Interview with Author Stuart Land


I am happy to present my first interview with Author Stuart Land

Hi Stuart I am very much interested in your life and writing. I am so happy you are the first Author on my website. Welcome! I am wondering what brought you to start writing. Was it a passion for a subject, or other thing?

My entree into writing was weird. I started writing when I was about ten, yet I could barely read and write because I was, and still am, dyslexic. Although I wrote short stories on and off through my teenage years, I was never encouraged, so it fell by the wayside when I became a visual artist. While working in the Hollywood movie business as a sculptor, I had the opportunity to work alongside some of the preeminent writers and directors of our time. I watched everything they did. This began at the same time computers and graphics began their rise. I knew it was only a matter of time before my job would become obsolete, so began learning the craft of screenwriting.

After working on so many movies and reading hundreds of scripts, I felt I could do as well, or better. Imagine my surprise when I found that writing wasn’t as easy as I thought. I took many courses, seminars, and workshops on screenwriting for several years. I worked with agents, producers, and directors honing my craft.

At the same time I started writing a novel; two diametrically opposed ways of thinking and writing. I never finished that novel because the Berlin Wall came down and my story was an espionage thriller. Now, I could finish it because it’s retro. LOL.

How did you see your life when writing your first book? Did you feel the same about learning to write as you did about learning your other arts, or was there something special about writing?

Well, I attack the things I’m interested in with a fierceness bordering on zealotry. Being that way, I tend to learn everything there is to learn about a subject while I fully immerse myself in it. I don’t believe in halfway measures. When working in movies and on theme parks around the world, I ran crews and was responsible for huge amounts of money, so I had to know what I was doing. So, learning to write while within the studio system, I had to follow rules and lay my writing in front of many people who had no qualms in decimating you and your writing. In that regard, writing was different because I learned the art of sculpting completely on my own with no one directing or critiquing me. Galleries and buyers either took my work or they didn’t.

I have found that writing is part of my soul, more even than sculpting or other visual arts (though I definitely still need to do them). But with writing, there’s a connection I get to the universe I don’t get any other way. I get to pass along feeling, ideas, and opinions I didn’t even know I had. I think writers and readers are connected this way; through a primal necessity to know their environment, whether external or internal.


How has writing, and later publishing, changed your life (or not?)

Writing totally changed my life. I’m not sure it was the best choice, career-wise, but sometimes we don’t really have a say in those things. For artists, choice is not the operative word like it is in other professions. We are compelled. People who aren’t will never understand this.

I’m a stubborn sort. When I first started writing, I hated everything I wrote. It was ugly. Not the stories, but the flow, meter, and style. I was determined to get to a place where I didn’t gag when reading my own work. It took a year. At that point, when I read back something and it was if someone else had written it, as if I had channeled something extraordinary, the choice of where my future would lead was no longer mine to make. Since that day, every job I took was to support my writing.


Since you live in a country that has a different language, do you feel like you want to translate your book?

Funny you should ask. I was just talking to a Japanese translator last night about doing just that. I would love to have my work translated into every language. But good translators are very difficult to find. And super expensive. There are phrases in one language that have no direct translation in another, but then one word can express a paragraph in another language. I think it’s almost an impossible task. I only speak 1 1/2 languages, English and Thai. When I read the subtitles at movies, either in English or Thai, I immediately see how wrong they are. Still, I know that if my books could be translated into Thai, I’d sell a lot of them.

Is writing the "real thing for you? A real career"?

It is the only thing in my life right now.


Please tell us readers about your books, and about your new book.

My newest book is cross-genre speculative fiction called EPIPHANY. Whereas my other three novels are paranormal, this may seem like it is, but it’s not. This story is based entirely on science fact. It took a year to write and a huge amount of research.
Doctor Sam Enright and his geneticist wife, Dorinda, face turmoil in their small town when a dozen adolescent girls show up pregnant at Sam’s office—and they’re all virgins. When their own daughter falls victim to the same fate, the Enrights rush to Homeland Security for answers. As the questions multiply, they realize they are at the vanguard of a worldwide epidemic, and the mystery deepens. As events escalate, a disparate group of international doctors, scientists, and mothers-to-be are brought together at Dorinda’s genetics lab in Middle America. They race to find the cause and meaning of the mysterious pregnancies, but every discovery reveals a new, worse scenario, leaving humanity's very existence in question.
-----------------------------------
ORIGINAL BLOOD is a delicious tale of two women, separated by two centuries but bound by blood, as they become vampires against their will; one experiences a mind-bending skewed Cinderella story with hot motorcycles, limitless money, and ancient mansions teeming with the undead, while the other rises from devastation, rage, and vengeance to become a powerful vampire leader. Both women have to rise above their circumstances, one of privilege, one of destitution, to gain the power that will save them and the man they both love from the vengeance of their creator.
-----------------------------------
SHADOW HOUSE is a psychological supernatural thriller about two men, alive in different times, who share a terrible secret that, through a quirk of fate, saved one, but damned the other. These seemingly unconnected lives begin interleaving between five year old PJ McAvoy—critically injured when his family dies in a mysterious fire in 1920’s Massachusetts—and contemporary suburban family man, Aaron Molina, when he wins an antique tool box at a flea market auction.
-----------------------------------
BACK FROM THE DEAD: the true sequel to Frankenstein (Coming this August)
Frankenstein's creature, revived from a two-hundred year arctic freeze, reveals a different perspective on his origins, why he survived, and what happened to his mate. How he fares in the modern world is an assemblage of psychological drama, horror, romance, sci-fi, and Gothic story telling. This present day reality has sojourns into the past that leaves you pondering the future.

How does living in different places influence your writing?
Living in different places for any length of time allows me to get to know people who think and act differently than myself. Books are about people, not situations. The more diverse types of people you meet, the more in depth characters you can create. Also, being able to use foreign places as background is a plus.