Ask the Author: Steven A. Roman
Answered Questions (8)
Steven A. Roman
I didn't have much time for reading during summer 2019, but I recently finished Craig Johnson's first Longmire mystery novel, The Cold Dish, and right now I'm balancing Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country with Claudia Gray's Star Wars: Bloodlines. I have...varied reading tastes!
Steven A. Roman
Hi, Joshua! Thanks for the question. The plot for Final Destination: Dead Man's Hand started out with me remembering a trip I'd made to Las Vegas in the 1990s, and a visit to the Stratosphere, which was the tallest hotel/casino structure in the city (probably still is); it had a roller coaster on its roof. For the book, I thought, what if that roller coaster broke free and fell off the roof? I changed the name of the hotel but pitched the roller coaster idea to the Black Library editor; it was soon approved by him and New Line Cinema.
However, just as I'm half-finished writing the manuscript, New Line announces Final Destination 3—which will be about a roller coaster breaking loose. (Hmm...) I contacted the editor and asked if this meant I now had to rewrite the manuscript and change out my roller coaster so it didn't conflict with the movie. He said yes; I cursed a lot. And then settled on the idea of a glass elevator along the wall of the casino tearing free from its moorings. And that became the final version of the death-trap for the book. The rest was just a matter of coming up with characters I'd be interested in writing about—and then putting them through hell. Hope you found all of this helpful!
However, just as I'm half-finished writing the manuscript, New Line announces Final Destination 3—which will be about a roller coaster breaking loose. (Hmm...) I contacted the editor and asked if this meant I now had to rewrite the manuscript and change out my roller coaster so it didn't conflict with the movie. He said yes; I cursed a lot. And then settled on the idea of a glass elevator along the wall of the casino tearing free from its moorings. And that became the final version of the death-trap for the book. The rest was just a matter of coming up with characters I'd be interested in writing about—and then putting them through hell. Hope you found all of this helpful!
Steven A. Roman
Depending on the project, it's usually certain music I'll listen to that'll get the mental gears turning—sound tracks, mostly (the second Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Reign, was written during a lot of replays of Harald Kloser's Alien vs. Predator, Graeme Revell's The Chronicles of Riddick, David Arnold's Four Brothers, Alan Silvestri's Van Helsing, and John Williams's Indiana Jones scores) but also classical. They help set the mood for whatever scenes I'm writing.
Steven A. Roman
Susan Silverman and Spenser, from Robert B. Parker's Spenser mystery novel series. Parker took the time to develop them as "real" people, with all the ups and downs in a relationship, yet they still remained committed to each other.
Steven A. Roman
Hello, Sacha! I hope you understand that my French is nonexistent, so I'll have to answer in English. (I used Google Translate for your question.) I'm glad you enjoyed Lorelei, although the story was never finished in France because the publisher of STRANGE canceled the serial. However, I published the complete story as a graphic novel, which is available through my StarWarp Concepts company as a book and e-book; it's English-language only, though. (Sorry.) http://www.starwarpconcepts.com/title...
Steven A. Roman
Learn the tools of your trade by purchasing copies of the latest Webster's dictionary and the Chicago Manual of Style—they're the books every major publishing house sticks to. The quickest turnoffs for someone reading your work, especially an editor, are poor spelling and punctuation—typos are an annoying distraction—and terrible sentence structure. And do the research when you're unfamiliar with a subject you're writing about.
Steven A. Roman
Sometimes I'll go do something else, to take my mind off the book: write posts for the Pandora Zwieback and StarWarp Concepts blogs; read comics; take a walk. But what usually does the trick is to stop working on the computer, grab a notebook, and go somewhere to write by longhand. My penmanship sucks, but it gives me a chance to put words on the page and work my way through the block.
Steven A. Roman
Right now I'm working on Blood & Iron, the third novel in the "Saga of Pandora Zwieback" dark-fantasy series. It wraps up Pan's first adventure, which started in the novel Blood Feud, and continued into the recently published Blood Reign. Pan and her parents and friends got drawn into a potential war between humanity and monsterkind, and although Blood & Iron wraps up the story arc with battles and such, it's really still the story of this teenaged Goth and how she has to persevere against the craziness of her life. The monster war just makes things more complicated!
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