Randy: You may remember me as Randy-- no relation to Rachel--Brandt. We emailed each other a few times.

Brandilyn: (laughing) That's right, I used your last name.

Randy: And even the same first initial.

Brandilyn: Yeah, that's right.

Randy: We're not related, but it was fun to see that in the book. I come from Canada, up north, Idaho, Canada, and then bringing a Brandt in, couldn't get any better than that. My mom loved it too. Tell me a little bit about the novelists' retreat last week. I saw on your blog, you had pictures of you guys. Was that just for published authors or was that open thing?

Brandilyn: It's the Chi Libris retreat and I think you have to have at least two published novels in order to be in the group. It's a very informal sort of...(laughs) I want to say the word "underground," but you know it's sort of an informal group. We get together every year right before CBA, ICRS, and it's a time of encouragement. We do learn about the craft some, we talk about the business.

Randy: Do you have some workshops?

Brandilyn: We do. Really the highlight is simply getting together, very encouraging to each other, praying for each other. It's a hard business and we're all in our own corners behind our own computers. We all like each other so much, we have so much fun, we just hang out. Amberly's had a ball just going to dinner with us. They're fun people, aren't they?

Amberly: Yeah, they're really fun.

Randy: I was a software developer for a long time, and it was kind of like that. We'd get together for these software conferences, and the same thing; we're behind our computers writing code, and then once in a while come out, and of course everyone stays up late, and is chatting and just having a great time. Summer camp for adults, right? (laughs) I'm an aspiring writer. I was an English major, and I love writing, and I'm actually working on a novel right now, so I had to get Getting Into Character and I really enjoyed that, but just share a little bit about what inspired you to put the thoughts in there and why you decided to write non-fiction.

Brandilyn: Getting Into Character is based on Stanislavsky's method acting techniques. My first major in college was acting, so I was learning Stanislavsky's techniques as all acting majors do. When I began writing fiction, I normally use these techniques in my writing for acting, and when I would start to talk to my colleagues about them, I would get blank stares. They had never heard of these concepts, so I thought, "Wow, how cool. This must be something new." So I took seven of the concepts, and reworked them for the writer, who is creating characters on the page, as opposed to the actor, who is creating characters on the stage. The actor interprets a character that's already been created; we are creating the characters from scratch, so there's certainly a difference. On the other hand, there's quite a bit of melding, and it's a tapestry woven there. I wrote the proposal, gave it to my agent, we thought it would take forever to sell. It sold so fast. Then it was like, "Oh my, I have to write this thing!" I had other contracts, I had novel contracts, I had no time to write it. So now I've got it out. It's been very, very effective. When I teach at writers conferences and that kind of thing, I'm always teaching these techniques, simply because they're so very different, they're not the typical novel writing techniques that you hear. It's a different way of looking at things.

Randy: I looked on the Amazon reviews, I don't know if you've checked that out lately, but there's a few 4's and everyone else is 5's. It's great when you don't even get 3's.

Brandilyn: That's pretty stellar, huh? (laughs)

Randy: Yeah. Also, I saw one of them was a college professor that was planning to use it was a textbook.

Brandilyn: Cool! I haven't seen that one! Alright!

Randy: She said she's planning to use it in a writing class. You can't beat that.

Brandilyn: No, you can't beat that.

Randy: Get some bulk sales if you can get some big classes using it.

Brandilyn: (laughing) There you go.

Randy: I really liked the discussion. What jumped out to me, one of the things was just the talk about mannerisms and observing people and kind of looking for that and how that helps define a character. I enjoyed that. Just the idea of always observing, of course, but the emotion memory, just some practical things in there.

Brandilyn: Did I turn you into a killer in ten minutes? (laughs)

Randy: Well, we'll try. I read some of the fly one, that killer part last night. It is kind of scary what you can drum up if you set your mind to it, isn't it?

Brandilyn: Yes, it is.

Randy: Maybe that's something to show that our fallen nature.

Brandilyn: That's right. We have the capacity for just about everything.

Randy: Validates Romans 3.

Brandilyn: (laughing) Yeah!

Randy: Amberly, I'm not going to leave you out, and ironically you're the second Amberly I know. One of my best friends from one of my first years teaching high school, I taught before I did the computer thing, his daughter was named Amberly.

Amberly: I keep hearing that this weekend, and I've never really heard that before.

Randy: Well, you're only the second one I've run into, and she's about your age, actually. She was probably born in '81, so a little bit older.

Amberly: Yeah, she's older.

Randy: But when I knew her, she was really young. You're all young, If you're in your twenties, you're young, right?

Brandilyn: (laughing) That's right.

Randy: Are you twenty yet?

Amberly: I'm nineteen.

Randy: So you're getting close. She's still in her twenties. Anyway, I saw in an interview that you also read that.

Amberly: I did?

Randy: You did, in an interview you said that.

Amberly: Oh! There were little parts of it I read, I didn't read the whole thing. She picked out little things and she picked out parts from other books too, like she picked out beginnings of books and showed me how to start it. She gave me a whole bunch of different little blips from different authors and books and stuff.

Randy: Do you remember what you had to learn from your mom's book?

Amberly: I just remember doing character building. Character building and how to do all the little personality traits that are for each character and build the character up and really set the setting for a character.

Randy: The Rayne Tour series. Youth fiction collaboration, it's written a little more for Amelia's demographic than for mine, but I still enjoyed it. We live here in the Denver area, and I've been to concerts backstage at Pepsi Center with some bands like--they did a festival, P.O.D., Switchfoot, Relient K, some of those kinds of Christian bands, and so that kind of made it a little more real for me, because I've been backstage at the Pepsi Center, and no murders, but still made it more interesting for me. When did you decide to collaborate on a series. Is it something you two thought of, or did someone pitch it to you, how did it come about that you two ended up collaborating?

Amberly: Someone from Zondervan approached her about it. They were starting a young adult line and so they approached her to write for it, and she didn't have time, so they came up with the idea to have me write with her so that it would take a little bit of the pressure off, it would give her more time for her other books under contract. So it was someone else's idea, but it was handed off to us.

Randy: Great. So you decided to buy in and go for it.

Brandilyn: Well I couldn't say no to this. Your daughter has the chance to have a book out at age nineteen and I'm gonna say no to that? No, I don't think so.

Randy: Well obviously there's a level of music and good old rock and roll behind a lot of the inspiration there. I read online in one interview that you're a fan of Kansas and Kerry Livgren, love Kerry Livgren's stuff.

Brandilyn: I would love to see him. I want to meet him so bad.

Randy: Have you read Seeds of Change, his autobiography?

Brandilyn: No. Is it new?

Randy: No, it's been out probably ten years.

Brandilyn: Seeds of Change. Oh, I must get it.

Randy: That was the name of his first solo album, and it's also the name of his autobiography.

Brandilyn: Thank you. I'm going to go get it.

Randy: If you don't, you also have to get his When Things Get Electric CD, which is probably my favorite Kerry Livegrin one, solo. When Things Get Electric. Great lyrics, great music, Kansas-flavored stuff, but good stuff there. I'm going to have Amelia ask a few questions for Amberly.

Amelia: The first question is how do you think of characters for books, and did you base them off people you know?

Brandilyn: Are you speaking of our Rayne Tour series in particular?

Randy: Yes.

Amberly: Yes, we did base some of them off real people. The best friend in the book, Brittanee, is my best friend in real life. Same name, too. A lot of her characteristics are the same as my best friend, there's a few differences, but in general it's the same type of personality that I put into that character. Shaley, the main character, isn't really like me, I get that question quite often. She just likes clothes like I do. Besides that, she has a completely different lifestyle than I have, obviously. There was one character we built off of one of my friends, but that's about it.

Amelia: Do you have a favorite character besides Shaley in the Rayne Tour series?

Amberly: Mine's Brittanee, because it's my best friend in real life, but that's kind of biased opinion.

Brandilyn: I don't think so.

Amberly: It's like her second daughter, so it's biased opinion. (laughs)

Brandilyn: No, it's funny. When I'm writing my books, I don't tend to think of one character as a favorite. I guess I like them all, I create them all, they're all mine, and so I guess I like them all. One really does not rise to the top.

Randy: Do you ever find that when you're developing a character that some characteristic about them causes you to change the whole way they appear in the book, like whether they're good or bad, protagonist, antagonist, as it's developed, suddenly go, "Wait, she can't be a bad person, she's got to be a protagonist"?

Brandilyn: Never to that extreme, because I know too much about the book when I'm going into it, however, I tend to write, I know the beginning, I know the major twists. My books are always about twists--suspense--and I know the end. I don't always know quite the middle of how I'm going to get to the end, and so in that middle the characters certainly develop and take on some things that can drive some scenes in the middle to get me to the end. But never do they change from protagonist/antagonist or vice versa.

Randy: Not quite that drastic. In the one I'm working on, I had one character that was supposed to get killed off, and I couldn't do it.

Brandilyn: (laughing) You couldn't do it.

Randy: I didn't have the guts. I had to find another victim. I liked her too much.

Brandilyn: That happens.

Amelia: Online there was a Live Like a Rockstar sweepstakes. Just tell us about that.

Brandilyn: It started in April, when the book came, and it just ended. There is a winner now. Entrants were 13 to 18 and needed to post some information about what was watching on their Facebook page, their blogs.

Randy: Kind of a street team idea?

Brandilyn: Yeah, it's a kind of viral thing. And every time they enter, every time they posted something somewhere, it was another entry for them. So you could enter up to ten times by doing more online. So we had numerous entrants and then it got cut off. There is a winner. I have not yet been able to announce the winner publicly because there's all these rules when you do a national sweepstakes, my goodness, I had no idea. Zondervan has to have a signed affidavit from this winner that she's accepting the award, and then she and five of her friends get to go out on this $850 night on the town, fancy restaurant, full stretch limo, whatever. If they want to pay more than that, they can pay it on their own, but $850 ought to cover a pretty good night on the town.

Randy: It should be a good night.

Brandilyn: Yeah.

Randy: Are you involved in meeting her in any way?

Brandilyn: We will certainly contact her. I know a little bit about her. I know that she's been home-schooled all these years, that she's a strong Christian, I just think it's really cool. I'll be announcing that on my blog as soon as we get that signed affidavit.

Amelia: Would you like to write a book about yourself someday?

Amberly: I keep getting this question all this weekend. No, not really. I'm in college right now for a marketing degree, so I'm going to go that route for now. I don't have any plans to do that, but it's definitely in my heart after this project, but I don't think I could do it. It's really hard.

Randy: Let your mom write it, you could market it.

Amberly: See, that's what I thought. After this weekend I thought, "That's a good idea!"

Randy: Brandilyn, you've written several fiction series. Do you have one that sticks out as a favorite that for whatever reason is really dear to you?

Brandilyn: Same answer. I love them all. The Kanner Lake characters just so live on...don't you know they're at Java Joint right now? And Wilbur is on his stool ragging away, and if any tourist comes in and takes that stool and he gets up, woe be to that tourist. They live on.

Randy: Any thought of ever extending it?

Brandilyn: There's always that possibility. As you know, after four books, after wreaking havoc, and I mean nationally acclaimed, watched havoc in this tiny town, four times in a row, the poor town needed a break. So I let them go. But you know, in that series, I picked up a character from the Hidden Faces series. They were mentioned. And in fact, the Hidden Faces series picked up Chelsea Adams from my Chelsea Adams series.

Randy: It's like Ted Dekker, there's always some links.

Brandilyn: There are some links, that's right.

Randy: I really enjoyed your recent blog entry, "How to Stab Someone at a Dinner Party and Get Away With It." Have you seen that one, Amberly? Those headlines will grab you. This is a crazed woman.

Brandilyn: (laughing) And she already knows that.

Randy: Do you have to be disciplined to make sure you blog, or is that just a nice for you from writing when you get tired of the real writing you go blog a little bit?

Brandilyn: It is--ugh, she's heard me complain about it.

Amberly: She did at twelve o' clock last night.

Brandilyn: It's hard. I do it Monday through Friday. It is hard. Especially when all this is going on or I'm at the end of a deadline, which happens to be at the same time. Yes, it's hard to be disciplined about that.

Randy: You've been creative in integrating blogging, like we mentioned with the Kanner Lake series. Talk a little bit about how that came about with having an actual blog online, not just a purely fictional one.

Brandilyn: The Kanner Lake blog, yeah. How did I get that idea? I don't even know. It was my idea, and I ran with it. I had international auditions and because I had my own blog in place, this is what your own blog is good for. You have all these people coming to listen to you every day, so I could get the word out, "I'm having auditions for people to play my fictional characters." Held auditions, had about thirty-one for about ten characters, so there were about three a character. The workload was a little bit less. I knew I would run that blog for a set amount of time. I knew that book four, Amber Morn, would bring that fictional blog into, and the whole book would be built around the fictional blog, which of course is really a real blog, because in the real world, you're seeing the blog. It was a very much blending of fiction and reality. The blog is still up, kannerlake.blogspot.com. It's still up, but it ended when the Amber Morn story ended and you see the final blog post as a result of that story.

Randy: It was a clever idea.

Brandilyn: It did help market the books, particularly Violet Dawn, the first one, there was a lot of buzz about Violet Dawn before it ever came out, because people were so excited. One of the things I did, those who won being able to play a character, I sent them a press release for their local paper, they could fill in the blanks for their character. Some did get run in their local paper. So they got their name run as a writer, of course, I'm marketing my book, so it worked out.

Randy: So again, that whole viral, street team kind of thing going on. Commonly used in the music world, but adapting it to novels, which is great. So I'm going to give you a line from a famous work, and I want to get your reaction to it. The opening line: "Once there was a stallion named Betsy."

Brandilyn: (laughing) I still love that line. (to Amberly) You know what that is?

Amberly: No.

Brandilyn: That's my first story I wrote in second grade, it started with the line, "Once there was a stallion named Betsy."

Amberly: How do people know that?

Randy: She's a blogger!

Brandilyn: I'm a blogger. My life's on my blog. And I'll have you know I won first place for the best short story.

Randy: You didn't realize you were going to come here to learn things about your mom? Now we've got the two reactions. Hers was all a blank look, yours was pure laughter. Was it at that point that you realized you wanted to write?

Brandilyn: It wasn't quite that. In fact, I was so proud of that story, I remember rushing home and telling my mom and one of my older sisters who was there, "Mom, I got this award!" And I started to read the story, and I read the first line and they burst out laughing and I couldn't figure out what they were laughing about. (laughing) It took me a few years.

Randy: I hope to read Exposure soon, I was supposed to get it before, so I could ask you some questions about it, but I didn't get it. Is it out already?

Brandilyn: It's out. You're going to love that book. That's a good book. You're going to like that one.

Randy: I'll have to get it read and review it. Any kind of writers love reading, obviously, or you wouldn't be a writer. It'd be kind of odd, but the hard part is when you're busy writing to find time to read. Do you have any favorite authors when you do find time to read?

Brandilyn: I'm always reading suspense, for one thing. Both Christian and secular. I'll read any Dean Koontz book that comes out.

Randy: You know what's funny? You're my third author I've interviewed at ICRS, first one was Ted Dekker, last time it was here, Terri, you, everyone named Dean Koontz as a favorite.

Brandilyn: For suspense, yeah. He's just an awesome wordsmith. He's wonderful. I keep up on particularly the suspense in the CBA market. There's a lot. A lot of new authors. I think reading is part of my work. You learn by reading. You learn what to do, what not to do. When I was first learning how to write fiction, my training was fifty percent reading, fifty percent writing. Very important to read. I have very little time to read, but I always read when I go to bed. I will go through books quickly.

Randy: When you travel, do you relax, read, write? What do you do when you're stuck on a plane?

Brandilyn: If I'm on a deadline, I'm writing. If I can take the time, I'm reading. I will have a book with me always, always.