1. What inspired you to write?
I’ve been a writer in the tabletop roleplaying game field for over two decades now, but I started writing (very poorly) all the way back in grade school. I’m inspired by the usual things for geeks like me: Dungeons and Dragons, Star Trek, Star Wars, and so on… At first it was fascination with the fantastic, but then I realized that you can tell some very engaging stories in these worlds, and I wanted to try my hand at it.
2) Are you a reader? What are some of your favorites?
Absolutely! I grew up reading JRR Tolkien, R.A. Salvatore, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. More recently, I’ve enjoyed the Star Trek tie-in fiction from David Mack, Dayton Ward, and Peter David. I enjoy reading in shared universes, even if a lot of people don’t consider them literary.
3) What is your newest work, and what is going to happen in the future?
I actually have some exciting news right now. I wrote a roleplaying game book called Battlemasters & Berserkers, which did pretty well as a Kickstarter. Part of the KS was a piece of original barbarian themed fantasy fiction called Rathorn: Savage Adventures. It’s a novella approximately 19,000 words long, which is the first of many. I’ll be releasing new episodes at a rate of one per month for the foreseeable future. These will be going out through my Patreon, which is located here: https://www.patreon.com/Rathorn and possibly Kindle Vella.
4) Do you have advice or tips for Indie Authors?
Yes. Don’t be in a rush to publish (which also means, don’t follow my example). If you want to compete, the book needs to be of professional quality, and that means it needs to be polished. Clumsy writing is endemic in the indie publishing realm, and readers pick up on it. It’s more than just fixing misspellings and correcting grammatical errors. You need to have style, and that means eliminating redundancy, extra words, and not phrasing things clumsily. Unless you have an English degree and a ton of editing experience, you’re not going to be able to find and fix all these issues yourself, and frankly even professionals shouldn’t edit their own work anyway (again, follow my advice, not my example).
5) What influenced you as a writer?
It was the realization that writing is the only professional endeavor I want to pursue, and it’s the only thing I feel like I have a decent amount of talent for. If it wasn’t for writing, I’d probably be asking customers if they want fries with their order, or locked into some dead-end soul-sucking desk job, like telephone debt collecting. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if I’m writing fiction or hammering out a book full of rules for Dungeons and Dragons, for me it’s the thrill of creation; of bringing something into the world with my name on it. Long after I’m gone, my books will remain, in both physical and digital form.
Samantha Evans--Author 