The Next Big Thing

The marvelous M.C. Hana tagged me for this blog meme last week. Somehow when I drafted this, I totally forgot to put her name and a link to her post up front. Editing has eaten part of my brain. >_<

So. Without further ado: M.C. Hana - The Next Big Thing

And, of course, my own entry.

What is the working title of your book?
Currently it's Saba, a term for the Zen practice of finding beauty in the act of decay.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
This novel grew out of a number of different influences, but the kernel of the idea started when I first saw Cowboy Bebop. I was so impressed with the movie and the show and I thought “I have to write something like this.” I wasn't even sure what “this” would look like. Cyberpunk? Dystopian near-future SF? But I was determined to find out. As I started brainstorming other influences jumped into the mix: the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa (especially Yojimbo); the Spaghetti Westerns (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; Once Upon a Time in The West); Asian action new classics (Hardboiled, Old Boy). In the end I discovered a world with an odd reverence/preservation of certain aspects of Earth culture (villains who speak in jive, characters who swear in the mother-tongue of a country they've never seen), a corruption of the “law” by corporations and the wealthy that opens the door for a sub-culture of bounty hunters dispensing justice for price, and the slow death of Humanity outside their home-world. In the middle of it all was a young woman of half-Japanese descent with a lot of ink, traditional swords and a gift for violence.

What is the genre of the book?
Science-fiction with cyber-punk and noir mystery elements.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
    Olivia Wilde as  Onarilla Taiomi.
    Ron Perlman as Sixty.
    Ken Watanabe as Miike Taiomi.
    Dev Patel as Morgan.
    Peter Sarsgaard as Nicodemus Quinn.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A monk turned bounty-hunter searches for redemption for her life of violence and defies family and government to save Mankind from death on The Outer Seven planets.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency/publisher?
Hoping to be represented by an agency. Currently searching for the right person to represent my    Steampunk Novel Series and the assorted stand-alone projects (like Saba) I've produced over the     past six years.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Currently it's still in-progress. I think because it's a collection of pieces that form a whole it's taken    longer to get on paper. My normal process of throwing words at the page until the right ones stick     doesn't work as well for this format, but it grows a little bit every year.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash is pretty much a given, though there's not as much “hard science” in    Saba. It's also got of touch of the weird and mystical like Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The protagonist, Onarilla Taiomi, got in my head and wouldn't leave. She's such a dark and funny and fundamentally broken character that I just couldn't put her story back on the shelf. As I wrote more of the bits and pieces of the novel I found the other characters in the novel were equally interesting and challenging to write – from her sociopathic father to the stalker turned love interest to the robot spider who is her constant companion, they all have something to say about what it is to be human. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It's written in a serial or mosaic format with each section taking place in different part of the MCs life/story and in different parts of the solar system. There are also some haiku, flash fiction interlogues and swearing in a bunch of different languages. If you're into that sort of thing.

I'm tagging S.R. Mastratone - The Written Absurd and Jessica Burde - Jessica's Ramblings
They'll be posting next week about their current WIP.