Welcome to this week’s Friday Author Spotlight! Today we have Science Fiction author, J C Steel visiting with the first book in his Cortii Universe series, Through the Hostage. He had this to share about himself:
Born in Gibraltar and raised on a yacht around the coasts of the Atlantic, I’m an author, martial artist, and introvert. In between the necessary making of money to allow the writing of more books, I can usually be found stowing away on a spaceship, halfway to the further galaxy.
Science-fiction and urban fantasy are my favourite genres to write in. I grew up on a rich diet of Anne McCaffrey, Tolkien, Dorothy Dunnett, and Jack Higgins, and finally started to write my own books aged fourteen. I can’t point the finger at any one book or author that set me in my current direction, but I blame my tendency to write characters who favour drastically practical solutions on some mix of those. If I can toss in a bit of gender- and genre-bending, so much the better. Status quo is boring.
I hope you enjoy reading the books half as much as I enjoyed writing them!
Connect with the Author
About the Book
Khyria Ilan is a commander in the Cortii, the most elite mercenary organisation in known space. With a past she can’t remember, and commanders who would love to see her dead, her future is likely to be short: her command faces their ultimate test to prove their right to survive.
When the odds are impossible, sometimes the only thing to do is play the game…
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Keep reading for an interview with the author:
What is the oddest thing you’ve ever researched for one of your books?
I write action and adventure style sci-fi; if someone’s checking my browser history I’m on more watchlists than I have fingers. My personal favourite was a few years back when I periodically shared a computer at work, and a colleague stumbled over my search history. Topics of the day: knife throwing and blood spatter analysis techniques. Another favourite was household herbs that could be used to repel a curse (bay leaves, believe it or not).
When did you first consider yourself an author?
Honestly, it came home to me when I got my first print proof in the mail. I had the eureka moment just standing there and staring at it – sort of a ‘this is a real book and I have made it’ kind of thing. I still occasionally catch myself staring at the print copies I keep on hand in the same kind of disbelief. There are four whole books out now 
What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Sit down and start writing. The only thing you can’t fix is an empty page.
What do you enjoy doing aside from writing?
Like many authors, I read a lot; when my self-discipline is on the upside of its cycle, I also enjoy martial arts, working out, and riding (on the rare occasion there’s a stable close by). Travelling’s another firm favourite – I grew up on a yacht, so I moved around a lot as a child and got bitten by the travel bug young. Since I started paying my own bills, my travel budget is mostly on the ‘well, we can go and explore the back garden’ scale, but I have a bucket list I’m working on.
About how many books do you read in a year?
Until I joined Goodreads, I would have shrugged at this question. Now I can confidently tell you I read about 200 books a year.
Do you prefer ebooks, print or both?
Depends. Left to my own devices with unlimited space, I prefer paperback books. On the other hand, given just how much I read, I turn coat very promptly to ebooks if I’m travelling – I can take my tablet along, rather than trying to pack 10 books for a two-week trip.
Are you a pantser or outliner?
I’m a pantser. Probably the outlier on the scale – for my sci-fi series, I quite literally have a couple of pages with some key details on ten or so major characters, and a spreadsheet of the quotes I use for chapter headers. That’s it. Books really do just happen, and mostly they happen when one or more of my characters (who are highly-trained mercenaries expert in storming defences) start invading my head. This usually starts out relatively innocuously with snippets of dialogue now and then, or a scene that won’t leave me alone, and has been known to escalate to vivid dreams about infiltrating alien factories and gunfights with giant robots when I try to resist. Generally, after a few weeks to a month of this, I cave and start writing with whatever scene I can’t dislodge from my head. After that, all I have to do is write down what my characters do. At this point, I’ve been daydreaming about my main characters and working with them for about thirty years, so most of the details about them and the environment are so internalised that I have the answer in a mental vault to most of the questions as I write. Although one of the characters I’ve been telling myself stories about since I was six surprised me the other day by letting me know she prefers stilettos to standard fighting knives.
How long does it take you to write a book?
Tricky question. I’ve done NaNoWriMo and won, so technically I know I can come up with a book-length manuscript in a month, but I haven’t dared open that MS again to try and edit it, because I know it’s a horrific hurrah’s nest that’ll take months of edits. Several of the books I’ve published recently I wrote first drafts of twenty years ago. Through the Hostage, the first in my sci-fi series, is one of them, although its current form is heavily-revised from that original draft. In addition to that, I have a full-time day job that’s pretty demanding and when a colleague hasn’t double-dog dared me to do NaNo, I write to relax, so I’m not even close to writing full time. Best guess, from nothing to publication, I’d say 18 months to a couple of years.
How do you come up with the titles for your books?
Actually, I’m very lucky on that score, based on what I hear from other people – my titles, in the vast majority, show up fully-formed at some point in the writing process, rather like Athena from the head of Zeus. Occasionally it doesn’t happen until I’m at the copy and proof stage, and starting to panic a bit about what on earth I’m going to do for the cover art drafts, but so far one’s shown up in time for each book. Long may that continue!
Do you write about real life experiences, or does everything come from your imagination?
I write primarily about an elite interstellar mercenary cult, so anything from real life I use there is dissected, shaken vigorously in stardrive lubricant, and then looked at through the bottom of a glass. If someone asks, I claim semi-truthfully that most of the darker psychological mind-games in my books are based on my time in a UK boarding school, which is probably about as close as writing about real-life experiences as I come in my main series. The urban fantasy I’m currently working on is partly set on a yacht in the Caribbean and that one I’ve been able to take chunks of my childhood for (the yacht and the islands, rather than the vampire hunting…hopefully that was obvious…uh).
Do you ever base your characters on people you know?
No, not really. Aspects of characters will be based on aspects of people I know; I don’t think you can help, once you start writing, observing people just a trifle too closely and writing them in your head. Some of that will always spill over. There are traces of me in my protagonists; one hates wearing shoes, another enjoys edged weapons training, things like that. I had a friend in a martial arts club once who had a joke where he’d flip someone the bird and ask them very seriously how many fingers he was holding up, which one of my characters has stolen.
Have you ever gotten an idea for a story from something really bizarre?
All the time! And then mostly I forget to write it down, because I’m disorganised, or I don’t have the time to write it (often), and nothing happens. However, there was something, about eight years ago now; I live in British Columbia, and the political party at the time came up with a genius (ahem) idea to publicise the province with a tagline of ‘Super natural British Columbia!’ – as punctuated. It was on billboards everywhere for about eighteen months, and then someone clearly got tired of the helpless laughter from everywhere and put the comma in. However, that one resulted in an urban fantasy NaNo on the lines of a werecat tribal enforcer with a poor attitude and a werewolf partner. Not sure if it’ll ever get published, but I laughed so hard writing it I kept getting funny looks.
What are you working on now?
I’m most of the way through the editing on my first urban fantasy for publication. I wrote the original version years ago, while I was still in boarding school and feeling homesick for the Tropics, and frankly never expected to actually publish it. I mean, vampire hunters based on a yacht in the Caribbean? Come on! Then I floated the idea on a writers’ forum, only half-seriously, and got an unexpected number of responses along the lines of ‘Heck yes, I’d tap that, publish it!’…so here I am, a year later, elbows-deep in getting it ready to go. Actually, I love my cover art for this one. I’m looking forward to see how it does compared to my sci-fi series.
