Mars Needs Writers

_ …Kate Hawkings caught our attention. She’d posted her emotions on her blog site and it gave us pause enough that we wandered through the site. The crying thing? It was one of those mid-day surges that everyone experiences now and then but the kind everyone pretends they never experience. Then we saw KH doing her very first video blog and it was charmingly awkward. It was exactly the kind of thing we’d try to do except, when she was done, we liked her even better.
 
If we ever do a vlog, when it’s complete, people will want to hunt us for sport.

Turns out, she’s always had a gift for writing (“I was once told that if my chosen career didn’t work out, I could make a living writing sympathy cards. I still don’t know if that was a good or bad thing”) and decided to write the stories she wanted to read. She says, “I love girls with a kick-ass attitude, whether they can actually kick ass or not…although my girls generally can.”

Would a kick-ass girl actually tell other people she felt like crying? We’re guessing, yes, they would, ‘cause Kate is fairly kick-ass herself. “I trained as a strength and conditioning couch,” she tell us, “studying exercise and nutrition at the University. When I decided to pursue self-publishing, I thought it would be the best option for me. I like the idea of doing everything myself and succeeding (or failing) because of my own efforts.”

Succeeding on your own exemplifies kick-assery, even if it’s worlds apart from our philosophy. Frankly, if you and you want to do everything necessary to make us a big success, we’d appreciate it.  We’ll stay at home and watch The Real Housewives.

Half of our writing team wanted to ask a couple of the standard ‘I’m interviewing a writer’ kind of questions, while the other one of us could have cared less but he got overruled. Happily, Kate answered the questions, anyway.  “The best thing about writing is, I finally have an outlet for all the crazy stuff going on in my head,” she said. “The worst thing? No matter how much work you put into it, no matter how many people tell you your work is good, there’s still that nagging voice at the back of your mind that tells you your writing is awful. You have to learn how to block the little gremlins out but sometimes they manage to sneak through.”

Her favorite writers? “I love Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series, Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy and Black Swan series, Harry Potter, Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series (although Mockingjay made me want to throw the book across the room) and David Gemmell’s White Wolf.” Any novels that she disliked? “I prefer not to call them out.  If I enjoy reading something I’ll usually mention what I enjoy but, if I don’t like something, I’ll pretend I’ve never read it.”

But what about Frankenstein, P.I.? Did she love our electronic novelette  or did she really, really love our e-novelette? “I really enjoyed Frankenstein,” she told us. No, no, different book, we said.  “What was the title again?” she asked.

It's Frankenstein, P.I., we repeated.“Why…" she said, her voice going all weird and wonky, "I don’t think I’ve ever read it.”
 
Kate Hawkins' The Sphinx Project comes out in February, 2012. The novel's blurb reads like this:Not many people can say their entire existence has been one big lab experiment: poked and prodded by scientists, genetically modified to be the best and endure the worst, subjected to daily tests and trials that would kill a normal human. All Michaela wants is her own life, to be able to go to school, flirt with boys, maybe eat ice cream now and then. So when the chance to escape finally comes, Michaela and her sister grab it, taking their friends with them.

But they weren't the only ones to find their way out of those labs. Following close behind are another breed of creature, one that doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, who exist only to feed their own hunger. The appearance of a strange boy who seems too much like them to be a coincidence makes things even more confusing. But as the world begins to literally fall apart around them, Michaela must accept his help, especially when she could lose the very thing she holds dearest: her sister.