Blog Tour Interview and Giveaway to celebrates Jay Posey's debut book Three!
I was completely unaware of Three being released this year, but luckily as a footsoldier of the Angry Robot Army, I got briefed last minute on this release. Three proved to be in many aspects a great read. The world that was envisioned, post apocalytpic hard tech sci-fi together with a rich but obscure cast, and the weir! Read my thoughts on Three here.
Author Bio:
Jay Posey has been working in the game industry since 1998 and has been writing for over a decade, currently Jay Posey works as a Senior Narrative Designer for Red Storm Entertainment. His portfolio consists of designing for Tom Clancy’s award winning Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six.
Hi Jay, Welcome to The Book Plank and thank you for taking some time of you busy schedule to answer these questions.
JP: It’s my
pleasure, thanks so much for having me.
First off who
is Jay Posey? Can you give a short introduction of your likes and dislikes and
your hobbies?
JP: Well, by
day I’m a Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, which means I
do writing things and game design things for video games. When I’m not working, writing, or spending
time with my family, that usually means I’m asleep. But in the few bits of Me Time I do get, I
enjoy (surprise) reading, playing video games, hiking, and occasionally doing
things like archery or rock climbing. I
try to be a pretty laidback and agreeable guy but some things I do NOT like include:
lawn care, reckless drivers, loud parties full of people I don’t know, and
spiders.
You have been
working actively in the video game business, when did you decide that you
wanted to write a book?
JP: I decided
I wanted to write a book actually several years before I ever got around to it. I think working in the game development
business really pushed me to write my own novel, though, because I discovered
while writing for games that I didn’t have as much freedom to tell the kinds of
stories I wanted to tell. So much was
outside of my control, I realized probably the only opportunity I’d have to do
what I wanted to creatively would be if I created something completely on my
own.
Genre-wise
Three doesn’t really fit into the Tom Clancy style. How did you come up with
the idea behind Three? Did you have any outside influences.
JP: Three was really the result of a lot of
different influences sort of crashing together.
Being well outside of the Tom Clancy world was probably partially a
reaction to spending so much of my day immersed in there. Creatively, I think you can only hear “but
that’s not real enough” so many times
before you have to go off and make up your own rules.
I’d had the idea for the
heart of the story for a couple of years, but I’d never really found quite the
right setting for it. I ended up writing
a short story that I thought was completely unrelated, but a few months after I
finished it, I suddenly had the wild idea of taking that world, giving it an
apocalypse, and seeing what came out on the other side. The Duskwalker world was basically the
result, and Three had its home.
Where do you
think Three draws its strength from?
JP: For me, it
comes from the relationships that develop over the course of the book. Even with all the craziness going on in that
high-tech, destroyed world, it’s still a very human story, and I think that’s
what gives people access to the world.
There are
quite a few post-apocalyptic stories published, but most feature a specific
fate and location and show the fate of planet Earth. This isn’t the case for
Three, why did you decide to leave these things obscure?
JP: There were
a couple of reasons for it. First off,
the real heart of the story is more about the characters than it is about the
world, so I really wanted to focus on telling that story. I tried to give
readers all the information they needed to understand the situation, without
bogging them down with world history details.
Secondarily, being a debut author, I wasn’t sure how interested people
were going to be in the world anyway, so I didn’t want to give them a big info
dump, not knowing whether or not people
would care.
Based on some of the early
reviews I’ve seen, I may have
underestimated how interesting people were going to find the world.
What was you biggest challenge in writing Three and did you
encounter any specific problems?
JP: The biggest
challenge for me with Three was staying motivated to finish
it. I didn't have an agent, I didn't know if any publisher out there
would ever have any interest in it at all, and I didn't even know if anyone
else would actually want to read it, so it was really
just a personal goal for me to see it through to the end. I did have a
buddy that was reading it for me a chapter at a time, and I'm honestly not sure
that I would've finished it if it hadn't been for his support and
encouragement.
I ran into several issues along the way, sometimes just not
knowing how to move the story forward, and sometimes putting my characters into
situations and then not knowing how to get them back out. There was one
in particular that I remember just sitting there staring blankly at the screen
thinking that I'd totally written myself into a corner. But the situation
felt right, and how they got there felt right, so I really just had to wrestle
with it to figure out how to resolve it without inventing a completely
artificial solution. There were also a couple of events that were really
hard for me emotionally. I hadn't really been expecting to be affected so
strongly by something I was writing myself.
In Three you
are directly thrown into the middle of the storyline with the protagonist Three
and a lot of science. Only later finding out the finer details of everything.
Why did you approach the story from this direction, instead of directly
explaining the how’s and why’s of it?
JP: A lot of
it has to do with what I just mentioned in the previous question … I really
wanted to focus on the heart of the story; how these three characters (Three,
Cass, and Wren) came to meet and got involved in each other’s’ lives, and what
the result was. I also didn’t want to
hit readers over the head with the whole “LOOK AT THIS WORLD I CREATED LOOK AT
IT LOOK AT IT” kind of thing. I figured
I could look at the reception Three got,
and determine from there whether or not people would want to learn more about
the world itself.
Another part of it comes
from the fact that you’re seeing the world through the eyes of characters who
don’t know everything themselves. There
will be some discoveries in the later books that make connections for readers
at the same time characters are learning them.
A lot of
things of the book really stand out; the futuristic technology, the destroyed
world but perhaps most of all are the Weir. How did you came up with them and
did they turn out the way you wanted them to be?
JP: As I said, the world actually came from a
mid-future short story I’d written several years ago. I sort of took that world, threw it into a
total meltdown, gave it a few years to recover, and the result is the
Duskwalker world. The Weir in particular
came from taking some of where we are today in technology, and some of where
it’s projected to be in the future, and then asking myself a bunch of what-if
questions. I’m relatively pleased with
what they are.
If you could
rewrite any of the scenes of Three would you choose to do so? And if so why?
JP: I’m
sure I could go back and find sections of it that I would do differently now,
but I probably won’t be doing that any time soon. I felt like I told the story I wanted to tell
in Three, and I think any time I
spent going back and retelling it would be time I could be spending writing
newer stories. Three isn’t a perfect book to be sure, but at this point I’ve let
myself be content with it, and am happy to move on to other things.
In Three it
feels like only the tip of the iceberg has been shown. You did reveal some of
the histories of the characters and the world itself but a lot still remains
obscure. Can you tell something of what we can expect from you in the future
books?
JP: I’ll
definitely be revealing more about the world as I continue the series, but I
don’t know if I’ll ever fully answer every question that people have. Sometimes I think there are gaps that are
better left to the audience to fill for themselves … I, for example, wish I had
never heard the word “midi-chlorians”.
I’ll be continuing to tell the stories of certain returning characters,
and introducing new ones. But hopefully
the world will continue to feel consistent with what people expect, even if it
takes turns they weren’t expecting.
Did you
already plan out the whole Legend of the Duskwalker or do you still take on
ideas on the fly?
JP: I have the
framework for a long arc planned out, but I definitely leave myself a lot of
space to fill in the details as I go. Sometimes
new characters pop up that I wasn’t anticipating, or an event occurs that I
wasn’t necessarily expecting, and I like to have the freedom to explore those
things when they come around.
Do you have
any ambitions to write more fantasy books besides The Legend of the Duskwalker?
JP: I do have
a couple of other projects on side- and backburners. I have a more military sci-fi book I’d like
to write, and one very different more fantasy-inspired thing that’s been lying
dormant for a number of years. I have a
lot of other things in various stages of completion as well, like a graphic
novel I’d like to get made one day.
What do you
like most about writing fantasy and science fiction?
JP: I think I
enjoy the freedom it allows in creativity.
You can really explore a lot of interesting concepts and ideas within
the genres, and still tell very human stories.
If you had to
choose your 5 favorite books, which would they be?
JP: Oof,
that’s probably an impossible question to answer truthfully, and I’m sure it’d
be different depending on the day (or possibly hour) that you asked but for
right now I will say, in no particular order, The Hobbit (Tolkien), The
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), Bridge
of Birds (Barry Hughart), God in the
Dock (C.S. Lewis), and Neuromancer (William Gibson).
Thanks again
for your time Jay and good luck with writing up the second book in The Legend
of the Duskwalker. Really looking forward to it!
JP: Thanks again
for having me, and thanks for reading!
Each stop on this Blog Tour of Three by
Jay Posey has a unique question. Be sure to enter your answers into
the giveaway by dropping by My Shelf Confessions LINK and enter
your answers in the rafflecopter widget! You can answer as many or as
few as you like as each answered question gets you an extra entry!
Here's the questions for my stop:
Question #17 - What is the name for people that have undergone extensive genetic enhancements, that grant then almost preternaturally advanced talent and skills?