Pump Up Your Book Chats with Benjamin Ethridge, author of “Bottled Abyss”

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ABOUT BENJAMIN ETHRIDGE

Benjamin Kane Ethridge is the Bram Stoker Award winning author of the novel BLACK & ORANGE (Bad Moon Books 2010) and Bottled Abyss ( Redrum Horror 2012). For his master’s thesis he wrote, “CAUSES OF UNEASE: The Rhetoric of Horror Fiction and Film.” Available in an ivory tower near you. Benjamin lives in Southern California with his wife and two creatures who possess stunning resemblances to human children. When he isn’t writing, reading, videogaming, Benjamin’s defending California’s waterways and sewers from pollution.

To learn more about Benjamin, visit his website at: www.bkethridge.com

Visit Benjamin on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/benjamin.kane.ethridge

Visit Benjamin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/bkethridge

The Interview

Q: Can you tell us why you wrote your book?

Ed Kurtz, the publisher from Redrum Horror made me do it.

Q: Which part of the book was the hardest to write?

Likely the middle, when I was teasing my characters into their respective roles for the finale.

Q: Do you remember when the writing bug hit?

Oh I can’t recall the year, but I wager it must have been sometime Before Common Era. Largely the poor were afflicted with the bug. In the streets piled high in self-published tomes, they shuffled around—charcoal bits, quills, sticks tipped in blood, all clutched in their hands (mugs of coffee in the other). No tablet or parchment was left unsoiled from the feverish outpourings that consumed the masses. These afflicted had no lives except for those they lived through in their stories, and they aliened all who knew and loved them. So isolated were they, that in fact, I believe the bug produced a different species entirely. Homo Sapien Writerus. The outbreak was contained for a while, but I do fear resurgence in our time.

Q: Besides books, what else do you write? Do you write for publications?

I have many articles out there in cyberspace, mostly through guest blogs on writer’s sites or genre related sites.

Q: Do you have a writing tip you’d like to share?

Posture is key.

Q: Would you like to tell us about your home life? Where you live? Family? Pets?

I live in a small home in Rancho Cucamonga, California with a wife, two kids, and one cat. We are all in a transition stage right now, fighting not to drive one another mad. Well, except for the cat. Twinkie, she doesn’t give a damn, but everybody else is trying really hard to enjoy existence together.

Q: What do you do to get away from it all?

We have the Pacific Electric Trail that runs for miles through our city and others. It’s nice to have a stroll and take the world in as it was intended to be (on a concrete path with stoplights to protect you from thundering SUVs that would rather reduce you to pink paste than slow down).

Q: What is the most frustrating part of being an author?

Standing out amongst the many: great, good and bad.

Q: Your book has just been awarded a Pulitzer. Who would you thank?

All the usual folks, but also, and especially, trees, for without their sacrifice none of my books would have been born into the physical world.

Q: Thank you so much for this interview, Benjamin. Do you have any final words?

Yikes. I didn’t know my death was so imminent. I love you all, fare the well!

ABOUT BOTTLED ABYSS

Herman and Janet Erikson are going through a crisis of grief and suffering after losing their daughter in a hit and run. They’ve given up on each other; they’ve given up on themselves. They are living day by day. One afternoon, to make a horrible situation worse, their dog goes missing in the coyote-infested badlands behind their property. Herman, resolved in preventing another tragedy, goes to find the dog, completely unaware he’s on a hike to the River Styx, the border between the Living world and the world of the dead.

Long ago the Gods died and the River dried up, but a bottle containing its waters still remains in the badlands. What Herman discovers about the dark power contained in those waters will change his and Janet’s lives forever…

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A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

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