I sat down to Interview E.M. Ervin about her upcoming book, Mother Knows Best: Book 2 of the Nasaru Chronicles. I had met E.M. previously at LibraryCon in Springfield, MO. E.M. is a delightful Lady, who has a ton of charismatic charm. I anticipated that interview would be a ton fun. I was not disappointed.
This interview became more than interview. It was a fun, entertaining, humorous, and educational discussion about writing a novel while part of it was a standard interview with questions about her soon to be released novel, Mother Knows Best:Book 2 of the Nasaru Chronicles.
This article is Part One of my discussion with the delightful and beautiful E.M. Ervin. Part One is the standard interview question and answers with E.M. Ervin. Part Two will be excerpts from our wonderful discussion about becoming an author. Part Two is scheduled to be published on Geeky KOOL this weekend.
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E.M. Ervin’s Novel, Mother Knows Best:Book 2 of the Nasaru Chronicles,will be released on Friday February 5th as an E-Book on Amazon. Mother Knows Best is the second book in the Nasaru Chronicles. It is the sequel to the novel, Wake Up Call. You can pick up the digital book 1, Wake Up Call for free and Mother Knows Best for only $.99 for a very limited time on Amazon. Pick it up NOW! You may also purchase a paper copy from E.M. Ervin at a Convention or on Amazon.
On to the Interview:
–GK(GeekyKool): First off, thank you., E.M. for meeting with me.
For our readers that may not have read the first book in the Nasaru Chronicles, tell us a little bit about the story from Wake Up Call, the main character of Jo, and what has led her to troubled nature from her past.
—E.M) Our main character is Jo or Jocelyn Rider. She prefers Jo and hates Jocelyn. She is the daughter of a very prestigious family. Her father is a Senator. Her mother is a Diplomat, who travels all over the world. To say they are high class and high society, is putting it mildly. Jo got kidnapped when she was twelve years old because she is a daughter of a rich family. That is when her powers came to the forefront.
This is not a world where that sort of thing is common. It would be like someone showing up in our world with superpowers. Her family treated her like she was a monster. We don’t talk about this. We are going to sweep it under the rug. In her brain, she is like, if they want a monster, I will give her a monster. For the last three years, she has gone out of her way to make herself a great big royal pain in the backside. She takes rebellion to a new level. She is intelligent. She is Clever. She has managed to get kicked out almost every private school on the Eastern seaboard. She has just managed to get booted out of a military academy.
Her brother picks her up in the beginning of the book after getting kicked out of the academy. Her brother is a FBI agent. He is about a decade older that she is. He took her home with him and told her that she was now going to live with him and not some random boarding school. He told her that this is her last shot. She is starting her senior year. She realizes her brother wants her around and fought for her. He is not just shuffling her around like her parents. She has all sorts of beautiful issues. She is very independent… probably far too much so.
She doesn’t know where her powers come from. Her power is to cast illusions. It isn’t something they have ever talked about, looked at, or tried to figure out.
The first book is her deciding to try to make this work. She will try to be as much of a good kid as she can or at least not get kicked out of this school. She is still a royal pain in the butt. She is going to give it a try because her brother gave her warm fuzzies.
At this new school, she finds out there is a ghost. It is killing people. She decides she must do something about it even though she knows nothing about ghosts. she is going to try anyway.
Wake Up Call is Jo stumbling through, learning to work with others and sometimes even relying on others.
–GK: In Wake Up Call, Jo faced several challenges including cultists, ghosts around her school, a homicidal ghost The White Lady, and coming to terms with herself while becoming a heroine. What new challenges does Jo face in Mother Knows Best.
—E.M.) Jo is use to getting bounced to a new school when she is involved with this much trouble. But she isn’t this time because it isn’t that kind of trouble. She is actually being told that she is a hero. She now has to deal with the consequences of what happened in Book One, Wake Up Call.
She may have stepped on some toes of the Irish mob variety. She kind of makes that even worse in Mother Knows Best. The mob is a big constant problem. They are not happy with her brother, the FBI agent. They tried to teach him a lesson with this girl and then she embarrassed them.
She is learning more about the Nasaru. It is an ancient warrior race that reincarnate. The powers travel with them through each of their lifetimes.
She is aggravated with it. The person that is trying to teacher her has an attitude that he has known her through many lives. She is like, you don’t know me.
She is causing a fair amount of her kind of trouble. She gets a bodyguard or a babysitter as she calls it.
–GK) There were more than one ghost in the first book. Are there still ghosts in this one?
–E.M.) I like ghosts. I love ghost stories.
–GK) Is there any personal stories you have had with ghost stories? Or anything that draws you to a ghost story?
–E.M.) My father was born and raised in New Orléans. That entire side of the family is from New Orléans. I remember when we were young. We would drive down there and go through these huge beautiful cemeteries. We would get stories from the family not only of the history but would hear “sometimes you will hear ghost of so and so walk through here or this building is haunted by the ghost of so and so.” Just things like that. That was from a very young age… elementary school sort of age. I have always had that fascination.
When I got to college up here, I lived in Kentwood Hall (Missouri State University), that was the haunted building… the haunted dorm at MSU. Some of my friends and I would go to some of the more renown haunted places around and Springfield and go Ghost hunting.
I have always been in love with it because of all of them from when I was young.
Ghost movies scare me so much. I am such a wimp. But I love ghost stories. I will start to get into it so much that I will scare myself. Like if the phone rang, I would scream like a little girl.
In this book, there will be ghosts but there will be some other supernatural stuff that she will be dealing with. Like I said, I love all types of mythology.
I always study for all of my books but I have studied a lot of mythology for different types of monsters and ghosts and stuff for Mother Knows Best..
I thought ghosts would be easy for the first one because everyone knows ghost stories. Everyone talks about them. That is your favorite thing to talk about in high school to scare the new person. “Oh you will sometimes see that creepy lady walking through the halls but no one knows who she was.” That was kind of promoted through first books. She is finding out that there is much more stuff out there. It was just the tip of the iceberg. She is going further down that rabbit hole. She is like, “How is this stuff real?” as she is trying to learn about it while she graduates high school.
–GK) Do you see correlations between this story and Buffy?
–E.M.) A little bit. I am trying not to do too much because I love Buffy. I watched the original movie in the theater. My son and I watched all seasons of Buffy and all of Angel. I am trying not to do too much like that.
Jo actually makes a lot of pop culture references. She yells at her brother at one point for enrolling her in school on a hellmouth. I am trying to keep it as vague as possible but she makes jokes about being the chosen one. But she is finding that she is not and there are other people with powers out there. She is starting to come in contact with them. She will probably continue to make those jokes and other people will make them towards her.
She is not as cool as Buffy is a lot of ways. In some ways, she is pretty awesome. It is illusions. It is pretty awesome. She is quit a scrapper herself.
If she faced a vampire… well there will be vampires in future novels so she will face one. I already know she will be throwing a handful of glitter them and laughing herself silly. For the record, the vampire will not be as amused by that as she is. Neither will anyone around her.
Because I am such a geek, I am trying to make it more superheroie. It is like a superhero meets Neil Gaiman, American Gods, more than Buffy but you can see a fair amount of Buffy.
–GK) Often times authors will pull a piece of themselves into their protagonist characters. How much of Jo’s personality is based on of key aspects of your personality and what are those personality aspects?
–E.M.) I see certain aspects of myself. I am a gamer. I still met with my gaming group on a weekly basis. I do that with my characters. As a writer, you put a piece of yourself in every single character. That is how you make that a richer character. Even the bad guys and the characters people are going to hate, you have to put a piece of yourself in there to really connect.
I have people tell me when they read Wake Up Call, they heard my voice. It wrote her that way. It was just easier. There are some aspects that are absolutely me. I know I am stubborn and I know I am a pain in the butt. I know if I had superpowers I would be doing very similar things to Jo.
There are little things like I made her a Supernatural fan. I love Supernatural, personally. I know about ghosts from studying ghosts for decades. As opposed to her (Jo) who says, “I watch Supernatural , I know how this must work.” She finds out the hard way that it doesn’t work that way.
There is a fair amount of me in Jo. I would like to think I would be smarter than she is. But I had to understand her and where she came from to write her. I wanted to have fun with her. There was a little bit of “what would I do in this situation” and realize that would make too much sense then I asked, what would a sixteen year old girl do in this situation. Ahh that will be fun.
–GK) Do you see your younger self in Jo?
–E.M.) Believe it or not, I was a lot more quieter when I was seventeen. I didn’t have nearly as much confidence. Jo is so arrogant that you just want to shake her. I had a message from fans going I absolutely love Jo but I really just wanted to shake her in parts of the story. Jo has a lot more confidence than I did. She probably has a lot more confidence than most sixteen or seventeen year girls or boys for that matter. I try to take those aspects and exaggerate it. I think most writers are going to do that.
I have always been the prankster. If there is a big shiny red button, I am going to push it every time. I won’t even give a chance for people to say don’t push it. I am more that personality now than I was when I was seventeen so I have fun with Jo doing it. I was a lot quieter and more behaved when I was seventeen. It took me going to college for me to start causing trouble.
–GK) Nasaru Chronicles implies a series of novels . What is your current vision for a number of novels in the Nasaru Chronicles? Do you see any of them based on other characters than Jo?
I don’t have a set amount. I have the next 8 novels planned. One will be an anthology of myths based off this world and the Nasaru. I want to show more of the Nasaru gifts. I am writing some of it as I go but I am going to wait to put it out. But I want people to know that there are people who go with each of the powers. I want them to read these stories and be able to go “I know who that is based off the power that they are showing.”
Book Three is from the perspective of a different group, who we meet early on in Book One. Jo wanders into dreams of others and wandered into the dreams of a Korean boy. They are not Nasaru. They are something different. They have their plotline and everything they are doing and dealing with this little girl that keeps showing up in their dreams and believes they are a part of her imagination. This takes place at the same time as Book One.
Book Four is from the perspective of another Nasaru that is already in the series. It takes place after Book Two.
–GK) Anyone who meets you at a Convention, has probably met Justine A Monster. Tell us a little about Justine A Monster.
–E.M.) (In a British accent) Justine Abigail Monster! She is my manager. She is a horrible human being. That would be because she is a muppet. FAO Schwarz partnered with Henson Studios and you can create your own muppet. I ordered her a few years ago. Lots of people are like, “she doesn’t look at all like you but she really reminds us of you.”
I take her to the conventions with me because she is my manager and she books everything . She has a little bit of an attitude. She is a little bit more Avenue Q than Sesame Street. She does bite. And for any parent that she caused trauma for their kids, I apologize. I am not going to lie, she has had a couple of boy friends at a couple of different conventions. That is a little bit embarrassing. I have someone, a fan, actually come up and kiss her. I feel like a third wheel and really awkward. “Can I have my hand back?”
She goads me into keep going. I actually created a Facebook page for her to say all the not nice things about me that go on in my head.
Yeah she is a lot of fun. I will keep taking her to all the conventions.
–GK) Talking about conventions, what is your convention schedule for this year at this moment?
–E.M.) I am still playing with it a little. I know Visioncon is going to happen. It is in four weeks at the end of February. That will be the big release of the physical copies of Mother Knows Best. The E-Book goes on sale on February 5th.
–GK) You can buy the e-book of Mother Knows Best. now on Amazon for only $.99.
–E.M.) Yes it is on pre-sale for only $.99. It will be that way through the middle of February when it goes up to $2.99. I will have a Con special going on for the physical books. You can get them for $10.00. Amazon will be selling them for $14.00. I will have the physical copies so come by and I will sign them and take pictures.
–GK) There you, readers can get it signed, get it cheaper, you can get a picture with E.M., all at the Con.
–E.M.) Aboslutely!
–E.M.) I am looking at a convention up in Lebanon (Lebanon MEGA Con). I believe Ben (Reeder) will be there. I think we will share a table there.
I am looking at an Anime Festival also in May– Arkansas Anime Festival– happens twice a year. There have been a lot of fans asking me to attend those. I am really excited.
If EclectiCon (in Springfield, MO) is going on, I will be there.
There is the Library Convention (LibraryCon!) in August and will be there.
There is another Con called Konsplosion. It is likely in September and I will be down there.
The second Anime Festival will be probably in November.
There may be others but I don’t have any definite dates yet.
–GK) Mother Knows Best goes on sale on Friday for e-books or at Visioncon at the end of February for your physical copy. Or get them on Amazon. Any other things you would like to tell our readers?
–E.M.) I hope you like it. If you read it, please let me know what you think about it. I love not only getting reviews on Amazon, obviously everyone like reviews on Amazon and Good Reads, but if you don’t feel comfortable with it then send me a message on Facebook. Or you can send me an email that is on the back of the books. I have Twitter @madcapwriter and even Instagram, for a the conventions I go to. I love to hear back and get feedback.
I will also have special prints of that are coloring pages based off of Wake Up Call. So if you come by the table, I will be able to hand those to you. A couple of the artists that did these will be at Visioncon. You have to come by and see how awesome these look. The artists have agreed to autograph these. Come say hi.
–GK) How can they get all the coloring pages?
–E.M.) If you purchase any of the books, you get a copy of all three, well I will have four by then, so at least four if you buy a book. If you just come by and say hi and that you love me, I will give you one. But if you buy a copy of the books, then you get all of them.
–GK) Thank you, (E.M), for letting us interview today.
–E.M.) Absolutely! It was fun.
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Part Two of my discussion with E.M. Ervin should be published this weekend. Please check it out. There are a ton of fun stories that you will not want to miss.
Check out E.M. Ervin’s website for all the up to date information.
Stay Geeky My Friends!
