Featured Interview With Chris Hepler
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.. Though I’ve lived in Maryland, Alberta, and both Southern and Northern California, I still like to write about the D.C. area. The urban fantasy field is so crowded with stories of either small towns or big cities that D.C. stands out in my mind. Its stories can be of grand scope, contrasting our world of 24-hour news cycles with the fantastical, or personal loyalties with obligations to the nation or even the world.
I currently live on the West Coast with my wife, two loud children, one loud cat, and a very quiet corn snake. I try to stay in shape by doing various martial arts, which sometimes show up in my writing.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I never thought I was born into writing, but in retrospect, it’s pretty close. My parents tell me I started reading at age three with a book called “Dinosaur Time” and read the novelization of Star Wars (A New Hope) at five. Granted, I doubt I understood the parts I hadn’t seen in the movie, but that’s when they realized I was sounding stuff out on my own. Only when I had kids did I realize those developmental milestones are pretty unusual.
I wrote a play about the Trojan War in fifth grade; by sixteen I was writing up background stories for my table-top roleplaying game characters. I think I knew I was a writer when everyone in class was groaning about being ordered to write a 10-page short story and I realized I’d written 25 over the weekend just for fun. A friend of mine said she’d also done that, and I felt a little more normal… except mine was single-spaced and hers wasn’t. (She went on to become an awesome environmental scientist, and writes very well, by the way.)
In college, I met my wife Jennifer, who was also majoring in creative writing, and we knew that we needed to develop a career ASAP or we’d both be starving artists. So we sent in samples to tabletop roleplaying game companies, had a bit of success, and then figured out we’d better aim our sights at an industry that paid a living wage. That led us to screenwriting, our first television job, and a lot of unpublished screenplays. But we leveraged our experience into a video game company called Bioware, and I’ve been writing in electronic games ever since… with the occasional foray into novels and comics.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
If you look at sheer shelf space, the novelists I’ve read the most are Stephen King and Nancy Kress. Their approaches to writing are, as far as I can tell, complete opposites. King often goes by the seat of his pants and is dedicated to provoking emotion, where Kress researches and plans. But of course, I don’t get inspired just by novelists; I also enjoy Neil Gaiman and Eric Shanower’s comics, David Simon’s work on TV’s The Wire, and, of course, I appreciate the current deluge of fantasy, sci-fi, and comic book movies as well as the next nerd. Since I work in video games, I’ll also include old favorites like Knights of the Old Republic, City of Heroes now that it’s got dialogue choices, and the Xbox version of The Bard’s Tale, which was a great send-up of its genre.
Of course, a fair bit of my inspiration credit must go to my wife, Jennifer Hepler, who is a writer in her own right. My writing journey didn’t begin with her, but she’s shaped it for some 25+ years now. She shoots down a lot of my worst ideas and impulses, and I think that’s helped my final products immensely.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
“Civil Blood” is subtitled “The Vampire Rights Case that Changed a Nation” because it’s an urban fantasy/legal thriller mashup centering around a trial that reaches the Supreme Court of the United States.
On one side of the class-action lawsuit are humans infected by a supernatural virus that turns them into highly infectious blood-drinkers. On the other is the Benjamin Rush Health Institute, whom the vampires see as the source of the viral outbreak due to medical negligence. BRHI, trying to avoid bankruptcy, claims that the vampires are no longer human and therefore no longer have any Constitutional rights. The public is divided: a virus cannot take away your humanity, but nor is it tenable to allow an epidemic of predators.
The battle is not limited to the courtroom. BRHI’s small team of deniable assassins has been covering up the vampires’ existence, but one of them, Infinity DeStard, can’t stomach the killings any more. Shaken by her own infection in the line of duty, she can’t reveal the truth or she’ll be dead. The question of the novel is, how long can she lie to them… and herself?
Oh, because there are several books titled “Civil Blood,” be sure to search for it with the subtitle or my name. (That’s what I get for taking a title from a public-domain phrase of Shakespeare’s.)
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