Today we have the great honour of chatting with award-winning author Bonnie Milani…
Ken: What made you want to be a writer?
Bonnie: I don’t think I can say anything ‘made’ me want to tell stories, any more than anything made me want to breathe. It’s like music: you’re born seeing stories in everyday events just as a musician is born hearing music in the wind.
Ken: That’s so great! I think that’s true, and I am also a musician. I find that a lot of ideas will almost attack me, and leave me no choice to address them. Where do you get your story ideas from?
Bonnie: Anywhere & everywhere. My debut novel, ‘Home World’ started with a recurring dream. The dream featured a young woman in a heavily decorated military dress uniform chained to a dungeon wall. Now, I am NOT into S & M, so that image really bugged me. I couldn’t stop trying to figure out who she was or what she was doing on that damn wall. By the time I got it right, I had an entire interstellar civilization and seven hundred years of future human history worked out.
Ken: Yeah, I think a really gripping scene is a very excellent way to start a book, and this can apply to the perspective of the reader or the writer or both. Did that scene end up being the opening of the book?
Bonnie: Actually… that scene never made it into the book at all. It – or some version of it – most likely won’t happen till at least the 3rd book in the series. Which is a ways away since I’ve yet to start book 2.
Ken: Ha ha. Yeah that’s funny. The one thing that started it all ends up being somewhere in the middle of the series. Even though as a writer you ostensibly have full control over your story, I mean it’s YOUR story after all, isn’t it? But then we find ourselves being shoved around by the muses, and they are transporting us to all kinds of different spaces and times. I guess it’s like real life in a way, in that we all end up in a very different place from where we started. For example, did you ever work summer jobs as a kid? What was your most interesting job?
Bonnie: Oh, yeah, I most certainly did the summery job routine. But I was lucky: instead of flipping burgers at McDonald’s, I passed the qualifying exam and got to work as a summer intern for the FAA. It took a bit of arguing to get to my assignment as go-fer to a team of aeronautic engineers (those were the days when girls were automatically assigned to the typing pool) but I had the time of my life. The engineers were wonderful about explaining what they did in layman’s language for me. They couldn’t tell me too much – even if I’d been smart enough to understand it – because the primary project we worked on was classified top secret. All I knew was we were working on an engine design. And every time we fired up the test engines, cows across the southern half of New Jersey stopped giving milk. Local farmers hated us. But it was worth it. I learned some years later that those engines were the prototype for the rocket that lifted the first space shuttle off the launch pad.
Ken: Woah that’s epic. Speaking of which, do you prefer to read and or write long complex series length stories or standalone books?
Bonnie: I’m perfectly happy reading long, complex series. And that’s certainly what I’ve got planned for the Aliya War universe. So far, though, even though most of my books are set in the Aliya War universe, the stories themselves standalone.
Ken: Who’s your favorite sci fi author? Fantasy?
Bonnie: Fantasy’s easy: Sir Terry Pratchett. I think I’ve read every book in the Disc World universe at least four times. If I ever have a cat, I’m going to name it Granny Weatherwax. It’s the sheer, no holds barred, imagination of his work. No matter how well I know the story, the beauty of those over-the-top details takes my breath away every time.
Sci Fi is harder. I grew up on Heinlein, Asimov, Niven & Pournelle. Sci Fi kindled my interest in equal rights for women (by being so often so hopelessly dismissive of my half of the species), not to mention history and science – that last one strictly on a layman’s level. James Schmitz’s “Demon Breed” was a watershed book for me; it was the first sci fi story I’d ever encountered that featured a woman who was totally capable of working independently to take on a deadly threat of alien invasion of her world. I still re-read it. It’s one of the very few books that reads as fresh today as it was when it came out over fifty years ago. (Oy! Have I just dated myself!)
But probably my real favorite sci fi author is C.J. Cherryh. It was her Chanur series that rekindled my desire to start telling my own sci fi stories. Up till then I’d been writing and getting published, but it was all non-fiction, and that’s not at all as satisfying as sharing the stories that are uniquely yours.
Ken: Right on. OK so tell us more about your books!
Bonnie: I tell stories as I hear them so I write in a number of sci fi sub-genres. ‘Home World’ is pure space opera; it’s been described as Game of Thrones on Waikiki.
But then the next story voice I heard belonged to Rick, a scarred, bitter warrior from the Lupan branch of humanity. In the Aliya War universe, the Lupans are human polymorphs genetically engineered for combat. They’ve got wolf, eagle, and owl genes interwoven in their DNA so they’ve got fangs and razor sharp talons. They’re also smart, loyal, and generally good company – to their friends. Rick’s misfortune is he’s outlived his family and his friends but not the dozen or so death warrants on his head. So he’s stuck on Bogue Dast, a neutral space station where corruption is the name of the game. The story’s very sci-fi noir – think Casablana on a space station.
By contrast, the character who told me ‘Cherry Pickers’ is a 17 year old girl named Nikki Sotolongo. She’s the only ‘kid’ in an all woman penal colony on the out-to-get-you world Sisyphus. She desparately wants to prove to her mom – the ex-Marine colony director – that she’s a woman. So when a supply ship arrives with hot’n handsome Jake on board, Nik thinks she’s got it made. Trouble is, the only guy she’s ever known is her adopted brother Sam – and he’s a Sisyphus native, which means he’s a 90ft tall sentient tarantula. Need I say things don’t go as planned?
Check out all of Bonnie’s books HERE.