This month's featured CSR story was Geron Kee's The House of Storms. Did you catch the feature at the beginning of the month featuring it? There were a lot of positive thoughts urging readers to check it out! If you did, make sure you share your thoughts below in the comments, but first, as always I pumped this month's author with all sorts of questions during an interview, so check that out! 

 

Are you a person who makes their bed in the morning, or do you not see much point?

I make my bed.  Or rather, we do.

 

If you were an animal, what would you be?

A porcupine. Even a tiger will not mess with a porcupine. And porcupines know it!

 

What's your favorite room in your house? Do you plot or write there?

My home office-library. I write here, and I read here.

 

If you had to only work on one project for the next year... what would it be?

That's a tough one. I have a folder of unfinished stories, that were interrupted by one thing or another, and to which I just never got back to. If the contents of the folder could be taken as a single project, I'd like to finish those tales.

 

Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?

Deadlines. I use a lot of my free time to write, and there never seems to be enough of it. I tend to no longer write entries in anything that has a specific date for which the work is required. If you are referring to the mechanical aspects of writing, I feel fairly comfortable with that. Mostly, I just wing it!

 

Were the Hardy Boys a childhood favorite of yours?

I found them very quickly after coming to The States at age 9. My dad had a large library in storage at his parent's house, which was reclaimed when we moved here. I think my dad has never parted with a single book in his life. He had most of the Hardy Boys series, and they were the editions published in the forties, before they were abridged in 1959. The Abridged editions are patently inferior to the originals, and I was able to get a really good dose of the best of that series.

 

Your characters use fun time period slang, like “the gas”.  Was it easy to sprinkle in time-period specific phrases or did you find modern slang creeping in?

If there was any accidental modern slang in the story, no one pointed it out to me. I generally research anything that I am unsure about before adding it to one of my stories. That said, we all have some 'fake' facts in our heads - things we think are true, but aren't. Those sorts of things can get into a tale under the guise of a fact I feel certain of, and then just prove to be wrong later. But, again, no one said anything, so I hope I got it right.

 

Do you have a favorite scene in The House of Storms?

Actually...I kind of smile at the scene where the power is out at the hotel, and then comes back on, and Frank and his boyfriend, who are holding each other in their room, and Joe and his boyfriend, who are doing the very same thing in their room next door, turn and spy each other through the open connecting door between rooms. Neither brother knew the other was gay until that point. Great pair of detectives, huh?

 

Was there any red herring or detail readers didn’t pick up in the mystery you wish they would have?

I don't think there was any discussion on the clues, so I actually don't know if people missed things or not. There were a few red herrings, but I kept them to a minimum. Hardy Boys stories tended to telegraph a little bit of what was coming, and I did the same, so I am not certain how much of a surprise the ending was to readers. As a boy, my general reaction to having the bad guy revealed at the end of a Hardy Boys story was, "I knew it!", rather than, "Didn't see that coming!" I think most readers simply had their suspicions confirmed at the end of my version, too.

 

Can you sum up The House of Storms in one sentence?

If it was as fun for readers to read as it was for me to write, than I consider it a successful tale.