WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT'S YOUR DEAL?
I'm Mark Bousquet and by day I'm the Assistant Director of Core Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, and by night I write all sorts of fiction. I'm the kind of writer who's always trying something new. My first novel, Dreamer's Syndrome, is a contemporary fantasy in which the entire world woke up one morning to find that their regular lives had been transformed into their childhood dreams. People went to bed as professors and painters and woke up as pirates and princesses. All because God had gone on walk-about and gotten lost.
I'm Mark Bousquet and by day I'm the Assistant Director of Core Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, and by night I write all sorts of fiction. I'm the kind of writer who's always trying something new. My first novel, Dreamer's Syndrome, is a contemporary fantasy in which the entire world woke up one morning to find that their regular lives had been transformed into their childhood dreams. People went to bed as professors and painters and woke up as pirates and princesses. All because God had gone on walk-about and gotten lost.
My next project, Adventures of the Five: The Coming of Frost,
is a kid's novel about five adventurous kid-animals who live in the Meadow and
become embroiled in a plot with human-size Nutcrackers, Yetis, a former child actor
turned super villain, and a turtle who wants to take over the world. Next up
was Harpsichord & the Wormhole
Witches, a straight ahead sci-fi action book about a college girl who gets
kidnapped and sent to the Deep, the furthest region of space, because her ex-boyfriend's
mother is a lunatic. All of these projects have sequels not only planned but
half-completed - new stuff just keeps calling to me.
WHAT'S YOUR CURRENT PROJECT?
I just released Gunfighter Gothic: Volume 0: Blood of the Universe, which is a bridge between my story in the Russ Anderson-edited How the West Was Weird, Volume 2 and the upcoming Gunfighter Gothic Volume 1: Under Zeppelin Skies, which will hopefully be released in August.
‘Gunfighter Gothic’ is an umbrella title for my supernatural western tales of two women heading into the American West to carve out new lives for themselves. Jill is a merchant's daughter from Boston and Hanna is her best friend/servant. Hanna has always been in love with Jill, and Jill has always been in love with Jill. This version of the American West is full of werewolves, vampires, religious fanatics, Confederates, and all manner of supernatural goodness.
"Blood of the Universe" starts right where my HTWWW story ended: Hanna and Jill's train has crashed. We discover right away that Jill is dead, but Bellingham (a time traveling British secret agent) lets Hanna know there's a way to bring Jill back - find the Universe Cutter. "Blood…" is Hanna's quest to find the blade and resurrect her friend. There's a back-up tale, "Appetite for Appeasement," that focuses on Bellingham. We find out he lives on a space station and that the Queen likes to dress up as a giant pink bunny, that he has a smartly dressed and sharp-tongued assistant named Tennyson Feathers, and that he basically does whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Pretty clearly, Bellingham is designed to answer the question, "What if James Bond had a TARDIS?"
The answer is that he has a whole lot of fun.
WHAT'S YOUR CURRENT PROJECT?
I just released Gunfighter Gothic: Volume 0: Blood of the Universe, which is a bridge between my story in the Russ Anderson-edited How the West Was Weird, Volume 2 and the upcoming Gunfighter Gothic Volume 1: Under Zeppelin Skies, which will hopefully be released in August.
‘Gunfighter Gothic’ is an umbrella title for my supernatural western tales of two women heading into the American West to carve out new lives for themselves. Jill is a merchant's daughter from Boston and Hanna is her best friend/servant. Hanna has always been in love with Jill, and Jill has always been in love with Jill. This version of the American West is full of werewolves, vampires, religious fanatics, Confederates, and all manner of supernatural goodness.
"Blood of the Universe" starts right where my HTWWW story ended: Hanna and Jill's train has crashed. We discover right away that Jill is dead, but Bellingham (a time traveling British secret agent) lets Hanna know there's a way to bring Jill back - find the Universe Cutter. "Blood…" is Hanna's quest to find the blade and resurrect her friend. There's a back-up tale, "Appetite for Appeasement," that focuses on Bellingham. We find out he lives on a space station and that the Queen likes to dress up as a giant pink bunny, that he has a smartly dressed and sharp-tongued assistant named Tennyson Feathers, and that he basically does whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Pretty clearly, Bellingham is designed to answer the question, "What if James Bond had a TARDIS?"
The answer is that he has a whole lot of fun.
WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR INFLUENCES?
I'm a child of the Marvel 80s, so Walt Simonson, Roger Stern, Steve Englehart, and Mark Gruenwald are at the top of the list. All of them were basically writing novels inside the monthly comic format as their
stories would build and grow over years. In terms of novelists, I devoured tons of mystery books as a kid: the Hardy Boys, the Three Investigators, and Encyclopedia Brown. I loved fantasy, too: Tolkien and Lewis, of course, but also the "nature fantasies" of Thornton W. Burgess. As I grew older, it was contemporary writers like Nick Hornby, Robert Parker, Edward Abbey, and Elmore Leonard, and I love the 19th century (which is why I earned my Ph.D. in 19th century American literature and history): Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
WHERE CAN WE FIND YOUR STUFF?
The hub for all of my writing is at http://atomicanxiety.wordpress.com/, my Amazon author's page is at:
http://www.amazon.com/Mark-Bousquet/e/B004WWUTNU/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1/187-8686434-3030664,
I'm on Twitter at
@mark_bousquet, and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/bousquet.mark.
Also, anyone who wants a free .PDF copy of Gunfighter Gothic, Volume 0 just has to email me at bousquet.mark@gmail.com and I'll send it off to them. As I mentioned up above, Volume 0 is a bridge book and I'm trying to get the book in as many hands (virtual or otherwise) as possible to build some hype for Volume 1: Under Zeppelin Skies.
Also, anyone who wants a free .PDF copy of Gunfighter Gothic, Volume 0 just has to email me at bousquet.mark@gmail.com and I'll send it off to them. As I mentioned up above, Volume 0 is a bridge book and I'm trying to get the book in as many hands (virtual or otherwise) as possible to build some hype for Volume 1: Under Zeppelin Skies.
WHERE CAN WE FIND YOU?
My home blog is the Atomic Anxiety site: http://atomicanxiety.wordpress.com/. While you can find links and blurbs on all my fiction there, it's primarily a review site, too, for any and all movies and TV shows that I watch.
INDULGE IN SOME SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION-WHAT SHOULD WE BE BUYING OR READING OR WATCHING OR LISTENING TO WITH YOUR NAME ON IT?
Gunfighter Gothic is where I'm staying at the moment. Volume 0 is out and I'm hard at work on Volume 1. After that, I hope to have an ‘Adventures of the Five’ Christmas adventure coming out for the
holidays.
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