Interview: Nadine Ducca and Serving Time

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SERVING TIME front coverI am happy to fea­ture an inter­view here with Nadine Ducca. She has just released her debut novel, the first in a series, called Serv­ing Time.  It sounds like a win­ner and I’ve added it to my “to read” list. You should too. You can also try your luck at win­ning a free copy of Serv­ing Time over at Goodreads. I hope I win it. Too bad there’s no way to enter the con­test more than once. ;-)

Goodreads Give­away!!!!

Other places you can find serv­ing time on Kin­dle and in print: 

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.es

Every­one, please wel­come Nadine, indie author extraordinaire! 

Nadine, thank you for join­ing me and giv­ing me the chance to take part in your efforts to pro­mote Serv­ing Time. As an indie author I appre­ci­ate the need for expo­sure. It sounds as if Serv­ing Time is going to be quite a story, one that I am def­i­nitely inter­ested in reading.

1. Give us a brief expla­na­tion of what Serv­ing Time is about.

When inter­plan­e­tary pilot and smug­gler Tris­tan Cross finally decides to do good for a change, the entire uni­verse seems bent on stop­ping him.

Serv­ing Time is a sci-fantasy pur­suit across the solar sys­tem as Tris­tan and his brother Eneld try to give the cruel mega­com­pany Star­Corp the slip and start a new anony­mous life on Earth. Dur­ing their voy­age, they’ll dis­cover that someone—or something—else is after them…and there are much larger threats out there than StarCorp…

Here is the offi­cial book description:

Life and death have been indus­tri­al­ized. The Forge, the birth­place of every soul, is a rum­bling fac­tory owned by the god­dess Time, man­aged by Lucifer, and pow­ered by the labor of demons and imps. In this dystopian world, a rene­gade inter­plan­e­tary pilot run­ning from his past doesn’t stand a chance.

Han­dling Nep­tun­ian meth and dodg­ing secu­rity can­nons are all in a day’s work for Tris­tan Cross—not that he’s one to com­plain. Work­ing for the smug­gling com­pany Star­Corp is an improve­ment over what he used to do for a living.

How­ever, when Star­Corp gives Tris­tan a one-way ticket into the brainwashed—and dis­turbingly suicidal—Loyal League, he decides to run from the com­pany and start a new life in the only safe haven he knows: Earth. With the help of his brother, Tris­tan embarks on the most haz­ardous jour­ney of his life, one that will place him at Time’s mercy. Lit­tle does he know the demons run­ning the uni­verse are crav­ing a feast, and his own soul is the next item on the menu.

2. What was the inspi­ra­tion for Serv­ing Time? How long did it take for Serv­ing Time to ger­mi­nate into a full fledged tellable tale?

Serv­ing Time started out as a short about 15 years ago. When I was a teen, I spent much of my free time jot­ting down short sto­ries. In fact, I have two full-length nov­els from when I was around 15 or 16, but I’m too embar­rassed to even begin edit­ing them!

The story that even­tu­ally evolved into Serv­ing Time was about two broth­ers who made a liv­ing loot­ing derelict space ships. In the short, they quickly ended up on the system’s “Most Wanted” list, and decided to flee to Earth, where they knew the space author­i­ties wouldn’t be able to find them.

As a teen, I shelved the story when the broth­ers met Verin, a dis­con­cert­ing man who offered to help them escape to Earth, but who seemed to have a very dif­fer­ent agenda in mind. Sev­eral years went by, and the short story gath­ered some dust—but wasn’t forgotten.

When I fin­ished uni­ver­sity, I was ter­ri­bly frus­trated with myself. I had had enough of doing what I was sup­posed to do. It was time to start doing what I wanted to do! That was when I promised my char­ac­ters (who were giv­ing me for­lorn looks as they stood by and waited) that I would tell their story.

The process of trans­form­ing the short into a 120,000 word novel took about three years, mainly because at first I had no idea what I was doing. I had to learn thecraft. In June of 2011, I enrolled in a cre­ative writ­ing course, and in Novem­ber of the same year I joined Cri­tique Cir­cle, an online cri­tique group.

I was finally doing what I had always wanted!

Then came the long hours of pound­ing at the key­board. And the changes—oh, so many changes!

Over time, names changed. The main char­ac­ters’ goals changed. The plot twisted itself into a knot. Some char­ac­ters slipped into obscu­rity while oth­ers rose to the occa­sion and sur­prised me with their ver­sa­til­ity. Creepy crawlies grad­u­ally popped up in sev­eral chap­ters. The plot evolved, and fan­tasy demanded a cen­tral role. I ended up wel­com­ing it into my story, and what a great deci­sion that was!

3. Of all of the char­ac­ters on your book, which one would you most want to befriend. Why?

I have a soft spot for Seth, the child­like owner of the Robot Rehab in the space colony Ring­wall. He spends his days strip­ping old robots and using the parts to cre­ate new…well… Let’s be frank here: they’re abom­i­na­tions. But don’t get me wrong! They’re very cre­ative abom­i­na­tions! Every now and then, Seth adds a lit­tle something—shall we say…unusual?—to his robotic cre­ations, a dis­qui­et­ing habit that earned him the title of “cannibal.”

He’s such a bright, chirpy and quirky char­ac­ter, and so absolutely obliv­i­ous to his innate creepi­ness, that you just have to love him! In my case, I’d love to spend a few days with him in the Robot Rehab and check out all the mon­sters he’s assem­bling. How­ever, don’t let his youth­ful appear­ance and easy­go­ing dis­po­si­tion fool you; there’s great poten­tial buried deep in that mind of his.

I love him so much…you can’t imag­ine how guilty I feel about every­thing I put him through.

Here you can see an inter­view with Seth.

Here you can catch a sneak peek into Serv­ing Time involv­ing Seth!

4. I’ve placed Serv­ing Time on my To Read list. It sounds really inter­est­ing espe­cially since it seems so much hap­pens in space. So, for that rea­son, I assume ST is a sci-fi tale. How did you han­dle the sci­ence in this story?

Indeed, Serving Time is a soft sci­ence fic­tion tale. Although I adore sci­ence fic­tion, I’m not a big fan of hard sci-fi (my eyes tend to glaze over when­ever I encounter an entire para­graph of pure tech­ni­cal descrip­tion). I pre­fer character-driven sto­ries to technology-driven ones, and that’s exactly what Serv­ing Time is.

For the sake of cred­i­bil­ity, I did per­form exten­sive research regard­ing Mar­t­ian ter­rafor­ma­tion, travel dis­tances across the solar sys­tem, and the like—but I also left a lot of room for fantasy.

As we travel through the chap­ters of Serv­ing Time, we grad­u­ally notice that the sci­ence fic­tion world is infested with an entire menagerie of unusual crea­tures, rang­ing from the (self-proclaimed) demon mas­ter Robert West­brook, to the packs of demons rem­i­nisc­ing of bet­ter times, to the god­dess of Time her­self, as she strug­gles to keep every­thing together and make amends for her past mis­takes. Time is a vain crea­ture, and just admit­ting that she made a mis­take takes its toll on the entire universe.

One of my all-time favorite authors is Robert Sheck­ley, whose witty and humor­ous short sto­ries have cap­ti­vated me for years. The col­lec­tion Untouched by Human Hands is absolutely mar­velous, a five-star read. While com­ment­ing on his work, Sheck­ley him­self once said: “I felt I wasn’t really writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion.” Well, I can relate to that. While writ­ing Serv­ing Time, I some­times also felt I wasn’t really writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion; my char­ac­ters just hap­pened to live in a cou­ple cen­turies in the future! With the uni­verse a cler­i­cal mess, it’s clear that many of the ele­ments in Serv­ing Time are pure fantasy.

5. What do read­ers have to look for­ward to in the next install­ment of Serv­ing Time?

I’m not going to reveal if Tris­tan and Eneld reach Earth safe and sound—you’ll have to read Serv­ing Time to find out! How­ever, I will tell you that our heroes are in for one heck of a jour­ney, and things just seem to get more and more com­pli­cated as they go. The adven­ture will take an unex­pected turn and con­tinue in book two:Making Time.

As I men­tioned in a recent blog hop, Making Time is a “sci-fi expe­di­tion into Hell.” Expect mon­sters. Dozens—no, hundreds—of them! Expect adven­ture and chal­lenges, and maybe even a tad of romance.

Mak­ing Time is almost com­plete. The plot is planned from begin­ning to end; I just need to wrap up sev­eral of the final chapters.

Click here to see a WIP Blog Hop post about Mak­ing Time!

Thank you very much for the inter­view, Khaal­i­dah! Before say­ing good­bye, I’d like to invite you all to my Goodreads give­away for a chance to win a free signed copy of Serv­ing Time! Just fol­low the link to enter.

No, no. Thank you for join­ing me. It was a plea­sure and an honor. Good luck Nadine!

Nadine

 

@NadineDucca

Author Face­book

Goodreads

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Pen Name in Dystopia

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NOMOS Action Roleplay Game in Gothic Futuristic City

I’m get­ting more and more excited by the day as I approach the end of the first act of Bilqis, the first book of the Hin­ter­land Chron­i­cles. Upon com­ple­tion of the first act, I plan to go back, fill in any miss­ing his­tory, repair plot holes and clean up any major lan­guage issues. I am finally able to see some progress in this story that has been with me for years.

I am already think­ing ahead to the release, which I don’t expect will be until some time next year, although I am push­ing for Decem­ber. I already have one will­ing beta reader in the wings and well… this type of progress after so long feels really good.

I started think­ing though about the idea of a pen name. My first novel, An Unpro­duc­tive Woman, is listed as con­tem­po­rary, women’s lit, or gen­eral fic­tion. Bilqis will be some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent though. We’re talk­ing near future, dystopian, SF.

Big dif­fer­ence, yeah?

I recently read an arti­cle that highly pro­moted the idea of using a pen name when writ­ing works in dif­fer­ing gen­res so as not to con­fuse or dis­ap­point read­ers. This makes a lot of sense to me because the peo­ple who loved AUW, will likely return to me look­ing for some­thing sim­i­lar and if so, they would be ter­ri­bly dis­ap­pointed. My inter­ests don’t lie in the realm any­more. That said, I don’t want to write under a pen name. I sim­ply do not.

What do you think?

Then I started to con­sider that per­haps I could used a pen name that was merely a dif­fer­ent form of my cur­rent name. Khaal­i­dah Muhammad-Ali could become K. M-Ali.

What do you think of that?

Hmm.  Deci­sions, decisions.

The Reason I Don’t Watch the News

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Granada, de Cine This morn­ing as I was headed to the kitchen to pre­pare a late break­fast for my fam­ily I stopped for a moment to catch a par­tic­u­larly com­pelling bit of news on an inter­na­tional news chan­nel. There was this loop­ing reel of footage that kept show­ing the body of a tiny girl wrapped in a white sheet. She was dead after hav­ing been bru­tally raped by two men who had kid­napped her. This footage also showed the poor girl’s shell shocked par­ents. Their grief was palpable.

This is why I don’t watch the news.

Accord­ing to the news report, the kid­nap­ping and rape of young women is nearly epi­demic in India which is sec­ond only to the United States. The reporter inter­viewed young women on the streets of India regard­ing the recent pas­sage of laws that would mete out severe pun­ish­ments to any man con­victed of rape. This was all com­pli­cated by the fact that the num­bers of women who are actu­ally will­ing to report the crime are min­i­mal due to the shame of hav­ing been the vic­tim of such a crime. Yes, the vic­tim is shamed and blamed.  The per­pe­tra­tor? Not so much. This is misog­yny at its worse, when it is woven into the very fab­ric of the cul­ture. It is sad, unjust, and plain horrific.

This is why I don’t watch the news.

But, just so we don’t point blam­ing fin­gers at India, or some coun­try in the Mid­dle East, or any other so-called third world coun­try we’d like to pre­tend is so much less pro­gres­sive than we are in the West, misog­y­nis­tic ideals and a whole host of other cross-cultural cross-societal ills is as broad and diverse as the peo­ple who uphold and abide by them.

It doesn’t mat­ter the coun­try or cul­ture because peo­ple are peo­ple, and not all of us are good. And of those of us who are good, not all of us are com­pletely good.  Sim­ply, we live in a world of mostly good inten­tioned peo­ple, but amongst those good peo­ple is another more insid­i­ous ele­ment that we should all be afraid of.  They are there.  We don’t know who they are but, we work with them and go to school with them and we talk to them while wait­ing in line at the register.

Why don’t I watch the news?

Because it makes me angry, and because it scares and sad­dens me. Watch­ing the news makes me lose faith in the world and the peo­ple in it. And, I’ll sound a lit­tle Sybil-ish here, it also gives me a tiny bit of weird hope. In our ever shrink­ing global com­mu­nity we are learn­ing more and more about each other and as such we are slowly elim­i­nat­ing mis­con­cep­tions about peo­ple who are dif­fer­ent from us. We are shar­ing the best of our­selves and hope­fully doing away with the worst. As long as there is an Earth with peo­ple liv­ing on her face, we will see ugli­ness and injus­tice and error, but things can be bet­ter, right? This is my hope.

This also brings me to the topic of my writ­ing. My major WIP, Bilqis, which will be book one of the Hin­ter­land Chron­i­cles, echoes much of my woes about the state of the world we live in, per­sonal and global.

I am for­tu­nate to have had extremely few openly racist or anti-Muslim expe­ri­ences in my life. I’ve had peo­ple say some incred­i­bly asi­nine things to me, but I’m not hyper­sen­si­tive and I can gen­er­ally deter­mine the dif­fer­ence between mal­ice and igno­rance. With that said, we all know that racism still exists and anti-Muslim sen­ti­ment is per­va­sive and in many instances heartily accepted. This is what the Hin­ter­land Chron­i­cles addresses.

What I’ve attempted to cre­ate is a world/society that is scarred by reli­gious tur­moil and racism, much like our own. Imag­ine that the gov­ern­ment, with the best of inten­tions, has tried to solve the issue of reli­gious and racial divi­sive­ness by out­law­ing the prac­tice of any faith. Imag­ine that those peo­ple who per­sist in reli­gious obser­vances are pun­ished, ostra­cized, and ejected from the major cities. Imag­ine that they are forced to make their lives scav­eng­ing off the land which is a vast wasteland.

What do you think would happen?

I’m still work­ing on the first draft, but it is dif­fi­cult to write about issues of faith/religion with­out sound­ing as if I am preach­ing and pros­e­ly­tiz­ing, which I am not. I pray that I am successful.

We should absolutely mine infor­ma­tion from our expe­ri­ences and the world for our writ­ing.  This includes the news.  I sup­pose I’m sim­ply not strong enough to tol­er­ate it… or to say it in a more for­giv­ing way, I’m too sen­si­tive. On sec­ond thought, it isn’t an alto­gether bad thing is it? Aren’t most writ­ers and artists intu­itive deep think­ing individuals?

If they’re not… shhh. Don’t ruin the illu­sion. I kind of like it.