Interview: John Heldt

John Heldt

When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

I knew I wanted to be a writer in grade school, when I was first asked to put thoughts on paper. Many of my classmates hated writing stories, essays, and book reports, but I loved it. I loved the opportunity to create and experiment with words. I didn't think about writing professionally, however, until I started college and didn't consider writing a novel until just a few years ago.

Which authors/works have influenced and inspired you?

Vince Flynn, Clive Cussler, John Jakes, Stephen King, Nelson DeMille, and Nicholas Sparks come to mind. I was a great admirer of Flynn and his work.

How did you get the inspiration for your book?

Books, movies, and my family history inspired The Mine. I wrote the novel shortly after reading and watching The Time Traveler's Wife in 2011. Back to the Future was also an influence, as were A Walk in the Clouds, From Here to Eternity, The Time Machine, Racing with the Moon, The Notebook, and Ray Bradbury's short story, "A Sound of Thunder." I was also inspired by stories about the attack on Pearl Harbor. One of my uncles, a construction worker in Honolulu who later served in the Army Air Corps, witnessed the whole thing from his car.

I wanted to write about 1941 almost from the start, but I wanted to approach that historic year from a different angle. I wanted to cover the months leading up to Pearl Harbor and cover them from the perspective of a civilian time traveler who knew war was coming and wasn't all that thrilled about jumping into it. My protagonist wrestles with difficult decisions, the kind that can only confront someone with knowledge of things to come.

What other projects are you working on?

I recently completed September Sky, the first novel of the American Journey series. In this book, an unemployed reporter and his college-dropout son travel from 2016 Los Angeles to 1900 Galveston — the time and place of one of the deadliest hurricanes in history. Like the five novels of the Northwest Passage series, September Sky will span several genres and offer multiple points of view. I intend to publish it in late December or early January.

Could you talk a bit about your publication process?

I begin every novel with an outline: a detailed, chapter-by-chapter summary of the entire book. I won't write a word until the outline is at least 95-percent complete. I then take three to five months to write the first draft and revise that draft extensively before turning it over to beta readers and an editor. I usually reread the full manuscript three times before I publish. When you produce a work with more than 100,000 words, there are many errors to catch. I do my best to catch them all.

If you could give your main character one piece of advice, what would it be?

Joel Smith is the protagonist of The Mine, the first book of the Northwest Passage series. If I could give him one piece of advice, it would be to remember the idiom, "Curiosity killed the cat." His curiosity gets him into a lot of trouble.

In five words, why should people read your book?

It will make you smile.

Title: THE MINE

Author: John A. Heldt

Series: Northwest Passage No. 1

File size: 537 KB (Kindle)

Formats: MOBI, EPUB, PDF

Words: 90,369

Pages: 286

Sold by: Amazon Digital Services

Genres: Romance-Time Travel, Historical Fiction, Adventure, New Adult

Description: In May 2000, Joel Smith is a cocky, adventurous young man who sees the world as his playground. But when the college senior, days from graduation, enters an abandoned Montana mine, he discovers the price of reckless curiosity. He emerges in May 1941 with a cell phone he can't use, money he can't spend, and little but his wits to guide his way. Stuck in the age of swing dancing and a peacetime draft, Joel begins a new life as the nation drifts toward war. With the help of his 21-year-old trailblazing grandmother and her friends, he finds his place in a world he knew only from movies and books. But when an opportunity comes to return to the present, Joel must decide whether tol leave his new love in the past or choose a course that will alter their lives forever. THE MINE follows a humbled man through a critical time in history as he adjusts to new surroundings and wrestles with the knowledge of things to come.

The Mine on Amazon

Review: Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series

Title: Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series

Author: Tyler Knott Gregson

Page Count: 144

My Rating: 3.5 TURTLES: A very enjoyable read, I recommend you check it out.

Description:

The epic made simple. The miracle in the mundane.

One day, while browsing an antique store in Helena, Montana, photographer Tyler Knott Gregson stumbled upon a vintage Remington typewriter for sale. Standing up and using a page from a broken book he was buying for $2, he typed a poem without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything.

He fell in love.

Three years and almost one thousand poems later, Tyler is now known as the creator of the Typewriter Series: a striking collection of poems typed onto found scraps of paper or created via blackout method. Chasers of the Light features some of his most insightful and beautifully worded pieces of work—poems that illuminate grand gestures and small glimpses, poems that celebrate the beauty of a life spent chasing the light.

Review:

When the publisher approached me and asked me to read this poetry collection in exchange for an honest review, I was thrilled. My blog does not focus on poetry, but I love it and have dabbled in writing it myself. When I first got it I flipped through the pages and adored the look of poems printed on found paper and his photographs are absolutely stunning. I love that the art of his poetry is that it isn't just the words, but the format as well. I also thought that the poems he created from blacking out all but a few words from old books was really neat and produced some beautiful results.

This book was really close to a full four stars, the art of the formatting I just talked about were almost enough to get it there by itself. Even as I'm writing this review I'm still a bit conflicting, but I'm going with what my impressions were as I was reading this collection. There is no doubt that Gregson is a beautiful writer, his poems have a sort of grace about them, but it is the subject matter that I think weakens some of the poems. The collection is not labelled as a collection of love poems, but that is what the majority of them about. I really enjoyed the few that were not love poems, and enjoyed the majority of those that were, but some of them felt a bit too much like they were saying "you're the only one I'll ever love, I can't breath without you". I'm sure some people find this incredibly romantic, and if I'm sufficiently brought into a story where I think those types of words would be appropriate in a story I wouldn't mind. they way they are presented in some of the poems just seemed a bit overly-dramatic to me.

Overall, this is a beautiful book, the type that I'd leave on a coffee table for visitors to leaf through, or that my alter-ego who runs a coffee shop and cafe would keep in her in-store library. Tyler Knott Gregson is certainly up and coming in the contemporary poetry scene, and I would definitely recommend that you at least check out his Tumblr page where he posts his poems individually. I think it is partly his merging of old and new technologies that makes him such an intriguing artist.

Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series on Amazon

Guest Post: Kim Smith

Creating characters that matter: what makes a good character?

This is somewhat a difficult question to ask ourselves as authors, because we create the people in our stories, so we love them all, like children or paintings we’ve made. There are no bad story people as far as the author is concerned. But creating characters that matter and placing them on the page for a reader is the most important thing we do.

Stories are about characters. They are the vehicle that people identify with and want to spend time with. So what makes a good one and how can we know we are hitting our mark?

Three ways to know when you have created a good character:

1. When the paper person (aka character) is one who has real problems that cannot be fixed with a simple conversation with the antagonist, and worse yet, the antagonist is the one with all the aces in their hand. If you make the situation seem real and unsolvable for our hapless hero, readers turn pages.

2. When the character has a serious connection to the problem. I think this is what I like the most about A Game of Thrones series. The characters all face insurmountable odds of differing types, but they are all their OWN problems, not the overall story situation at hand, not just the war and who will win what battle, but the situations each character faces with life on his own terms. And Martin keeps us guessing as to if they will survive them. When our characters face life issues that have no easy way out, it makes a good read.

3. When the reader can turn pages and see the character going from being whipped at every turn to being the victor in the end, it is a satisfying read and everyone will be talking about the great encounter they had with that character. I guess the word conflict is about to pop out of my mouth. Conflict and lots of it will make a character change and grow through the pages of your book and that is the thing that makes us care. If your character is the same at the end of the book as he was at the beginning, then what was the reason for his enduring such trials in the first place?

I could give you a number of examples about books who do this really well in just about every genre. You should be reading widely to see for yourself though.

 Bio:

Kim is the author of An Unexpected Performance, the Case of the Missing Body mini-series, and Ten Tips for Getting that Book Written. She lives in the Mid South region of the US with her hubby and little dog, Tinkerbell.

Book Blurb:

An Unexpected Performance

After clinching lead roles, two high school kids want to perfect their roles to ensure winning their teacher's prestigious drama award. Both of them desire to escape their current situations at home and think that the era of their play was a cool time to be alive. But when they are flung back to that time, they discover that their drama training might be the only thing keeping them alive! 

An Unexpected Performance on Amazon
Facebook: Kim Smith, author
Twitter: Kim Smith (@mkimsmith) | Twitter
Website: KimSmithauthor.com welcomes you! - Kim Smith, author 

Guest Post: Marsha Cornelius

What if . . .

My ‘what-if’s started at a young age.

What if my body shrank and I got sucked down the bathtub drain?

What if Barbie had really short hair, and it was blue?

I had my share of pubescent imaginings—okay let’s call them curses. What if Susie Jackson had pus-oozing poison ivy blisters all over her arms and legs like me? Then I bet Bobby Schindler wouldn’t think she was so cute.

Thankfully, I moved on past the petty jealousies, and by adulthood, my imagination was focused on fiction.

I loved books like Contagion, and Hot Zone. I sat transfixed at movies like The Andromeda Strain and Outbreak. But they all had one thing in common. The contagion was stopped—and I was a bit disappointed. I couldn’t help wondering what if they couldn’t stop an epidemic?

This was the basis of my first novel H10 N1. (A play on H1N1, but much worse.) My two main characters, Rick and Taeya, are survivors of a deadly flu pandemic. The make their way across the country, fleeing cutthroats and dodging marauders as they search for a safe haven.

Next up? Cryonics. I read that Ted Williams had his body frozen, and several questions came to mind.

I was told as a child that once a heart stopped beating, our soul left our body. Ted Williams’ heart certainly was not beating in that frozen body, so it only stood to reason that his soul was out there somewhere. But where? Certainly not in heaven, because it has to come back once he’s thawed out.

What if his soul is just hanging around with other dead people’s souls? That question inspired my second novel, The Ups and Downs of Being Dead. And a lot more questions, like if my character Robert, who is frozen, meets Suzanne, who was killed in a car crash, can they fall in love?

Ever since Rhett swept Scarlett off her feet, threw her on the bed, and showed her what a good man could do, I’ve been hooked on romance. But so much of the genre is based on unrealistic characters. The man is always ruggedly handsome, (and usually filthy rich.) The woman is stunningly beautiful, (and occasionally she’s filthy rich.) Come on now.

What if I took an average young mother—her husband abandons her and their two small children, she loses her job, falls behind on her rent, and gets evicted—and I throw in a homeless guy who’s been drifting ever since he came back from Vietnam. 

If these two could overcome their challenges? Now that’s a love story. I called the book Losing It All.

Still drawn to speculative fiction, I based my last novel on our country’s obsession with pills. I’m over-weight but I don’t want to exercise, or eat right, I just want to take a pill. My child is disruptive in the classroom, and the teacher suggests he needs a pill to settle down. We take pills to stay alert, to relax, to sleep, to wake up again. Where will it end?

I created a future where college-aged Luna takes pills for everything: to concentrate, to keep a positive attitude, to maintain her weight, even to stifle her sexual desires. She decides to see what her life would be like without all of these supplements, and kicks the habit. But as she falls in love, and her emotions run wild, she discovers that sometimes Habits Kick Back.

And my next book, coming this spring? What if women ruled the world?

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

After working for fifteen years as a cafeteria manager in an elementary school, Marsha Cornelius turned in her non-skid shoes for a bathrobe and slippers. She now works at home, writing novels, acting out scenes with her cats, and occasionally running a Swiffer across dusty surfaces.

All of her books can be found on her author’s page:

http://amzn.to/SLhv6O (US)         http://ow.ly/k96eE (UK)

Spotlight: Calvin the Cookie Maker

Blurb

It’s December in Wisconsin and not quite Christmas, which means it’s already cold and snowy and all Calvin Greene can think about is Christmas. After watching a cooking show on TV, he is inspired to make a glittery Christmas Cookie book that he tries to share with his parents, but they’re too busy to pay attention. Adding to Calvin’s holiday blues, two of the best players on his hockey team want him to play with them in the Pond Hockey Tournament, but his best friends, Perry, who’s not a very good hockey player, wants Calvin to play with him, too. What should Calvin do? A snow storm is coming, so who knows if the Pond Hockey will even happen? Life is crazy and Christmas is around the corner. Will Calvin and his family and friends have time to take a breath and enjoy the holiday season?

Available now at Amazon in Kindle

Soon to be available in Paperback at Amazon and at the publisher

My information is as follows

Blog

Twitter: #CAkervik

Blurb about the author 

Caroline Akervik has been an avid reader since the fourth grade when a nun named Sister Dorothy introduced her to the magical world of Narnia. Caroline read anything and everything and was a particular fan of Marguerite Henry's horse stories and, especially, of King of the Wind.

Most of her early adulthood was spent as a professional horsewoman. She competed through the Grand Prix level of Dressage and worked with and trained many horses. Then, Caroline was blessed with a wonderful husband and three incredible children. Spending time with her own children motivated her to return to school to become a library/media specialist. 

 Now, Caroline shares her love of story and of the magic and power of words with the children she teaches In her own work, Caroline seeks to write from the heart and to transport her readers and give wings to their imaginations. Caroline writes for young people, but agrees with C.S. Lewis that "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."