Hamish Downie’s Five Questions with Richard Lee
Editor Note: Hamish has another in his series of Five Questions With…
Hamish came up with this idea because he was accumulating too much material for his Famous News Sushi column and asked if he could do these mini-interviews. Why would we say no?
Thank you Hamish for being such a trooper for us. We really appreciate all for your hard work.
Let us know what you think of these interviews in the comments below.
TGG: Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed, Richard Lee. Can you please introduce yourself to our readers?
RL: Thank you for offering me a chance to talk about this book.
As way of introduction: My name is Richard Lee. I write a mix of Sci-fi and horror (SFH)—also known as Science Fantasy. This is my sixth book. I’ve been lucky as my first book was picked up by a traditional publisher in 1999, but they closed. I self-published it in 2001. It went unnoticed, so I decided to build a name for myself. Editors changed as the Internet allowed them to receive email submissions. I’ve sold over 70 short stories, one poetry collection, and five novels (published by various small presses and now reside under my banner, Triskaideka Books NZ.
TGG: Can you tell us about your latest book, “Scorched Earth”?
RL:Scorched Earth is a book that came to me while walking my dogs in the morning. I don’t know exactly where the thought came from but I imagined a woman living in a nuclear destroyed land, sword fighting a man almost as skilled as her. An hour later I had the township, Havelock Grove, mapped out, with Caden, Hoyt and Electro.
Scorched Earth is a story about Betrayal and Revenge. Hope and Despair. Love and hate. War and survival. Violence and Peace. Time Travel and Wormholes.
Heading home, IT specialist Craig Buffett, steps out of an elevator and into a forest thirty years in the future. He encounters a world foreign to him. Vast, devastated landscapes reach to the horizon, littered with broken glass and twisted metal. Genetically modified creatures roam the land existing on human blood. A youth drug that does what it claims on the box. And a wormhole controlled by a megalomaniac military leader.
Desperate to get home, Craig adjusts to this world. He embraces his new reality. Deep inside, he has to find the will to step up and do what he must stop this future from happening.
TGG: What made you decide to self-publish? How did you find a good editor?
RL: Two questions in one? I shall answer separately 🙂
As I mentioned above I ended up self-publishing my first novel. I was self-publishing before it was the norm. Before Kindle, before Kobo and all the others. I sold books via PDF download, locked .exeBooks (they were brilliant) and printed paperbacks at Lulu and then Createspace. Back in those days, almost everybody looked down on self-publishing, so I searched for small press publishers. When contracts expired, I got the rights back for my novels and did a little refining, renaming, and released them under my own banner.
Finding an editor I could afford was a challenge. Most editors wanted over a thousand bucks. That’s way too much for my blood. I was complaining about this on Twitter:
What happened to the $80-$99 proofreaders? Cheapest I found was $400. After that everything is over a thousand bucks. Going Indy sure hits the pocket.
— Richard Lee (@threeand10) May 12, 2020
After I posted that, a Twitter buddy, Craig Jackson Hoffman (@craighoffman) who lives in the same city offered to edit for a more than reasonable price. He worked really fast. He had the book edited in a day. Took me two days to catch up. And then he edited it two more times.
TGG: What’s next for you?
RL: Interesting question. I have several projects in the fire, namely a werewolf trilogy.
TGG: How can we best support you? (Where can we buy the book?)
RL: Scorched Earth is available in preorder for 0.99. It is available at Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Nook, Sony, and more.
http://scorchedearth.threeand10.com/ has a universal link for many booksellers but not Kindle.
Universal link: https://books2read.com/b/mdlG6Z
Amazon Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08B7RVNDY
6X9 paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Scorched-Earth-Richard-Lee/dp/B08BRJXMYJ/
You can also visit my website: http://threeand10.com
Book Trailer:
