PJ Interviews Robert C Roman

photo by PJ Schnyder

Today, I’m interviewing my big brother, Robert C Roman.  He has called himself the Mycroft to my Sherlock in the past, which would make me a rather bohemian …male. O.o

Erm, I must agree on a different aspect of Mycroft to Sherlock. He is a much larger and stouter man than I, possessed of great wit and a talent for making his reader ask, “wtf?!?” in the niftiest of ways. We’ll have a contest at the end of the interview for a chance to win one of his ebooks, so get to know him!

Plus, his quirky fun story, Fae Eye for the Golem Guy is November’s Read for a Cure book at Decadent Publishing. Go, buy Fae Eye, and know that all publishing profits go to the Relay for Life.

Hey there, big brother, and thank you for stepping up to the interview platform. Those of us following your recent interviews know that Fae Eye for the Golem Guy was inspired during a brainstorming discussion with fellow author and mutual friend, Dana Marie Bell. My question is, what element came to mind first? The Fae Eye or the Golem Guy?

Hallo Sis. Actually, the title sort of happened all at once. We were talking about juxtaposing personal makeover shows with automotive makeover shows. The idea of Xhibit and a crew of mechanics going over some poor dude with rivet guns, electronics, and faux leather was too precious, and we started throwing mashup titles at the wall. Fae Eye for the Golem Guy was the one that stuck.

Similarly, we also know Road Mage was inspired by your commute for work. It is the first in the Urban Pandora series, from what I understand. What was the inspiration for the series name?

I’ve seen several takes on the Pandora legend. The better ones have to do with a repentant Pandora; after releasing evil into the world, Pandora quests to put the evil back in the box. I have one problem with those stories. A real hero Wouldn’t Open The Box. So the protagonist is clueless at best or a bitch at worst. It’s a Greek myth, which implies that both were probably true in the original story, but that doesn’t somehow make it a good story. The fact that so many classic stories come to us from the ancient Greeks don’t mean they were storytellers without peer; it means in the intervening three thousand years we’ve lost most of the slush-pile-wastebasket-fodder.

Except Pandora.

At any rate, I’m dissatisfied with the Repentant Pandora stories I’ve read, so I’m doing my own. Jason Rodriguez is the ‘Pandora’, and the ‘Box’ is Paul Dunn. Jason really didn’t have much of a choice but to kill Paul, but in doing so he’s let loose a whole bunch of nastiness, which he didn’t know about in the first place. So… While the character of Jason still has human imperfections, complete sociopathy isn’t one of them. He’s an Urban character; he fits on highways and in row houses and around skyscrapers. So… Urban Pandora.

Can you tell us about your more recent story, The Strange Fate of Capricious Jones – OR – Birth of an Iron Angel? How DID your head transmute Lady Gaga to Steam Punk and what does Standardized Testing have to do with it?

I’m honestly not sure how my own creative process does what it does. I mean, Agatha and Penelope take stuff, mangle it, and shove it in my brain, but what they select and how they mangle it just happens at a level below conscious thought. I can tell you the bits and pieces I know about though.

Lady Gaga’s Telephone was playing when I was thinking about Capricious. She’s a planner. She wouldn’t go up in an experimental aircraft without a parachute and some means of communication. When I thought about that, I thought about how someone would sabotage both. The parachute wasn’t hard, but the crystal device was harder; it’s not got any moving parts, and it’s compact enough that sabotage would be obvious. That made me think about radio rooms and how you’d make sure someone didn’t announce that they were plummeting to their death, especially when that’s exactly why you had the device in the first place. That’s when I heard the intro with the line “Hello, Hello, Baby” and the next bits. That spawned the idea of Cap’s little girl being in the radio room. It really informed me about how much of a World Class Bastard David really is.

Regarding Standardized Testing, I was proctoring the HSPA when I first heard about a call for SteamPunk stories. I needed a name, and I was hearing some names over the loudspeaker. I misheard a few, and those misheard names led me to other names, and those led me to other names, and finally they led me to the character name “Capricious Fate Jones”. Not sure HOW that name wound up attached to a character who is two parts Agatha Heterodyne, one part Grace Jones, one part Dolly Parton, and three parts Temperence Brennan, but it did.

Lucky little sister that I am, I’ve met your muses. Agatha and Penelope were introduced to me in a short story touching on incest (twin-cest?), naughty literary commentary and “Prose so Purple it out to be used by Behr as a dye” and I’m betting I know the beta reader who made the Purple Prose comment. If you could put faces to Agatha and Penelope, what would they look like?

Lucky me, THEY put faces on however and whenever they like. Half the time I don’t know it’s them until they open their mouths. Because then it’s unmistakable. Agatha Steam Punk is the wild one, going on adventures and leaping into peril with eyes wide open. Auburn hair, brown / green hazel eyes, strong cheekbones and chin, small nosed. Curves. Penelope Gothic Horror is the proper one, stumbling into adventures because she’s a complete bimbo. Strawberry blond hair, blue / black hazel eyes, aristocratic nose with refined features otherwise. Willowy.

You’ve had some experience collaborating with another author on a story. Would you co-write with someone again? What are some of the fun and/or frustrating facets to collaboration?

Sure I would. I have no real problems working with someone. Occasionally there is friction, but that’s going to happen in any joint venture. The fun comes from having someone give immediate ‘Oh YEAH!’ feedback to your writing, even when it’s half-done. The frustration comes when something you thought was uber-cool makes your co-author go “uh, what were you smoking when you wrote this gibberish?” Of course, there’s also some issues with stylistic differences. If your style and the other authors are wildly different, it can make for difficulty selling the story. Both parts may be stellar, and they may work together well, but if an editor really lurves her some intellectual discourse and can’t stand peppy zingers, or the other way round, they’re going to nix the whole thing because of that.

Tell me a story, big brother. What’s this about you wielding a hamster as a weapon of Doom?

Pfft. I once mentioned that with enough of anything, you can do anything. The immediate response was ‘take over the world using nothing but hamsters’. I said ‘ok, give me enough hamsters to consume all of the vegetable matter in Quebec in four hours’. Get a loan to open a chain of pet stores selling custom hamsters. Use that money to rent transport trucks and release enough to eliminate a ten mile radius around each major city in Quebec. The Canadians will provide transport and supplies out of a combination of gratitude and fear of reprisals. Now given transport, repeat the process, first with the countries in North Asia, then Eastern Europe, then North America, then Western Europe. Given the reproductive rates of hamsters, you can sacrifice the occasional ‘example’ territory and get them to reproduce enough to knock out the larger, better organized countries.

So, yeah. Death Hamsters. Not really different to normal hamsters.

Of course, the next statement was ‘there aren’t enough hamsters in the world to do that!’ To which I replied ‘saying that with enough of anything I can do anything does not imply that enough of your chosen substance exists’

In lieu of the usual speed round, I have a surprise just for you…

I’m scared now…

PJ’s Strategy and Tactics:

You’re blockaded in a storage room with sparkling vampires beating down the main door and coming up through the floor. You have a spork, a rubber ducky and Q tip. What’s your weapon of choice?

The spork. Gotta be.

The rubber ducky has an appeal, but in its most effective form it’s a one use item. Shove it into the mouth and it’s hard to get out, depriving the sparkly vampire of his most important weapon, his Angsty Whine. Thing is, you can only stop one of them with that.

The Q Tip can do some awful things when applied in the proper manner (“Go for the eyes, Boo!”), but it has two disadvantages. First, most of them won’t realize that you’re aiming for their eyes with a ball of awful, scratchy fibers. Instead they’ll think ‘oh, a Q-Tip’ and think ‘soft and fluffy’, by the time they’re moaning and squinting their eyes shut you’re already disabled by the endless whiny prattle about how immortality is a curse. Also, there’s only so much TO a Q-Tip. After two or three it’s worn down to a nigh useless unsweetened lollipop stick. Sure, you’ve got the other end, but if you’ve got more than six S-Vamps out there, you’re toast.

Finally, the Spork. Like the Q-Tip, an eye weapon. Unlike the cotton-on-a-stick, it’s bristling with pointy bits. As well, it has the spoon in it’s heritage, which gives it some of the cultural baggage of cutting hearts out painfully AND the Tick’s battlecry. The fork, of course, is the devil’s main weapon, so you’ve got some threat ability from that.

Lunging at the Sparkly-Vamp’s eyes with your Tick-blessed, devil-approved heart cutter is certain to get at least a blink response, probably even hands raised to block. While the eyes are closed and the hands are up, knee them in the sternum. Via the crotch. This has been proven to incapacitate even supernatural creatures. (“Wolfman has nards!”) When they crumple forward, aim for the voicebox. With the eternal whine out of commission, they’re mostly harmless.

Since the spork is a threat weapon, you’re not going to wear it out. If one of the Vamps DOES maintain open eyes, they’re going to have scooped eyeballs to worry about, which can be inserted orally to prevent the S Vamp’s Death Kvetch. If they duck or do something else stupid, and the spork shatters, now you’ve got an Oz-Approved Shiv, and you can go all convict stabby on them.

So yeah. Gotta go with the Spork on this one.

You’re leading your biology class in a dissection. A student decides to try out toad licking, and becomes zombified. How do you stem the zombified student and dissected frog invasion and get the maximum number of uninfected students out alive? into the streets of Camden…

Not as hard as it sounds, really. Step one is jumping on the front work table and kicking the fan out of the window. That will go right through the hornet nest outside. That will get the non-zombie students out of the room. With that many students out of the room, the halls will fill pretty quickly. Meanwhile inside the room pin the zombie with a work table and throw the locks on the window bars to prevent egress. On the way out of the door hit the ‘call’ button on the intercom, because that will get the zombies trying to get to the speaker, which is about ten feet off the ground.

Head across the hall to the courtyard, across the courtyard to the main entrance, hit the main office and tell Ms. Roman (no relation) there’s a code Blue biohazard in the building. With the kids already in the halls, the building can be cleared in a matter of seconds.

The zombie frog(s) will be full of angry hornets. Since it has no teeth to tranmit zombie plague, and it can’t keep the hornets contained, they’ll keep getting out and stinging it, and it will eventually stop moving from the swelling. The student-zombies we’ll have to find a containment method for. I’m thinking something like the rig at the end of Shaun of the Dead. At that point, if they’re not already classified as a special ed students, we’ll probably have to write them up individualized IEPs and 504 plans. Or edit the existing ones if they’ve got them.

See? No problem.

AI robots take over the world. Do you fight, submit to mechanical domination, or get off the planet?

That last is always the goal, isn’t it? I mean, the fusion plant is unstable. We’ve known that for at least fifty years, but do we take the natural next steps and start working on evacuation plans? No, we screw around trying to sort out who is going to be captain of the Titanic. I mean, HELLO! Captain of the iceberg would at least last longer, if not by much. Silly humans.

At any rate, that aside, it really depends on the AI overlords. If they’re matrix style robots, the backstory says they’re fighting humans because we were absolute dicks. Practically the platonic ideal of richard-hood, in fact. With that in mind, I’m going to do some talking with them, pointing out that my hobby in life is to use mine, not be one. Since they seem to be intent on building big structures for which they have no practical use, powered by lots and lots of humans, I’m thinking we can work together and create massive human-spawning pools, and set the Matrix itself to ‘seraglio’ mode. At that point I’m pretty content, as long as the robots themselves start working on the whole ‘unstable fusion engine / lifeboat’ problem. A Niven’s Puppeteer solution would be perfect, as it wouldn’t require a seraglio simulation interruption.

If the AI are Terminator-style psychopaths, I’m thinking there’s no choice but fight, at least until we take out Skynet. After that’s done, a little judicious reprogramming might solve some of the problems humans have had. Put them in ‘must be trusted’ positions, with another terminator buddied up with them to make sure they’re not subsequently reprogrammed. Honestly, though, if we’re up to reprogramming them, I think we need to reprogram one with a Mr. Rogers protocol and send him back to Skynet. Seriously, he’s got issues, and needs to spend some time in the Land of Make Believe learning manners.

LOL. Thank you, Bobby.

Okay, folks. In honor of Mycroft and Sherlock, I’ve got a contest for you.  Tell us your favorite mystery in comments for a chance to win not just an ecopy of Bob’s Strange Fate of Capricious Jones but also a copy of my Red’s Wolf. Just in time for the holidays.

And, stay tuned for a special holiday event involving holiday stories from Bobby and me as well as several other Decadent authors. Here’s a sneak peak: