time when my active (and very scared) mind was trapped inside a body turned almost to stone by constant all-over muscle cramps.
David, you are quite an inspiration. I'm so happy for how far you've come both personally, physically, and now professionally. Male romance novelists are a rare breed. What is it about this particular Genre that attracts you?
I've always been a romantic. Most sailors are, you know. It's that "called by the brooding sea" thing. :)
So it came as no surprise when everything I wrote had romance in it somewhere, even if it wasn't always the main course.
Do you find it harder to be a male in this industry or do you think it gives you an advantage?
I don't know if it gives me any advantage. Curiosity points, perhaps? But I certainly haven't felt at any disadvantage because of my gender. I've found romance readers, authors and epublishers to be generous, and helpful, and all round delightful people.
Indeed. Tell me a little about your writing process, do you outline and plot out detailed characterizations, or do you sit down and write when the muses dictate?
I do both a little planning and a little pantsing. I live with my characters and let a scene or two play like a movie in my head for a while before writing anything. Then I write those scenes. By that time, ideas for character and plot and all that good stuff are pouring into my mind, and I turn them into a skeleton outline. Just one sentence per scene, usually, and divided into chapters to get a shape for the story. Then I plan chapter 1 in a bit more detail and start writing.
I don't do fast drafting. I tried it, and it doesn't work for me, so I aim to write my best possible draft straight off. That might seem likely to slow the process, but actually it makes the whole thing faster for me in the long run.
Well, you do a fantastic job. Who do you read in your spare time? Who inspires you?
I read enthusiastically in both the genres I write - paranormal romance and urban fantasy - and also enjoy science fiction and a small handful of crime writers. For nostalgia, I return every now and then to my beloved collection of John le Carre's cold war spy novels. Two writers who rock my world with everything they produce are Neil Gaiman and Stacia Kane.
What we all want to know is: what can we look for next? What are you currently working on?
I'm writing another Angels and Demons novella right now. It's set in the same world as Beauty and the Bastard, but features a whole new cast of characters. I love it!
Where can we find your work or read more about you?
My site is www.davidbridger.com and I blog at http://david-bridger.livejournal.com/
Well, thank you so much for stopping by to share your fantastic story with us. You’re definitely someone worth reading, I hope you’ll stop back in when you’re next release is issued.
Thank you for having me, Miranda! I've enjoyed my visit and would love to come back!
No comments:
Post a Comment