Hey all you fantastic BOD members, thanks for reading! Check out this week’s author spotlight. I’m very excited to introduce and interview A.J. Leavens. Welcome!

Hello! Thanks for having me. It’s been fun getting to know all the cool folks on the blog and the Facebook group, and I’m humbled to be chosen for the spotlight.

A.J., why don’t you tell us a little about yourself and how you got into writing?

I’ve been reading forever. I loved the escapism that books provided. When I was 12, I fell in love with Piers Anthony’s Xanth series and Terry Brooks’ Landover series. I read them as fast as they came out. When I hit Grade 8, I wrote a story that took my favorite characters from both series and melded them into one book. It was full of magic and crazy powers. It really got the bug going.

By the time I hit high school, I was hooked. I took English all the way to Grade 13 – it’s an Ontario thing – and was even selected to be part of a new writing development class that they were piloting with a poem I wrote entitled My Father, The Tree. Somewhere, my dad has a copy of that, framed.

I prefer to write fantasy and sci-fi, as it allows me to use my over-over-active imagination, but I’m slowly working on a mystery novel also. It’s a long work in progress that keeps getting put on the back burner.

I really enjoyed your first book in the Meechan Chronicles. Can you tell us where you came up with the setting for Death’s Twilight?

Thanks! It means a lot to me when someone who is a fan of the genre enjoys Slade’s world. In the opening scenes of Death’s Twilight, the reader is introduced to the world after the bombs, and it mentions that George Washington found a Risk board in the Smithsonian.

My wife and I were playing Risk with my teenaged sons, and I looked at the game board and asked, “What would it take to get the world to actually align itself like this?” The first answer that popped into my head was Nuclear War.

I took a picture of the game board and used that as a basis for the world, circa 2308. I wanted an elitist society to exist (The Emissaries), but with a Big Brother feel to it. That’s how IRIS came into being. Meechan Chronicles Trivia Fact: IRIS is SIRI’s really evil cousin 😉

You have some awesome fighting scenes in Death’s Twilight. Do you have personal knowledge of hand to hand combat, or are these scenes results of intense research?

A little of both. I took Karate and Aikido as a youth, and those lessons have always stayed with me. Hotaru’s washroom fight scene was written based on some of the teachings I received. Her training session when she is praised by Lao Shi was the result of weeks of studying Tai Chi and gymnastics.

I also watched a lot of fight scenes in movies and on YouTube, especially ones that were specifically hand to hand. I’d watch them in slo-mo, backwards and forwards to make sure I was getting the feel of the fight, and how bodies would react to the things the characters were doing to them.

There is pretty clear message about the power people have in law enforcement positions, and how they go about administering the rule of law. What do you want readers to take from reading Death’s Twilight?

I hope that people will see Death’s Twilight for what it is – a story. I find it quite amazing that some of the things I wrote into the book (postal mail being finished by 2015; Canada Post announced they are stopping home delivery in January, and Crimea being an independent state) actually coming into existence. Even more amazing considering I finished the book in 2012.

There have been some recent developments in the world that highlight (to extremes) what can happen if the wrong people have power – or the right people have power but choose to wield it wrongly. What I want readers to take away from Death’s Twilight is that yes, there are corrupted people (systems) in the world. There always have been and probably always will be. But if the people who know about it are willing to stand up and do something about it, there is a chance for hope and peace.

Can you tell us where Slade’s story is headed in the next book? And when will we be able to read it?

Slade, Brooks, Nathaniel, and Hotaru are off to stop IRIS. Brooks has been keeping a journal that contains clues to help them. Along the way, Slade meets some new friends, makes more enemies, and discovers something about himself that he thought he had lost. They travel around the North American continent in their search for the things they need to stop IRIS.

I am 60ish% done with the first draft and have a goal of releasing the final product February 17, 2015. Folks who can’t wait that long can get a serialized, beta version of the story via email starting this month. I’m also hoping that these folks will be additional sets of eyes to point out any glitches I’ve missed. (Link)

Now tell us some fun random facts about you. What kind are your go-to books to unwind?

Random? Hmmm…I own a still sealed Beatles Blue Album (my all-time favorite band). My favorite gum flavor is cinnamon. I have CDO (which is like OCD, but in the correct alphabetical order).

I love books that can make me laugh out loud when I read them – not necessarily from comedians or the like, but just from the happenings in the book. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series is one that does it every time. So is JR Ward’s Fallen Angels series. My go-to genre though? Vampires. Anything with vampires. Absolutely love vampires. I have ever since I met Louis and Lestat in Interview With the Vampire.

Do you have a favorite band or type of music you listen to help you write?

It completely depends on what I’m writing. Music is a very important and motivating thing for me. When I’m writing a chase scene or a fighting scene, I need something upbeat, almost techno. If I’m writing something sad or moving, like when Slade reset Sarah or the scene between Hotaru and Kozel, I listen to somber music, usually a piano concerto or similar. I draw from the music and try and put that emotion into the scene.

For Death’s Midnight, though, I was lucky enough to stumble onto a local indie band (The Neutral States) whose music fits the changing world near-perfectly, regardless of what type of scene I’m writing. They definitely have more plays on my iPod than any other in my writing playlist.

A.J., I love Slade’s boomstick as a weapon of choice. If you lived in a society where it was completely normal to carry such a weapon, what would you choose and why?

I would have to say a sword – samurai or 17th/18th Century. There is something elegant about a sword – from the skill needed to craft a sword, to the training needed to properly wield one. I’m not talking about hack and slash. Think The Three Musketeers and The Last Samurai, not Highlander. Graceful, yet deadly.

Truthfully, though, if I could find a way to create a Boom Stick like Slade uses? I’d be all over that.

Thank you so much A.J. Leavens, for sharing your time and gift of writing. It has been a pleasure to get to know you, and to learn about the fun world you have created in The Meechan Chronicles.

Thanks to you for the opportunity! I’m open to questions from any of the members. Would love to chat and get to know you all better. Feel free to connect!

A.J.’s Links: Website  |  Facebook  |  Twitter
Death’s Twilight:  Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  | iBooks  |  Smashwords

ABOUT A.J. LEAVENS

A love of reading as a kid allowed me to explore worlds with dragons, spaceships, robots, and antique cars. I’ve always had stories in my brain, and I’ve finally had the time to let them out onto the page. I’m a father of 4 who’s been married for 15 years. My kids may or may not be inspirations for characters in my works.

Today, Band of Dystopian’s Angie Taylor interviews Ann Christy, author of YA Dystopian, Strikers. Check out their chat below and enter to win a copy of Strikers!

It is such a pleasure to interview you and help the BOD members to get to know you better. Thank you for letting me spotlight you!

Super glad to do it! I see the BOD names and icons every day, and I’m just as curious about them!

Ann, you have written many books. Tell us when your journey to be a writer first started.

It all began with Hugh Howey. No joke. As a naval officer of over 28 years, I’m very good at telling myself stories out in the middle of the ocean to help the night watches move along, but I’ve never written them down. So, I guess I had some experience with world-building in that way.

Then I read WOOL…the first one…not too long after it came out when the little Amazon recommendation came up. I was hooked. By the time the third episode of WOOL came out I had the story sort of germinating in my head. Still, I dallied. I finally wrote to Hugh as the SHIFT episodes finished coming out, told him what I wanted to do and he gave me permission.

After that, I wrote the Silo 49 series, which remains very popular. I was amazed. Why would thousands…then tens of thousands…of people read my stuff? Baffled was I. So, I kept writing and I learned a whole lot in the doing of it. I’m hooked.

Tell us a little about your most recent book, Strikers, and the different meanings the title carries?

Strikers is absolutely from my heart. That is the name given to those who escape Texas. Most do to avoid getting their fifth and final strike, because that brings the death penalty. How it came about it from reading real life news.

I’m a news junkie, but most interesting to me are the comments on news stories. I started to notice that stories about repeat offenders of petty crimes, perpetual ne’er-do-wells and such called for fairly extreme things. Like, giving them tattoos so people would know what they were or giving them so many chances and then giving them the death penalty because they were just plain of no use…that sort of thing.

It made me ask myself the question. What would happen if we actually did that? We’re human and we’ve shown over and over that no matter how carefully or how good our intentions are, our systems get misused and go haywire.

Strikers is that dystopian future. I built the world very carefully and Karas, our main character, doesn’t know the origins of her world so we…as the readers…don’t either. It will play a role in future books for sure, but Strikers is a full novel with a full story. No cliffhangers, no sequel bait. I hope people enjoy it for what it is.

It’s a book about escape, about growing up in bad circumstances and yet shining, about realistic folks who make brave decisions and take enormous risks for others, about loss and finding hope. And there’s love because they are teenagers and well, falling in love is a huge part of that!

Almost the entire book is a chase between the good guys escaping the bad guys. It creates such a fantastic intensity. How do you think this method of writing allows for Karas, Jovan, and their friends to develop?

I suppose because I’ve had some experience with motion and tension in long term situations. Deployments on ships are a long tense action (depending on what you’re doing) and doing Humanitarian Assistance after a disaster is much the same. It flavors life with an intensity that is lacking in any other situation. There’s less caution, less reserve. You get to see who people really are. I wanted to incorporate that and let these young people strip themselves of artifice. I think they did pretty well at that. I think it revealed both weakness and strength and allowed for them to care for each other despite it all. That may sound all deep and artsy-fartsy, but I think it made it fun as well.

As a reader, Strikers has a very realistic feel to it. What inspired the setting and circumstances the characters live in?

Google maps! Nah, real life travel and lots of research. But the world-building was difficult because of the wider story and the wider actions that brought Strikers-world to be as it is. (I can’t give all that away!) So, *where* I would put the land of Strikers was based on current laws but also on weather patterns and all sorts of physical parameters. So, Texas was the winner, but no offense was meant to Texans!

What can you tell us about your future writing projects?

I have a slew of stuff on the docket. A novella (that started as a short story…yikes!) called Yankari is coming out soon. It started as a story with the theme of super-powers but morphed into something else. I have another sort of double length short story (again with the length!) coming out sometime soon called Sedge. I like it, very intimate. Really only two characters, but they are stuck in the middle of big conflict not of their making.

Strikers book two is being written, but those are big books with a lot of hard work involved. It will be a while. I’ve gotten some reader email asking for a prequel on how the Strikers world came about. I have that history, but I think putting it out before book two will spoil it some. Look for those in the next six or seven months, if nothing else goes nuts, that is.

I’ve also got Silo 49: Roughneck coming within the next 75 days. Again, too much reader email for me to not do it. It takes us from just before they went into the silos until right after. I love, love, love this character!

And finally, a collection of my short stories from the anthologies I’ve been in, plus some new ones is scheduled for sometime soon. Is that enough? ::laughs::

Now for the random questions. Which of your books would you like to see made into a movie, and who would you want to act the main parts?

No fair! I want them all to be! Seriously, Strikers would be fun and I have a pinterest page that has a collection of photos on it. Go look and tell me…hot or not? Yes or no? Send me pins of your ideas for who they should be. http://www.pinterest.com/annchristy792 For Jovan…I’m thinking JD Pardo. Anyone agree?

Actually, the one I think would be the best TV series would be Silo 49. It would be too many movies. And a story that is coming out in my collection called, Life/Time, is probably my choice for a movie. I can’t even think of who the characters would be yet. Maybe Liam Neeson for Darren.

If you could star in a movie, what kind of movie would it be and why?

Jeepers! Probably sexy older woman up to no good. Because yeah, that’s not me so I’d have to play that on TV.

Thank you so much, Ann, for being a part of the BOD author spotlight!

Thank you! I really look forward to seeing some of the other author’s get their turn under the ax…er..spotlight. And it would be great to see some of readers as well. Happy Reading All!

ABOUT ANN CHRISTY

Website  |  Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Pinterest  |  Goodreads

Ann Christy is a navy commander by day and a secret science fiction writer at night. She lives by the sea under the benevolent rule of her canine overlords and assorted unruly family members.