Welcome to De Kenyon
What first prompted you to publish your work? Jealousy. An indie author started publishing his work, and rather than hate him forever 😛 I decided to follow suit.
How did you become involved in book bundles? Would you recommend it? I got invited. It’s fun and I very much recommend it.
Are you a ‘pantser’ or a ‘plotter’? I vary. Sometimes I pants, and sometimes I plot. Sometimes I’ll even write up a full synopsis first (most writers hate them!). But I rarely stick to whatever plan I came up with in the first place!
What is your favourite mythical creature? Why is this? The Fae. I’m the kind of person who always wants to see behind the stage, under the basement, and the other side of the mirror. The fae are always sneaking around, slipping through the cracks between worlds. That speaks to me.
If you had to pick 5 books to take to a desert island which 5 would it be? How long am I going to be stuck on this desert island, anyway?
Assuming that a) they have to be paper books, and b) that I don’t want to use one of my choices as something like How to Survive on a Desert Island, today I’m going to say:
- The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart, because that’s my go-to book for terrible days.
- Journey to the West, the bawdy tale of a monk’s journey toward enlightenment, because it’s super long (2500 pages) and I’ve been meaning to read it.
- St. Augustine’s Confessions, because I hate that book and would gladly use it to start fires, for toilet paper, etc.
- Can I put the Internet in a paper book? No? Okay, then the collected works of William Shakespeare (Riverside Edition).
- The collected Anne of Green Gables series, or, if I can’t get that (it’s not available in a single collected edition), H is for Hawk. Both of them are nerdy comfort reading.
- And, finally, a blank book and a beeeeg box of pencils, which I will sharpen on rocks…
My favorite books are the Alice in Wonderland books by Lewis Carroll, but I think I could probably write them from memory!
If you could have dinner with any literary character who would you choose, and what would you eat? I don’t want to eat with a literary character. I want to have dinner with Edgar Allan Poe and get the scoop on exactly how he died! Okay, literary character…I’m going to pick Hannibal Lecter. He doesn’t kill indiscriminately, after all, and he’s a gourmet. A lot of my favorite characters would be real pills at the dinner table, they’re such picky eaters. What would we eat? Whatever M. Lecter wanted…
Sort these into order of importance:
Good plot
Great characters
Awesome world-building
Technically perfect
How much research do you do for your work? What’s the wildest subject you’ve looked at? I try to do a lot of background research for historical pieces, and fairly similar amount for sci-fi elements. I grew up reading a lot of folktales and mythology, so most of the time when I draw from those elements, I just need a refresher. My big thing lately is about researching real-life homicide detective procedures for some of my adult mystery stories (under another pen name). WOW. I don’t really even want to say some of the things I’ve researched for that. It gets gruesome.
Tell us about your latest piece? “Beware of the Easter Moon” is a short middle-grade creepy adventure story about a boy who discovers that his family isn’t exactly normal. It was inspired by me suddenly realizing, completely out of the blue, that Easter always falls on or just after a full moon. The reason the Easter celebration moves around so much is that it’s the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the spring equinox.
So…obviously there needed to be werewolves.
What’s your next writing adventure? My next adventure as De Kenyon is going to be London in the 1880s, infested by cats, rats, and tentacled things coming out of the sewers!
With the influx of indie authors do you think this is the future of storytelling? How about a future of storytelling? It’s not like indie authors are the future of storytelling if they’re happening now.
The interesting question is, to me: what happens after this? If indies bring a major challenge to the big publishers, and they do, how do the big publishers respond? Do they shrink? Do their corporate over-bosses force them to shift course?
And what about collective groups of indies, or indies organized under other indies? I ghostwrite for some indie authors (who shall remain unnamed) who seem to be making the shift from indie authors to indie publishers.
Will the big publishers start trying to buy out those indie publishers? I mean, I would.
Are indie/self-published authors viewed with scepticism or wariness by readers? Why is this? We are, but less than we used to be. I think it helps that readers are noticing that big publishers aren’t doing the level of editing that they used to do, and have stopped assuming that traditionally published books are perfect.
I think it also helps that it’s easier and easier for readers to pick indie books with a reputation for quality behind them, by both recommendations and algorithms, so they tend to end up with the better books now, instead of a deluge.
Is there a message in your books? If I have a message, it’s “Beware of bullies! They aren’t always obvious.”
Blood Moon Bundle.
When the sun has set, when the moon is full, the shapeshifters gather—wolves, cats and totemic creatures, nightmares and revelations.
Seeking answers, seeking revenge, seeking a cure to affliction, seeking blood, seeking answers or seeking love—a gathering of beasts abounds. Dare you walk beneath the moonlight?
https://books2read.com/BloodMoonBundle
https://bundlerabbit.com/products/detail/beware-easter-moon
