2012 - 08/2012 Meeting

Page Created: 07/27/12. Last Updated: 09/21/12.

EDWARD LAZELLARI

Author's Website: http://www.edwardlazellari.com/

MEETING SUMMARY:

Meeting Date: August 11, 2012.

Meeting Site: Barnes & Noble, Hackensack, New Jersey.

Official Attendance: 19.

Meeting Program: Talk by Fantasy Writer.

Notes:

Newsletter Account:

Fantasy writer Edward Lazellari spoke at the General Meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County on Saturday, August 11, 2012. The gathering was held at Barnes & Noble in The Shops at Riverside in Hackensack, New Jersey.

The Ice Nine Pre Meeting discussion covered movies (ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER--a historical, no, make that a hysterical), books, comic books, television (GRIMM has resumed) and news (The Cartoon Museum and the Society of Illustrators in New York have merged).

Our guest speaker was Edward Lazellari, author of AWAKENINGS, the first book in a contemporary fantasy trilogy from Tor Books. He is a former artist at Marvel Comics and he set up a display of his comic book art on a table for people to examine.

Comic books were the first love of Mr Lazellari. Green Lantern of DC Comics is his favorite character and he paid him homage by making the teen artist in AWAKENINGS drawing the superhero on his desk top. Our speaker attended the Kubert School of Art and began freelancing for Marvel in 1989. He said working for a comic book company was a blast.

Mr Lazellari was drawn to the medium through the artwork, describing himself as a middle of the road draftsman. After working in the industry for a few years he started getting ideas for stories. The more time our guest spent writing, the more he discovered he enjoyed it. He went back to college and earned a degree in English. While at Rutgers he entered a contest for undergraduate writers, won it with "The Date," a dark comedy tale about the dating problems of a set of female Siamese twins, and had the story published in PLAYBOY MAGAZINE in October 1999.

Mr Lazellari switched careers after Rutgers and went to work for McGraw Hill where he edits an online boutique investment magazine for their Standard and Poors division. It only costs $ 50,000 a year to subscribe.

AWAKENINGS was conceived as a graphic novel in 2003. It went through many changes and revisions before emerging as a completed novel manuscript in 2009. The author's big break came when he met art director Seth Kramer of Tor Books at a party who asked for the manuscript. Mr Kramer liked the work and passed it up to publisher Tom Doherty. Mr Doherty also liked it and signed off on a three book deal, assigning Paul Stevens the actual editorial duties for the trilogy.

The trilogy is about the aftermath of a war of succession in the magical world of Aandor. Thirteen years ago a group of humans and non humans fled to our reality with the infant rightful heir. Unfortunately, the spell which was intended to give them the knowledge and skills to fit into our world went awry. Instead of giving the refugees a second persona with the new skill set, it overwrote and erased their true identities. The amnesia victims went their separate ways and forged new lives for themselves. These lives are about to be uprooted, for their past is catching up with them. Enemies and allies have discovered that they fled to our world and have agents searching for them.

The series features an ensemble cast and is written from multiple viewpoints, a technique inspired by George R R Martin's Game of Thrones novels. Every reader seems to have a different favorite character. Roger Zelazny's Amber novels are another big influence on the books.

The author composes in Microsoft Word. He has only a loose outline and uses the literary fiction technique of discovering the story while writing it. Ideas never come to him when he is at his keyboard, so he always has a pad and pen to jot down stray ideas. He writes on a laptop in his kitchen.

Mr Lazellari does not belong to any critique groups, but did show the manuscript to a group of 15 friends for feedback. They included a New York City policeman who made sure that all of the technical aspects (jargon, procedures, etc) of Officer Cal MacDonnell were correctly handled. The second book's reader circle has been whittled down to five.

Our guest feels that his background in comics has been useful to him as a writer. He visualizes scenes as if he were planning to illustrate them and blocks out the fight scenes so that he is always sure of the placement of the actors and actions in a scene, something he feels helps the reader better follow the sequence of events. He also does quick little sketches of his characters.

While our speaker felt that his editor had some excellent suggestions concerning the novel, he disagreed with others. Mr Lazellari feels that you need to pick your battles when negotiating with your editor. Overall he was quite happy with the results and his editor's ideas added an additional 40 pages to the work.

In response to a question from the audience, our guest said that new authors need to strike a balance with their work. On the one hand, you need to be happy with what you are writing. One the other, you need to be aware of the market. Something which is very off the beaten path would have an easier time getting published if it came from a writer who had already demonstrated that he could write a traditional, salable opus.

Mr Lazellari admitted to starting with a very thin skin about negative reviews. He has become more philosophical about such matters, feeling that much of this is simply a matter of personal taste. He used A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES as an example of a book which is celebrated by a lot of people he respects, but one which does nothing for him.

He is considering trying his hand at a YA novel when the series is done. The story would be from the point of view of a vampire wizard and is one part standard teen post-apocalypse and one part LORD OF THE FLIES.

All of our summer meetings have had glitches. This one was no different, with both the store's escalators and elevator being out of order at one point. Fortunately the elevator was fixed in time to get the folding chairs to us. Other than that, things went very well.