If you remember, we have around a week ago suggested a book for reading ‘the silver ship and the sea’ and here the magical lady is herself answering all those questions that you have in your minds for her. Take a look!
Q. Who is Brenda Cooper outside the frame?
Brenda:I’m not sure I understand the question - outside the frame? If you mean fame, well, I’m not famous yet. I’m pretty busy since I have a day job (I’m the Chief Information Officer for the City of Kirkland) and a family and I’m writing novels and short stories and giving talks as a futurist. So a lot of my time is spent on those things. I also love to read and walk and travel.
Q. What made you decide to take to writing? At what age did you actually start?
Brenda:I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I was writing poetry and stories at a very young age, and I kept writing and journaling at various levels throughout my life. I did have some poetry published when I was in college. I have a twenty-seven-year-old son, and right after he turned eighteen, I decided to write professionally. I think it was the realization that if I didn’t get started on my writing career, I wouldn’t have time left in my life to really succeed at it. I was thirty-eight.
Q. How has the journey been up till now?
Brenda:Fun. I love to write. I have pretty much always loved to write. Learning the craft enough to get published was sometimes hard since it’s really a process of getting a lot of rejections. But a friend (who is a published writer) once told me that you just need to wallpaper a whole room with rejections until you start selling, and so every rejection is one more piece of the work done. That advice helped - it made it easier to get rejections.
Q. Your book “the silver ship and the sea” is a science fiction. From where do you get ideas for writing?
Brenda:Sometimes from reading the paper, or a science magazine or hearing a talk. An idea might come from a casual conversation with a friends or something that happens at work. I might meet someone and see something in them that I want to integrate into a fictional character. As a writer, it is important to watch and listen a lot, which is sometimes hard for me.
Q. You are a writer as well as a futurist. Your profile and books show that you are quiet interested in technology and science. Any specific reasons?
Brenda:I just always remember wanting to understand how the world works. You know that period kids go through when they ask ‘Why?’ all the time? I might have just never quite outgrown that.
Q. What do you expect from the future? Why is it one of your favorite topics?
Brenda:The future is likely to be pretty chaotic. If you think about it, the last two decades have seen a lot of change in communication, technology, and knowledge/information. Yet in spite of all the change, a lot of what it is to be human is still the same as it was hundreds of years ago. We love, we learn, we experiment, we create. We yearn to be accepted and we value our families. Most of us have some kind of spiritual life. Unfortunately, we still go to war a lot. So some things will be really different and a lot will be like today. But there are a lot of new risks as technology has made more powerful ways to both do good and cause evil, to put it really simply. Climate change is going to be a big topic for a long time, and probably very disruptive in good and bad ways. So the future is a favorite topic of mine because I think it is important that we act responsibly with the power and ideas and capabilities we have.
I’m a member of the Futurist Board for the Lifeboat Foundation which is dealing with those issues. Even though I don’t have much time to engage with the foundation, I think it’s an interesting community and worth visiting.
Q. Do you have a certain criterion/writing style for making your readers stick to your books?
Brenda:I just try to write an interesting story and make the people I write about as realistic as possible, no matter which side of an issue they are on. I think readers can relate to that. If you look at most debatable topics in the real world, there are multiple sides and both side soften have a lot of valid points, or at least the people on both sides of the issues are well-intentioned.
Q. Which one is your favorite among your own works?
Brenda:I really like a short piece - a few thousand words - called ‘My Grandfather’s River,’ that got published in the journal Nature last year. That story came out of a lecture. I was in San Diego at a geographic information systems users group, and our keynote speaker was Michael Fay, who talked about his fabulous trips through the Congo (I think they were sponsored by National Geographic). Mr. Fay mentioned something like ‘I’m mapping a vanishing ecosystem before it disappears.’ When he said that, it almost made me cry, and so I decided to write a story about that idea. I’ve actually written a few versions of that story, and the one in Nature came out the way I pictures it.
Q. Who are your favorite authors/books? What kinds of work fascinate you?
Brenda:I read widely. I love poetry. I like Stephen King’s non-horror work (I really liked Lisey’s Story). I grew up on Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven and J.K. Krishnamurti and Mary Stewart. I love finding writers who are new to me (I just discovered Jodi Picault, who has been a bestselling mainstream author for years, and Tamora Pierce who writes wonderful YA fantasy). I like dissidents, like Arundhati Roy. For example, when I was a teenager I read all of Solzenheitsen’s books. I just listened to the Dalai Llama’s book on science and spirituality on my ipod, and I enjoyed his thoughts a lot (this was the first full-length work of his I’d read).
Q. What are you doing when not writing?
Brenda:There isn’t much time that isn’t writing or working. But I try to exercise an hour a day, and manage more like three or four hours a week (usually walking the two dogs, Sasha and Nixie). I like listening to live music and pulling weeds and meeting friends and talking.
Q. Your life’s philosophy in your own words?
Brenda:Learn a lot, work hard, love hard, and be happy.
Q. What advice do you hold for upcoming authors?
Brenda:Well, I’m still an upcoming author. But I think the best advice is to practice. Write. Writers write, and the way to learn to write better is to write more. Don’t let yourself make excuses, but do let yourself write badly. You can always re-write. But you can’t even do that until you’ve written. Oh...and turn off the television.
Wow!what a piece of advice. By the way, thank you so much Brenda for taking out some time for us from your busy schedule.
Image Credit:IInet
