10 things you never wanted to know about Elizabeth Richards (but she’s going to tell you anyway)

1. Elizabeth is a YA author specializing in dystopian novels with a paranormal twist. If it has explosions and kissing in it (preferably at the same time), she’s there.

2. She’s an identical twin, and yes, she is the evil one, mwa ha ha ha ha ha.  *twirls moustache*

3. When querying her first YA novel, she accidentally invited an agent to her sister’s bachelorette party, and demanded they come dressed in hot-pants and fishnet stockings. This isn’t her most embarrassing story.

4. Penguin put in an offer for BLACK CITY the day after she got married! BEST. WEDDING GIFT. EVER.

5. Her favorite movie is Jaws. Or Halloween. Or maybe Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire…

6.  She’s decisive.

7.  She’s seen Daniel Radcliffe in the nude, twice, sadly both times in a theater with 500 other people. The sight of him doing a naked combat roll still haunts her dreams.

8.  Her favorite TV shows are Buffy, Being Erica, and Extreme Couponing.

9. She has a heart-shaped birthmark on her foot.

10. She can never think of ten things to say about herself…

11. Oh! She's bad at maths.

How I Was Influenced by UGLIES

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And now onto our regularly scheduled topic week: Influences!

When I first started writing, I wrote an urban fantasy. That's the kind of whack stuff I used to like to read. I started devouring more than just Harry Potter, and I came across Scott Westerfeld's UGLIES series in about 2008.

It was new for me. Something different I'd never read before. As I was reading it, I thought to myself, "I want to write a book like that." But I had no idea what that was. So I turned to my good pal, the Internet. After some searching and researching and more reading, I realized that there was this whole genre out there called dystopia. The future as we don't know it. Warped. Different. Weird.

I liked it.

I wanted to write in it. Not only that, but I wanted there to be cool gadgets and technological advancements, and anything else that sounded cool and could explode or transform someone into something they're not.

Yeah, those kinds of stories.

So I did. I wrote my first dystopic novel, POSSESSION. Since then, I've dabbled in dystopian fantasy, and more hard science fiction, like time travel. I love making and exploring new worlds outside the realm of existence.

I've moved on to reading more of this kind of fiction too. THE GIVER, INSIGNIA, MONUMENT 14, LIFE AS WE KNEW IT, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, WARM BODIES. They're all completely different, yet awesomely the same.

They create a world beyond what I already know. I can't seem to get enough of this kind of story for some reason. It all started with UGLIES.

Have you ever read a book that expanded your horizons? What was it?

Christopher Nolan

Authors, filmmakers, songwriters, composers, artists and journalists. They’re all influences on my writing, but the films of Chris Nolan are some of my major inspirations. I saw his film Memento in a small studio screening ten years ago, with Chris in attendance. He’s British, so instead of the jeans and leather jacket uniform of directors, he wore a suit and an earnest expression. He explained how the idea came from a short story his brother wrote. In the audience Q&A after, while we all sat there shell-shocked, I was dying to raise my hand and tell him how brilliant it was. But I was there as someone’s guest and was afraid I’d embarrass him with my fan-girl gush, so I kept quiet while people asked questions that seemed more accusatory than appreciative.

 

Later, I watched the film again, of course. You had to, because there are so many layers in this unusual backward format. My friend, a film critic, dismissed it as “gimmicky,” and he was not alone. It opened small, in only eleven theatres across the US. But I knew I had seen an amazing piece of work, a risky story that took a lot of guts to commit to. Yes, it’s told backward, but that form was a perfect way to tell this story of a man with short-term amnesia looking for the killer of his wife. I loved how it played with different levels of reality. Like the main character Leonard, the viewer doesn’t know who to trust. Can you trust Teddy, who says he’s a cop? Or Natalie, who would have good reason to turn on you because you killed her boyfriend?

 

I also loved Following, his first film, very low budget, shot mostly in his parent’s house. It juggled similar themes of trust and identity. And of course, Inception played with different levels of reality, now questioning whether this life is even real? If you’ve read my book, you know these are themes that intrigue me as well. I like to set up several levels of reality but keeping it as clean and streamlined as possible, giving the illusion of simplicity. In 2011, I saw Chris at the Egyptian Theatre for the ten-year anniversary of Memento. The director Guillermo Del Toro conducted an interview after the film. Gone was the tentative, almost shy Nolan, now replaced by a confident yet thoughtful director. Even though ten years had passed, the film held its power. It was very bit the tightly-wound film noir that it had been the first time around. In fact, it was impressive in its perfection. This time, no one was there to doubt him, because ten years and five more feature films had proven that it was far more than a trick. For just a moment, I was tempted to write this post backwards. But then that would have been a gimmick.

 

 

Topic Week: Gennifer's Influences

I was probably eleven years old when my Aunt handed me a worn copy of Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.  I took her book recommendations seriously.  She was the cool relation.  She cursed and watched movies late at night and put blonde streaks in my hair.  She also loved science fiction and fantasy.  She loved escaping to worlds and she was willing to go anywhere if there was a good story.  So when she gave me Ender's Game I opened the pages and found myself sucked into Ender Wiggin's world.

Today that book would be classified as a dystopian novel.  With a young protagonist it might have been cleaned up for the young adult market, which is why I'm so relieved it's not a contemporary novel.  Ender's world is one of control and violence where children are made into soldiers against the terrible Buggers ravaging the Earth.  In many ways it's a novel of action and war, but at its heart it's a coming of age story set in a strongly imagined future.

This is a novel about bullying, about the terrible ways political power can be used, about bigotry and paranoia.  I read it when I was eleven, and it changed my life.  I read it many more times over the years.

I tried unsuccessfully to read the rest of the series.  I'm sure they're well-written novels, but for me Ender's Game was complete in and of itself.  It resonated with me not because of the plot but because of its ideas.

I like ideas.  I like ideas that allow a reader to explore, that evolve with the reader's life experience.  Ideas are the essence of science fiction for me.  And at heart, all of the science fiction that's truly influenced and inspired me did so through sparks and innuendos.  I'm equally moved by ideas that hold humanity's flaws up for inspection and those that consider the immense possibility of our species.

As a reader, Ender's Game changed me.  As an adult, I learned things that made it difficult to champion the novelist and his work.  And still when I had the opportunity to tell Card in person how he influenced my career, I did so.  Because although I grew to understand not everyone we look up to deserves it, Ender's Game taught me the power of free thinking.  I shook Card's hand because ultimately he taught me idea trumps intention and the power of a story resides in the mind of the reader.

Topic week: Susanne's influences

For me there wasn’t that one crucial epiphany that made me realize I wanted to write science fiction, nor is there only one book or one movie that inspired it all. For me it was a process; a process of slow realization. Of realizing what I like in books and movies, and that it’s okay to like them.

When I was a teen, unlike many of the girls I knew, I wasn’t interested in romance neither in book form, nor on the big screen.

I read books from Dean Koontz and Stephen King (mainly those with science fiction elements). I devoured their books, but of course I was aware that I was the only girl (I knew) that read them and I thought it was a relict from my pre-teen tomboy times, and so I stopped reading those books. I stopped reading books altogether – except for those I was forced to read for school.  Because the books I was interested in – science fiction or thriller with horror elements – was something I thought I shouldn’t read if I wanted to fit in.

But I still sneaked into the living room at night to watch reruns of the Alien movies because even though I’d stopped reading science fiction/horror I couldn’t quite give it up completely.

When I started writing, I suddenly remembered all those nights spent in the dark living room – scared and yet excited, heart pounding and still smiling -, I remembered my torn and crinkled copies of Watchers and Fear Nothing and The Dark Half and many more, and I wanted that for my books. I realized that I loved science fiction elements and horror, that I preferred dark undertones to funny, that while I liked romantic elements, I didn’t want them to dominate my books completely. The thrill I’d once gotten from books by King and Koontz, and from movies like Alien, I wanted to get them from my own writing now. 

Topic Week: Beth's Influences

Today is the first day of a new feature on the League: Topic Week! And this week's topic is all about influences.

I often get asked who my science fiction influences are, and I think people expect me to say Heinlein or something similar. But the truth is, with a very few exceptions, I didn't read that much science fiction growing up. (I know, I know. This is totally going to get me razzed later.) When I was younger, there were some SF books I loved. Namely: Madeleine L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME and Orson Scott Card's ENDER'S GAME. But once I got past these, there were few adult SF books that I actually enjoyed--Douglas Adams's THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY being one of the rare ones I adored.

I blame my husband for this. See, he loves hard sci fi. I mean, whole chapters dedicated to the exact, precise functionings of the engine. He likes science fiction, whereas I liked science fiction. The adult SF books he was reading bored me to tears. I didn't care about how the science worked--I just wanted something awesome to happen, preferably by blowing up.

There were whole years that passed where I didn't really care about science fiction books at all because of this. I was limited in my understanding of the genre (really, I prefer "space opera", but I didn't even know those existed before), and that led me to dismiss the whole genre as a whole.

Until...Firefly.

While I avoided reading science fiction, I quickly fell in love with Firefly (thanks to my husband, who insisted I'd love it). There was so much to love: quick plots, exciting twists, mysteries, snappy dialog. And there was science, but rather than spending ages explaining it, it just worked, much like magic tends to do in fantasy novels.

When I started working on ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, I knew from the start that I wanted to write science fiction. And I was scared. I'd never written science fiction, and I wasn't sure I could it. I knew I couldn't write hard sci fi. That was definitely not my scene.

But then I remembered Firefly. Joss Whedon presented a science fiction world which emphasized fiction over science.

Now that? That I could do.

Topic Week

One of the first changes we're incorporating here at the League is a Topic Week--a week where we all post about a single topic. To kick of February, our first topic is going to be...

"What SF book/movie most influenced your writing?"

So come back every day this week to find out what the different League members consider to be their greatest influences!