Featured Interview With Quinn Raye
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Hello everyone. My name is Quinn Raye and I’m from England; I was born in the depths of the county of Essex, yet I moved further north to the county of Lincolnshire when I was seven. Of course, my family moved with me and I didn’t move on my own!
I write multi-genre YA short stories and novellas. I enjoy exploring historic houses as well as ex-RAF airfields, to look at equally historic aircraft. I’m a metal-head and my favourite bands are Rammstein (from Germany) and Grandma’s Smuzi (from Ukraine.)
I’ve been writing for about forty years, since I was six years old, so I couldn’t really say how many books I’ve written in that time! I’ve published about half a dozen books though on such retailers as B&N, Rakuten Kobo and Smashwords with many more planned
I am crazy about reptiles, and I own a female leopard gecko. Her name is Chickpea and she’s eight years old this year! I’ve owned her since she was about six weeks old.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I started writing when I was six years old but my fascination with books didn’t happen until I was about eight. Roughly forty years later and I can still be found nose-deep in a book.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have so many favourite authors, it’s ridiculous. I will literally read pretty much anything. I particularly love anything by Anne McCaffrey, Terry Pratchett, Mario Puzo, HG Wells, Stephen King, Jenny Colgan, Roald Dahl, Cressida Cowell…. the list is endless!
My favourite genres are fantasy (of all flavours), sci-fi and any books focussing on gangsters and spies.
I think the closest influence I probably have is Anne McCaffrey. I don’t think I necessarily write like her as she’s more sci-fi orientated than I am (though I do write sci-fi); it’s more the fact that my love of dragons was aided and abetted by her Pern sequence. I do write a lot about dragons.
I’m probably also indirectly influenced by Terry Pratchett. I do try and inject humour into my stories although I do believe Sir Pratchett’s Discworld series is one heck of a lot funnier than my books though. He was an absolute master at comic fantasy and I want to be him when I grow up.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The last book I published at the time of writing this response was the second in my ‘Dragons of Fire and Ice’ series which is entitled ‘Back to Blackloch.’ It was originally published on Amazon in 2017, but I’ve been republishing a lot of my older works (as well as my newer works) on the above-mentioned sites. (I don’t publish on Amazon anymore.)
I can’t say what inspired the story anymore, other than it was a follow-on from the first book (DoFaI #1: Escape from Adiren). I wrote it about ten years ago, so it’s been a while!
At the moment, I’m working on the second book in a new series entitled ‘The Annals of Elvish Espionage’. That’s the series title but the book itself doesn’t have a title yet! It’s a mish-mash of historical fantasy, Mayan pyramids and military intelligence (yes, really) and has been great fun to write so far. I can’t say too much about it yet as I haven’t finished writing the first draft yet. Things may change drastically in between now and whenever that publishing date will be, so if I do say anything about the plot right now, it might be redundant by the time it’s published. I also have to publish the first book in that series, too, in the meantime.
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