Author Interview: Alyson Miers

Product Details File Size: 662 KB Print Length: 494 pages Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1466443839 Publisher: Alyson Miers (October 15, 2011) Sold by: Amazon Digital Services Language: English ASIN: B005W71H0S Text-to-Speech: Enabled  Lending: Enabled Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #205,581 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) Overview In 2012, the Plague ended the world as we know it.  In 2130, Charlinder wants to know why.  The origin of the disease remains a mystery.  Their ignorance of its provenance fuels a growing schism that threatens to destroy the peace that the survivors' descendants have built. Unwilling to wait for matters to get any worse, he decides to travel to where the Plague first appeared and find out the truth-which means walking across three continents before returning home.   Chrlinder has never been more than ten miles from home, has never heard anyone speak a foreign language, and he's going it alone.

He survives thousands of miles of everything from near-starvation to near-madness before he meets Gentiola. By then he’s so exhausted that the story she offers to tell seems like little more than a diversion...until he hears it.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he learns from her, and no one ever told him: be careful what you wish for. The world is a much bigger place than Charlinder knew, and his place in it is a question he never asked before

More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Alyson Miers Page

Biography

Alyson is a Maryland-based author of literary fiction and whatever happens to strike her fancy. She aims to write books that people can argue about for hours over glasses of red wine. She is not above talking about herself in the third person.

Excerpts, setting and character bios about Alyson's debut novel, Charlinder's Walk, can be found here: http://www.redsresources.com/charlinder/index.html

Why did you choose a male character to write about. 

Charlinder was the character who presented himself to me for this coming-of-age tale. Why a female protagonist didn't occur to me probably has a lot to do with why female protagonists aren't already more represented in hero's quest tales. If I'd written Charlotte's Walk instead, it would have taken some more doing to explain why a post-apocalyptic agrarian community would allow a young woman to walk out, with the intention of crossing three continents, and possibly never return. Charlinder is plenty vulnerable on his journey but a Charlotte would have been more so. Women are subject to different expectations and different dangers, and those differences make a young man a more natural fit in this type of story. Which is not to say that a heroine's quest couldn't be written, if a writer were to be so inspired, but so far I have started several more novels, with mostly female protagonists, and a heroine's quest hasn't occurred to me.

Was it odd to write from the POV of a male being a female. 

Oddly enough, it was not that odd.

I've read a lot of stories written from male POVs before, and Charlinder is very much my character and I made him what I wanted him to be. He's thoughtful, introverted, stubborn and curious, and those aren't specifically masculine traits. Furthermore, part of Char's individuality is that he interprets masculinity on his own terms and doesn't worry too hard about not appearing sufficiently manly. In the excerpt he's surrounded by women, and there's a lot of that in the book, because Charlinder is more comfortable around women. 

He was nowhere near as difficult a character to write as Gentiola.

What made you want to write about a virus that wiped out most of the population. 

I needed a Doomsday scenario that would wipe out nearly all of the human population but leave the few survivors in good health, and leave the rest of the planet in good shape. A nuclear holocaust or meteor strike wouldn't allow for those conditions. A vicious disease fit the bill. I needed an ecologically sound world with a sparse but high-functioning human population, and I needed their defining catastrophe to be open to some controversy.

If this could be made would you prefer a movie or tv show. 

Now that I think of it, a TV miniseries would probably be more appropriate, because there's no way a narrative of this size could be fit into a feature-length film.

Who would you want to portray the main character.

I think they'd need to find an obscure actor to play Charlinder, because I honestly can't think of any known actors who fit his description. It would make a great role for a fresh face, though. I can say that Rachel Weisz would make a nice Gentiola, but Charlinder would be trickier to cast.

Here’s the official tour page:  http://www.novelpublicity.com/charlinder/

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