Author Spotlight and Guest Post

This week I'm combining my Author Spotlight with my Guest Post by Lisa Morton, I thought this was a perfect oppertunity to tell you about the author, for her to talk to you and finally... let you listen to the lady herself!!

Lisa Morton
Taken from Goodreads..
Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of horror fiction, and Halloween expert. She is a winner of both the Black Quill and Bram Stoker Awards, and her short stories have appeared in more than 50 books and magazines. Her first novel, THE CASTLE OF LOS ANGELES, was released by Gray Friar Press in 2010, and her first collection, MONSTERS OF L.A., was published by Bad Moon Books in October 2011. She is a native and lifelong resident of Southern California, and currently resides in the San Fernando Valley.

And now to the lady herself....

Hello to Gemma and all of your readers, with whom I certainly share a particular passion!

I was one of those kids who was reading by the time I was three, and who, at six, demanded daily visits to the library (mom was very accommodating). The first adult novels I enjoyed were almost all genre works - H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - so perhaps it was inevitable that I’d end up moving into speculative fiction.

I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember - my first poem was published when I was in kindergarten - but I took a long, strange left turn away from fiction for a while to pursue screenwriting. I studied it in college, and achieved minor success by writing half-a-dozen low-budget features (and one decently-budgeted television movie called Tornado Warning), but somewhere along the line I realized a funny thing: I wasn’t really proud of any of the movies that had my name on them. Sure, the money had been decent...but life takes more than money, doesn’t it?

So I finally turned to prose writing, and (to borrow a bad cliche) it really was like coming home. I started with short horror fiction, partly because I’d gotten to know some wonderful horror writers and editors through my movie work, but mainly because I loved how primal and intense the emotions were. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, I was selling short fiction regularly, to books and magazines like the Dark Delicacies series, the Hot Blood series, The Mammoth Book series, and Cemetery Dance, but I came to novels late.

Frankly, the idea of writing a novel seemed impossible to me. I was used to writing either screenplays or short stories. Something 200 pages or more was terrifying!

But ideas started to obsess me. A lot of them centered on a real building near downtown Los Angeles called the Brewery, which is a collection of artists’ lofts; I had friends who ran a small theater out of their unit, and seeing a play there was such an odd experience that I knew I wanted to write about it. I’d been a small theater director myself, so a lot of my own background started working its way into the story. I soon realized it was too big for 5,000 words...and my novel The Castle of Los Angeles was born.

As you can well imagine, I was pretty knocked out when Castle was purchased by a wonderful British publisher, Gray Friar Press, and then started garnering astonishing reviews. It wound up on several “Ten Best of the Year” lists, was nominated for the Black Quill Award, and, finally, won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel.

All of which proved to me that writing novels really wasn’t impossible.

My current book, Monsters of L.A., is a short story collection (my first), but it was almost structured like a longer work, with stories that connect and interweave and depend on each other. Like The Castle of Los Angeles, it’s obviously very L.A.-centric (I’m a lifelong native), and most of the twenty stories in it were written in a single time frame. Even I was surprised by how some of them ended up crisscrossing with each other and forming bigger stories, and I’m wondering if becoming a novelist has now changed my way of writing short stories forever.

Talk about a passion for novels...!

Next week I will be reviewing her book Monsters in L.A so make sure you look out for it!!!