Daniel Price Author Interview ~ JeanBookNerd

Book Nerd Interview

I'm an L.A. author with two very different novels to my name. One's a comedy set in the world of public relations. The other's a sci-fi saga about superpowered people on an alternate Earth. I'm not entirely sure how that happened.

Readers can contact me directly through Goodreads mail. I'll gladly reply to any thoughtful message, though my response time may be slow. I'm scrambling to finish the sequel to "The Flight of the Silvers."

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Was there a defining moment during your youth when you realized you wanted to be a writer?

If I had any “Eureka!” moments, I don’t remember them. But I do feel comfortable saying that Star Wars made me want to become a storyteller and Lord of the Rings made we want to become a writer.

Why is storytelling so important for all of us?

Because while non-fiction’s nice and all, it doesn’t always do a perfect job of explaining the world around us. Sometimes you need a good story to drive the point home, to illustrate life in a way you never considered before.

And when that fails, a story’s just a good way to get out of your own head for a while. I think we’d all be psychotic without that escape.

Beyond your own work (of course), what is your all-time favorite book and why? And what is your favorite book outside of your genre?

My favorite book, by far, is The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. Even though he didn’t like having his works called “science fiction,” his novels represent everything about I love about the genre: insanely inventive concepts, a compelling cast of characters, a poignant parallel to the world of today. The Sirens of Titan has all of that and then some. It also includes one of the funniest and saddest explanations for human existence I’ve ever read. There’s no one like Vonnegut and there never will be again.

Outside the genre, I’d have go with The Stand by Stephen King. I’ve read it a dozen times now and it never fails to blow me away. He takes the entire world from pre- to post-apocalypse and makes you feel every step of the transition. It’s just an epic American horror story. No other post-apocalyptic novel has ever been able to measure up for me.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received from another author?

I don’t remember who first said “Write what you want to write,” but it’s a powerful piece of advice. I wasted a lot of time worrying about the market, the audience, the arc of my career and all that other ancillary crap. All it did was paralyze me. It kept me from writing the story that had been burning a hole in my brain for years, namely The Flight of the Silvers.

In your book; The Flight of the Silvers, can you tell my Book Nerd community a little about it?

It’s about two sisters and four strangers who survive the end of the world under mysterious circumstances and find themselves on a parallel Earth, a place where common household technology has the ability to manipulate time. Once they get there, they have a whole mess problems to deal with. New enemies, new powers, a whole alien America to process. It’s a character-driven story with action, humor, and a heaping amount of temporal manipulation. The characters bend time in a dozen different ways that have nothing to do with time travel.

For those who are unfamiliar with Hannah, how would you introduce her?

She’s the younger of the two Given sisters, an insecure actress who wears her heart on her sleeve and is often prone to temperamental outbursts. She starts the book in a very bad place, but she gets stronger as the story progresses. I’m writing the final chapters of Book Two now and I can barely recognize her from the character I first created.

If you could introduce one of your characters to any character from another book, who would it be and why?

Oh wow. I love that question. I suppose if I wanted to make things easier for the Silvers, I’d add Odysseus to the group. The guy’s adaptable. He’s a tough traveler. Good in a fight. I think he could help them.

Then again, anyone who’s read The Odyssey knows that bad things happen to the people who travel with Odysseus. The Silvers would probably get eaten by monsters or turned into pigs.

What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating Amanda?

Of all the main characters, she’s the least like me. In many ways, she’s my polar opposite. So you can imagine my surprise when she turned out to be one of my favorite Silvers to write. I’m not sure what that says about me, but there it is.

When asked, what’s the one question you always answer with a lie?

When people ask me how the Silvers series ends, I always lie. I usually tell them it ends with a big musical number. If they’re a hardcore grammarian, I tell them it ends with a preposition.

What’s the best advice you can give writers to help them develop their own unique voice and style?

The same advice I got. Stop thinking about the market. Stop caring what other people think. Tell the stories you want to tell and tell them exactly how you want to tell them. There is no better advice for any writer, other than “Write."

What's the most memorable summer job you've ever had?

I spent many years as a freelance graphic artist, so I had a lot of seasonal jobs. I spent one summer creating courtroom exhibits for a law firm that specialized in wrongful death suits. It was horrible. I had to work with clients to pick out the best photos of their dead kids. The lawyers told me to find as many baseball pictures as I could. Juries apparently respond really well to dead kids in baseball gear. I did a lot of drinking that summer.

Who was your first girlfriend?

Her name was Perry and we were both six. I don’t remember her last name. I just know the relationship ended badly and somehow she got half my toys.

Tell me about your first kiss

I was thirteen. I had braces and I was very clumsy. All other details of the incident are sealed under court order.

What would be harder for you, to tell someone you love them or that you do not love them back?

Oh God. The second one. Who wants to break someone’s heart like that? It’s devastating.

When was the last time you cried?

When I read that last question.

What decade during the last century would you have chosen to be a teenager?

The 1990s. You had all this cool technology but it still pre-dated the social media craze. I would never want to be a teenager in the Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr era. Good lord.

What is your greatest adventure?

As weird as it sounds, my unequivocal answer is “cancer.” I got it in 2006 and it changed everything about my life. It was like being taken apart and reassembled. I can’t recommend it as an experience, and I hope to God I never get it again, but I know I’m a better person for surviving it. There’s so much in my life that I wouldn’t have today if I didn’t get that kick in the ass. And that includes The Flight of the Silvers.

Where can readers stalk you?

You can learn everything about me at www.danielprice.info or find me on Twitter as @SilversGuy. I was dragged kicking and screaming onto Twitter by the Penguin publicists, but now I love it. It’s a terrific place to interact with readers and authors.

Without any warning, the world comes to an end for Hannah and Amanda Given. The sky looms frigid white. The electricity falters, and airplanes everywhere crash to the ground. But the Givens are saved by three mysterious strangers—fearsome and beautiful beings who force a simple silver bracelet onto each sister’s wrist.

Within moments, the sky comes down in a crushing sheet of light and everything around them is gone.

Shielded from the devastation by their silver adornments, the Givens suddenly find themselves elsewhere, a strange new Earth where restaurants move through the air like flying saucers and the fabric of time is manipulated by common household appliances.

Soon, Hannah and Amanda are joined by four other survivors from their world—an acerbic cartoonist, a shy teenage girl, a brilliant young Australian, and a troubled ex-prodigy. Hunted by enemies they never knew they had (and afflicted with temporal abilities they never wanted), the sisters and their companions begin a cross-country journey to find the one man who can save them…before time runs out.

PRAISE FOR THE FLIGHT OF THE SILVERS:

“An absorbing adventure with a fresh take on both the parallel-universe and the paranormal subgenres. You’ll get pulled in.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“VERDICT: This first volume in a planned trilogy is fascinating sf; Price’s strong, engaging characters and fast-moving plot will keep readers on their toes. Highly recommended for fans of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“Price deserves credit for creating immediately relatable characters whose motivations are understandable even when not so commendable. But he deserves out-and-out praise for doing so while constantly upping the temporal ante…Any hours spent reading The Flight of the Silvers will be time well spent.”
—BookPage

“Daniel Price has given readers the first installment of what promises to be a well-wrought sci-fi saga, colored by intriguing ideas and complex characters adrift in a wonderfully weird world. The Flight of the Silvers is thought-provoking, cinematic in scope…and very, very good.”
—The Maine Edge

“The cast is engaging and the author has created an alternate-reality world that is both bewilderingly different and reassuringly familiar…A highly imaginative exercise in world building that also features characters it’s very easy to care about.”
—Booklist

You can purchase The Flight of the Silvers at the following Retailers: