What does SFF allow you to do that other genres don’t?

Science fiction lets me and my characters move freely though time and space, into other dimensions, and anywhere else we want to go.

The Way Beyond (originally called The Life and Times of Halycon Sage) was barely SF at all. That element came in with slightly mad scientist Alexander Preisczech and his Nanobots, designed to save the world from nuclear destruction and other technological disasters.

Republishing allowed the brief introduction of two extraterrestrial characters, an alien Squid and the Adequately Magnificent Presence he reports to.

The second book is explicitly SF. The Squidren are active, the Nanobots become conscious and self-determined with absurd consequences, and our time-travel adventures begin.

How did you develop your cast and the tools or technology they use?

Once the door was open, the characters came in and collaborated with me. Protagonist Halycon Sage has no interest in technology except to get rid of it, but his best friend Preisczech is all about tech, creating first the Nanobots and later the elegant formula SUX²BU and the world-changing innovation, SwitchingUp.

The Squidren have their own technologies for time and space travel, as well as the shapeshifting SquidShip, the SquidPool where the genderfluid Zi hang out, and a translation machine that supplements their own psychic powers but sometimes needs a swift kick with a tentacle to get it working. Author Rupert Griffin has replaced boring old time travel—“You can see there but never be there”—with “UnVirtual Time Travel: We take you there!

Was your storyline something that you envisioned from the beginning, or did you build/change it as you wrote your SFF novel?

This character-based story evolved organically, with me as a fascinated watcher and collaborator. I steered the boat, but I did not make the ocean. After Sage became real, there followed the supercilious horse No-Name Stupid, the Dirty Dog Gang, the Apocalypse Zombie, and many others.

It all started when I woke one morning hearing the words, "One-hundred-and-one cows: a novel," which became a tiny mininovel about preventing the discovery of America.

A Shakespeare professor in my family responded, "This may be a caprice, a whimsy, or possibly a lowland fling, but it is definitely not a novel." His comment was duly incorporated into the story, which grew into The Way Beyond.

What are you working on now?

The Way Beyond begins with relatively ordinary events and opens out in many directions into multiple meanings, multiple possibilities, and multiple points of view. The Book of Squidly Light continues and accelerates this process.

Now, there's a thing in geometry called a tesseract, a hyperdimensional supercube which is to a cube as a cube is to a square, and which can't be pictured in three-dimensional reality. And I've always felt that if The Way Beyond is a square and The Book of Squidly Light is a cube, then Book 3, if there ever was one, would have to be a tesseract.

Frankly, I didn't know if I could pull this off, but to my eternal wonder and gratitude, it has happened. So, Book 3 is titled The Tesseract, and is due out on June 18. Booyah!

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.