A native of Southern California,
Christine Pope has been writing stories ever since she commandeered her
family's Smith-Corona typewriter back in the sixth grade. Her short fiction has
appeared in Astonishing Adventures, Luna Station Quarterly, and the journal of
dark fiction, Dark Valentine. Two of her short stories have been nominated for
the Pushcart Prize.
Christine Pope writes as the mood
takes her, and her work encompasses paranormal romance, fantasy, science
fiction, and historical romance. She blames this on being easily distracted by
bright, shiny objects, which could also account for the size of her shoe
collection. After spending many years in the magazine publishing industry, she
now works as a freelance editor and graphic designer in addition to writing
fiction. She fell in love with Sedona, Arizona, while researching the Sedona
Trilogy and now makes her home there, surrounded by the red rocks. No alien
sightings, though...not yet, anyway!
KT:
Your new book, Angel Fire, rounds out the paranormal/sci-fi
romance series you dubbed “The Sedona Trilogy.” Is that the last we’ll see of
those characters?
CP: I hope not. I do have another trilogy partway sketched out
in my head, but I’m sort of waiting to see how the original trilogy does now
that it’s complete before I start into anything new.
KT: Did you know when you wrote the first book in the series (Bad Vibrations) that the story would evolve
into a trilogy?
CP: Actually, I didn’t. The original idea had been kicking
around in my head for a while, and then it was on a later read-through while I
was reformatting the book for print that I realized there was this overarching
story going on behind Persephone’s and Paul’s romance that needed to be told.
That’s when I decided to expand the book into a trilogy.
KT: Your love for Sedona really comes through in the books and I
love that you set so many scenes in real places. When did you first visit
Sedona? Did you fall in love with it the moment you set eyes on the red rocks?
CP: Our first visit was at the end of March in 2011. While I
was doing research for Bad Vibrations,
I came across a lot of references to Sedona in terms of UFO activity and alien
abductions, including the theory that there’s actually an alien base built
underground somewhere in Boynton Canyon. I’d already heard that the area was
beautiful and a New Age center, so we decided to take a road trip and do some
research in person.
In a way, my experience kind of
mirrors that of Persephone in Bad
Vibrations, since we wound our way down through the canyon on 89A and it
was dark when we came into town. So it was really the next morning that I got
my first glimpse of the red rocks – and yes, it was love at first sight. I
can’t even really explain it, because I’m not that much of a “desert” person,
but this doesn’t feel like a desert to me because there’s so much that stays
green here year-‘round. In fact, it’s very green right now because of the monsoon
rains we get in northern Arizona at this time of year.
KT: What’s next for you this year?
CP: Well, the next book out will be another novel in the Gaian
Consortium series, The Gaia Gambit.
It’s finished and with beta readers as we speak, so I’m hoping it will be out
in at least ebook format by the end of August. Toward the end of September I’ll
be re-releasing the second of my books that were published by a small press and
to which I’m gradually getting back the rights. That one, Playing With Fire, is a paranormal romance novella. In October I’m planning to put out an omnibus
version of the Sedona Trilogy, and then either in later November or early
December I’ll be releasing Ashes of Roses,
a new novel in my Tales of the Latter Kingdoms series, this one based on the
Cinderella fairytale.
