AUTHOR CRUSH FRIDAY: BECK NICOLAS
Glitter girls, you have pressing questions for your favorite authors and we have their answers. Welcome to our new weekly segment, Author Crush Fridays.
We love asking questions and we love the answers from some of our favorite authors. Today we’re talking to Beck Nicholas, author of Lifer. Thank you for talking to us today, Beck! We’re honored!
GLITTER: Tell us five random things about yourself.
BECK:
– My big sister named me. She whined until she got her way.
– I studied laser chemistry at university but wrote stories in my spare time.
– My favorite color is blue.
– I once got food poisoning from seafood and can’t eat it without feeling ill.
– When I was about six I once walked home from school by myself in the middle of the day for no reason.
GLITTER: For those not familiar with your writing, how would you describe it?
BECK: My writing is generally fast-paced and my characters are my focus. I like to consider a problem from different angles and don’t like anything to be too simple. I like when good people make mistakes and apparent villains are shown to have their own motives and even do something heroic. I try to write to keep the reader up way past their bedtime.
GLITTER: Tell us more about Lifer. What is it about? What was it like to write a sci-fi?
BECK: Lifer is a mystery and a romance as well as a sci-fi. It’s about Asher, a slave girl on a generation ship who needs to find the answers to her boyfriend’s freak training accident death while collecting information from the masters she serves to aid a rebellion.
At the same time it’s about a boy on a post-apocalyptic earth who wakes up naked and without his memory. Blank must risk his life to find out who he is while getting caught up with a hot girl and an underground society who want to overthrow the all-powerful Company.
Writing a sci-fi let me give full rein to my imagination while extending some of the science I studied at university. To take the details of my real world research and then stretch them was fun and exciting. I loved the way the characters interacted with each other in this different world and with the different technology.
GLITTER: Do you believe pasts can truly collide?
BECK: I believe that who we are and who we’ve been is difficult (but not impossible) to escape. I think we leave a path not just physically but with the people we interact with and that version of us lives on for them even if we change. It can mean the past can have a huge impact on the present and into the future.
GLITTER: Do you believe in aliens and life outside of the Earth’s atmosphere?
BECK: I do. Statistically I have to believe it’s possible, while at the same time knowing the chance that the life is at all like us is infinitely small. The possibility makes for some great what-ifs and is the inspiration for so many stories.
GLITTER: What has been your favorite scene to write?
BECK: It’s hard to pick just one but I loved writing the opening scene. the characters walked into my mind so alive that I couldn’t wait to put them on the page. In it a slave girl, Asher, has sought privacy to complete the Lifer (the servants on board the ship) mourning ritual for her dead boyfriend. It’s her first chance to grieve his mysterious death. She’s barely begun when she’s interrupted by his loathsome brother who questions whether she really knew her boyfriend at all. I loved her strength, despite her pain, in the face of his contempt. And he was so hot.
GLITTER: What are you working on next?
BECK: I’ve recently completed a sequel for Lifer. It was great to revisit the characters and see more of their lives. Right now I’m working on a story of a refugee fleeing a planet at war to carry out her mother’s final wishes and the pilot of her ship whose true identity will make them hunted across galaxies. There are spaceship crashes and mad kings and a man who will stop at nothing to destroy them. If they don’t kill each other first.
Beck always wanted to write. She’s worked as a lab assistant, a pizza delivery driver and a high school teacher, but always pursued her first dream of creating stories. Now, she lives with her family near Adelaide, halfway between the city and the sea, and am lucky to spend her days (and nights) writing young adult fiction.
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Editorial Director | Writer | Tweet me @heatherriccio
