LEGENDARY SPACE PILGRIMS - Grace Bridges - Free Book

Welcome back, Grace. It's been a while since you were here. Why do you write the kind of books you do?

Because science fiction contains the potential to expand the mind more than any other genre – to me, at least. That's the same kind of mind-expanding that comes when we recognise a little bit more of what God is like. And the two can definitely come together: science fiction can lead into worship. Just think of the grandness of the universe…

Besides when you came to know the Lord, what is the happiest day in your life?

The day I moved into my new house. I'd been on the road and globetrotting for many years, but now I have a home of my own again and a "tower" room with a view of the sea a few miles away. It's good to be settled at last.

Sounds like a wonderful room to write in. How has being published changed your life?

It hasn't, really. As Jeff Gerke says, being published is like having a candy bar. It's nice, but not that much of a big deal.

What are you reading right now?

The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card, and SHINE, an anthology of optimistic science fiction.

What is your current work in progress?

I've got two: CyberDublin and Godspeed. In CyberDublin, the Oodles global hypernet falls to sabotage and we watch as a houseful of Dublin girls are faced with reality that's suddenly a whole lot less virtual than they're used to. But the saboteurs are closer to home than they know…

Godspeed is the sequel to my first book Faith Awakened: If you could solve world hunger, you'd do it, right? What if government experiments turned your miracle fertiliser into a weapon of mass destruction? Meet Naomi, the Belfast biologist forced to flee from her own creation.

Oh yes, and I'm writing a chapter a month on the superhero serial Comet Born for Digital Dragon Magazine. You can find an index of the story so far at http://gracebridges.blogspot.com/p/comet-born.html.

What would be your dream vacation?

An unplanned roadtrip around New Zealand. It's my own country, but there are many parts of it I have yet to see. It would be great to hop in the car with no time limit and head off into the wild yonder. All I need is someone to go with me, because alone's no fun. Someday!

How do you choose your settings for each book?

It has to be a place I know well, as in the Irish settings I use often, or developed from real places as in the seven planets of Legendary Space Pilgrims. I have to be able to describe it fully.

If you could spend an evening with one person who is currently alive, who would it be and why?

Chris Walley. One of my very favourite authors, he wrote the epic Lamb Among the Stars space trilogy which I just love to bits. Also, as a publisher myself, there are some of my own authors I've never met and would like very much to do so: Fred Warren and P.A. Baines, both brilliant writers.

What are your hobbies, besides writing and reading?

Beach walking, photography, a little painting, and now home improvement!

What is your most difficult writing obstacle, and how do you overcome it?

My sales are still low so it's easy to wonder if it matters to anyone what I'm doing. Yet it matters to God, that much is sure, and I've proven over and over that there's nothing like writing to clarify my own soul.

What advice would you give to a beginning author?

Read widely – Eat dem books! The more you read, the more vocabulary and styles you will have at your fingertips. Then read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by King and Browne, the single best writing manual I have ever found, and live by its principles.

Tell us about the featured book.

LEGENDARY SPACE PILGRIMS

If Pilgrim's Progress happened in space, this is what it might look like... On a planet that has never seen the sun, a harvester hears a Voice from beyond. It's time to leave the oatfield. Mario and Caitlin escape the mind control of Planet Monday, following the Voice to unknown worlds where wonders and challenges await. Have you got what it takes...to be a legend?

Please give us the first page of the book.

PART ONE

MONDAY-MORNING-ITIS

MONDAY 1

The clang of the work-bells forced its way into Mario’s consciousness. A sliver of light pushed through his eyelids, and he pried them all the way open.

Morning again. Monday morning. But on Planet Monday, every day was the same. No joke. He threw back the thick rough-woven blanket and heaved himself upright.

His limbs were slow to respond as he lurched into the plastic wet-cell that towered beside his bed. What had he been up to last night? It sure didn’t feel like he’d slept the full nineteen hours.

He slid the pane across the opening and flinched at the shock of the cold water. After thirty seconds the water switched off and he stood still as the airdryers around the cell’s base kicked in. The air wasn’t much warmer than the water, but it invigorated him.

Stepping out of the cell into the two-by-four-foot floor space of his living quarters, he opened the long drawer built under the bed and pulled out a sky-grey sweatsuit, standard issue. Some things never changed. He chased the thought across his consciousness and peered out the tiny window above the bed. Square grey buildings met his gaze. Above hung the eternal grey clouds. Nothing ever changed on Monday. Unless…

Unless he’d been mindwiped.

He groaned and let himself sink onto the tangled brown bedcover. Looking up at the emergency transport tube access in the ceiling just above head height, he examined its round rim. No dust. Talk in the fields said this was the sign of recent use. Of mindwipe.

He blinked and shivered as he stared unseeing at the vid-wall’s moving feed of Ocean region, intended to soothe but failing at present.

Last night, they’d sucked him up that tube. Wiped his emotional memory. Extreme feelings were erased from the workers—a technique no one ever remembered going through. But everyone knew it happened, since afterwards only the simplest facts remained. Had he really been emoting so badly?

Mario scratched his head, put on his boots, then the second bell sounded. He rose, seized his blade-gloves by the cuffs, and moved to the door as it swished open simultaneously with all the other doors up and down the hallway.

The two hundred inhabitants of the third floor exited their quarters as one. To be precise, the third floor of Wing B, Building 17, Sector X9, Foodstuffs Region, Planet Monday. The doors swished closed again and the workers turned to march towards 17’s central hub.

Mario strode over the hallway’s threshold to the third-floor lobby and accepted a breakfast pack from the dispenser in the doorway. He bit off the cap and squeezed the warm coffee-flavoured sludge into his gullet on his way to the mass transport tube. He joined the shuffling line in front of Wing B’s accessway and guzzled the rest of his breakfast while he waited. Smiles greeted him, but he’d lost all memory of their owners.

Monday-morning-itis. The clown who named this planet deserved to be recrewed to Sewage Region. Just because they discovered it on a Monday…since when do you have Mondays in space, anyhow?

He chucked the empty plastic foodsack in a waste unit to the left of the accessway, slipped on the bladed work-gloves, and stepped into the pod that opened before him.

The thin plastic shell closed. A jolt accompanied the sudden blackness as the pod began its journey. The familiar whoosh of the surrounding air calmed him, which was a bonus for the emo-reader implanted in his neck. If it didn’t detect strong emotions, he wouldn’t get sent to be mindwiped. But it was too late for that. Again.

How can readers find you on the Internet?

My books are available at all the usual online stores, and at a discount from http://www.splashdownbooks.com/. Please connect with me on Facebook (www.gracebridges.com/facebook) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/gracebridges). You can also find me on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/gracebridges1 and links to my published short stories are at http://gracebridges.blogspot.com/p/grace-author.html .

Thanks everyone for reading!

And thank you, Grace, for visiting us today.
 
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Grace Bridges

Let me introduce you to Grace Bridges. I first met her at Shoutlife, the Christian online community.

Grace, tell us how much of yourself you write into your characters.

That depends on the story. Faith Awakened is my first “real” book, and it’s been going around in my head for 14 years – so there’s a lot of me in there. With other current projects, it’s not so extreme – but in any case, I love to write my own real feelings and sensations into any character, whether he/she is like me or not. I love to stand outside in a brewing storm with a notebook and write down what it feels like, and use that as a backdrop for a scene. Going through really bad days has equipped me to describe the depths of desperation, too.

What is the quirkiest thing you have ever done?

Besides getting stuck in Timbuctu in 2001? LOL. One time I was bored and published a music CD on Lulu. Is that quirky? It’s the soundtrack for Faith Awakened and you can visit that here: http://www.lulu.com/content/815053

When did you first discover that you were a writer?

When I was 9, my Nana gave me a hardcover notebook. It looked so much like a real book that I decided to write a novel in it – even back then I had a thing for science fiction. It was all about this married couple who colonized a new planet, and it had little green men in it and everything. Complete with illustrations! But there was no plan to it. I wrote by the seat of my pants, and climax followed climax for dozens of pages. I never did come to a conclusion. In later writing, I’ve always liked to plan out what happens to a certain extent, to avoid sheer endless drama! There’s a wonderful article on novel planning here, written by a Christian sci-fi author:
http://www.ingermanson.com/writing/snowflake.php

Tell us the range of the kinds of books you enjoy reading.

Wow, that’s hard to put in a nutshell. Tell you what – you could go to my Goodreads reading list at http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/45683 – pretty much everything is on there. It ranges from Pride & Prejudice through Peretti and Lawhead and ends up in the Lost Genre Guild.

What other books have you written, whether published or not?

When I was 14 I wrote a 40,000 word novel, sort of a children’s adventure thing. No sci-fi, but it’s based on an urban legend from the part of town I grew up in on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand. It was fun to write. I also wrote a partial autobiography four years ago with a print run of 150 copies, all about moving to Germany. There’s a children’s picture book called Dad’s Duds, and I’m currently working on a contribution to Frank Creed’s Underground project – a novel entitled Lost Zone, the sequel to Flashpoint, which is described here:
http://www.frankcreed.com/bookreviews.html

How do you keep your sanity in our run, run, run world?

Seriously? I stop. I have a very low tolerance for stress, and there are times when I do just stop the world and get off for a while, whether that means a lazy day on a sunny ruined castle, or a cheapo last-minute flight to flee the country for a week... a strategy I’d recommend to anyone!

How do you choose your characters’ names?

Faith is called Faith because I’m Grace and she’s a copy of me. In other situations it’s not so easy. I look up baby name websites and try out the sound and feel of lots of names before picking one. A name has to fit with the character and ethnicity of the person, and I have to be able to imagine someone being called that. And it has to be realistic. I can’t stand it when novelists go to so much trouble and actually invent a name no one ever heard of before – though it would be more acceptable in sci-fi.

What is the accomplishment that you are most proud of?

Teaching myself computer literacy from scratch – from text formatting through HTML and graphic editing to making videos and MP3’s. I’m no expert, and there’s so much more to learn, but I make all my own websites and audio/video material, as well as my book cover text. I’d be a bit stuck without all that I think.

If you were an animal, which one would you be, and why?

A cat. No doubt about it. For one, they sleep most of the time (Yeah! Pick me!), and for another, they radiate such a wonderful contentedness. And they know how to have fun at the right time.

What is your favorite food?

Anything with chocolate. I also have a thing for mincemeat pies, but they don’t sell those in Germany, so I have to make them myself.

My husband and I love mincemeat pies, but the children never did like them. So James and I get the whole pie at holiday time. What is the problem with writing that was your greatest roadblock, and how did you overcome it?

For years I was caught up in church ministry. I led worship and Bible studies and all sorts of things. But there was no time to write. Sure, it was all good stuff, but it took up every hour of every day, just about. After cutting that right back to an absolute minimum (=zero), the creativity began to flow again. I’m definitely not saying everyone should do this. Of course church is important. It’s probably because I can only focus on one thing properly. I do have many symptoms of ADD.

What advice would you give to an author just starting out?

Read as much as you can. It improves your style and extends your expressive abilities. Get in a critique group where you are required to crit at least one short piece a week. Picking out what you don’t like in someone else’s work will give you a new perspective on your own writing. And the others will help you out with feedback too. Take it seriously, but keep hold of your own style. And learn the Snowflake method I mentioned earlier.

What would you like to tell us about the featured book?

It began as a childhood fantasy where I often imagined my life wasn’t real, but rather a kind of re-run provided by God. I liked to think I was in heaven already. Eventually this idea grew into Faith Awakened – where virtual reality is a place to experience God’s blessing and fulfilment, and enriches the lives of those who go through it. They don’t know this before entering it though, and only do so to escape a great danger in the real world. I explored a whole bunch of “what ifs” – What if God can influence a computer system? What if you woke up to discover your childhood friend is now twenty years older than you? What if you could go back and do things differently? What if you did already? Finally, I set the story in Ireland because I have deep family roots there.

Oh yeah, and I’m not getting any royalties on sales. At present you can buy it for cost price only. After all, I’m just a newbie author – can’t really say how my work will go down with the public – and I also have two other jobs to live from. Call it an experiment.

How can readers find you on the Internet?

I’m all over the place. The easiest portal is probably www.faithawakened.com, which is all about the book, and there are links from there to my author homepage, my personal homepage, my blogs, and various other places. I’m also on Myspace, Shoutlife, Goodreads, Amazon, Lulu, Second Life, Bebo, Xianz, and the Lost Genre Guild. If you want to go directly to the complete list of these links, visit www.faithawakened.com/hang.html – my Hang Out page. Thanks very much for your attention!

And thank you, Grace for spending this time with us.

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