An Inteview with Author Steven Montano and a 2 Book Give Away!

I have the pleasure of interviewing Steven Montano today. He'll be giving away two Kindle copies of Black Scars today. Leave a comment and I'll do a drawing around midnight tonight and repost the winners.

Alisha: Yarn shop? Tell us more about your wife's business.

Steven: Liberty (my wife) started up Liberty's Yarns in 2008. She's an avid knitter, and when our son started kindergarten she fired up the business to take her hobby to the next level. The results? She's been WILDLY successful, gathering a solid body of followers who eat up both her yarn and her hand-crafted soaps. She's also an advocate of local businesses and independent entrepreneurship. I'm terribly proud of her. =D Check out her stuff at LIBERTYS YARN.

Alisha: Going to go check out her website today. Awesome! How cool is that? So, you're an accountant? Seriously? Why? Do you like being bored? Tell us more.

Steven: LOL.I had to get a job fast when my Dad took ill shortly after I graduated from college. The temp job that I managed to land had me working in the mail room for a healthcare company, but while I was there an entry-level position opened up in the Accounts Payable department. I found that I strangely had a knack for solving numbery problems, and before I knew I had a better position and a couple of years of experience under my belt, and I've been rolling with it ever since.


It's not my dream profession, by any means, but it's steady employment (I've been doing it for....God...15 years...) and it pays the bills.

Alisha: Well, you impressed the hell out of me. I'm terrible at math. Rain shelter? What the heck is that? You live in a rain shelter? Tell us more.

Steven: Actually, I kid about the rain shelter. But it rains in Washington a frickin' lot. Sometimes it feels like we need an extra tin plate over to roof to make sure we stay dry.


Alisha; What are you working on now?

Steven: Next up are the revisions for ...SOMETHING BLACK, the prequel to the BLOOD SKIES series. After that I need to get back on SOULRAZOR, Book 3 in the series, which with any luck will be finished as a Nanowrimo project.

Alisha: You have a creative writing degree? So did you actually get a diploma for that? Tell us about your classes? Maybe I should have taken some too. Tell us a cool experience or assignment or hey, tell us about a cool professor. Love those professor stories.

Steven: They do! The University of Colorado at Boulder had a heckuva good Creative Writing degree, which primarily consisted of writing workshops with local published authors. I took classes with Lucia Berlin, Steve Katz, and Ron Sukenick, each of whom offered some wonderful insight into the writing process.


The best part about the Creative Writing courses were the workshops. I still do these assignments from time to time to keep my writing brain fresh...


* Write a story with nothing but dialogue.
* Come up with your ten favorite words. Use each of them ten times in a single story.
* Steal dialogue from a conversation that you overheard. Use that dialogue as the opening to a story.
* Keep a writing journal by your nightstand. Write down the first thing that comes into your head as soon as you wake up. Go back to it from time to time and see if there's anything you can use in a story. (Note: this is how BLOOD SKIES came to be.)
* Keep a vocab notebook. Write down words you don't know from books you read. Once a week, look up their definitions and write them in.
* Keep a prose notebook. Write down passages or lines that you like from the things that you read, and use them as inspiration.

BLACK SCARS

Alisha: I've loved having you on my blog today, Steven. You're an interesting guy and an author I want to read. Thanks for being my guest this week. Come back anytime. :)