Today’s interviewee for the Blog World Tour: Science Fiction Edition is Dawn Chapman, author of The Secret King series, and Director of TSK Productions Ltd.!
Welcome to my blog, Dawn! I’m glad you could be here today. My first question for you, as one science fiction writer to another, what drew you to write in this genre?
As a child I always watched scifi, action or drama. So that to me meant there was a world out there that just begged to be written.
I grew up reading science fiction (didn’t watch a lot of things), and that influenced my writing. It’s interesting how the things we enjoy can influence the paths our writing takes. Do you have any tips on what to do and what not to do when writing?
Write what you want to. Don’t always try and please others. Get some beta readers you can trust and work had to keep them. If one person says something is wrong you can ignore it, but if 5 people say it…then think about what they’re saying.
That’s good advice–I said something very similar during a recent author talk I gave. After you finish a first draft, do you let it stew for a bit? Leave it for a month or so before returning to edit it?
The fact my editors and other people have it while I work on other projects is long enough for me.
I do like to come back to a project after a good while, at least a month or more.
It’s good you’ve found a method that works for you. You’ve been writing for a long time–longer than I’ve been alive, actually! What are your ambitions for your writing career?
As The Secret King’s growing so quick already, it’s not just about my writing. Of course I want people to enjoy my work, but I also want them to enjoy the work of others.
Those are both good goals! *glances at clock* We have time for one more question. What do your fans mean to you?
Getting that little message from a fan–“You had me in tears”–means so much, it means I’m doing my job right and invoking emotions.
When someone leaves a review on a piece it means even more because it helps to show others the emotional impact that your work had on a piece. My latest review on Lethao read:
WOWZA! NO… FREAKIN’ WOWZA!
A nail-biter from the first, I quickly became emotionally invested in the characters. Intrigue, secrets (hard to do when emotions are literally written on your arm) and mystery. Prophecy. Politics. And a planet destroyed by a star going nova. Such a wonderfully complex plot.
I listened to the audiobook.
The narrator did a fantastic job. I loved the unusual accents the characters had.
That’s what we’re aiming for 🙂 To see that spike in someone’s thoughts and emotions. So the fans mean everything.
I love receiving reviews like that! And I hope that you continue to receive such wonderful feedback from your fans.
Thank you for being here today, Dawn!
Dawn Chapman has been creating scifi and fantasy stories for thirty years. Until 2005 when her life and attention turned to scripts, and she started work on The Secret King, a 13 episode Sci Fi TV series, with great passion for this medium.
In 2010, Dawn returned to her first love of prose. She’s been working with coach EJ Runyon who’s encouraged her away from fast-paced script writing, to revel in the world of TSK and Letháo as an epic prose space journey.
Where TSK came from, in Dawn’s own words: The Secret King began its journey in 2007 when I broke my hand. I had a dream and that dream became a feature script. I wanted to learn and find like-minded people, so I joined an online writing community, this is where I met one of TSK’s partners, Steven Kogan, and from that first rough draft of a feature film I began to plot a TV series. I asked Steven if he would like to write inside my world and he accepted; together we penned 13 episodes, and became fast friends over the next few years.
In 2010, I started entering competitions, and discovering NaNoWriMo was where I found my second partner, Jaime Bengzon, who also came on board with TSK’s TV series as a character designer. In 2016, we made it official and formed TSK Productions, with the dream of novels, novellas, comics and animation in our sights.
To date, the TSK team is 14 strong and growing. And we just released our second book, also available on KU.
You connect with Dawn and learn more about TSK through:
TSK Productions Ltd’s Facebook Page
