Chris Mentzer: Interview with the Author of The Askinar Towers Trilogy

It's been a little while since I've hosted an author interview (and if you're thinking of doing one with me, I am considering moving the format to video via G+ Hangout) but today we welcome chris Mentzer, author of The Askinar towers trilogy. thanks for joining us today, Chris. Could you share a little bit about your recent projects? 

My trilogy The Askinar Towers is completed and I’m waiting for book 1 release in December by Tiger Dynasty Publishing. In addition to these, I’m working on a new Towers story featuring a supporting character that appears in both book 2 and book 3 of the trilogy. I’m also working on a blog series called Observations of a Café Waiter. This features a waiter named Chuck and his employment at the Floor 17 Café found in the Tower of Water. 

Busy, busy! Do you tend to put messages or themes in your novels? 

Adventure can be found everywhere and anywhere you look. A simple trip to the grocery store can be made exciting just by using your imagination. But always remember that when you are out on an adventure, home is the place you always want to return to in the end. 

What was your favourite chapter (or part) to write and why? 

From book one, I would say my favorite chapter to write was How To Rescue a Damsel in Distress. The reason being that first, it is an off-the-wall title, and secondly, the chapter gives a breakdown of the rescue but it doesn’t go as planned.

From book two, my favorite part would be the Black Friday scenario in a sleepy town called Pleasington. I won’t say anymore for fear of spoilers.

From book three, it’s a toss-up between the chapter called Angry Villagers 101, and the pirate scenario. Both were fun to write and the outcome is somewhat unexpected. 

Did you choose your genre, or did it more choose you? 

I got interested in Fantasy primarily from reading the Chronicles of Narnia series in junior high. From there I progressed to David Eddings novels and the Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett. The Askinar Towers trilogy was greatly inspired by Narnia in that it too is a Portal Fantasy series. 

Some of my own early favourites! I would have read The Chronicles of Narnia before I even knew what fantasy was, and David Eddings was my first 'real' fantasy as I understood it. I pinched Castle of Wizardry off Dad when I was ten. I was well into Discworld by age twelve.

What book are you reading now? 

Currently I’m reading The World of Karov by Elyse Salpeter. It’s book 1 of the Children of Demliee Series. I recently met her online and picked up an e-copy of her book. Very inspiring story.

I'm not familiar with that one. I might need to check it out. Are there any other new authors that have seized your attention? 

In addition to Elyse, I’ve been following Kayla Curry, Scott Bartlett, and Ciara Ballintyne. I’ve haven’t read much from them but I’m in the process of making the rounds. 

Awww, me? I'm flattered! I have to say this is a first for me.

Who is your favourite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work? 

Hands down it would have to be M.C. Beaton. She write small village mysteries featuring a local constable by the name of Hamish Macbeth. What I love about her writing is her ability to make the fictional town of Lochdubh seem real including the residents. I’ve read all her Macbeth books and hope to collect them all and reread them in the order that they were released.

That got my attention! Although the Scottish angle always does that for me. No, I do not have a 'men-in-kilts' fetish, just some relatively recent Scottish roots, as my Dad was born in Edinburgh.

I imagine like many authors (myself included) you have a day job as well. Are you happy to share that with us? 

Yes, I’m currently serving a life sentence in retail. Been with the company for 17 years and I hope to survive long enough to reach 20. Time will tell. 

Yikes, that's a long time. I hope you make 20 as well.

If you were a Star Trek® character, which one would it be? 

Definitely a Red Shirt crewmember; Ensign Expendable. I can’t see myself surviving any particular mission down to a planet (hostile or non) and most likely would die shortly after arrival. 

That has got to be the funniest answer I've ever received, although I certainly hope you are not that expendable!

What would I find in your refrigerator right now? 

Surprisingly this is a difficult question to answer. We have two refrigerators in our house. My wife is a diabetic and has a gluten intolerance and she (and our youngest daughter) has control of the main fridge. I have the secondary one which houses basic things like bread, tortilla shells, and other items that can’t be eaten by the other two. Of course if you look in just my fridge, you’d probably wonder how I survive! 

If you looked in my second fridge, you'd think I survived on a steady diet of beer and ice cream...

If you were a car, what kind would you be? 

A 4x4 car crushing monster truck. I am so sick of the way people drive on the road these days, I’d rather just run right over them to get to my destination. Plus I’d enter competitions on the weekend. 

*makes a note not to annoy Chris*

Thanks for joining us today, Chris. 

If you'd like to know more about Chris and his work, keep reading and check out his contact details at the end. Nexus of the Worlds, Book 1 of The Askinar Towers Trilogy is being published by Tiger Dynasty Publishing and is expected to be released on December 3, 2013. Watch Chris's Facebook Page and Twitter account for details of the release.   

About Nexus of the Worlds 

Sara and Erika weren’t looking for an adventure but when but they are given a special key, they find a portal that takes them into a world dominated by four towers. They soon realize the towers themselves are the center of every known world. Their quest is to locate the legendary fifth tower, encounter the entity that lives within, and then find a way back home. Meanwhile a sinister cloaked figure is watching from the shadows and following their every move. Are they ally or foe? Do they want the girls or the special key? Find out in book one of The Askinar Towers. 

About Chris Mentzer 

Chris has been interested in writing ever since 1982 when he was given an English assignment in the 9^th grade. He had to write a paragraph using a lot of detail. Although he wasn’t sure he completely understood the assignment, he wrote a scene in a bank where a guy was coming out of the bathroom and witnessed a robbery in progress. The detail portion came in when the witness described the robber to the police. From that moment Chris decided he wanted to be a writer.

Between 1982 and 2005, he made several attempts to write a story; it was his goal to write the great American novel, you know the one that everyone wants to own and read. The majority of his work lay incomplete in a personal slush pile in a filing cabinet.

Having read The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis and all fantasy books by David Eddings, he took a stab at Fantasy with minimal success. Even tried his hand at Science Fiction with a couple of buddies while he was in college. The bottom line was he lacked discipline and the desire to stick with any one project. But that was all to change in 2005.

In November of that year, Chris entered his first writing challenge held by the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) website. Although the goal was 50,000 words, he obtained his personal goal of 25K, which went on to be the foundation of book 1 of The Askinar Towers Trilogy. He later wrote foundations for books 2 and 3 in ’07 and ’09 respectively. His inspiration for the Towers books came from John DeChancie’s Castle Perilous series and Doctor Who’s Paradise Towers. 

Chris lives in Mesa, AZ with his wife and two daughters. He is currently employed in the retail industry working in the produce department. In his spare time, when not writing or stalking the social media streams, Chris loves to hike out in the Lost Dutchman area and Saguaro Lake. 

Here’s another interview with Chris Mentzer 

http://tigerdynastypub.blogspot.com/2013/09/meet-chris-mentzer.html 

Contact information 

Platform Blog: http://2150.wordpress.com 

Facebook Profile: https://www.facebook.com/Chris.Mentzer.3D   

Facebook Fan Page: https://www.facebook.com/Mentzer.Author 

Askinar Towers Fan Page: https://www.facebook.com/Askinartower

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Chris_Mentzer

Email: fifth.tower@gmail.com

Why I Originally Liked Falling Skies Better Than The Walking Dead

Don’t shoot me! I always liked The Walking Dead, but my fondness for the show grew rapidly at the beginning of Season 3.

Before that, while I enjoyed the storylines, watching it was sometimes an exercise in frustration for me. So many people doing so many stupid things. Mostly characters who are dead now. And you know why they are dead now? Because they did stupid things!

Well, that’s natural selection for you, but with my disposition and low tolerance for stupidity, it wasn’t my idea of entertainment. My long-suffering husband had to endure hours of my rants, or screaming at the TV.

‘Take someone with you!’

‘Don’t wander off in the dark alone – I don’t care if you need to pee.’

‘Where is your gun? Where the hell is your gun, moron?’

'Oh my god, why are you letting that kid wander off alone? This isn't a playground!'

Eventually these explosions evolved into a reorganisation of the survivors by yours truly – if only Rick had listened to me sooner, he might have made it out with more people alive.

Of course, then my husband had to listen to me wax lyrical about how I’d be running my band of zombie survivors.

I may not be able to fight. I’ve never shot a gun. I’m short, so I probably can’t run that fast, and god forbid I would have to ditch my heels - a sacrifice I grudgingly admit I would make in the interests of survival. God dammit, why can't one be an efficient zombie survivor and look stylish?

But assuming I managed to survive the initial zombie onslaught using my brain, I’d be organising the hell out of my band of survivors, and you bet I’d be the one running the show. There’d be a buddy system. No wandering off alone, especially at night. In fact, no wandering around at all without a good reason. Everyone would be armed with something. There’d be guards posted.

Ah hell, I forget now a lot of the stuff I said. I’d have to watch it all again.

I know that people were getting used to the idea that humanity was no longer top dog, but hell, we are the most adaptable species on the planet. That’s why we survive. And most of Rick’s little group weren’t doing a good job of demonstrating that – although they were doing a good job of demonstrating what happens if you don’t adapt.

You die.

At the time, Falling Skies appealed to me more because the characters in that show got it. They immediately understood they were no longer top of the food chain, and they were organising themselves to deal with that situation as best they could. They were mounting guards. They were armed. They expected something to jump out of the shadows and try and kill them at any moment. They were treating life like a hostile situation, not a jaunt in the woods, and consequently far fewer of them died.

They were smart. I liked them.

Then of course at the end of Season 2 of The Walking Dead, Rick basically declared it was his way or the highway, and that’s when things got better. At the opening of Season 3, the survivors were finally behaving the way I thought they should have been from the beginning. Better late than never, I guess, although for some of the original characters late was too late…

Season 4 has started, and I’m still waiting to watch it because my husband is working long hours out at the Sydney bushfires, and we’ve had no time together to catch up on TV. So the episodes just stack up on the DVR… eventually I’ll get to watch them.

What do you like about The Walking Dead or Falling Skies, or how do they compare for you if you watch both of them? Yes I know they are different things, zombies, aliens, blah blah blah. It’s all sci-fi, and both these shows are post-apocalyptic dystopian stories.

Just, don’t talk to me about Season 4 of The Walking Dead.

Character Building Using Personality Profiles

I’m a structured person. Very structured. I've got more structure than the Coliseum. In the definition of structured, there should be...

OK, you got the picture.

Anyway, the point being that there’s a myriad of details that go into a book. If the writer wants to ensure consistency - which I do; see above about being structured - then those details need to be tracked. Once I’m immersed in a story, I don’t like to have to stop to invent things, like clothes or currency, and I especially don’t want to stop to make a note of it in case I need it again. I resent such intrusions, and consequently I tend to do a slapdash job. It's probably a left-brain/right-brain conflict. The right brain has the reins, and doesn't want to give them up!

I’ve gotten around this with world-building by having a comprehensive set of notes in advance. There’s a map, and a file for each country detailing those things I’m most likely to need, like physical appearance, clothes, currency, trade and so on and so forth. It’s great; if I need a detail while I’m writing I just look it up, slot it in, and away I go. Kind of like plug and play!

Despite that, I still tend to have a slapdash approach to characters. I mean, I have some idea of who they are when I start, but really I’m not much of a people-watcher.

What, a writer who doesn’t like to people-watch?

There's a goddess of death in the WIP for
which I'm currently character building, but I'm
pretty sure she has on more clothes than this!

I know, I know, I feel abnormal too, but I can’t help it. People watching exposes me to far too many things I don’t want to see. Like stupidity. And then my eyes need to be sanitised. And then I get depressed about the state of humanity. Possibly I feel homicidal. Yeah, it's all kinds of bad.

Consequently, I struggle to articulate characters sometimes, leaving them occasionally two dimensional. I try to flesh them out during revisions, of course, but still… It would be easier if I was a people-watcher.

Then it occurred to me that what I needed was a quick reference card for each of my characters like I have for different countries. A solution to every instance in which I ask ‘how would this character respond to that?’ Plug and play characters!

Enter the personality test.

There’s a free resource online at www.16personalities.com which has pretty comprehensive profiles. The test and a summary is free, and you can buy the full profile for $16.99, which is pretty cheap in my opinion, and a business expense anyway – and one I can’t possibly incur more than 16 times.

So I’ve started doing personality tests for my characters.

I know, hard-core right? I know what you’re thinking, and I’ve heard it before. Anal. Perfectionist. Pedantic. I consider them compliments. Writers tap their right brain for their creativity, but I use my left brain equally, so I’m also extremely rational and logical. I am not a seat of the pants type person. I'm a planner. A strategist. In fact, I used the website to personality profile myself, and it pretty much said that. INTJ personalities have a plan for everything, including a plan for if the plan fails.

So shoot me.  Maybe I’m uptight. I can’t help that. I can’t change me but I can change my writing process to suit me.

I like this goddess of death.

What I know of the character in the initial stages of starting a new story is enough to enable me to answer the personality test questions, and then, hey presto I have a personality profile. I’ve been building character profiles off the back of the personality profile, making up historical details to fit the story and the personality as I go. And now, when I’m writing, and I'm not sure how my character would react in a given situation, I can look at the profile. Instant consistency. Just add personality profile!

It has also spawned some interesting ideas. The profile for my latest protagonist said he can fall back on vices like drugs and alcohol under pressure. Well, the guy is grieving for his murdered wife, and he's been sent by his king to some backwater to get over it basically, but if we add in some heavy drinking, and some unreliability, and now we've got a convincing reason why an otherwise stellar commander has been shipped out to command an outpost no one wants.

It’s early days, and I wouldn’t recommend this technique for all writers, especially those who are extremely right-brained or definite pantsers, but so far it seems to be working really well for me. Already I can feel the characters are more fully-fleshed people, which makes it much easier for me to write them instead of me.

Suddenly I have that feeling I’m sure is familiar and natural to nearly all writers – of having another person riding around in my head.

Current WIP: In the Company of the Dead – a full-length adult high fantasy novel. Lyram thought life couldn’t get any worse than a prince wanting him dead, until he fell in love with a woman dedicated to the goddess of death.  

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