Author Bio:
STEVEN A. ROMAN is the bestselling author of the novels Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1, X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy, and Final Destination: Dead Man’s Hand.
His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Best New Zombie Tales 2, The Dead Walk Again!, Doctor Who: Short Trips: Farewells, Untold Tales of Spider-Man, The Ultimate Hulk, If I Were an Evil Overlord, Lorelei Presents: House Macabre, The Almanac of Vampires, and Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror. He also wrote the comic books The Saga of Pandora Zwieback Annual #1 and Stan Lee’s Alexa; the graphic novels Lorelei: Sects and the City, Lorelei: Building the Perfect Beast, and Sunn; and co-wrote the Marvel Comics animated short film X-Men: Darktide.
What inspires you to write?
I guess it’s just a need to tell stories filled with interesting characters. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed doing ever since I was a kid, whether it was short stories or comic strips, and it’s continued all the way up to the novels and graphic novels I now write and publish through my StarWarp Concepts company.
Tell us about your writing process.
An author friend of mine has two categories for writers: plotters and “pantsers”—the “by the seat of their pants” kind, without a fully developed plot. I guess that would make me a pantser. I’ll create a rough idea of a plot when I start, but not in great detail—I find it too limiting to be locked in to a particular story direction. As I’ve often told my friend, I know how the story starts and usually how it’s supposed to end, it’s the stuff in the middle that constantly changes. But at least I know where I’m supposed to wind up!
It’s not that I haven’t done full-out plots for certain projects. When I was writing original novels based on licensed franchises like Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Final Destination horror movies, I had to present detailed plots to the licensors, in order to get their approval. But even then, the final manuscripts often deviated completely from what I’d outlined, because the stories or characters took other directions as I was writing. I’m just more comfortable letting the story play out as I go.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
No, I don’t talk to my characters, but I will discover them going in directions I hadn’t anticipated, and then following them on that journey—as long as it makes sense. For instance, in my young adult dark-fantasy novel, Blood Feud: The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, Book 1, I had a scene in which Pan—who’s a teenaged Goth from New York with the power to detect monsters—follow a boy she’d just met into a subway tunnel. He’s trying to corral a mythological primate, and had accidentally bumped into Pan during the chase.
Now, the way I’d set up Pan is that she’s adventurous and headstrong and has a sardonic sense of humor—but she’s also highly intelligent and responsible (to a degree). She’s also a horror fan, so she knows that following some stranger into a tunnel to hunt some kind of monster would be the height of stupidity. And yet…it’s exactly the kind of thing she’d do anyway, because it’s too intriguing a situation to pass up. Also, the boy is really good-looking, so she doesn’t want to pass up the chance to meet up with him again. And by going ahead with this lame-brained impulse to follow him, she winds up saving his life.
If I’d gone along with my first idea for the scene, Pan would have walked in the other direction. But even though I knew it would be stupid for her to follow the boy, that’s the action the character dictated. And now they’re boyfriend and girlfriend, so it worked out okay for everybody!
Who are your favorite authors?
Well, Stephen King would go at the top of the favorite-authors list, followed by (in no particular order) Robert B. Parker, Ray Bradbury, J.M. DeMatteis, and H.P. Lovecraft. Maybe a little Harlan Ellison and Chuck Palahniuk, too. And then there are comic writers like Stan Lee and Alan Moore, who’ve influenced my writing as well.
As for the last book that made me want to stay up reading it, that’s probably M.R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts, a smartly written zombie apocalypse novel that came out last year. The lead character is a young zombie girl who narrates the story, and you can’t help but want to find out where her journey’s going.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
I wound up publishing my current series, The Saga of Pandora Zwieback, through StarWarp Concepts after making the rounds of mainstream publishers and agents and receiving varying degrees of ridiculous comments. At the time I was shopping it around, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight was ruling book sales, so every agent and editor I showed Pandora Zwieback to wanted me to knock off Twilight. They didn’t like that Pan was a Goth, or the sarcasm of the characters, or the level of violence—there’s nothing romantic about the vampires in the books—or the fact that her boyfriend is a normal kid, instead of a vampire. Eventually, I just threw up my hands and said, “You know what? Screw it. I’ll just publish it myself.”
Self-publishing wasn’t new territory for me—I’ve been publishing the occasional comic book since 1993—but self¬–book publishing was, even though I’d spent ten years working as a fiction editor for a New York publishing house. I had to learn the ins and outs on the fly, but I’m happy with the results. In fact, I must be doing something right—a magazine once reviewed a StarWarp Concepts title and remarked that we were “a small-press company that presented itself with nothing but professionalism.”
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
I think self-publishing will continue to expand, but my hope is that self-published writers will continue to work on improving their craft. The old axiom of (Theodore) Sturgeon’s Law is that 90% of everything is crap—self-published writers need to work harder so it stops applying to their books, by improving their grammar and punctuation and spelling. The greatest turnoff to a reader is a book filled with typos and poor writing. Fix those problems and you’ll be a more-respected publisher.
What genres do you write?
Dark fantasy, horror, young adult, superheroes, comic books, graphic novels
What formats are your books in?
eBook, Print
Website(s)
Steven A. Roman Home Page Link
Link To Steven A. Roman Page On Amazon
Link to Author Page on Smashwords