Meet the Author: Vivien Jackson

 

This is our kick-off "Meet the Author Monday" interview, so we thought it would be fun to have newly minted SFR Brigade administrator and newly announced RWA RITA Award® finalist Vivien Jackson (that was a heck of a week for Vivien!) tell us more about herself and her books.


How or why did you first start writing SFR? Any inspirations?

I was trundling along writing (bad) sci-fi and went to an ArmadilloCon (annual Austin SFF literary convention) and lo! Catherine Asaro was there! And she was amazing. And I started reading her books. And light burst through the heavens, raining down the revelation that romance and science fiction do not have to be two different things. They can be together. In the same story! Like chocolate and peanut butter! So, um, yes. That was the beginning of SFR for me.


How many SFR books have you published and what are the titles? Can you give us a quick blurb on your most recent?

Only two: Wanted and Wired was my debut, and its follow-up was Perfect Gravity. Both came out in November, 2017.

Give us a brief snippet of a favorite scene or passage from your work.

Ack! I'm blanking. I've heard some folks really liked the car scene in Wanted and Wired, but it's probably too dirty to paste in here.

I really like the scene out on the beach in Perfect Gravity when Kellen gets nekkid and changes into his diving suit while Angela bald-eyeballs watches. But again, NSFW.

Oooh! And the scene that is a huge spoiler and I can't talk about. And the Perfect Gravity prologue, but that's kind of long.


Have any of your books received any special recognition? What and where?

Wanted and Wired was an Amazon Best Romance of 2017, an Amazon Best Romance of April 2017, the winner of the 2017 SFR Galaxy Award for "Best Hi-Tech Lovemaking," and a 2018 Romance Writers of America® RITA® Finalist.

Perfect Gravity was an Amazon Best Romance of November 2017 and winner of the 2017 SFR Galaxy Award for "Best Politician Protagonist."


Where's your favorite place to write? Do you have a dedicated writer's cave?

I keep meaning to put a spot together, but I move around a lot. My critique partner, Sloane Calder, has this amazing dark corner in her house with a super comfy chair and no one to bother me, and I'm always amazed by how I much work I get done over there. But generally? I'll work anywhere -- sofa, hub's desk, coffee shop, public library, car while kids are at music lessons. Oh! I have this app on my phone called BrainWave that makes almost any setting an instant-focus opportunity. It's like ear magic.


What are your favorite SF/R movies or television series and why?

I love so many of them! Seriously, I have been -- and continue to be -- a giant fanfic-writing, tee-shirt buying, convention-attending, spoiler-hunting fangirl of Farscape, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The X-Files, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, Heroes (not the recent revisit, just the original series), Fringe, and Westworld.


How long have you been a member of the SFR Brigade and do you serve any special roles within the community?

I don't remember a time when I was on Facebook and wasn't a member of the Brigade. I think I found it through Pippa Jay, way back when, and just hung around soaking up the awesome. Last year I bothered the admin team until they let me join up, and now I have super powers. (Not really.)


About the Author

Vivien Jackson writes fantastical, futuristic, down-home salacious kissery. Her debut science fiction romance, Wanted and Wired, was selected as an Amazon Best Book of 2017 in the romance category and is a 2018 Romance Writers of America® RITA® Finalist. A devoted Whovian Browncoat Sindarin Jedi gamer, she has a degree in English, which just means she's read gobs of stuff in that language. With her similarly geeky partner, children, and hairy little pets, she lives in Austin, Texas, and watches a lot of football.

Member of Romance Writers of America, Austin RWA, and the online Fantasy, Futuristic, & Paranormal chapter, Vivien is represented by Holly Root of Root Literary.

She'd love to hear from you on the web, Twitter (@Vivien_Jackson), Facebook or you can sign up for her newsletter.


Many thanks to Vivien Jackson for being our first Meet the Author Monday interviewee. Going forward, we hope to make this a regular series on the SFR Brigade blog.

When Researching Cloned Cybernetic Cats by @Vivien_Jackson

by Vivien Jackson

It’s kind of  secret and please don’t tell the dogs, but…I’m a cat person. I grew up with cats—we always had at least one cat in our family, and for many years a gray domestic shorthair named Rascal was the most reliable alarm clock in the house. Every morning at 5am, she would sit on somebody’s neck until they couldn’t breathe and were forced to wake up.

With all this cat experience and know-how stored up, it’s kind of weird that recently I found myself both felineless and urgently in need of a cat.

For research purposes, right.

One key character in my book Perfect Gravity is a cloned, cybernetically altered, talking cat named Yoink. And no matter how small they are or how innately judgmental or pushy, the tiny Chihuahua dogs currently living in my fuzzy blanket weren’t going to give me the research nuggets I needed.

The search for a feline subject matter expert yielded two candidates: Oreokitty and General Leia. Oreokitty is my mother-in-law’s cat, and for a few months she came to live with me (the cat, not my mother-in-law), so I could observe her day-to-day and learn all things cat. However, it quickly became obvious that Oreokitty not a right cat. In fact, she was once a rat, or rather, she was a feral kitten who lived underneath the house and who got barked at by dogs so often that my mother-in-law at first thought she was a rodent infestation. Once MIL realized the infestation was instead black and white and adorable, Oreokitty became a legit part of the family. Nowadays, she’s a girl who’s seen hard times and is persistently appreciative of the fact that she’s living the good life. Like, really appreciative. You can feed her anything and she will love you forever. She starts purring when a human so much as enters a room. She seeks head rubs from my cell phone. 

I needed Yoink to be somewhat less accommodating, so I hit up my critique partner for advice from her cat, General Leia, who is much closer to the character I needed for my story. General Leia is also a rescue kitty and so has some personality quirks, but it is from patient observation of her that Yoink developed a pushy demand for belly rubs and the ability to judge you constantly because you are clearly failing. At everything. She is judging you right now. And she is IN CHARGE.

To fill in the blanks left by these two real-life kitties, I did some casual online feline research as well. My favorite site for this kind of browsing is a thing called Quora. Kind of like Reddit in structure, it’s a web site where someone asks a question and then people of varying levels of expertise attempt to answer. From Quora, I learned these gems of cat behavior:

• If your cat persistently leads you to the kitchen and meows even though the food and water bowls are full, she probably wants you to stand there and watch her eat. Quora expert Ben Wu (owner of three cats) says his parents call this phenomenon, loosely translated, “accompanying the princess while she eats.”

• Cats can not only be innately intelligent and empathetic but can also teach themselves a lot through observation and mimicry. Quora expert Jaimes Roe says his cat Stiles “hugs us, and he pets me when I’m not feeling well. He is always watching us to figure out how to do things like get into the cabinets or turn on the faucet.”

•  Cats live in the moment, so they don’t spend a lot of energy on missing you when you leave. After a brief re-integration period, a cat will return to a previous relationship routine even if you’ve been gone a long time. Even a really long time. (In my character Yoink’s case, ten years and three clonings have occurred since she last saw her favorite human, but it takes her only seconds to realize that Angela, in fact, her human.)

I also learned why cats like boxes (conservation of heat and protection on all sides while they sleep), why they like to sit on computers (heat again, plus there’s usually something interesting to look at, not to mention a human to annoy/laze near), and why Rascal woke us all up at stupid o’clock every morning (she was evil and … no, more likely she was hungry and we let her rule the house).

Also (not at Quora this time) I read about crazysauce CIA experiments to create Cold War-era cybernetic spy kitties. Not even kidding.

In the end, I have to imagine that Yoink, despite her quirks, isn’t the weirdest cat in the history of people being owned by cats. But she sure was fun to write and research.

 

Vivien Jackson writes fantastical, futuristic, down-home salacious kissery. A devoted Whovian Browncoat Sindarin Jedi gamer, she has a degree in English, which just means she's read gobs of stuff in that language. Her debut science-fiction romance, Wanted and Wired, was selected as an Amazon Best Romance of 2017. The follow-up, Perfect Gravity, was a Amazon Best Book of the Month. With her similarly geeky partner, children, and hairy little pets, Viv lives in Austin, Texas, and tweets a lot.