Featured Interview With Joseph Picard
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up all over Canada, but from around age sixteen and on, I’ve been in the suburban soup around Vancouver BC. Weather’s alright, and the snow generally keeps out of the way of me and my wheelchair. I know a lot of people from the states hear “Canada” and think “SNOW!!!” but to those types, I just have to say..
“You know Seattle?”
“Yeah…”
“It’s like that.”
“Oh. RAIN!!!!”
… Well, yeah. Oh, it’s not that bad. Shush.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
“Realize my fascination”… well, there’s no modular, identifiable fascination, it’s part of life. Maybe because my mother’s a voracious reader, books were just the norm. I started writing in school, with assigned short stories, and found myself eventually writing them for myself, for fun. It was only when story lines got really long that I figured out that books were brewing…
I start with a concept, then throw in characters. I spend quite a while getting to know them before writing about them too much. I often fall for them, (hopefully this reaches the reader) and when I have to hurt them… wow, it can hurt.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Oh boy.. It’s hard to peg some down. I still have a pleasant aftertaste from Michelle Patricia Browne’s ‘Underlighters’. I finally own my own copy of Max Brooke’s World War Z. (I’ll skip the typical rant about the movie…) Robert J Sawyer does a lot of awesome stuff, his WWW trilogy is my favourite of his.
What inspire my writings? I often say it starts with the idea of “Wouldn’t it be cool IF:”. This generally leads to sci-fi themes. I’d dabbled in the supernatural, but I generally dislike how easy it is to pull a trick out of one’s hat. Sci-fi suffers the same issue often, but I limit myself to a certain level of plausibility- which has led to finding stuff form my books getting invented in reality. Which is creepy and amazing.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My most recent is Echoes of Erebus. It caps off a 3 book series, (which I made sure that each were readable stand-alone.) I want to say it took a bit over a year to wrap up.
It follows Sarah as she discovers that she’s entirely artificial, and her creator/father is the mind that caused millions of deaths in book 1, Lifehack. She gets to know him, his new motives, the seeds of her origins, and faces a monstrous threat similar to what her ‘father’ once created. Oh, and he lives in her skull. And the world would like him dead. It’s awkward. In some odd ways, it comes down to her ‘families’. The one of her ‘birth’, and the one she finds.
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