What inspired you to write a novel about human/animal
hybrids and spliced DNA?
A.S. Oren and I wanted to do a series together. She actually
called me on the 4th of July weekend. Anyway, we started talking
about different things we might be interested in writing. There were quite a
few ideas thrown around, but most we had already formulated plots for and had a
bit of claim to them being our own ideas. We knew we needed to pick something
neither of us had any ideas for yet. A few months before we were talking about
stem cells and how they can help to cure some of the effects of CP. During this
discussion, I brought up that if abortions were going to continue to take place,
then the embryos should be used for stem cell research and other things that
can lead to saving/improving lives. I’m taking a big risk by saying this, but I
am 100% anti-abortion. (Note: I don’t consider removing the baby in
life-threatening scenarios to be abortion. I’d also be fine with any woman
having the baby removed from their body and put into a machine that finishes
the gestation period. Therefore, I’m also 100% pro-choice, but only if the baby
isn’t killed when being removed. Unfortunately, we don’t have that level of
technology. Two hundred years into the future, I believe we will.) The whole
abortion thing plays into the creation of splicers, but the reader won’t know
exactly how until later in the series.
One of the reasons why I bring up the whole abortion thing
is because A.S. Oren and I have completely different beliefs and opinions about
tricky subjects. Somehow we’re still able to be best friends and have lively
debates that others would murder over. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration.
Anyway, for the original idea, we thought of having women donate aborted
fetuses to their government. This suited her taste because it fits with
pro-choice, and it suited mine because the babies got to live.
The whole splicing aspect came from an article she showed me
about a goat being spliced with a spider. This splicing resulted in the goat
having silk in its milk.
Pulling both of these old conversations together, we created
The Splicing Project. Once we had the
“creature” picked out, we developed all of the characters together, their
government, and a bit of the general setting and concept for the first three
episodes.
Did the subject require you to do any research?
There was a ton of research. Not as much as I did for The Newcomer, which involves mythological
creatures, but there was still quite a bit. I researched all of the animals we
wanted to splice our characters with. I found out their natural abilities and
some of their unique features. From there, I shared my animal research with
A.S. Oren, and we started figuring out how we would incorporate some of those
features.
A.S. Oren is very interested in issues like global warming
and pollution. She watch a documentary about what the world would be like one
hundred years from now if everyone continues living the same way. She shared
this video with me and that kind of served as our initial world building
platform.
There’s also a lot of military concepts in the book. I draw
from my Navy experience to write those.
You have both an adult and YA version of this novel. What
made you decide to go that route?
In all honesty, I finished writing my portion of the first
episode and it just didn’t feel right. We had both decided to write it as a
reverse harem-erotic-paranormal-dystopian-futuristic-thriller with LGBT
aspects—that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?—but overtime it made me sick. I thought if
I published that under my real name my parents would disown me, or I wouldn’t
feel comfortable being in the same room with them knowing that they knew I
wrote it. They are BOTH ordained ministers though they weren’t when I was
growing up. I wasn’t all that comfortable with writing it either. In the end, I
made the choice to stay true to my beliefs. Lucky for me, A.S. Oren understood
and we made the split on good terms. She actually noticed I was having doubts
and assured me we’d still be best friends if I decide to break off and do my
own version.
We were both very invested in our character and the story we
had created, so we decided to both carry on with the project and write the
stories as if they were taking place in alternate dimensions.
How do the two versions differ?
A.S. Oren’s steps into the realm of erotica, but that is not
the only difference. Her female lead has a shy personality and is highly
intelligent. All you have to do is think of a toned-down mute version of Velma
off of Scooby-Doo and you’ve got Velma from The Splicing Project. Her world is
also different. The first episode is very similar in that the splicers have a
challenge to complete, but the buck stops there.
My series is YA Reverse Harem and my female lead is Daphne.
Did you catch it yet? Yep, that’s right, another Scooby-Doo character. When we
were developing characters, we didn’t have names for them, so we named them
after stock characters that shared a similar personality. In the end we had
gotten so used to calling our female leads Daphne and Velma that they became
Daphne and Velma. I can’t imagine them being called anything else.
Was it difficult to write the same book in different
versions?
More like time consuming. I had already written the first
version, so I had to rewrite everything but the challenge. That doesn’t seem
like much, but there were a lot of chapters that were removed. In the original,
I only wrote in Daphne’s POV. I also had them return to the compound after the
challenge. Daphne witnessed Octavius being whipped and then passed out, only to
get kicked in the side by Richards. When she woke up, she was in a medical
unit, where she used her blood to heal Octavius’ wounds. Then they got to pick
their names outside. After that, she lifted a tile in the bathroom that led to
a large air duct. Octavius led her to a secret room, where he would reward her
for healing his wounds by having sex with her. (Daphne is part bonobo, a
species in which women rule and settle disputes with sex.) He wound up tell her
how he had been locked up in that room for years and had to kill a guard to
escape. Then they had sex—twice! One time involved shackles. You do NOT see any
of that in The Challenge. I wrote about three versions in different tenses
until I decided to write the series in first person present with multiple
POVs—something I have NEVER seen done before. I know there are books with two
POVs, but I used eight in the first episode.
As far as keeping A.S. Oren’s version and my version
different, well, that’s easy. I simply don’t tell her what I’m writing (**Cough
Cough** I’m horrible about not spilling my whole dang outline.) and she doesn’t
tell me what she’s writing. We have discussed a few things, and I will tell you
that our sequence of events and the directions we take with certain characters
are completely different.
You wrote this novel from the viewpoints of several
characters. What made you decide to do
that rather than focusing on Daphne?
I had wrote it all as Daphne in the beginning, but that was
when Velma was still in the book. Velma knows things that Daphne doesn’t
because Daphne has not grown up with the other splicers. I need some
information to be presented to the reader, and I can’t do that when Daphne
doesn’t have a clue.
I tried writing it in third person. I really, really tried,
but it felt so bland to me. I was having a hard time editing it. It was boring
me. I even tried writing in third person present, which is odd sounding in most
cases. Nothing seemed natural.
I finally settled on using multiple POVs. This story goes in
several directions. There will be a kidnaping, a betrayal, and a possible
separation of the group. I don’t want to establish any one character as the
MAIN character because they all have an important role in what happens in the
story. I like to have rounded characters and give them all backstories. Their
history makes them seem more realistic.
I’m sure people had a bit of trouble with the first episode.
I jumped right in and none of the characters knew each other except for Griffin
and Quillon, but you saw how that turned out. They also had really SHORT
chapters with only bits and pieces of physical description or insights. They
are there if you look, I promise.
People also had trouble with the lack of dialogue tags. I
used as few as possible on purpose. If this weren’t the first episode, I don’t
think anyone (skim readers) would have had any trouble. The person speaking is
always indicated, I just don’t use “he said” every time. I had a reason. A
whole bunch of “he said”/”she said” slows down the action, and I wanted to make
the reader slightly uncomfortable and nerve-racked. That is how the characters
were feeling, and I wanted the reader to experience that. I think the shorter
chapters also made it harder to put down. So, if anyone was wondering if that
was done deliberately, it was.
I will not be using every character’s POV in each and every
episode. Some you may go three episodes without having their POV. I will not
let certain characters be the POV for certain scenes, because I don’t want to
reveal too much too soon. For instance, if a character flat-out decides he’s in
love with Daphne, I won’t use his POV until I want the reader to know that. I’m
restricting in order to build suspense. I bet I sound cruel, don’t I? I also do
that because romance is not the center focus. If anything, the government is,
and this series is a bit of a satire of what this world could be like two
hundred years from now.
Also, the chapters will be much longer in the coming
episodes, and the number of POVs used per episode will dwindle down (maybe even
to one character if it’s feasible).
When reading the novel, I felt like, despite the multiple
viewpoints, Daphne was the main character. Do you agree?
I will agree that Daphne was the “SUN” for this episode and
all the other characters were “PLANETS”. It just kind of happened that way. I
knew she would be in the group whose challenge I showed, so it made sense to
introduce her early and have her throughout the whole episode. If you noticed,
most of the things that happened in this episode were either witnessed by her
for the first time (the shooting) or were done to her. She was the recipient of
most of the action.
This will be true for The
Selection as well. You will have four consecutive chapters with Daphne,
followed by one chapter each for the boys. Then you get another chapter with
Daphne and that dreaded cliffhanger. Everything in the second episode will be
resolved, but the cliffhanger will make you want the second. You’ll find out
more about Red’s and Blacky’s plan for Daphne, and it will keep you on your
toes.
OH MY GOSH, y’all are going to be on the edge of your seat
for episode three. It’ll start off calm and slow and then BAM BAM BAM!
I will release a collection of the first three episodes in
April. It’ll be called The Escape. I
plan on it being a full length novel, which I will release in print. The first
episode is by far the shortest in length. The next two may have as much as two
hundred pages each—plenty of time to get to know the characters who don’t seem
all that important just yet.
You have these young people facing deadly obstacles in order
to survive. Was this idea inspired by other works with similar themes?
Subconsciously, maybe. I will admit to loving The Hunger Game, Divergent, and X-men.
There are correlations, but I wouldn’t say mine is a copycat. I wanted to have
Daphne thrown into this life or death challenge. Compared to the other
splicers, she has been pampered all of her life. She didn’t know the splicers
were treated like soldiers and lived with structure. She didn’t know that the
guards were corrupt or that the government didn’t care for their safety. She
had no idea that they would want to weed out the weak.
I laughed so hard when I read the blurb for the book Taken by Erin Bowman. Basically, all the
males get taken on their 18th birthday and no one knows where they
go. I was like “I did that!”, but mine’s a bit different. They don’t get taken
on their 18th birthday. All of the eighteen year olds get taken one
day a year. I guess you could say it’s like The Reaping in Hunger Games, but instead of two tributes, everyone is a tribute.
Luckily, more than one person can survive The Challenge.
I’m afraid The
Selection may seem like Divergent.
There is a tunnel involved along with a selection process. By the time you make
it to episode three, The Mission, the
similarities should stop. Everything that happens during The Challenge and The
Selection is a lead in to The Mission.
What made you decide to write each character's POV in first
person?
They all have a unique backstory, some which I have yet to
deeply explore, that contributes to the overall plot. I feel detached when I
write in third person. I prefer to get into the character’s head and see what
drives them.
Can you give us a little hint about what's in store for
these young characters in future installments?
There will be a lot of character development, especially in
Quillon. He was kind of a woman hater in the beginning of episode one and
slowly came around to respect Daphne. Like people say, old habits die hard, so
don’t expect them to be all lovey dovey just because he had a moment of
understanding. I think a few people thought they were detecting a bit of
instalove in episode one. Sorry, guys.
There will be a budding romance (a few) over time. Lots of
fighting, mostly about leadership. There are some very strong personalities
namely Arrow, Daphne, Quillon, and Octavius in the group. If you put a whole
bunch of type A’s in a room they tend to try to outdo one another and fight for
dominance. You’ll get to see that here and will probably want to slap a few of
them.
There will be some challenges to come. Some are physical and
some are psychological. The psychological ones will mold the characters.
AND three new characters, but I don’t plan on using their
POVs. When we get to episode four, I’ll try to drop down to one, but there will
be a different character every episode.
Is that a little hint? Or do you want some oneworders?
Braided whip
Tunnel
Parrott Fur
Probe
Venom
Crash
Tree
Thank you Heather Dowell for that insight into the world of the Splicers. If any of my readers are interested in checking out the first installment in this interesting and unique series, you can pick up Episode One: The Challenge, for .99 cents on Amazon.
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