Hi, I’m Jo!
Let me tell you a little bit about myself!
When did you start writing?
I’m told no one is sure when I started reading, and I do not remember either. According to my mother, I memorized and could recite any book that was read to me from the time I could speak, and she does not know when I went from memorizing to reading. Certainly by the time I got to Kindergarten, like Scout Finch, I was already reading fluently.
Likewise, I don’t remember when I started writing. My mother was a successful freelance photojournalist, and served as the Secretary, Treasurer, Vice-President and President of her area writer’s association from the time I was small, so I was rubbing elbows with working writers from my earliest memories. When Mom would go on interviews, my brother and I would ride along. She would leave us in waiting rooms with books, notepads, coloring books, pencils, crayons, and paper, and instructions to be impeccably quiet and well-behaved. And we did it.
I published my first articles in the church bulletin, at just eight years old. That year I won my first writing contest, entering a poem in a contest sponsored by my mother’s writer’s association. For all I know, mine was the only entry, but I wrote it. In high school, for a fiction writing assignment, I wrote a grandiosely awful fantasy story and my English teacher, rather than fail me, signed me up for a summer program for young writers.
When I went to college, everyone assumed I would be an English major, get a creative writing degree and go on to become the next great Indiana author, joining ranks with Booth Tarkington, James Whitcomb Riley, Gene Stratton Porter and Lew Wallace. In a fit of teenage rebellion, I got a science degree and went into a different field entirely.
But I never quit writing. Even during a fifteen-year drought that followed the birth of my second child, I wrote; just, not fiction.
Until, with both of my children nearing adulthood, I started writing fiction again.
The first marketable thing I finished was The Magnetar. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it!
Where do you get your inspiration?
Perhaps this will sound odd, but I am often inspired by disappointment and annoyance.
For example, aliens always disappoint me. In TV and movies, aliens are always either humanoid, or incorporeal, or shapeshifters who present as humans. I understand the reasons for this, but it’s still disappointing. Aliens in books do tend to be more “alien”–but sometimes they are too “alien” to tell the kind of space-opera story I really love. I wanted alien aliens, and space ships and adventures. So, as many authors do, I made my own. For the Combined Service universe, I created the Gu’ul, the Avians, and the Octopods.
The origins of the Gu’ul should be obvious enough: they’re greys. Their appearance, at least, is drawn from the modern conception of extra-terrestrials.
The Avians arose out of a specific disappointment. In Star Trek: Enterprise, in Season 3, we’re told that there is an avian species among the Xindi–but they’re extinct. I was disappointed by this: no avians? So, I made my own.
The Octopods, fittingly enough, arose out of a different type of inspiration. I read a spate of articles in the popular press that discussed earth octopuses as being so different from other earth-species as to be essentially aliens already. So, why not? In the process of creating my Octopods, I read a book (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness) that contributed heavily to my aliens. The book was so important in forming my Octopods that I carried it everywhere for months, lost it, and had to buy a second copy.
Having my four species of aliens, I then needed a plot for them to play out. The Octopods were the obvious villains, and obviously, I would need a human hero to draw in my human readers. Here, I ran up against another inspiring irritation: I didn’t want Yet Another Traditional Hero.
I didn’t want a Chosen One, a la Luke Skywalker; I didn’t want a badass, a la Ripley, or Neo. Nor did I want a charismatic rogue like Captain Kirk, or a superhero of any kind. I didn’t want to stack my hero against all of society’s great injustices, or all of the evil in the universe, or task her with saving all of humanity. I wanted a more relatable hero, with more relatable goals, who nonetheless has to find within herself something extraordinary.
That’s how I ended up with Charlie. And just to subvert the most obvious hero trope from the outset, I killed her outright in chapter one.
And that, dear reader, is where The Magnetar begins: with an Octopod villain, and a hero who has just died.
What keeps you going?
Writing is not my day job; it’s my hobby. I do it because I enjoy it; I do it for fun. I tell people: my primary goal in writing a book is to pack as much fun stuff into it as I can fit. Picture a traveler abroad who has bought too many souvenirs, trying to close an overstuffed suitcase. I want my books to be overstuffed with fun souvenirs.
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