Thursday's Interview -- Debra Soles

1. What's your genre or do you write in more than one?
Primarily I write Futuristic Romance, but occasionally I throw something unexpected in. Like, in June I have a Contemporary Romance called To Late coming out

2. Did you choose your genre or did it choose you?
It chose me and it was a major surprise. I always read contemporary or historical romances, normal stuff. My older sister was always the horror novel lover, into strange things. Don’t get me wrong. I’m one of the Buffy lovers, but when it came to books I just looked for the romance.
That was until one night I had a horrible nightmare that had be waking up in the middle of the night gasping for air. The next morning I wrote down the details of that dream and before I knew it, that one dream had tuned into my four book Zogone series. The fourth book of the series, New Beginnings will be out in July.

3. Is there any genre you'd like to try? Or is there one you wouldn't?
Honestly, I would love to be able to write Romantic Comedies. I have a great sense of humor, but my jokes aren’t quite up to snuff. As my twelve-year-old son is more than happy to say, “Ma that was lame.” He rolls his eyes and says to make sure I stick to what I’m good at, because I could never be a comedian with such lame jokes.

4. What fiction do you read for pleasure?
As long as it’s romance I can read it. If there is no love, then it isn’t for me. My favorites would be a few of the greats Nora Roberts, Debbie Macomber, Charlaine Harris… I’m also a huge manga fan as readers can see from my dedication in Ancient Enemies.

5. Tell me a bit about yourself and how long you've been writing,
When I was twelve, I got my hands on my first Harlequin Romance. The picture on the front lured me in, but it was the love story that kept me coming back for more. Every romance I could get my hands on I absorbed as if it were life and death. By the time I was fifteen I had a collection of close to a thousand titles and knew I had to be a writer.
Years of failure and learning went by before I published a few poems and won a Writing Round Robin contest with Harlequin. After a while my rejections stopped being because I hadn’t learned enough yet and became about my ideas being to strange. When I found out about New Concepts Publishing, I knew I had found the perfect place for me. They embraced the odd, strange, paranormal, sci-fi ideas I had, loving my new different concepts. Now years later they have published four books, with two more coming out this Summer. With even more where my weird came from.

6. Which of your characters is your favorite?
This question I had to think long and hard about. My favorite character would have to be Arlene Hardigan from Old Dreams. The nightmare that started it all started with her. At the time she was called Colleen, a young girl growing up in Scotland hundreds of years ago. She warns her village that monsters are coming and days later six people are abducted by aliens, her being one of them. She falls in love with an alien scientist, Brian, but ends up escaping back to Earth after an attack on their ship. When she makes it back the village priest accuses her of witch craft and burns her at the stake. Though rescued she didn’t make it, only the child she was carrying. When she is reincarnated, she becomes Arlene. Meeting Brian again she falls in love with him once more, at the same time she is chased by the Puritan Vampire. It’s a fight to stay alive and find her way back to the life she should have had.
Arlene is an important character in all the Zogone books, being the main entity that pulls all of her loved ones together. After everything she goes through, she can still be happy, energetic, hopeful and help keep her family going no matter the odds. She adapts to life as an alien and delegate, even at such a young age she can become the grandmother to all the characters who came after her own son. All that aside, she would have to be my favorite, because she is the first character to ever make me cry. In a scene in Past Regrets Ginger has found Colleen’s son who was cloned and cryogenically frozen when he was a teenager. The moment Arlene sees him she knows who he is and cries, “My Baby!” Every time I think of that scene I can’t help, but get choked up.

7. Are there villains in your books and how were they created?
In the Zogone saga, there is an enemy alien race called the Baygers, half cyborg/ half were-wolf race. They came about purely by what if, questioning myself, wondering what you would get by mixing to scary monsters. The major villain of the Zogone saga is a priest called the Puritan Vampire. As a human he used religion as a means to his evil burning a young woman at the stake, swearing she was a witch after predicting their village would be attacked by monsters. After the girl dies the priest is attacked by a vampire and changed into one himself.
The girl is later reincarnated and the Puritan Vampire goes after her again, blaming her for what happened to him. He shows up in all four Zogone books in one form or another, along with the children he fathered after attacking and raping four women.
The new villain in book four, New Beginnings, will probably the most amazing and outstanding. My main character Megumi and her ex-boyfriend end up crashing his fighter plane and being taken prisoner by Queen Shiva. Shiva terrifying, beautiful is the Hindu Goddess of destruction and rebirth. She is in the form of what looks like a ten feet long albino ferret that likes to collect aliens of all types as play things. When she has an Earthling and a Zogone solider in her castle, they become her favorite playthings and she fully intends to keep them.

8. What are you working on now?
If romance novels are my first love, music would have to come in as a close second. So, I couldn’t help writing a book with a rock band in it. Talkers, is about a pilot/mechanic Shayle, with the reputation for being the best and being able to take care of herself. When the safety of Ritter’s band is compromised by stalkers his uncle recommends Shayle to protect the band and catch the stalkers.
Though famous, talented, gorgeous young men, they have a secret from their past that makes them who they are and fuels the stalker problem. While Ritter is looking for true love, his twin brother rejects it. When they were children their father a mean nasty alcoholic showed them the bad side of love through yelling and abusive to their mother. Seeing it, jaded Petrus, making him into a player who sleeps with a different woman every night. Making it no surprise when stalkers came after him.
When their mother remarried, Ritter saw the good side of love and became the opposite of Petrus, desperately seeking his true love. He finds her in Shayle and despite all her objects he swears to make her his.
Near the Summer when my next book comes out, I will be featured in Wildfire Newsletter, where my readers can get a sneak peek at a scene from Talkers.
http://www.allromanceebooks.com/newsletters.html

9. What's your latest release and how did the idea arrive?
The last book of mine that was released is the third book in my Zogone saga, Ancient Enemies. Like a lot of my ideas, this too came from a what if. In the second book, Past Regrets Sam the half human/half vampire child born from an attack by the Puritan Vampire, and his partner Ginger goes missing. The Zogone ship he was on does a D.N.A. search for him and found two matches, one was Sam the second they fear could be the then thought dead Puritan Vampire.
Ancient Enemies is the story of Ginger’s brother Josh searching for that second D.N.A. sign and finding more lost children like Sam. The story came about after considering if Sam’s mother was attacked, who says other women weren’t too. Josh has also been a much loved character from the first Zogone book Old Dreams and I thought he deserved a love story of his own.

10. Tell me about your latest book and how it came about. Enclose the opening of the book around 400 words.
Description:
After the discovery of a D.N.A. trace, Josh is pulled back into action to once again protect his family from an ancient evil that refuses to rest in peace. After years of watching everyone else find love, it’s finally Josh’s turn, but it comes at a price. Finding more victims of the Puritan Vampire, one long dead and two more living children carrying the blood viral disease.
Tama has lived his whole life being ostracized by society and forced to live with the knowledge that he isn’t exactly human. The Zogones find him to offer help and he agrees to go into space with them as long as he can bring his sister, freeing her from Yankii gang life.

Ancient Enemies: Prologue

It was funny how one event could lead to another, and then another until a person's life completely revolved around that one moment. That was what Josh's life was like.
It had all started over five hundred years before when a young woman named Colleen Hardigan was brutally murdered by a monster known as the Puritan Vampire. Before she died, her body was recovered by an alien race called the Zogones. Colleen's husband was one of the Zogone's rookie scientists, Dr. Brianth Hardigan.
The head of the science team realized Colleen was pregnant and managed to remove the fetus before her death, though Brian never knew the child had survived. After death, Colleen received the last rites that would help her be reincarnated and her husband Brian was cryogenically frozen until the day the Zogone's main computers could locate Colleen's life signs after her rebirth.

And that is where Josh comes in. Colleen's son Borus not only survived but also thrived. He grew up, married, and became a successful scientist in his own long life, with a large family of kids and grandkids. Josh was one of Borus' great-great-grandchildren.

After five hundred years of their family waiting, Josh and his younger sister Ginger made sure they were positioned in the military to take the mission if Colleen was reincarnated in their time. The moment her life signs were picked up, Ginger had been contacted and Brian was recovered from the Cryo-freeze. Then along with Josh, they had found her on Earth reborn as a teenager named Arlene Garnet.
Over time, her memories of her past life were recovered and her killer, who was again chasing her, was killed. Or at least that was what they thought. Four years went by and their lives took another unexpected turn.

Just five months before Ginger had been sent on another mission to recover a kidnapped victim, the son of an important Galactic Security Colonel. The boy, Leap Qualtose, was taken by the Zogone's enemy, the Baygers, to their home planet.
Ginger didn't go alone, but was ordered to take along Captain Samuel Paddington. Sam was a friend they had made on Earth, whom Josh had found following the Puritan Vampire. His mother had been another victim of the monster. The Puritan Vampire had beaten her, raped her, and then left her with a blood viral infection, which had later killed her. However, not before she had given birth to a half-human, half-vampire child, Sam himself.

During the rescue mission Ginger and Sam were caught and their transmitter equipment destroyed. In order to recover them, the battleship Replacer had resorted to scanning for their D.N.A. signs, which had led Josh to where he was now.