Today’s interview is with Toni V. Sweeney, author of more than ten published books, including her recent release The Serpent’s Tooth. She explains how a devastating car accident can breed success and why she loves the idea of guest blogging, and confirms that book trailers can certainly persuade potential readers.

LZ: According to your Web site, your writing career began after you were in a car accident. How long ago was that, and what about that incident prompted you to turn to writing?

TS: That was back in 1970. A Ford Fairlane broadsided our Toyota Corolla. I had multiple fractures of the pelvis, a crushed hip, fractured vertebra and numerous facial and arm injuries from broken glass (windshields may not shatter into jagged pieces anymore but they can still cut pretty badly) and was also six weeks pregnant, so I was pretty well out of it for more than a year. The sad part was I had been married eight months at the time and the accident ended that too.

So there I was immobile, expecting and spending all my days reading and sleeping. When I was recovered enough to begin work again, I was now a single parent and was so poor, I couldn’t afford to buy books, not with a baby to care for, so I wrote my own so I’d have something to read. I would type it on my typewriter, punch holes in the pages and put them in a loose-leaf notebook and take it to work and everyone would pass it around and read it. When the books started getting published, I got out those originals and compared them to the finished product. Some were still pretty close. Others were so changed, I barely recognized them. Incidentally, the first one I wrote later transformed itself into the novel Blood Sin.

LZ: How/when did you decide to make that leap from writing for yourself to seeking publication?

TS: As I said, I would take my manuscripts to work and the receptionists would pass them around and read them. They’d also give me little critiques. One day, the conversation went like this:

She: Have you ever thought about getting that one published?
Me (modestly): Oh, I doubt anyone would want to do that.
She (aggressively): You’ll never know. Still, I bet you’ll never send one in, will you? Nah, you won’t.

What could I do? Gauntlet thrown down. I had to take the challenge. I submitted the manuscript to a publisher. Now, this is where it gets convoluted. (Bear with me here.) I called a local bookstore and asked her to look up the publisher’s address in their Books in Print catalogue. I sent off the manuscript but I didn’t know she’d given me the wrong address and it went to the wrong publisher. I received a rejection, since they didn’t handle adventure stories, but they asked if I had any children’s stories. I said yes and they wished to see one. Then I had to sit down and write a YA story for them and get it in within the next two weeks. It was accepted, and…there you are! (The rejected manuscript, by the way, was Bloodseek, which was published in 2007 by Double Dragon Publications. The novel they published was Spacedog’s Best Friend.)

LZ: Can you tell readers about one of your most recent works, The Serpent’s Tooth? Where did you get the inspiration for the story?

TS: Serpent’s Tooth was a dream and by that, I mean I dreamed the main character. At least, his name. I don’t remember anything about the dream except that it was about an actor from the ’50s named Arthur Franz who was in a lot of Grade-B SF movies and when I woke up, I had the name “Hildebrand” in my mind.

Two days later, I was watching Atomic Submarine on TV and Arthur Franz was in it and the admiral’s name in the movies was Hildebrand. I figured that had to be some kind of sign, so I started thinking about it and came up with the story that ended up being Serpent’s Tooth. The original name of the novel, by the way, was The Inheritor.

LZ: You often host other authors on your blog, such as myself! What have you found to be beneficial about doing so?

TS: I gets lots of invites to blog on their Web sites! Seriously—and this is going to sound sooo schmaltzy—it gives me a good feeling to give someone a chance to talk about their novels and how and why they wrote them and bring them to the attention of other people. Since I started the “Book Review” page, I’ve gotten a chance to read a lot of very good stories too.

LZ: What was the most recent great book you’ve read?

TS: “Great” covers a lot of territory. Do you mean, one that’ll withstand the ravages of time or one I really enjoyed or what? The last book I read that I really enjoyed was one I just finished and posted a review on Amazon: You Can’t Stop Me by Max Allan Collins and Matthew Clemens. Max Collins has written a lot of the CSI paperbacks, and this story reads like a TV script. It’s the story of a lawman who saves the life of the president and comes home to discover his own family murdered. He’s approached by a TV network to host a crime reality show and while studying a recent murder, one of his staff discovers a clue pointing to the killer being the same one who murdered his family. He announces on the air that he’s going to track down the murderer and the rest of the story is taken up with his investigation which is broadcast life to the nation and the killer as it happens. I’d love to see it filmed. It’s a tense story and has a real twist at the end.

LZ: Most of your works are in the sci fi/fantasy genre. What about the genre appeals the most to you?

TS: I’ve asked myself that I don’t know how many times and I haven’t come up with an answer yet! When I was small, we would go to the movies at least four times a week and my mother took me to see every horror movie that came out because she didn’t believe in leaving me with a babysitter. The first movie I remember seeing, in fact, was Dracula’s Daughter. I dunno—maybe liking them was just instilled in me through osmosis or something. Whatever, I have a huge library and about two-thirds of it is horror/sf/fantasy novels.

LZ: What kind of horror/sci fi/fantasy novels do you prefer?

TS: Oh, I like vampire stories, of course, and there are so many of them around today, but I still like the old Nosferatu kind, though I’m a sucker for happy endings. (My own stories notwithstanding—I don’t exactly practice what I preach.) Costume-type drama stories. I’m a child of the old Universal horrors and Hammer films, so I like a lot of the ancient evil brought back to life and rearing its head to endanger modern man types, too. But I don’t like an excess of blood and gore of the slasher-movie kind, and I don’t want my stories to get so gross they’re repulsive. I like more space opera than hard core SF, a la Star Trek or Star Wars…exotic planets, exotic characters, lots of camaraderie and banter.

As for fantasy, sometimes the fantasy and horror stories blend together, so that one’s a little more difficult to define. If you want to know what kind of books I like to read, just check out what I write. Imitation is the best form of flattery.

LZ: As an author who creates book trailers, do you find them to be effective? How do you go about creating them?

TS: I have both MovieMaker and iMovie on my computer so I have a choice of how I’ll make them. Both applications have features I like so I wish I could combine the two. I make up a script, select the pictures from sites like fotolia.com and dreamstime.com and then select the music from imcompetech.com and put it together! I hope making trailers interests readers in my books. I know I myself have bought books after seeing the trailers.

LZ: What do you have in store for readers next?

TS: Right now, I have a futuristic novel called The Finer Gentleman, which is making the rounds under my pseudonym Icy Snow Blackstone. That’s a sequel to my TWRP novel Three Moon Station, which I wrote specifically at the request of a reader.

And also two under my own name: a thriller—and that’s a big departure in the genre for me—called Blood Bay, which is set on an island in Georgia’s Golden Isles. I started it in 1993 and finished it this year. Lots of Southern color. Think Cape Fear meets Justified. The other is a fantasy called Wizard’s Wife, a story of a newlywed who discovers her husband is a faery wizard sent from another dimension to save Earth from an invasion by a rival wizard.

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To purchase The Serpent’s Tooth from its publisher, Class Act Books, visit www.classactbooks.com/Serpents-Tooth-by-Toni-V-Sweeney_p_154.html.

To learn more about Toni V. Sweeney, visit http://www.tonivsweeney.com.