An Interview with Kevin Emerson

Meet Kevin Emerson, author of The Lost Code. Just released today, the book is a fast-paced adventure that blends sci-fi with a whole bunch of other genres. From my review:

The Lost Code resembles a YA version of the Percy Jackson series, but darker, and with Atlantis instead of the Greek myths. If I had to assign a genre, I’d aim for climate apocalypse/dystopia/YA fantasy/action-adventure summer camp tale, with a dash of the TV show Lost and a smidgeon of The Hunger Games. 

And now, the interview:

Where did you get the idea to mix climate change dystopia with fantasy? 

It was weirdly organic. Looking back, I don’t even quite get how it happened. A lot of seemingly unrelated stuff kind of fused together in my brain, and I feel like it was mostly subconscious at first.

That said, there were some concrete things: I read this book called The Atlantis Blueprint which got me thinking about what Atlantis may actually have been. Around that same time, a few years ago now, I wrote this scene where my main character, Owen, is drowning at summer camp, and mysteriously survives. It had Lilly, and the Siren, and the dome. It just kind of came out and I was like, ‘WTF is this?’ I knew I wanted it to connect to Atlantis, but I didn’t know how. Also, I’d wanted to write about summer camp for awhile, because that was a powerful experience for me in my own YA years.

The key to making it all fit was something from my Atlantis research: many ancient cultures have a very similar flood myth, and a similar idea of wise people arriving out of darkness with knowledge to share. There’s a possibility that the Atlantis culture predated the big Biblical flood event. Then, I read about how that flood event may have been connected to climate change. That was the big connection. I thought: we are facing a flood of our own, and the Atlanteans faced one.

The word ‘dystopia’ never actually crossed my mind, until my editor brought it up, though by definition it is accurate. I was just reading a lot of climate change articles and my science-major brain was thinking about where those possibilities could lead, and the results could be pretty bad!

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An Interview with the Creators of Knighttime

Meet the Hazardous Players: writers, artists, and the creators of Knighttime, an online fantasy adventure series that might best be described as podcast meets illustrated guidebook, or medieval tales with every medium under the sun.

In short, their work shows that old-fashioned storytelling is alive and well. So without further ado, we’re delighted to present our interview with the Hazardous Players, edited lightly for length (all images courtesy of Knighttime):

Knighttime tells stories through a unique blend of audio, drawings and text. Is there anything else like it, and if not, how did you get the idea to blend these mediums?

We would like to start off by thanking Jen and Lisa for this interview, we really appreciate it.

Knighttime is an experiment and though we would eventually love to publish Knighttime through more traditional means, the website allows us to play with ideas and media.  As we all discovered our mutual interest in fantasy and our abilities to make ridiculous voices we, the Hazardous Players, thought perhaps different mediums would allow us to play with many narrative ideas, using different creative techniques to express some aspect of the story and craft the humor. Maybe an idea works better as an episodic audio story as opposed a written story, or perhaps some combination of the two, oh look that’s interesting—but wait maybe throw in some video or art, oh yea why not, here are some photos I took, try those (sort of our thought process in action there.)  The internet seems a perfect playground to try new ideas. We readily admit that not everything we do is successful, but that is part of the enjoyment of experimenting, occasionally you get Frankenstein’s Monster and sometimes you end up with Flubber.

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