Interview at Lara's Book Blog

This week I was contacted for an interview by an upstate New York news reporter for her blog, Lara's Book Club. For fledgling authors it puts a spring in your step to have a reviewer notice your work in the midst of that great sea of volumes, volumes everywhere.

Lara Greenberg's life is a cycle of reading, observing and writing about all she sees and hears. Her subject matter includes all things related to books and culture, and the cloud of topics on her Wordpress book blog reveals much of what she's written about including Harry Potter, Barnes & Noble, science fiction, Kindle, fantasy, reality TV, young adult books and more. Since The Red Scorpion was written for the YA category, is fiction with a supernatural twist, it evidently fell within the scope of Lara's radar.

The interview begins with her review of my novel:

Haunted houses, scorpions, and teenagers. It sounds like the rumblings of your typical tween science fiction novel, but it isn’t. The debut novel, The Red Scorpion, from Ed Newman — who is generally known for his short stories — deals with all these topics. But Newman combines them in an mature, adult fiction kind of way.

The scene of the story is set with Book One — a professor and researcher travels to Mexico to follow up on some well-known myths. But along the way, he comes across a dangerous breed of red scorpions. His naive, but curious demeanor encourages him to bring a scorpion back home. And so begins an 80-year haunted house story with a twist. The house isn’t haunted with ghosts, but scorpions.

The interview was conducted by email, delving into the story's themes, how I came to publish the book, and why it seemed important to make it strictly available as an e-book.

On this latter topic, it's noteworthy that Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com this week announced a $99 Kindle and moments later unveiled a $79 Kindle. Apparently they are aiming to stay ahead of the Nook in the electronic reading device category. But what's really exciting is two-fold. First, people are still reading books in the Internet age. Second, both companies recognize the huge potential profits in the e-book product category.

If interested in reading the full interview, you'll find it here at Lara's Book Club.

Keep on keepin' on.