Interview with Peter Hansen

Our Wednesday interview is Peter Hansen whose first release with Riptide publishing is the rather spooky First Watch. Welcome to the blog Peter and everyone who comments will have the chance to win any one backlist book from Rachel Haimowitz, Aleksandr Voinov, L.A. Witt, Brita Addams, or Cat Grant
(“Frontlist” books, i.e. Riptide releases and newest non-Riptide release, are excluded, as are the Courtland Chronicles).

So let's get to know Peter.

1. When did you start the adventure of writing?

I was four, and I wrote a story about football.

2. Have you always loved romance writing?

Come to think of it, my football story was totally a romance.

3. How about some favorites.

• Favorite Hero: Superhero? Iron Man all the way.
• Favorite Dessert: Tiramisu.
• Favorite Villain: Magneto.
• Favorite Song: Calexico's "Guns of Brixton" cover.

4. Have you ever written to music?

Never write without it.


5. What music?

Mostly metal, particularly symphonic metal.

6. Tell us about your work:

• Changing the Guard (in Weight of a Gun) – In this tale of interplanetary espionage, disgraced security officer Tomi Vuorela is assigned to a solo posting in an icebound outpost. His job is to guard the remote access node of IntelServ: an intelligence supercomputer built into the crust of a planet. When smooth talker Andile Harper makes an unscheduled service stop at the outpost, though, Tomi doesn't believe for a second that he's a mechanical engineer. As he fights to uncover Andile's real identity, Tomi bares old scars and leaves new ones—and as the threats shade into sex, he begins to suspect that Andile has come to find out about him.
• First Watch – 1926. Eldritch creatures roam the darkness, preying on the dying and the desperate-to-live. Aboard the Flèche, a grim submarine with a nightmare captain, Edouard Montreuil must give his body each night as the bells sound for the first watch. To save his own life on the battlefield, Edouard made a pact with a monster—a pact with a steep price attached. As the days stretch into months beneath the waves, Edouard becomes desperate for escape … and calls on his old comrade Farid Ruiz to help him break this devil's bargain.

7. Do you have a writing tip to share with our viewers?

If you've got a lot to keep track of, it helps me to make an outline or a map or a spreadsheet or something. I'm a spatial thinker. I like to see how stories work in space, rather than in time.

8. What genre do you write mostly and what appeals to you most about your genre?

Fantasy/science fiction, often shading toward steampunk or dieselpunk. I like the challenge of building plausible worlds and then populating them with people, although unfortunately I often wind up with worlds full of people I don't want to write about.

9. What is the most interesting thing you have learned from your research?

I have learned a heck of a lot about shortwave radios in Italy.

10. What fascinates you most about writing m/m?

As a queer person, myself, I really like having the chance to create worlds where it's okay to be queer. It's a little utopian of me, maybe, but I like to imagine that there are (or were, or one day will be) people for whom being queer is simply a fact of life, not something they have to fight to recognize in themselves and to be recognized as in their society.

11. What does your family think of you writing erotica?

I think my dad laughed for a solid minute.

12. What would you tell a reader reluctant to read erotica?

Depends on why the reluctance. As a person who was reluctant, myself, I needed to understand that erotica wasn't just whack-off material, and that many of the writers were thoughtful, talented people who could craft stories with punch and plot and soul-searing characterization. Other people, though, have got traumas that they just can't bear to see engaged, and others are more asexual than I am, and others just don't find it to their tastes. There are a lot of good reasons to be reluctant to read erotica, and I want to honor those reasons as well as I can.

13. Have you ever tested out one of your sex scenes on your significant other?

Nope! My girlfriend and I are in a long-distance relationship.

14. Is there any topic you find taboo?

"Taboo" is a social construction, so it's not just about me or my hang-ups. Taboo topics are ones that we-as-culture, we-as-society find difficult to address, and so we wind up not dealing with those topics at all—let alone dealing with them maturely and sensitively. I'm not always going to succeed in being mature and sensitive, myself, but I want to learn to be, and I can't learn unless I open a conversation about things that we-the-culture find hard to approach.

Thanks so much for joining us today Peter and letting us get to know you better. Good luck with your new releases and we look forward to more stories from you.

You can find Peter at:

Website: http://peterhansenfiction.weebly.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/P_HansenWrites
Email: peter.hansen.writes@gmail.com