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Welcome, Dean. Please tell us a little
bit about yourself.
I
write sci-fi, fantasy, action-adventures and thrillers, or some combination
thereof—usually with a strong vein of dark humor. Though, my works are dramas
first; the humor is there to take the edge off as with the Raiders of the Lost
Ark, Transformers, and Jurassic Park franchises.
My current catalog of twelve books represents a little over five years' worth of work. I'm currently averaging a couple books annually. Of my existing franchises with multiple installments, The Hundred Year Clone books can be read in any order, while the 5 books of Renaissance 2.0 must be read in sequence as they form part of a singular story arc (much as with A Game of Thrones.)
I
live in the country where I breed bluebirds, which are endangered in these
parts, as my small contribution to restoring nature's balance. When I'm not
writing, or researching my next book, I may also be found socializing with
friends, or working in my organic garden.
Please tell us about your current
release.
Blood Brothers is a paranormal fantasy about
fraternal twins with extraordinary powers. They’re taken by a secretive
government department as infants and raised separately with the intent of
keeping them from knowing of one another’s existence. Trained to be assassins,
it isn’t long before their abilities graduate from making them exemplary at
their jobs to making them something the government can no longer control. They
are subsequently scheduled for cancellation and given their final assignment: take
out one another. Not only does that not work out, they team up to go against
the people trying to bring them down.
Heading the
department tasked with eliminating the brothers is none other than their own
father, who turns out to be several magnitudes of power beyond either of the
boys. Even together, they’re no match for him. But they have an ace up their
sleeves they don’t know about. Drawn to the same kind of women, they discover
that their wives are sorceresses only now coming into power. But is the
menagerie enough to take down dear old dad?
One
reviewer said it best: “The series is called
Blood Brothers, but this adventure is really a family affair: the brothers,
their partners, children and even their old man in a starring role as the
villain. Think Disney's Incredibles, but in a violent and bizarre fantasy
world.”
What inspired you to write this book?
I would write
not only Blood Brothers, but several
other titles before consciously realizing that what I write isn’t fantasy so
much as paranormal fantasy (at times blended with sci-fi). I would have thought
my range was greater than that, but I guess not, lol. As with Nietzsche, I’m
fascinated with the man into superman idea. And I’m constantly on the lookout
for dark situations that put my heroes under the kind of pressures that would
destroy baser mortals. There I will find the rare few individuals who manage to
rewire their minds post their traumas to emerge as something more than what
they were before, usually with any number of psychic and paranormal abilities.
My novels
and my characters thus tend to take one of two paths to self-transcendence. In
the case of my sci-fi, it’s usually some type of cyberpunk upgrade. Or the
characters may in fact be robots determined to better themselves. But with my
fantasies, such as Blood Brothers,
the path from the human to the superhuman is different. Here I borrow more on
ancient Tibetan scrolls, Zen wisdoms, Buddhist philosophy, the teachings of
saints and sages alike, and studies done on Shaolin monks, to name some
influences. I look at studies into peak performance among star athletes and
mentalists and I stir in a little imagination and extrapolation to look at
what’s ahead for us as we evolve individually and collectively into something
more than human.
For some
people, paranormal fantasy means stories about shapeshifters, werewolves and
vampires. You’ll find these in my books also, but always coming from this
private place, from the same nagging question, how can each of us—not just our
fantasy escape characters—do this? So my books, if you read between the lines,
are primers for turning each of us into something a good deal more
extraordinary. No one book has all the answers. After all, I have to entice you
to keep reading. And I have to keep the stories fun and fast-moving, as opposed
to pedagogic, which means lightly sprinkling the technical details of how you
too can follow a path into the mystical and magical.
Excerpt from Blood Brothers:
Just beyond the perimeter of the military encampment, Clay
and Jared soared in with the F-14, still moving relatively slowly under the
influence of Clay's telekinesis, the jet’s fuel long spent.
They observed the drama with the dragons breathing fire on
the soldiers and having it deflected by the force field.
And then they watched as Rydell took out the two-headed
dragons one after the other with blasts from his eyes, boring basketball-size
holes through each of their hearts.
The beasts emitted agonizing cries as they fell. The first
to land, the one with the more pointy snouts, managed to penetrate the shield
with her heads as she landed on top of it. With her dying breaths, the fiery
boluses she emitted took out a healthy allotment of soldiers already panicked
and fleeing beneath the energy dome. Then, with her body limp and arched to
accommodate the shield, she slid off.
As the second dragon crashed, it flicked its tail,
penetrating the shield, and slicing any number of running soldiers in two,
before the shield pushed it back out, resuming its perfect spherical shape.
The last of the second dragon’s heads hammered the ground
moments after.
Jared took over the F-14, firing up the afterburners. “We're
outta here.”
“And the defenseless women we're arriving like knights in
shining armor to save?”
“We'll say a prayer.”
What exciting story are you working on
next?
One of the
ones I’m working on now, Odd Man Out,
is a darkly funny tale about a FBI profiler who hunts serial killers by day,
but is a serial killer himself by night. Fans of the Dexter TV series will feel right at home here. Though ostensibly a
high-tech thriller, as always with my writing, paranormal elements lurk just
beneath the surface. Part of the fun with this series is watching the FBI
profiler cum serial killer mentoring his protégé on how to take his game to the
next level. Sharing best practices includes divulging some of his meditative
curriculum, and other mind-enhancing disciplines for being all he can be. His
ability to stay ahead of the best and brightest the various world agencies have
had to throw at him over the years, after call, can’t be explained entirely by
simply being smarter than they are.
When did you first consider yourself a
writer?
I had a palm
reader look at my right palm once and say, “Hmm, you’re very fickle.” She
promptly handed my arm back to me and turned forward in the car seat. We were
driving someplace at the time. I hated her for that. I thought, “The audacity
of the woman!” But she’d clearly hit a nerve. Some years later I decided for
myself, “Dean, you’ll never be able to be one thing for the rest of your life
unless that one thing allows you to be everything else.” Through my writing I
can be a lawyer, a doctor, a spy, a mad scientist, a health nut, and the
hundred and one other things I would like to have been in real life—if only I
weren’t so fickle. Better yet, I can enjoy superhuman abilities that only
people who live in fantasies much of their waking life can ever hope to enjoy.
The above
realizations came to me during my college years at Cal Berkeley. It was an age
of revelations, all in all. I’ll save the rest of the shattering insights into
myself and my world made back then for next time.
Do you write full-time? If so, what's
your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find
time to write?
I do write
full time. You would think that without the distractions of a day job that it
would all be downhill skiing as far as resistance to getting my daily allotment
of pages written. You’d be wrong. It requires years of discipline and technique
to keep the pipes open and flowing, to circumvent writer’s block, to know how
to balance the writing with the editing and the researching of the next book,
and with some semblance of a social life that keeps you from becoming a
peculiar form of recluse. All of which explains why I started writing late in
life (when I was younger I had none of those things going for me.)
And then
there are the health issues surrounding such a sedentary life. I constantly
have to interrupt my writing to do my twenty-minute exercise breaks if I expect
to keep my mind sharp and in the “zone” of peak performance. And then there’s
the issue of what to do about those hundred and one errands I’ve been putting
off, just so I can write, all screaming for my attention. Unfortunately, I’m
not British royalty who can afford to hire out for every little thing. That means
when the faucet is leaking, I have to fix it. When the car needs a tune up, it
strangely won’t drive itself to the shop and take care of this on its own. (Ask
me why I also write sci-fi, if not to ensure that cars of the future do just
this. And houses clean themselves, and yard work gets done by robo-lawn mowers,
which I hear they actually have, I just can’t afford one. Please buy my books
so I can, and so I can feed this strange, insatiable addiction that really does
want to gobble up the rest of my life, and which I’d be happy to let do just
that, if only life didn’t have a mind of its own.)
What would you say is your interesting
writing quirk?
I’m into
power drinks. I’m constantly seeking out new exotic ingredients to throw into the
blender before hitting “purée.” Spirulina. Chlorella. Acai berries. Noni. You
name the superfood, I’ve tried it separately or in combination. Then there are
the herbal supplements for mind enhancement, better memory, better focus,
faster mental processing—I’m a huge fan of lecithin on that score. I think it’s
a post-40 thing. You hit that age and you’re told your heart beats less,
sending less blood to your brain. Did I mention the yoga and the part where I
stand on my head for some of the day to compensate? Writing is mind-work. Being
told your mind is heading south—not encouraging. I jog. I do tai chi.
I remember
when I was younger I had this dear friend in his 40s, and I thought, “God, what
a hypochondriac.” He’d run from his Sufi dancing and Whirling Dervishes class
to his Chinese medicine and acupuncture class. Spirulina wasn’t good enough for
him. (This was before superfoods was even a big thing). He wanted Klamath lake
algae (something about targeting the brain better than Spirulina.) He played
Mozart the livelong day because it helped with secretion of hormones that aided
peak performance. And he flew to Findhorn, a New Age community in Scotland, to
find out how they grew tomatoes the size of watermelons for his organic garden.
I used to laugh and make fun of him (in a loving, chiding way.) Then somewhere
along the line I became him. Though I do take the same time out that I did with
him to laugh at myself. After all, it’s only fair.
As a child, what did you want to be
when you grew up?
An
astronaut. I was humble enough back then to realize, “Dean, you’re not rocket
scientist material. But getting out of the space capsule, going over and
introducing yourself to the alien, that’s very you.” As it turns out, they have
standards for being an astronaut. Go figure. One of which I think requires not
being at all claustrophobic for those long journeys to never never land. Scratch
that idea. Writing, however, has no such limitations. And rather than wait for
a space program that would never get me where I wanted in my lifetime, I opted
for the more audacious scheme of dreaming up entirely alien worlds all for
myself. Some of these worlds fit far more solidly within the fantasy paradigm,
as with Blood Brothers. Others are
more get out the phaser, and require more of a Star Trek Into Darkness approach. But wherever I go with my mind,
you can bet I’ll be able to do things there I could never do back on Earth. Not
even if I could be anything I wanted.
Anything additional you want to share
with the readers?
There’s
definitely a “Dean heavy” and a “Dean light.” “Dean light” includes my shorter
works like Blood Brothers, Escape From
the Future, The Warlock’s Friend, and
Love on the Run that are just unmitigated fun, and shameless escapes from
reality. “Dean heavy” includes my big, fat books, the epics, like The Hundred Year Clones and Renaissance 2.0 franchises which are a
return to the days of heady sci-fi. They’re part psychological thrillers, and
they delve into ethical and other thorny dilemmas facing societies that rely increasingly
on more and more technology, until even people have to become upgraded, that is
to say, part machine or part computer, just to keep up. Or they must find some
paranormal pathway to self-transcendence if they have any chance of staying
atop the food chain.
But with
“Dean light” and “Dean heavy” both, the underlying question remains, how do we
get from here to there? How do we survive the shift in global consciousness
that insists if we are to survive into the future we must find a way to be transcendent?
There are many ways to be transcendent. For some of these paths, fantasy
stories work best, for others, sci-fi, and for some, a hybrid version of the
two. But if you’re experiencing what Alvin Toffler termed Future Shock, and
what another writer has more recently coined Present Shock to indicate just how
pressured we’re all feeling to hang in there, as the demands of the workplace
and of survival continue to ratchet up, then you may find some help by way of
my novels. Just keep in mind, all that helpfulness is disguised in the subtext.
After all, God forbid it get in the way of the fun of telling a good story.
Links:
Thank you, Dean!
