✨ INTERVIEW ✨
What was your first published work? Tell me a little about it.
My first published book was The Pyre Starter, an adult urban fantasy. It is the first novel in a seven-book series called The Talisman War. It follows a suicidal young man named Dakota as he enters a world of magic and soon finds himself defending those he cares about against an unnamed evil. It is a queer story with romance and tons of action.
How long on average does it take you to write a book?
About a year from start to publication. The Talisman War series actually took less than that, only about four or five years. I started writing The Wasteland Kings at the beginning of November of 2022, and it came out November 25th of 2023.
What does success mean to you?
Getting readers. All I really want is to have people buy and read my stories. Obviously, I would love to win awards or make best-seller lists, but at the end of the day, readers are what matters to me. Anything that can bring more readers to my books is success for me.
What inspired you to write The Wasteland Kings? What were the challenges in bringing it to life?
I love writing stories of survival and dealing with hardship. My previous books all feature these themes. At its core, The Wasteland Kings is about two men and a small cast of characters working to survive a nearly impossible situation. It’s very much a human vs. nature and human vs. technology kind of story. There is no one bad guy (or girl). The conflict is with their situation.
I started with a basic idea about a hacker out of his element and went from there.
The biggest challenge was doing all the research. I’m more of an urban fantasy writer than science fiction, so I had to look up all sorts of things about technology, robots, etc. I also had to develop an in-depth understanding of growing crops and creating a self-sufficient town. Moreover, I needed a brand-new vocabulary to properly convey what happens in the novel, especially with the robotic dogs.
Thankfully, I already had a decent understanding of building an apocalyptic/dystopian environment because I also made one in The Talisman War series. The Wasteland Kings was like a sci-fi version of the fantasy world I created for that series.
Tell us something we don’t know about your heroes. What makes them tick?
When we meet Bast, he is an accomplished hacker living with a bunch of other hackers as they steal information from a bank. That might lead to the reader thinking he’s got his life together or he knows what he wants. Turns out, he’s very naïve about the world outside his self-contained bubble. He makes a lot of mistakes and isn’t particularly careful in protecting his identity. This inevitably results in his life crashing down around him. As the story progresses, he thinks more with his heart than his head, and that continues well into the climax of the story.
Gabriel, on the other hand, is much more level-headed and careful. In fact, he does not like taking risks if he can help it. He loves his family, but he’s fairly lonely when we meet him. He has no real friends and no partner. Despite all that, he becomes a leader to a group of his coworkers, and in turn, tries to protect them from the dangers of the wastelands. He’s much more reliable than Bast, and he serves as a good contrast to the erratic hacker.
What are you working on now, and when can we expect it?
I have a Middle Grade children’s book for which I am querying agents. It features a queer ten-year-old girl who falls into a world with talking animals. A possum mage and a helpful raven are some of the characters she meets. She must utilize their help to try and get back to her world. I hope to find a home for this story soon. When I do, it will be published under the pseudonym Angelina Price. (Angelina is my grandmother’s name, and Price is the last name of one of my favorite characters from The Talisman War.) I intend to keep my adult and children’s books separate, thus the pen name. I really like this little book, and I can’t wait to share it with the world!
The Wasteland Kings
by Jamie N. Schock
Release Date: Saturday, November 25 2023
Publisher: JMS Books
Primary Plot Arc: Speculative Fiction
Pairings: There are three romantic pairings in the book, all of which are MM. I would say it is half romance, half sci-fi.
Main Genres: Romance, Science Fiction
Sub-Genres: Cyberpunk, survival, dystopian, queer
Length: Novel / 68,025 Words / 244 Pages
LGBTQ+ Identities: Bi, gay, and non-binary
Keywords/Categories: robots, wasteland, future, futuristic, androids, cyborgs, body modification, queer sex, MM, MM romance, romance subplot, gay romance, love and lost, queer love, cyberpunk, dystopian, survival, sci-fi, science fiction
Tropes: HFN
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Blurb
Hacker Bast has it all: a cushy condo, a sexy boyfriend, and a place among the wealthy elite. When his past catches up with him, he flees into the dreary and dangerous wastelands between domed cities. There, he meets Delphi, who saves him, and Galeron, who runs a small town. He is anything but safe, however, as robotic “dogs” roam the countryside, looking for people to kill, and humans can be just as deadly.
As Bast settles in to life in the town, he develops a controversial relationship with Galeron. They fall in love, but all is not well in their world. Can the two of them survive and reach the happy ending they long for, or will the wastelands take everything they hold dear?
Warnings: Guns, death, child death, violence, animal death, suicide, drug use, nazis.
Excerpt
Breakfast was water. Lunch was water. Dinner was water. By the end of the next day, he had very little left.
He looked for anything that might help him survive. He found paper to start a fire; large decorative stones that he could throw at an animal; an ancient first aid kit featuring gauze, medical glue, tape, and rubbing alcohol; and a shaker filled with salt.
Bast couldn’t believe he’d found so much. He still needed food, however, and his hunger pangs were getting more severe as time went on.
He took an unopened bag of potato chips—not to eat, but to hopefully bring out animals that might be interested in consuming its contents. That night, he dumped the degraded snack into three piles and waited with a rock in hand.
The only thing that showed any interest was a large rat. It looked less than appetizing.
Bast didn’t hesitate. He threw a stone and then jumped on the dazed animal. He smashed its head with a larger rock. Breathing quickly, he sat back and stared at the dead creature.
He wondered if it was safe to eat, even cooked. After all, this animal lived in a polluted world.
First things first, he had to gut it. He’d seen people do it in old survival videos. Taking his small knife, he made an incision along the abdomen and began carefully digging out the digestive system, so as not to break it open. He imagined the bacteria in the stomach and intestines would ruin the meat if it got out. He gagged more than once and tasted bile.
Bast cut off the crushed head and placed the animal in a cigar box. It would last a day or so, he thought. The air was cold, to the point of making him shiver, so it should help preserve the rat.
Now, he really needed to find a way to make fire.
After sleeping for a few hours, he started out as soon as the sun poked through the trees. He wasn’t an expert on survival—not even close. But he knew from movies that there were ways to produce a spark without the use of a lighter or matches.
Near mid-day, he found what he needed:
An old pair of glasses, tucked into the pocket of a person’s naturally mummified corpse.
It was one of several bodies he encountered so far. Bast didn’t want to touch it. The thought of being around a long-dead body made him queasy. The only other times he’d seen a dead body were at funerals and when he killed that police officer. This was different. The body thankfully didn’t smell anymore, but it looked horrific. Drawn lips over skeletal teeth. Missing eyes. Gnarled hands clutching at nothing. If he didn’t need the glasses to survive, he would have stayed far away from the corpse.
He planned to utilize the sun by focusing light onto the paper and hopefully burning it. Bast took the glasses and the rat and found a clearing. He placed the paper and some small sticks on a pile and tried to aim sunlight at it.
At first, it didn’t work. Then, the paper began to smolder. Small amounts of smoke rose up, and he could smell ashes. Bast joyfully added bigger sticks and blew on the fire to encourage it. When the fire grew, he stuck his dead rat on a metal rod and held it over the flames. He couldn’t be happier to eat a day-old polluted rat.
He cooked the animal until it was nearly too tough to eat. Bast pulled off the greasy meat with his fingers and ate it all in little more than a minute. He was still very hungry when he discarded the bones and fur.
Regardless, he felt energized by the small amount of food. And now he knew he could cook something if and when he caught another critter. For the first time, he felt hopeful—and then he ran out of water.
For the next twenty-four hours or so, Bast spent nearly every waking moment looking for more liquids. He would have tried old beverages of almost any kind if it meant he could have his thirst satisfied.
He found nothing. With the empty water jug in hand, he stooped over a stream, wondering if it was worth tempting fate. He could certainly find a pot and boil the water, which would take care of germs, but if it was filled with chemicals, plastics, and man-made contaminants, no amount of boiling would fix that. He knew he was still pretty close to the cities. He knew it could kill him. Sighing, he filled the jug and put it in his bag.
Bast went another full day without drinking anything. It was agony. He found an empty metal bottle and put that in a fire with some of the creek water. By the time it cooled enough to drink, a black slime covered the top of the liquid. He threw it out, preferring to die over drinking something that disgusting.
His limbs stopped working properly. He tripped while walking along uneven asphalt. When he looked down at his bleeding knee, his vision tunneled, and he passed out.
About the Author
Jaimie N. Schock is an author, editor, and journalist with nearly two decades of professional experience. She has been published in newspapers and magazines and has released nine fiction novels.
She is married and living in Northern Virginia. Though she have an extensive career, she is disabled with PTSD and chronic illness. Schock tries to incorporate her life experiences into the fictional pieces she writes while delivering complex and diverse characters. Her pronouns are she/her, and she is proudly a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Author Links
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