BRYAN W. ALASPA

I've talked about this before, but it comes up time and again. People always want to know where the stories I write come from. What's interesting is the people you meet who try to tell you they have a great idea for a story. Hey, you should write about - XYZ. That would be a great book! I always appreciate that. My own father was a consistent source. In fact, from time to time, those suggestions are good enough to get stored away in my brain somewhere or a notebook. But for t

Scott Norman is the kind of a guy you often see called a "bear of a man." Hes tall. He's big. Everything about him is bigger than life. He has a loud laugh, loud way of speaking, and is a kind of force of nature when you meet him. When I first met him, it was my freshman year in college at Webster University in St. Louis. One of the first people I met and he and I became fast friends. Scott had ambitions to direct movies and I got to star in at least two of them. One of the f

One of the questions I as an author get asked a lot is - where do you get your story ideas? I have talked about my latest horror book S.P.I.D.A.R. and how it came to be, but there are some deeper things that happened along the way. I mean, spiders are scary all on their own, but why create a bunch of fictional half-robot/half-spider creatures that do the horrifying things they do to people like in this story? I have personally been afraid of spider for a long time. However, i

So, the big news, I guess I should lead with, is that I have officially started writing the third novel in the Elementals YA series. This is probably the single biggest request I get these days (right behind asking when the next Deklan Falls book is coming out) and I have been meaning to get around to it for some time. I was nervous about writing novel number three. I have to admit that. I have done a third novel in a series before (aforementioned Deklan series) and it gets v

Over the weekend I saw a 60 Minutes piece where they interviewed the legendary spy author John le Carre. I have not read any of his stuff, but I have seen some of the movies made from them. He writes the very smart, realistic, spy novels that try to put spies in the real world. Intense stuff requiring a lot of research and the exact opposite of the cartoonish (but fun) stuff that James Bond does. I love seeing how other writers do their thing, regardless of if their stuff is

So, I have finished a first draft of another novel this year. That means, in the span of less than a year, I have drafted three novels. One is currently being shopped around to literary agents (and if that fails, then to small press publishers, then maybe to Kindle Scout and, if that fails, I'll publish it myself), one is with a Beta reader and needs MAJOR help (that one may be out by end of the year) and this one. And this one scared the crap out of me. I have two Beta reade

Where did the story for TEXT come from? More than anything we writers probably get asked where we get our ideas. I have written before about the fact that I just don't know. I do not believe that I am in control of my stories. I sometimes feel that I am just a portal, that I can open that portal and peer into this other world and the people there tell me the tales I then put down on this laptop and eventually bring to you. I think that my latest thriller novel TEXT is a good

I complain a lot in my life about how I am not yet a full time author. You can ask my wife who bears the brunt of my whining and whinging. The fact is, I am doing this the hard way. I have talked to at least one writer friend who told me how he has hundreds of books written, under many different names and what he does is look at the bestseller list and then, basically, imitate whatever's popular there. Apparently he can just turn on the spigot and create duplicates of existin

It's one of the questions that you get asked when you tell someone that you are a writer and that you write books, a lot more often than you might think. The conversation goes something like this: PERSON: So, what do you do? ME: Oh, I'm a writer. PERSON: Oh, what do you write? ME: Well, I write for a company. Website content and blog, but I also write books. PERSON (really interested now): Really? What kind of books? ME: All kinds. Horror, suspense, thrillers, mystery and det

It doesn't happen often. Usually when I start writing, I have at least some idea where the story is going to go. Although I believe that the characters in my head come and tell me their tales and sometimes that leads to things that even surprise me as the writer, the fact is I do have some idea of where the road is headed. I have some idea that there might be a scary thing coming up and sometimes that has freaked me out a little - but it is rare that the idea I have in my bra