Author Interview with Manda Benson

Manda Benson is a brilliant, up and coming author of science fiction and fantasy. Her new book Pilgrennon's Beacon became available through Amazon recently. I had the opportunity to interview her and she was gracious to allow me to post the interview on my blog:


1. Pilgrennon's Beacon has just come out and is available for sale on Amazon. After reading your novel, what might a reader take away from the story?

There are a lot of different aspects to the book and its three central characters, so it’s really up to the readers to read it and make up their own mind. At face value, it’s a near-future science-fiction novel with an autistic main character. It’s also a modern Pandora story that doesn’t follow the traditional protagonist vs. antagonist formula.
 
2. Who is the most compelling character in Pilgrennon's Beacon in your opinion? Did you base this character on any living person?

The people who read it from a YA angle seem to like Dana more; others usually are more interested in the motivations of the two older characters. Personally I think all of them are interesting in different ways.

Dana’s personality is in some ways based on myself and my own experiences growing up with an autistic spectrum disorder. Probably if Dana had been an average autistic child it would have been difficult for nonautistic readers to understand the character, and for Dana to understand the environment around her fully, but this is made somewhat easier by Dana’s ability to get information from computers and mentally control them that gives her an edge through an additional ‘sense’.

I really enjoy writing Ivor Pilgrennon because he’s a very different personality type from me, so it’s a challenge and it’s sort of refreshing to get inside his head and work out the sorts of things he’d say and do in various situations. He’s extraverted at the same time as being devious, and he’s the sort of person who likes to light the metaphorical touchpaper and stand back.

Jananin Blake came out as something of a fusion of the best and worst of Asperger’s syndrome. She’s a bona fide genius on one hand, and has taken on the political environment of modern academia purely on the strength of her ideas and her research, without kowtowing to funding bodies and the academic system. On the other hand, she’s intolerant and idealistic and she’s not good at dealing with people. Because of her and Ivor’s very different personalities, not to mention their antagonistic history, it’s fairly easy to get conflict into the scenes they appear in. Sparks fly even when they’re trying to co-operate.
 
3. You have stated in the past that you feel that your writing has a particularly British feel to it, what elements of your writing contribute to your describing it as such?

Most of my fiction is set in the UK or in a hypothetical future of the UK, which I’ve felt before is a disadvantage in respect of the established publishing industry, as a lot of the growth in the current market for science fiction seems to be concentrated in the USA. (I don’t know if it is or not, that’s just the impression I’ve had of it) I prefer to write about what I’m familiar with and hope readers will take an interest in something that might be a bit different too what they know.
 
4. In regards to writing in general, how many novels have you written and what are the titles? Do you have a favorite?
 
If you count 25,000 words and up as a novel, I am currently on my fifteenth. I don’t feel my earliest attempts are of sufficient quality to be worth publishing. My earliest available work is my ‘illustrated episodic novella’ HyperGolf, which appears as an ongoing serial on my website. http://tangentrine.com/hypergolf I have another novel in the same setting as HyperGolf, Financial Management and the Inflationary Universe, that I might make available at some point. After this I wrote Dark Tempest and In the Shadow of Lazarus, which are both published by Lyrical Press. Then I wrote Pilgrennon’s Beacon, Wastelander, and The Weatherman’s Niece, all of which are published by Tangentrine. More recently, I have written a novel called Moonsteed, to be published by Lyrical Press in May, and a novella in a different genre that I am hoping to sell under a pseudonym. Currently I am writing a crime/romance book and starting work on the next book in the Pilgrennon’s Children series.

My favourite of my books that I have written so far is probably the Pilgrennon’s Children series, because I think it’s my biggest idea and I really enjoyed writing the first book.

5. Where do you get the majority of your ideas for a story or novel? How long does it typically take for you to get an idea and then carry it through to completion?

Before I can have an idea for a plot, I need a setting. From the setting usually comes a character with a specific problem or situation within the premise, and from this character the plot develops. For example, with Dark Tempest the setting was an imagined future scenario where genetic polarisation had separated the human species into a genetic ruling caste and a genetic underclass. So I started to wonder what would happen if two people from opposite ends of this spectrum started having a relationship — wouldn’t this be taboo in this society? So the plot came out of that.

How long it takes depends on the individual book, and whether it’s going to be re-using a setting I’ve already used or creating a brand new one from scratch. It took a few years to get the ideas for Pilgrennon’s Beacon straight in my head to the point where I could start writing. I tend to pick up inspiration for scientific premises a lot by reading textbooks and scientific articles.
 
6. Which of your novels was the easiest for you to write and why? Which was the most difficult and why?

Probably the first novel I wrote was the easiest, because I hadn’t really developed the ability to self-criticise and I had no goals or properly defined ambitions — I just wrote what I wanted until I felt it was finished. Unfortunately the main reason it wasn’t very good was probably because I set about it in such a disorganised, undisciplined way. It was also far too long and ended up being two books.

Probably the most difficult one is the one I’m currently writing. It’s a sort of crime/romance story. Crime fiction isn’t something I’ve attempted before and I’m finding myself getting bogged down in research to do with little details, like how much money would fit in a suitcase and what would it weigh and what car would do as a getaway vehicle, and because other writing projects and matters in life have cropped up since I started writing it over a year ago and taken precedence.
 
7. Which character in your novels would you like to meet the most?

Probably Rh’Arrol from Dark Tempest. Simply because it’s an alien and it would be cool to meet an alien.
 
8. As an author, how do you think a bookseller in a store would describe your work?

’Something Different.’

Manda's Books available through Lyrical Press:
Dark Tempest
In the Shadow of Lazarus

Manda's Publishing Company is Tangentrine.

Manda's Books that can be purchased on Amazon:
Pilgrennon's Beacon
Wastelander
The Weatherman's Niece