Book Tour Q&A: Kenai by Dave Dobson
- Fiction Fans
- Sep 24, 2023
- 10 min read
Today we're taking part in the book tour organized by Escapist Book Company for Kenai by Dave Dobson! Continue reading for the book blurb and a Q&A with the author.
About the book
A planet steeped in mystery...
Jess Amiko is long past her days as a space marine, with all the glory of that time tarnished beyond repair by what came after. Trying to rebuild from the ashes, she's taken a job as a security guard on Kenai, a lonely world far from the Council systems. It's supposed to be easy duty - quiet and peaceful, on a docile world with no real threats, watching over an archeological dig at a site built by a race long vanished.
Betrayed and attacked by forces unknown, and finding that nothing on Kenai makes sense, Jess is plunged into a desperate fight for survival that leads her deep into the mysteries of Kenai's past, and deep into the hardship and paradox the planet imposes on all who call it home.
On to the interview...!
Thank you so much for joining us for this Q&A! We’ll start off with one of our standard podcast opening questions–tell us something great that’s happened recently.
I got permission to go back to walking around and wearing two shoes. That doesn’t seem like much, but I broke my foot back in April and have been non-weight-bearing and non-driving for almost three months, so it’s a big deal for my daily life. It also means I can go back to doing improv comedy at my local club, which I love.
What are you currently reading or what’s up next on your TBR? What made you pick up this book?
I’m actually currently reading through a thriller I started last November as part of NaNoWriMo. I wrote about 70,000 words in November and was nearly ready to write the conclusion, but I left it after the end of November to handle holidays and the finishing and release of two more books. It’s a fun story - needs finishing and tightening and editing, but I’m happy with how it is in its nearly-final draft state.
In terms of other people’s books, I recently finished up Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor, which was great. I’m trying to read more stories that go beyond the European-ish roots of most fantasy classics.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to start writing?
I’m from Iowa originally, son of two academics. I went to college thinking I’d be a doctor, but a bio lab that involved cow hearts demonstrated to me that the inner workings of organisms are actually pretty gross, so I ended up diving into my major, geology. I got a Ph.D. in marine geology, specializing in ocean sediments and climate. I always loved computer games and programming, so while in grad school procrastinating from swirling mud around in little tubes, I published a few shareware computer games, and one of them, Snood, got pretty big in the 2000’s, which was a really fun ride. After grad school, I started a teaching career at Guilford College that lasted 24 years, until the college ran into some trouble and my department ended up getting shut down. By then, I had a few books published, and I’d also published a couple of puzzle card games (the Dr. Esker’s Notebook series), so I figured rather than look for another academic job, I’d try doing writing and game design full time.
I have always loved writing, even as a kid, and I especially loved imaginative stories. I started out as a young reader with the Oz books, which I read over and over and found completely captivating, and also fairy tales and other such stories. I graduated to more sophisticated fantasy and sci fi books. I loved writing and wrote a few stories during high school, although my attention there was more on computer game programming. In grad school, I started doing more writing for fun, because it was a diversion from the science I was doing sometimes 50+ hours a week. I was always good at starting new stories and terrible at finishing them, so not much came of that time. I did get a children’s book on endangered species published then, back in 1997 or so, and that was a great experience with a different form of writing.
Once I got deeper into my teaching career and had kids, and with working on Snood taking up a lot of my spare time, I didn’t have as much time for writing. I got back into it in about 2005, when I started a novel on my laptop on one of our long trips from North Carolina to Massachusetts to visit family. That became my main writing project, and although I didn’t work on it continuously, and sometimes took a year or more off, I always came back to it. That’s the book that eventually became Flames Over Frosthelm, and it took me seven years for the first draft, and another seven to get it into shape for publication.
You may well believe that fourteen years per book is not a great pace for a career in writing, and I would agree. Now that I’ve figured out more how I write, and dedicated myself to it as my main gig, my later books have gone much faster than that. My thriller, Got Trouble, was probably the fastest - I got a first draft of that one done in a month during NaNoWriMo. Kenai took me a little under a year from first word written to publication.
How do you spend your free time when you’re not reading or writing? Do you have any hobbies or interests that you can talk to us about?
I love doing improv comedy, and our practice every week is just about my favorite thing. I also really like playing and designing boardgames, so that’s a big hobby for me, and even a business - I have published a couple of puzzle card games, and I have some other board and card games ready to go as I continue exploring how to publish and market those. I love tabletop RPGs, too. I took some time off from D&D, like maybe fifteen years, when my kids were small, but I got back into it about ten years ago and have been having a lot of fun with it, both as a DM and as a player. I’ve designed a few RPG systems and experimented on my players with them, and that’s a lot of fun for me. I also love computer games - I usually play a couple of hours a day - and pinball, Taco Bell, movies, and TV. I’m a sucker for detective shows and barbarian movies. If it has swords and yelling, I’m there for it.
If you could collaborate with any one author, who would it be and why?
William Goldman, although I think it would be more learning at his feet on my part than collaborating. I really love his ability to include humor and silliness along with warmth, fun dialogue, and wit into a story that you still care deeply about. I would be thrilled to have a chance to see how his process works.
What comes first to you when you’re writing, the world, the characters, or the storyline?
It’s always, always the characters. I tend to write without much planning ahead of time, and I only stop and plan things or flesh out world details when I need to or when I get to an important part where getting it right matters. I don’t skip around while writing - I write the first draft from page one to the end and barely ever deviate unless I think of a cool idea to add - and that means I’m discovering the story as I go rather than trying to reach a predetermined endpoint.
I try to let the characters do and say what I think they would do and say in the situations I put them in, which means I’m often surprised by how things develop and where the plot goes. My background with improv comedy and tabletop RPGS I think makes me inclined to let things develop on the fly. Sometimes that comes at the expense of sharing rich, intricate details about the world, because the characters won’t necessarily know all that or talk about it. That can be a weakness, and I work hard on edits to give more of that necessary and fun info, but you’re never going to get a five page Dwarven song in one of my books.
They say to never judge a book by its cover, but a cover is still a marketing tool that helps sell books. Can you tell us about the idea behind the cover of your book?
Happy to talk about that, because I absolutely love this cover. For a sci-fi book, I think you need people to recognize the genre instantly. Sometimes people do this with ships or planets (that’s what I went for with my other sci fi book, Daros), but this story is mostly about the adventures of one woman, so I wanted her on the cover. The artist I worked with is a friend - we’ve played D&D off and on for a while now, and she’s done some art for a card game I’m working on, so I knew she’d be able to give me something really striking. I gave her a mock-up of a space marine in front of a jungle as a starting point, and she gave me something that looked a lot better, a lot more personal, and a bit haunting, which I thought was perfect. I also like that it has more of a classical sci-fi feel than just a set of stock photos mashed together in front of a default background. She actually used her son’s Nerf gun as the model for the pistol, which is a hoot.
How different is the final version of this book from the first draft?
It’s very close in terms of character and dialogue, pretty close in terms of plot. Now that I’ve published seven novels (well, six and a novella), I think I’ve started to avoid issues that require major alterations on rewrite. Or maybe I’ve just let ego and overconfidence and my general unhealthy resistance to good advice take over.
I am very lucky to have a reliable set of first readers who will look at my drafts and tell me what worked and didn’t work for them. In the case of Kenai, there was a lot of the world and the situation that they either wanted to understand better or that they thought didn’t work or was too improbable. They also let me know when they don’t understand a character’s motivation or actions, which is a great help - that’s the last thing I want to put in there, a character not being true to who we thought they were. There are definitely parts of Kenai that get confusing based on the storyline I chose, so a lot of the revision process was making those elements clearer and making the whole thing flow more smoothly and avoid moments of either confusion or disbelief. That was the key for Kenai - in my other books, my helpers have focused more on character and plot elements, but here it was more world details and mechanics.
Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? What are your favorite kinds of characters to write?
In Kenai, the main character Jess is a former space marine who’s been through some hard times (loss, disgrace, prison), and she’s trying to put her life back together and figure out who she is after all that. At heart, though, she’s fundamentally a good person. The person she’s closest to here, Elihar, is likewise trying to make sense of a confusing world with capricious rules, and he’s got some difficult choices to make as well, choices that he knows will affect those he loves.
When I’m reading or writing, I don’t like anti-heroes. I like to write complex characters facing difficult choices, but I need to have somebody to cheer for, and they can’t do something unforgivable, or they lose me. I almost can’t watch mafia movies.
I am a sucker for people put into difficult situations, trying to make the best of things, and trying to help others and maintain their morals, whatever they are. I also really like characters who learn new skills or grow into more power and confidence along the way. And if they’re willing to crack a joke so it’s not dead serious and grim the whole time, that’s a real plus.
Do you have a favorite quote from your book that you can share with us? What about this quote in particular makes it your favorite?
I really like this quote from Jess, speaking as the narrator (below). It’s in the second chapter, which is a flashback to one of her worst days. I like to think it captures her voice, her despair, her tendency toward detachment, and maybe a little bit of how it might be to suffer a loss on a battlefield.
And now Kenzi was dead. I knew that was true. And in the abstract, I knew that my heart was on fire inside, so much that I might well be dying myself. I would become utterly devastated, shattered in ways that would never come back together. I knew this. But I couldn’t feel it. The combat stims were keeping me from that reality. All I had was just a buzz of something not right, something that occasionally stirred to hint at the horror behind the chemical curtain.
Is there anything you can tell us about any current projects you’re working on?
I’m working on finishing up my second modern-day real-world thriller about an out-of-work college professor in North Carolina (write what you know, right?). I’m also just starting out on an epic fantasy story about a war veteran who comes into possession of a sword that’s probably cursed and definitely not going to make her life easier.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions for us! Do you have any parting thoughts or comments you’d like to leave for our readers?
Just a big thank you to anybody who’s spent their valuable time exploring one of my worlds. I love hearing from folks. If you enjoy anybody’s creative work, whether that’s food, music, dance, theater, art, writing, please say something - post a review, mention it to friends, or tell them in person. It costs you almost nothing, and it will make their whole day.
And finally, where can you be found on the internet if our readers want to hear more from you?
My main author site is https://davedobsonbooks.com
I also do puzzle card games and other games at my game site, https://planktongames.com
I’m on Facebook, Twitter (or whatever it’s called this week), BlueSky, Mastodon, and other places, and you can email me at dave@davedobsonbooks.com. I’d love to hear from you.
