Chaser
By Fred T. Kerns
Can you imagine having a day where everything
that could go wrong does? What’s even worse, is that it’s your first day on the
job. Yep, this is the kind of luck Boiler has. What could get worse? Yeah you’re
not supposed to ask that!
Now Boiler has been targeted by a local crime
lord- yep that’s worse! Now she isn’t even safe on Earth. This is not something
Boiler is used to, she is usually the one doing to the hunting, not the hunted.
You see, that was what Boiler job entailed, she
is a bounty hunter. Always has been, and is usually damn good at her job. Well,
at least until she has a bad day….
Upon realizing she is no longer safe on Earth,
Boiler decides to make a safer heading elsewhere. She heads to a starship
construction station, where she hopes to remain safely, until everything clears
up.
In the meantime, while there, Boiler finds her
place on the stations security team. Here she makes some new friends, and even
better, a new boy friend and girl friend. Now she hopes to make a better start,
and feel safe, and enable everyone else's safety at the same time.
In the meantime, will the crime lord find her
again? Is she really safe? What do you think could happen? You need to read to
find out!
This is an extremely fun book, that will keep
you on the tip of your chair. You are truly worried about Boiler and what will
become of her. Boiler has a great personality, and you will enjoy her.
Therefore I give this book, Chaser five stars. Fred has entertained me once
again! I feel he will do the same to you, so give his book a look, see! You
will be glad you did!
My questions for Fred!
1. What made you write this book?
As usual, it started with a number of little things gradually coming
together in my head. I'd already introduced Boiler as a supporting
character in my first novel, Load.
She, her younger brother, and a friend had used an alien device to
travel several decades into the past to escape someone who was pursuing
them and to try to prevent a catastrophe that wiped out the whole city
in 2075. (Can't tell any more about it. As River Song likes to say ...
"Spoilers!") Boiler was also pretty prominent in the sequel, Fifteen Minutes,
and had her own plot going at the same time as the three main
characters, and both stories converged in the last few chapters. I found
Boiler such a fun character to write that I wanted to do more with her,
and after a while I started getting ideas for a story that focused
entirely on her and how she got started in her career as a bounty
hunter.
2. How long did it take you to write this book?
It took several years to change and grow through quite a few different drafts.
It
started off as a short story
in 2006, if I remember correctly
,
and was considerably different from the final draft of the novel.
Originally, the story had a crime lord kidnap her little brother and
force her to make a sadistic choice -- save his life, or save the lives
of several hundred innocent people. She had time to stop one bomb from
going off, but not both, and each was miles apart. She chose to save her
brother, and had to live with all those other deaths while going after
the villain, intending to punish him for what he did.
I was pretty happy with the way the story turned out, submitted it to a
bunch of magazines over the next year or so, but it didn't sell. Later
on, I decided to flesh it out and expand it into a full-length novel. I
dropped the sadistic choice angle, but kept the villain and changed a
few of the details of the conflict between him and Boiler. I added more
stuff with her parents, brother, and some of their friends, and also
added some developments that sent them to a space station orbiting Io so
I could play around with some new ideas I'd had along the way.
I
think it took a year or two to write the first draft. Another change I
made was to write the book in first-person, after writing all of my
other stories in third-person. The story hadn't quite gelled for me, but
when I made that change, the character and her story really came to
life. It also helped set this book apart from Load and Fifteen Minutes,
since it wasn't part of that series. This book is kind of its own little
thing. I submitted it to different publishers over the next few years,
but no one was interested in it. Then a friend suggested I try sending
it to her publisher, so I gave it a shot, and it was accepted a few
weeks after I moved to Tucson from the Oregon coast.
3. Do you have any photos or descriptions of these characters? Especially Boiler?
I
just have a few sketches of Boiler that one of my friends drew way back
in 1999 or 2000 or so. I'd been using the character in some stories
that I ended up abandoning, but liked her so much that I made a few
adjustments and put her in my novels. Here's my favorite of those
sketches.
4. How do you come up with the ideas for these awesome sci fi books?
Aww, thanks. :D Well, the ideas come from pretty much anywhere and
everywhere. You never know when a little thing you see on the way to the
grocery store, or something that happens at work, or a line of a
conversation you overhear somewhere, or something you see on TV, will
generate the seed of an idea that will grow until it's ready to be used
for a story or a character. As an example, when I started writing Load
,
I started the protagonist off in a job he hated passionately. I decided
to use my own job at the time, which I was absolutely miserable in, so I
took some of the customers and situations from my own experience and
used them as inspiration for this character's last night on his job.
I also used a couple of things from another job as inspiration for some
stuff in Fifteen Minutes. And in Chaser, Boiler makes a few comments
about those sorts of situations.
For another example, little things I see in videos on YouTube will often
give me ideas for bits of business here and there, like when characters
are bonding over a video game. Seeing gameplay videos by some of the
people working at Rooster Teeth, in particular, gave me the idea of
characters taking some time off to just goof around and have some fun in
between clashes with villains. (This is one of my favorites, as well as this one.) Also, things that happen when I'm playing a game will often give me ideas, such as the trouble I had driving a street sweeper in Saints Row: The Third inspiring a bit of humor in my novel Project Revenant. Then there's the game's opening scenes, which has several action bits
so over the top that I wish I'd thought of them myself, especially the
skydiving-through-an-airplane sequence. But next time something I'm
writing needs a scene with elements similar to those, I now have
something I can try to top, haha.
Speaking
of writing action, I got a lot of ideas (and learned how to think about
these kinds of scenes in ways I'd never previously considered) from the
fight choreography in the Red vs. Blue web series. For instance, it
probably never would've occurred to me that characters fighting in zero
gravity could be so dynamic if I hadn't seen this.
Anyway,
various little things I put in my books are inspired by all sorts of
things. Just catching a glimpse of a woman with a scarred face in one of
the trailers for Borderlands gave me the idea for a new character and
led to my first officially published short story, Mission to Bellatrix.
The basic plots, on the other hand ... well, Load started with a single
character coming together in my head, then his girlfriend and their
roommate, followed by building the kind of world these characters would
inhabit and then finding various kinds of trouble for them to get into.
The act of writing the book gave me ideas for more books, and as
mentioned above, Boiler really became fun to write and that made me want
to focus a whole story on her. And it just kind of built up from there
over time.
5. What do you have in store for us next?
I'm working on a campaign to get Project Revenant published on
Inkshares, and thinking over ideas for the sequel. I've got a fairly
solid idea for what the basic plot will be, plus there are several
threads from the previous books to continue developing. Aside from that,
I've got a couple other works in progress, Freelancers and Harbinger, which I'll be adding new chapters to ASAP.
Freelancers is frequently quite action-packed and also has a lot of
humor coming from the smartass characters, and while Harbinger (and the
previous stories, Game-Changer, Rematch, and Enemy of my Enemy) is filled with action and humor, it's an ongoing romance at its heart. There's also A Personal War,
which is kind of a sneak peek at a story arc I've been planning for
Freelancers but haven't kicked off yet, that I wrote as a big, epic
action set-piece. It's about an elite soldier whose husband, parents,
and siblings have been abducted by an old enemy, and her single-handed
assault on the mercenary's compound to rescue them. I'm planning to
really flesh that out when I get to that point in Freelancers, delving
into her relationship with her parents and some conflicts they've got
going, plus rounding out the villain a little more so he isn't just a
target for her to take out.
But my main project right now is fleshing out the short story Mission to Bellatrix and expanding it into a full-length novel, Uncharted Territory. That's the one I'm most eager to finish.
6. What was your favorite book to write?
I had a blast writing Chaser, and also really enjoyed writing Fifteen
Minutes and Project Revenant. But right now, I think my favorite so far
is turning out to be Uncharted Territory, because I'm playing around
with new characters and a new setting that I haven't been writing for
over a decade, so it's something fresh and new and exciting. I've always
been a sucker for space opera-type stuff -- Star Trek and Star Wars, of
course, and also Doctor Who and my all-time favorite, Babylon 5 -- so
I'm having a lot of fun with it. My other books, while they're in a
futuristic setting, are still set entirely on Earth (with the exception
of Chaser), so writing about space travel and long-lost spaceships and
aliens and mysterious ruins on dead planets is a whole new kind of fun.
Plus, the character of Kolya Mason has really taken root in my head the
same way Boiler did all those years ago.
7. What is your favorite type of book to read?
Sci-fi (what a shock, huh?) and a bit of nonfiction every now and then.
My library includes books by Alan Dean Foster, William Gibson, Allen
Steele, and many others. I kind of lean toward harder SF and cyberpunk
(or post-cyberpunk) most of the time. On the nonfiction side, I'm
usually reading books on astronomy and related subjects, by Carl Sagan,
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Phil Plait, and others. I've even developed a
tendency to name spaceships in my books after astronomers and
astronauts, due to my enjoyment of space and astronomy. Game Over and
Mission to Bellatrix/Uncharted Territory, for example, feature a
research and exploration ship named after astronaut Mae Jemison, and
Chaser has several mentions of an explorer ship named after Carl Sagan,
one of my childhood heroes.
8. Seriously- you're a GTA addict?! LOL
Heh. Yeah, right now, that's my go-to game when I need to unwind after
work or just take a break from whatever's going on. Before that, it was
Star Trek Online for a while (until the gameplay became too
frustrating). Before that, it was the last couple of Saints Row games
that I just couldn't get enough of. And before that, for several years, I
was addicted to Mass Effect 2. Just for fun, here's a few pictures of
my GTA Online character, her bitchin' car, and her minigun. :D
When Chaser was published, I even used GTA Online for a video to introduce and talk about the book, by riding around on a bike just so there would be something interesting on the screen, since I'm not entirely comfortable being on-camera, myself.
9. How long have you been playing GTA?
I started with GTA III a few years after it was released (once the price
dropped enough for me to afford it, haha). I've played the major
entries in the series over the years (Vice City, San Andreas, IV, and
now V), but haven't played the console-exclusive ones. I'm strictly a PC
gamer. These games are just so much fun, especially the most recent
ones, since the setting is so huge and you can just explore and goof
around.
10. Please provide for us your links to follow you & your work:
My website and blog have links to just about everything I'm up to
online, including links to my Goodreads and Amazon author pages, plus
individual links to my books and stories:
11. Any last words:
Thank you again for the review and for giving me an opportunity to talk
about Chaser, my other books, and just generally talk about stuff I'm
interested in. I hope you and your readers enjoyed reading this, and I
hope you all check out my other books. I had a great time with this. :D
From Deneale I hafta share this, because it is posted by Fred, but it is also about me. It made me smile. (Yes I am lame!)
One of the things I honestly like about Fred, is the guy is very human. He calls 'em like he see's them and pulls no punches. I truly enjoy his company. If you don't have Fred as a friend, you are missing a damn cool guy!
As posted on Goodreads:
As posted on Goodreads:
Chaser by Fred T. KernsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Can you imagine having a day where everything that could go wrong does? What’s even worse, is that it’s your first day on the job. Yep, this is the kind of luck Boiler has. What could get worse? Yeah you’re not supposed to ask that!
Now Boiler has been targeted by a local crime lord- yep that’s worse! Now she isn’t even safe on Earth. This is not something Boiler is used to, she is usually the one doing to the hunting, not the hunted.
You see, that was what Boiler job entailed, she is a bounty hunter. Always has been, and is usually damn good at her job. Well, at least until she has a bad day….
Upon realizing she is no longer safe on Earth, Boiler decides to make a safer heading elsewhere. She heads to a starship construction station, where she hopes to remain safely, until everything clears up.
In the meantime, while there, Boiler finds her place on the stations security team. Here she makes some new friends, and even better, a new boy friend and girl friend. Now she hopes to make a better start, and feel safe, and enable everyone else's safety at the same time.
In the meantime, will the crime lord find her again? Is she really safe? What do you think could happen? You need to read to find out!
This is an extremely fun book, that will keep you on the tip of your chair. You are truly worried about Boiler and what will become of her. Boiler has a great personality, and you will enjoy her. Therefore I give this book, Chaser five stars. Fred has entertained me once again! I feel he will do the same to you, so give his book a look, see! You will be glad you did!
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