Eisley Jacobs -

Welcome George H. Sirois to the Ellipses of Eisley… I hope you won’t trip over them as you walk to your seat.

Let me tell my audience a bit about you before we start… George is the author of Excelsior, a young adult / science-fiction novel. This is his second novel, but Excelsior has been eighteen (18… no I didn’t type that wrong) years in the making! So we are going to dive in and find out a little more about George and about his new novel….
EXCELSIOR.

EISLEY: First off, George, may I call you George? George… Tell us a little about you. Where you are from, bits of family trivia, and maybe your favorite type of food. I think it’s pizza… or peet-za…

GEORGE: First of all, thanks so much for having me here. And yes, please call me George. I lived in Poughkeepsie, New York until just before my 12th birthday, when my mother, sister and I moved to Richmond, Virginia. I stayed there until my high school graduation and got to come back to New York to study Theatre at Marymount Manhattan College. I’ve been in the New York / New Jersey area ever since, and my wife and I currently live in Queens.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a science-fiction fan: movies, television, comic books, novels, etc. My parents took me to see Star Wars when it was re-released in 1978, and the John Williams overture is the first piece of music I remember hearing. Dad would also tape the midnight airings of Star Trek: The Original Series on WPIX-11 to introduce me to that franchise as well. (I returned the favor in 2009 by re-introducing it when I took him to see the new Star Trek movie for Father’s Day.)

In grade school, my viewing habits were simple. Repeat the VHS of Star Wars whenever possible and watch TransFormers and G.I. Joe when I came home from school. In 1985, when I was in fourth grade, some classmates and I spent time sketching between assignments. We were all TransFormers fans and they inspired us to come up with our own cast of characters, which were very simple in design and name. When we moved to Richmond, I lost track of them (I’ve since gotten back in touch with several of them, thanks to Facebook) and kept developing the characters on my own. As the years passed, they eventually got so detailed that I could barely draw them anymore, so I shifted over to writing short stories about them. I wish I still had the steno notebooks I filled with those stories, notebooks that SHOULD have been filled with assignments.

And yes, pizza is my favorite food. New York pizza, to be precise.

EISLEY: So what is your favorite kind of Pizza?

*George looks at me funny*

EISLEY: Why are you looking at me like that? Yes, okay, I haven’t eaten lunch… sue me. I would like to know tho… really yourfavorite kind?

GEORGE: I’ve always loved pepperoni, especially from a new place that opened up just a few blocks from us: Lenny’s Pizza in Sunnyside, Queens.
(Cheap plug!)

*stops for a moment and orders pizza from Queens… Only briefly do I wonder how much the delivery charge to Denver will be*

EISLEY: So George, tell us a little about your inspiration behind this novel.
At the beginning of the novel you have some quotes… Can you tell us how they fit together and why you used them?

GEORGE: Well, in 1992, I was watching the John Boorman movie Excalibur. The one about King Arthur, you know? That movie really grabbed me and I wanted to create a new character to play in the universe that I was still developing for – at that point – seven years. I wanted him to be a mythic kind of hero, someone legendary, and I took elements from King Arthur, Jesus Christ and Optimus Prime to add to his character.

When I was trying to come up with a name for him, the word “Excelsior” popped into my head. I’d seen that word a lot, like on the New York state flag and at the end of Stan Lee’s editorials. I even saw the USS Excelsior in Star Trek III, IV & VI. When I found out the definition – how it means “Onward and upward to greater glory” – I just thought it was a perfect fit.

The three quotes I used at the beginning were my way of paying tribute to the main three sources of inspiration: Jesus Christ because Excelsior was a god in a human form, King Arthur because he was chosen to lead his people and Optimus Prime because he was my hero from childhood, a noble warrior sworn to defend two different planets from tyranny.

EISLEY: Matthew, your main character, shares a name with your late cousin Matthew Peter Henkel. Can you tell the readers a little about why you chose to use his name?

GEORGE: Back in high school, when I was writing the original stories of Excelsior, his origin on Earth was similar to what it is now, with the only exception being that he was an adult making a name for himself and his character in the comic book industry. Before I started writing the first draft of the novel in June of 2008, I realized the story would have more appeal if the main character were a high school senior. I got the idea of changing the medium from comic books to a web comic from my friend and cover artist Jason Goodman.

When it comes to what I would eventually name the main character, I thought about how I could possibly make Excelsior even more heroic. At the same time, I was talking with my mother on the phone and how there should be a story about my cousin Matt. He was such a hero to me and to so many people that just writing his life story wouldn’t do him justice. So the idea popped in my head to take the hero that I was about to start writing about and tie him to my cousin, making both of them even more heroic since Matt was literally the type of guy who would make a great character in a story like this. He was a seemingly ordinary man who did extraordinary things.

EISLEY: Did you have any inspirations for your villains? They were so nasty and heartless… surely there was SOMEONE you can pin them on?

GEO

RGE: There are actually several characters I grew up watching that I can point to and say, “Those guys inspired my villains.”

First, there’s Nocterar. One of my guilty pleasures from childhood to the present was the 1987 Masters of t

he Universe movie, and a big reason was how Frank Langella played the role of Skeletor. He was such an imposing figure, and he gave a wonderful over-the-top performance without coming off as campy. Plus, despite the facial makeup being a little lacking, he looked great with the hood and the cloak. I thought that would be a great look for the Krunation emperor, so I took that and gave him the reptilian look to match his underlings. The name Nocterar goes all the way back to 1993, when I was working on the fourth of four Excelsior stories in my steno notebooks. He was supposed to be the main bad guy Excelsior would face on Denab IV after defeating Danaak on Earth.
(Danaak’s another name that goes all the way back to the beginning.)

Developing the character of Danaak was a lot of fun, since he’s more treacherous than Nocterar. He’s very much in the same vein as one of the most popular TransFormers ever, Starscream. He was always trying to usurp command of the Decepticons from Megatron and that conflict created great storylines. I always saw Danaak as one of Nocterar’s greatest soldiers, but also as more ambitious than Nocterar counted on, which puts them at odds even though they’re on two different planets.

And then there was Hodera. She came to be during the re-writes of the novel, so she’s the latest character to join the party. I originally wanted a towering and intimidating force that would be the ideal Krunation to take over while both Nocterar and Danaak were out of action. Think a reptilian version of The Undertaker from WWE. I pitched that character to my editor JeriAnn Geller, and she asked, “Can Hodera be a woman?” The rest is history. She’s now one of my favorite characters in this book.

EISLEY: You mentioned that much like Matthew, of the story, you drew and dreamt about Excelsior as a kid. Did you ever dream you would see it published and out there for the world to see?

GEORGE: When I first started writing about this character, I thought it was eventually going to be a movie. I even started a screenplay during my freshman year of college, but I never got past the first scene, when the Denarian chosen to be the next Excelsior leads a successful prison break. The story that would have been a movie just sat in my head until 2008, when I made the decision to start writing the novel.

EISLEY: Stepping away from the story itself, I’m going to ask a few “Independently Published” questions. What made you decide to skip the “traditional” method?

GEORGE: Up to the writing of the third draft, I was set on shopping this book to a traditional publisher. As it came more and more into focus, however, I just couldn’t risk the possibility of losing this character if the book was sold but failed to catch on. I started to envision it sitting in the bargain sections at Barnes & Noble’s and me not being able to write the sequel or the third part. So I took the plunge to self-publish the book myself through Infinity Publishing, and so far, so good.

EISLEY: Do you see more of the industry leaning in this direction?

GEORGE: I see more aspiring authors moving in that direction, because the traditional houses give so much of their attention to either established authors or pop culture figures of all types – even the most irrelevant. It seems like self-publishing (eBook or otherwise) or working with small presses are the best options for new authors to be read.

EISLEY: What is the best piece of advice you can give the writers who are reading this interview regarding writing, publishing, or the craft?

GEORGE: I would suggest that you not be afraid to write crap. If there’s one thing I learned while writing the first draft, it was that writing truly is re-writing, and you can’t re-write nothing. So just think of quantity instead of quality when you’re working on your first draft, as Chris Baty said in his “No Plot? No Problem!” book, and you’ll be on your way toward completing your own novel.

EISLEY: That is awesome!

*Doorbell Rings*

EISLEY: Oh my goodness! That must be the pizza! They weren’t kidding when they say they were fast! Won’t you stay for some?

GEORGE: Of course! I’ll get the plates…

EISLEY: Well, folks… I hope you enjoyed this brief glimpse into the life of George H. Sirois and his new novel Excelsior, available on Amazon.com and at most e-publishing retailers. I hope you will check it out and find the hero waiting inside for you!

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