Today I’d like to welcome author Joseph Devon to Juniper Grove! Joseph is here to promote his book Probability Angels!

 

About the Author:

Joseph Devon was born in New Jersey and currently lives in New York. He’s been a student, a nanny, worked at the Ground Zero recovery project after 9/11, and of all the things he’s created he is probably most proud of the character Kyo. He writes a blog at josephdevon.com and also enjoys photography, so he’s also at flickr, and tumblr, and twitter too, and sometimes he thinks maybe he has too many social networking outlets.

 

Joseph has graciously submitted to an author interview! Check it out below:

 

Without giving too much away, can you tell us what your book is about?

The main characters of my book are immortals, or close to immortals anyway. They’re people who died under special circumstances and were given the option of sticking around on this world in order to help “push” humans to make sure that humans lived up to their full potential. They can take physical form and walk and talk with us, or they can exist as pure energy and do things that boggle the mind. Matthew is the newest member of this group of testers, as they’re sometimes called, and he’s learning the ropes from his mentor, Epp, a two-thousand year old Roman slave. Just as Matthew starts to get the hang of things, though, a civil war breaks out amongst their kind and puts both our worlds teetering on the edge of collapse.

 

How long did it take you to write this book?

This book took me exactly forty eight weeks to write. I know this because it came about due to a writing project I started where I wrote a short story every two weeks for a year. Part one of Probability Angels was the third short story I wrote for that project. I knew I had something that could be expanded on, so every third story or so I’d go back and revisit that world. By part three I knew I could make a book out of it and so I planned it out so that the final two short stories in my writing project would be the final two parts of Probability Angels. And that wrapped up the year-long project. So fifty-two weeks for the entire project, but take away four weeks because there were two stories before I first stumbled onto Matthew and Epp’s world. Forty eight weeks exactly to the day. I never really thought about it but that’s quite rare to be able to pinpoint a start and finish date for a book like that.

 

Please tell us in one sentence only, why we should read your book.

In Probability Angels there is a scene where a century’s old Japanese samurai stops a two-thousand year old Roman slave from killing himself by trying to help Isaac Newton discover the theory of gravity.

 

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

I like hanging out in bars with friends and I like wine and scotch and martinis. I’m also relearning photography. I took a course in high-school and loved it but then didn’t touch a camera for years. I recently bought a SLR digital camera, which is a whole different world from my old film camera from high-school. I love digital, now. The ability to take so many shots really lets you capture more. And it was actually my New Year’s resolution to start bringing my camera out more often. I’m hoping bars and cameras make a good mix.

 

What do you think makes a good story?

I think I agree with Aristotle, a good story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. I know that sounds overly simplistic but it’s the truth. When I’m reading a book, if I feel like I’m in the hand of an author who has those three things in mind while writing, then I feel like I’m in good hands and I enjoy the story. I hate when a story has a great beginning but then frays and sprawls out in all different directions and doesn’t really end. And I’m not saying that things need to be all pat and tied up neatly at the end, but there should be a sense that the journey we’ve started has come to a close.

 

What genre do you find the most difficult to write in and why?

That’s an interesting question. I’ve written in almost every genre I can think of. For awhile a few years ago that was my goal, I wanted to try every genre as a learning exercise so I wrote a ton of short stories that were all over the place. I think the hardest for me was sci-fi. I don’t know why exactly. It was a hard genre for me to take seriously, even though I enjoy plenty of sci-fi books and movies, but when I was writing it, it just felt so silly in my hands. I was making up names of technologies and worlds and I don’t think I was very good at it. It wound up feeling very goofy.

 

Do you ever experience writer’s block and if so, how to you overcome it?

I constantly experience writer’s block. The best short term solution, for me, is to focus on getting to the third or fourth sentence, or maybe the second paragraph, of that session. When I focus on the first sentence I get all locked up but if I ignore that and just type something to get to the third sentence then I get the ball rolling and the block starts to ease up. Long-term, I find it very helpful to trust in the skills and writing muscles that I’ve been building all these years, not to mention the rewriting skills. If it feels weird and like you’re writing awful stuff, which is usually what blocks me up, it helps to be able to take a deep breath and remember that you do know what you’re doing and that it will read just fine when you come back to it, and it will read even better after you’ve done your rewrites.

 

Do you have any writing projects you are currently working on?

Probability Angels is the first book of a trilogy. The second book, Persistent Illusions, will actually be going on tour in about another month. The third book is being researched and I’ll be starting it any day now, so readers can expect to see this all played out in the near future.

 

If you had to have one word or phrase written on your forehead for an entire week, what would it be?

Ha! That’s a great question. I honestly have no idea. My email address maybe? I think I’d like to see who would bother to write it down and then who would actually take the time to write to me. I bet that would spark some interesting conversations.

 

One food you would never eat?

That’s easy. I hate all seafood. Well actually I like mussels and clams and tuna fish from a can, but other than that I dislike seafood. I’ve tried what I’ve been told is very good fish at some very fine establishments, and I’ve had freshly smoked salmon in a fishing lodge in Alaska. It all tastes pretty foul to me. And don’t even get me started on sushi…

 

What is the last book you read?

I’m doing research for the next book now so my last read was a textbook on ancient Rome. Up next is a textbook about the history of clothes. Scintillating stuff, let me tell you.

 

What was the last movie you watched?

Sadly I believe the last movie I watched was some horrible thing on the SyFy channel. They’ve made, like, 10,000 movies and they all involve some computer generated monster animal eating bad actors. I think the movie I watched was called Crocosaur. It was amazing. I love bad movies; something in me just wants to eat them like junk food. But I think, or I like to think anyway, that it helps with the writing. I make fun of them while I’m watching but I also try and figure out how I would fix them. It’s sort of a test I give myself, if I was handed this script, could I make these scenes suspenseful? Could I add some gravitas? Could I fix the dialogue? Some are probably beyond fixing, and there’s more mocking than learning. But, like I said, I do think horrible movies give you some chance to work at the craft of storytelling.

 

Thank you Joseph for that insightful interview!

 

Synopsis:

Matthew knows that he died twenty years ago. He has, after all, been bouncing around New York City ever since, causing mischief and having fun as a supernatural being. But recently some problems have been cropping up: not only is he hallucinating things in garbage cans, but his mentor doesn’t think he’s working up to his full potential, his best friend can’t offer any solace but drunken confusion, and his wife is dying in Central Park.

 

See, the past twenty years haven’t meant a thing because now it’s time for Matthew to make his second choice and become a tester of humanity.

 

And that’s all before the zombies show up.

 

Come explore the world of Matthew and Epp and see what a samurai from Feudal Japan has to do with the course of modern physics, what a two-thousand year old Roman slave has to do with the summit of Mount Everest, and what a dead man from Brooklyn has to do with the fate of the world.

 

You can find the complete schedule HERE but here are tomorrow’s stops:

• March 2nd – Farrah K. @ The Book Faery Reviews
• March 2nd – MK @ MK McClintock Blog

 

Thanks to Joseph, I have two copies of Probability Angels up for grabs! One is an eBook copy (available Globally) and one is a print (available to US, UK and Canada Only).

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Happy Reading,

Jaidis