But if you want a great site to visit while I’m gone and well after, be sure to visit scholar/author/wit-for-hire Amy H. Sturgis’ newly designed website. I interviewed Amy in the early days of this blog and I’m always pleased to shine any light on her fine work.

Tim O’Shea: How did you first develop the Vamps concept?

Nancy Collins: The vampire society of Old Bloods and New Bloods emerged from a scuttled comic book series I created for Vertigo Comics called “Dhampire”. It was about a half-human/half-vampire hybrid and how he didn’t fit into either world terribly well. For several years I tinkered with the basic structure of that world, extrapolating on it, until it became the VAMPS world. I had the society and social structure down, but didn’t have a storyline/plot to go with it until my agent suggested that I try and pitch it as a YA series. After that, it was merely a matter of creating the various teenaged vampires and their families.

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Two nations at war, fighting for dominion over the known, and undiscovered, world, pin their last hopes at ultimate victory on finding a land out of legend.

Each will send their ships to brave the untamed seas, wild storms, sea serpents, and darker dangers unknown to any man. It is a perilous undertaking, but there will always be the impetuous, the brave and the mad who are willing to leave their homes to explore the unknown.

Even unto the edge of the world…

Kevin J. Anderson’s spectacular fantasy debut is a sweeping tale of adventure on the high seas, as two warring kingdoms vie for the greatest treasure of them all.”

At the same time, Anderson is involved in Terra Incognita: Beyond the Horizon, a progressive rock CD companion effort to the trilogy by Roswell Six. Here’s the official description on the CD (Now available from ProgRock Records):

“Kevin and [his wife] Rebecca [Moesta] have written the lyrics for all songs on a new CD with music by accomplished keyboardist/composer Erik Norlander (Rocket Scientists). Vocals by rock legends James LaBrie (DREAM THEATER), Michael Sadler (ex-SAGA), John Payne (ASIA Featuring John Payne), and Lana Lane (the Queen of Symphonic Rock). Performers include David Ragsdale (KANSAS), Gary Wehrkamp (SHADOW GALLERY), Kurt Barabas (AMARAN’S PLIGHT), Chris Brown (GHOST CIRCUS), Chris Quirarte (PRYMARY), and Mike Alvarez.”

Last month I was able to talk to Anderson about Enemies and Allies (a “prose novel is set in the 1950s and tells of the first meeting between Batman and Superman. “) over at my comics blog home, Robot 6. And he piqued my curiosity so much about the multimedia efforts behind  Terra Incognita that I asked to interview him here about it. My thanks to Anderson for his time.

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Tim O’Shea: You sing with a British accent at times, don’t deny it–and it’s never intentional, I know. Does it annoy you when people think it’s an affectation on your part?

Richard Coker: I’ve loved British music all my life, but I have never purposefully tried to sing with an English accent. No one’s accused me of affecting it, though. Maybe said accusations are lacking because so few people are familiar with my music. However, linguistically speaking, there are far more traces of British Isles speech among Southerners. Appalachians still use Elizabethan words (at least they did before satellite dishes). Perhaps, too, when I’m singing I favor softer, more Englishy, vowel sounds. I like the way they feel when I sing them.

O’Shea: How many songs have you written over the years?

Coker: I’ve been writing songs for over twenty years. I still have lyrics for over three hundred songs. My current acoustic set has about seventy songs to it. If I had to guess, my total song output is somewhere around four or five hundred.

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Tim O’Shea: IAMTW was initially established by you and Max Allan Collins to enhance “the professional and public image of tie-in writers”. Have you found that Mystery Writers of America, Science Fiction Writers of America, and the Romance Writers of America have given greater credit to tie-in writers since the formation of the group–or what metrics do you use to evaluate the effectiveness of IAMTW’s efforts to date?

Lee Goldberg: We aren’t interested in getting acknowledgement from other writers’ organizations…our goal is to increase awareness of, and appreciation for, tie-in writing among the general public, booksellers, publishers, and the media (print, Internet, broadcast, etc). In that regard, I think we’ve succeeded. We’ve seen a LOT more press about tie-in authors since our organization started, much of it directly mentioning the IAMTW or our Scribe Awards (ie Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Mystery Scene, etc)…and we are noticing increased recognition from publishers, who are starting to mention Scribe Awards and/or nominations for their authors in sales catalogs, promo materials and book jacket copy.

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Here’s the basic premise of the new novel:
“The turning of the wheel by the tilling of the wheat.

With these cryptic words, a conspiracy is set in motion. It threatens a new translation of the Bible ordered by King James I. The year is 1605. In Cambridge England one of the translators is savagely murdered. Deacon Marbury, charged with protecting the group, seeks outside help to find the murderer. But the people who offer to help are not who they claim to be and the man they send to Marbury–Brother Timon–has a secret past and blood on his hands. He is the agent of certain forces that hope to halt the translation itself. The killer continues his gruesome work; the body count rises. Brother Timon is torn between conflicting loyalties. He believes that an even greater crisis looms; ancient and alarming secrets are revealed. These secrets date to the earliest days of Christianity and threaten the most basic of its beliefs.”

Here’s just a snippet of DePoy’s biography: “Phillip DePoy is the EDGAR award winning playwright of EASY (New York’s vote for best mystery play in the country). He is also the author of 10 novels, 2 published plays, and 37 theatre pieces that have seen production throughout the United States. His play LAMB ON FIRE was produced in New York. His Dell mystery novels, featuring Atlanta character Flap Tucker, have been called the best regional detective fiction on the market today. … The author is currently director of theatre for Clayton State University. His play TURNED FUNNY recently received 3 SUZI awards (Atlanta’s Tony Awards). His newly commissioned CHRISTMAS AT SWEET APPLE sold out in 2007 at THEATRE IN THE SQUARE and was remounted for Christmas 2008.” There’s a great deal more to his bio, but you can follow the link, as his entire website is entertaining in and of itself. Of particular interest with the new novel, the site offers folks a chance to read an excerpt. Nothing better than free words, I tell ya. My thanks to DePoy for a really enjoyable and funny interview.

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Tim O’Shea: Given how much you know about the history of baseball, what long dormant rules that used to exist do you think could be re-introduced in the modern era to help revitalize the game?

Peter Morris: What today’s baseball fans rarely realize is that baseball was originally a sport with fast-paced, non-stop action. Catchers snapped the ball back to the pitcher and if the batter stepped out of the box or even looked like he wasn’t paying attention, the pitcher would try to sneak a pitch past him. While every sport has timeouts, only baseball has unlimited timeouts and I think some limit should be put on them. There’s no good reason that a batter should be allowed to step out and take as long as he wants after every pitch. Then you could put and enforce similar restrictions on the pitcher, as well as limiting the number of pickoff throws per at bat.

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Tim O’Shea: How did Canadian Content originally form?

Ian Boothby: Canadian Content is a spin off from Urban Improv which has been doing weekly sketch style improv for 13 years in Vancouver. We still perform every Monday at Chivana. There was a Vancouver Sketchfest show happening and we wanted Urban Improv to attend but the other groups were adamant that the material had to be scripted. So we wrote some sketches based mostly on characters we’d done on our Monday shows and called ourselves Canadian Content.

Most of the performers in the group have actually had sketch television series in Canada but we never really thought about doing sketch regularly live before this. Since then we’ve got on to do the Chicago and San Fran Sketchfests and the Vancouver ComedyFest. We’ve gotten to work with most of our sketch comedy heroes from Kids in the Hall and Mr. Show. If it all ends now we couldn’t complain. Okay, we clearly would complain but…

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Tim O’Shea: How did the idea for the textbook first come about?

Jennifer Holt/Alisa Perren: We both teach classes about the media industries and were frustrated with the lack of course materials devoted to this subject – especially materials approaching the topic from a humanistic perspective. We also saw that the study of media industries had been growing and expanding but it had not yet been mapped as a field in an academic text. So we enlisted some of the people who have done formative work in this area as well as those doing new scholarship to help us put what we saw as the emerging field of media industries into context for our readers. (To view the book’s table of contents, click here.)

O’Shea: How did you divvy up the editorial duties on the textbook?

Holt/Perren: This was truly a collaborative effort. We worked together in recruiting contributors, editing all of the essays, and writing the introduction. And amazingly, we remained friends through it all.

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The Wednesday interview will return next week.

Thanks for your patience.