Omni Interviews: Mira Grant and A. Lee Martinez (with novel excerpt)

In case you missed them, I had a couple of interviews posted on the Amazon book blog, both really interesting.Mira Grant"I try to approach characterization as honestly as possible. Sometimes I don't like my own protagonists. They do things I don't approve of, they make choices I wouldn't make, they have beliefs I don't share. And unless that would actively damage the story, I let them go their own way. They're only going to be real to you if they're also real to me. I write pages of dialog that no one ever sees, just to feel out the way different characters use words and phrases. It's a fascinating exercise."A. Lee Martinez"I usually consider humor to be secondary to the plot and characters. I know I have a reputation as a comic writer, but the humor elements usually fall into place naturally. In the end, I don't think humor is the opposite of serious storytelling. We tend to think of humor as light and inconsequential, but great humor is often founded on observation and commentary."For space considerations a snippet from the new novel Mira Grant is working on got lopped off of the interview, so I'm reproducing it below.The piece that follows is from a novel in progress, Ashes of Honor, writing under her real name, Seanan McGuire, and "finds Toby in a place she really doesn't like being: the police station"…***This is my life: clinging to the back of a furiously bellowing Swamp Troll who’s decided to rampage through the mortal world, hoping I can choke the wind out of him before he manages to yank me loose and rip my legs off.This is also my life: sitting in the back of the Valencia Street police station almost two hours later, wearing an illusion to let me pass for human while I waited for the policeman assigned to take my statement to decide that he was done, and I could go.I wasn’t expecting that to happen any time soon.“Let’s go over this again,” said the policeman.“Okay,” I said.Not fast enough, or maybe not enthusiastically enough. The policeman looked up from his copy of my statement, eyes narrowing. “Unless you had somewhere else you wanted to be tonight?”“I’m fine with going over my statement again,” I said, and smiled.He didn’t. “Good. Now, you were picked up at approximately ten thirty-seven PM, on the private beach belonging to—”He kept droning on. I kept smiling and nodding, trying to look like I was practicing attentive listening and truly paying attention to every word that he said. Very little could have been further from the truth, but hey. Sometimes you have to play by the rules, even if they’re the rules of somebody else’s game.My name is October Daye. I’m a knight errant in service to the Court of Shadowed Hills, one of the secret fiefdoms Faerie has hidden in the mortal state of California. All of which adds up to mean that the only reason the San Francisco Police Department had been able to hold me for questioning was the part where most of the time, I try to play human. I used to be pretty good at it. These days…not so much.