Blog Tour + Giveaway: Interview with Greg van Eekhout, Author of PACIFIC FIRE

I’m thrilled to be participating in the Pacific Fire blog tour, hosted by Tor Books! I loved Pacific Fire, which is book two in van Eekhout’s Daniel Blackland series. If you missed my review, you can catch it here. Today, I’m happy to welcome Greg to the blog, and I also have three copies of Pacific Fire to give away, courtesy of Tor Books! Read to the end if you’d like to enter (US and Canada only).

Please join me in welcoming Greg van Eekhout to Books, Bones & Buffy!

Congratulations on the publication of Pacific Fire, the second book in the trilogy! How easy (or difficult) was it to write the follow-up to California Bones?

All writing is hard for me! I don’t even understand the concept of writing not being hard. There’s all these words and you have to pick the right ones and put them in the right order and figure out what to say and how to say it. Ugh!

Ha ha, well, you make it look easy:-) Pacific Fire opens ten years after the ending of California Bones, as opposed to many sequels that begin right after the events of the previous book. What prompted this decision?

I wanted to deal with the aftermath of California Bones, and deal with the kind of life Daniel and Sam, the Hierarch’s golem, have had to lead after all the stuff that happens in the first book. So giving them a decade to accumulate consequences seemed like the best way to accommodate that.

Your fantastical vision of a magical Los Angeles is one of my favorite parts of your series. I especially loved the idea of water canals in place of freeways. Did this idea come about after spending time in the horrible L.A. freeway traffic?

Since cars and freeways are some of the things people most closely associate with L.A., switching them out for boats and canals gave me a clear and dramatic way to signal that this is a different version of L.A.. It also made water magic an intrinsic part of the city. But, yeah, L.A. traffic is dreadful. It really detracts from quality of life.

I loved the idea of using famous Los Angeles icons as characters in your books. It must have been fun to incorporate those characters into your stories! How did you decide which people—Disney, William Mulholland, etc.—to use?

Since hydromancy, or water magic, is such a big part of the story, it made sense to include Mulholland, the guy who’s largely responsible for bringing water to Los Angeles. And Disney, jeez, he’s Hollywood and he’s Disneyland.

Can you tell us why you chose to use the unique idea of ingesting human and supernatural creature bones in order to do magic?

The whole idea for the series began with the notion that, in the middle of L.A., there are these amazingly cool ponds of thick, bubbling goo, and inside the goo there are fossils of fantastic creatures. So I wanted to use fossils to enact magic. Eating them just seemed like the most direct way to do that, and it also fits in with themes of using people and consuming limited resources. The idea that you could get magic not just from eating the bones of magical creatures but also by eating the bones of people who’ve eaten bones is just a logical extension of the idea.

You’ve also written a couple of middle-grade books for Bloomsbury USA. How different was it to switch gears completely and jump into adult novels?

The first chapter of the first draft of California Bones was nothing but the F-word, over and over. But once I got that out of my system, the approach isn’t all that different. What do these characters want? How do they see the world? How do I put the reader in the characters’ heads? And what’s cool, fun, exciting, important about the world they live in?

What’s next for you? Can you tell us about what you’re working on right now? And I’m hoping the answer is Dragon Coast (Book three of the Daniel Blackland series)!

I am almost done reviewing the copyedits of Dragon Coast, and it’s due out in September. Then I owe a short story for an anthology, and then I’ve got a couple of book proposals to write. One is for another adult fantasy novel, and one is for a middle-grade science fiction novel. For the first time in several years, I don’t have a book under contract. It’s terrifying, but it also gives me a lot of freedom to work on whatever I want.

Tell us three things about yourself that can’t be found on your website

1. I have an alternative way of snapping my fingers that involves bending one finger backwards. It grosses out my wife.
2. I once tried brewing my own beer and discovered rocketry and made a hole in my ceiling.
3. I’m nice to telemarketers because I was once a telemarketer and it’s a horrible job and few people do it because they want to be telemarketers.

Thank you for visiting today, Greg!

About the author:

GREG VAN EEKHOUT is the author of California Bones and Pacific Fire, as well as a previous fantasy novel with Bantam Books, Norse Code. He is also the author of two middle-grade SF novels, Kid vs. Squid and The Boy at the End of the World (a finalist for the Andre Norton Award). He lives in San Diego, California.

Find Greg: Author Website | Twitter

About Pacific Fire:

I’m Sam. I’m just this guy.

Okay, yeah, I’m a golem created from the substance of his own magic by the late Hierarch of Southern California. With a lot of work, I might be able to wield magic myself. I kind of doubt it, though. Not like Daniel Blackland can.

Daniel’s the reason the Hierarch’s gone and I’m still alive. He’s also the reason I’ve lived my entire life on the run. Ten years of never, ever going back to Los Angeles. Daniel’s determined to protect me. To teach me.

But it gets old. I’ve got nobody but Daniel. I’ll never do anything normal. Like attend school. Or date a girl.

Now it’s worse. Because things are happening back in LA. Very bad people are building a Pacific firedrake, a kind of ultimate weapon of mass magical destruction.  Daniel seemed to think only he could stop them. Now Daniel’s been hurt. I managed to get us to the place run by the Emmas. (Many of them. All named Emma. It’s a long story.) They seem to be healing him, but he isn’t going anyplace soon.

Do I even have a reason for existing, if it isn’t to prevent this firedrake from happening? I’m good at escaping from things. Now I’ve escaped from Daniel and the Emmas, and I’m on my way to LA.

This may be the worst idea I ever had.

Find Pacific Fire:

 

And now for the giveaway! (3) winners will receive a finished copy of Pacific Fire. Giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only. Please fill out the Rafflecopter form below to enter. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway