Featured Interview With Kyoko M
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in a metro-Atlanta city called Riverdale. (No relation to the Archie comics, trust me.) My mother is a nurse and my father is a business marketing professional, and so while we lived in Georgia all our lives, my parents moved to a sleepy town called Ocala in central Florida after Paddock Mall made my dad an offer he couldn’t refuse. After I graduated from the University of Georgia, my day job unexpectedly closed and I couldn’t find any work, so I moved in with my parents until I got back on my feet. I’m currently in the nearby college town of Gainesville, with the intent to move back to Atlanta, Georgia this summer so that I can expand my writing career even further.
I have a three-year-old black cat! Her name is Selina, of course after everyone’s favorite cat burglar/vigilante, Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman. It seemed appropriate, since this cat is incredible at sneaking up on people and is a full-tilt diva when she wants to be.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My parents read to me as a child every night, and so I naturally grew up a voracious reader. I started writing as soon as I was old enough to hold a pencil. Almost all of my early writing as a child was simply diaries of my thoughts, and then by the time I reached late elementary school and early middle school, I began writing little stories as they came to me. By high school, I was writing fanfiction constantly and even made a few attempts at a novel, but I wasn’t successful until halfway through college when I penned The Black Parade. I always keep my old writing, even if I never read it, because I think these memories are important to record and after I’m gone, they may provide comfort or amusement to my loved ones.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite authors are Jim Butcher, Ilona Andrews, the late great Brian Jacques, Jane Green, Chuck Wendig, Neil Gaiman, and J. K. Rowling. My favorite writers in general vary, because I have a huge appreciation for other types of media. For instance, I love Andrew W. Marlowe and his wife Terri Edda Miller, the creative team who wrote all the good seasons of the ABC show ‘Castle.’ I can definitely attribute a lot of what I know about writing relationships from how they wrote Detective Kate Beckett and author Richard Castle. I also grew up loving the DC Animated Universe cartoons written by Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, Glen Murakami, and Dwayne McDuffie. Each of them had an impact on me in regards to how to tell a story and how to make your audience fall in love with your characters.
My favorite genre to read is typically fantasy of all types. I tend to like urban fantasy the most, but I can dabble in a few high fantasy stories like Elizabeth Haydon’s Rhapsody series. I love the idea of mixing magic with the real world, whether it’s out in the open like in the Kate Daniels series, halfway hidden like the Dresden Files, or fully hidden from the world like in Neverwhere.
Inspiration comes from most of the authors I mentioned before, but if you want to get specific, yes, I do have direct examples. The Black Parade series is a meeting of several different things: first, the 2005 film ‘Constantine’ (yes, I acknowledge it’s nothing like the Hellblazer comics, but I really liked the concept and the universe it was set in), second, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and third, the legends of Greek heroes. What kickstarted my desire to write a novel was when I took a class in college where we got to reread the Iliad and the Odyssey and I remembered how much I love the storytelling and creativity in the Greek legends. Originally, I thought about maybe writing an urban fantasy about the Greek gods in modern society, but then I read American Gods by Neil Gaiman and knew I’d never write anything as good about gods in modern day, and scrapped the idea. Eventually, The Black Parade formed after I realized I loved the idea of ‘Constantine,’ but wanted to see it from the perspective of a woman of color. I then added in some influences from other media like Paradise Lost and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and eventually my own little urban fantasy story came to life. I seek to create what I want to see out in the world, and for better or for worse, I feel as if I’ve done that with The Black Parade novels.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest novel is actually a first-in-series that is pretty much a mashup of genres. At its heart, Of Cinder and Bone began life as a hardcore science fiction novel, but as I continued writing the beginning, I realized that wasn’t where it was going to stay. It crossed over into an action-adventure and then into a borderline crime thriller, and then into a modern romance. It’s complicated and hard to explain unless you see it for yourself.
Speaking of influences, the craziest thing is where the idea for Of Cinder and Bone came from: a bad movie, of all things! I got the idea for the book after I realized how much I loved the idea of dragons being real, but not in a magical sense–in a science-fiction sense. The idea came to mind after I re-watched the abysmal but entertaining 2002 film ‘Reign of Fire’ starring Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey. Most books having to deal with dragons only look at them from the magical aspect. You most often see dragons in swords and sorcery books, and so I decided that I wanted to see how they would fit into the real world. I researched heavily on how it would be possible to bring them to life if there were such a world that dragons used to exist, but were wiped out by the worldwide phenomenon of dragon-hunting. For example, one thing I loved from ‘Reign of Fire’ was that the dragon’s fire wasn’t just inexplicable gas-powered flames; it came from two chemicals that shot out of the dragon’s mouth that mixed together to make a chemical fire. I thought that was brilliant, and so I started creating different types of dragons based on the hard science behind reptiles and dinosaurs. I then decided that I wanted to eventually build this story towards a series about modern day dragon-hunters, and while that concept is still the intention for the series, the first book has more to do about dealing with the repercussions of our effect on nature. I drew influence from Michael Crichton and Stephen Spielberg’s joint venture in Jurassic Park because one of my favorite things about the film is how it intelligently discusses the man vs. nature vs. God argument, which is highly relevant in an age where we are so technologically advanced, and so it’s possible for it to either help or hurt the environment as a result.
I also like the idea of a dragon hunter that isn’t really a dragon-hunter, but someone who wants to preserve the animals and find them a place in the world where it feels like they don’t belong, but he can make a space for them. It kind of puts a different spin on it and plays with the dragon-hunter trope in what I hope is a fun way.
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