Please welcome Tom Kepler, author of The Stone Dragon, to the Underground. Tom is an avid writer, also penning a book of poetry and a YA novel, Love Ya Like a Sister. Tom is an educator by day and an avid blogger and writer. He practices consciousness-based writing and transcendental meditation. Below he offers insights in the world of young adult fantasy, self-publishing and promotion. 


Katie: The world your novel inhabits in is very lush and inviting. Where do you draw your inspiration from when you are world building? Any advice for those wanting to improve their fantasy world building? 

Tom: To be honest, I started out with a vague idea one Thanksgiving vacation. I was thinking that dragons were embodiments of the fabric of creation, and I was also thinking that gnomes had an undeserved reputation--pudgy, long beards, and those pointy hats. I wanted to write a more real story. Suddenly, I was seven thousand words into the novel, and the whole idea was just there. My advice is open the doors of possibility--you can always close them later.


Katie: Tell us more about Glimmer, the main character. Where did he originate from? What did you do to get into a young dream mage's head? 

Tom: I have no idea where Glimmer came from. Honest! He has some aspects of my son, some aspects of me, but mostly, he's just himself. I'm also not sure how I came up with the idea of a dream mage. I think Glimmer is a kind of Everyman for me. He is brave yet vulnerable, insightful yet impulsive. He's a lot like all of us, if we're honest about it. As a career classroom teacher, I am surrounded by inspiration daily for the heroic task that we call "growing up."


Katie: One of my favorite characters is Cabbage-pants, the cabbage gnome. He is funny, wise and charming. How do you keep characters original when so many of the fantasy characters have been done before? 

Tom: I had a very clear vision of Cabbage-pants from the start. I'm an avid gardener and find the garden to be a magical, spiritual place. I really wanted to create a sense of the gnomes being spiritual extensions of the plants. It helped, too, that he provided humor for the story.


Katie: Who are your contemporaries in literature? To which authors would you compare your work? 

Tom: Well, I have to approach this with honesty about who inspired me for The Stone Dragon. Science fiction/fantasy writer Roger Zelazny was an incredible writer who didn't let the genre limit his style. He was a very creative stylist. Also, for this particular novel, William Faulkner poked me with a stick. I needed something to move me to take chances with the dream sequences, and Faulkner's style provided me with a place to start.


Katie: Tell us about your path to self-publishing. What made you decide on that route versus traipsing around to all the publishers in New York?  

Tom: Well, I did do a little traipsing for both my novels, actually. I self-published my poetry book because I wanted to create the entire book myself. My young adult novel, Love Ya Like a Sister, was something I began over ten years ago. I'm proud of it--it's been called gritty and raw, but I didn't want to write another book like that--at least not right now. As for The Stone Dragon, C.J. Cherryh's agent responded to my query by saying dragon books were not "in" right now. It was at that point that I decided to self-publish. My students wanted to read the book, and waiting years wasn't an option for them.


Katie: How much marketing do you focus on when trying to promote a book? What types of efforts have been most helpful?

Tom: I'm still learning. My main goal for marketing is to have some books to market. I couldn't see myself developing my "platform" if I didn't have anything to sell. I've also written and published some flash fiction and poetry to help enrich my website. Blogging is the staple of my marketing. There are a lot of people who read books. A blog is a good way to begin to connect.


Katie: Tell us more about consciousness-based writing. Where did you learn the technique? How do you employ it?

Tom: It's not really a technique, really more a perspective. One could say it centers around the saying "The world is as you are." We color our world by how we see it--by the color of the glasses we wear, if I may use an analogy. For my fantasy novel, the idea was that the more comprehensive the consciousness, the deeper one interacts with the fabric of the laws of nature. The more possibilities available to us, the more we can choose just the right action so that someone might say, "Wow! How'd you figure that?"


Katie: I see you are also a poet. Which genre is your favorite? Do you employ techniques in fiction writing that you've learned from poetry?

Tom: Poetry played a larger part in The Stone Dragon than my other novel. I was really trying to push the experience of the reader to get inside Glimmer's head, to not read about his magic but to have some sense of an experience of his mind as he experienced it. I don't know if I was successful or not, but that was the chance I took. I wanted the dream sequences to have a stream of consciousness quality. My poetry book Bare Ruined Choirs is a small book that uses poems written over a long period of time to tell a story. Each poem stands on its own, but the poems flow in a sequence.


Katie: On your blog www.tomkeplerswritingblog.com you mention you are an educator. How do you balance your day job and still find time to write? 

Tom: Lately (the last few months) not so well. When I was writing the rough draft of The Stone Dragon, this was my routine--at least 200 words a day, Monday through Friday, and a thousand on the weekend. That gave me eight thousand a month, and by summer vacation, I had the rough draft completed. Then I revised it twice during the summer.

Katie: One of your reviewers mentioned a sequel. What do we have to look forward to in the next installment of The Stone Dragon series?

Tom: I have the rough draft of the sequel written. It's called Dragons of Blood and Stone. I'm working on a short story right now about Alma-Ata's grandfather and grand-uncle. It's called "Who Listened to Dragons." One of the main characters is a young boy of eight years who does magic, even though he's autistic. I think I'll finish the rough draft by the new year.

Katie: Any last words of wisdom or advice for budding novelists out there?

Tom: I know the fad is to show your work as you write it, but I don't. Even my wife hasn't read the RD of Dragons of Blood and Stone. This takes a lot of pressure off of me. I can do anything I want to. Let the first draft unfold, blossom. Worry about how bad it is when revising, not during the first draft. A great book to read about this concept is a classic: Ranier Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

Thanks to Tom for answering our questions. You can find Tom Kelper at www.tomkeplerswritingblog.com.