Welcome Riptide Press Author Peter Hansen/Contest

 CONTEST INFORMATION: Leave a comment to be entered to win one of the following: First Wave Winner’s Choice: Pick any one backlist book from Rachel Haimowitz, Aleksandr Voinov, L.A. Witt, Brita Addams, or Cat Grant (“Frontlist” books, i.e. Riptide releases and newest non-Riptide release, are excluded, as are the Courtland Chronicles). Make sure to  leave your emaila ddress so in case you win, we can contact you.

What one event in your past had the greatest effect on your writing career?

Visions and Revisions: A Writer Gets Schooled

When I was in college, I had a lot of pretty typical college-kid writing foibles. I thought critical feedback spoiled my vision, I thought imitating Jack Kerouac was cool, and I thought I was going to be above petty little things like "genre." (For the record, I still think imitating Jack Kerouac is cool, but I know better than to do it in public.)

My sophomore year of college, I had the gall to trot that business out in a workshop writing class, where I listened to the other students explain the difficulties they'd had with my stories. I gave them very grave little nodes when they debated the physics of my fight scenes, and I manfully restrained my rolling eyes when they collapsed into a writhing mass of folklore over my four-page zombie story. I wanted to be on my best behavior, because it was a class and not a pro wrestling arena, but frankly I fantasized about thwapping the lot of them upside the head with a folding chair. They didn't get my vision—and I was maybe nineteen years old, so of course I had a vision.

"Do you realize that you've written a romance?" the professor asked me, while we were workshopping my story about a pair of queer college kids hunting ghosts and finding each other. "I think this is the first romance we've had in this class." I cocked my head at that like an excessively obtuse Jack Russell terrier, because of course it wasn't a romance. I wrote it; I didn't write romance; thus, it wasn't a romance. QED, or some other Latin abbreviation. Clearly the woman was delusional.

In short, my first creative writing class kicked my ass.

You have to understand, it was kind of a delayed ass-kicking. An ass-kicking deferred, if you will. I got out of that class with my asshole notions of my own superiority still intact, still pretty damn sure I didn't write romance and didn't need critique and couldn't get better if I tried. I didn't actually realize how thoroughly I'd been schooled until I started teaching writing, when I got a chance to rip kids' papers and stories apart the way my teacher had ripped mine apart. I got the same asshole responses from my kids that I gave my teacher, all "This is good the way it is" and "That's just my style" and "Stop trying to box me into your stupid little categories." The pupil has become the master, and the master wondered what the fuck the pupil had been thinking.

Over the years since that class, I've come to understand what I was missing when I walked into the classroom—and part of it was humility, sure, but the bigger part was self-awareness. I went in thinking that writing was this sort of magical process where the author would go into a semi-conscious, energy-drink-fueled trance and then THE WORD would appear. Any failures in my fiction couldn't be failures on my part; they were obviously failures of the magic.

I wrote a lot faster in those days, channeling pure inspiration onto the page, but I had only a little control and not even a smidgeon of self-awareness. If I couldn't watch myself writing and see why I made each choice, then I couldn't see those choices as choices that I could un-choose at will.

Just because I wasn't aware, though, doesn't mean I wasn't watching. Some part of me—the real, writerly part—had its eyes open as I glugged cans of Amp and had WWF-related workshop fantasies. When I finally pulled my head out of my ass and got ready to be an active agent in the creative process, that open-eyed part of me unfolded my choices for me and showed me where and how I could intervene.

No, of course that zombie story didn't work; it was structured all wrong. No, the kind of gun my character was using was really fucking heavy; I should've used a lighter, more maneuverable one. Yes, that ghost-hunter story was totally a romance. Thus, I was the kind of person who wrote romances. QED.

I could revise. I could rewrite the fabric of the universe and transform dreck into gold.  I could make the magic happen.

That long-delayed boot to the ass finally connected.

 

Here's a blurb from First Watch, to be released on October 30:

What price would you pay to survive?

Do you want to live? In the darkness of a WWI battlefield, young Legionnaire Edouard Montreuil lies dying. As teeth nibble his flesh, a voice whispers, Do you want to live? Frightened and desperate, Edouard bargains his freedom for a second chance.

Aboard the Flèche, a grim submarine captained by the nightmare who granted Edouard new life, Edouard pays the price for his survival. Each night, he gives his body to his captain as the bells sound first watch. But surviving is not living, and as the days stretch into months beneath the waves, Edouard grows desperate for escape.

Can Edouard’s old comrade Farid Ruiz help him break this devil's bargain, or will Ruiz fall to the same fate, trapped beneath the waves at the mercy of a monster whose hunger knows no bounds? Edouard and Ruiz served together once before, and slept together too, but courage and passion failed to save them from the eldritch beasts who roamed the night. This time, the cost of failure is nothing so clean or simple as death, and the spoilof victory are not just life, but love.

First Watch, is available for pre-sale at this link: http://riptidepublishing.com/titles/first-watch

Email address: peter.hansen.writes@gmail.com

Website URL: http://peterhansenfiction.weebly.com/

Blog URL: http://peterhansenfiction.weebly.com/blog.html

Twitter: P_HansenWrites ( http://twitter.com/#!/P_HansenWrites )

Facebook: N/A

MySpace: N/A

Goodreads Page: http://www.goodreads.com/peterhansen