Heartland

I love the mixture of absurdity and accuracy in writer Mark Teppo‘s bio (from his site): “Mark Teppo suffers from a mild case of bibliomania, which serves him well in his on-going pursuit of a writing career. He also owns a pink bunny suit. Fascinated with the mystical and the extra-ordinary, he channels this enthusiasm into fictional explorations of magic realism, urban fantasy, and surreal experimentation. Maybe, one day, he’ll write a space opera. With rabbits.” We delve into a range of products in this email interview. My thanks to Teppo for his thoughts/time and to friend of the blog Allison Baker for introducing me in contact with Teppo. One of his collaborations, The Mongoliad, actually had its official launch earlier today, be sure to visit the site.

Tim O’Shea: As an urban fantasy author, I’m curious did you grow up in a city? What is it that attracted you to writing in the urban fantasy vein?

Mark Teppo: I grew up in a speck of a town out in the Mohave Desert, and spent a better part of my formative years in a towns under 100,000 people. It wasn’t until I moved to the Seattle area going on twenty years ago that I really arrived in a city, proper. I grew up on a diet of thrillers and mainstream mystery fiction, which always seemed to take place in big cities. In the classic “write what you know sense,” this is what I knew: all the action took place in the cities. As for the fantasy part, well, I didn’t think I knew enough about international politics and guns to write a convincing thriller.

O’Shea: In a recent essay about your writing, you said of Lightbreaker, the first book in the Codex of Souls series: “I was going to write an urban fantasy book without vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, angels, or demons.” When and why did you realize you wanted to approach the book without vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, angels, or demons?

Read the rest of this entry »