The Same Six Questions - S.B. Jones

Another chance to meet indie authors on The Same Six Questions! Today, we welcome S.B. Jones to the blog.

Take it away!

Thanks, Andy! I am 33 years old and writing under the pen name S.B. Jones. I live in South Central Idaho in Twin Falls and Hagerman. I have a passport with a lot of stamps in it and have traveled to the hacker convention DefCon in Las Vegas now for five years.


Thanks, S.B.! Now it's time to answer The Same Six Questions...

1. Have you published a book yet?

Yes, I have published a book! It is the first of a trilogy titled The Eternal Gateway: Requiem. It is available on Amazon as well as Barnes & Noble in both e-book and paperback. I outlined all three books before I began work on the first. It revolves around the hero’s journey in a Steampunk, Science Fiction, and Time Travel setting. The first book is 74,500 words long and took me an estimated 250 hours to write the first draft and several months for the rest before it was launched.


2. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

There never was a moment really that clicked about becoming a writer. I worked for Dell for 8 years in a call center that had me do just about everything from taking calls to getting on a plane and flying to another country to train people. When they decided to shut down the call center I had six months notice and a severance coming. I took that time to trim expenses and invest what I already had to make it last. Then I decided that this was a very opportune time to do something new. The computer world had gotten stale so I decided that I would take the time to do something different. The idea of ‘The Eternal Gateway’ was something I had been kicking around for years.

3. What was your first lengthy piece of fiction? What was it about? When did you write it? Do you still have it?

Aside from writing the outlines for classes, the only thing I had written before was a piece of Harry Potter fan fiction that I posted in August of 2009. It is still out there as I posted it on the HPFF site. I did go back and look at it for this interview and it’s a pretty sad unedited piece of work. However, I was surprised at how many of the objects and ideas that were in there made it into my own book.

4. When was your first indication, “I can do this (write)”?

I think when it dawned on me that I had something going was when I handed the first rough draft of ‘Requiem’ to my parents to read. My father is a lawyer and reads a lot, but does not read for pleasure. When I handed him a copy he told me that he could count on one hand how many books he has read for entertainment with a roll of his eyes. A weekend later and my mom and sister tell me that he couldn’t put it down and joked about him coming out of his study to tease them that he had read it but couldn’t talk to them about it because they hadn’t. If the syntax-butchered rough draft could do that, then imagine what an edited and polished version could do.

5. If you could meet one of your characters in real life, which would it be?

That’s a tough one. I would have to go with meeting Angela Atagi, the woman who was born a thousand years ago with the ability to fly. A close second would be Bastiana, the psycho child who commands a lot of magical power. They would be a lot of fun to show up at the movie premier with.

6. It’s a dark and stormy night...you’re alone in the house...there’s a knock at the door...you open it, look out, and proceed to scream like a little girl. What’s on the doorstep?

I have two answers for this. One would be the ex-wife, that would be the most scary thing to have show up on the doorstep, regardless of the weather. The other would be Gwen Stefani and Zhang Ziyi begging to play a part in the film adaptation of my books.

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Thanks for stopping by S.B.! For more of his work, check out his blog or follow him on Twitter.

For more indie author goodness, be sure to stop by on Thursday, when my guest will be Nancy Fulda! See you then!