Author Interview: Amber Green

Author Name: Amber Green
Year started writing for LI: 2007
Titles: The Huntsmen 1: Lights Out!, The Huntsmen 2: Bareback
Web Page: www.ShapeshiftersInLust.com

What genre do you write in, and why? How did you come up with your paranormal characters? How do you decide what their powers and history are?

The shadowy edges of reality fascinate me. I like thinking about the differences one change in standard reality would make, and the difference each of those differences would make. I also like to think that keeping my rules very close to standard reality will intensify the effect of the nonstandard reality.

The basic departure for this reality is the existence of huntsmen, who fit pretty much within the standard definition of human except in that they have the potential to become nonhuman. The nonhuman form, in contemporary English called a hyde, is the the hairy man of the wilderness that appears in almost every culture. In Britain, he was a woodiwoe; in most of the US he's Bigfoot. When Europeans explored the world east and south of India and first heard stories about orangutans, they wrote them down as quaint legends of a primitive culture's hairy man--and were shocked when confronted with living specimens.
One huntsman or another might have the ability to see a bit further into the infrared spectrum, or an ability to see auras, or an ability to see in low-light conditions, but having too much of any of these abilities would mean sacrificing "normal" vision because the human-sized eyeball has room for only so many rods, cones, etc. and the human brain has only so much room for the area devoted to processing visual information. The huntsmen have better noses than the average human, but about half of them can't smell any better than a human with a very good nose. None of them smells as well as a dog because that would require gross changes in the nasal structure and the proportion of the brain that is devoted to analyzing scent.

A huntsman's strength and agility are within human norms, but are always developed to the degree that humans reserve for athletes because each huntsman is a warrior, born and reared with the duty to protect humans from hydes and--if only to keep in practice--other things that go bump in the night. Joe, who is quite human, is as strong, as fast, and as silent in his movement as any huntsman. A huntsman's metabolism is faster than a human's, but not fast enough to heal broken bones in less than a couple of weeks.

A huntsman's great weakness is his need to inhale and exhale emotionally, to feed on energy as you'd feel on oxygen and to purge himself of foulness, as you'd purge your lungs of smoke, before it builds up enough to block his ability to absorb more wholesome energies. If he suffocates, whether that happens over a period of hours or years, he loses his humanity and becomes a hyde.

When a huntsman crosses the line to become a hyde, he becomes increasingly animalistic, gaining the dog-like olfactory powers for example but sacrificing human characteristics in exactly the same proportion. His brain goes to mud and muscle and sensory perception. He is stronger, but less agile. He can see in the dark, but bright light blinds him. He gets a double-sized dick, but develops such a rank stench he can't get any willing takers for it.

In a reality that included demons, aliens, fae, telepathy, human flight, pyrokinesis, precognition and body jumping, say, what would be special about huntsmen? But in a prosaic, human-centric world, they stand out.

What was the first story you ever wrote about? (not nec. first published story) :
The Time Traveller’s Daughter, about Hello Central, a girl who was not anchored in any one timeline or reality, and would skip from reality to reality with a disconcerting lack of notice. I started it around age 11, re-wrote it repeatedly, and finally abandoned it during my senior year in high school.

Where did your most unusual plot idea come from? :
Dreams. Nightmares.

What music inspires your writing? :
I like to have a pair of theme songs, preferably conflicting, for each major character. When one isn’t working, I can play the other. Instrumental versions work better when I can get them, but where are you going to find an instrumental of the John Kay version of Bold Marauder? I also like to listen to music in languages I don’t know, such as Russian and Gaelic. After a few listenings I start “translating” in my head, but don't get the distraction of the singer's imagery. My son bought me an album of Final Fantasy songs done in a Gaelic style but keeping the Japanese lyrics. To protect me from being influenced by the titles, he copied them onto an unlabelled CD. I don't know who did this music or why, but I want more of it.

Does your cat insist on sitting on your keyboard like mine does? :
Jackson chins my screen for attention. Her nemesis QP waits until I’m cuddled up with the laptop, then oozes in between my lap and the lap-board. The other cats ignore me when I'm typing.

When you get stuck, how do you find your way back to the writing? :
By reading.

The Personal stuff:

TWELVE WAYS TO TELL I'M A GEEK

I like playing online games in Dutch, a language with which I am only passingly familiar. Thinking of "shops" as "winkels" and trying out different ways to pronounce "Dreigende Gelei Klodders" never fails to make me grin.

Computers outnumber people in my house.

All but one of them is lying around in pieces at the moment.

I know pi to a dozen places. Almost. Or I used to. Really. I wrote a fan letter after hearing "White and Nerdy." And the answer is Picard.

As an 18-year-old English major, I bopped into my faculty advisor’s office and asked whether I should take general chemistry 1101 or "honors general chemistry for majors" as my mandatory science class. He said, "If it were me, there wouldn’t be any question at all." I said "Thanks!" and bopped out. Took a few weeks to realize he’d meant something along the lines of, "Are you flipping crazy?"

My first rejection letter was from The Dragon. They said I was taking too technical an approach to [the ecology of] a fantasy universe. A year later, they began running a series of articles exactly like what I had proposed. My fingerprints on the world of DnD. Yup. :)

I have been known to use "grok" and "Talleyrand" in the same sentence.

I used the term "cognitive dissonance" in an erotic romance.

I have never studied the Klingon language, but I could give a five-minute off-the-cuff speech comparing Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy as recited in the Klingon language to the Bill of Rights as recited in NewSpeak.

I can spell "soliloquy" and "ecdysiastic."

I read reference books for fun. I can, without getting up from this chair, reach two translations of Sun Tzu, five issues of Osprey, a handful of books on the Napoleonic Wars, a book on Spanish for Law Enforcement Personnel, three dictionaries, and two 19th century manuals on household management. A collection of medieval reference works holds down the other end of the table.

I play tank battles for fun. I can lose Kursk as easily playing the Germans as I can playing the Russians.