Coffin Hop and an interview with Leigh M Lane.

I am having so much fun with Coffin Hop this year. There are so many wonderful authors and publishing houses signed up this year. Click that badge over on the right there and check out the list for yourself. Scroll through and visit all the super awesome writers that have given of their time and hard work to make this event the fun it is.

On to my interview with the lovely, and utterly amazing, Leigh M Lane. We share a ToC together in the charity anthology Scare Package and she has blessedly edited two of my books so trust me when I say this woman rocks.

Q: When did you start writing?

A: I was just a little girl, somewhere around nine or ten years old, when the writing bug first bit me.

Q: What was the first story you remember writing?

A: I don’t remember a whole lot about it since it was around thirty years ago, but I do remember it was about a good witch and her cat. I also remember giving it a cardboard cover, complete with crayon drawings (because all “real” books have proper covers).

Q: What genre is your most preferred?

A: Horror, of course. My favorite works tend to be on the psychological and literary end of the spectrum, although I do also enjoy paranormal thrillers.

Q: What challenges you the most in your writing?

A: I’d say my biggest challenge is time management. Facebook can be an evil, evil trap.

Q: What is your favorite thing about being an author?

A: I love hearing from readers, knowing something I wrote has affected all different kinds of people all across the world. I like being able to share a piece of myself in such a personal way.

Q: What do you like least about being an author?

A: I can’t stand the cliques and politics.

Q: How many books do you currently have available?

A: Ten. I have four literary works—dystopian thriller World-Mart, Gothic horror Finding Poe, religious allegory Myths of Gods, and contemporary paranormal horror The Hidden Valley Horror—published under Leigh M. Lane, as well as the erotic horror trilogy The Darkness and the Night and two sci-fi romances published under Lisa Lane.

Q: What projects are you currently working on?

A: I’ve just begun the second installment of what I hope to be a paranormal horror novella series, I’m in the development stages of a sequel to World-Mart, and I’m redrafting a couple of horror shorts.

Q: Do you have any books coming out soon?

A: I’m currently shopping another dystopian novel, The Private Sector, a loose prequel to World-Mart. I have no idea when it will be available.

Q: Which book, or series, is your favorite?

A: Finding Poe is my baby, although The Private Sector comes at a close second.

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors?

A: Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Olaf Stapledon, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Louise Erdrich, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Roald Dahl, and too many Indies to list.

Q: Which book(s) inspire you the most?

A: I find literary works most inspiring, especially those that tread far from the beaten path. A good example is Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Using a combination of Catholicism and American Indian lore, the author creates such beauty through dissonance and juxtaposition of religious imagery. It really is brilliant, and it inspires me to strive for that level of artistry in my own writing.

Q: Do you listen to music when you write? If so, what band(s) do you play?

A: These days, I’m rarely able to listen to music while I write. When I was younger, I found it inspiring, and I listened to different styles depending on the genre I was writing.  Hard rock or metal worked well for horror, alternative rock was my typical sci-fi music, and classical inspired my literary work.

Q: Any hobbies?

A: I enjoy sketching and painting, singing, writing critical analyses on television and cinema, researching random subjects, and spending time with my aging cat, Kadie. I like cooking and baking, challenging hubby to games of Scrabble (we’re highly competitive) and playing the occasional action-adventure video game.

Tell us some more about yourself including your website and where we can find you on social media sites:

Those who know me well would likely describe me as honest to a fault (my “lie” filter just doesn’t function like most people’s, which can be both good and bad), but also generous, empathetic, and passionate about everything I do. I’m the adopted daughter of a professional football coach, I have an identical twin sister, and I have six other half siblings. My husband is an exceptional editor and my greatest support.

For more about me and my writing, you can visit my website at http://www.cerebralwriter.com.  I’m on Twitter @LeighMLane and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AuthorLeighMLane.

Care to share a bit of one of your books with us?

Absolutely.  In the spirit of its upcoming prequel and sequel, the following is a short excerpt from World-Mart:

George slowed his pace as the piles of trash on his left gave way to an immense automobile graveyard.  Old metal frames, engines, and compacted cubes sat piled amongst rusty remnants of the Old World’s most popular form of transportation.  George remembered automobiles.  He had never driven one, but he had ridden in many of them up until his early teens.  They became obsolete even before fossil fuels became scarce, phased out in a last ditch effort to reverse the effects of global warming.  Of course, the effort came far too late, and the Big Climate Change happened anyway.

George marveled at the piles of twisted metal, reminiscing back to the all but completely forgotten days of road trips, family vacations, and regular visits with relatives.  The world had been a far different place for almost as long as he could remember, and sometimes he forgot how much life really had changed through the years.  He stopped for a moment, his breath still, as he and Joseph came upon the remains of a large, commercial airliner.

Joseph stopped with George, assuming the older man had never before seen a vehicle so large.  “It’s called an aero-jet.  They say people used to get these heavy behemoths up in the air, somehow, and keep them there long enough to fly anywhere across the globe.  It seems impossible, I know, but—”

“I remember airplanes,” George gently interrupted.

Joseph turned to George, surprised.  “You do?”

George took one last good look at the dead mechanical structures at his side, and then continued down the trail.  It was strange how familiar, yet so equally foreign, the vehicles were.  He never had the opportunity to fly before all of the commercial airlines shut down, but he remembered watching planes cross the sky when he was very young.  Sometimes he would wonder if those memories were no more than petty childhood imaginings: spectral flying machines that disappeared from the skies once Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny fell into their rightful ranks of childhood fantasy.  With everything he just saw, however, he knew that they all had to have been real ... every single one of them.

Once upon a time.

George wondered if he looked hard enough, or dug deep enough through the endless piles of trash, perhaps he’d find that God was buried somewhere out there as well.

 Click on the picture to head to Amazon and grab World-Mart today!