Interview: Mik Wilkens – Author of The Silver Cage

  

Mik Wilkens is my first author to be featured on here as part of my 12 Days of Lazy Day Authors.

What is The Silver Cage about?

The Silver Cage is about David Conner, a down-to-earth guy who has everything going for him: he’s got a great job, he has plenty of money, and he’s just met Jennasara, quite literally the woman of his dreams. But David’s world is turned upside-down when he finds himself on Lucasia, a world where magic is a force of nature and creatures of myth are real. To save Jennasara, David must learn the ways of this strange new world, master its magic forces, and decide who is his friend and who is his enemy.

What inspired you to write this book?

My muse handed me the idea, and I ran with it. A lot of the creatures and characters and things that happen in the story were inspired by my idea of making this book different from similar fantasy books. By “different,” I mean skewed from what a reader would normally expect. I wanted everything to feel familiar but have some sort of twist or something a little bit (or a lot) unique about it.

Who is your favorite character in your novel, and why?

Overall, my favorite character would have to be Riak. The funny thing is, he wasn’t in my first rough ideas for the book or even in the first part of the first draft. I was several chapters into the novel when he walked into my head and said, “Hey, I’m supposed to be in this story.” So I had to go back and add him in several places. Good thing I did, too, because he became a really important part of the story. The reason I like him so much is because of how little I knew about him when I started writing the book and how much I found out about him. Plus he’s an emotionally complex character, and he’s pretty darn sexy. From a writer’s perspective, my favorite character would have to be either Emerald or Karel, mostly because writing dialogue for them is so much fun, although in rather different ways since Emerald tends to be rather talkative and Karel not so much.

How long have you been writing?

I started writing when I was about 11 or 12 years old. At the time, all I read were stories about animals, either fiction or nonfiction. So that was what I wrote: stories about animals, told from the animals’ point of view. I read a lot, too, so it only took me a couple of years to read all of the animal books in our local library (we lived in a very small town). After that, I needed to find a new type of book to read. That’s when I discovered science fiction and fantasy. I started writing science fiction and fantasy stories soon after that, which is what I’ve been writing for the past several decades.

How did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I fell in love with writing in the sixth grade. We had a sort of free period once a week during which we could choose from several different activities. One of the activities was to write a story based on a couple of sentences printed on an index card that was drawn randomly out of a box. I always chose that activity. Once I started doing that, I realized how much I loved to write.　

Why do you write fantasy?

I write both fantasy and science fiction (mostly space opera), as well as other types of speculative fiction, but fantasy is my favorite because of the freedom it gives me to create worlds and characters without limitation. Fantasy is wide open because of all of the different subgenres within it: high fantasy, urban fantasy, fairy tale fantasy, historical fantasy, dark fantasy, etc. You can put almost anything into a fantasy story: cars, faeries, guns, dragons, werewolves, vampires, even starships. There’s really very little you can’t do.

What was your first reaction when LazyDay Publishing offered you a contract?

I was thrilled! My novella The Price of Conquest had been accepted by WolfSinger Publications earlier in the year, so the LazyDay contract meant I had two major works accepted within just a few months, and I’d have a novel coming out in 2010 and a novella being released the following year. It feels like 2010 is the year I’ve been discovered.

Are you working on your next book? What can you tell us about it?

I’m working on several books right now. I’m almost finished with the sequel to The Silver Cage. It’s called The Golden Drake, and it pretty much starts right where The Silver Cage ends. Actually, the first chapter starts a little bit before The Silver Cage ends. I’m also almost done writing another fantasy novel called The Greyhounds of Aeravon, which is the first book in a series of novels I plan to use to raise money to support the adoption of retired racing greyhounds. I’m also working on a science fiction trilogy. All three of the books in the trilogy are finished in rough draft form. I’m doing the final editson the first book, and then I’ll start on the other two. Finally, I’m finishing the edits on ascience fiction novella called Esora, which is a follow-up story to another science fictionnovella I have coming out in 2011 called The Price of Conquest.

To find out more about The Silver Cage and to read excerpts from the book please visit: www.thesilvercage.com and to buy The Silver Cage please visit: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004E11438/ref=cm_sw_su_dp